LOU CHAMPAGNE SYSTEM No Visible Means (Medical Records) lp 19.98
We were pretty much sold before we'd even heard a single note from the bizarrely name Lou Champagne System, which is indeed the work of Mr. Lou Champagne, and that 'System' is actually a thing, not just a cool band name appellation, it's some sort of "guitar and hookup" invented by Lou himself which "allows him to play guitar and sound like a whole band with no tapes!" There's a picture of him on the cover too, skinny mustache, and skinny Cylon style new wave shades. Plus it's on Medical Records, who were responsible for another recent Record Of The Week, Novels For The Moons by Axxess. And if you thought that one was weird, this one is gonna blow your mind.
"The Lou Champagne System is a real time guitar synth solo act" the original liner notes go on to explain, who with the help of that aforementioned system, whipped up some of the coolest, weirdest post punk / new wave we've heard in ages. A rare private press lp from Canada, originally released in 1983 on Champagne's own label, this unearthed gem, on first listen, elicited a whole range of reactions, ranging from "this is freaking amazing?!" to "what the fuck is this?!", and in most cases it was a little bit of both, cuz while this stuff is pretty weird and a little bit goofy, it's also totally kick ass. And the fact that he played this stuff live using a whole array of pedals and switches and that system. Just check out the opener "Don't Say I'm Here", which takes crunchy almost metallic guitars, swirling analog synths, and primitive skeletal drum machines, and crams it all into some dense, claustrophobic punk wave weirdness. Ranting vocals, hysterical laughter, a bizarre back and forth dialogue between someone called "Fred" and a "Narrator", there's also some rad shredding psychedelic leads. It's the sort of retro weirdness that the current crop of outsider synth wave revivalists are channeling, but nothing compares to the sheer madness/brilliance of the original. "Broken Hearts" is a bit more poppy, the same sonic layout as "Don't Say I'm Here", but for a brief minute it sounds way more commercial like it could have been some obscure eighties hit, but then BAM, the synths get all squiggly, the vocals get even more unhinged, a woozy weirdly psychedelic synth punk freakout that is so fucked and bizarrely brilliant, there's another wild squall of guitar leads, this time sounding like some tangle of malfunctioning electronics.
The other jam here we're obsessing on is the awesomely titled "Propaganda Frustration", with its smoldering slow build synth intro, that explodes into a droned out sprawl of skeletal drum skitter and pulsing synths, and when the song proper kicks in, it's all dark and heavy and propulsive, a sort of Goblin / Carpenter sound transformed into something much more electro-pop, the vocal heavily effected and buried in the mix, a driving late night future groove that sound like those sunglasses on the cover. Then there's "Another Dimension", with a sort of faux synth horn intro, that gives way to some chugging metallic guitars, that almost sounds like Motorhead or something, until those primitive programmed drums come in, then it becomes this weirdly metallic driving synth punk, the vocals over the top and dramatic, you can almost imagine the sort of low budget cable access video that would have accompanied this jam. Oh and did we mention the insane chorus, where the drums go all wobbly and chaotic and sound like they're totally malfunctioning beneath the howled vox? So fucking nuts!
From there on out it doesn't get any less weird, in fact, if anything it continues on its warped trajectory, squiggly synths, skittery stuttery drums, strange synth melodies, the vocals unhinged and maniacal, the songs heavy and punky and fuzzy and synth and totally catchy and baffling bizarre, but we definitely have to mention the awesomely brooding closer, which is quickly becoming our favorite, sounding like some outsider synth dirge version of Blue Oyster Cult's "Veteran Of The Psychic Wars" from the Heavy Metal soundtrack, with it's haunting creep and weird field recorded honking horns and crickets, all beneath super psychedelic swirls of synth and some seriously tripped out gorgeously multi-tracked harmonized vocals, including the way too appropriate lyric "I'm like a man in a fantasy, maybe I should just get stoned..."
Totally and utterly amazing, and baffling, and so obviously absolutely recommended. Total fractured genius outsider post-punk synth wave weirdness that is threatening to become the only thing we want to listen to!
Pressed on white vinyl, LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES, each one hand numbered. Includes a 12" x 12" insert with liner notes / lyrics.
MPEG Stream: "Don't Say I'm Here"
MPEG Stream: "Broken Hearts"
MPEG Stream: "Propaganda Frustration"
MPEG Stream: "Silent Walking"

GATE The Dew Line (MIE) 2lp 32.00
A long while back we listed this on cd, easily one of our favorite noise-rock / noise-pop records ever, a mesmerizing noise-pop-drone gem from the Dead C's Michael Morley, an improbable mix of NZ noise whir and skree, minimal drifting drone and lilting indie pop. Think the Dead C at their very poppiest, crossed with Sentridoh at its most minimal and raw, a slab of lush, sculpted melody-infused indie rock rendered as something much more abstract and avant, but with a core that's pure pop genius. Originally released way back in 1994, and reissued again on cd a few years ago, we're not sure this has ever been on vinyl before, at least until now. And this new version, besides being remastered and packaged in a swank heavy gatefold jacket, also tacks on FIVE bonus tracks, all of which sound like they could have been included with the original version, and make this well worth buying again, even for those of us who already own an extremely well worn digital version. And if you've never heard the Dew Line before, you are in for a serious, perhaps life altering, sonic treatÉ
Gate's Golden record, a singles collection, was one of our favorite 'noise' records ever, and we do hear a lot of that Golden 'noise' in this chunk of damaged deconstructed pop. Long drawn out expanses of crumbling guitars, buried-in-the-mix sad boy vocals, all very raw and lo-fi, but strangely lush and heavy in that way only blown out bedroom recordings seem to sound. It's a little like Lou Barlow if he was raised on Throbbing Gristle and Suicide instead of indie rock. Guitar jangles transformed into thick sprawling atonal riffage, verse chorus verse transformed into verse verse verse, and the vocals adding a strange sweet sadness.
Dense clouds of electronic glitch and amp buzz seem to surround everything on The Dew Line, the riffs more textural than melodic, long stretches of whirring lo-fi organ, mournful and almost funereal, strange haunting minimal percussion, drifting alien FX, disembodied guitars unfurling crunchy textures and barely there melodies. Many of the tracks are vocal-less haunting guitarscapes, riffs and layers, looped and repetitive, extended into grinding washed out mantras. Cyclical and gorgeously hypnotic. Which makes the tracks with vocals sound all the more poppy.
Especially "Have Not", which is essentially a single, super catchy, languid distorted guitar riff, looped and cyclical, minor key, sounding a bit like a slowed down drum-less Rein Sanction, with drawled Neil Young / Dinosaur Jr. style double tracked vocals, laid back, emotive, and hauntingly monotone. Nearly 13 minutes long, a single riff, a subtly changing vocal line, but it's just so mysterious, sad and perfect, the whole record could easily have been a 70 minute version of this track only and we would have been just as happyÉ
But then we would have missed out on the melancholy minimalism of "Needed All Words", a lonely vocal line, drifting above a glacial sea of organ drone and fractured effects, or the looped stuttering industrial buzzscapeÊ of the title track, or the divine washed out crumbling grind of "Triphammer", the final song, which manages to turn 3 minutes of abstract distorted riffage, into a dense chunk of dark moodiness.
And even sans the newly added bonus tracks, this would still be absolutely required listening and a shoe-in for Record Of The Week, but the nearly twenty minutes of extra stuff only seals the deal. There's "Sunshine", a crunchy, distorted chunk of detuned dirgery, the vocals plaintive, and way up in the mix, the drums stumbling, the guitars thick and corrosive, the whole thing sounding like some live Sonic Youth B-side, while "Ives" is a sprawling expanse of churning rhythmic murk, laced with streaks of electronics, wild squalls of psych-noise guitar, all dragged along by a seriously 'rawk' riff, although that riff is buried beneath an avalanche of noise and skree. "Sadness Sings" is another one of those impossibly noise drenched guitar heavy indie rock/noise pop dirge, like a looser more abstract take on the above mentioned "Have Not", the same sort of sad boy bedroom broodiness, which is pushed even further on "Bitcher", which slows it waaaaay down, adds a little Jandek-y outsider detuned warble, but Morley delivers some sweetly crooned vox, which balance the surrounding sounds, which seem to be melting, a warped drone-pop dirge, heavy on the flanger, and the crumbling dying-battery distortion, and then finally, the awesomely titled "Tuba Is Funny", a brief bit of effects drenched field recorded acoustic guitar driven balladry, that would have sounded out of place on some old Sentridoh record.
Obviously, WAY recommended. This record is old enough that for many of you, we're probably already preaching to the converted, but those extra tracks are some serious music nerd buried treasure, and the record sounds incredible, and again, if you're one of those people who somehow managed to miss out on this entirely, here's one more chance to sink deep into Morley's mysterious musical miserablsim.
LIMITED TO 500 COPIES! Housed in a super swank heavy gatefold jacket!
MPEG Stream: "Millions"
MPEG Stream: "Needed All Words"
MPEG Stream: "Have Not"
MPEG Stream: "Sadness Sings [Bonus]"
MPEG Stream: "Bitcher [Bonus]"

JK FLESH Posthuman (3by3) cd 16.98
We had been hearing about this record for ages, mostly that it was the best thing Justin Broadrick had done since Godflesh! Which would be discounting everything he'd done as Jesu, much of which we hold near and dear, so while we're actually inclined to agree with the above sentiment, it might be more accurate to say that, besides Jesu, which is an entirely different beast, we haven't dug a Broadrick project this much since the days of classic Godflesh. Which makes sense really. The first hint was the name, Broadrick having resurrected a name he used back in the Techno Animal days, and in fact, JK Flesh reminds us a lot more of Techno Animal than Godflesh. The jams here all remind us of the kind of weirdo experimental electronic stuff Broadrick was doing on the side, when he was still doing Godflesh. The sort of jams that you'd hear on some obscure comp alongside Alec Empire, or Porter Ricks or Spectre or Scorn, if you remember those Macro Dub Infection comps from back in the day (if not, you should track them down, they are incredible!) or remember any of the more obscure Broadrick alter-egos, Curse Of The Golden Vampire, the Sidewinder, Techno Animal of course, especially the opening track on Posthuman, which lays down a spare lurching beat over buzzing droned out guitars, and features some super intense heavily effected vokills that sound unlike anything else we've heard from Broadrick. And instead of being heavy, it's more a sort of brooding malevolence, a hypnotic lumber that borders on some sort of industrial demonic dub. And had the whole record sounded like that, we would have been just fine. But the other thing we'd been hearing about JK Flesh, is that it was like Godflesh, but with dubstep beats, which may have had some folks crying foul, it actually sounded pretty goddamn good to us, and we're happy to report that it does in fact sound about as good as we imagined it would.
The same sonic template as the opening track for the most part, but with distinctly dubstep beats, and the thing is, it totally works, the dubstep element really becomes secondary, as Broadrick unfurls some of his fiercest and heaviest guitar work in ages, his vocals a thick, hellish bellow, far removed from the shouty vocals that marred the last few Godflesh records, this is some sick, fierce, and yeah, slightly groovy heaviness. But think how radical the drum machine driven Godflesh was back in the day, playing alongside all these crusty grind bands and straight up metal bands, that actually translates pretty well to the now, with JK Flesh, melding that sort of crusty chugging heaviness to a more modern beat. The first few tracks really don't even really get dubsteppy at all, instead, seeming to ease the listener into this brave new world, two massive slabs of massive downtuned machine-doom heaviness that kills. It's not until "Devoured" that things get crazy, when the beat is actually skittery, sounding a bit like Clubroot remixing Godflesh, which is obviously not a bad thing AT ALL. The title track too, is all manic skitter, wreathed in an impossibly thick gristly patina of crumbling super distorted buzz, and it's a crazy killer mix. The sort of thing that just might have metalheads tempted to poke their heads out onto the dancefloor, but should most definitely have the dancefloor heaving, with what is essentially some of THEE heaviest dubstep EVER. "Earthmover" introduces some of that blown out bass wobble, but it's mostly lost amidst all the churning metallic riffery and squalls of effects. The record finishes with another weird one, a good bookend for that opener, a sort of abject creeping doom dirge, driven by a skittery beat, but not so overtly dubsteppy, instead, a pounding lumbering lurch, with some seriously sick vokills, and while there is a kind of drop, it turns into something much more washed out and psychedelic, with clean vocals, and thick washed out guitars, the result sort of dreamy and druggy, and a little bit like a darker noisier heavier Jesu.
For those of you, like us, who always found yourselves way more into Broadrick's extracurricular sonic activities, this is a no brainer, it pushes all our Techno Animal buttons big time, but it definitely is the closest thing we've heard to Godflesh in a while, but still different enough to be fresh and exciting. Needless to say, this totally rules, and is WAY WAY WAY recommended (& anyone who digs Necro Deathmort, in particular, should check this out).
MPEG Stream: "Kunckledragger"
MPEG Stream: "Punchdrunk"
MPEG Stream: "Devoured"

HEADS, THE Relaxing With The Heads (Rooster) lp 16.98
Hey Vinyl Fanatics & Psych Freeks! This killer album, reissued on cd a couple years ago, which we made a Record Of The Week at the time, has now at last been remastered and reissued on lp too - and 'cause it and The Heads are such aQ faves, we're making it Record Of The Week once again. This vinyl version doesn't include all the extras found on the cd's bonus disc, but it does come with an mp3 download card (that we assume might provide access to those bonus tracks, though we don't know). And, we're one of the only places anywhere that has the RED vinyl version, limited to 300 copies, while they last... Here's what we said about this before:
In a world of way too many bands, it seems as if every other group just wants to just plug in, turn on, and turn it up, and somehow sound like some impossible hybrid of Hawkwind, Spacemen 3, the Stooges, Monster Magnet and Loop, the result unfortunately but not surprisingly is a lot of pointless psychedelic noise. Sure there are a handful of bands who do manage to pull it off, like White Hills, Carlton Melton, Wooden Shjips, Burnt Hills, Gnod, Bardo Pond, Eternal Tapestry, and Heavy Winged, and as much as we do love ALL of those bands, it's safe to say, the Heads still reign supreme. These long running UK spaced out psychedelic riff rockers effortlessly transform a dingy basement packed with amps and a beat up old drum kit, a floor littered with distortion pedals and empty beer bottles into some sort of interdimensional sonic starship, a crushing, blown out, distortion drenched, riff heavy, psychedelic space rock TRIP. And while all the various elements are present, it's what they do with them that counts, and listening to the Heads, and this record again, even years and years later, it really does sound like maybe they're still the only ones who know what do with them.
Relaxing is the band's debut album, originally released in 1996, and even then the band sounded like the heaviest, druggiest, most psychedelic, freaked out band in the land. From the first the very track, now going on 15 years old, this still sounds more fresh, and more heavy than practically any modern psychedelic space rock record we can think of. After a brief sample, and a swirling squall of feedback and distorted effects, the band explode into one of THEE most bad ass riffs ever, and it doesn't let up for the next 70 minutes. Strange distorted processed vocals, layer upon layer of wild psychedelic leads and churning riffage, like an amphetamine fueled Loop jam, or Spacemen 3 if they were into speed instead of acid, the song just spirals into the stratosphere, heavy and hypnotic and totally trancelike, it's somehow totally groove, utterly headbangable, and absolutely transcendent. The band pack more pure heavy space rock energy into the first 4 minutes of their first record, than most bands can hope for over entire careers. But then what to say about what they cram into the next hour, more roiling riffage, wild distorted harmonica (has a harmonica ever sounded so bad ass?), pounding motorik drumming, thick clouds of tangled freaked out psych guitar, thick swaths of effects drenched heaving crush, twisted vocals, the first three songs are like 12 minutes of staring straight into the sun, blinding and incendiary and so intense, it's not until track four that the band dials it down, locking into a sort of Velvets meets Loop groove over the next few songs, but even then, the guitars smoke, the tracks bursting into some dense downtuned chugging throughout, but always returning to a lowslung lumber, "U33" splintering into some heaven born heaviness, which leads into the second batch of relentless space psych howl, the garagey stomp of "Television", the swings from woozy jangle to super mathy almost proggy freak out, while "Woke Up" is another drugged out post Stooges, Monster Magnetized chunk of churn and chug, with a slow build to a heart-of-the-sun climax, "Widowmaker" is more of the same, before "Taken Too Much" gets all slinky and bluesy, a stripped down psychblues creep, which builds to another amp melting lysergic space psych freakout, which leads right into the dizzying, sprawling "Coogan's Bluff", a 45 minute multi part psychedelic garage space rock epic trip, which would be a whole record for any other band, but for the Heads, it's just another song. A fucking insane song, but still. Swinging from droned out fuzz drenched psychedelic krautdirge, with a super intense supernova outro, to echo drenched tribal drummed ambient drift, to woozy midtempo post space rock lope, to almost jangly drug pop, to a furious chugging, effects drenched final freak out, that sounds like all the best parts of Loop and Spacemen 3 piled on top of one another.
All in all, a totally head spinning collection of chaotic lysergic psychedelia and crushing droned out space riff raw power rock, that remains pretty untouchable. Record Of The Week, easy.
MPEG Stream: "Quad"
MPEG Stream: "Don't Know Yet"
MPEG Stream: "Chipped"
MPEG Stream: "Slow Down"

----*
----* Highlights :
----*

AGAKUS IV III II I (Sygil) cassette 4.50
From the same label that brought us the blackened witchy doomdirge of Charnel House, and the abstract black metal doomscapes of OS, and the droned out cosmic weirdness of Sky Projection, comes this mysterious new release, from a one man band called Agakus, whose debut release is a heavy sprawl of caustic abstract industrial dronescapes, bleak abject expanses of churning downtuned rumble, of crumbling black noise clatter, as well as lots and lots of space, the doom and noise coming in waves, leaving near silence in between, like the musical version of listening to the thunder to figure out how soon the storm will arrive. And thunder is definitely an apt comparison, as the sounds here are massive low end reverberations, and when the storm DOES finally hit, it's almost symphonic in scope, a droned out psychedelic skree that's a thick cloud of layered tones, a slowed down pulled apart melody, the sounds massive and dense, and so blown out that they seem to blot out the other sounds, like the dinosaur footsteps in Jurassic Park, everything in your house will rattle, books will slide off shelves, plaster will fall from the walls, as this plodding, blackened behemoth crawls beastlike from your speakers. This plodding low end underpinning sheets of hum and hiss, mesmerizing looped melodies, and stuttering textures. Elsewhere groaning slabs of blackbuzz churn beneath anguished wails and dense squalls of feedback, again separated into some strange sort of super spare, super spaced out death march rhythm, burst of bleak brutality, then hushed ominous shimmer, waiting for the next blast to come.
Dark and dense, sinister and seriously grim, this is some black sonic energy, some bleak ultradoom blackdrone minimalism that should definitely appeal to fans of Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Pig Heart Transplant, Wolf Eyes, Stalaggh, Wolvserpent, Abruptum, MZ412, Pussygutt, Khanate and other similarly black spirited dronelordsÉ
Packaged in a cool Chinatown fireworks style paper sleeve, stickered, with a full color sticker as well as a printed, hand numbered insert inside. LIMITED TO 100 COPIES!!

ALOONALUNA Bunny (Hooker Vision) cassette 8.98
Funny to discover a project from San Francisco by way of LaGrange, Georgia; but that's the way it goes some times. Aloonaluna is the one-woman project of Lynn Fister who landed her first cassette of thoroughly drugged-out drone-pop on the thoroughly drugged-out imprint Hooker Vision (run by Grant and Rachel Evans, of Nova Scotia Arms and Motion Sickness Of Time Travel respectively), and it's a warped gem of twisted psychedelic lullabies that seem to bridge the damaged tape resurgence with a Jewelled Antler style miasma of half-dreamt songs and half-remembered drones. She loops bells, guitars, field recordings, gristly synths, her own voice, and whatever else she can find into hazy, atmospheric songs that turn inward on many tracks (a la Grouper) but at times like on "Watercolor Rabbit" she breaks out a punchy drum machine to turn her somnambulant, stumbling songs into giddy, lo-fi dance numbers (sorta like Kwjaz remixing Julee Cruise). "Antarctica" could almost be her homage to Richard Pinhas' "Iceland" in terms of coldwave synth propulsion. Twelve tracks in all over this 45 minute tape. Nice stuff, but unfortunately this tape is already sold out at the source... so what we got now is all we'll ever get!

