Current Album Reviews |
Singles Albums Video and DVD
Last updated 29 December 2008
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| ASVA
– What You Don't Know Is Frontier Label: Southern Format: CD  ASVA's
second album is a stunning array of dark landscapes and textures. It's
scale is truly epic. Somehow I can't get the film Dune (directed by David Lynch, of
course) out of my head. What
You Don't Know Is Frontier would be the
perfect backing music. It's that epic. Helmed by Stuart Dahlquist of Sunn0))), Burning Witch and Goatsnake, Asva include other members of the aforementioned bands as well as Earth. Perhaps Earth is the more telling than Sunn0))). This isn't an album of drones. What You Don't Know Is Frontier has the slow soporific melodious feel of the recent Earth albums like Hex (2005) or Hibernaculum (2007), but with more distortion ... sometimes. It isn't an album that is swamped with noise and Asva aren't afraid to let explore the quite empty spaces. The album has deep meaning for Stuart Dahlquist. What You Don't Know Is Frontier is part of the process of understanding the loss of his brother Michael, something I can all too sadly relate to. It is an album written with emotion. The sense of loss and absence can be felt in the great empty panoramas of sound that Asva create. The opening of "A Game In Hell, Hard Work In Heaven", with gentle guitar and organ, is a moment of beautiful tranquillity. The massive riff that follows rolls along at geological speeds. There aren't many metal albums, prog drone or otherwise, that can be described as beautiful. What You Don't Know Is Frontier is one of them. -Alaric- |
| Blood Ceremony
– Blood Ceremony Label: Rise Above Format: CD,LP  Flute-tinged witch rock
debut from Toronto's Blood Ceremony.
These days a lot of metal bands head straight for the big Black Sabbath
riff, slow it down, and just stay there. However, I don't think Blood
Ceremony are too interested in what lots of metal bands are doing these
days. They look back to the era of bands such as Coven, Affinity, and Black Widow, capture the prog
tendencies of Black Sabbath and fuse it with a huge pagan doom laden
riff out. Vocalist Alia O'Brien's
flute solos are something else ... they give Blood Ceremony a unique
quality. Flute is an instrument that's virtually never heard in metal, and has been in the rock wilderness since the seventies, though used and abused by the Ozric Tentacles, but seldom heard otherwise. Chunky riffs sandwich extended solos, walls of psychedelic organ, rockouts with flute and guitar double up. Yeah, all in all prog as hell. Blood Ceremony is a very retro album. The band utterly revel in 70s occult rock and 60s psychedelia and they do it very well. It really is 1971 again - the eighties, nineties, and naughties never happened. -Alaric- |
| Boris
- Smile Label: Southern Lord Format: CD,2LP  Boris love to
surprise, and the opener "Flower Sun Rain" does just that. They go
straight for Jpop in the form of a cover of a PYG song. My
surprise came at All Tomorrow's Parties seeing Earth, Boris, then Sunn O)))
and, reasonably enough, expecting a good wall to wall evening of drone
and just not getting it: country doom, ballads, and on stage fighting
in that order. I'm not wholly surprised by Boris, though. I've always
had a feeling that there was a good singalong wave your lighter in the
air ballad not too far from the surface. Of course, it gets the Boris
treatment and pushed that bit too far. Like the other tracks on Smile it is totally
over the top, a nice catchy ballad saturated with far too much wah and
rock excess for its own good. But don't get the impression Smile is a collection of ballads. Boris have never been afraid to totally rock out, here they push it into a distinctly hair metal direction – again in a totally over the top kind of way. Its hair metal in the sense of holding a zippo up to someone wearing a gallon of hair spray and watching the resulting supernova. Ear piercing squeals, big buzzing riffs, and racing drums. Sunn O)))'s Stephen O'Malley collaborates on a drone heavy track which has one of the most intense crescendos ever. Over all, Smile is characteristically Boris. They shamelessly rock at points and remain thoroughly excessive throughout. -Alaric- |
| Burning Witch
- Crippled Lucifer Label: Southern Lord Format: 2xCD  Before
Sunn O)))
there was Burning Witch,
formed in the mid 90s by Stephen
O'Malley and Greg
Anderson, although none of their recordings actually
features Anderson who had started Goatsnake
by the time. Crippled
Lucifer is a reissue of their 1996 Towers... and 1997 Rift.Canyon.Dreams
releases - two discs of fabulous doom. This release of Crippled Lucifer is
expanded from the 1998 Southern Lord edition (subtitled Seven
Psalms For Our Lord Of Light),
which only featured seven tracks. It now has ten and an enormously
thick booklet filled with gorgeous artwork ... but don't expect a novel
charting the brief history of Burning Witch. Listening
to Burning Witch I can hear where Sunn0))) come from, but they aren't
the same band at all. The songs of both Crippled Lucifer
EPs are guitar/bass/drum/vocal metal rather than the Sunn0))) wall of
drone. Burning Witch's came from the period when stoner/doom metal
began to emerge and bands like Electric
Wizard and The
Melvins appeared. Burning Witch are much more
doom-laden than Electric Wizard though; yes it is possible - easily. Towers...
and Rift.Canyon.Dreams
are superb and utterly, brutally metal: stoner grunge hijacked and held
to ransom by black metal. Vocalist Edgy
59
wails and screams over the O'Malleys droning sludgy guitars. They took
it one step further, heavier, and slower. It reminds me of Celtic Frost at
their gloomiest and slowest, especially their recent release Monotheist or the
early Frost incarnation Hellhammer.Crippled Lucifer is an absolute classic. It deserves all the volume you can give it. -ap- |
| CarterTutti - Feral Vapours Of The Silver Ether Label: Conspiracy International Format: CD  It's
something of a relief to know that, despite the much-trumpeted return
of Throbbing Gristle
with their recent live shows and this year's excellent The Endless Not
studio album, CarterTutti
are not showing any signs of giving up on the day job just yet, as
these eleven new tracks prove.The opener, "So Slow The Knife", sets out their stall pretty effectively. Beginning with what sounds very much like a collection of sounds which are just pleasant, but have little logical connection to each other, it quickly becomes apparent that it's all part of a whole - once Chris Carter's pulsing bassline comes onboard, everything makes sense. And the echoed cornet sound of yore is still present. There was always something about its use on TG tracks that made me think of wounded beasts calling mournfully to one another across ice floes, and that's still no less true, though there's something a lot more beautiful about the sound the way CarterTutti utilise it these days. Appropriately enough, I suppose, given that the ice floes are melting, these days they seem to imbue it with a lot more warmth. That's probably the key to this album- it's the interplay of coolness and warmth - not quite ice and fire, but something a little less extreme. Eno's probably a good reference point here, especially when listening to a track like "Torn Window". But whereas Eno, beautiful though his music can be, often tends to leave one with the lingering impression that there was no real human input into the music, that Brian was just the guy who invented robots to synthesise emotion and watched them all go a bit crazy, here the human heart is very much in evidence. The icy-cool electronica never quite has the self-assurance of an Eno, or even a Sakamoto, but instead reveals a frailty that is all too human at its centre, and is made all the more lovely for that. This is never more apparent than when Cosey is singing, especially on the standout track "Woven Clouds", which seems to straddle the lines between Eno, Coil (the obvious reference point I was trying to avoid using, but appear to have failed) and, strangely, some of David Sylvian's instrumental stuff. By which I mean, really, it's rather good. By the time you get to "Forest Floor", and start imagining Gavin Bryars is drifting through space with the lot of them, you've realised this is actually a killer album. Then we get the trademark Carter chugging machine pulse coming through on "Acid Tongue", and, almost mirroring the way the first track began, the disparate elements of the album as a whole all start to make sense together. It's a pretty neat trick. If you've been put off CarterTutti (or indeed Chris & Cosey) by their seeming glaciality before, then certainly give this a go as they've definitely thawed. And if, having any sense, you thought they were great anyway, then DEFINITELY give this a go, as it would appear they've put the heating up a little. -Deuteronemu 90210- |
| Nick Cave
and Warren Ellis
- The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford Label: Mute Format: CD  OK,
confession time- I have yet to get around to seeing the film to which
this is the soundtrack, though I have been assured by people who have
and whose opinions I respect that it's awesome. Though that's not
really the point - the point is that I'm only able to judge this album
on how well its stands up on its own. Don't blame me if, when
the music is heard in conjunction with the film, the whole thing seems
as stunningly inappropriate as a skateboarding elk at the funeral of a
dearly-beloved, though legendarily elkophobic, loved one. It seems
unlikely, though, given how perfectly-judged Messrs Cave and Ellis's
soundtrack for John
Hillcoat's The
Proposition was. And you'd be
forgiven for expecting more of the same, given that that movie was, to
all intents and purposes, a Western itself in all but, well, lack of
westerliness. And to an extent, you'd be right- this is, after all, Nick Cave and his Bad Seeds and Grinderman sidekick Warren Ellis, leader of The Dirty Three, so obviously there's a lot of piano and mournful violin, so that much at least is the same. This is a much less minimal affair, though - it's still fairly sparse, but a lot meatier than The Proposition's soundtrack, which at times sounded so delicate and fragmented it would blow away in a gust of wind, but was no less lovely for all that. For all its greatness, though, that soundtrack didn't work so well divorced from the film (not that there was any reason why it should have had to, really) - The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, on the other hand, makes for a much more fulfilling listening experience. Of course, there are similarities to The Dirty Three - it would be hard to have Ellis playing violin on anything and not be able to make that comparison somewhere, so distinctive is his sound. But it's what's done with it here that is interesting, and the way it often takes a back seat - in "Moving On", it's strapped to a bells and pizzicato backing which seems (possibly consciously) to evoke the graveyard duel from Morricone's music for The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. Elsewhere, and for most of the album, it's married to the most mournful piano melodies this side of Current 93's Soft Black Stars, with nice bassy cello parts doing the whole "soundtrack" thing. However, when Ellis's violin DOES take the lead, as on "Song For Bob", it is as gorgeously heartbreaking as anything he's done with The Dirty Three, Cave's piano (presumably) providing the perfect foil. As I say, I haven't seen the film yet, but it's hard to stop yourself trying to imagine what would be going on onscreen with each successive track. If the movie's anything as good as I imagine it would be, listening to this, it should be really rather good indeed. And if it isn't? Hey, at least it has a kick-ass soundtrack. That's more than can be said for a lot of movies. -Deuteronemu 90210 on a horse- |
| Chris Connelly – The Episodes Label: Durtro Jnana Format: CD  Ex-
of Scots industrial dance pioneers Fini
Tribe, Chris
Connelly is probably best known for his work with Ministry and Revolting Cocks,
though his CV is a veritable Who's
Who of industrial music through the 90s, encompassing work
with KMFDM, Pigface, Murder Inc
and The Damage Manual.
So those unfamiliar with his more melodic stuff might be expecting
something a lot, well, shoutier and grindier than this. Instead of the
head-spining-round-and-vomiting-cos-Satan's-in-it growls and shrieks of
his work with RevCo and Ministry, his voice, when allowed to actually
play with tunes, proves to be remarkably Bowie-esque, and he
has a similar love of the faded joys of the carnival.The Episodes consists of a few (it has to be said, very long) tracks on which he comes across as a Scottish Gavin Friday, crooning his way through extended swathes of what could, for the most part, be a quieter Bad Seeds, or a more psychotic Tindersticks. Or indeed a less psychotic Gallon Drunk. Though the album seems largely to be based around the bluesy grind of "The Son Of Empty Sam", which comes round in one epic chunk and a later reprise, for me the centrepiece is "Soul Boys/Hard Legends", which is like Scott Walker's The Drift being taken on a Friday night tour of some of the finest drinking establishments Scotland has to offer, and then getting into a fight. It's all smudged eyeliner and inappropriate glitter smeared across production for which the word "soundscape" is more appropriate than the word "tune", but which is no less affecting for all that. So, it's music for drinking to. I'm well aware that as far as I'm concerned, ALL music is music for drinking to, but to the connoisseur there are as many types of drinking music as there are types of drink. (You can mix and match them to make cocktails, too, which is nice). This is music for drinking to in the cab home, when you don't know where it's going and the cabbie is becoming increasingly stressed, and you're still trying to figure out how your booze managed to get glitter in it. And it's very good, too. -Deuteronemu 90210, who's not as shouty as he used to be- |
| Cultural Amnesia - Enormous Savages Label: Anna Logue Format: LP+bonus 3"CD  Remember
cassettes? You know, those weird little flat box things full of
magnetic tape that kept stretching and getting tangled up, and they
were like little machines of their own- I mean, yeah, the actual thing
you put in your stereo actually
had moving parts,
how weird is THAT? Yeah, you know, they were those things that you used
when you wanted to copy your mates' records from vinyl- vinyl? Big
black circles of plastic, well, funnily enough VINYL actually, with
spirals carved into them which you read with a FUCKING DIAMOND??? Yeah,
vinyl. That format they had before CDs. What, you don't even understand
CDs anymore? It's all- what now? MP-whats? Erm… shouldn't you be in
school, anyway?Well, back in the day, people used to use these cassettes to put music on. And swap them. And this, bizarrely, was known as tape trading. Good for unsigned bands, of which there were many after punk proved that you didn't need a big label behind you to make killer tunes. Members of the tape trading subculture included (yes, I'm getting to the point now) Cultural Amnesia, who have finally had some of their stuff cut to vinyl, in the shape of Enormous Savages, nine tracks released over a three-year period back at the beginning of the 80s. And here it is. What with being the early Eighties, it's all very lo-fi, meaning a lot of the synth sounds are somewhat akin to those found on the sort of mid-period Portastudio stuff by Psychic TV, and the production's pretty much non-existent. That said, that's never been a problem for people like the aforementioned PTV, or even soundscape-heavy bands like the Legendary Pink Dots, whose own collection of early, cheap recordings, the Legendary Pink Box, this is pretty reminiscent of. Vocals ranging from "The Wildlife Of The Tranquil Vale"'s anguished screeching, to the very English camp of "Kingdom Come" (whose "Dolly I don't shit miracles" is probably my favourite part of this whole album) and "Sacrebleu", which is entirely conducted with that weird effect Bauhaus used on "The Man With The X-Ray Eyes". Musically it's got a lot in common with the aforementioned Pink Dots, though there are flashes of early Skinny Puppy in there. And my personal favourite, "Blind Rag", could conceivably have fitted on Throbbing Gristle's seminal 20 Jazz Funk Greats. One of the selling points of this album is bound to be the fact that three of the tracks have lyrics penned by the late John Balance of Coil, but good as these are, their relative star status shouldn't take the spotlight off the other tracks. Again, my personal favourite is the "non-Balance" Blind Rag, which seems to come from some strange world where Throbbing Gristle and Soft Cell had fallen into the teleporter together and emerged as some strange gloomy industrial-cabaret hybrid. So far, so early 80s lo-fi. However, it doesn't end there. Early sales of Enormous Savages (on vinyl, naturally) come complete with a mini-CD of new stuff, called, appropriately enough, Little Savage. This carries on the post-punk electronica project with cleaner, more expensive sounds, but still the sense of paranoia and claustrophobia which infused the early stuff, especially on the manic "syst.admin" which sounds, unexpectedly, like an electronic Stump (or possibly a less scatological TISM) - which can be no bad thing. All this would be something of a curio (though a damn good one) - kind of stuck out of time and neither fish nor flesh - , were it not for the news that it comes in advance of new material currently being prepared. That will certainly be worth hearing, on the strength of a history this rich. -Deuteronemu 90210, trying to figure out what happened to 8-track cartridges- |
| The Dillinger Escape Plan - Ire Works Label: Relapse Format: CD/LP  The
Dillinger Escape Plan are a reviewer's nightmare, somewhat
akin to Akron/Family
- not that the two bands sound in any way similar (except when they
do), more that both have an alarming tendency to jump from genre to
genre like Sonic The Hedgehog after a crystal meth enema. I mean, Ire Works
starts off straightforward enough, with the two opening tracks being
fairly categorisably angry, shouty, angry hardcore, somewhere between Melvins and Meshuggah, maybe,
with a touch of the jazzier end of the
Rollins Band.
