Current Album Reviews |
Singles Albums Compilations Video and DVD
Last updated 13 June 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- |
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Atari
Teenage Riot - Atari Teenage
Riot 1992-2000
After an immaculate scam involving pitching themselves as a Punk Sigue Sigue Sputnik, grabbing a huge cash advance and then recording Delete Yourself, an album clearly designed to be unreleasable by a major label, ATR frontman and glamorous revolutionary Alec Empire used the cash to set up Digital Hardcore Recordings, released Delete Yourself, and embarked on a life of sonic crime. The album was a glorious mess of bangin' Techno and shouted slogans, including a cover of Sham 69's "Kids Are United" of which Jimmy Pursey could never have dreamed. Tracks like "Hetzjagd Auf Nazis" ("Hunt Down The Nazis")-also included here- should have left people in no doubt as to where ATR and DHR were coming from (though a later label release, Patric Catani's Attitude PC8/Hitler 2000 caused problems when distributors wrongly thought it was glorifying Fascism). It was the follow-up album, The Future Of War, which really cemented the Atari Teenage Riot sound. From the anarchist bulldozer Hip-Hop of "Destroy 2000 Years Of Culture" to the classic riot anthem "Deutschland Has Got To Die" ("The bloody wankers try to put us down - but we are gonna smash them in!") The Future Of War was a pretty definitive statement of what this by-now legendary "music to start riots" actually sounded like. By the next album, 1999's 60 Second Wipeout, Japanese noise diva and star of DHR-Fatal (DHR's women-only imprint) Nic Endo had joined the existing line-up of Empire, Hanin Elias and Carl Crack, and the noise element became simultaneously more refined and more chaotic. "Revolution Action", culled from the album, also sparked controversy when its utterly amazing video featuring an anarchist virus taking over a corporate office and causing the workers to rip off their clothes (and faces) and smash the place up- very silly, but utterly exhilirating, though the end scene (with the band torturing one of the whitecollars who they've tied to a chair) was given short shrift by the guys at MTV. The ATR legend seemed unstoppable- gigs erupted into good-natured riot, with Alec Empire even saying once that he hadn't let the legendary Royal Festival Hall gig in London degenerate totally into violence only out of respect for John Peel, who'd booked them in the first place. Tragically, Carl Crack died (less than a week before the terrorist attacks on the World Trace Centre and the Pentagon, and the declaration of the ongoing "War On Terror") in 2001, robbing the world of one of the most vital and impassioned bands around, just when it needs them the most- Empire has said there will likely be no reunions - "I don't think it would make sense without Carl Crack". If you've never heard them, and are the slightest bit interested in noise, then this album is an essential introduction to the world's sexiest anarchists. If, like me, you've religiously collected all their stuff, this is a great collection of the best of it (with choices and tracklist chosen by Empire himself, it's about as good a collection as you could wish for). There's plenty here to smash barricades to. Atari Teenage Riot were a real one-off, and neither they nor Crack should be forgotten. This album is about the best monument to them they could be. Until the next generation of sonic terrorists come along, it's all we've got. Man the barricades! -Deuteronemu 90210, hurriedly stuffing some cotton wool into the neck of a bottle- |
Boredoms - Super Roots 1,3,5,6,7,8 The Super Roots series is an epic series of compilations containing previously unreleased material from the Boredoms. Previously unreleased in the west, at least. The series is as ever shifting and hard to pin down as the band themselves, which makes Super Roots a good introduction to the crazy noisy creative genius of the Boredoms. There are some absolute gems in the series, which contains a broad spectrum of material from the Boredoms. Rock, dada, noise, tribal percussion, more psychedelia than is good for you, remix CDs, full length albums, and epic CD long monster tracks. Being new to the Boredoms I made the fatal mistake of asking the question: what do the Boredoms usually sound like? What would be a good reference to judge the Super Roots against? So I immersed myself in Seadrum/House Of Sun, Super �, and other albums. I pretty quickly saw that I was wrong. Very wrong. The Boredoms are hard to pigeonhole. Sometimes referred to as Noise Rock or Japanoise, their sound is ever shifting. I didn’t know what to make of the Boredoms at to begin with. I probably won't be the first or last to say that. It took a little while to get into them. They grew on me slowly, then "GO!!!" and "Cosmic Karaoke" clicked 100% in two huge jolts. It was worth the wait. I got a feel for what they were doing. The brilliance of the Boredoms stood right in front of me. Unique, inventive, flippant, intense then mellow. Always surprising. Fantastic and contrary. The Boredoms are quirky idiosyncratic, always shifting, always inventing and reinventing themselves. As I've said, taken as a whole the Super Roots series is a good introduction to the diversity and quality of the Boredoms. Every CD in the series shows a different direction they move in.
It would be wrong to think of Super Roots as a collection of off cuts or odds and sods. They are not. The Super Roots series were released in Japan quite a while ago. Super Roots #1 was released in 1993. However, they have only been released in the UK by Very Friendly records now. Warner chose not to release the Super Roots CDs in the West. Knowing this I found myself comparing the series with Seadrum. Perhaps the Boredoms' are a little more anarchic or nihilistic at points. Or maybe a little less polished. There is always the possibility that these comparisons are just down to hindsight, though. It's always tempting to think that a big label would favour the less wild, but with that type of thinking the Boredoms would never have been released at all! And Seadrum/House of Sun is a very recent release which would favour its release in the west. Add to this the fact that the Boredoms are hugely prolific. It is almost inevitable that some material would get over looked. Very Friendly have done a great job in redressing the balance. Sing along. Super Roots!. Yeah! Yeah! -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- |
| 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- |
| 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- |
| 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- |
| 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 clich�s 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- |
| 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- |
| 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 |
How to
sum up Atari Teenage Riot? The simple way to review
this album would be to say that if you haven't yet been exposed to
their combination of breakbeats, polemic and sweet, sweet noise, you
owe it to yourself to buy this album. But that'd maybe be a tad lazy.
Okay, put it like this. Remember Crass, the
legendary anarchopunk innovators? Okay, well imagine they were all
still young, renounced their pacifism (maybe they found Keith
Flint eating a hamburger or something) and decided to kick
the living shit out of the Prodigy using their own
instruments. It would probably sound a bit like ATR.
S
Super Roots #3 - The third album is a totally
different dimension to the Boredoms than 
Super Roots #5 - "GO!!!" is just as epic,
and lengthy, as "Cosmic Karaoke". It begins gently enough: a nice
ambient bubble bath of electronic textures that lulls you into a
false sense of security then kicks you in the guts. The bubble is
burst by 
Super Roots #6 - Before I'd heard the
Boredoms people had told me that they could be more 
S
S
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