BABY GRANDMOTHERS s/t (Subliminal Sounds) cd 17.98
THIS JAMMING FUZZ FAVE, AT LAST REPRESSED! This '60s Swedish psych trio is pretty obscure - they only ever officially released one record, a 7" single that came out in Finland only - but they haven't been forgotten 'cause the guys in this band eventually went on to play with such bigger, better-known acts as Mecki Mark Men and Kebnekajse. If you picked up that Psychedelic Phinland compilation we highlighted not long before we first got this in, you've heard "Being Is More Than Life" the B-side of their 7", it appears here too along with the A-side "Somebody Keeps Calling My Name" and several previously unreleased live recordings from the era (1967-'68), for a full hour of music in all.
The Baby Grandmothers really liked to jam, they had a thrice-weekly (Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays!) residency at the short-lived psychedelic Stockholm club FILIPS, where much of the live material found here was recorded - there's a reproduction of a flier in the cd booklet advertising them appearing at FILIPS with AQ faves Parson Sound (oh for a time machine!). So if you dig mostly-instrumental electric guitar oriented psych improv, dosed with plenty of feedback and fuzz, there's plenty here to turn you on, from stoned moody meanderings to freaked out solo spasms. It's all rather raw and energetically alive.
The lengthy liner notes in the photo-illustrated 15-page cd booklet tell the whole Baby Grandmothers story, from their origins in a R&B combo called the T-Boones to gigs opening for Jimi Hendrix to their transformation into the Mark II line-up of the prog-psych act Mecki Mark Men and beyond.
MPEG Stream: "Saint George's Dragon"
MPEG Stream: "Somebody Keeps Calling My Name"

BARROW, GEOFF & BEN SALISBURY Drokk: Music Inspired By Mega-City One (Invada) cd 22.00
Originally composed as the soundtrack for an upcoming Judge Dredd film adaptation (and rejected!), Drokk finds Geoff Barrow from Portishead, teaming up with composer Ben Salisbury for a dark futuristic synthscape that looks to the classic scores of John Carpenter and Goblin, but instead of sounding like just another record jumping on the retro-futuristic synthscape bandwagon, that seems to have infected so many other groups, the sound these two have conjured up is much darker, and much more dense. And it plays out more like an actual soundtrack, since after all it is (was?) one. Drokk offers up all sorts of rhythms and melodies and arrangements and textures that definitely do feel like cues, like sounds designed to accompany specific images and actions, and while in many cases, scores loosed from their films lose a lot of their power, that is definitely not the case here. The sound reminding us in places of Blade Runner, and displaying obvious influence from groups like Tangerine Dream. There are also some Portishead like moments, creeping spare downtempo dirges that work surprisingly well with the more driving puslating synths. The opening jam definitely sets the tone, and sounds like it must have been for the opening credits/sequence, a spare bit of synth pulse, underpinned by a high sinewave like tone, the synths growing ever more ominous, expanding into fuzzy swooping synths, before exploding into full on eighties style sequenced synth stutter, laced with reverby industrial percussion, the sounds dense and lush and layered, frantic and frenetic (it is titled "Pursuit" after all). From there on out it's easy to get lost in the Barrow and Salisbury's imagined soundworld, haunting minor key melodies, woozy percolating synths, primitive rhythms, one second all washed out and cosmic, the next dark and driving and relentlessly rhythmic.
Needless to say, fans of the current crop of Carpenter/Goblin worshipping retro synthwranglers will flip for this big time, and while sonically, this does fit pretty perfectly alongside Umberto, Zombi, Majeure, Roll The Dice, Expo 70, Bitchin Bajas, Dylan Ettinger, Gatekeeper, Food Pyramid, Xander Harris and all the rest, Drokk actually manages to sound less like one of those bands looking to the past, and more like one of the originals from back in the day, looking forward, to some impossible unimaginable future, like the one we're living in today.
MPEG Stream: "Lawmaster / Pursuit"
MPEG Stream: "Helmet Theme"
MPEG Stream: "Justice One"
MPEG Stream: "Scope The Block"

BARROW, GEOFF & BEN SALISBURY Drokk: Music Inspired By Mega-City One (Invada) lp 35.00
Originally composed as the soundtrack for an upcoming Judge Dredd film adaptation (and rejected!), Drokk finds Geoff Barrow from Portishead, teaming up with composer Ben Salisbury for a dark futuristic synthscape that looks to the classic scores of John Carpenter and Goblin, but instead of sounding like just another record jumping on the retro-futuristic synthscape bandwagon, that seems to have infected so many other groups, the sound these two have conjured up is much darker, and much more dense. And it plays out more like an actual soundtrack, since after all it is (was?) one. Drokk offers up all sorts of rhythms and melodies and arrangements and textures that definitely do feel like cues, like sounds designed to accompany specific images and actions, and while in many cases, scores loosed from their films lose a lot of their power, that is definitely not the case here. The sound reminding us in places of Blade Runner, and displaying obvious influence from groups like Tangerine Dream. There are also some Portishead like moments, creeping spare downtempo dirges that work surprisingly well with the more driving puslating synths. The opening jam definitely sets the tone, and sounds like it must have been for the opening credits/sequence, a spare bit of synth pulse, underpinned by a high sinewave like tone, the synths growing ever more ominous, expanding into fuzzy swooping synths, before exploding into full on eighties style sequenced synth stutter, laced with reverby industrial percussion, the sounds dense and lush and layered, frantic and frenetic (it is titled "Pursuit" after all). From there on out it's easy to get lost in the Barrow and Salisbury's imagined soundworld, haunting minor key melodies, woozy percolating synths, primitive rhythms, one second all washed out and cosmic, the next dark and driving and relentlessly rhythmic.
Needless to say, fans of the current crop of Carpenter/Goblin worshipping retro synthwranglers will flip for this big time, and while sonically, this does fit pretty perfectly alongside Umberto, Zombi, Majeure, Roll The Dice, Expo 70, Bitchin Bajas, Dylan Ettinger, Gatekeeper, Food Pyramid, Xander Harris and all the rest, Drokk actually manages to sound less like one of those bands looking to the past, and more like one of the originals from back in the day, looking forward, to some impossible unimaginable future, like the one we're living in today.
MPEG Stream: "Lawmaster / Pursuit"
MPEG Stream: "Helmet Theme"
MPEG Stream: "Justice One"
MPEG Stream: "Scope The Block"

BLACK SUN ROOF! 3012 (Stiff Opposition) 3"cd-r 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
One of two new releases from Mr. Matthew Bower (Skullflower, Total, Sunroof! etc.), the other a killer blast of hypnotic blackbuzz reviewed elsewhere on this week's list, which, as several recent SF records have done, hints at Bower's growing interest in black metal, which is precisely why assumed that this new project, Black Sun Roof!, must be a black metal version of Bower's long running psychedelic ur-drone project Sunroof! Which while we have to admit sounds pretty goddamn good, is not in fact what Black Sun Roof! sounds like. Instead, it takes the blissy kosmische shimmer of Sunroof! and seems to meld it to the tripped out psychedelic jamminess of SF's Exquisite Fucking Boredom. Just check out the opener, "Crystal Docking Station", with its heavily flanged primitive riffing draped over simple soft focus chordal squalls, all wreathed in a druggy dreamy haze, and everything tethered to a super spare, skeletal, mostly buried in the mix rhythm. It's a glistening lo-fi sort of krautpsych mesmer that is seriously mesmerizing, one of those jams that definitely could have continued on well past its 6:40 termination point. "Fans Of Ego" is up next, and adds some industrial clatter, and low fidelity noisiness to the mix, a clattery stumbling rhythm surrounded on all sides by hiss and whir, and howl and hum, the effect is very much like some strange Dead C outtake, although Bower crafts it into something a bit more psychedelic and spaced out, a gorgeously heady feedback drenched blown out soft noise dirge, that like the opener, we could listen to forever. And finally, the disc finishes off with "Glassy Penetralia", which is the toughest of the bunch to describe, a swirling chunk of almost symphonic noisiness, the foundation a blown out riff, blurred and smeared into a bed of woozy washed out melody, while over the top, a tangle of jagged guitars, that sound more like strings, like some hellish string section, swaddled in blackened streaks of guitar noise, which sounds strangely like some impossible Kronos Quartet / Skullflower mashup. Awesome!
EXTREMELY LIMITED! As in 25 or 30 total made EVER. We have about 10 left and unless we can convince Bower to whip up more, these are the last copies we'll ever see. Housed in cool handpainted minisleeves with pasted on liner notes.
MPEG Stream: "Crystal Docking Station"
MPEG Stream: "Glassy Penetralia"

BLUE SABBATH BLACK CHEER PIG HEART TRANSPLANT s/t (Phage Tapes) cd 11.98
A seriously grim blackened doomdronedirge songsuite from these two outfits, both of which are perfectly capable of kicking up a serious din on their own, so you might be expecting a skull splitting ear piercing onslaught, but the first track at least is downright beautiful, in a bleak and sinister sort of way, lots of space, and texture, some caustic feedback and rumbling low end, some weird demonic voices, and some glitched out electronics, but all laid over a bed of hiss and hum, and eventually morphing into a strange series of moaning chordal swells, all woven together by a barely audible sinewave tone. And the same sort of ethereal abstract ambience extends into the second track, which unfurls like some sort of super minimal abstract rhythmscape, the rhythm in this case a barely there assemblage of murky pulses and concentrated bursts of soft focus static, but it's only the first half of the track, by part two, the sound have splintered into filthy shards of blunted noise, the low end oozing and bleeding into long black streaks, the vocals a FX drenched bellow, all the elements again held together by a strange tangled bit of high end that sounds a bit like air escaping from a balloon.
Track three (they're all untitled) is the first really noisy bit, but even here, it's tempered by some serious dynamics, and some cool abstract production, with the initial onslaught soon dialed back into a strangely rhythmic textural backdrop, before exploding once again, into a churning, rhythmic blackened dirge, the vocals this time around a monstrous growl WAY down in the mix, the shards of feedback strangely melodic, the whole track with a darkly hypnotic looped vibe, super mesmerizing, and the sort of noise that ends up being more tranced out than brutal. After a short stretch of glitched out skeletal doom, which sounds like some sort of experimental death metal run through a bunch of busted FX pedals and spinning at 16rpm, the record finishes off with a nearly 14 minute epic, that spends most of its time all delicate and barely there, lots of processed electronics and strange glitches, but all smeared into the background, some creepy bellowed slowed down vox the only thing that really makes this more noise than some haunting dark dronemusic, it's not until after a long stretch of near silence, that the song finally erupts into some full on crushing and crumbling NOISE, an avalanche of roiling low end crumble, that blossoms into a speaker shredding squall of blown out amp damage and abject sonic decay. Nice!
MPEG Stream: "I"
MPEG Stream: "II"

BONG Mana-Yood-Sushai (Ritual Productions) cd 16.98
By now, we're pretty sure most regular AQ customers are familiar with Bong. The name rings a bell, right? (Hahaha.) While there's plenty of stoner/sludge type bands with "bong" in their name, and a lot of 'em are pretty good (Bongzilla, Bongripper, and the recent Belzebong, for instance), this Bong, the one true Bong, have deservedly earned the appellation of Bong by itself without any cute suffixes or prefixes. This UK band's sweet sonic smoke does indeed send the listener into an altered state. On this, their latest, recorded by Esoteric's Greg Chandler, they've come from beyond ancient space (the title of their previous album, also released on the aptly named Ritual Productions) to bring us another two looooonnng tracks of their trademark slomo, spaced out, dronedirge dooooom. Dunno though if we should even be calling Bong doom, or dooooom, actually, though we do. What's heralded here is perhaps something more transcendentally wondrous, psychedelically blissful. Tune in, turn on... the first, 27+ minute track is "Dreams Of Mana-Yood-Shushai", its title referencing the poetic, pre-Lovecraft mythology of early 20th century fantasist Lord Dunsany. Mana-Yood-Shushai is the sleeping god, creator of all, the god of "having done", to whom none may pray, for when he wakes the world will end... Bong do a good job of conjuring the gentle, yet ominous mood of such a god's dreams here, as near as we mere mortals can tell. Heaving waves of down-tuned guitar riffage and rolling, rumbling softly thunderous percussion accompany droning monkish vox doing some sort of seemingly ceremonial chant. The deep, Earth-like bass frequencies emanating mountainously from Bong's amps provide a solid foundation also for the exotic East Indian zing of Bong's secret weapon, the Shahi Baaja (an electrified zither / drone harp with typewriter keys) to play its part in the unfolding phantasmagoria of the endless innerspace odyssey that is Bong's gift to you... Massive, meditative. Sinister, somewhat, and sensuous, the Shahi Baaja contributing to the sense of snake-charmer sway.
Next, track two, "Trees Grass And Stones", we must assume is a nod to legendary Swedish psychsters Trad Gras Och Stenar! Certainly not just the name, but the somewhat more pastoral feel of the mesmeric music, supports such an interpretation. If not, then it's a case of great minds... some sort of psychic psychedelic communion between two of our faves. In any event, it's a thick, 19 minute slab of sturdy, stately krautdrone hypnorock, that stirs up a mite more rhythmic umph than what came before.
Once again, highly recommended by all of us here at aQ, especially of course to fans of Bong (or the use of bongs), Megaton Leviathan, OM, Earth, SUNNO))), Hawkwind, and all other bands that could have used the name Bong but didn't, leaving it to this groop to take up the challenge, and succeed. All bow down and pray to Mana-Yood-Shushai! (Whoops!)
MPEG Stream: "Dreams Of Mana-Yood-Shushai"
MPEG Stream: "Trees Grass And Stones"

BURIAL Street Halo / Kindred (Hyperdub) cd 18.98
Like the title suggests, this is the cd version of Burial's last two 12"s. 6 tracks, almost an hour long, complete with obi 'cause it's a Japanese import. Both 12"s are pretty much out of print, so if you missed them, you gotta get this!
Street Halo was the first new music we had heard from Burial in 4+ years, and hardly needed a review at all (then or now), needless to say, the master of dark moody soul inflected minimal dubstep does it again, just check out the murky melancholy "Street Halo", which ditches some of the more overt dubsteppiness of past records, for something a bit more techno flecked, the beat a muted four on the floor pulse, while the surrounding sounds remain appropriately washed out and dreamlike, some spectral soulful female vox just add to the vibe. We actually spun the vinyl version of this at 33 the first few times, and holy shit, not sure if it's just us, but might sound even better that way, syrupy and witch house-y, total slomo cough syrup blackened dub electro drag. Too bad you can't easily slow down a cd, but even at the right speed of 45, it's pretty dang perfect, only a slight swerve from the dubbed out soul of Untrue.
"NYC" slows things way down, lacing some electro skitter and shuffling techno with a seriously dubbed out production and some sped up soul samples, still spare and skeletal, wreathed in a late night, winding down, chill out haze. And finally "Stolen Dog" is a dubby downtempo electro soul ballad, with a super hooky main melody, warm swirling low end swells, a skittery beat buried in the mix, and still more vocal soul. So good!
Beautifully sad and heavy, "Kindred" is laid out like a dystopic symphonic requiem that morphs through a slow-motion roughshodden landscape. Lonely remote vocals spliced and polished into barely discernible words pitter-patter over record crackle, and far-off doomy atmospheres as clanging minimal garage rhythms propel forward and then drop out at irregular intervals. "Loner" steps it up with arpeggiated synths and an anxious pace with a cinematic car chase theme feel and RnB-ish vocal shadows buried underneath a layer of sonic grit and asphalt that freefalls into a strange haunted ambiance. "Ashtray Wasp" show a bit more light and hope at first. The vocals culled from cell phone recordings give a broader sense of actual song structure with sped up minimalist Phillip Glass-like orchestrations wrapping the song in a dramatically understated fury, eventually disintegrating into an extended oceanic womb of crackling unease. The final salvo turning into a lyrical filigree of piano, cascading vocal swatches and waves of radio static that fades like the night into the stratosphere. Chilling!
MPEG Stream: "Street Halo"
MPEG Stream: "Stolen Dog"
MPEG Stream: "Kindred"

CARLETTA SUE KAY Incongruent (Kitten Charmer) cd 9.98
Incongruent is a collection of highly intelligent, mostly melancholy songs sung extraordinarily well by a six-foot man in a frock and wig. One would never know that, of course, from any of the minimal (and "naughty") imagery included with the record... The songs here demand your attention: they're catchy, clever, and heartfelt without being sentimental. Carletta Sue Kay's Incongruent is a record that many will obsess over. An obvious comparison would be to Antony (& the Johnsons). Even though Antony and Carletta's voices occupy completely different sonic ranges, they both approach songwriting with an inherent sense of drama. And, like Antony, there's no campiness here. A bit of humor, yes, and a bit of genderbending, but Carletta is definitely not a drag performer. There's no question of Randy playing some kind of character: Carletta is Randy Walker is Carletta Sue Kay. Carletta/Randy lent his vocal talents to the most recent Magnetic Fields disc Love At the Bottom of the Sea. An honor (for a fan), and homage can be felt in the staccato, precise quality to the storytelling and playing on Incongruent. "For the Birds" and "Just Another Beautiful Boy" provide nice juxtaposition as opening tracks. Lyrically, "For the Birds" is some dark shit, but the band takes you to such a dreamy Willie Nelson kind of place you don't notice until your second time through the record. You also don't notice the song tops well over six minutes until maybe your third. After an introduction that includes some crafty arrangements and production to segue, "Beautiful Boy" kicks in with a nod-your-head pop jangle you never expected. By the end you're humming along with the refrain, but there's no way to sing along once Carletta really opens it up at the end unless you've got pipes like his, and that's pretty doubtful. The opening lines of "Pas la Meme" has CSK wondering how much dog shit is in Paris, delivered with just enough bitterness to make you wonder why Carletta has such antipathy for that city. During the entire record, Carletta's androgynous voice never strays below an alto, and is quite strong even in very high registers. He makes you WANT to listen. At a recent (albeit somewhat compact) show, he held the mic well away from him for most of the performance and his voice was still well above the instruments. "Joy Division" sounds more like the also-mentioned Echo and the Bunnymen (no complaints) but none of the songs are predictable or too traditionally arranged. Aside from "Joy Division" and "Beautiful Boy" there's very little use of percussion on Incongruent, relying on the percussive qualities of the piano and acoustic guitar to provide the pulse. The more rocking, poppier songs are great, but the songs without drums provide a more intimate cushion to caress Carletta's voice. The choice to keep the record more orchestral and less traditionally "pop" was a good one. People have been coming into the store for the past week or so asking for this record and that shows no sign of letting up... HIGHLY recommended!
MPEG Stream: "For the Birds"
MPEG Stream: "Pas le Meme"
MPEG Stream: "Joy Division"

CHEF MENTEUR East Of The Sun & West Of The Moon (Backporch Revolution) 2lp 24.00
This is the first we've heard from this New Orleans psychedelic combo, even though this is their third record, but it's as good a place to start as any, cuz it's hard to imagine any of the other records competing with the sheer sonic scope of East Of The Sun & West Of The Moon, a sprawling double lp (which was supposedly trimmed down from a QUINTUPLE lp!!), literally years in the making, which finds the band touching on all sorts of different sounds, but all the various sonic strains held together by a thread of cosmic psychedelia that runs through the whole record. The opener, "Narconaut", should have space rock nerds losing their shit, totally druggy and drifty, the bass and drums locked tight into a loping groove, while the guitars fill the sky with wild tangles of FX heavy swirls and squiggles, clouds of swirling psychedelia, that drifts from heady and ethereal to churning and heavy. The record unwinds gradually, the second track, a smoldering bit of mathiness, rife with twang, and spidery minor key melodies, and laced with a bit of Appalachia, but building to a serious heavy crescendo before slipping into a brief bit of country, only to return to the mathiness of the opening few minutes. From there the band drift into weird woozy horn driven slowburn balladry, a washed out blues, wreathed in loads of echo and reverb, giving it a serious dub vibe, only to then slip into a brief bit of rhythmic churn, which quickly transitions into some drum driven, almost IDM sounding electronica, but that electronica is wedded to the band's brooding drifting psychedelia, there's even some sampled voices, which gives it a definite Boards Of Canada feel.
"Oxen Of The Sun" is one of the record's two centerpieces, an 11+ minute jam that flits from sound to sound, beginning as a dense chunk of buzzing space rock, driven by low slung bass and wheezing organs, it soon gives way to a sort of blurred countryish drone/drift, which in turn becomes a haunting elegy of organ drone, before exploding into some seriously heavy super distorted psychrock, that itself shifts from dense driving pound, to spaced out abstract shuffle and back again. "Ganymede" is the other one, clocking in at more than 19 minutes, this one less all over the map, a lush organ/synth/keyboard dronescape, softly roiling, spacious and kosmische, gradually building to the occasional Sunroof! like ur-drone, only to slip right back into something much more serene and pastoral. It's a fantastically heady chunk of droned out psych bliss for sure.
The rest of the record continues the group's sonic explorations, more heavy psych space outs, bits of droned out minimal guitarscapery, woozy, slide guitar laced twang flecked drifts, pocked with slow build to explosive psychedelic squalls, dark strummed folk that gives way to some seriously dense and druggy psychedelia, and a final bit of spare steel string guitar, a little coda, surprisingly spare, considering how dense and sprawling and ambitious the rest of the record is.
WAY recommended, and pretty much essential listening for all you psychedelic space phreaks out there,
LIMITED TO 200 COPIES. Super elaborately packaged, in deluxe gatefold jackets, each one printed and hand numbered by the artist, the art a handmade woodblock print, includes a digital download.
MPEG Stream: "Narconaut"
MPEG Stream: "Il Obstrue Ma Vue De Venus"
MPEG Stream: "Oxen Of The Sun"
MPEG Stream: "The Long Stand (Part 2)"

CHIPS & BEER Issue #1 magazine 5.00
While we're still wringing a lot of reading enjoyment out of the 120 pages of the most recent issue of this cult metal 'zine, #3, reviewed here last list, we also have been excitedly perusing the two back issues we got in as well, #1 and #2, collect 'em all! As we said in our review of the latest, this is a great 'zine - the kind of 'zine that makes us wanna do 'zines again, actually. Edited by the inimitable Stewart Voegtlin, whose drunken hesher gone grad school writing style is the standard for all the magazine's enthusiastic & clever contributors, Chips & Beer's non-ironic love of underground metal past and present, the real good stuff, is abundantly evident throughout these first two issues.
#1, at 96 pages, features the likes of Manilla Road (an interview AND primer), Pentagram, Christian Mistress, Negative Plane, Cauchemar (with cocktail recipes), Vanhelgd, gore artist Matt "Putrid" Carr, and more! Buy this to read about the time Bobby Liebling met Iggy Stooge...
Issue #2, is up to 120 pages, crammed with stuff on Twisted Tower Dire, Thrones, The Mentors, Deceased, Midnight, Obsequiae, and much more, including a chat with our pal Ian Christie, of Bazillion Points Books. Plus, the primer this time is on King Diamond/Mercyful Fate.
And both issues of course feature editorial rants, peurile cartoons, clever comix, and plenty of opinionated, if sometimes cryptic reviews. We don't always agree with 'em (when we can even figure out if they like something or not) but find their viewpoints worth considering, and certainly amusing to read.
Blogs are great and all, but, well, screw 'em. Nothin' like a real 'zine! And especially nothin' like Chips & Beer.