We know where we are. Okay, there's something slightly odd going on
with a piano in the second track, "Lurch", but so far, all is well. We
know where we are, and all is well.Then "Black Bubblegum" kicks in, and we're all like WHAT THE FUCK??? It's like Faith No More at their poppiest and most soulful, with a nice chunky chorus which could have fitted on The Real Thing, and… well, it’s got "accessible" written all over it, largely due to that insanely catchy chorus. This has all got a bit weird, and quite frankly, we no longer know where we are. Pretty sure all is still well, though. In fact, the Faith No More reference is probably important, as a love of all things Mike Patton (who has, of course, played with The Dillinger Escape Plan on Irony Is A Dead Scene) is about the only uniting feature of much of the stuff here, though perhaps Mr Bungle's eclecticism would be a better reference point that FNM. "Sick On Sunday" somehow manages to weld the chunky guitars and falsetto vocals of "Black Bubblegum" with an Angelo Badalementi spooky lounge kind of vibe, before "When Acting As A Particle" does… well, some weird shit. Basically, it's all over the place, in the best way possible. A bit of Tool here, a bit more Faith No More here, then - from out of nowhere, some more of the shouty hardcore. See, the thing that makes it all work is that they're so bloody good at all of it. It's not like they're a shouty hardcore band who decide to get a bit jazzy for novelty value and end up making a yak's bollocks of the whole thing. No, the cross-genre shifts and interludes are all inherent to each song, rather than being in any way gimmicky. There's some pretty nifty shit going on with the production as well, giving the impression this must have taken an absolute aeon to record. Not only that, but the tunes are never far from the surface, no matter which direction a track is moving in at any particular time. By the end, you feel like you've just come back from being transported into the head of a child with ADHD, a random collection of CDs, and the babysitter tied up in the basement. As I say, it's hard to review, but a joy to listen to. Never frightened to experiment, but neither falling into the trap of thinking experimentalism must be unlistenable or in any way difficult, this is, quite simply, a work of noisy, shouty, jazzy, poppy, rockin', erm, add a couple more adjectives here and bung the word "genius" on the end, and you'll be about there. -Deuteronemu 90210 in a prog metal... thing...- |
|
DJ Scotch
Egg
- Scotch Hausen
The results sound like a weekends hard partying in Rotterdam and an arcade full of space invaders singing Bach and Mozart. Great stuff. Primitive, utterly banging, and brutally lo-fi with a twist of Gameboy kitch. The demented fury of Scotch Hausen burns itself out by the end of the album and transforms into an altogether gentler sound. The "Scotch Sundance" tracks begin with a recording of children singing a song in a classroom. The Gameboy sound becomes a whole lot lighter, childlike and innocent. More toylike in a nutshell. In a way the gentle end of Scotch Hausen is oddly parallel with the course of Hardcore artists who mellow after several albums of abrasive noise. The levels of anger are unsustainable - at least without getting seriously repetitive. -A.P.- |
| Earth - The Bees Made Honey In The
Lion's Skull Label: Southern Lord Format: CD  The
progression from early Earth
to modern Earth makes perfect sense, to me at least. Behind
the
change from dirty droning guitars to country doom, Earth retain a
distinctive quality. The sound has changed, and the lineup has changed
around Dylan Carlson,
but the
quality remains: a slow slow moving riff looping round and round,
seemingly going nowhere, and catching you out when you start to think
that. The riff is, and always has been, one of the keys to Earth. Where
the early sound was as stripped down as possible, often solely
consisting of a slow ultra-sparse grunge churn, modern Earth has
started the process of building up again. The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull, and Hex before it, has a much more detailed sound. Earth are a full band full of rich and varied musical textures, but without losing their wonderful minimal quality. The Bees Made Honey ... takes the sound of Hex and pushes it into new directions. It is more rock- and jazz-based with shades of gospel creeping in through oscillating washes of Hammond organ. Guitar legend Bill Frisell adds fuzz guitar along side Carlson's riff. I love the new material Earth are producing. Haunting and sparse magic. The Bees Made Honey In The Lion's Skull is a further step in their evolution. They have recently embarked on a European tour to coincide with the album. Having seen Earth at All Tomorrow's Parties in December 2007 I know they are well worth seeing. -Alaric- |
| Earthless – Live At Roadburn Label: TeePee Format: CD  Earthless rock. Earthless know that
rock isn't found in the middle of the verse or tucked away politely in
the corner of a chorus. Earthless know that rock is huge tube driven
distorted excess. And that's exactly what they did at Roadburn. One and
a half hours of primal solo and riff on the main stage of the Roadburn
festival. It wasn't a gig they were expecting to play. When the main
act couldn't play the organisers asked Earthless at the last minute.
They stepped up and delivered a raw assault of rock noise. Appropriate
given that Roadburn is a celebration of the riff. On finding out the gig was recorded Earthless listened to the performance and decided that it was the most honest document they could offer. On the basis of only hearing the CD the gig must have been awesome. They are purist in the way The Fucking Champs are and have all the intensity and single minded determination of Boredoms' Hard Trance Takeaway (Karaoke of Cosmos). Live At Roadburn is rock refined to its essentials. Its one to play loud and repays all the volume you give it. So there you have it. Hard screaming honesty. -Alaric- |
| Eat Static – Back To Earth Label: Interchill Format: CD,2LP  Back To Earth is the first album
since Joie Hinton left Eat Static in February this year,
but you wouldn't know half the band had left. Or perhaps that should be
a third, as Steve Everitt, the
invisible third member of Eat Static, is as busy as ever. Back To Earth is a fresh,
inventive, and surprising album that sees Eat Static exploring new
sonic territories: eastern music, Latin, and jazz. Arabesque rhythms
rub shoulders with glitchy granular noise and epic electronic dub. The
songs are relaxed and chilled, and most are under 100bpm. The first track "Tuned Mass Damper" is the fastest at 135bpm but it is hardly a huge floor stomper – glitchy clicky psychedelic electronica. Eat Static have come a long way since the early days of "Inanna"/"Monkey Man" and their gigs during the hardcore rave years. The more polished Eat Static get the more I hear the Ozric Tentacles coming out. Ironic as the ex-Ozrics originally wanted to ignore the technically impressive stuff they were doing, get the synths out, and act stupid. This time around Eat Static have produced an album to sit down and listen to as they weave through styles in an ambient mood. -Alaric- |
| Fear Falls Burning - Frenzy Of The Absolute Label: Conspiracy Format: CD,2LP  Frenzy of the Absolute,
by Belgian drone master Fear
Falls Burning,
is one of the sparsest and most haunting collection of drones it has
been my pleasure to hear. It's big, and sinister, and oppressive, and
intensely doom laden. This is the first I've heard of his work, and I
can see that I've been missing something rather special. On Frenzy of the Absolute
he works in collaboration with a number of drummers: Tim Bertilsson (Switchblade), Dave Vanderplas (Rubbish Heap, Ontayso) and Magnus Lindberg (Cult of Luna). Johannes Persson,
also from Cult of Luna, collaborates with guitar loops.Drone in itself can be timeless, but percussion adds a whole new dimension. It adds a heaviness and oppressiveness to the already cold supremely desolate drones of Frenzy of the Absolute. Even within the layers of guitar drones there is a cyclical looping rhythm. Riffs stretched out to ultra slow proportions, slowed to the point where they naturally seem to turn into slow looping drones. Drumming helps to reinforce the idea of time coming to an almost stand still. The drums fall away, time stands still leaving a world of pulsating drones just hanging there. Frenzy of the Absolute could quite easily have just set a new benchmark for drone. -Alaric- |
| Un Festín
Sagital
- Epitafio
A La Permanencia Label: Beta-lactam Ring Records Format: CD  From
the opening blasts of the title track, it's apparent that Epitafio a la Permanencia
is going to be more than just strange - it's going to be weird.