CHIPS & BEER Issue #2 magazine 7.00
While we're still wringing a lot of reading enjoyment out of the 120 pages of the most recent issue of this cult metal 'zine, #3, reviewed here last list, we also have been excitedly perusing the two back issues we got in as well, #1 and #2, collect 'em all! As we said in our review of the latest, this is a great 'zine - the kind of 'zine that makes us wanna do 'zines again, actually. Edited by the inimitable Stewart Voegtlin, whose drunken hesher gone grad school writing style is the standard for all the magazine's enthusiastic & clever contributors, Chips & Beer's non-ironic love of underground metal past and present, the real good stuff, is abundantly evident throughout these first two issues.
#1, at 96 pages, features the likes of Manilla Road (an interview AND primer), Pentagram, Christian Mistress, Negative Plane, Cauchemar (with cocktail recipes), Vanhelgd, gore artist Matt "Putrid" Carr, and more! Buy this to read about the time Bobby Liebling met Iggy Stooge...
Issue #2, is up to 120 pages, crammed with stuff on Twisted Tower Dire, Thrones, The Mentors, Deceased, Midnight, Obsequiae, and much more, including a chat with our pal Ian Christie, of Bazillion Points Books. Plus, the primer this time is on King Diamond/Mercyful Fate.
And both issues of course feature editorial rants, peurile cartoons, clever comix, and plenty of opinionated, if sometimes cryptic reviews. We don't always agree with 'em (when we can even figure out if they like something or not) but find their viewpoints worth considering, and certainly amusing to read.
Blogs are great and all, but, well, screw 'em. Nothin' like a real 'zine! And especially nothin' like Chips & Beer.

CRAFT SPELLS Gallery (Captured Tracks) cd 8.98
Record number two from these eighties style new wave indie pop revivalists and another fantastic batch of pretty much perfect new wave pop songs, and all we could think was 'these guys are not fucking around'. Every record not only sounding more polished and more catchy, but sounding more like it actually comes from the eighties. There's no outsider weirdness, not tongue in cheek, this is pure eighties pop and it totally hits the spot. Sounding in places a bit like M83, due in no small part to the glistening glossy production, but also this new batch of songs are pretty fantastic, the guitars chiming and glistening, the programmed beats more intricate and driving, the vocals still appropriately wistful sad boy and slouchy, but this times there's also stings (or synth strings) that add a dark gravitas, and an emotional heft, making these tracks play out like songs that you totally would have put in a mixtape as a teenager back in the day. There's also a bit of a shoegaze vibe going on (hence the M83 comparison), with the guitars and synths whipped up into thick soaring swells, all held together by some awesome gloom pop basslines, especially on "Burst" which is especially bass heavy, with a wildly soaring post chorus bridge and a super hooky melody. Probably by now you know if this is your cup of tea, but if you dig this new wave of eighties, well, new wave, few do it as good as these guys. And stick around for the title track, a darkly dramatic closer, all fuzzed out and dreamily droney, moody and brooding, with cool percussion, some vibes, spidery guitar, subtle piano, and some gorgeous vox, all woven into the dreamiest track of the bunch.
MPEG Stream: "Still Left With Me"
MPEG Stream: "Warmth"

CRAFT SPELLS Gallery (Captured Tracks) lp 13.98
Record number two from these eighties style new wave indie pop revivalists and another fantastic batch of pretty much perfect new wave pop songs, and all we could think was 'these guys are not fucking around'. Every record not only sounding more polished and more catchy, but sounding more like it actually comes from the eighties. There's no outsider weirdness, not tongue in cheek, this is pure eighties pop and it totally hits the spot. Sounding in places a bit like M83, due in no small part to the glistening glossy production, but also this new batch of songs are pretty fantastic, the guitars chiming and glistening, the programmed beats more intricate and driving, the vocals still appropriately wistful sad boy and slouchy, but this times there's also stings (or synth strings) that add a dark gravitas, and an emotional heft, making these tracks play out like songs that you totally would have put in a mixtape as a teenager back in the day. There's also a bit of a shoegaze vibe going on (hence the M83 comparison), with the guitars and synths whipped up into thick soaring swells, all held together by some awesome gloom pop basslines, especially on "Burst" which is especially bass heavy, with a wildly soaring post chorus bridge and a super hooky melody. Probably by now you know if this is your cup of tea, but if you dig this new wave of eighties, well, new wave, few do it as good as these guys. And stick around for the title track, a darkly dramatic closer, all fuzzed out and dreamily droney, moody and brooding, with cool percussion, some vibes, spidery guitar, subtle piano, and some gorgeous vox, all woven into the dreamiest track of the bunch.
MPEG Stream: "Still Left With Me"
MPEG Stream: "Warmth"

CROCODILES Endless Flowers (French Kiss) cd 12.98
Death rock and surf rock don't really seem like the best mix, but somehow, that seems to be what Crocodiles's M.O. is, and in the past it seemed to be mostly visual, the band constantly clad in black leather and shades, like some sort of modern day surf pop Lords Of The New Church, and while the music may have had hints of that death rock sound, it was subtle enough that they ended up falling with groups like Wavves, Best Coast, Dum Dum Girls and all the rest, and sounded right at home. We thought maybe that death rock thing would play a bigger part on this new record, based on the very gothy album title, and the even gothier songs: "Electric Death Song", "Hung Up On A Flower", "Sunday (Psychic Conversation #9)". Of course those titles are tempered by ones like "My Surfing Lucifer", which seems to be the perfect mix of surf and death rock. But as much as we wanted all this death rock stuff to come to pass, Endless Flowers takes up pretty much right where Sleep Forever left off, and once we pushed play, we couldn't have cared less, cuz these guys sound as good as ever, and this new batch of songs are killer. Big crunchy fuzzed out guitars, crooned vox, hooks galore, if anything the sound is even more polished than before, the songs more well crafted, which is a little surprising since this new one is on French Kiss. This is the sort of record that usually heralds the move to a major, the one where all the punks yell sell out. But really, no matter hoe much more polished this new one is, Sleep Forever wasn't exactly lo-fi. Some of the druggier Spacemen 3 and Jesus And Mary Chain elements that were a big part of Sleep Forever have definitely been dialed back a bit, in favor of a more jangly pop sound. That said, there are some moments, like on "Hung Up On A Flower" that's plenty dirgey and druggy, and even features a cool super weird trip out in the second half, all detuned guitars and weird foreign female voices, and all sorts of warped production, and the stripped down closer, which also has a sort of woozy softly psychedelic vibe, but elsewhere it's all fuzzy jangly pop and really we couldn't be happier. Definitely a new pop fave for sure.
MPEG Stream: "Endless Flowers"
MPEG Stream: "Sunday (Psychic Conversation #9)"
MPEG Stream: "No Black Clouds For Dee Dee"

DAHLEN, ERLAND Rolling Bomber (Hubro) cd 17.98
We just love solo percussion albums. Stomu Yamash'ta, Toshiaki Ishizuka, Glen Velez, Milford Graves, Christopher Tree, Keiji Haino, Christian Vander, Janne Tuomi.... We're suckers for 'em. Something about a drummer saying, "hey, I'm more than just the timekeeper, you other guys, with your guitars and stuff, I don't need you, get lost, I'm doing this all myself my own way", is just cool, and often quite creative. So already we were interested in this debut solo album from this hitherto unknown to us (but apparently prolific) Norwegian jazz drummer, Erland Dahlen.
And then there's the title, Rolling Bomber. Sound heavy, right? We're already thinking martial drum rolls, and, uh, Motorhead's Bomber. But, the title actually comes from the name of Dahlen's drum kit, it's a vintage Slingerland "Rollingbomber" model, from the '40s, mostly made of wood 'cause of wartime metal shortages. So this isn't heavy - aside from the thump of the bass drum upon occasion - it's more of an atmospheric, textural soundscape thing. Besides the Rollingbomber kit, Dahlen makes use of multiple other percussion instruments (gongs, logdrum, timpani, maracas, kalimba, temple blocks, bells, etc.), also electronics, and some custom built gadgets, and a "monkey drummer with battery"... AND, also close to our hearts here at aQ, he plays the musical saw! That's where a lot of the (eerie) melody comes from. Not a percussion instrument per se, but cool.
So, the seven tracks here are all quite moody, dramatic, and rhythmically interesting (naturally). The grand finale, "Germany", gets kinda krautrocky, thus the title perhaps, with the beats more insistent, and the musical saw used effectively, it's an energetic culmination to this fine album.
MPEG Stream: "Flower Power"
MPEG Stream: "Monkey"
MPEG Stream: "Germany"

DAHLEN, ERLAND Rolling Bomber (Hubro) lp 24.00
We just love solo percussion albums. Stomu Yamash'ta, Toshiaki Ishizuka, Glen Velez, Milford Graves, Christopher Tree, Keiji Haino, Christian Vander, Janne Tuomi.... We're suckers for 'em. Something about a drummer saying, "hey, I'm more than just the timekeeper, you other guys, with your guitars and stuff, I don't need you, get lost, I'm doing this all myself my own way", is just cool, and often quite creative. So already we were interested in this debut solo album from this hitherto unknown to us (but apparently prolific) Norwegian jazz drummer, Erland Dahlen.
And then there's the title, Rolling Bomber. Sound heavy, right? We're already thinking martial drum rolls, and, uh, Motorhead's Bomber. But, the title actually comes from the name of Dahlen's drum kit, it's a vintage Slingerland "Rollingbomber" model, from the '40s, mostly made of wood 'cause of wartime metal shortages. So this isn't heavy - aside from the thump of the bass drum upon occasion - it's more of an atmospheric, textural soundscape thing. Besides the Rollingbomber kit, Dahlen makes use of multiple other percussion instruments (gongs, logdrum, timpani, maracas, kalimba, temple blocks, bells, etc.), also electronics, and some custom built gadgets, and a "monkey drummer with battery"... AND, also close to our hearts here at aQ, he plays the musical saw! That's where a lot of the (eerie) melody comes from. Not a percussion instrument per se, but cool.
So, the seven tracks here are all quite moody, dramatic, and rhythmically interesting (naturally). The grand finale, "Germany", gets kinda krautrocky, thus the title perhaps, with the beats more insistent, and the musical saw used effectively, it's an energetic culmination to this fine album.
MPEG Stream: "Flower Power"
MPEG Stream: "Monkey"
MPEG Stream: "Germany"

DAWNBRINGER Into The Lair Of The Sun God (Profound Lore) cd 13.98
All hail! At last, a follow up to the critically-acclaimed (and by us as well) 2010 album Nucleus, from this idiosyncratic lone genius metal cult. Yes it's the return of Dawnbringer, masterminded by guitarist/drummer/vocalist Chris "Professor" Black, he of also, amongst others, AQ faves High Spirits. Interestingly, Dawnbringer started off years ago as the one-man band of *somebody else*, but early on, Chris Black joined on drums, and then the other guy subsequently quit, making Dawnbringer into Black's own one-man band! (Though he does get help from friends.)
For those who've heard Nucleus, you know that Dawnbringer plays truly classic metal, but with an experimental edge, informed by black and death and other styles, though those elements have been toned down in recent years. Dawnbringer's latest comes quite close to the sound of the NWOBHM-ish High Spirits, with some of the power/proggishness of another band the Professor plays drums in, Pharaoh.
Dawnbringer must be lauded for their real, honest-to-god heavy metal songwriting, unafraid to be a bit 'pop' - track five even gets a little power-ballady, we love it! Other trademarks include the powerful drumming, TONS of gorgeously shredding guitarwork, various quirky details, and, crucially, the whiskey-weary, Lemmy-phlegmy, soulful vocal stylings of Black - the earnestness of which go a long way toward making the weirder aspects of this seem worth taking seriously, 'cause yes, the album title kinda sounds like the name of a D&D module, and indeed it's fantastical. The sticker on the shrinkwrap says that this album is "the story of a naive assassin, his bizarre journey, and its tragic end". But beyond that, for a 'concept album', very little is revealed. The disc is broken up into nine completely untitled tracks, there's no 'story' provided in the cd booklet, and only a few lines of lyrics are printed. You just gotta listen. And, whether you follow the plot or not, you'll enjoy the masterful metal music, full of killer riffage, galloping rhythms, and impassioned vocals...
Dawnbringer here can certainly be compared to their former Profound Lore labelmates, Slough Feg and Hammers Of Misfortune (the latter especially due to the pounding '70s prog Hammond organ you'll hear on track VI, in particular). Also of course, such bands as diverse as Iron Maiden, Blue Oyster Cult, Bathory, Manowar... In sum, this album is an artistic, ambitious attempt at 'Epic Metal', and it's a huge triumph. Definitely in competition for best heavy metal offering of 2012!
MPEG Stream: "I"
MPEG Stream: "II"
MPEG Stream: "VI"

DIVE Geist (Captured Tracks) 7" 6.98
Latest single from these shoegaze new wavers, an offshoot of aQ faves the Smith Westerns, but unlike the last few singles, which tended toward the wispy and dreamy, the sound on this latest single is much darker and more dense, with a surprisingly lush production. Plenty of chiming jangle and everything washed out and a bit ethereal but the vocals super effected, the rhythms darkly propulsive, the vibe more ominous and sinister. Even more so on the B side, which is the real reason to grab this, a cover of a super obscure Kurt Cobain demo, "Bambi Slaughter", pre Nirvana, the only existing version a rough unfinished acoustic sketch, but here, Dive finish it up, and turn it into something dark and brooding and surprisingly noisy and chaotic, the sound is definitely Nirvana-esque, the chord progression and the melody, but Dive make it all woozy and jangly, with wild burst of blown out psychedelic chaos between the brooding churning verses. Really awesome, and neither track here will be on the upcoming full length!
MPEG Stream: "Bambi Slaughter"

EVANS, GRANT Tactical Gamelan (Hooker Vision) cassette 8.98
After a spate of tape releases under the moniker Nova Scotian Arms and as Quiet Evenings (with his wife Rachel Evans aka Motion Sickness Of Time Travel), Grant Evans has released this drone-n-murk cassette through his mighty fine tape label Hooker Vision. There's a strong link between the sounds here, and on the NSA album Cult Spectrum released earlier in 2012 on Digitalis. Mossy, subterranean drones shift and wiggle out of the initial burst of a noisy industrial-strength flange that opens the first side of the tape. The soft, malleable surfaces of Evans' dark-minded sources (synth? guitar? processed field recordings?) settle nicely into the murk of the tape itself. Here, the sounds are akin to the occluded dronemuzik of Maeror Tri in one of their more circumspect, dreamtime moods, mixed with the likes of RV Paintings. The flip is equally as murky, although the syrupy tones seem to crawl from a turntable playing a 78 of morse code tutorials at 16 rpm, with aerated, black drones spewing smoke and shadow in the distance and spluttering synth percolations coming into focus. Limited to 100 copies; and unfortunately, already sold out at the source.

FATHER JOHN MISTY Fear Fun (Sub Pop) cd 14.98
Yet another Fleet Foxes offshoot whose sound doesn't fall that far from the FF tree. And we're not complaining. It took us a while to decide that we did indeed love the Fleet Foxes, but once we did, we couldn't get enough, which makes this proliferation of sort-of-sound-alikes good news for folks like us who love THAT sound and want more. But like the Poor Moon record we reviewed recently, Father John Misty, the work of former FF drummer Joshua Tillman, who seems to effortlessly capture the same sort of timeless sounding folk pop as the FF mothership. But where Fleet Foxes tended more toward traditional folk sounds, Father John Misty is definitely on the pop side of the spectrum, the arrangements lush and expansive, strings and percussion, piano and all manner of studio filigree, the songs rife with rich layered drones, lush old fashioned production, and Tillman's voice is fantastic, spending much of its time in the upper registers, sounding not unlike Roy Orbison at times, the music appropriately orchestral, and then there are the lyrics, which pop out once in a while, especially when Tillman is singing something about punching himself in the face, or something about Jesus Christ, but delivered in that gorgeous velvety croon, over some lush dreamy twang flecked pop, it's hard not to love. Lots of dreamy ooooh's and aaaah's, cool crunchy guitars, big bombastic drumming (just check out "Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings", which might be our favorite track), wheezing organs, groovy electric pianos, programmed beats here and there, slippery slide guitar, the songs all over the map, stripped down folk, fuzzy almost indie pop, dark country, lush chamber pop, sixties psychedelic rock, and more often than not, some mix of them all.
Super cool eye popping psychedelic cover art too!
MPEG Stream: "Hollywood Forever Cemetary Sings"
MPEG Stream: "Funtimes In Babylon"
MPEG Stream: "Nancy From Now On"

FEELING OF LOVE Dissolve Me (Born Bad) cd 17.98
NOW ON CD!!!
Killer disc of droned out buzz drenched post punk dirge pop from this French outfit, their sound a Velvets inspired druggy synth/organ heavy haze, fans of Moon Duo will flip for these guys, the same sort of kraut-drone mesmer, but Feeling Of Love, with what we can only assume is a live drummer, sound a lot looser, and a lot more rocking, getting downright garage-rocky in places, but they often lace that rock with some dreamy angelic background vox and infuse everything with some seriously prismatic poppiness, which is pretty irresistible. The band sound as good rocking out jubilantly, as they do churning away in a dour sonic trance, both of which they do in equal measure, and it's a pretty fantastic combo, but the band also display a fairly expansive sonic palette, occasionally unfurling long stretches of hazy rhythms, wreathed in squealing feedback, and wrapped in smokey tendrils of psychedelic guitar, or bursting into twee pop ditties at the drop of a hat, somehow even managing to mix the two once in a while, like on "La Bas C'est Naturel", which sounds like some lo-fi drug psych rock via K Records, but then before long, they slip right back into their droney swaggery hypno-rock, but one that seems to have limitless permutations, whether it's the druggy Fuzztones via Spacemen 3 trance out of "666 Blank Girls", or the Railroad Jerk like junkyard bluesiness of "Empty Trash Bag", or the frenetic caffeinated drum heavy, yelpy vocal-ed jangle and crunch of "I Am Right, You Are Wrong" (which has a surprisingly KILLER chorus)...
Fans of groups like Night Control, Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall, Mikal Cronin, Pink Noise, etc, will dig this big time, as will everybody who loved records by aQ faves J.C. Satan, or heck really anybody into hooky, druggy, droney, garagey, psychedelic garage pop radness.
MPEG Stream: "Cellophane Face"
MPEG Stream: "Dissolve Me"
MPEG Stream: "La-Bas C'est Naturel"
MPEG Stream: "666 Blank Girls"
MPEG Stream: "Empty Trash Bag"

FURZE Psych Minus Space Control (Fysisk Format) cd 17.98
Back in the day, when we wanted to talk about the most fucked up and damaged black metal EVER, we generally reference weirdo Norwegian black metal one man band Furze, whose records were pretty much completely nuts, demented and warped, but somehow utterly genius as well. The last Furze record, Reaper Subconscious Guide, found him cranking up the weirdness, but in a truly unexpected way, offering up that record as a tribute to his favorite band, Black Sabbath. In retrospect, we really should have made that a Record Of The Week, cuz the aQ metalheads were totally obsessed with that record. And even non-metalheads found it intriguing. A twisted homage, right down to some seriously Ozzy like vox, but so warped that it was like listening to Sabbath through a funhouse mirror. We weren't really sure if that was a one-off thing, or if Furze would return to the world of buzzing blackness, until we got our hands on this, Psych Minus Space Control, the latest maniacal musical missive from Woe J Reaper, aka Furze, and it is in fact, still an homage to the classic days of heavy metal, and Sabbath in particular, with extensive notes on each song, detailing the instruments used, the inspiration behind each song, all heartfelt and totally confusional and completely genius! Opener "Occult Soul, With Mind", is some lumbering Sabbathy doom for sure, total old school doom, with Furze teaching the riffs to some other guitar player called LFM "in order to have some more dynamic guitar sound", with Reaper also playing Mini-Moog and Mellotron, and explaining in the liner notes: "Why is the soul occult? Ain't the mind just as occult? Please be my guest to let this question roll on... PolyTriad Fingerprints are tapping up! Vol. 3 of the Triad is always outside the circle - the circle..." Woah, umm, okay. The same notes also ask "Do we WORSHIP BLACK SABBATH LIKE A KNELL or do we ride out there with pride??'
"Psych Mooz Space Control" is up next, and the notes explain that "This 'mooz' word is 'zoom' read backwards. Psych Mooz Space Control means 'to zoom neither IN nor OUT' - on reality - in order to grasp and define itÉ" It goes on, in great detail to explain how the meaning has a lot to do with people who oppose religions, and why 'mooz' wasn't used in the album title. The first few minutes of the song are a haunting sprawl of spare solo guitar, droney riffs and spidery melodies drifting in wide open expanses of emptiness, very meditative and mesmerizing, it's not until about 5 minutes in that the song kicks in proper, this time laced with some super creepy (and cool) electric violin, another woozy druggy classic doom jam, that slips from churning murky downtuned chug, to some soaring downright poppiness that s impossibly catchy yet doesn't sound at all out of place.
We could go on, song by song, we almost want to reprint the notes in their entirety, but needless to say, they're super fun and funny, and offer a sort of twisted insight, that really actually does add to the listening experience, the rest of the record continues in a similar fashion, slipping from doomy churn, to cosmic blackened psych, no sign of black metal AT ALL (well maybe a wee bit on the last track), so fans of the old Furze, unless you have a soft spot for Sabbath, and appreciated a twisted off kilter homage, then steer clear, for the rest of us, there's all sorts of Sabbathy weirdness, some killer riffing some strange instrumentation (glockenspiel!), plenty of flanger, some seriously tripped our FX heavy vox, all woven into a seriously twisted slab of outsider psychedelic doom, that definitely does Furze's sonic forebears proud!
Awesome cover art, tons of liner notes, and a sticker on the front that reads: "Do not upload nor copy this cd. Doing so you kill what you support."
MPEG Stream: "Occult Soul, With Mind"
MPEG Stream: "Psych Mooz Space Control"
MPEG Stream: "Reaper Subconscious Guide"

FURZE Psych Minus Space Control (Fysisk Format) lp 26.00
Back in the day, when we wanted to talk about the most fucked up and damaged black metal EVER, we generally reference weirdo Norwegian black metal one man band Furze, whose records were pretty much completely nuts, demented and warped, but somehow utterly genius as well. The last Furze record, Reaper Subconscious Guide, found him cranking up the weirdness, but in a truly unexpected way, offering up that record as a tribute to his favorite band, Black Sabbath. In retrospect, we really should have made that a Record Of The Week, cuz the aQ metalheads were totally obsessed with that record. And even non-metalheads found it intriguing. A twisted homage, right down to some seriously Ozzy like vox, but so warped that it was like listening to Sabbath through a funhouse mirror. We weren't really sure if that was a one-off thing, or if Furze would return to the world of buzzing blackness, until we got our hands on this, Psych Minus Space Control, the latest maniacal musical missive from Woe J Reaper, aka Furze, and it is in fact, still an homage to the classic days of heavy metal, and Sabbath in particular, with extensive notes on each song, detailing the instruments used, the inspiration behind each song, all heartfelt and totally confusional and completely genius! Opener "Occult Soul, With Mind", is some lumbering Sabbathy doom for sure, total old school doom, with Furze teaching the riffs to some other guitar player called LFM "in order to have some more dynamic guitar sound", with Reaper also playing Mini-Moog and Mellotron, and explaining in the liner notes: "Why is the soul occult? Ain't the mind just as occult? Please be my guest to let this question roll on... PolyTriad Fingerprints are tapping up! Vol. 3 of the Triad is always outside the circle - the circle..." Woah, umm, okay. The same notes also ask "Do we WORSHIP BLACK SABBATH LIKE A KNELL or do we ride out there with pride??'
"Psych Mooz Space Control" is up next, and the notes explain that "This 'mooz' word is 'zoom' read backwards. Psych Mooz Space Control means 'to zoom neither IN nor OUT' - on reality - in order to grasp and define itÉ" It goes on, in great detail to explain how the meaning has a lot to do with people who oppose religions, and why 'mooz' wasn't used in the album title. The first few minutes of the song are a haunting sprawl of spare solo guitar, droney riffs and spidery melodies drifting in wide open expanses of emptiness, very meditative and mesmerizing, it's not until about 5 minutes in that the song kicks in proper, this time laced with some super creepy (and cool) electric violin, another woozy druggy classic doom jam, that slips from churning murky downtuned chug, to some soaring downright poppiness that s impossibly catchy yet doesn't sound at all out of place.
We could go on, song by song, we almost want to reprint the notes in their entirety, but needless to say, they're super fun and funny, and offer a sort of twisted insight, that really actually does add to the listening experience, the rest of the record continues in a similar fashion, slipping from doomy churn, to cosmic blackened psych, no sign of black metal AT ALL (well maybe a wee bit on the last track), so fans of the old Furze, unless you have a soft spot for Sabbath, and appreciated a twisted off kilter homage, then steer clear, for the rest of us, there's all sorts of Sabbathy weirdness, some killer riffing some strange instrumentation (glockenspiel!), plenty of flanger, some seriously tripped our FX heavy vox, all woven into a seriously twisted slab of outsider psychedelic doom, that definitely does Furze's sonic forebears proud!
Awesome cover art, tons of liner notes, and a sticker on the front that reads: "Do not upload nor copy this cd. Doing so you kill what you support."