First off Un Festín
Sagital get top
marks for impersonating Magma within
the first few bars, then dropping the dramatic chorale motif for now in
favour of a deliciously avant slide into the meanders of a sound which
winds its way, in riverine grandeur, from twinkling, tinkling
melodicism into organ-surging power cycles, shimmering in the light
side of the divide between artiness and artfulness, at the point where
prog-rock is not really an adequate description, but is most probably
where the band will be pigeonholed - which would somewhat miss the
point
- it's far
more out there than what passes (or passed for that matter) for prog
these days.Their use of electronics is exemplary in its embrace of texture and tone, with timbre getting a fair whack of the bat as the tonalities fracture and some good old-fashioned metal-thwacking takes over the percussive element. Staggering, steaming sax, even more battered electrical trickles and a sense that if they know where they're going, it might be best not to ask too quickly, as it could lead to a place downriver where the folk monsters live, and everyone knows what they're like - harmonic, scuffly and beguiling in their capacity to draw in strangers and set them down by the fire for a disjointed, scrappy singalong of occasional surprising delight. Less obscurely, Epitafio a la Permanencia traipses its merry parth from slow motion delicacy and drone to bursts of brighly-painted full-face clarity with whichever instrumentation and style seems appropriate, whether that be heavy-riffing, chorus-soaring guitars in a (sometimes, somtimes not) rockist manner; electro-acoustic swarms and hallways of drone; perky stabs of melody; or the aforementioned alien glossolalia choir of otherworldly aspect - whose temper is short and quick to sudden flights of deranged post-operatic dementia. "L'Age Délicieux (la revolución perenne)" is a case in point, with prowling keyboards and a gently percussive rhythm underpinning a sinister vocal offset by tingling stutters of synth and mysteriously urgent riffing which soon lifts off into a thrillingly psychedelic nightmare hyperdriven morass of disparate sound sources clawing for backmasked attention. The way the group set the mood flowing with joyful ease into altogether more fragrant pastures of string-driven sunshine and gently reverbed heaven becomes yet more astonishing as the transition to "¡No hay Coristas!" finds them in more apparently trad Chiléan mood, strumming guitars and weaving a soon-to-be dissolved web of twangy normality; but it cannot, will not last long, as "La dignidad del espíritu bestia" shuffles out of the carapace and into a propulsive (and compulsive) progged-up dance of the deranged, a sensation which the expansively wayward finale (didgeridoo and all) of "Destierro" does little to overcome - thankfully. Whatever Un Festín Sagital's chosen method, it's on occasion truly inspiring stuff, and calls out for a concert hall, a row of comfortable reclining seats, a bucketload of whatever takes the chemical fancy and a quiet, appreciative audience to appreciate the impressively thunderous heights and delicate dreamlike vales of what is more often than not a severely beautiful, and always highly unusual, listen. -Linus Tossio- |
| Fuck Buttons - Street Horrrsing Label: ATP Recordings Format: CD  Fuck
Buttons are fucking great. They are Bristol-based Andrew Hung and Ben
Power. Their début album is superb - a huge wall
of
big buzzing electronic drones with more distortion and screaming vocals
that your average stoner/doom metal band. Unlike some (most?) noise
electronica though, there is much more to Fuck Buttons than a wall of
noise for noise' sake. Using an eclectic collection of instruments,
including toys, they build up big slabs of texture that are at turns
melodic, harsh, and hypnotic. Texture is what they are after. There is
a lot of control and restraint in their music. Asked if they improvise,
Ben Power said “we're not really interested in that. All the parts – as
distinct from songs – are carefully planned.” And it shows, when I saw
them perform Street
Horrrsing live they did just that. They recreated
all the gorgeously raw textures on stage. Street Horrrsing as an album forms a wonderful cohesive whole, and all the tracks segue neatly into one another. A nice feeling of circularity is built up. Opener "Sweet Love for Planet Earth" begins with gentle tinkling melodies before being obliterated by buzzing distortion. Album closer "Colours Move" returns to the opening melodies as the wall of sound ebbs away. On their MySpace page they describe themselves as sounding like the universe. Yeah, a big buzzing universe. -Gadshill- |
| Ghost - In Stormy Nights Label: Drag City Format: CD, 2LP  While
topped and tailed by folksy melodies, In
Stormy Nights has
a thunderous heart beating at its centre in the vertiginous form of
"Hemicyclic Anthelion", a piece constructed from live improvisations
welded together into a vibrant half hour of revolving, warbling
atmospherics which ebb and flow with the meanders of Ghost's
collective stream of consciousness. Flute trills and analoge synth
squalls flutter with hallucinogenic irregularity, colliding with mellow
recorder runs and the spasmodic tinkle of vibraphonic chimes, wrapping
up scraped percussion and scrawling guitar feedback in a Zen paradox
sure to delight the acid-eaters in the audience. Everyone else is
recommended to take the headphone route to ghostly satori,
as the freeform segues ripple from ear to ear, from delerium to
relaxation. This is quality improvisational avant-noodling to
be sure,
but there is much better to come."Water Door Yellow Gate" steps up the pressure, with Masaki Batoh's vocals declaiming ominously while Michio Kurihara lets his guitar do the frazzling as the band thump out a ponderous rhythm. Swelling into a choral flume of wavelike cymbals, the intensified percussion of "Gareki No Toshi" brings frame drums, metallic crashes and megaphone excorcisms to the fore, with results channelling the combined mania of the Butthole Surfers, Einstürzende Neubauten and a group of Taiko drummers, Ghost style. But if a band were to decide to blow the minds of their listeners by dint of covering a lost Sixties psychedelic classic, there are few to equal the deranged bagpipe and drum arrangments of Cromagnon's orcish ur-stomp "Caledonia", and this is the next shattering stage of an album which by now is living up to the promise of its title. In the hands of Ghost, the cave-dwelling original is faithfully replicated, then made bigger, louder, more spine-shiveringly epic, with the percussion welling up in a martial surge to simultaneously thrill and scare the living bejesus out of anyone whose stumbles across its path. The immediate response is to flip the rewind button, as it's one of those tunes which pummel their way into glory on a backbrain-sizzling drone and the sheer windswept fury of its delivery. Moments like this don't come that often, and Ghost have excelled themselves - and probably every other psychedelic band on this or any other planet in the immediate vicinity. So it's a relief that there is a cyclical return to their wistful side to the gentle accompaniment of an acoustic guitar and Ghost in swaying, singalong mode. As Kurihara's soaring electric guitar reaches for the clearing skies, Batoh sings with heartfelt emotion "you know the time fades away... stormy nights are memories" and it's like the sun's come out once more, and sanity has been restored - until "Caledonia" gets played again, that is. Which as it happens, it can be, at least on the double vinyl edition, where a lyric sheet and the "Sing Together Mix" allow for an element of listener participation, which is nice. -Richard Fontenoy- |
| Grand Magus - Iron
Will Label: Rise Above Format: CD,LP  Metal
(or, should I say, METAAAAL) seems to have undergone something of a
renaissance in recent years, at least in the way it's popularly
perceived. Until very recently, metal was looked at like the creepy,
socially-maladjusted child who sits at the back of the class reading Fangoria and
plotting the next Columbine massacre. If a band were to be accepted by
anyone else, they had to hyphenate or hybridise the genre- you couldn't
just be "thrash metal" or "death metal" or something that actually WAS
metal, you had to be something with metally bits, or worse, "nu-" or
"funk-" metal.Now it seems to be de rigeur to be as metal as possible - bands like Lair Of The Minotaur and Mastodon have no qualms about wearing their spikes on their sleeve, and are spearheading the drive out of the Age of Irony - at last you can be into metal and not have to pretend you just think it's funny. Sweden's Grand Magus are most definitely not ashamed to be metal. And power metal, at that. Although the tolling bell that opens the album, coupled with the fact that they were once on Southern Lord (not to mention the sleeve artwork), might give you the impression that they're a doom outfit, this is nine tracks of intertwining solos, chunky riffs and Iron Maiden-style vocals. And while it may be determinedly old-fashioned, it's damned enjoyable. It may not be breaking any new ground, but it doesn't need to- there's still a lot to be made from the old. A must for fans of old-skool metal. And headbanging. -Deuteronemu 90210 from the frozen wastes of the Northlands- |
| The Great Depression – Forever Altered Label: Fire Format: CD  Forever
Altered, third album from Denmark-based Americans The Great Depression,
is a huge, lush, and symphonic album that drifts effortlessly between
chamber psychedelia and shoegaze folk. The scale and ambition of the
record is impressive - an album of intricately crafted and beautiful
songs, haunting lyrics and vocals, and brooding and melancholic
textures. Emotionally infectious, tragic and sad, Forever Altered never wallows in
self-indulgent grief. Their sound lends comparisons to Radiohead or early Spiritualized. Another comparison
that comes to my mind is Mothlite,
but with a little less volume and more pathos. Both bands are rich and
symphonic in scope, lovingly crafted, and haunting.The Great Depression is a superb name for an indie band. Lets face it, that could describe indie music. Boomkat summed Forever Altered up by saying "This is the way indie rock should be" They have point. Forever Altered just feels right. The music, lyrics, emotion and overall musical experience are stunning. And despite the scope and complexity of their music The Great Depression make it feel totally natural. They put songcraft back on the map. Great album. -Alaric- |
| Grinderman
- Grinderman Label: Mute Format: CD/LP
There's been a fair bit of speculation that this is Nick Cave's mid-life crisis - sick of being a domesticated Bible reader, he's necked a couple of gallons of booze and jumped astride a younger man's motorbike. This is not, on current evidence, true. Nor is the suggestion that this is Cave's Tin Machine - that one's easily blown out of the water by the simple fact that Tin Machine were rubbish. Grinderman definitely aren't. A boozed-up, priapic groove monstrosity, Grinderman are the sound of sleaze, of a truck full of testosterone crashing into your local off-licence and bursting gloriously into flames. Gorgeously dirty, wonderfully hedonistic, Grinderman are the very essence of Rock'n'Roll in all its seedy beauty. Opener "Get It On" may as well be called "The Essence Of Rock'n'Roll In All Its Seedy Beauty". From anyone else, some of this would be distinctly unsavoury. Take, for example, "No Pussy Blues". On first hearing, a queasily misogynistic cock-waving endeavour, until you realise the unnamed female is pulling ALL the strings, and not in some bullshit "all women are bad" way - there's nothing devious or malevolent. No, she just doesn't want to fuck him. And that's all there is to it. Even here, even while digging away to get back to the primal nature of Rock and Roll, Cave's lyricism is stunning, and it's his gift for self-deprecation that stops this all tumbling into some horrible Nick-Hornby-Does-Fight-Club morass of paranoid masculine arrogance. But this isn't Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds. It's not Nick Cave And The ANYTHING. Grinderman as a band are tight enough to make your eyes water, but loose enough to drink a bottle of whisky through. "Electric Alice", a real change in tempo, has more cool sounds than you could shake your John Thomas at, sounding simultaneously meticulously planned and made up on the spot. Frankly, the whole thing's glorious. The title track sounds strangely Neubauten-esque, all clunky metallic guitar sounds and harmonics that could take your teeth out. "Go Tell The Women" is like a very straight-faced Palahniuk story, all bruised male pride and barely-salvaged ego, but "straight-faced" only in the sense that it's hiding an enormous toothy grin behind that sombre facade. "Depth Charge Ethel", who we first meet "angled across some dude's knee", is the subject of another stompy rock-out-with-yer-cock-out Bluesy bonanza, complete with whoo-whoos, grinding bass and insistent punch-in-the-face snares. By now if you haven't realised that Nick and the boys are having a fucking wild old time, then you have something wrong with your ears, brain or central nervous system. Possibly all of them. This is the sound of people having FUN. FUN with a capital FU. If you want the Bad Seeds sound, then look no further than "(I Don't Need You To) Set Me Free". If you want to live in a parallel universe where Nick Cave fronted The Stooges, then head straight for "Honey Bee Let's Fly To Mars". Replete with "bzz bzz" noises, this is going to be the cause of several moshpit injuries if the live shows are even half as good as they should be. All of a sudden, we get one of the most beautiful songs these dudes have produced in years. "Man In The Moon" is as heartbreaking as anything Cave's ever written, and the sparse backing (yes, even with that Chris DefuckingBurgh piano sound) only adds to it. Somewhere in all this masculine bravado, we're given a glimpse of real vulnerability, and the loss of the father. Hugely symbolic, I guess, but there's no time for that, because WOW. A scratchy, windswept and relentless soundscape pushes "When My Love Comes Down" right into your face. YOUR face. RIGHT INTO it. With the pushing and that. A pulsing bass that keeps erupting into "From Her To Eternity"-style glory underpins this most mantric of Rock's hymns. But it's "Love Bomb", a balls-to-the-wall stomper, that provides the most fun on this, the funnest album released yet this year. For me, it's the lines "I been listening to Woman's Hour / I been listening to Gardener's Questiontime / But everything I try to grow / I can't even grow a dandelion" that make this the bestest of the bestest. Cave and the guys are all grown up now, and all domesticated and Radio 4-friendly. But still within them lies what Nietzsche probably wouldn't have called the Will To Rock. Y'know, I was hoping this would be a decent stopgap between Bad Seeds albums, but it's turned out to be a masterpiece in its own right. I can only hope that this amount of greatness, when combined once more with the undoubtable genius of Mr Harvey, will produce something above and beyond anything I could ever imagine. Becausethis is absolutely fantastic. -Deuteronemu 90210, with help from Butch McGuire off the Sheila's Wheels advert- |
| Harvey Milk
- Life
... The Best Game
In Town Label: Hydra Head Format: CD  "Death
goes to the Winner" opens the album with delicate vocals and guitar,
but no album whose cover has a ripped poster of the Iron Maiden album Killers (Eddie
with bloody hatchet in hand) can possibly avoid being metal for too
long, and Harvey Milk delivers. The opening tranquillity is obliterated
by a huge wall of stoner metal: pounding beats, sludgy chugging riffs,
growling vocals, and screaming feedback. The cover is the only Maiden influence that I can spot. Musically, The Melvins come to mind. Harvey Milk has all the roughness, rawness, and haphazardness of a Melvins live performance: Life ... The Best Game In Town sounds like it is about to fall apart and fuck up. Then out of nowhere they up the tempo and launch into frantic and intricate riffing with total wild abandon. Too dirty to be technical metal, they race on like Tool or Voivod dragged through a hedge backwards before collapsing into a buzzing mire of guitar drones. Definitely in the rocks like a bastard category, Harvey Milk have made an album that begs to be played really loud. MOAR! -Alaric- |
|
A Hawk And
A Hacksaw - The Way The
Wind Blows
The Way The Wind Blows is not an anthropological document of any one folk form frozen in time, more of a febrile immersion in many traditions which shudders with a brightly positive energy even when played in a minor key. Though the words are in English, they are largely chanted, or declaimed in the fashion of cantors, giving the songs an ancient quality which they possess in spirit if not necessarily in actuality. There are songs of warning and mourning, rapid-fire drums spattering staccato tattos as the violin keens. Who could not have their viscera stirred by the threnody of woe transcended, of regimes smashed and remembered as footnotes to a bloody Europen history which bubbles under still? There are songs to die to and to die for, but there are waltzes and more to elevate and dance the suffering away, brushed aside in a fusilade of drumbeats and bells, in tuba steps, piano paces and scorching brass, the asthmatic worm measuring breath on the listener's behalf. So when a South-Western New-Mex trill shatters the gloom and flutters of accordion brighten the pace with an irresistible fever, the oompah buzz of "Gadje Sirba" steps up the ryhthmic pace with a delerious motion, or the Turkish riffs of "God Bless The Ottoman Empire" call in yet another world to the dance, all is swept away in gleeful abandonment to the music - just as it should be. In the background of many tracks, beyond the harrumph and trills, there are telling whoops and calls, clatters, cackles and snippets of conversations and the sound of Moldova life rolling at its own pace - one which is swept up with the musics - and peoples - which This Is The Way The Wind Blows celebrates with a mighty passion which is in turn enveloping and heartstoppingly wondrous. -Linus Tossio- |
| Jesu
- Conqueror Label: Hydra Head Format: CD
It sounds nothing like Godflesh, but it's easy to see how it could spring from the same mind. The psychedelia Godflesh began to dip into on their classic Pure is here given full rein, and there's a lot less anger. Broadrick's long said he wants to make Pop music, and this is his most "pop" album yet- even his and Kevin Martin's Techno Animal project, which released among other things the scorching Hip-hop album Brotherhood Of The Bomb was unspeakably brutal, and the same is the case here. Things take an even poppier turn on "Transfigure", where the guitars go all Sonic Youth and the bassline even gets a bit jaunty. Yeah, jaunty. Weird, I know, but it works, strangely enough. Sounds a bit like a far more brutal version of Slowdive, or someone like that, although admittedly this time it's a Slowdive you probably couldn't beat in a fight But the reason I actually called this meeting was to discuss "Weightless And Horizontal", the absolute best track on this album. Considering Broadrick manages to make something that sounds like Slowdive actually transcendental, that "absolute best" tag carries a lot of weight. "Weightless and Horizontal" is like the first album's standout track "Friends Are Evil", if it went away for a while, took a whole bunch more drugs than it already had, and came home, all fragile and desolate and lost, and needed to be loved. And it's easy to love. It's like a puppy. Like an enormous, savage, mental, robotic and relentless puppy. And somehow it's swallowed Broadrick. You can hear his plaintive cries as it rushes to devour you with love. "Try not to lose yourself... I'm way past caring... I'm way past hoping... wash away your tears"... After a career in which he's become most famous for jamming the ugliness of the universe in our faces, and as a result of that process, Mr Broadrick has created one of the most beautiful pieces of music I've heard in a long time. But, being Broadrick and Parsons, it's relentlessly beautiful. It's like a drug that's too nice. It's like eating too much chocolate cake and feeling like shit but not being able to stop because it has CRUSHED YOU IN ITS PATH LIKE A CHOCOLATE CAKE TANK OF DOOM. It's... well, it's a little too much, and you wish it would stop. Then it finishes, and you wish it could have gone on forever. Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is a bloody good trick, and Jesu have totally pulled it off here. "Mother Earth", by contrast, starts like something you'd expect from the later Swans stuff, and does all their mantric thing, but never seems to hold you down. It's nice, and it's great, and though it's actually still fairly brutal, it's kind of like a Bizarro-World version of something from The Great Annihilator. To be honest, the weakest track on here is "Medicine", which has a riff too quickly resolved to actually allow the big big megalithic sound to build around it. But it's still head and shoulders, and possibly even other hair products, over anything you'll hear in the same vein for the rest of the year, I'd put money on it (unless Jesu release anything else this year, in which case all bets are off). So yes. To sum up, imagine a cross between Swans and My Bloody Valentine. If that doesn't sound good to you, then please send me your address, and I will personally come round and kill your soulless ass. Hey. If you can't appreciate this album, then I'd totally be doing you a favour. -Deuteronemu 90210 at ear-splitting volumes- |
| Jesu
- Lifeline Label: Hydrahead Format: CD  Unless
I'm counting badly, which is always a possibility, this marks the
second release from Justin
Broadrick's psychedelic noise machine Jesu
this year, which is probably two more than we deserve. That shouldn't
really be a cause for complaint, though it does begin to beg the
question as to just how BIG a band has to sound before too many
releases from them will no longer actually fit into the world. Jesu are
a fair bit to cram into your ears at the best of times, and Lifeline is no
exception, even though it's only four tracks long.For the most part, it continues Jesu's movement from monolithic slabs of noise to a more mellow, musical palate, with the title track coming on like Slowdive, if someone had given them all a whole shitload of smack. And made them, well, how can I put this? A lot better. That's what I was grasping for. Again, as on Conqueror, it's kind of a headfuck to think that these fragile vocals are the same guy who growled and screamed as Godflesh all those years ago. This time round, though, they're a little more to the fore, and not quite as lost in the mix as they were previously. This is probably my only criticism, to be honest; these sound like songs in a more traditional sense, rather than fragments of something being beamed in from space. Very good songs, naturally, but still, it's actually much easier imagining these being actually written by someone rather than accidentally leaked from the mind of some strange opiate god, which for me at least tends to take the edge off a little. But there's a whole new edge waiting on stand-out track "Storm Comin' On", where everything I've ever said about the frailty of Broadrick's vocals being an integral part of the whole Jesu experience is proven to be bollocks. Here he's replaced by one of the least frail voices in the world, that of Jarboe, with whom it's never been easy to tell whether you're in the company of a soothing crooner or a voice direct from the pits from hell. Here, she's great in both roles, the "goth Stevie Nicks" soon giving way to the "Diamanda Galas with a sawn-off shotgun" in a track every bit as ominous as the title would suggest. By the time the last wave of guitars chugs through the middle of the trademark Jesu effects, you're left in absolutely no doubt that the storm is, indeed, comin' on, and you may as well not bother getting an umbrella, 'cos you'll have no need of it where you're going, where you'll have far more things to worry about, what with those little red guys sticking forks in your jacksy for all eternity. On the whole, this is pretty fuckin' awesome, to be honest. Three tracks of what we've come to expect done every bit as well as we've come to expect, and one that reminds us just how scary Broadrick can make noise when he puts his mind to it, in case all this floaty stuff had let us forget. -Deuteronemu 90210 in the eye of the hurricane- |
| Laibach
-Volk Label: Mute Format: CD/Ltd. ed. CD + hardback book  As
far as I know, no-one since Stockhausen
has attempted a major
re-interpretation of the national anthems of the world, and anyone
but Laibach
would be foolish to try it. There's little sign here of the
triumphalist bombast of "The Final Countdown", "Jesus Christ Superstar"
or
"Leben Heisst Leben", which is surprising given that some of the most
notorious imperial powers of the past and present are represented. But
then Laibach were never about predictability. Instead they are
operating largely in a much more subdued, atmospheric mood, flirting
with Neoclassicism, and approaching Pop balladry from time to time
despite Milan Fras'
trademark sepulchral growl.The songs are not simply covers but 'music from and inspired by' each country's original, setting lyrical and musical elements from each one in a new context. Laibach's own lyrical additions are mostly in English - which is itself an explicit statement about deliberate cultural imperialism - and mostly consist of commentaries on the frequently bloody and violent histories that silently underlie the source material, and the true or supposed national characterictistics of each state. Some of these are subtle critiques of the hypocrisy that patriotism can give rise to, such as Israel's talk of homelands or Turkey's paean to human rights; others are more overtly scathing, particularly England's tale of lost empire. There are other levels here that are not apparent without research, such as the fact that Spain's arrangement uses parts of two songs from different historical periods; this bellicose number is one of the most upbeat tracks here, perhaps reflecting Spain's transformation from fascist dictatorship to Northern Europe's holiday annex. Russia's song sets up all sorts of unexpected resonances, given that it builds on the same progression from Pachelbel's Canon as the Village People's anthemic "Go West", the Pet Shop Boys version of which has been expertly mashed-up elsewhere with Laibach's "Barbarians" by a crafty fan. The most and least radical track here at once is their rendering of the Vatican's "Inno e Marcia Pontificale" as a beautiful choral requiem, basically unmolested by the band's own industrial leanings. Appropriately though, only the closing track is arranged as a traditional national anthem ought to be, and this is the battle hymn of the band's own virtual republic, the Neue Slowenische Kunst. And long may they reign. -Andrew Clegg- |
| Littl Shyning
Man – Mockery Label: Sonic360 Format: CD Inchborough EP Label: Sonic360 Format: CDS/12"/Digital Download  Mockery
is the breathtaking début album from Littl
Shyning Man, a.k.a. Christopher
Haworth, which was originally released in 2005. To me it struck
a chord with Mothlite's The Flax of Reverie – a huge
symphonic sweeping spectrum of style: a mixture of electronics and
instruments, frantic modernist string pieces, vocal harmonies, spoken
word, raw buzzing noise, drum and bass joins folk in a shimmering
clicking whir. And like Mothlite, Mockery
has a quality that is very English. The name Littl Shyning Man comes
from the book Riddley Walker
by Russell Hoban. Mockery is a sound track to this
post apocalyptic tale. Christopher Haworth steers us through a
landscape that is disjointed and fractured, melancholic and unsettling.
The shards and embers of electronica and folk are fused together in the
apocalyptic ruins. "Inchborough",
one of Mockery's highlights,
has been released as a single in 2008. Alongside the original is a
remix by producer/rapper duo FBC
Fabric and Reindeer,
and two Littl Shyning Man interpretations of fellow Sonic 360 artists Acida and Gladkazuka. FBC Fabric and Reindeer
emphasise the drum and bass that emerges at points during Mockery. They bring "Inchborough"
to the urban dance floor in a relaxed chill out groove. Littl Shyning
Man's remixes move between laid back lounge jazz and out and out
electro, both infused with his apocalyptic vision. All in all a timely
reminder of Christopher Haworth's vision and talent. More please.-Alaric- |
| LSD March
- Nikutai No
Tubomi Label: Beta-lactam ring Records Format: 2CD  Naming
a band after one of Guru
Guru's
more involved freakout tracks hints to what the resulting
music might sound like - dense, effects-heavy, and deeply, deeply
fried, just like the effects pedals have been battered and bunged into
a vat
of hot oil. At least that pretty much sums up disc one, which is taken
up with nearly forty minutes of psychedelic heaviness in the
shape of
"Aubade", roiling and straining at the bounds of musical mania, phasers
set to maximum swarm. LSD
March
brush up a cacophonous sludge which takes
its own sweet time developing into an amphetamine monster which
wriggles fitfully while developing of the eventual release into
mind-bending riffology.
The resulting churn keeps the momentum pulsing with speedfreak
intensity, and listening to it for the full length can have an
uncanny
abilty to cause synaesthetic strobes to flicker at sympathetic
frequencies in the mind's eye of the listener who sticks through what
is quite probably something of an
endurance test for those uncomfortable with delving deep into the
thrashing groove they pull through the typhoon of noise. Everyone
else can bathe in the delerious whirr until the inevitable prolonged
heat-death of all long-form wigout tracks, and then attempt recovery
afterwards , or proceed to the rest of the album for at least an
approximate semblance of soothing melody.The second disc reverses the usual trend for putting all the shorter pieces on the first record, and leaving the mashup for a finale. Instead CD2 opens gently with the chiming invocation and rimshots of the title track before scraping strings introduce a note (or three) of dissonance in "Elephant", which explores some of the same disconcerting irritation value as Nurse With Wound have bent opened minds with in collaboration with Aranos, a theme which LSD March expand upon later in the crepitating tonescape of "Dance". By way of reed extemporisations, percussive strata and occasional vocal insertions, the group weave and meander their own beguilingly spare way into the realms of hallucinatory meditation music. That is until "Love" throws up stuttering analogue rhythms which spin out into degenerating electronic grooves and inpenetrably-distorted space voices, and while it's a mite facile to bring Ghost into the frame of reference, they probably needs to be mentioned, just for comparison purposes, as the droning, cymbal-scoring and chants of "1978" also indicate - though LSD March have a distinct, equally diverse, sound in their own right. The album concludes in fine miscreant style, rattling and rolling out in a free-for-all miasma of noise making atonality, a punctuation which stands up better for the more lysergically benevolent shifts and twists which have proceeded it into the aether. Nikutai No Tubomi does what good psychedlic music should - it provokes headscratching puzzlement, occasional bursts of dislocating wobbliness (often simultaneously), and allows the music to reach out into spaces where the listener can become lost in the musicans' own particular trip at the time of recording, but without the pesky intrusions of ego acting as stumbling blocks along the way. -Linus Tossio- |
| The Long
Dead Sevens -
The White
Waltz And Other Stories Label: Beta-lactam ring Records Format: CD  I
dunno quite what you call the sub-genre of music which seemed to spring
fully-formed from the head of Lee
Hazlewood a long time ago before being kicked into touch by the
punks and goths, but you know the one I mean. It's got the Bad Seeds, Gallon Drunk, Tindersticks, Crime And The City Solution
and other such magnificent acts in it, and they're drinking whisky,
listening to blues and country, and making wonderfully beautiful music
from misery and humour. Anyway, whatever you call it - probably alt-
something, or swamp- something, or something equally and unfittingly
banal - there's a new recruit to the posse in the shape of The Long Dead Sevens. Coming very
much from the spaghetti western end of the spectrum, they still manage not to sound anything
like Fields of the Nephilim,