GAY WITCH ABORTION Maverick (Learning Curve) cd 8.98
We first heard the awesomely monikered Gay Witch Abortion on a killer 4 way split we reviewed recently called A Butcher's Waltz, which teamed up this duo with some other aQ faves including Skoal Kodiak, Seawhores and Power Take Off. But for as much as we dug those other outfits, Gay Witch Abortion definitely stole the show, more than living up to the hype, which was a relief as we'd been hearing how great they were for ages.
So here now is the debut full length from these guys, hot on the heels of their collaboration with AmRep head honcho Tom Hazelmeyer, which should come as no surprise cuz GWA definitely sound like they'd be right at home on AmRep, channelling a little Lightning Bolt, reminding us a bit of recent aQ faves Wizard Rifle too, these guys take that bass (guitar?) / drum duo thing and make it their own, their sound more a sort of blown out fuzz drenched heavy rock stoner prog thing, wild chaotic drumming under dense buzzing riffage, the guitar weirdly processed so it almost sounds electronic, their might be keyboards too, but it sounds more like the guitar/bass is run through some seriously fucked up FX, the sound constantly peppered with bits of buzz and hum, little glitches, swirls of hiss and crackle, the songs locking into dense looped mesmer, before slipping into songs proper, the vocals clean and crooned, when there are vocals, but more often these two are like a cobra and a mongoose, a wild squirming sonic tangle, a gnarled, writhing metallic noise rock that flits from droned out dirge to frantic hyperspeed punkprog and back again in the blink of an eye, all that and the group never shies away from weirdness either, peppering these blasts of acrobatic noise rockery with bits of twangy dirgery rife with whistled melodies, or stretches of Torche like fuzz pop, tripped out super distorted psychedelic drones, and even some cool experimental electronic noisiness.
Super intense sweat soaked math metal spazz punk stoner prog heaviness that will definitely hit the spot for anyone who digs Lightning Bolt and other like minded outfits, or really anyone into heavy, dense, noise rock aktion!!
The cd version comes with a Learning Curve beer cozy!!
MPEG Stream: "Down With Giants"
MPEG Stream: "Stain On The Floor"
MPEG Stream: "Scythian Skulls"
MPEG Stream: "Asleep In The Dirt"

GAY WITCH ABORTION Maverick (Learning Curve) lp 13.98
We first heard the awesomely monikered Gay Witch Abortion on a killer 4 way split we reviewed recently called A Butcher's Waltz, which teamed up this duo with some other aQ faves including Skoal Kodiak, Seawhores and Power Take Off. But for as much as we dug those other outfits, Gay Witch Abortion definitely stole the show, more than living up to the hype, which was a relief as we'd been hearing how great they were for ages.
So here now is the debut full length from these guys, hot on the heels of their collaboration with AmRep head honcho Tom Hazelmeyer, which should come as no surprise cuz GWA definitely sound like they'd be right at home on AmRep, channelling a little Lightning Bolt, reminding us a bit of recent aQ faves Wizard Rifle too, these guys take that bass (guitar?) / drum duo thing and make it their own, their sound more a sort of blown out fuzz drenched heavy rock stoner prog thing, wild chaotic drumming under dense buzzing riffage, the guitar weirdly processed so it almost sounds electronic, their might be keyboards too, but it sounds more like the guitar/bass is run through some seriously fucked up FX, the sound constantly peppered with bits of buzz and hum, little glitches, swirls of hiss and crackle, the songs locking into dense looped mesmer, before slipping into songs proper, the vocals clean and crooned, when there are vocals, but more often these two are like a cobra and a mongoose, a wild squirming sonic tangle, a gnarled, writhing metallic noise rock that flits from droned out dirge to frantic hyperspeed punkprog and back again in the blink of an eye, all that and the group never shies away from weirdness either, peppering these blasts of acrobatic noise rockery with bits of twangy dirgery rife with whistled melodies, or stretches of Torche like fuzz pop, tripped out super distorted psychedelic drones, and even some cool experimental electronic noisiness.
Super intense sweat soaked math metal spazz punk stoner prog heaviness that will definitely hit the spot for anyone who digs Lightning Bolt and other like minded outfits, or really anyone into heavy, dense, noise rock aktion!!
The cd version comes with a Learning Curve beer cozy!!
MPEG Stream: "Down With Giants"
MPEG Stream: "Stain On The Floor"
MPEG Stream: "Scythian Skulls"
MPEG Stream: "Asleep In The Dirt"

GLITTERBUG Cancerboy (c.sides) cd 17.98
The last Glitterbug record showed up in the midst of some sort of electronica renaissance, with fantastic new records from Pantha Du Prince, Actress, Klimek, T++ (sad we haven't heard anything else from them/him) and a bunch more, so Glitterbug, the work of a German DJ/producer fit perfectly with all of those, the sound lush and layered, softly psychedelic, cosmic with a definitely Pop Ambient vibe. We played that record to death. This record looks to follow suit, but unlike that first one, which was more a full self contained sound world, woven from both studio work and live recordings, this record, Cancerboy, is a much more personal collection, focusing on Glitterbug's struggle with cancer as a boy (hence the title). The record even starts off with what sounds like the ambient sound of a hospital room, the wheezing and beeping of machines, the voices of doctors and nurses, which gives way to the opening track "To Guess", which takes some of those sounds and weaves them into a dark, droney stretch of moody electronic melancholia, a hushed rhythmic shuffle, warm shimmery drones, little flecks of glitchery here and there, a super simple kick drum pulse, tinkling chimes, and ethereal melodies, quite haunting and cinematic, and an appropriately somber opening for a record with such a dark focus. But the darkness is not all encompassing, the record slips into more sort of Kompakt style minimal techno on "Abyss", a grid of pulse and click, wreathed in dark melodic swirls and brooding low end thrum, but as the song progresses, the melodies percolate wildly, the song grows more distorted and the vibe more frantic.
"Undertow" brings it back down, another Kompakt style shuffle, a woozy moody robotic groove, laced with a spidery minor key melody, the beats and loops in constant flux, sometimes sleek and clinical, other times noisy and rough around the edges, the vibe definitely cool and late night, but seemingly always underpinned by a melancholia that infuses the whole record. Much of the record could very well pass for some modern minimal techno, not knowing the background or the source of the title, but the record is rife with tracks that are a bit more moody and brooding, tracks that peel back the skitter and stutter to reveal the darkness underneath, like on "From Here On", that loops a strange echo drenched hand clap beat, and then drapes it with thick washes of low end rumble and waves of metallic buzz, as well as some delicate chiming melodies, or on "Dragged Along", which is a hushed sprawl of super spare dubbed out ambience, that skitters amidst vast swirls of barely there sonic shimmer, only coalescing into a proper beat near the end, and even then, wreathed in wistful melodies, or on "Outside My Window", which is a lush collage of tangled beats and murky swirling melodies and blurred psychedelic textures, that seem to gradually bleed into one another.
MPEG Stream: "Backwards"
MPEG Stream: "To Guess"
MPEG Stream: "Abyss"
MPEG Stream: "Undertow"

GRASS WIDOW Internal Logic (HLR) lp 14.98
The Grass Widow gals are fast becoming one of the best bands in San Francisco. Their tight, three-part vocal harmonies layered on top of angular guitar-driven melodies cannot be beat. It's like Dig Me out era Sleater-Kinney mixed with a healthy dose of the Mamas and the Papas. Internal Logic is the first full-length released on Grass Widow's own HLR label. Over the course of a few eps, 7"s and a full-length, they've really honed their sound into something all their own, however. There isn't a power trio out there right now who can do what Grass Widow does. They really use all of the various layers at their disposal to the fullest advantage possible, mixing up Raven's sometimes jagged guitar lines with Lillian's drums that sometimes play straight surf-rock beats and sometimes bounce around all over the kit. Hannah's mid-range bass tones never dip too low in frequency, sounding for the most part straight off an early Joy Division record. It's all about the interplay, one vocal harmony leading into another, slightly more discordant one. These ladies have been playing together for a while now and it's quite evident in the way each instrument compliments the other, skillfully showing technical prowess without one ever dominating the overall sound. The entire record clocks in at a little under half an hour, a short and sweet slab of vinyl that really could have been two or three songs longer, especially since two of the songs ("Milo Minute" and "Disappearing Industries") on the A side were previously released on 7"s. We're not complaining by any means, though, because this record is great from start to finish. Grass Widow is one of those bands, no matter how many records they release, you just want more! If for some reason you have been living under a rock and have never heard of Grass Widow, fans of The Shop Assistants, Erase Errata, Thee Oh Sees, The Mallard, The Soft Moon, you need this!

GUIDED BY VOICES Class Clown Spots A UFO (GBV Inc) cd 14.98
Maybe Robert Pollard just needed a break. Writing and recording literally THOUSANDS of songs can do that to a person. Although when Pollard disbanded Guided By Voices a few years back, he didn't really slow down in the interim, instead ended up making just as many records and writing just as many songs solo. But as much as we dug some of that stuff, and as much as GBV is Pollard's show, there was and is something magical about that band, about the chemistry between Pollard and Tobin Sprout, Mitch Mitchell, Greg Demos, and all the others who sail with the USS GBV. And the evidence is plain to see. GBV's comeback album, Let's Go Eat The Factory, definitely proved there was still a spark, and that even if Pollard wrote most of the songs, these guys as a unit, were way better and making those songs come alive. So it's barely been a handful of months since that record came out, and apparently, there's another one scheduled for November, so GBV are back on track, and working their way back to the sort of release schedule that would kill most bands, but then GBV are most definitely not most bands, and really we're not complaining cuz Class Clown Spots a UFO is even better than Let's Go. Right from the first song, "He Rises! Our Union Bellboy", these guys sound as good as ever, the song impossibly catchy, the band ramshackle but still sorta tight, Pollard's voice in fine form, the lyrics ridiculous but perfect, and so it goes, song after song of classic sounding GBV pop, from the pounding crunch of the awesomely titled "Blue Babbleships Bay", to the woozy, string laden jangle pop of "Forever Until It Breaks", the handclappy power pop bounce of the title track with a really weird (but cool) a capella break (and the title of which we remember from one of those sprawling multiple disc GBV collections, where every track was by a different imaginary band), the dirgey swagger of "Hang Up And Try Again", hell, we could go track by track, but instead we'll just mention that we've only had this for a few days now, and already, just after a couple plays, we're finding these songs stuck in our heads like crazy. And some of the GBV of old is also present in the various super short jams (there's at least 7 or 8 songs that clock in at a minute or less), which as always, manage to be just as catchy, if not more so than their (slightly) longer counterparts.
This should definitely hold us over for a few months, at least until it's time for a whole 'nother set of songs. We already can't wait.
MPEG Stream: "He Rises! Our Union Bellboy"
MPEG Stream: "Blue Babbleships Bay"
MPEG Stream: "Class Clown Spots A UFO"
MPEG Stream: "Chain To The Moon"

GUIDED BY VOICES Class Clown Spots A UFO (GBV Inc) lp 15.98
Maybe Robert Pollard just needed a break. Writing and recording literally THOUSANDS of songs can do that to a person. Although when Pollard disbanded Guided By Voices a few years back, he didn't really slow down in the interim, instead ended up making just as many records and writing just as many songs solo. But as much as we dug some of that stuff, and as much as GBV is Pollard's show, there was and is something magical about that band, about the chemistry between Pollard and Tobin Sprout, Mitch Mitchell, Greg Demos, and all the others who sail with the USS GBV. And the evidence is plain to see. GBV's comeback album, Let's Go Eat The Factory, definitely proved there was still a spark, and that even if Pollard wrote most of the songs, these guys as a unit, were way better and making those songs come alive. So it's barely been a handful of months since that record came out, and apparently, there's another one scheduled for November, so GBV are back on track, and working their way back to the sort of release schedule that would kill most bands, but then GBV are most definitely not most bands, and really we're not complaining cuz Class Clown Spots a UFO is even better than Let's Go. Right from the first song, "He Rises! Our Union Bellboy", these guys sound as good as ever, the song impossibly catchy, the band ramshackle but still sorta tight, Pollard's voice in fine form, the lyrics ridiculous but perfect, and so it goes, song after song of classic sounding GBV pop, from the pounding crunch of the awesomely titled "Blue Babbleships Bay", to the woozy, string laden jangle pop of "Forever Until It Breaks", the handclappy power pop bounce of the title track with a really weird (but cool) a capella break (and the title of which we remember from one of those sprawling multiple disc GBV collections, where every track was by a different imaginary band), the dirgey swagger of "Hang Up And Try Again", hell, we could go track by track, but instead we'll just mention that we've only had this for a few days now, and already, just after a couple plays, we're finding these songs stuck in our heads like crazy. And some of the GBV of old is also present in the various super short jams (there's at least 7 or 8 songs that clock in at a minute or less), which as always, manage to be just as catchy, if not more so than their (slightly) longer counterparts.
This should definitely hold us over for a few months, at least until it's time for a whole 'nother set of songs. We already can't wait.

HALL, NATE A Great River (Neurot) cd 14.98
It doesn't always work out that when frontmen from heavy bands begin to fancy themselves troubadours, ditching all the distortion and metallic bombast and laying everything bare, it's the sort of thing that in the worst case can reveal all the shortcomings that are disguised by all that volume, and all those other instruments, we've seen plenty of ultra painful unplugged sets, that were just begging to be plugged back in. But in the best cases, like this, the solo debut from Nate Hall, frontman for psychedelic heavies US Christmas, it can demonstrate just why the heavy stuff is so compelling, cuz there are actual songs lurking underneath, and a vocalist who can actually sing, and has a knack for classic songsmithery. To be fair, it's not like the singer from Cannibal Corpse making a psych folk record (oh how we want to hear that now!), since US Christmas is essentially just a supercharged cranked up more metallic version of a psych folk band anyway. And plenty of the songs here actually sound like they could easily have been retooled into proper US Christmas jams, but that doesn't take away from how good they sound. Hall's voice is a slightly raspy croon that reminds us a bit of Nikki Sudden, ragged and rough around the edges, but it's perfect for USX and perfect for these songs here. Rooted around simple strummed acoustic guitar, but wreathed in thick swaths of distorted effected psych guitars, theremin here and there, a bit of slide guitar, plenty of echo and reverb, the songs droned out and a little druggy, there's even a killer cover of Townes Van Zandt's "Kathleen", and Hall definitely makes it his own, adding some cavernous reverb, but for the most part playing it straight. Helps that it's such a great song, and Hall's got the kind of voice that can do justice to a song that was basically already perfect (not sure why Hall wasn't included on the recent three way Townes Van Zandt tribute with Scott Kelly, Steve Von Till and Wino).
But not all the tracks are so psychedelic, a handful of the songs here are even more stripped down, no electric guitars, just straight up Appalachia, steel string guitar and banjo, and those tracks kill as well.
Folks into other psych folk should check this out for sure, and heck who knows, this might be the gateway that gets you into US Christmas that gets you into other heavy stuff, it's a slippery slope, but we're all waiting for you down here at the bottom!
MPEG Stream: "The Earth In One Cell"
MPEG Stream: "Dark Star"
MPEG Stream: "Kathleen"

HEADBOGGLE s/t (Spectrum Spools) lp 22.00
Headboggle is an aptly named project from Bay Area product Derek Gedalecia, who landed this polydactile, outsider/avant-electronic album on the always impressive Spectrum Spools imprint. Like much of what we've heard from John Elliott's label, Headboggle filters a historical aesthetic through a contemporary-DIY lens with pretty reliable results, and Gedalecia has a pretty different take on that agenda by looking not so much to the cosmic / post-psychedelic era of progressive electronics. He's one to apply a huge amount of studio techniques and references including Tod Dockstader, Francoise Bayle, Nurse With Wound, Caroliner, Stockhausen, as well as Dilloway, Nate Young, and much of the post-noise synth wranglers, although Gedalecia is much more keen on dumping all sorts of odd samples and live instruments into densely packed, yet wholly decentered collages. Yup, he too has the suitcase full of cassette releases that have been spilling forth over the past three or four years, with a few of those popping up in the tape case here at aQuarius even. This self-titled lp is full of way-out there synth jams - citing six or seven synths in various interviews and whatnot, that give the record an 'everything-at-once' sort of overload bursting with candy-colored tones and bright-lite plastic luminosity, all topped with erratic banjo plucks, atonal harpsichords spluttering, and ragtime piano passages. What a trip!