although it wouldn't surprise me if at least a couple of them wore hats.The White Waltz is an apt showcase of their talents, opening with the wonderfully dark and ominous "Pigface", which is not, despite its title, as far as I can tell a eulogy to the 90s industrial supergroup of the same name. Slide and acoustic guitars back up a supremely mournful vocal - “Oh, I make love but I can still hear those castanets; how they echo in my head like a thousand companion insects”. If that's the kind of melodrama that turns you off, then let's face it, you're probably not going to like it. If, like me, it's exactly your kind of thing, then The Long Dead Sevens will deliver in spades (although the line “the fat man he is dead” did have the unfortunate side-effect of reminding me of the David Bowie episode of Extras, but that's probably just me). The country element comes way to the fore on "The Mother Song", a tale of bad parenting (“you should have kept him at home and kept him out of all the bars, ma”) told to a whirl of hillbilly banjo and Dirty Three-style violin, which comes across as a spiritual cousin of Violet Femmes' classic "Country Death Song", only less whiny and with more footstomping. Add the righteous blues of "Seven Levels", which takes us on a trip through Dante's Inferno by way of some slide guitar which wouldn't sound out of place on the Hardware soundtrack. Think maybe of a more countrified Bad Seeds, or Tindersticks if you caught them on a drinking bender before they got maudlin and were getting a little bit aggro down the pub; like a belliegerent drunk who's been okay up til now, and still retains some of his charm, but shows in his eyes that he's about to go on the turn and punch someone's lights out. “Edgy” in that sense, rather than a crass marketing sense. Instead of buying a round, appease that guy with a pint and spend the rest of your cash on this album. Except it'll probably make you want a drink. -Deuteronemu 90210, drunk and angry - |
| Lustmord – Other Label: Hydrahead Format: CD  Other is sinister listening. Huge
intimidating drones. That's what Lustmord
does very well, and he doesn't fail to deliver here. At the risk of
upping Freq's carbon footprint, I like to listen to CDs as I drive
around. I put Other on. It
was dark ... it had to be. The world outside was transformed into a
wasteland. Most likely post-apocalyptic. Huge empty and desolate. Other is an immensely atmospheric
album, but its an atmosphere that will have you cowering in the corner.Lustmord has a long and impressive musical history, starting in 1980, working with industrial legends such as Nurse With Wound, Current 93, and Coil. He was a member of SPK. His 1990 album Heresy gave birth to dark ambiance. He has scored numerous films. Not to mention performing at a ritual of The Church of Satan. Other features appearances from Adam Jones (Tool), Aaron Turner (Isis), and Buzz Osborne (Melvins), all to good effect. This isn't the first industrial/drone/metal collaboration I've heard. There is something quite logical and right about the crossover, really. This is what industrial metal always ought to have been, not lamer thrash with a drum machine. On Other drone metal teams up with industrial ambiance to give us all nightmares. -A228- |
| Merzbow
- Coma Berenices Label: Vivo Format: CD  This
three-hundred-and-somethingth release from noise magician Masami Akita
is packaged in sombre black and themed against animal cruelty - albeit
in a loose sense that has nothing to do with the music, unless perhaps
the listener's suffering is an allegory for that of the animals. But
perhaps not.Eleven minute opener "Earth Worms" is a gross caricature of a guitar solo, all soaring harmonics, feedback and wah-wah effects. One wonders if this is what Jimi Hendrix sounded like to grown-ups in the 1960s. "Dark Stars" is more overtly electronic, a pandaemonium of oscillators and resonant filters backed my an intermittent bass thrum that provides the only hint of order and repetition. At eight minutes this is the shortest and most hectic of the five pieces here. "Alishan" brings the first real melody and structure, a ponderous stoner bassline that wouldn't sound out of place in a motorik krautrock rhythm section. "Silk Feather" slows the pace down a little, blending the implicit psychedelia of "Alishan" with the synth twiddling of "Dark Stars" but with a slower, more ominous bass riff and more restraint on the chaos. Something about this track makes me think of Black Sabbath, but maybe that's just me. Finally, "Revenge on Humanity" heads into more brutal, percussive territory, assaulting the listener with pulses of overdriven synth and grinding noise. What's remarkable about Akita is that he can make something so alien and hostile actually quite listenable. The tracks could be a little shorter but then you wouldn't get such a dislocating sense of unreality when they finish. Occasionally the effect is like getting all the jarring, noisy elements of a rock album but without the actual formulas of rock music. I've heard a lot of noise acts over the years but very few of them have the subtlety and lasting appeal of Merzbow. -Andrew Clegg- |
| Mice
Parade - Mice Parade Label: FatCat Format: CD  So
it seems Mice Parade
is largely the work of one Adam
Pierce,
and that this is the fifth Mice Parade album, although it's the first
to come to my attention. With household name status or indie-rock
critical notoriety apparently not forthcoming, knocking out five albums
in quick succession has certainly taught the indefatigable Mr. Pierce a
thing or two about how to make a really fucking NICE sounding record. I'm willing to bet he knows everything that's worth knowing about which microphones to use for what, where to put them, how to work the console in the studio to get exactly what he's looking for, how to get the, like, totally sweetest tones possible out of all of the fine musical gear he and his collaborators use on this here album. He seems like a humble and tasteful dude too, someone who knows how to assemble and showcase all these recorded bits to their greatest advantage, so that the sounds complement each other just so and everything stands out bright, warm, woozy, enticing, faintly psychedelic.... Mmm, NICE. Ever so nice. And I'm not being facetious here either; seriously, good for him. These virtues are not to be underrated - it takes a rare combination of skill, fortitude, talent and hard work to get things sounding this spot-on - better, sweeter and cooler than the murky, whacked out guff pedalled by any number of overpaid name 'producers'. So a pat on the back and a stiff drink for Mr. Pierce for a job well done, re: making Mice Parade a fucking pleasure to listen to. BUT - you knew there was gonna be a BUT, right? Can you guess what it is? That's right: inspiration, spark, spirit, soul, energy, all that stuff that raises pop music beyond the ordinary to the plains of glory....? I am sad to report that there is precious little of it to go around here. Tracks meander dreamily out of yr speakers, in one ear, out the other and off into the ether. There's some admirable Stephen Drodz-style contemporary drum action, with occasional brushy, skittery folkyness. Gorgeous synth and keyboard tones burble along nicely, waving at passersby, delighting mellow ladies and dudes with three week beards. All of the tracks have singing, mostly the classic indie well-someone's-got-to-sing-so-I-guess-it'll-be-me variety, utilising floaty melodies that do that self-conscious college boy sing-song thing that Deathcab For Cutie do so well. Guitars are prevalent and have three settings: electric chiming (the default), acoustic plucking (for folky bits) and polite showgazey fuzz (ooh, edgey!). I've listened to this damn thing four times, and couldn't tell you a single lyric that I recall. There are beautiful moments here of course, particularly a splendid appearance by Kristin Anna Valtysdottir of M�m, purring like a cat awaking from a confusing dream on "Double Dolphins on the Nickel" (pity Mice Parade's tribute to The Minutemen doesn't extend beyond a tastefully obtuse name-check). There is also a fine turn by Laetitia Sadler, who injects some much-needed chilly fire into the sultry "Tales of Las Negras". From time to time, it's hard not to be won over by the sheer sonic charm of Mice Parade, their perfect everyday detail ready to accept your laidback love, like a hand-painted teapot, or somebody else's granny. But no, not quite. It's a tragedy of unified cultural tastes and technical proficiency really; Mice Parade's intentions are good, but they've produced yet another addition to the ever-growing mountain of records that are impossible to hate, but equally impossible to love. Don't cry for Adam Pierce though; you'll no doubt be able to catch Mice Parade hitting the afternoon slot at some of the summer festivals, getting the picnicers and families smiling and tapping feet beneath their sun-hats, and that's not such a bad fate really. Nice in excelsis. -Ben Haggar- |
| Monks
- Demo Tapes
1965 Label: Munster/Play Loud! Format: CD,LP  1966's Black Monk Time,
the sole album from American GIs turned musical iconoclasts the Monks,
has benefited from a ever-rising cultural cachet in recent years via
reissues, critical reappraisal and word of mouth, making the journey
from a one-in-a-million record collector oddity to a vital touchstone
of proto-punk underground rock, with writers and musicians falling over
each other to testify to the legend of the Monks' minimalist nihilism
and aesthetic shock tactics.And rightly so, as Black Monk Time is undoubtedly an extraordinary record in many ways, but I can't help but think the band's cultural importance is getting a little misinterpreted. Most of the declarations of Monk-Love to turn up in print recently have tended to begin by scribbling a quick sketch of the mid-60s music scene as a realm of upbeat hippy pop and easy-going vibes into which the dark spectre of the Monks pounced out of nowhere with an terrifying outburst of mind-blowing musical barbarism. Take a look at '60s rock that extends beyond the clichés however, and you'll see that the violence of Monk Music was hardly unprecedented in late 1966. In Britain, The Troggs had spent most of the preceding two years churning out slabs of their ultra-repetitive caveman bliss, building on the equally raw early work of The Kinks. In America meanwhile, the landmark rock'n'roll mentalism of The Sonics' first album dropped in '65, and by the end of '66 audiences had been subjected to the buzzsaw distortion of The Shadows of Knights' "I'm Gonna Make You Mine", the extraordinary WRONG-ness of The Elastik Band's "Spazz" and the speed and acid insanity cocktail that is Love's "7 & 7 Is", amongst others. And, unlike the Monks, most of those groups actually scored hits, suggesting that listeners weren't exactly cowering in fear every time some wildman stomped on his new fuzzbox. Trying to frame Black Monk Time, with its fairly conventional lead guitar and organ parts and its tendency to hide unashamedly pretty songs beneath the martial pounding, as a benchmark for garage-rock brutality just doesn't hold up. No, far better to champion the Monks for their ideas and calculated subversion. Their geek-gang mentality and profoundly weird monk attire, their incorporation of stomping, militaristic tempos and jilted, authoritarian yelping, their obtuse and ambiguous expressions of political satire, their mysterioso black album cover - this was most assuredly NOT the way the emerging counter-culture of the mid-sixties usually did business. The timing here is all important of course; if the Monks had emerged in '68 they could easily have been lost amid the innumerable gangs of gimmicky freak-flag flyers rolling up to cash in on the brief major label faux-psychedelia boom. But this is SIXTY SIX we're talking here man, and, as if to prove the point beyond doubt to time-nazis like me, Munster records have now masterminded the first official release of the Monks demo tapes, serving to push back the genesis of Monk-Music to 1965. So yes, whilst teenage America was getting down to "Louis Louis" and Dylan was pissing off the folkies with his electric guitar, over in Germany our heroes already had their shtick down. And if these demo recordings are perhaps less focused and less aggressive than the versions which were eventually released for public consumption, they are in some ways even more startling. The key to the Monks genius lies I think in the unprecedented deconstructionist approach to music. Reversing the usual punk-savant formula of untrained delinquents wrestling accidental genius out of their instruments, the Monks were consummate professional musicians, used to playing all night sets of dance band pop as their civilian alter-egos The Five Torquays, who took the decision to jettison nearly every building block of conventional popular music, from the melody on down. And it is this deliberate minimalism, aiming to shock, confuse and excite listeners in ways few had attempted before, which helps cement the Monks' true legacy as the originators of a lineage of conceptual outsider pop malcontents that runs from The Residents and Devo through to Clinic and The Fall. The main revelation provided by the Demo Tapes is just how radical and far-reaching this deconstruction was. Some of the songs here are allowed to meander into longer jams than was permitted on Black Monk Time, often without interjections from the vocals and guitar which provided the recognisable hooks on the finished album. For several minutes at a time on songs such as "Higgle-dy Piggle-dy", the sound is stripped down to just the inventive and hyper-repetitive rhythms of the drums and bass and the distinctive thwack of Dave Day's banjo, creating an unnervingly primal sound with scarcely any resemblance to song-based rock'n'roll. This process can be heard to best effect on "Space Age", a song which developed into Black Monk Time's "Blast-Off", but is presented here minus the hokey surf-riff that normalised the album version, but with chiming steel drums and a truly weird echoed recording instead, sounding less like any conceivable kind of rock band and more like a Moondog performance produced by Joe Meek. The demos includes several older, previously unheard songs which were presumably dropped from the Monks repertoire for being too much like regular pop songs, but even these are given an uncompromising Monk-Music makeover, emerging like some sort of collapsing carnival nightmare music. "Pretty Suzanne" drips with unhinged acid rock soloing and staccato yelping, whilst "Hushie Pushie" features tripped out a-cappella vocals about a lost cat and instrumental sections that sound absurdly similar to the kind of inventive West African guitar pop which you can be near certain the Monks had never heard, assuming recordings of it even existed at this point (I'm no expert). Add to this the kooky church organ and spoken word introductions that the band or their managers saw fit to tack onto every song here, and truly we have a recording like no other. The CD is rounded off with two tracks cut some time earlier by The Five Torquays ("There She Walks" and "Boys are Boys"), and the contrast between their groovy '60s pop stylings and the cavalcade of madness which has preceded them is remarkable as it is hilarious. Whilst they are perhaps not, as allmusic.com claims of Black Monk Time, "the strangest recordings ever made", the Monks demos are still about as far-out as anyone in the world was getting in 1965. Not so much 'off the wall' in the context of their time as 'buzzing circles around the ceiling giggling to themselves', these songs make essential listening for any connoisseur of the strange and inexplicable. -Ben Haggar- |
| Monno – Ghosts Label: Conspiracy Format: CD  Would
it be a cliché to say that Ghosts
is a haunting album? Most likely, but not to worry. Monno, from Belgium, make dark music
in epic proportions. Ghosts
is fantastic: ultra slow, droning, and doom laden. Think metal the
speed of Burning Witch, but
less vocal and more atmospheric. I love the way high pitch electronic
drones hang above crushing riffs. And the riffs are crushing,
grinding, brutal, gloomy, and spot on. Monno are giving us
a lesson how to play guitar here. It isn't all slow, though. "Troye" is
up tempo, by doom standards at least. As for "Hull" ... "Hull" is
utterly ballistic. A frantic hardcore rush of guitar and electronics
charging headlong towards you. Like The
Locust but looser, dirtier, and every bit as demented. Everyone needs a copy of this album. -Alaric- |
| Morning
Bride - Lea Valley Delta Blues Label: Letterbox Format: CD  Paradoxes.
(Yeah, I thought the plural'd be “paradoces” as well, but no).
Paradoxes and Hackney. I love Hackney, yet at the same time I fear her
something rotten. No, it's not just the fact that I've been mugged here
more times than I care to remember (well, even just the first time was
technically “more than I care to remember”, but, y'know...), or that
there's always the risk of getting shot. No, what frightens me is that
the other day, while out walking in Stoke Newington, I happened to
notice that someone had left pasta out for the birds. Pasta. Not
breadcrumbs, pasta. How can it be that in just the one borough, stupid
amounts of crime can sit alongside people who genuinely believe pesto
is a sandwich filling? As I say, paradoxes.Another like that is Morning Bride's new album, Lea Valley Delta Blues. Yeah, even the title's paradoxical, or at the very least self-contradictory. As is the fact that Morning Bride, already possessed of a huge cult following in Hackney, are exponents of what I could call Americana, if it weren't for the fact that I hate the term. And have members coming from up North as well as from, well, America. But, y'know, paradox is what drives Morning Bride, as it does all truly great music. Love and loss. Heartbreak and hope. Suicidal despair and transcendent optimism. Somewhere is a place where all these things meet and have a few shots of whisky, and Morning Bride are on the jukebox there. Examples? Crikey. Nine tracks and not a moment wasted. Like the finest booze, it's bloody hard to distil. But I'm a nice guy, so I'll give it a go. Each time I listen to this I have a different favourite track. Right now it's “Stepping Out In Front Of Cars”. Utterly gorgeous- one moment the vocals are breathy, frail... next thing they're kicking ass and taking names. Not sure whether it's the most uplifting song ever, or the saddest. Like I said, paradox. “Faith Is Blind”. Another cracker. Slide guitar and strings... always a beautiful combination. I honestly couldn't tell you whether this is a gorgeous love song with a core of spite, or a vicious one with a heart of gold. And do you know what? I couldn't really give two shits if it's gonna sound this good at whatever it's doing. Imagine if Shivaree had come from Hackney. You can't, can you? Well, you don't have to. It's all right here. “Eleanora” is a very different beast. Chief songwriter (that's a good title - wonder if you get a special hat with that?) Mark Pearson takes over lead vocal duties for something that wouldn't have sounded out of place on Julian Cope's Fried, or Skellington, maybe. If you don't understand that that's a recommendation, then you can stuff your fair trade pineapples up your asses and fuck off. Ahem, sorry. It's that Hackney duality thing kicking in again, I'm afraid. Oh, on the subject of Hackney, the album closes with a proper down-home hoedown, "Mother Hackney", which addresses both the fear and love people have for this place. “Livin' on the Murder Mile/oh what can you do but smile?” indeed. Come on. That's great. A love song for a dysfunctional relationship with a London borough - now that's what we need. Get to know and love this song now, so you can sing it in drunken memory once the Lea Valley's been destroyed to make way for that sporting event they're planning on having in a few years' time. I don't care where you live, you'll be pretending to live in Hackney by the time the last note dies on this one. So, did I like this album? Figure it out. It's hardly rocket salad. Science. Sorry, meant to say “science”. If you can't do that, then try this one. How come my favourite Country album in, well, ages, managed to come from the middle of a built up urban shithole? As I say, paradox. Paradox is beautiful, and it can rip your heart out. Let it - there are worse ways to go, after all. -Deuteronemu 90210 in a goddamn suit- |
| Mothlite
- The Flax
Of Reverie Label: Southern Format: CD,2LP  The
Flax of Reverie is the gorgeous symphonic début from Daniel O'Sullivan
(of Guapo, Miama and The Carousel Of
Headless Horses and Æthenor)
and Antii Uusimaki
(of Panic DHH).
I could make comparisons with Pink
Floyd, Coil,
or even the sparse melodic folk rock of Tenhi.
To me they also seem to explore similar territory to the more delicate
moments of prog metal, they reach the same levels of intensity but not
in quite the same direction as metal. Specifically, I'm thinking of the
melodic side of Agalloch.
I'm clutching at straws looking for comparisons, though. Mothlite
are too original and distinctive to pin down that easily. Each song is
a musical journey, the sound is by turns dark and moody, rich and lush,
or a gentle drifting texture. Moody melancholic piano keyboards weave
in and out of rich choir like walls of vocals, pierced occasionally
with wailing strings.They take their name from Stan Brakhage's film Mothlight, which comprised of foliage and natural detritus fixed directly onto the celluloid. This is how Mothlite approach music. There is something incredibly natural and organic about The Flax of Reverie, something very English too. There is something else as well, though. It isn't the familiar English countryside they conjure up - Mothlite take us to quite another place, somewhere haunting and lyrical. This album really doesn't sound like a début. It is so richly composed, performed and produced. A testament to O'Sullivan's compositions and Uusimaki's production. The musical ideas are so clear and definite, Mothlite know exactly what they are doing, where they are taking us, and have created a unique and stunning album. -Alaric- |
| Murcof – The Versailles
Sessions Label: Leaf Format: CD/2LP/Digital  The Versailles Sessions are hardly
the realms of John Eliot Gardiner.
Murcof has used the
performance of Baroque music played on seventeenth century instruments
as the source of The Versailles
Sessions: including harpsichord, viola da gamba, flute, and
violin. But there the similarities to Gardiner ends. This is no attempt
to recapture an authentic sound of the Baroque era. In the summer of
2007 Mexican electronic musician Fernando
Corona, aka Murcof, received a commission for Les Grandes Eaux Nocturnes, an
annual festival at Versailles. He worked alongside musicians who
specialised in playing Baroque music.The Versailles Sessions is a document of the event. It is mind blowing stuff. Uncut described Murcof's Cosmos as “Sunn O))) playing Ligeti in a galaxy far, far away”. There is certainly an element of this to The Versailles Sessions, but this is not an album of drones. While I was listening all sorts of diverse comparisons came to mind. The reworked renaissance sound made me think of Miranda Sex Garden's noise rock madrigals in an electronic form. Holger Hiller's use of sampled instruments came to mind. Some of the instrumental and vocal sections, overlaid with electronics and epicness, were reminiscent of Vangelis' Heaven and Hell. Sometimes Murcof launches us straight up into space, sometimes he takes us into sinister soundscapes. There are some moments of utter baroque beauty as the music of Couperin and Lully surface above the electronics and then submerge again into clicking squeaking drones. At points the music has a distinctly Arabic feel, but Baroque music has always had that tendency. The Venetian composer Claudio Monteverdi springs to mind. Murcof has indicated that this is not a follow up to Cosmos but a one off project. The Versailles Sessions are totally unique, haunting and beautiful, a head on collision between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries. -Alaric- |
| Muslimgauze
- Speaker Of
Turkish Label: Soleilmoon Format: CD  Wallowing
in the hazy mists drifing across a backmasked pan-Arabian sea
of
ethnotronic dub and shivering with brightly-struck pecussion, Speaker Of Turkish
uncoils with langourous, leisurly bass and rhythms keeping time at a
rolling pace. There are wafts of breathy pipes and shards of brittle
tapeloops clashing in the mix too, liquid morasses bubbling up between
chiming bells and ghostly voices from and about the Muslim
world. One of the key aspects of Jones' method was that he eschewed the use of digital samplers, and his fondness for constucting his unique music by razor cut and the splicing of tape imbues his edits with a particular sound, the ever present echoes and flickering reverb layering a fug as dense as that of a basement full of contented shisha-tokers. This is some of Bryn Jones's most finely textured work, though the soothing balm of lengthy tracks like the melliflously relaxing "Turkish Speaker" or the hypnagogic, slow-burning hiss'n'shuffle of the deftly-constructed "Bedouin Tablet" are still coiled around a musical heart which pulses with a fervent passion for his subject. Likewise, the two versions of "The Good Musilm" are sprinkled with fractured percussion debris, clicking and clattering around the central rhythm which soon gallops into euphoric life, cresting softly in undulating waves redolent of hot winds and exotic enchantments. It's a album which at once is a reminder that the passing of Bryn Jones at such a young age was tragic; but also stands as a superb spur to recall that his back catalogue is not only legendarily immense, at over one hundred releases, but that so many Muslimgauze recordings are almost untouchably, achingly beautiful, as is most definitely the case here. -Linus Tossio- |
| Nadja
– Skin Turns To Glass Label: The End Format: CD  Skin Turns to Glass is epic stuff, I
love it. Huge shoegazer doom from Toronto-based duo Nadja, who began as a solo project
of Aidan Baker. In 2005 Leah Buckareff joined him allowing
them to leave the studio and go live, though this album was originally
released in 2003 in a slightly different version with Buckareff on bass
and vocals. Between them they make a sound that could conquer the world.Imagine My Bloody Valentine or Jesu, but much much slower. Big wailing riffs crawl along at snail pace like early Earth. Nadja are as slow as Sunn O))) but they are far dirtier sounding, rather than deep and booming. They don't really have the doom sound that evolved from Black Sabbath via black metal and stoner rock. Nadja have the shoegazer lover of noise for the sake of noise and explore a range of massive distorted textures. Huge walls of chip frying, sizzling, buzzing, and grinding guitars. Add sparse drum machine rhythms and moaned vocals barely able to penetrate through the guitars and the comparisons with My Bloody Valentine and Jesu become obvious. Noise tempered with melody ... or should that be the other way around? Somewhere within Nadja there is a nice melodic indie song but it is smothered by layer upon layer of dirty guitar and distorted beyond all recognition. Definitely world-conquering stuff. How could Skin Turns to Glass be anything other than fantastic? -Alaric- |
| No Age - Nouns Label: Sub Pop Format: CD  Right
now in some of the more garish wine bars the world over, record company
lowlives sit hunched over their tapas, brows furrowed under expensive
haircuts, racking their manicured brains to figure a way of luring
people away from fucking iTunes and back into actual record
shops. And right here, with the release of their new album Nouns, punky LA duo No Age might just have come up with
a winner. The CD edition of Nouns
comes packaged with a chunky and gorgeous booklet of photos, video
stills, and colourful bits and pieces, which not only serves to
give you an idea of who this band are and where they’re coming from,
but also stands on its own as a beautiful thing that makes the album
itself something exciting to own, rather than just being another
annoying piece of plastic cluttering up your room. Seriously, I haven't
felt this happy about owning a physical copy of an album since I
stopped buying vinyl. And crucially, of course, a chunky and gorgeous
booklet can't be downloaded from fucking iTunes. Well, not yet, as far
as I know – but I’d bet you almost anything that some geek is currently
furiously working on a way to wreck this, too. No Age itself consists of drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt and a guitarist with the ludicrously awesome name of Randy Randall. At first blush Nouns seems to be a fairly simple proposition: cherrypick the snotty suburban numbers from Sonic Youth’s late 80s output and distil all that skateartnoisepunk energy down to barely half an hour of frenetic fuzzy joyous thrashy racket. And if that were all that Nouns entailed, it would still be an exciting listen. But there is a lot more to this record, after repeat listenings (and I’ve had it on fairly high rotate for the last couple of weeks – god bless short albums) Nouns reveals itself in a way that few records manage to do. Not just the music itself, the sheer joy which Spunt and Randall bring to making music shines through every track on this record, and it is truly a pleasure to behold. No Age often attack their instruments with such a fervour that you have to remind yourself that, yes, there are only two people making this ruckus, and the guitar and drums often seem to struggle with each other, both spiralling up through the mix as if in racing to make it to the top through pure manic energy and volume. The vocals are inevitably the losers in this hairball, disappearing and reappearing in the murk, but the fact that this almost DIY dynamic managed to survive the studio process intact is truly remarkable, and it gives the record a genuine energy which is exhilarating. -Anton Allen- |
| KK Null
- [BaryoGenesis] Label: Vivo Format: CD ![KK Null - [BaryoGenesis] sleeve detail](pictures/kk_null_baryogenesis.png) Baryons
are subatomic particles
which include neutrons and protons - baryogenesis is the hypothetical
process of the physical creation of the matter which went on to make up
most of universe, just before the Big
Bang. It's also a pretty good title for the album, as there are moments
when it sounds like the cosmos is expanding into something really quite
vast. Being put in a position to listen to [BaryoGenesis] is
a bit like being dragged off the street, muffled up in headphones and a
virtual reality suit plugged into a planatarium, and made to endure
whatever psychedelic surround-sound punishment the devious mind behind
it can throw into the mix. In fact, doing that to a random person, were
it ever likely, could get the perpetrator sent down for a considerable
time, as [BaryoGenesis]
is quite a challenge when heard voluntarily - imagine being tortured
with it?Unlikely reality show hypotheses aside, this album is probably not to be undertaken lightly; Kazuyuki Kishino has taken his sound sources, analogue and digital, and whipped up four tracks of devastatingly full-on material which is guaranteed to spin its audience through an audio blender, and will leave many shaken, and probably disturbed, by the end of the hour-long sonic drubbing he metes out from the opening environmental sounds of birdsong and insect life onwards and upwards into the wide blue yonder of abstract electronics which expands outward from there. And it's great, like a rollercoaster ride into whatever KK Null can throw into the sampler and spit out again; but this is not sheer unaldulterated, disorganised noise, fun as that can be sometimes. Null has constructed [BaryoGenesis] with a sense of purpose, a clarity even, which is a delight to be immersed in, to live through, without ripping those damned headphones off and running screaming into the starry, uncaring night. -Linus Tossio- |
| O'Death - Broken Hymns,
Limbs, and Skin
Label: City Slang (Europe)/ Ernest Jenning Record Co (USA) Format: CD  O'Death’s stated intention with Broken Hymns, Limbs and Skin