HELLVETRON Death Scroll Of Seven Hells And Its Infernal Majesties (Hell's Headbangers) cd 12.98
A killer slab of blackened lo-fi doom from these Texas misanthropes, whose sound is echo drenched and dismal, a murky, muddy abyss of downtuned guitars, and reverby vox, that are WAY up in the mix, so when the vokills bellow, everything else disappears into the background. It's the sort of muddy hellish sonic miasma that seems to ooze black energy, the band plodding though tarpits of riffage and pounding slomo dirgery, the songs peppered with the (very) occasional burst of buzzing blackness, but for the most part, remaining in the realm of doomic creep, grim, filthy, crusty, blackened rituals that lurch and lumber like some hellish black beast, dragging itself from the pit.
Hellvetron features members of another group called Nyogthaeblisz, who like lots of black metal bands, definitely have a problematic ideology, but in Hellvetron, the focus seems to be on something much more abstract, the usual black metal stuff, darkness, hell, oblivion, death and damnation, demons and of course SATAN, the sound thus appropriately foul, the doomic churn laced with some surprising elements though, chantlike background vox, what sounds like swirling synths, which adds a strange sort of liturgical vibe to the proceedings, as if these were indeed some sort of sonic rites being performed for the dark ones, the sound blurred and smeared and gloriously washed out, the black buzz muted and muddied, making it strangely meditative and trancelike, which weirdly enough ended up making this sound surprisingly soothing to us, infusing our blackened souls with some sort of demonic tranquility, the perfect grim black trance.
MPEG Stream: "Sheol - Grave of Supernals"
MPEG Stream: "Abbadon - Wings of Perdition"

HIGGINS, GARY Red Hash (Drag City ) lp+7" 21.00
ORIGINALLY REISSUED IN 2008, LONG GONE, BUT NOW BACK IN PRINT ON VINYL!!!
Back in 2005, when we reviewed School Of The Flower, the latest from modern day acid folk hero Ben Chasny's Six Organs Of Admittance, we mentioned that Ben had become obsessed with the music of one Gary Higgins, an obscure '70s hippie singer/songwriter whose lone LP from 1973, Red Hash, had developed something of a cult following over the decades, not that all that many people had even ever heard OF it, let alone actually heard it. But those who had all spoke highly of its mystic beauty, mysterious aura, and so forth. Ben covered a Higgins song on School Of The Flower, and asked that if anyone knew of his whereabouts to let Drag City know. Apparently that paid off, 'cause now Drag City *has* managed to track down Mr. Higgins and properly reissue Red Hash on cd to enlighten all of us to its wonders. And we bet Ben is excited to now be labelmates with one of his heroes! (They've even performed together in recent months!)
Kicking off with the song that Six Organs' covered, "Thicker Than A Smokey", Red Hash immediately lives up to its reputation as a hidden treasure of psychedelic folk music, oft slow and sad and melancholically melodic. There's a lost and lonely vibe to a lot of this, with Gary's gentle singing and acoustic guitar backed by friends playing piano, cello, mandolin, flute and more. Together they weave eleven tracks of entrancing dope smoking folk music, drifting, sometimes dreary, but always oh so lovely. The freakiness is mainly in the lyrics, which can be quite interestingly cryptic and weird, often regarding the worried wandering and woes of a young man, while the music remains alluringly melodic and inwardly calm. Though, with a deeper voice and more urgent tone, the Beefheartian "Down On The Farm" stands out as more menacing (and humorous) than the rest. Two (lesser) bonus tracks are also included, "Last Great Sperm Whale" from 1975 and "Don't Ya Know" from sometime in the early '80s. But the album alone is a gem and shines just a bright now as it did briefly back in '73. By the way, one reason for its obscurity is that shortly after the LP's original release, Higgins was sent away to prison to do a two-year stretch on a pot bust... so it must be really nice for him to gain some belated recognition nowadays.
MPEG Stream: "Windy Child"
MPEG Stream: "I Can't Sleep At Night"

HORSEBACK Half Blood (Relapse) lp 19.98
NOW HERE ON VINYL!
It's always difficult to know exactly what to expect from Horseback, the one man black metal / drone / psych project of Jenks Miller, every record is different, and every record over the course of the album shifts constantly, yet we're always pretty blown away. And this new one, just like the last few, confuses from the get-go. Opening with a mathy sort of post rock groove, all clean guitar jangle, churning distorted bassline, and warbly organ, and then the vocals, a weirdly distorted black metal rasp, which is only really weird paired with post rock. But it sounds killer, the record sounds massive, the drums crushing, the instruments lush and layered, the vocals the only thing pointing to anything other than post rock. Minus those, it sounds more like Skull Defekts or maybe Lungfish or even Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat. But that was just the first track, which as we've learned is hardly an indicator of what's to come. But here it sort of is, as the second track is another lumbering post rock groove, all big drums and spidery guitar melodies, and again driven by some serious distorted bass heft. Replace those vokills with say Dan Higgs, and this WOULD be a dead ringer for an as yet unreleased Skull Defekts record. A strange twist for sure, but it suits him, as so any seemingly disparate sounds do.
And so it goes, we were steeled for the eventual crush, the track that would suddenly splinter into some brooding black dirgery, or some furious blasting blackness, but nope, this is the sound of the new Horseback, a twisted slightly blackened post rock, and we dig it. The rest of the record is peppered with a handful of tracks that slip back into a more blissed out drone sound, at one point blossoming into a glorious Sunroof!-like ur-drone rife with strange shortwave interference and dreamy drifty melodies, while another track drags those raspy vokills in and rapes them over some ethereal shimmer, making for even stranger bedfellows. The post rock jams get even stranger, when Miller switches to clean vocals, and it couldn't be further removed from the Horseback(s) of old, and then there's the gorgeously blissed out final track, a 12 minute raga, that laces stuttery melodies and processed vox over a simple pulsing krautrock like beat, all wreathed in a haze of synth shimmer and guitar buzz, sounding a bit like Stereolab crossed with Amps For Christ, which if you couldn't tell by that description, might make it our favorite track of the bunch.
MPEG Stream: "Mithras"
MPEG Stream: "Hallucigenia III - The Emerald Tablet"

IIBIIS ROUGE Hespherides (Weird Forest) lp 16.98
Latest in this ongoing collaboration between two aQ faves, Neil Campbell from Astral Social Club, and French loopscaper High Wolf. Somehow this is the first of these collabs we've heard but it's pretty much just as good as we might have expected, fusing the looped psychedelic mesmer of High Wolf with ASC's latent dancefloor proclivities, as well as their blissed out astral ur-drones. It's a pretty potent combo for sure. Super tripped out and abstractly groovy, a pulsing heavily layered landscape of dizzying loops and shimmering drones, a sea of colliding sounds, that rather than sounding purely chaotic, ends up sounding dizzying and psychedelic, reminding us at times of Campbell Kneale's Our Love Will Destroy The World. So many layers and rhythms and melodies, constantly careening and transforming and fusing to each other, wrapped in squiggles of feedback and draped in stuttery effects, the multiple competing rhythms created by weirdly clipped loops, actual programmed beats and various sounds aligning into strange formations, often creating random rhythms, that disappear as quickly as they materialized. Spaced out grooves give way to murky drifts which in turn give way to chaotic swirls and back again.
The B side (both sides are single tracks) is more krautrocky, but a way abstract variant, pastoral, gauzy and hazy and softly noisy, all driven by an insistent yet barely there beat, submerged in the swirling shimmer, only to slowly build to a super distorted final blowout. Super cool.

JAY, ABNER One Man Band (Subliminal Sounds) cd 16.98
REPRESSED! This disc was first we ever heard from ol' Abner Jay, subsequently the subject of several quite popular Mississippi label vinyl reissues too (most, if not all, out of print, now). But it remains the only cd we've seen.
Leave it to Swedish reissue label Subliminal Sounds, who've already brought us Parson Sound and the Stomachmouths from their native land, to turn us on to someone this disc's liner notes somewhat bizarrely refer to as American's Toscanini! Black minstrel showman Abner Jay hailed from south Georgia, and was one of the last of the travelling minstrel musicians. Presumably he's dead now, though his habit of laying on his belly to drink water from the Swaunee River helped him to persevere for more than fifty years in a career as a one man band, banging out tunes on his six-string banjo, bass drum, harmonica and little else. On the evidence of this disc, Abner Jay was quite the entertainer. He tells some off-color groaners 'tween songs (love the one about the kangaroo), but the humor in his show doesn't stop his most affecting songs from being truly morose and sad, and beautiful. He's got the blues alright (the "Cocaine Blues" to be precise). Indeed, one of his most moving songs is entitled "I'm So Depressed". Stick that alongside his risque jokes and more lighthearted fare, and you've got a manic-depressive masterpiece, not to mention a piece of close to forgotten history.
It doesn't say anywhere exactly when these tracks were recorded, or from which of Jay's rare records they were compiled, but from the sounds of things, and Abner Jay's between-song patter, we'd guess this material dates from the late sixties or so. There's a song about Vietnam, anyway, and mention of LSD. Definitely a slice of Americana worthy of checking out, kudos to Subliminal Sounds for digging this up!
FYI for folks with the Mississippi lps, this 13-track cd has a bunch of songs from True Story, and one or two from the others, but there's also songs on here not found on any of the Mississippi vinyl we're pretty sure.
MPEG Stream: "I'm So Depressed"
MPEG Stream: "Cocaine"

KINK GONG Xinjiang (Discrepant) lp 24.00
We've been meaning to review this for a while now, a fantastic release from composer / ethnomusicologist / field recordist Laurent Jeaneau, who is also a contributor to the Sublime Frequencies series, which makes sense listening to Xinjiang, a gloriously mesmerizing world music audio collage, named for the province in China where all of these sounds were captured. Xinjiang has a similar vibe as those 'Radio' collections on Sublime Frequencies, a dizzying sampling of local musics, but also the sounds of the city and the country and the people, a series of seamlessly arranged soundscapes made up of gently manipulated field recordings, voices from the radio, rural folk music, the sounds of animals, the clip clop of horses' hooves, bowed and plucked strings, simple percussion, mournful melodies, the various recordings varying dramatically in tone and timbre, some lush and vibrant, as if you were right there, others tinny and warbly, as if being broadcast from the past, but all blurred into a mesmerizing whole.
In places the music gets super frenetic with wild percussion and manic melodies, but for the most part, the vibe is much more meditative and laid back. The sound slipping effortlessly from almost bluesy twang to dense melodic tangle, often rhythmic and tranced out, at times sounding like some sort of Chinese court music, with fluttering woodwinds, strange detuned string buzz and martial percussion, while other times like some timeless folk music. The A side is much more varied, and peppered with much of the more obviously constructed elements, while the B side is much more tranquil, stripped down and mostly acoustic. The collage aspect is really quite subtle throughout, with much of the record sounding more like an actual recording of indigenous musics, complete with the ambient sounds of the locations, the only overtly collaged aspect is the mix of the broadcasts, and the occasional shortwave interference, but strap on some headphones, or crank those speakers, and the machinations become a bit more obvious, and the record reveals itself as a gorgeously and meticulously arranged sonic construct, all of which only somehow makes it that much cooler.
LIMITED TO 300 COPIES!

LESSER Elder Bits (self-released) cassette 4.50
Longtime readers of the aQ list will no doubt remember our undying love for some thing / group / person called Lesser. If not have a look at the website and revel in our Lesser love. Heck, our own Andee even sports a Lesser tattoo. Briefly signed to Matador, and an auxiliary member of Matmos, Jay Lesser is responsible for some of our favorite weirdo electronica EVER, and yet, has always been about the most reluctant artist we can think of. Seemingly driven since day one to stop making music, yet, with every new thing we heard, we marveled at the amazing shit he could conjure up, whether it was wildly twisted drum and bass, or pure what the fuck experimentalism, few could rival his warped vision, and it's still a travesty that the world at large didn't embrace him the way we did. We like to think it was because it shit was just too weird, too next level, an opinion which seems to be furthered by this unexpected return.
While we assumed that Lesser was done, apparently, he got super interested in building his own synths, and this is the result, a pretty stellar chunk of heady, rhythmic electronic experimentalism that sounds so good, we're again wondering why the fuck Lesser isn't still making music on a regular basis, and why this is self-released, this would fit perfectly on Spectrum Spools or Ideologic Organ or Root Strata or Digitalis, and if any of the folks who run those labels are reading this, buy one of these and put out a fancy pants vinyl version.
Two sidelong sprawls that manage to be impossible varied, but somehow hold together as single epic pieces, beginning as a dizzyingly dubbed out field of percolations, the track soon mutates into, a thick chunk of crunchy beat heavy stutter, underpinned by woozy swooping low end, the sounds all crumbly and raw. Before too long the sound shifts again into a sort of super raw electro, all wild sonic squiggles and a beat constructed from squelches and static, the beats gradually fading into a murky minimalism, before blossoming into a strange sort of glimmering field of bleeps and bloops.
The second track/side starts off all minimal pulsations and dense chordal swells, laced with strangely soundtracky sonic filigree, before the beat drops and it becomes a strange sort of cinematic electro shuffle. Elsewhere, the sound grows serene, and becomes a dreamily melodic drift, all tinkling melodies and chiming tones, but wreathed in constantly swirling spaced out psychedelic synth squiggles, that soon gives way to some minimal squelch, before the track bursts into some seriously Perrey And Kingsley worthy bleep blorp playfulness, but edges with a slightly sinister undertone, before finally winding it up with a brief blast of primitive academic synth.
MPEG Stream: "Excerpt 1"
MPEG Stream: "Excerpt 2"

LORD OF DOUBTS The Gates Of Doom (Sekt Ov Gnozis) cd ep 11.98
Many moons ago, we gave a plethora of positive hand signals (thumbs up, devil horns, 'hang loose'...) in written review form to the debut disc by a Russian stoner doom band, this one, Lord Of Doubts, who impressed the hell out of us both -despite- and -because- of their uncanny resemblance to those aQ (and everyone's) fave stoner doom metal mongers, Electric Wizard. Nothin' original about 'em, no doubt about it, Lord Of Doubts were (and are) Electric Wizard worshippers, but sometimes that's ok. When done right. Which they did. Basically, it's about the sound AND the riffs. If you got 'em, you got 'em. We declared Lord Of Doubts "heirs to the Dopethrone" and there was high demand for that disc, which unfortunately was somewhat limited and went out of print all too soon...
But now, we've learned of a NEW opus from LoD, well an ep at least, which we just ordered direct from the Russian Federation. Ensconced in a handsome digipak, this golden disc contains a brief introduction, and then two longer, bonged-out songs, "The Gates Of Doom" and "Kali Ma - Black Mother", over 20 minutes total. Once again, damn if they don't sound just like the Electric Wizard... Crushing riff repetition. Crashing cymbals. Gnarled vocal chant. Everything slowly pulsating in a dense druggy haze. But, now it's as if Electric Wizard, in the tradition of the Beatles, travelled to India to get high with their guru... Maybe it's the cover art, and the droning chants of "Kali Ma", and the buried, distorted dialog samples from some Hindi movie... but Lord Of Doubts do seem to bring an Eastern ceremonial vibe to these lugubriously heavy, sprawling psych proceedings! Electric Wizard and The Temple Of Doom, anyone?
MPEG Stream: "The Gates Of Doom"
MPEG Stream: "Kali Ma - Black Mother"

MANCO, BARIS 2023 (Guerssen) cd 17.98
You know that we at aQ are big fans of Turkish psych legend Erkin Koray. We were even incredibly lucky enough to have him spend an afternoon here recently, signing autographs!! We've also recommended stuff by various of Koray's contemporaries, like Cem Karaca and Edip Akbayram. But, we haven't gotten much of a chance to talk about another Turkish psych/pop legend, Baris Manco, a man immediately recognizable by his luxuriant long hair and impressive mustache.
Now, Spain's Guerssen label has, for the first time, properly reissued on cd several classics from Manco's discography. We'll start with this one. It's Manco's first full-length album, we think, from 1975, and is considered by some to be his masterpiece. Certainly it's got its special charms - most notably, as you might guess from the title 2023, there's a futuristic vibe to it. Which means, lots of far out synthesizer sounds accompany the traditional Anadolu Pop folk elements. So it sounds just a bit like Bruce Haack goes belly dancing! Weird that may be, but Manco's smooth singing tends to accentuate the mostly laid back, mellow mood here. Though this Middle Eastern soft rock prog does of course get kinda funky/groovy too. And we definitely can call it "prog", when one track is a 12 minute plus multi-part suite that incorporates both flute and field recordings of bird twitter, right? Oh, and there's one song, we swear if Ozzy were singing instead of Baris, that would sound a lot like Sabbath's "Planet Caravan".
To sum up: pretty cool. We wish our country's "most influential pop artists" made weird sci-fi sounding concept albums like this. And if you were wondering, our guess, without looking at the copious liner notes that this comes with, is that the significance of the "2023" date has to do with how that year will be the centennial anniversary of the founding of the modern Turkish Republic.
MPEG Stream: "Kayalarõn Oglu"
MPEG Stream: "2023"
MPEG Stream: "Tavuklara Kõsst De"

MARTIN, IAN Mechanical Rain (Further) lp 15.98
Not sure how we first heard Ian Martin, a Dutch visual and recording artist, but we do remember it only took about two minutes of one track, and we were totally hooked. With a super minimal set up, never more than two synths, and absolutely no drum machines, Martin manages to create strange overlapping patterns and haunting synthscapes that manage to be ultra minimal, and that are driven by subtle rhythms created from the synths alone. The track that did it for us is the opener here, "Moving Activity", which unfurls long slow chordal swells, lush and haunting, over a murky looped percolation, that makes it sound like some sort of Philip Jeck installation, the feel of a skipping record driving the track, all gauzy and hazy and wreathed in a patina of barely there tape hiss. It's totally mesmerizing and utterly hypnotic, a gorgeous chunk of minimal mesmer that ends way to soon after only about 8 minutes.
It's almost as easy to get lost in the rest of the record "Drups" lays down a dense layered sprawl of atonal drones, over which Martin sends a series of bleeps and bloops pinging back and forth, giving it the vibe of some sort of early electronic space music, raw and primitive. "Voice Of Space" is a bit more crunchy and caustic, the percussion made up of little bits of squelch and static, over a strangely hypnotic loopscape that is both mesmerizing and tense, very cinematic too.
"Stream" probably ranks as a close second to the opener, another Jeck like loopscape, this one flecked with what sounds almost like a Morricone style twang, the rhythm a murky softly crunchy bit of churn, gorgeously hypnotic and hauntingly cinematic, another one we could listen to all day. "Wires" is a lot like "Drups", much busier, and another song that seems to approximate some lost primitive space music, a field of bleeps and bloops, strange tinkling melodies, all over a field of buzz and shimmer, and driven by a muted thump, very playful, almost reminding us of Raymond Scott at times. And finally, the title track, which unfurls a lush metallic buzzscape, that sounds almost like it was woven together from the sounds of grandfather clocks, chiming and tolling tones, all drifting above a strangely clattery abstract rhythm, the sounds crystalline and glistening, a gorgeously mesmerizing sprawl of glimmering synth drift mesmer that's the perfect way soundtrack to drifting off, disappearing into the heavens, are body and soul becoming one with the stars. Fantastic.
MPEG Stream: "Moving Activity"
MPEG Stream: "Stream"

MILLER, LLOYD & THE HELIOCENTRICS OST (Strut) cd 13.98
A while back we reviewed a collection from unsung jazz legend Lloyd Miller, called A Lifetime In Oriental Jazz, which was a huge hit around here. We had become obsessed with Miller after hearing a track from him on the amazing Spiritual Jazz compilation (the second volume of which is out now, check out the 'in stock not yet reviewed' section of this week's list!), and the collection only furthered that obsession. The songs on that comp represented a sampling of Miller's eclectic and lengthy career, the music a killer fusion of classic jazz, Indian style drones, Eastern melodies, Turkish and Persian folk music, it's heady nearly psychedelic stuff, experimental and far out, but still emotional and grounded in classic jazz. So we were super excited to discover this new record, and were under the impression that it was in fact another collection or some sort of reissue, but is actually a brand new record which finds Miller recording with a UK collective called the Heliocentrics, whose sound seems to be a sort of Sun Ra worshipping psychedelic spiritual jazz, a sound that meshes with Miller's perfectly, so much so, that even listening to this, it wasn't until we read more about the record that we realized it wasn't a collection of vintage recordings. Which definitely speaks to the performances here. A modern production is really the only thing that might mark this as modern, otherwise, Miller and the Heliocentrics unwind longform jazz epics that alternately brood and soar, rife with all manner of unlikely instrumentation, strange melodies surfacing here and there, fluttering flutes, haunting vibes, delicate piano, some incredible drumming, hints of the Eastern musics that so informed Miller's older work abound, with some of the tracks slipping into full on ragas, while others flit from darkly meditative to wild and skronky, a few tracks are redone versions of old Miller tunes, but the originals are just as good.
Some seriously beautiful modern spiritual jazz for sure. And apparently the Heliocentrics also made a record with Ethiopian jazz legend Mulatu Astatke, which we're definitely gonna have to track down now!
MPEG Stream: "Electricone"
MPEG Stream: "Nava"
MPEG Stream: "Sunda Sunset"

MILLER, LLOYD & THE HELIOCENTRICS OST (Strut) lp 24.00
A while back we reviewed a collection from unsung jazz legend Lloyd Miller, called A Lifetime In Oriental Jazz, which was a huge hit around here. We had become obsessed with Miller after hearing a track from him on the amazing Spiritual Jazz compilation (the second volume of which is out now, check out the 'in stock not yet reviewed' section of this week's list!), and the collection only furthered that obsession. The songs on that comp represented a sampling of Miller's eclectic and lengthy career, the music a killer fusion of classic jazz, Indian style drones, Eastern melodies, Turkish and Persian folk music, it's heady nearly psychedelic stuff, experimental and far out, but still emotional and grounded in classic jazz. So we were super excited to discover this new record, and were under the impression that it was in fact another collection or some sort of reissue, but is actually a brand new record which finds Miller recording with a UK collective called the Heliocentrics, whose sound seems to be a sort of Sun Ra worshipping psychedelic spiritual jazz, a sound that meshes with Miller's perfectly, so much so, that even listening to this, it wasn't until we read more about the record that we realized it wasn't a collection of vintage recordings. Which definitely speaks to the performances here. A modern production is really the only thing that might mark this as modern, otherwise, Miller and the Heliocentrics unwind longform jazz epics that alternately brood and soar, rife with all manner of unlikely instrumentation, strange melodies surfacing here and there, fluttering flutes, haunting vibes, delicate piano, some incredible drumming, hints of the Eastern musics that so informed Miller's older work abound, with some of the tracks slipping into full on ragas, while others flit from darkly meditative to wild and skronky, a few tracks are redone versions of old Miller tunes, but the originals are just as good.
Some seriously beautiful modern spiritual jazz for sure. And apparently the Heliocentrics also made a record with Ethiopian jazz legend Mulatu Astatke, which we're definitely gonna have to track down now!

MILLIS, ROBERT This World Is Unreal Like A Snake In A Rope (Sublime Frequencies) dvd 21.00
Our favorite "world music" label has gotta be Sublime Frequencies, their dedicated operatives backpacking through the far reaches of the non-Western world, documenting so much amazing music and sound. While SF mostly does limited edition vinyl and cds, they also do dvd releases too, adding equally 'exotic' visuals to the mix.
Here's one such dvd, a film by Robert Millis of the Climax Golden Twins, whom you probably know also as a prolific field recordist and collector of 78s. Here he shares the sound and imagery from a journey he took, from Mumbai to Madurai and back.
"Filmed live and in the moment in South India" this is a narrative-free exploration of the wonders (to us) of what must be rather mundane (to them, there). It's fascinating, odd, dreamlike, colorful, with much beauty, and moments of humor. The film is full of woozy close-ups and cross-fades of peeling murals painted on pockmarked walls. Religious processions. Traffic-clogged streets. Beach amusements. Strange scenes on flickering TV screens. Temple performances. Laundry being done. Street musicians. Cows, elephants! It's all reality, yet unreal, a bit hallucinatory. Helped along by (of course) the evocative field recordings and Bollywood samplings that serve as the soundtrack.
One of the most mind blowing bits, for us at least, was the visit to the Experimental Instrument Museum in Chennai, revealing such treasures as the "revolving tambura". Wow. Makes Lark In The Morning seem pretty lame. Want. To. Go. There.
55 minutes, indexed into chapters accessible from the menu screen. Also includes an equally compelling photo gallery slideshow section.

MONKS Black Monk Time (Light In The Attic) 2lp 26.00
Yay, repressed! Light In The Attic first reissued this on vinyl 3 years ago, but that's been out of print for the past year or two. Now it's back, still a classic, essential. What we said before for those that missed it:
Now reissued on Deluxe Double Vinyl, thereby making any record collection without it, incomplete!
Oh Happy Day! Another pre-list aQ classic returns to see the light, and we finally get to write a review of it! Back in the day, circa 1996 when we first moved into our current digs from our old storefront on 24th street, the first reissue of 1966's Black Monk Time was on constant rotation, right next to Os Mutantes, Sounds of Doomsday Cults, North American Frogs, Neutral Milk Motel and of course, The Conet Project. Sadly, it eventually went out of print before we ever got to express how we felt about it on the list. And now enough time has passed between represses, that one of our own (younger) employees didn't get the Monks reference on last month's Wire Magazine cover featuring SUNNO)))!
Formed in the mid '60s by five ex-GIs stationed in Germany, the band mastered a minimalist sixties freakbeat sound driven more by amphetamines than by songwriting ability. But their masterstroke was to adopt another kind of confrontational militant image to match its biting commentary on war, dehumanized social mores and fucked up romance. Dressed in all black matching uniforms with white knotted rope ties to match their painted white instruments, the final touch was to shave their heads in the middle like a classic monks tonsure. Thus The Monks were born! Penning primitive stompers like "Shut Up" and "I Hate You" ("I hate you with a passion, baby... but call me!") with searing organ swells, fuzzed bass and electric banjo over martial and polka rhythms adding to the overall weirdness. Keep in mind this was 1966 and outside of the US, where the terms, psych, punk, and garage had yet to be coined! Their lone album and two singles disappeared as quickly as they came, but have gained a heavy cult following over the years, culminating in a string of reissues and an autobiography by bassist Eddie Shaw. This fine reissue combines the full album, a couple of live and unreleased cuts not featured on previous reissues, plus liner notes with essays, history and praises from just about everybody from Dead Moon to the White Stripes.
Fucking Essential!!!!!!
MPEG Stream: "Shut Up"
MPEG Stream: "I Hate You"
MPEG Stream: "Complication"
MPEG Stream: "Pretty Suzanne"

NEW THRILL PARADE, THE Slumber In Colorland (Wonder Quest / Big Drum) lp + cd-r 7.98
The band discovered a small stash of these hidden away, and decided to offer them up to the aQ faithful at a SUPER cheap price. And these are most likely the last copies EVER...
Release me now from my mortal flesh, where all my thoughts look towards death. This blackened void in which I gasp for breath, death release me NOW! Oh, what we mean is, this is the FINAL release from San Francisco's own late great twisted goth, mindfreakin art damaged, sorrowfully psychedelic Death Rockers, The New Thrill Parade! Whoa. Woe.
We have reviewed all their previous releases up until now, and luckily for us things just kept getting weirder and weirder and more and more demented in the New Thrill Parade commune. The sound is an angular misanthropic romp. Bass and drums churning out urgent, fractured rhythms, while the guitar cuts the throat of any soul with open ears, with piercing, discordant, mind-bending leads. Everything swirling, and seething madly, till the brain leaks out of the ears, and any thoughts you had before, about music, life, social relations, death, sex, are completely mutated and subverted. It's a jubilant sonic experience, but travels dark roads to come to it. This explanation of NTP's sound world is not unlike those of our past reviews (which you should check out), but Slumber In Colorland presents a marked development in both the bands sound and aesthetic. The intensely orchestrated, and inspired song craft fuckery of this latest venture show the band maturing and really finding their own unique mode of operation, giving this album a consistency not yet found in their previous works. It's like gothy deathrock darkness has finally met its blurry-brained, altered state, tripped out, color smeared polar blood brother! The songs range from depressive dark jazz sounding crooners, to completely fucked up rock fury, with mutilated melodies and disjointed noises. Heavily warped shit! Not so much genre defying, as it is genre defining!

NEWLYN, DAVID Ruins (Time Released Sound) cd 14.98
While we've raved about the insane and insanely elaborate packaging from local boutique label Time Released Sound, we try to stress that all this fancy pants packaging wouldn't mean shit though if the music wasn't able to stand on its own, and thankfully, since a lot of the TRS releases sell out before we can get our hands on them, or are just a bit too pricey for some folks, they also come available as more affordable discs in less extravagant packaging, which is especially good news, cuz it would be sad for music like this to only make it into the ears of the 80 people who managed to nab the deluxe version.
We reviewed David Newlyn's last release on TRS, and sold out in a heartbeat, and while we weren't able to get any copies of the super deluxe version of this new one, we got a handful of the standard version, but it's the sounds that count this time around, and they are divine, two lengthy tracks of haunting modern classical music, lush soaring strings and haunting melodies, melancholy swells and dreamlike drifts, the sounds gradually growing more abstract, the effects slowly dialed up, the sort of chamber music of the first few minutes soon pulled apart into something more abstract and spaced out, a whirling drifty ambience, all bleary shimmer and softly reverbed thrum, laced with glitches and subtle electronic interference, not to mention what sounds like banjo or mandolin at one point. So lovely.
The second track is even more pastoral, hazy and gauzy and washed out, long layered drones softly undulate over all manner of mysterious field recordings, delicate piano melodies, buried operatic vocals, foot steps, voices, children playing, all beneath a fog of long tranced out drones and looped string shimmer, finishing with a surprising bit of drum driven distorted noisiness!
Not as limited as the deluxe version, but limited nonetheless, so grab one before they're gone!
MPEG Stream: "Transitions"

PARSON SOUND s/t (Subliminal Sounds) 2cd 34.00
REPRESSED, AT LAST! This former Record Of The Week release is finally available again on cd, after a long hiatus (and brief existence in super fancy limited edition vinyl box set form). Here's more or less what we said about it the first time:
Before we actually listened to this reissue, we didn't expect too much from these fairly obscure Swedish psychedelic underground rockers, having never heard them before, and knowing only that they were an earlier incarnation of another Swedish hippy rock outfit (Trad, Gras och Stenar) whose much-hyped live album somehow failed to impress us much when it was issued on cd several years ago by this same label. So how was it that this band could deserve a double cd collection? Well, they do. Man, were we wrong! These guys were great! [Something also borne out by the more recent reissues of Harvester, International Harvester, and the actual Trad, Gras och Stenar studio album, all of which are worth getting as well - not to mention that live album, which now we love too!] This is a completely astounding collection of dark shimmering drones and super heavy tranced out minimal psych-rock recorded in 1967 and '68. At times freaky and chaotic, but most often hypnotically locked into stoned grooves, this is some of the best heavy psych we've ever heard. Their shifting instrumentation (the list includes guitar, bass, drums, organ, double-bass, electric-cello, flute, cowbell, saxophone, hand drums, acoustic guitar, tape recorder, and...seance? huh?) is employed in both intricate and extended studio recordings and totally primal and euphoric live performances over the course of these two discs. Parson Sound crafted music that, while reminiscient of the Taj Mahal Travellers, Terry Riley (who mentored them, during a Swedish visit), Flower Travelling Band and the like, is almost wholly their own. If you were told that this was a new, 2001 recording you'd think that it must be some Japanese Acid Mothers Temple style psych-rock supergroup, or Bardo Pond on some hitherto unknown variety of really really good drugs...wow! Yet again we are amazed at the musical treasures hidden in the not-so-ancient past, and greatful to the fans and labels that dig 'em up for reissues like this one. And Subliminal Sounds does it right, packaging these archival recordings with detailed liner notes, and evocative art and photos - although the music is all that's needed to make you wish you'd been born old and Swedish enough to have been at one of the free-rock happenings documented here!
MPEG Stream: "Tio Minuter"
MPEG Stream: "From Tunis To India In Fullmoon (On Testosterone)"
MPEG Stream: "India (Slight Return)"
MPEG Stream: "A Glimpse Inside The Glyptotec-66"

PELICAN Ataraxia / Taraxis (Southern Lord) cd 9.98
It's been a while (three years!) since we've heard from these instru-metallers, this being their first record since their Southern Lord debut What We All Come To Need, from back in 2009, a record which find them sounding less heavy, and more melodic, which seemed like a strange twist considering they were now on what many consider to be a proper metal label. But that shift continues here, with the opening track, which immediately moves even further from the Neur-Isis crush of old Pelican, and drapes vibe like melodies over shimmering low end buzz, peppering the proceedings with bits of static and a strange pulsing synth like rumble, it's pretty awesome actually, very cinematic and hauntingly melodic. But this is Pelican after all, who can, rock with the best of them, and do so on the second track, which explodes out of the gate with a seriously killer riff, that sounds somewhere between old school noise rock and super melodic classic rock, like Thin Lizzy via the Hellacopters with hints of some old Touch And Go band, the song sounding like it could burst into a proper full on rock song at any second, like the vocalist is gonna come bounding in, but instead, they draw it out, the guitars adding melody, the drums uncharacteristically flashy in places, but it works, might just be our favorite Pelican jam yet, capturing the mesmer of their old sound but sort of cranking it up. There's plenty of variation too, the middle section gets all darkly psychedelic and a little dubby, but before long they return to that riffy crunch and it kills. "Parasite Colony" is a bit more brooding and loping, a low slung bass driving a slithery main riff, building to some seriously muscly crunch, before the final track, "Taraxis", which seems to bookend the ep, similar in style to the opener, tangled almost Appalachian guitar, over thick swells of distorted buzz, squiggly feedbacky melodies, urgent strum, all over a simple stripped down looped rhythm, before blissing out into some moody deserty smolder, only to get seriously metal for the last few minutes, a churning sludgey pound, all super dirty sounding crumblingly distorted guitars, all wreathed in feedback, those acoustic guitars still strumming away beneath the din. Killer stuff, the band definitely pushing their sound in new and exciting directions, and making us hope we don't have to wait another 3 years for more!
MPEG Stream: "Ataraxia"
MPEG Stream: "Lathe Biosas"

PELICAN Ataraxia / Taraxis (Southern Lord) lp 14.98
It's been a while (three years!) since we've heard from these instru-metallers, this being their first record since their Southern Lord debut What We All Come To Need, from back in 2009, a record which find them sounding less heavy, and more melodic, which seemed like a strange twist considering they were now on what many consider to be a proper metal label. But that shift continues here, with the opening track, which immediately moves even further from the Neur-Isis crush of old Pelican, and drapes vibe like melodies over shimmering low end buzz, peppering the proceedings with bits of static and a strange pulsing synth like rumble, it's pretty awesome actually, very cinematic and hauntingly melodic. But this is Pelican after all, who can, rock with the best of them, and do so on the second track, which explodes out of the gate with a seriously killer riff, that sounds somewhere between old school noise rock and super melodic classic rock, like Thin Lizzy via the Hellacopters with hints of some old Touch And Go band, the song sounding like it could burst into a proper full on rock song at any second, like the vocalist is gonna come bounding in, but instead, they draw it out, the guitars adding melody, the drums uncharacteristically flashy in places, but it works, might just be our favorite Pelican jam yet, capturing the mesmer of their old sound but sort of cranking it up. There's plenty of variation too, the middle section gets all darkly psychedelic and a little dubby, but before long they return to that riffy crunch and it kills. "Parasite Colony" is a bit more brooding and loping, a low slung bass driving a slithery main riff, building to some seriously muscly crunch, before the final track, "Taraxis", which seems to bookend the ep, similar in style to the opener, tangled almost Appalachian guitar, over thick swells of distorted buzz, squiggly feedbacky melodies, urgent strum, all over a simple stripped down looped rhythm, before blissing out into some moody deserty smolder, only to get seriously metal for the last few minutes, a churning sludgey pound, all super dirty sounding crumblingly distorted guitars, all wreathed in feedback, those acoustic guitars still strumming away beneath the din. Killer stuff, the band definitely pushing their sound in new and exciting directions, and making us hope we don't have to wait another 3 years for more!
MPEG Stream: "Ataraxia"
MPEG Stream: "Lathe Biosas"

PHARAOH OVERLORD Lunar Jetman (Ektro) cd 17.98
Now we've got a few copies of this great new PO opus on compact disc! Here's what we said about the already out of print vinyl version we reviewed a few months back:
Finland's Pharaoh Overlord return with this devastating double lp [er, fairly long cd]. Whilst we have many favorite Finns, these guys (and their mothership Circle) are among our very favoritest. Yours too probably, so we imagine these are gonna fly out of here fast.
This Circle sideproject is certainly VERY "circular" here, full of repetitive minimalist vibrations to the max, utter stoner neo-kraut hypnosis for sure, with a heavy metallic undercurrent and some freaky cosmic jazziness to it too. Of the couple most recent previous PO efforts, Lunar Jetman aligns more closely with the space/noise rock of live lp Horn, rather than the "song-ier" classic metal of Out Of Darkness, harking back also to the dark stoner soundscapes of some of their earlier albums as well; but as always, it is its own entity.
Lunar Jetman features six tracks, mostly quite long, sprawling over four album sides, for far more than an hour of slow burning, steady building, all-instrumental Overlord action. The album begins with the insistent gallop of the nearly 11 minute long "Rodent", which almost sounds like Maiden gone motorik! With extra spaceage shoegazey shwooshing and wooshing thrown in. It'll have you totally transfixed before it's even half over. The distortodelic kraut-iness continues amidst the metronymic percussive percolations of the even-lengthier track two, "Palmyra Cali"; then "Cardinal" is a much shorter, blissed out improv-sounding interlude.
That's followed by the 16+ minutes of "Black Horse", at long last a studio version of a composition earlier documented in briefer versions on both PO's 2004 live album The Battle Of The Axehammer, and then again on 2007's Live In Suomi. Here, it begins with much skitter and skree, before hammering into the happy heavy churning riffage we recognize. This one's definitely bound to be a fave of all the Wooden Shjips' fans out there.
Finally, Lunar Jetman delves deep into the dirge, with the two-part, nearly half-hour, massively moody "Cave Of Hair", a detailed, obsessively repetitive soundscape of ominous chuggery, building from quietly brooding near ambient creepy-crawl to metallic majesty...
Another awesome Overlord recording, in other words. And fyi, Lunar Jetman features Faust's Hans Joachim Irmler on keyboards, who has performed with PO previously, appearing on Live In Suomi - and who produced Circle's 2002 Klangbad release, Alotus. Not that PO nor Circle need Irmler to make 'em any krautrockier, they already had that covered!! But this IS plenty krautrocky.
MPEG Stream: "Rodent"
MPEG Stream: "Black Horse"
MPEG Stream: "Cave Of Hair Pt. 2"

POLGAR, EVA AND SANDOR VALY Mondrian Variations: Piano and Samplerworks (Ektro) cd 14.98
Using visual artworks as a means of musical composition often sounds better in theory than in practice. Take the recent book and cd of Baudouin de Jaer's solo violin interpretations of the musical motifs in Adolf Wolfli's cosmological drawings where the audible results were less dazzling than the images would suggest. But not so in this latest experiment from conceptual composers Eve Polgar and Sandor Valy who turn the nonrepresentational paintings of Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian into beautifully vibrant minimalist scores. Mondrian, who started out as a representational painter, became increasingly interested in a process of reduction from nature into essential forms that soon evolved away from any overt natural reference. Most famous for his painting of bold black lines on white grounds and geometric forms in primary colors, and their perhaps musically influenced titles (Broadway Boogie Woogie!), it's not hard to see a correlation of sound and vision in his work.
There is an interesting booklet that comes in the slipcase with this, detailing the process of how the pieces were composed to which paintings, where we also learned that this is not the first time the composers have worked in this manner. They previously worked out scores based on paintings by Breugel and there are cool pictures of how they designed scores based on how the orientation of the heads of peasants in Breugel's paintings followed a kind of musical order. Would like to see how that turned out musically, but getting back to the Mondrian Variations, the music starts out with repetitive solo piano figures that have a simple but idiosyncratic repetitive quality with sudden pauses that seem to follow a precise structure. With each composition, we're introduced to something new sonically through computer programs and samplers: an organ, pitched string modulations, then some minimal percussive rhythms until the pieces grow more epic in scope with choral like sounds, vocal counting of the odd tempos and blocks of interweaving rhythms. Of course, the musical corollary of this is Steve Reich and Philip Glass, but the music feels somehow different as if Polgar and Valy were reaching the same place through a completely different approach. Regardless of the process, the music is engaging and a delight to listen to. An extraordinary release on Circle's Ektro label that comes highly recommended! Please note: these cds have cardboard slipcases that arrived in somewhat less than pristine condition due to shipping, so persnickety collector types be warned. And, like most Ektro titles, these aren't limited but might take a longer time to restock, once we're out, since they come all the way from Finland.
MPEG Stream: "Composition With Lines 1917 Part 1"
MPEG Stream: "Broadway Boogie Woogie 1942-43"
MPEG Stream: "Composition with Yellow Blue Black and Grey 1921"
MPEG Stream: "New York City 1 1941"

PYROLATOR Inland (Bureau B) cd 17.98
This album has the word "synthesizer" emblazoned on its cover, in letters as big as either the artist name or the album title. And when you hear it, you will know why. This album is all about Pyrolator putting his several synthesizers through their paces. Inland was the debut lp from Germany's Kurt Dahlke aka Pyrolator (also a member of DAF and Der Plan), originally released in 1979 on his own Aka Tak label, and its synth-noise experimentation belongs both to the spacey electronic krautrock genre and to the (currently in revival) '80s minimal-wave scene. Think DIY Kraftwerk. It encompasses the abstract experimentation of someone like Asmus Tietchens, as well as other stuff that's much more melodic and Cluster-y. There's shortwave static, distant schlager transmissions, rhythmically buzzing glitchwerks, musique concrete tape edits, some blissed out white noise soundscapes... For folks who like difficult, mad scientist music, you've got squelchy distortion laced with whining, high end tones ("Inland 1"), and for the new wavers, there's trax with burbling sequenced beats, pulsing like something Zombi or Majeure might do today ("Minimal Tape 3/7.2"). Indeed, Inland is a veritable cornucopia of such ear candy for those of us enamored with the minimal coldwave synth sorta thing, the more experimental side of which, especially. You could file this with your Axxess album (that recent Record Of The Week) though a lot of this is scarier than that - Inland apparently intended as cutting edge "protest music" (those were radical days in West Germany, the Red Army Faction running rampant). But its claustrophobic character is abstract enough for us to enjoy today without any explicit political aspects made plain. Another good reference, perhaps, being Bernard Szajner.
The compact disc version of this reissue comes with 6 worthwhile bonus tracks. Oh, and Bureau B has another early but much poppier Pyrolator reissue we'll try to get to soon...
MPEG Stream: "It Always Rains In Wuppertal"
MPEG Stream: "Minimal Tape 3/7.2"
MPEG Stream: "Have A Good Ride"

PYROLATOR Inland (Bureau B) lp 17.98
This album has the word "synthesizer" emblazoned on its cover, in letters as big as either the artist name or the album title. And when you hear it, you will know why. This album is all about Pyrolator putting his several synthesizers through their paces. Inland was the debut lp from Germany's Kurt Dahlke aka Pyrolator (also a member of DAF and Der Plan), originally released in 1979 on his own Aka Tak label, and its synth-noise experimentation belongs both to the spacey electronic krautrock genre and to the (currently in revival) '80s minimal-wave scene. Think DIY Kraftwerk. It encompasses the abstract experimentation of someone like Asmus Tietchens, as well as other stuff that's much more melodic and Cluster-y. There's shortwave static, distant schlager transmissions, rhythmically buzzing glitchwerks, musique concrete tape edits, some blissed out white noise soundscapes... For folks who like difficult, mad scientist music, you've got squelchy distortion laced with whining, high end tones ("Inland 1"), and for the new wavers, there's trax with burbling sequenced beats, pulsing like something Zombi or Majeure might do today ("Minimal Tape 3/7.2"). Indeed, Inland is a veritable cornucopia of such ear candy for those of us enamored with the minimal coldwave synth sorta thing, the more experimental side of which, especially. You could file this with your Axxess album (that recent Record Of The Week) though a lot of this is scarier than that - Inland apparently intended as cutting edge "protest music" (those were radical days in West Germany, the Red Army Faction running rampant). But its claustrophobic character is abstract enough for us to enjoy today without any explicit political aspects made plain. Another good reference, perhaps, being Bernard Szajner.
The compact disc version of this reissue comes with 6 worthwhile bonus tracks. Oh, and Bureau B has another early but much poppier Pyrolator reissue we'll try to get to soon...
MPEG Stream: "It Always Rains In Wuppertal"
MPEG Stream: "Minimal Tape 3/7.2"
MPEG Stream: "Have A Good Ride"

REALMBUILDER Fortifications Of The Pale Architect (I Hate Records) cd 15.98
Been eagerly awaiting this!! The 2nd coming of this strange band and their rather outsider-y epic true metal. The hermetic duo of JH Halberd and Czar, have indeed built upon their realm, expanded their empire, brought forth further examples of their special sound, one that's triumphant (heck they even use trumpet!) and weird and raw and curiously poppy. Realmbuilder, while certainly under the sway of such cult '80s fantasy metal acts as Manilla Road, Brocas Helm and Cirith Ungol (along with sharing the same literary inspirations like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith), aspire to actualize a unique vision of their own. And for us, their stirring striving is quite effective, as well as eccentric!
The album begins with an anthem to a mythic highwayman, wherein the basic building blocks of Realmbuilder's sound are made apparent: catchy old school heavy metal riffing, accompanying somewhat amateurish but expressive clean vocals that are far from the usual sort of polished power metal wail (and become quite glorious when both band members harmonize together). The oddity of the vocals will be the most make or break thing regarding your reaction to this band; we love 'em. And the choruses are quickly skull-lodged, with lyrics that usually contain commands: "Yield or perish!" "Swing your pick axe!" "Pull the wagon!"...
Another significant Realmbuilder trait: psychedelic soloing (courtesy session guitarist Brian Koenig) that adds to the emotional impact of these songs rather than being mere shred.
Realmbuilder's compositions tend to be filled with an energetic choppiness, but just as often possess a more solemn, droned out vibe... as, especially, on the album's spacey, dreamy final epic, with the suitably lengthy title "The Stars Disappeared From The Sky When We Uncovered The Bones Of The First Gods". It's a strange sort of pop indeed.
Again, probably to be appreciated by fans of the likes of early Manilla Road, Max Planck, the long forgotten but utterly genius Coven, and the lordliest weirdest of Slough Feg. Also you could certainly consider this to be the even more DIY cousin of Dawnbringer, whose new one is reviewed elsewhere this list.
Oh, and once again, we love the Crystal Logic of the cover painting, by Czar...
MPEG Stream: "Old Savage"
MPEG Stream: "Iron Wheels Of The Siege Machines"
MPEG Stream: "The Stars Disappeared From The Sky When We Uncovered The Bones Of The First Gods"