was to capture the energy of their live sets on record, and anyone who
has seen one of O’Death’s riotous shows will know that this is a hell
of a tall order. The resulting album is a gypsy stomp barn burner, a
chaotic celebratory oom-pah punk sea shanty set to wailing fiddles and
crashing shards of scrap metal, an emotional hoe-down encompassing
howling angst and Jesus-jumping ecstasy and whisky swagger. As for
freezing an O’Death show and printing it on three and a half inches of
plastic, this is about as close as you’re going to get.Granted, at the moment we’re not exactly short of artists who earn their crust exploring the dark underbelly of Appalachia. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if Appalachia is anything but dark underbelly. But Broken Hymns puts O’Death up there with the best of their field. On the more contemplative numbers, Greg Jamie’s vocals have a fragile wisdom reminiscent of Neil Young or Will Oldham; however it’s when the band ratchets its trademark fervour up to snake-handling levels, and he’s howling hooks like a horsewhipped demon, that’s when O’Death really come into their own. Not so much toe-tapping catchy as foot-stomping epidemic, this is an album you could lock yourself away with all winter, provided you had a few buckets of bourbon and a fiddle. -Anton Allen- |
| Joe Preston and Daniel Menche - Cerberic Doxology Label: Anthem format: Dual CD/DVD  Cerberic Doxology is a huge, eerie
25 minute epic of vocal chants. Joe
Preston and Daniel Menche
have captured the vastness of the pacific north west USA amidst layer
upon layer of drone. They begin and end with chanted melodies, which
gives a nice circularity to Cerberic
Doxology. The music is as timeless and unchanging as the
landscape they evoke, as immovable as the monumental stones of the
Stonehenge memorial in Washington State . For me there is something
very Russian to the opening melodies. They could equally well be
creating a sonic image of the Siberian steppe. That's the kind of epic
scale we are dealing with here. Mr Preston and Mr Menche don't mess around. Then they really hit the drones. Think Sunn O))) or Earth, but made using vocals (incidentally, Joe Preston has worked with both of these bands in the past ... along with Harvey Milk, High on Fire, and the Melvins). Think Ligeti's vocal compositions. Huge layers of vocals drifting in and out, processed and unprocessed, covering all elements of the spectrum from guttural growls to choral highs. The result is an epic Buddhist chant from the smoking top of Mount St Helens. The video on the DVD side of the disk is shot in grainy black and white. Its the perfect visual counterpart to the droning chants. Every bit as haunting as the sound track, they shot it around Mount St Helens. Huge empty panoramas of primordial volcanic stone drift in and out like the wash of vocals. Joe Preston and Daniel Menche have hewn out a timeless classic. Amazing. -Alaric- |
| Jack Rose
- Dr Ragtime
And Pals/Self Titled Label: Beautiful Happiness Format: 2CD  It
pretty much goes without saying that Jack
Rose
is at the forefront of the American Primitive school of folk based
around acoustic guitar and in Rose's case lap steel too. This double CD
provides a European release for two albums issued previously on
vinyl on the Tequila
Sunrise label (and Self
Titled was also put out on CD by the marvellous Archive Records in a
long-since deleted edition). Dr Ragtime finds him and friends Glenn Jones (of Cul de Sac and himself a notable exponent of the form), Mike Gangloff (banjo, and a former collaborator in Pelt), Micah Smaldone, Sean Bowles on washboard and Harmonica Dan making the sort of sounds which resonate so strongly of the USA that it's nigh on impossible not to picture a rocking chair on a wraparound porch, a jug of iced tea and a vast sense of space populated with mile-long trains, abandoned factories with tin shacks built into the roof and the breath of possibilites, real or imagined, blowing through the continental breezes. The chiming steel strings vibrate through the album's twelve instrumentals like the wires of the telegraph poles which dot and connect small town America, and the melodic beauty of the playing is touched by a sadness as immense as the Mojave desert skies and rugged as the mountains of Appalachia. One glance at the old-time guitarist and fiddler all dressed up in their best suits sat on hard-backed chairs in a country field on the cover is almost enough to picture the sounds here, and the shadowed faces which peer out from the sepia are simultaneously as tightly under control - and yet as relaxed - as Rose's music. Self Titled is Rose solo, the lap steel twanging to the cursive strums of his acoustic guitar on seven pieces of mesmerising redolence, the Americana connections above stripped down to the sound of one man and his brightly expressive music. The deceptive simplicity underscores the power of the tunes, which roll and spring forth into expanses of frankly astonishing guitar work, and it's at about the time "Revolt" kicks in that it's necessary to mention John Fahey, simply because Rose is a worthy follower along the trail he blazed across a century which half forgot - and sometimes misremembered - America's folk music heritage for some long while. Jack Rose, along with the aforementioned Glenn Jones as well as the likes of Sir Richard Bishop, are keeping the passion alive for far more receptive ears these days - and it can be heard in every strum, glide, chord or tap on the body of Rose's guitar as he works through the American songbook, closing with a plangent rendition of "Dark Was the Night" every bit a stirring as Ry Cooder's use of the same tune as the central motif for his evocative soundtrack to Paris, Texas. Self Titled is a classic; and the combination with Dr Ragtime makes for a double delight to the ears. -Richard Fontenoy- |
| A Slow
Rip – For The Time Being Label: Endgame Format: 2CD  For
The Time Being is a double CD compilation of ambience, taken
from material originally released between 2004 and 2007 by A Slow Rip on 7 CDR albums. The
Wollongong based trio take the name from the initials of their first
names: Rob Laurie (guitar,
percussion, vocals and wind instruments), Ian Miles (analogue synths, guitar
and bass), and Phil Turnbull (virtual
analogue synth). A pretty impressive list of instruments. A Slow Rip
are definitely not laptop artists, which is fine by me; personally,
I've always thought they were more suited for spreadsheets than music. A Slow Rip improvise and record straight to tape. This approach leads to a warm organic soundscape of buzzing synths, long drones and prepared guitar. The first CD is predominantly composed of more drone based music, whereas the second CD is more experimental but still very warm and effortless. The percussion really comes to the fore, in a very spacious and relaxed way. A Slow RIP are slow. Nothing happens that quickly. Their sound has the feeling of time stood still. All in all very nice stuff. They've clearly got a lot more material, so hopefully we'll get to hear more of it soon. -Alaric- |
| The Sontaran
Experiment - {The Sontaran
Experiment} Label: Undergroove Format: CD  I
remember the "Sontaran Experiment" Doctor Who story. Tom Baker
fighting bad guys with lame papier-mâché heads and then there was this
really crap robot-crab-thing. Fantastic. So when this beautifully
packaged CD dropped through my door it had already done a pretty good
job of endearing itself to me before I had even given it a listen.Everything about The Sontaran Experiment's self titled debut is epic. Clocking in at 58 minutes long it consists of three huge movements. Not one to file under easy listening. Paul Catten's musical vision is brutal, harrowing, utterly intense and emotionally draining. Huge slabs of doom reminiscent of Burning Witch or ASVA beat you into submission. Catten's cries of “There's no one left but us” fight to break through the wall of guitar and ever intensifying crescendos. What makes this album really great is that The Sontaran Experiment are full of twists and turns. When you least expect it, when their pounding doom has got total hold of you, they leap into tight drum and bass riffs, or washes of ominous keyboards. They collapse into pure noise experimentalism and rise out again. There are even moments of delicate melody, sounding especially fragile in the midst of the brutality. At one point in the first movement the big wall of doom cuts out. A clock ticks away, interrupted by momentary blasts of ultra fast hardcore every bit as demented as The Locust. Fantastic, brutal and original. Alaric |
| Strings
Of Consciousness
- Our Moon
Is Full Label: Central Control International Format: CD,LP  Not
so much a supergroup as a superhighway-connected collective, mostly
based in the south of France, Strings
Of Consciousness
delight in melding acoustic instruments with electronics, sliding one
over the other and processing the former with the latter. The results
could be messy, or could be described as extremely hallucinatory
soundtracks to that imaginary collective headtrip movie which everyone
who composes
this sort of music seemingly contributes to.Perhaps it is best to approach the album in its own right, but the guest names ( JG Thirlwell, Eugene Robinson from Oxbow, Barry Adamson - on whose label Our Moon Is Full is released, and it shows - and others contribute vocals) are as impressive as those of the ensemble's core members who include Phillipe Petite of BiP_HOp label fame, Andy Diagram of Spaceheads and Two Pale Boys and a host of french improv scenesters. Hell, even Hugh Hopper of the Soft Machine joins in the fun. One result the number of participants involved is a certain tendency towards sounding like a compilation, and this is especially apparent in the first four tracks. No one overall sound ever dominates, but this is no bad thing, the mood swinging from electro-acoustic ambience and splurges of distended rock to the scratchy, sensous strings and reeds accompanying Robinson's spoken word trek into the mythopaeic abyss of a tale of treachery, violence and murder in "Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness". Here the electronics building in density until the music cracks as the enraged jealousy in narrator's voice breaks down into impassioned despair as his self-appointed state of frenzied bloodlust explodes in metallic percussion and pounding heart bass beats. This marks an intense emotive peak for the first part of the album, and takes some coming down from - which is where Adamson comes in on a waft of throaty, soothing mutterings and a far gentler backing on "Sonic Glimpses", whose almost romantic tone at first is soon spurred into thickly-spread impassioned jazz-rock spaciousness. The second phase of the record finds twinkling strings plucked and bowed briefly around the treated voice of Lisa Smith Klossner, before Black Sifichi takes on the poetic duties, ruminating on mortality and the passage of time while the musical mood glows softly louder and grittier below his words, which flow in waves and ripples in - of course - a stream of consciousness which is soon immersed in a propulsive psychedelic grind of rhythm and melodic twin guitar. Sifichi is soon back along with Pete Simonelli of The Enablers, and the last tracks on the album merge into each other more seamlessly than the first on the first side (assuming the vinyl paradigm is being observed, which of course it can be on the LP edition), the whole flowing with less disconnection in peaks and troughs following a richly textured loud-quiet-loud dynamic which closes in a welter of disjointed feedback and words flung out into the moonlight. -Linus Tossio- |
| Sunn0)))
- ØØVoid Label: Daymare Format: 2CD  This
is a 2CD reissue of the second Sunn0)))
album, released on Japan's Daymare
label, that couples the original album with a previously unreleased
disc subtitled The
Iron Soul of Nothing, which features radical remixes by
none other than Nurse
With Wound.
I ordered this despite being unimpressed by Sunn0))) when I saw them
live a few years ago - I've been partly won over by some of the studio
stuff I've heard since, and the NWW disc sounded interesting, so...First thing to note is that it arrived within a few days despite coming from Japan. Second point is that the packaging is absolutely gorgeous. Then the music - I'd say this is the most consistently interesting of the Sunn0))) albums I've heard to date. Four tracks, each about a quarter of an hour long - no quick snacks here. On ØØVoid they are still exploring their mighty, rumbling droneworld, but without the slightly cheesy Black Metal tropes or hit-and-miss experimentalism of later releases. It's true that as the disc progresses there's a law of diminishing returns - the glacial, slo-mo riffing sounds somewhat formulaic after an hour or so - but the first two tracks here must rank among the band's definitive statements. Opening track "Richard" features a looping, cyclical riff, with intermittent accompaniment from electronic insect swarms. It pulls off the difficult trick of being massively weighty without sounding ponderous. "NN0)))" follows a simialr template, but plays up the ritualistic aspects with processed chanting and a progressively eerie atmosphere. The remainder of the disc is less compelling, but far from negligible: "Rabbit's Revenge", a Melvins cover of sorts, takes a more abrasive approach with buzzing, discordant bass tones thrown into the mix, while "Ra at Dusk" achieves in its first few minutes the densest, heaviest guitar noise of the whole disc (if you've ever heard The Heads' "Coogan's Bluff", imagine the final section played at 16rpm and that should give you some idea) before rather disappointingly fizzling out into more bottom-end riffing. The Nurse With Wound (here represented by Steve Stapleton and Colin Potter) disc was a real surprise - I'd expected a remix where the noise factor was ramped up; instead the first track begins with slowly building blissed-out drone (think "Funeral Music for Perez Prado") and develops into an excellent Hafler Trio-esque piece, with enough interesting little touches to prevent drone fatigue setting in. The second track is an entirely different beast - it has (gasp) vocals! I can't work out from the sleeve who is singing here, the voice is heavily processed and sounds like some strange cross between John Balance and Tom Verlaine, if you can imagine that (David Tibet is namechecked elsewhere on the sleeve but it doesn't sound like him). Anyway this is much darker and doomier and sounds a bit, well, silly to start with, but then develops into something really quite sinister. The third piece is more in the vein of the first and is another excellent track. Given my love of NWW I'm biased but I'd say their disc eclipses the original album - but overall this is an excellent package and highly recommended. -Manfred Scholido- |
| Damo
Suzuki
- The Fire
Of Heaven
At The End Of Universe
(Live at UFO Club) Label: Vivo format: CD  Featuring
guest musicans (or sound carriers as Damo
Suzuki prefers
to refer to his collaborators) from Rovo,
Ruins
and the legendary Hoppy
Kamiyama of God
Mountain records and Optical*8,
The
Fire of Heaven at the End of Universe
was, as its subtitle indicates, recorded live at Tokyo's UFO Club in
March 2006. The recording quality is good, if very live sounding and
lacking in much warmth or room sound, and the five improvised tracks
gradually
assemble themselves from a
meandering freeform opening as the group and Damo adjust to each other into some
hefty longer grooves which allow time for the music to breathe.