REALMBUILDER Fortifications Of The Pale Architect (I Hate Records) lp 16.98
Been eagerly awaiting this!! The 2nd coming of this strange band and their rather outsider-y epic true metal. The hermetic duo of JH Halberd and Czar, have indeed built upon their realm, expanded their empire, brought forth further examples of their special sound, one that's triumphant (heck they even use trumpet!) and weird and raw and curiously poppy. Realmbuilder, while certainly under the sway of such cult '80s fantasy metal acts as Manilla Road, Brocas Helm and Cirith Ungol (along with sharing the same literary inspirations like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith), aspire to actualize a unique vision of their own. And for us, their stirring striving is quite effective, as well as eccentric!
The album begins with an anthem to a mythic highwayman, wherein the basic building blocks of Realmbuilder's sound are made apparent: catchy old school heavy metal riffing, accompanying somewhat amateurish but expressive clean vocals that are far from the usual sort of polished power metal wail (and become quite glorious when both band members harmonize together). The oddity of the vocals will be the most make or break thing regarding your reaction to this band; we love 'em. And the choruses are quickly skull-lodged, with lyrics that usually contain commands: "Yield or perish!" "Swing your pick axe!" "Pull the wagon!"...
Another significant Realmbuilder trait: psychedelic soloing (courtesy session guitarist Brian Koenig) that adds to the emotional impact of these songs rather than being mere shred.
Realmbuilder's compositions tend to be filled with an energetic choppiness, but just as often possess a more solemn, droned out vibe... as, especially, on the album's spacey, dreamy final epic, with the suitably lengthy title "The Stars Disappeared From The Sky When We Uncovered The Bones Of The First Gods". It's a strange sort of pop indeed.
Again, probably to be appreciated by fans of the likes of early Manilla Road, Max Planck, the long forgotten but utterly genius Coven, and the lordliest weirdest of Slough Feg. Also you could certainly consider this to be the even more DIY cousin of Dawnbringer, whose new one is reviewed elsewhere this list.
Oh, and once again, we love the Crystal Logic of the cover painting, by Czar...
MPEG Stream: "Old Savage"
MPEG Stream: "Iron Wheels Of The Siege Machines"
MPEG Stream: "The Stars Disappeared From The Sky When We Uncovered The Bones Of The First Gods"

ROYAL THUNDER CVI (Relapse) 2lp 29.00
NOW HERE ON SWANK DOUBLE VINYL TOO!
Record number two from these witchy Atlanta heavies, part of, whether they like it or not, the new female fronted heavy rock movement, that includes loads of aQ faves like The Devil's Blood, Loon, Jex Thoth, Blood Ceremony, Castle, Christian Mistress, Purple Rhinestone Eagle, Cauchemar, and, well you get the drift. And as much as we love all those bands, and we do, Royal Thunder definitely stand out, for one thing, being not nearly as metal as most of those outfits, instead trafficking in something much more hard rocking, their sound riffy and heavy as fuck, but with a vibe that feels more Southern/classic/stoner rock than metal or doom. And as we mentioned in our review of the last Royal Thunder record, there seems to be a serious eighties metal vibe going on as well. A thumbnail this band plus this band description might be Lynyrd Skynrd plus Neurosis, although we tend to lean toward something more along the lines of Janis Joplin fronting Baroness. Cuz their sound definitely owes much to their Southern countrymen and women (Baroness, Kylesa, etc.), but also because vocalist Miny Parsonz has one of those voices that KILLS, throaty and sultry, witchy and powerful as fuck, the sort of voice that in a different generation might have made her a genuine big time mainstream rockstar. She can croon seductively, of wail like nobody's business, and the music is the perfect match, melodic and dynamic, riffy and groovy, heavy but also plenty psychedelic, and of course catchy like crazy, cuz these songs are less about headbanging or flailing wildly in a pit, and more about drinking beer in the parking lot and driving through town in your beat up old Trans Am, top down, parking behind the Winn Dixie, hanging out, getting stoned and blasting these jams at full volume. They have that sort of classic timeless heavy rock sound that is definitely rare, not just in this new breed of female fronted metal outfits, but in music in general.
For some reason our favorite track from the first record, gets a reworking here, the band slowing it down even further, adding some mournful fiddle (or maybe it's cello), the song much more polished and even more perfect than the original, the main groove, just that much more slithery and swaggery, Parsonz vocals fierce, everything louder and more distorted and heavier and just all around more intense. But really, all the songs here kill, and some of us are tempted to proclaim Royal Thunder top of the witchy heavy rock heap at this point, and we're thinking some of you just might agree.
MPEG Stream: "Sleeping Witch"
MPEG Stream: "Parsonz Curse"
MPEG Stream: "Whispering World"
MPEG Stream: "Shake And Shift"

SCHNITZLER, CONRAD Zug (Reshaped & Remodeled By Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer) (M=Minimal) cd 19.98
The history behind this particular Conrad Schnitzler track is a little vague. Supposedly, Zug is also known as the "Red Cassette" which the German electronic pioneer self-released in 1973 (some say 1974). M=Minimal reissued one of the two 20 minute cuts from that tape as Zug, and fleshing out the rest of the vinyl with two remixes - one from glitched-dub expert Pole and another from Borngraber & Struver. Both of those remixes are reprised on this cd, but Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer are the artists who get the marquee treatment by having their names affixed to the title. A little strange, yes, but don't let the lack of parity dissuade you from this fine remix collection of one of the most influential electronic artists of the post-Krautrok era. Schnitzler's history has been well mapped here at aQuarius, so we'll merely mention his inspired involvement in Tangerine Dream and Kluster. Villalobos & Loderbauer recently wowed us with their abstract recontextualization of ECM chamber jazz. On the first remix here they adopt more of a motorik / minimalist techno vibe that fits with the taut rhythms that Schniztler embedded into that old tape; and the second spins Schnitzler's dystopian synth drones into a clattering decentered piece more reminiscent of the New Zealand outsider Omit (who really would make for a stellar artist for M=Minimal to reissue!). Pole's remix shifts the rhythm to the offbeat, plenty of percolating metallic tones and ghostly filigrees of digital debris; but the clear winner of all of these remixes is from the previously unknown duo of Borngraber & Struver, who snap the darkest, nastiest swells of Schnitzler's synth patches onto a techno-noir grid that reconnects the Detroit / Berlin axis of techno all over again through the mid-tempo 909 thump and locomotive samples. As good as the other three remixes are, Borngraber & Struver tap a vein most in keeping with Schnitzler's grim futurism. Totally worth the price of admission just for that one track!
MPEG Stream: "Zug (Aktion Mix By Villalobos & Loderbauer)"
MPEG Stream: "Zug (remixed by Borngraber & Struver)"

SEGALL, TY & WHITE FENCE Hair (Drag City) cd 14.98
Sort of seemed inevitable that these guys would get together, two local lo-fi garage pop masters, both of whom have gotten much love from aQ, and both of whom have surprisingly similar styles, collaborating on a set of songs, that ultimately manage to sound like they could have been proper records from either. No distinct separation between tracks, no huge stylistic shifts, instead, a meeting of the minds that manages to be both impossibly hooky and fuzzy and catchy, but also as weird and twisted as anything either of them have done on their own. Lots of kick ass axework, wild psychedelic leads and dense squalls of tangled freakout, over all manner of jangle and crunch, the vocals doused in reverb and appropriately washed out and yelpy, the drums simple and spare, the songs slipping easily from druggy psychedelic jangle pop to crunchy noisy garage punk raveups, to full on skiffle-y sixties psych-pop to twisted echo drenched garage rock dirges and some head spinningly experimental garage rock space jams, like "Scissor People", which might be THEE jam here, beginning with a little bit of birdsong, before launching into some jangly crunch, another blast of garage-y poppiness, until things go totally crazy about halfway through, the song suddenly a patchwork of alternate takes and different productions, as if multiple versions of the song were playing simultaneously, and someone began to flip between the various channels, the sounds dramatically different, even the tempos, and then coming out of it into a sort of motorik psych-kraut groove, wreathed in killer leads, and thick swaths of guitarnoise, it's the sort of jam most bands would have stretched out for ages, but these guys cram into a succinct 3:31.
We have to admit, that on first listen, mostly heard in the shop in little chunks, didn't fully sell us, but once we strapped on some headphones, this collab definitely revealed itself as being something sort of next level, and blossomed into a pretty fantastic(al) psychedelic garage pop trip out that we've had on pretty heavy rotation ever since.
MPEG Stream: "Time"
MPEG Stream: "I Am Not A Game"
MPEG Stream: "Scissor People"

SHAVED WOMEN s/t (Ektro) cd 14.98
Jussi Lethisalo can never be accused of not following his weird and warped muse. Whether it's in his band Circle, who while remaining rooted to a particular sound, have offered up pretty much every iteration / permutation of that sound imaginable, or in any of his many other groups, whether it be Pharaoh Overlord, Doktor Kettu, Steel Mammoth, Ektroverde, Grumbling Fur, Lehitsalofamily (a group he formed with his parents!), Split Cranium, Ratto Ja Lehtisalo, we could go on, but you get the drift. And Jussi's Ektro label is no different, while mainly focused on releasing records by any/all of the above mentioned bands, Ektro also released records by legendary Finnish punks Death Trip, weirdo Finnish experimentalist Keuhkot, legendary krautrockers Faust, '80s LA metallers Jesters Of Destiny, '70s Finnish prog rockers Haikara, Argentinean stoner rock outfit Los Natas, weirdo Japanese metal outfit Quest For Blood, Finnish heavy metallers Solitaire, legendary hard rocking muscleman Thor and now the oddly named Shaved Women, a noise rock / dirge punk outfit from St. Louis, who definitely channel classic pig fuck heaviness though Black Flag punk and AmRep noise rock. The bass is thick and corrosive, the caveman riffing is caustic and blown out, the drumming loose limbed and chaotic, the vocals a throat shredding bark, feedback everywhere, the band wild and unhinged, the sound shifting from downtuned dirgery to frantic punk pound, the label namedrop Jesus Lizard and Drunks With Guns, the latter seeming much more applicable, but definitely the sort of noisy filth that would appeal to fans (like us!) of Violent Students, Twin Stumps, Drunkdriver, Rusted Shut. Eight songs in seventeen minutes, chaotic hardcore infused punksludge that KILLS. Also included are five bonus live tracks, that make the band sound even more gloriously blown out and noise drenched.
MPEG Stream: "Every Day Life"
MPEG Stream: "Same In The End"
MPEG Stream: "Think For Me"

SIGUR ROS Valtari (XL Recordings) cd 14.98
Like pretty much everyone else, when we first heard Sigur Ros, we were totally smitten, utterly captivated by the dark delicate haunting soundworld these Icelanders conjured up. But for whatever reason, over the years, many of us stopped paying attention. Not because the band stopped making records, or making great records, they just seemed to fade from our everyday listening. Part of it might have to do with the whole mainstream factor. As crappy as it is, that sort of thing does tend to afflict music nerds/obsessives, and as Sigur Ros got more and more popular, as their songs started popping up constantly on C.S.I. and a million other programs, some of us went looking for new, less overexposed sounds. And often, as is the case with Sigur Ros, much amazing music was missed out on. Listening to this latest feels like the first time we hear Sigur Ros all over again. From the very first song, we're whisked away to some hazy dreamy otherworld, the delicate falsetto vox, the lush layered musical majesty, the haunting heartfelt melancholic melodies, it all sounds as good as it ever did. We had heard much about how this new one was the group's most minimal to date, and while we haven't heard enough of the last few records to know for sure, we're finding this record to be surprisingly dynamic and dramatic, with huge tonal shifts, moments of barely there crystalline shimmer, but also moments of crushing epic bombast. The opener is the perfect introduction, all blurred and shimmery, jangly and chiming, softly fuzzy and wistfully dream poppy. But it's the second track we find ourselves returning to over and over, a dark delicate sprawl of soft swells and haunting strings, buried electronics, and woozy ethereal vox, all wreathed in a thick patina of record crackle, sounding a bit like Sigur Ros produced by Tim Hecker, laced with some strange melodies, and all held together in an abstract but somehow totally compelling arrangement. Cinematic throughout, but shifting smoothly from hushed drift to layered shoegaze shimmer to spare chamber music minimalism, all the while warm and crackly and dreamlike.
The following track offers up some of the aforementioned serious sonic heft, it may start out delicate and fragile, but a la Godspeed, it's a smoldering slow build to a super distorted but still gloriously melodic prismatic big drum pound blowout. Those moments pop up here and there, but the rest of the record does tend toward the delicate drift, with some swirly pop moments, plenty of celestial shimmer, loads of ethereal ambience, all woven into a sound we hadn't really realized we'd been missing.
MPEG Stream: "Eg Anda"
MPEG Stream: "Ekki Mukk"
MPEG Stream: "Fjogur Piano"

SIGUR ROS Valtari (XL Recordings) 2lp 24.00
Like pretty much everyone else, when we first heard Sigur Ros, we were totally smitten, utterly captivated by the dark delicate haunting soundworld these Icelanders conjured up. But for whatever reason, over the years, many of us stopped paying attention. Not because the band stopped making records, or making great records, they just seemed to fade from our everyday listening. Part of it might have to do with the whole mainstream factor. As crappy as it is, that sort of thing does tend to afflict music nerds/obsessives, and as Sigur Ros got more and more popular, as their songs started popping up constantly on C.S.I. and a million other programs, some of us went looking for new, less overexposed sounds. And often, as is the case with Sigur Ros, much amazing music was missed out on. Listening to this latest feels like the first time we hear Sigur Ros all over again. From the very first song, we're whisked away to some hazy dreamy otherworld, the delicate falsetto vox, the lush layered musical majesty, the haunting heartfelt melancholic melodies, it all sounds as good as it ever did. We had heard much about how this new one was the group's most minimal to date, and while we haven't heard enough of the last few records to know for sure, we're finding this record to be surprisingly dynamic and dramatic, with huge tonal shifts, moments of barely there crystalline shimmer, but also moments of crushing epic bombast. The opener is the perfect introduction, all blurred and shimmery, jangly and chiming, softly fuzzy and wistfully dream poppy. But it's the second track we find ourselves returning to over and over, a dark delicate sprawl of soft swells and haunting strings, buried electronics, and woozy ethereal vox, all wreathed in a thick patina of record crackle, sounding a bit like Sigur Ros produced by Tim Hecker, laced with some strange melodies, and all held together in an abstract but somehow totally compelling arrangement. Cinematic throughout, but shifting smoothly from hushed drift to layered shoegaze shimmer to spare chamber music minimalism, all the while warm and crackly and dreamlike.
The following track offers up some of the aforementioned serious sonic heft, it may start out delicate and fragile, but a la Godspeed, it's a smoldering slow build to a super distorted but still gloriously melodic prismatic big drum pound blowout. Those moments pop up here and there, but the rest of the record does tend toward the delicate drift, with some swirly pop moments, plenty of celestial shimmer, loads of ethereal ambience, all woven into a sound we hadn't really realized we'd been missing.

SKULLFLOWER Funeral Rites (Stiff Opposition) 3"cd-r 14.98
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
One of two new ULTRA limited releases from Mr. Matthew Bower (Skullflower, Total, Sunroof! etc.), this one from his long running Skullflower project, which has gone through many permutations over the years, from pummeling thud rock, to full on face melting noise, to tripped out tranced out psychedelia. In recent years, Bower has become increasingly interested in black metal, and SF records have definitely offered up glimpses of this black buzz obsession, maybe none more so than this two track ep, which starts out with "Black Helicopters", an intro of sorts, a stuttering loopscape of static pulsations and swirls of hiss and whir, super mesmerizing, heavily textured and atmospheric, with a subtly pulsing rhythmic component. Gradually, the sounds begin to glitch out, the sound blurring into a hazy sprawl of heady thrum, before slipping into the second track, the 10+ minute "Sky Burial", which finds Bower unfurling some thick swaths of blackened riffage, smeared into the buzzing washed out background, the effect not so much 'black metal', as a sort of super thick, darkly psychedelic blackened drone, sounding like Tim Hecker armed with nothing but a handful of black metal riffs and an arsenal of pedals. Super tripped out and dizzyingly hypnotic, the frantic frenzied riffing is almost more implied, as the edges blur and everything oozes into one epic undulating mass of blackdrone blurbuzz. The sound does gradually build, but never explodes fully, instead just seeming to grow more and more dense, while within this black squall, lurk all manner of haunting minimal barely-there melodies, and buried not-quite rhythms.
EXTREMELY LIMITED! As in 25 or 30 total made EVER, we have about just 7 remaining out of the batch we started with, and unless we can convince Bower to whip up more, these are the last copies we'll ever see. So act fast, list alternates, you know the drill. Housed in cool handpainted minisleeves with pasted on liner notes.
MPEG Stream: "Sky Burial"

STONEBURNER Sickness Will Pass (Seventh Rule) cd 11.98
"Play At Maximum Volume" it says here, right on the face of the cd. Well, OF COURSE! Duh. Stoneburner, from PDX, are another sludgier-than-thou (and maybe than Thou) metal band, whose debut full-length is brought to us by the same label, Seventh Rule, recently responsible for the newest, aQ Record Of The Week awarded Author & Punisher album, as well as cool discs from the likes of Atriarch, Batillus, Wizard Rifle, Indian and other heavy hitters. Furthermore, one of Stoneburner's guitarists used to wield his axe in the late, great Buried At Sea.
So, it comes as no surprise that Stoneburner, in the nasty doomed-out tradition of such bands as Buried At Sea, Graves At Sea too, Eyehategod, YOB, and yes their hometown pals & labelmates Atriarch, are loaded for bear with fuzz-storted heavy riff-chuggery and throat-ripped vile vokills, along with some suddenly quiet, postrockish detours into acoustic-atmospheric moments that serve to make the prevalent heavy and wretched sounding parts all the more heavy and wretched by contrast (and earn Stoneburner some extra points for musical nuance and sophistication). Six songs here, including an unlisted bonus soundscape-y one (that the CDDB tells us is called "Thank You For Listening").
The misanthropically doom/sludge lovin' amongst us will indeed be playing this at the recommended volume. But we doubt the neighbors will be thankful for listening.
Oh, and we like how the "band pics" in the digipak are all (only) of the individual band members pedals - drum pedals for the drummer, many and various effects pedals for the others.
MPEG Stream: "Christian's Charity"
MPEG Stream: "Marriage"
MPEG Stream: "We Have Failed"

SUUM CUIQUE Ascetic (Modern Love) lp 22.00
The name of this 'group' might not be familiar to you, it wasn't to us, even though this is Suum Cuique's second album. SC is in fact Miles Whittaker, whose name you also might not recognize, but he is in fact one half of aQ faves, the hauntological electronic duo Demdike Stare, but Suum Cuique, while sharing some sonic similarities with Demdike, is very much its own beast, with Whittaker recording straight from the mixing board, using only analog equipment and almost no edits or overdubs. You wouldn't necessarily be able to tell, but it does lend the sounds of Suum Cuique a sort of raw urgency and an old school primitivism that is definitely missing from Demdike records.
The record begins with a wild squall of spacey synths before slipping into a long sprawl of skittery primitive drum machine driven space kraut, wreathed in metallic shimmers. The record gradually drifts towards a more reverbed soft noise collage, peppered with rhythmic pulsations, the sounds oozing into blackened drones, abstract percussive workouts, and finally, finishing up the A side with a looped sounding stretch of hypnotic murk, al buried sine tones and rumbling crumbling whirs, sounding quite a bit like Philip Jeck.
The flipside is equally all over the map, starting off with a churning doomy electronic dirge, that gradually dissipates into an ominous ambience before transforming into some hazy hauntological dronescapery, only to splinter into a serious blast of super distorted blown out Our Love Will Destroy The World style rhythmic noisiness, all looped and layered, gnarled and tangled, only to finally fade out in a cloud of cosmic FX shimmer.
LIMITED TO 700 COPIES!!