Suzuki's vocals are typically otherworldly - in that he sounds like he
is beaming in from a parallel universe, singing, vocalising, wandering
in ways
which probably only make some kind of literal sense to himself, the
stream of consciousness tripping off the ensemble's chundering flow.The set has an upbeat skronky feel to pieces like "The Crystal desert", Yuji Katsui's violin scraping up what occasionally sounds more like brass sounds than strings, while Kenji Sato's bass throbs as Tatsuya Yoshida's drumkit rattles frentically. The tempo picks up a few beats as the performance morphs into the urgent opening of "Moonlight Warrior" before throttling back into an easier choppy passage. "The Last Night Of The Sun" opens with a scat from Damo whch has decidedly Satchmo-like qualities, his voice uncurling as the group join in, constructing a number which weaves a slow slumbery funk which delays the propulsive takeoff until the violin is good and ready to scatter itself on a field of faded out delay. "Dress Your Girl" pops back in after a swift edit, continuing the mostly relaxed mood over half an hour of sometimes intense, infrequently faltering workout, the drums building the solid foundation of a muscular middle section which soon brings forward jerky rhythms circled by brightly-sparked keyboard and bass interaction. The violin follows along, but never quite locks in tightly to the sound until a good balance is achieved as they zoom off towards a more satisfyingly uptempo final section, the psychedelic impulse overtakes the noodling. The album closes with the full-spectrum spasms of "Another Dirty Weekend", the jam winding up in a powerhouse foray into space improv, Damo intoning repetitive phrases as the band get into gear-shifted action, the violin and synths flickering and wibbling while the motorik underpinnings hammer out rhythms which shudder from forward-facing mania to switchback returns until they brim over with what ultimately feels like a very serious sort of musical energy. -Linus Tossio- |
|
Teeth Of The
Hydra - Greenland
And they sound BIG. I have no idea what these guys look like, but I hope they have beards and big muscles, or it'll spoil it a bit. But they certainly sound big. Opener "Sawing Through The Ice" is the sort of thing you'd want to listen to if you were, in fact, sawing through some ice. Like the Blind Chainsaw Fisherman from Bad Wisdom. Only possibly more Metal. To be honest, the thing this reminds me of the most is the Rollins Band at their most Sabbath-obsessed: the album's centrepiece, the ten-minute "The Garden Of Rotten Teeth", which tells the Kafka-esque story of some dude who's arrested for crimes unknown and driven to Siberia, where radiation makes his teeth fall out, is all repeated Iommi-style riffs, with a vocal sounding like one of Henry Rollins' more epic moments. But it's not all Sabbath and shouting. Well, most of it is. "Voices Over Conus" has brief snatches of acoustic guitar, which are promptly CRUSHED LIKE WORMS by drum-rolls that wouldn't sound out of place on a Mastodon album, and some good old-fashioned riffing, the kind that a few years ago would have been dismissed by "rock" fans as "too Metal" (yeah, figure that one out) but have now thankfully emerged from their misplaced sense of shame. But yeah. Think 70s Stoner Rock played by a 90s outfit who've somehow travelled forward in time and listened to the convergence of Black Metal and post-Tool Prog Metal, and you won't be far off. But it'll be an epic voyage nonetheless. -DEUTERONEMU 90210, SLAYER OF MEN- |
| Teleseen
- War Label: Percepts Format: CD  Fizzing
with digital dub, much in the way that Pole's
bass-heavy
electronica does, War
offers a head-stepping, foot-nodding series of skanking
instrumentals,
slipping from trebly overtones to low end shuffles with an ear for the
groove. Smoke almost seems to curl out from the speakers at the
mellowest points; but there are uptempo moments of beat
excitement too,
as the mood shifts gear in the spikier throes of floor-friendliness and
a hint or two of murky drum'n'bass. Keeping the dubs moving is accomplished well, and Teleseen (AKA Gabriel Cyr of Brooklyn) perches neatly on the cusp of digital and analogue, striking an effective balance for the most part. While the core sounds often have a clean, sequenced flavour, the flickering crackles and sparsely layered washes of echo and reverb blend in more organic textures to offset the crispness of the deftly intricate programming, slides of sub-bass heaving in an undertow which helps to have a capable sound sytem - or even better a generous PA - to fully appreciate. There's plenty of diversity within the narrow framework of low end resonance, as microdubs, minimelodies and environmental samples stack up and ripple around exploratory percussion manouevres. As the album progresses, the ideas flow with greater confidence and depth of focus, with long pulsating waves packed full of engrossing twists and a hefty dose of minimal techno. Whether evoking a stoned contemplation or a harsher set of urban vibrations, War develops into a worthy slice of contemporary dubplate weightiness. -Linus Tossio- |
| Tenhornedbeast/Marzuraan - Tenhornedbeast/Marzuraan Label: Aurora Borealis Format: CD  Divided
between two lengthy tracks, one per artist, the disc is packed up in a
neat die-cut sleeve which when unfolded reveals a woodcut of
a mediaeval unfortunate being sawed in half at the crotch (it
is a
split CD, after all), an image which sets the scene for a solid forty
minutes plus of descendant drone and mire-surfing rumble. Tenhornedbeast is
the solo project of Christopher
Walton of Endvra,
and the fed-back noise sculpture he builds on treated and
heavily-effected guitar rises at a glacial pace from a swelling sound
of something akin to close-mic'ed electric bergs
forming in
the icebox; or perhaps, given the title of the track is "The Law of the
Needle", more like the noise of a brain dissolving softly in
an
opiated haze. Marzuraan have been taking a few hints from the work of Justin Broadrick, most probably from his work as Jesu, and their contribution "Into Countless Battles" buzzes and thrums with low-temparature fuzz and ponderous percussion. The mordant vocals lumber on in self-reflective introspection, and overall the effect is like being pulled into the mind of a depressive with a thousand yard stare, chugging away on a long lost journey into the dim twilight. -Richard Fontenoy- |
| Triosk – The Headlight
Serenade (Special Edition) Label: Leaf Format: 2CD  A
very relaxed third and final album from the pre-Pivot Australian avant-garde jazz
trio, who consisted of Adrian Klumpes
(piano/synth), Laurence Pike
(drums/percussion), and Ben Walpes
(bass). The Headlight Serenade drifts
seamlessly between jazz and electronica, recreating a spontaneous and
energetic drum and bass feel. Laurence Pike described the drift as "the
transitory way that the headlights pass across objects, creating split
second moments and alternate spaces in time". Triosk move on from the previous
album Moment Returns (2004),
which was more improvisational. On The
Headlight Serenade they have gone over their improvised material
and refined it. The result is more purposeful, and Triosk sound as if
they are working to a plan, albeit a loosely formed and drifting one.
Sometimes too much effort and planning can kill an album, but The Headlight Serenade retains the
spontaneity of improvised jazz and electronica. Purposeful spontaneity.Originally released in 2006, the special edition contains an extra CD of live material recorded for the Australian broadcaster ABC in 2006. The tracks are looser – a quality of most live improvisation – but also a whole lot darker. The Headlight Serenade has its moments of darkness, but overall I found it mellow and gentle. On the live tracks the drifting ambient electronics and effortless jazz drum and bass is replaced by a frantic sound. Electronics scrape, buzz, and interrupt the sound. The trio seem to play with a certain desperation, as if frantically grasping for something. The contrast of the two CDs makes for an intriguing and balanced album. Focus on one side, raw spontaneity on the other. One side light, one side dark. It also offers a great insight into the creation of The Headlight Serenade. It was born out of improvised music, and the live CD demonstrates the primal sound it emerged from. -Alaric- |
| USSA
- The
Spoils Label: Fuzz Format: CD  USSA is the new
project by Paul Barker,
formerly of industrial juggernaut Ministry
(the band for whom the phrase "Slayer
played by giant robots" was invented) and Duane Denison,
formerly of Jesus Lizard
(the band for whom the phrase "blimey, that David Yow
fella's gonna have someone's eye out in a minute" was invented). So it
could conceivably have gone one of two ways- sonic bulldozer, or spiky
punching-you-in-the-face shoutiness. Or somewhere in between.But it didn't. What The Spoils is most reminiscent of, to these ears at least, is Killing Joke. Which seems a bit weird at first, until you consider the evolution of alternative guitar music through the eighties and nineties. Killing Joke were arguable one of the largest influences on nineties industrial music, leading right up to Ministry's final incarnation as, well, Slayer played by giant robots, with everyone from Front 242 to Godflesh's Justin Broadrick (who was once in a band named after a KJ track) owing them a fairly substantial debt. And they were also a massive influence on the grunge movement, with that whole legal malarkey in which Nirvana claimed not to have noticed that "Come As You Are" was essentially "Eighties" played twice as fast somehow coming full circle with ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl joining Killing Joke for their triumphant comeback… they were all over the place. In more ways than one. Grunge itself is another useful reference point for USSA, most notably on "Blue Light", which has a throbbing, menacing verse built around one of those relentless, brain-pounding basslines that Barker put to such effective use in his time with Ministry, then bursts into a chorus which wouldn't have sounded amiss on something by, oh, I don't know, Soundgarden or Alice in Chains, if they'd been the sort of bands who'd traded on relentless, brain-pounding basslines. The closest Ministry frame of reference, I guess, is The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste, when they were still wiry enough to not quite be metal, when the bass was still what was framing the tracks. At times USSA can sound a little subdued, if what you're expecting is Ministry or the Jesus Lizard. But then if what you're expecting is Ministry or the Jesus Lizard, you should probably be listening to one of those two bands rather than USSA, shouldn't you? Denison fires off angular, almost jazz-flavoured riffs left, right and centre, and once you let the new sound get into your head you find it scraping round and round the inside of your skull while vocalist Gary Call moans, whines and screams his way out, one minute Rozz Williams, the next Maynard James Keenan (actually, at points, like parts of "Summer Endless Summe"r, you could almost be listening to early Tool). It's all very disorienting. I guess the best way to describe this album is to think of it as being a cross between eighties post-punk and nineties hardcore, only both recorded with the benefit of hindsight afforded by it now being, well, the twenty-first century. If you see what I mean. And while that may sound awfully pompous, there's a kind of rock swagger to the whole thing which stops it ever quite descending into dour navel-gazing, and for some reason reminds me of Prong. Only it doesn't sound like them either. -Deuteronemu (a quiet bit then a loud bit) 90210- |
| Various
Artists - BBC Radiophonic
Workshop: A Retrospective
Label: Mute Format: 2CD  This
weird, quirky collection of TV themes celebrates the 50th anniversary
of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
A huge collection of alien landscapes, analogue oddities, bizarre
kitsch, and jingles resynthesised and filtered beyond all recognition.
It features contributions from workshop regulars such as John Baker, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, Elizabeth Parker, Desmond Briscoe, Paddy Kingsland, Peter Howell, Malcolm Clarke and others. Of
course, the original 1960s Doctor Who
theme and TARDIS sound are included. They most easily recognised pieces
of Radiophonic work, but the one hundred tracks on this double CD show
just how varied and productive the workshop was. Odd medievalisms like Clarke's highly filtered track “Hurdy Gurdy” rub shoulders with synthesised sea shanties and full on kitsch such as Kingsland's “Broken Biscuit Club”. There are points that are reminiscent of the filtered classicism of the Clockwork Orange sound track. Other moments are pure ambience and soundscape. The hundred tracks also show just how experimental the workshop was. If Syd Barrett had made TV themes this is how he would have done it. It is no exaggeration to say that they were every bit as experimental and important as Pink Floyd's early sonic experiments or The Beatles' production-as-an-artform album Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. At the same time as the pop and rock experiments of the 60s, people at the BBC were busily exploring new territories and doing things no one had done before. This was before the days of well established and efficient methods of manipulating sound with a computer. Delia Derbyshire made the Doctor Who theme, one of the first purely electronic pieces of music, in the days before sequencers let alone computers. She recorded synth tones on tape and then cut and spliced them together to create the now famous tune. This pioneering quality is one of the reasons that the Radiophonic Workshop has such an enduring influence in the world of electronica. As more and more people return to analogue the workshop stands as an important point of reference. After all, they invented many of the rules in the book. You've just got to hand it to the BBC for setting up something so experimental and innovative. The Radiophonic Workshop may have closed it doors in 1997, but this timely retrospective is an important and often bizarre reminder of their work. -Alaric- |
|
Go to Video and DVD or Singles reviews |
Fox
Mulder described 
Ever
wondered what
would happen to the 
Expanding
on Jeremy Barnes' wild excursions into the depths
of folk music from the old and new worlds and with Heather
Trost bringing a Klezmer twist along with her vibrant violin
talent, The Way The Wind Blows was recorded partly
in Romania with members of renowned Roma group Fanfare
Ciocarlia and in Barnes' and Trost's hometown of Albuquerque,
New Mexico with fellow resident trumpter Zach Condon
of Beirut. The immediate response to the music,
regardless of history and biographicalndetails though, is a sense of
marvel at the easy fusion of worlds which has been made here - the
wheeze of the accordion and the blare of the brass swirled around by
deliciously emotive strings which pull pizzicatos on the heartstrings
with the mournful call of thousands of years of grind overcome by
staggeringly lovely sounds. 
J
Let's face it, Vikings
were pretty
cool. I mean, we all know how cool pirates were. And we all know how
cool barbarians were. And Vikings were like pirate barbarians, in a
way. Or barbarian pirates. Or something. So they were pretty damn cool,
really. And metal seems to agree. METAL AGREES WITH ME. FEAR ME FOR I
ROCK REALLY FUCKING AWESOMELY. (Ahem. Ed.)
Combining the genre's long-standing love affair with all things Norse
and the current movement for 70s-style riffing and experimentation
filtered through some sort of post-black metal FILTER OF DOOM, as
exemplified by Mastodon, Ohio's Teeth Of
The Hydra drive a big fuck-off longship through the American
mid-West, sacred blades aloft and axes ready to drink the blood of the
fallen and all that malarkey. 
|