TASKERLANDS Taskerlands (Time Released Sound) cd 14.98
While we've raved about the insane and insanely elaborate packaging from local boutique label Time Released Sound, we try to stress that all this fancy pants packaging wouldn't mean shit though if the music wasn't able to stand on its own, and thankfully, since a lot of the TRS releases sell out before we can get our hands on them, or are just a bit too pricey for some folks, they also come available as more affordable discs in less extravagant packaging, which is especially good news, cuz it would be sad for music like this to only make it into the ears of the 80 people who managed to nab the deluxe version.
Taskerlands is a duo consisting of Michael Tanner, aka Plinth, who was responsible for that incredible Collected Machine Music disc all created from the sounds of vintage music boxes, and David Colohan from psych folk outfit United Bible Studies. Tanner and Colohan each strap on a guitar, run it through some pedals, and out comes some gloriously dreamy pastoral psychedelic folk, lush and sun dappled, the notes and chords wreathed in reverb and echo and allowed to drift weightless over darkly delicate piano, and the sweet melodies from a bass clarinet fluttering just below the surface. Two twenty-one minute tracks, each one a softly smoldering sonic rumination, slipping from dense tangles of abstract Appalachia to brooding low end swirl, flickering melodic drift to dark distorted droned out minor key dirges, from haunting hypnotic thrum, to washed out hazy psychedelic shimmer. Lovely, lovely stuff.
Not as limited as the deluxe version, but limited nonetheless, so grab one before they're gone!
MPEG Stream: "In Forests Submerg'd, No Season Brooks Heeding"

TRAD GRAS OCH STENAR Gardet 12.6.1970 (Subliminal Sounds) cd 16.98
Somehow, we never wrote up a review of this before, although it was probably the first document of anything by this longtime AQ fave Swedish psych rock band that we ever stocked. (Guess it took us a while to really get into 'em.) So, cool this disc has at last been repressed, for us to finally list, especially since their several other live albums are all out of print.
If you're new to Trad Gras Och Stenar (Trees, Grass and Stones) you should read some of our other reviews of records by them and the other bands they morphed out of, like for instance their earliest incarnation as Parson Sound! In short, the whole TGOS/Parson Sound/Harvester/International Harvester thing was Sweden's answer to krautrock: droned out, rhythmic hippie hypnorock, representing radical politics and alternative lifestyles, in an almost proto-punk, or primitive prog style. Seriously, if they were German they'd be up there with Amon Duul I&II, Faust, Can, etc. And fans of Hawkwind also oughta check 'em out.
This live recording is an instant timewarp back to the pothaze atmosphere of the famous underground Gardet Festival in 1970, sorta the Swedish Woodstock, giving the listener a dose of TGOS's magic, live and raw. While there's other albums maybe we'd suggest for first timers, since this is a tad lo-fi, this WILL demonstrate their mesmeric majesty pretty darn well. Like we said, it's raw, and it rocks in its druggy dreamy hella distorted way. Oh, and it was recorded (on Nagra tape recorder, with one mic) by their fan, none other than Joakim Skogsberg, himself responsible for the amazing Jola Rota album.
Six songs here, almost an hour of music, including their oh-so-woozy cover of the Dylan by way of Hendrix classic "All Along The Watchtower" along with a wild nine-minute rave up on the Stones' "Satisfaction", and of course several lengthy, and equally wild, jamming originals, like the rollicking (and bluesy/folky) "In Kommer Gosta".
Must have been amazing to have been there that summer day. You can tell the audience is enjoying it. Rad it was recorded (thanks Mr. Skogsberg!).
The cd booklet is full of liner notes and vintage photos from the festival. And, by the way, this is also available in a relatively recent double vinyl pressing that we think we'll be getting some more of in soon, too.
MPEG Stream: "Frihetsdas i D-moll"
MPEG Stream: "Tegenborgvalsen"
MPEG Stream: "Lifeforce #3"

TRUST Trst (Arts & Crafts) cd 11.98
We sorta flipped for these new wave electro gloom pop weirdos when we heard their first single, which sadly, we were never able to get enough of to list (although the A side is included here!). We did review the follow up 12", which found the band cranking up the dancier side of their sound, which seems to be the direction they've continued to move in with this, their debut, but, and this is important, this is not just some sort of retro Breakfast Club soundtrack worshipping MTV style eighties electro pop, these guys are fucking WEIRD. Fusing a sort of draggy dancy witch house sound, to classic eighties new wave tropes, adding plenty of cold wave chill not to mention a sort of M83 bombastic electro pop shoegaze vibe. Sound like a mess, and it sort of is, but a glorious, impossibly irresistible mess.
Just check out the opener here, the oddly named "Shoom", and you'll be sold, a creepy industrial intro gives way to some pulsing eighties synths, and then when the vocals come in, total WTF, a mush mouthed super affected creepy old man mumble, the sound stripped down, creepy and haunting, and then when the beat kicks in, the vocals remain weird, just differently weird, a sort of maniacal whine, over some super propulsive krauty gloom, and then after a long instrumental stretch, where all the sounds seem to be melting and slipping out of tune, a super hooky melody swoops in and it sounds like some weird witch housey M83, and then female vocals come in, adding even more of a pop element, until those creepy male vox return and the song finishes up with a cool gothic electro dirge before disappearing into a cloud of electronics. So good! Another one of those cases where we listened to the first song at least ten times before we dug any deeper.
But if that first one does it for you, the rest will hit the spot as well. Even when the sound is more traditionally new wave, those vocals add a twisted vibe to the proceedings, and the production is super tripped out, with fat slabs of bass buzz, big stuttery beats, some almost dubstep sounding bits, not to mention long stretches of brooding minimalism, that in places sound like they were cribbed from an Interpol B side, while others touch on Kraftwerk like robotic krautrock and woozy gloomy house music (?). The track from the aforementioned 12" is included here, as is the A side from that 7" we never got to list!
Definitely a new weirdo goth pop gloom wave favorite for sure!
MPEG Stream: "Shoom"
MPEG Stream: "Dressed For Space"
MPEG Stream: "Bulbform"
MPEG Stream: "Candy Walls"

TRUST Trst (Arts & Crafts) lp 17.98
We sorta flipped for these new wave electro gloom pop weirdos when we heard their first single, which sadly, we were never able to get enough of to list (although the A side is included here!). We did review the follow up 12", which found the band cranking up the dancier side of their sound, which seems to be the direction they've continued to move in with this, their debut, but, and this is important, this is not just some sort of retro Breakfast Club soundtrack worshipping MTV style eighties electro pop, these guys are fucking WEIRD. Fusing a sort of draggy dancy witch house sound, to classic eighties new wave tropes, adding plenty of cold wave chill not to mention a sort of M83 bombastic electro pop shoegaze vibe. Sound like a mess, and it sort of is, but a glorious, impossibly irresistible mess.
Just check out the opener here, the oddly named "Shoom", and you'll be sold, a creepy industrial intro gives way to some pulsing eighties synths, and then when the vocals come in, total WTF, a mush mouthed super affected creepy old man mumble, the sound stripped down, creepy and haunting, and then when the beat kicks in, the vocals remain weird, just differently weird, a sort of maniacal whine, over some super propulsive krauty gloom, and then after a long instrumental stretch, where all the sounds seem to be melting and slipping out of tune, a super hooky melody swoops in and it sounds like some weird witch housey M83, and then female vocals come in, adding even more of a pop element, until those creepy male vox return and the song finishes up with a cool gothic electro dirge before disappearing into a cloud of electronics. So good! Another one of those cases where we listened to the first song at least ten times before we dug any deeper.
But if that first one does it for you, the rest will hit the spot as well. Even when the sound is more traditionally new wave, those vocals add a twisted vibe to the proceedings, and the production is super tripped out, with fat slabs of bass buzz, big stuttery beats, some almost dubstep sounding bits, not to mention long stretches of brooding minimalism, that in places sound like they were cribbed from an Interpol B side, while others touch on Kraftwerk like robotic krautrock and woozy gloomy house music (?). The track from the aforementioned 12" is included here, as is the A side from that 7" we never got to list!
Definitely a new weirdo goth pop gloom wave favorite for sure!
MPEG Stream: "Shoom"
MPEG Stream: "Dressed For Space"
MPEG Stream: "Bulbform"
MPEG Stream: "Candy Walls"

TURING MACHINE What Is The Meaning Of What (Temporary Residence) cd 14.98
If you go way back in the aQuarius list archive, you'll find us raving about Turing Machine years and years ago, and while that was before our reviews got to be so long, it didn't take a huge review to explain that they were one of our favorite instrumental post rock bands. We compared them to Polvo and Drive Like Jehu, Pitchblende, Shellac, Unwound, their sound was mathy and propulsive, driving and complex, a modern day kraut / prog combo that made it all seem effortless, from darkly hypnotic minimal grooves, to wildly dense almost metallic heaviness. Much of their magic was the incredible drumming of Jerry Fuchs, who tragically passed away a few years ago.
This album, recorded prior to Fuch's death, is the first Turing Machine release since their Zwei record in 2004, that long hiatus in no small part due to Fuchs' extracurricular drumming activity, which included a whole bunch of dance outfits, !!!, the Juan Maclean, LCD Soundsystem, even Massive Attack, and all that dance music drumming definitely had a huge effect on Turing Machine, who were no longer just a nineties style math/post rock outfit, but instead had become something much more. Fear not though, there's plenty of awesomely motorik post rock jamming, it's just that a lot of the time, there are also pulsing synths, or electronics. But just check out album opener, "Yeah, C'mon", which starts out like some strangely percolating new wave jam, the drums almost disco-y, the driving synths, but as the guitars come in, and coalesce into riffs, the song begins to take on rock form, until finally, exploding into some seriously fierce and driving post rock, wrapped in wild guitar squiggles and all sorts of random electronics, and the drumming, fucking KICK ASS.
"Lazy Afternoon Of The Jaguar" is equal parts laid back dance groove and motorik krautfunk, the guitars looped in woozy psychedelic swirls around the super tight bass/drums foundation. "Slave To The Algorithm" is total electro kraut-funk, Fuchs doing his best robo-beat accompanied by all manner of pulsing synths and weirdly processed guitars. The title track sounds like "Legs" by ZZ Top, stripped down and given a cosmic psychedelic space rock makeover, the synths again in full effect, but the drums locked tight, and the guitars loose and spidery and wildly psychedelic. "If It's Gone (It's On)" adds vocals to the mix, and lays down a serious slab of crunchy, fuzzy, guitar driven post-punk electro-funk, and record closer "Bovina 2/23/08" finds the band in full on heart of the sun mode, effortlessly channeling the sort of FX drenched space rock psychedelic freakout that should most definitely endear them to fans of White Hills, the Heads and the like.
MPEG Stream: "Yeah, C'mon"
MPEG Stream: "What Is The Meaning Of What"
MPEG Stream: "Bovina 2/23/08"

TUURD I Wish My Wife Was This Dirty (Carbon) lp 14.98
First we've heard from this oddly monikered duo, just bass and drums, who traffic in a sort of sludge/doom dirgery, the bass super distorted and blown out, sounding in places more like a guitar than a bass, but unfurling thick slabs of buzzing low end, while the drums deliver a plodding caveman accompaniment. The vocals might be the strangest of all, a sort of sung/spoken demonic growl, which give Tuurd a much more abstract experimental vibe. It really does sound like a Neanderthal version of OM. The groove is dark and stonery, thick and sludgey, but when it slows down, and gets a little mathy and dynamic, stripped down while the vocals gurgle malevolently, it's transformed into something else entirely. Which is also what happens on the second track, at least in the first half, the band ditching the sludge for some dense mathy noise prog, the bass and drums in a wild tussle, which finally gives way to a more slithery downtuned groove.
It's hard to really nail these guys down, the label mentions all sorts of other duos, from Lightning Bolt to the Ruins, as well as other bands that occupy a similar sonic space, Sleep, Abruptum, Killdozer, Slug (someone needs to reissue all the Slug records!), Black Sabbath and a bunch of others. But to our ears, Tuurd sound like slowed down power violence, like Man Is The Bastard covered by Corrupted, or some rare Slap A Ham 7" spinning at 5 or 6 rpm, but that's only one side of the Tuurd, the band totally capable of whipping out some seriously dense downtuned progginess, the combination of the two is what makes this stuff so good. Murky and muddy, dirgey and doomy, crusty and filthy, heavy as fuck obviously, proggy and mathy and not without a sense of humor (check out "Eating Ice Cream With Satan"). Definitely recommended for fans of any and all of the above mentioned bands, and anyone who like their music sloooooow and loooooow.
Super striking cover art, the album titled drawn in dirt on the front, the band name smeared in mud (please let it be mud!) on the back. Pressed on brown vinyl (of course) and includes a digital download.
MPEG Stream: "Water"
MPEG Stream: "Eating Ice Cream With Satan"

V/A Thai Beat A Go-Go Volume 1 (Subliminal Sounds) cd 16.98
REPRESSED! All three volumes, each somehow better than the last, of this crucial SE Asian psych rock series... Here's the first:
From the label that brought us Dungen, Parson Sound and Abner Jay comes a crazy collection of Thai Beat A Go-Go, as they put it. We're still reeling from the double whammy of the two volume Cambodian Rocks releases and the excellent Cambodian Cassette Archives and now this. Though to be fair to the latter, this release might not necessarily cater to all the same fans. The music here is more likely to appeal to fans of obscure '60s pop and garage than say, fans of off kilter pop influenced Thai music. In fact, much of what's on this disc would be difficult to place within any particular country, let alone region of the world through listening alone. Apparently the musicians here were first and foremost concerned with reproducing an accurate replica (there are many overt copies included here) of popular American music of the day. This was, after all, during the Vietnam war and plenty of American servicemen were stationed in Thailand and American music was being broadcast far and wide for their benefit. That said, there are still plenty of great rocking vocal and instrumental tracks here and a few nutty renditions of classics. Of note is The Son Of P.M.'s version of the "James Bond Theme", which gets a little spicing up with Thai drums and The Cat's "Meow" or Louise Kennedy's "Poo Yai Lee", either of which would have been an excellent addition to the Ultra Chicks compilations. There's also a version of Hank Williams' "Kaw Liga" with augmented Native American drumming and a super upbeat bridge, and Johnny Guitar's "Klongyao", probably the best representation of Thai-Western pop hybrid on the collection. Definitely stick this one out to the end when you pick it up though, as it seems heavily weighted with the best tracks in the second half.
MPEG Stream: THE VIKING BAND "Phom Rak Khoon Tching Tching"
MPEG Stream: JOHNNY'S GUITAR "Klongyao"
MPEG Stream: PAIBOON "Yom Pha Barn Norn Pahwaa"

V/A Thai Beat A Go-Go Volume 2 (Subliminal Sounds) cd 16.98
REPRESSED! All three volumes, each somehow better than the last, of this crucial SE Asian psych rock series... Here's the second:
Hot on the heels of the first volume, Subliminal Sounds has released this second collection of Thai garage beat pop go-go madness. And we have to say it's better than the first. Like the first volume the tracks here are all distinct replicas of popular music from the Occident of the late sixties. Some notable covers include the King's "All Shook Up", Serge Gainsbourg's "Je T'aime Moi Non Plus" and The Beatles' "Lady Madonna". What makes this collection stand out for us though is both the inclusion of a wider range of severely demented production aesthetics and a great deal more songs that, vocally, sound more Thai. The album starts off with a bang to Viparat Piengsuwan's "YoK YoK" with chipper explosive vocals that could only come from Thailand. So cute it'll make you barf. Not skipping a beat we're led into Surapon's "Ding Dong", which sounds like a seriously fucked up deconstruction of the "Surfing Bird". A little later Waipot Petsuwan's "Mia Chaa" throws a monkey wrench into our expectations with a dreamy ellyptical vocal line -- that sounds reminiscent of Mo Lam -- over an otherwise standard garage beat tune, instantly transforming it into a classic. Then, of course, there's some demented production like excessive reverb in the oddest places and a strange Thai version of the Chipmonks that'll have you spitting your lunch out your nose. Highly recommended!
MPEG Stream: VIPARAT PIENGSUWAN "Yok Yok (Jump)"
MPEG Stream: WAIPOT PETSUWAN "Mia Chaa (My Darling)"
MPEG Stream: SURAPON ALIAS THE FOX "Nang Maew Pee (The Ghost of Catwoman)"

V/A Thai Beat A Go-Go Volume 3 (Subliminal Sounds) cd 16.98
REPRESSED! All three volumes, each somehow better than the last, of this crucial SE Asian psych rock series... Here's the third:
It's beginning to appear as though Subliminal Sounds' well of amazing undiscovered Thai Beat music might be bottomless! We were a bit surprised when they managed to pull off a second excellent collection of Thai bubblegum psych tunes from yesteryear, but now a *third*?? "Is it just as good", you ask? Well, heck yeah, it is! It doesn't seem as though they culled the best for the first, or even the second, collection. This third volume may in fact be the best - though it's hard to choose. This one has about the same ratio of purely weird and inimitably Thai "pop" to off-kilter covers of your favorites from the golden era of rock (including "Hang On Sloopy" and another Elvis number "Heartbreak Hotel"), but add into that mix a great deal of seventies funk & disco and even some Santana-esque rock, all with a Thai twist and lots of fun. But the real gems on this collection are two tracks - "Thai Boxing" and "Siamese Boxing" - by Jiraphand Ong-Ard which nearly bookend the anthology and completely fill their own void of strange rock. Both tracks pay homage to Muay Thai boxing and raam muay - the traditional music that accompanies boxing events. The music of raam muay features a Thai reed instrument that sounds like a kazoo run through a Marshall amp. Both the tracks use this music as an odd bridge mixed in to them - almost arbitrarily - in such a way that they sound bi-polar. In addition to all the cool music on this collection is album's cover, which looks as though it were taken from a '70s Thai B-grade horror film. A "scary" looking dude in blue slacks, red sweater, and dracula fangs is lightly held back (or is he dancing with?) two sexy Thai girls wearing matching green skirts and white knee high boots. WOW! is our reaction to that, and the whole disc as well!
MPEG Stream: JIRAPHAND ONG-ARD "Thai Boxing"
MPEG Stream: SUPAPHORN "Lua Chan See"
MPEG Stream: FLASH "Where Is the Love?"

VEKTOR Black Future (Heavy Artillery) cd 14.98
Last year we raved about the Insane Technical Sci-Fi Thrash Metal Mastery of this group's 2nd album, Outer Isolation. And, having subsequently seen 'em play n' slay live, we're even more convinced that Arizona's Vektor are one of thee very best metal bands currently going. Live, their music was complex yet ragin', these guys effortlessly, amazingly technical, but ready to party at the same time. Plus one of the guitarists has a tattoo on his arm that sez, 'Sci-fi or die', how cool is that?
Sadly, though, the record label Vektor was signed to, Heavy Artillery, has just folded. And so for the time being, the Outer Isolation cd is out of print, with its planned release on vinyl also in limbo. WTF? But, since Vektor has gotta be a hot property, we imagine they'll soon be signed to another label... However, for the time being, we can't get their newer album. But, we DID manage to grab a last few copies of this, their 2009 debut, for those that missed it. We didn't actually review it when it came out before, either, though we should have.
Utter next-level mind-boggling shred, that's heavy and hectic, and impossibly catchy too, like a brilliant mix of Voivod, Coroner, Destruction, and Megadeth. With their chugging rollercoaster riffs, exquisite neo-classical melodies, and outer space atmospherics, plus the vocalist's uncanny ability to switch from guttural tones to an inhuman shriek (they say in space, no one can hear you scream, but you'll hear this guy, and your dog will hear him better!), Vektor are one of the few 'retro-80s-thrash-revival' acts that we consider to be actually equal or superior to the best bands back then.
Basically, If you liked Outer Isolation, you'll like this too, in fact, how come you don't have it already?? And if you haven't yet heard any Vektor, well, check this out! But be quick, we only got like 5 copies, and then they're gone...
MPEG Stream: "Black Future"
MPEG Stream: "Asteroid"

VIOLENS True (Slumberland) cd 10.98
In our review of the first Violens records, we spent a lot of time talking about how weird it was to listen to their music, in particular because in their previous incarnation, they were such a different sounding outfit, but since then we've actually gone back and re-listened to that old stuff, and can definitely see the connection, and the path from there to here doesn't seem nearly so unlikely. That group, Lansing-Dreiden, was definitely weirder, and while even back then they definitely had an eighties new wave MTV style pop thing going on, they mixed it with all sorts of more modern conventions, but it seems like maybe we've been basing that whole idea of Violens being so dramatically different on a single song, our favorite L-D song, which melded eighties MTV pop and crushing death metal, which to be fair, WAS pretty goddamn awesome. If anything, Violens are more of a real band, less of an experimental collective, so while that meant shedding some of the cool weirdness, it definitely meant these guys got a lot better, tighter, more polished, their songs gorgeous and lush and catchy, jangly and so melodic, where other bands of a similar stripe seem to be aping the eighties doing their best to sound like they actually were from the eighties, Violens seem to take a much more mature approach, obviously influenced by those bands and that sound, but instead of crafting some sort of homage, they simply make their own music, which definitely stands on it's own as modern jangle pop, but if you're old enough to remember the eighties, and all those bands, then that somehow makes it even better, the best of both worlds, fantastic new songs that are fresh and modern, but that are inherently infused with a bit of nostalgia.
And really Slumberland is the perfect home for this new record, the band actually moving away from the overt eighties new waviness into a sound that's much more classic pop, fuzzy and jangly, dreamy and divine, sounding weirdly a little more nineties this time around, and very much like a band that would have been on Slumberland back in the day as well!
MPEG Stream: "Totally True"
MPEG Stream: "Der Microarc"
MPEG Stream: "When To Let Go"

VIOLENS True (Slumberland) lp 14.98
In our review of the first Violens records, we spent a lot of time talking about how weird it was to listen to their music, in particular because in their previous incarnation, they were such a different sounding outfit, but since then we've actually gone back and re-listened to that old stuff, and can definitely see the connection, and the path from there to here doesn't seem nearly so unlikely. That group, Lansing-Dreiden, was definitely weirder, and while even back then they definitely had an eighties new wave MTV style pop thing going on, they mixed it with all sorts of more modern conventions, but it seems like maybe we've been basing that whole idea of Violens being so dramatically different on a single song, our favorite L-D song, which melded eighties MTV pop and crushing death metal, which to be fair, WAS pretty goddamn awesome. If anything, Violens are more of a real band, less of an experimental collective, so while that meant shedding some of the cool weirdness, it definitely meant these guys got a lot better, tighter, more polished, their songs gorgeous and lush and catchy, jangly and so melodic, where other bands of a similar stripe seem to be aping the eighties doing their best to sound like they actually were from the eighties, Violens seem to take a much more mature approach, obviously influenced by those bands and that sound, but instead of crafting some sort of homage, they simply make their own music, which definitely stands on it's own as modern jangle pop, but if you're old enough to remember the eighties, and all those bands, then that somehow makes it even better, the best of both worlds, fantastic new songs that are fresh and modern, but that are inherently infused with a bit of nostalgia.
And really Slumberland is the perfect home for this new record, the band actually moving away from the overt eighties new waviness into a sound that's much more classic pop, fuzzy and jangly, dreamy and divine, sounding weirdly a little more nineties this time around, and very much like a band that would have been on Slumberland back in the day as well!
MPEG Stream: "Totally True"
MPEG Stream: "Der Microarc"
MPEG Stream: "When To Let Go"

----*
----* Selected New Arrivals :
----*

FLASHBACK Issue 1 magazine 10.98
Quite hefty (208 pages!) debut issue of this new magazine out of the UK, dealing in "psych, prog, jazz, folk, blues & beyond". It's a heck of a lot like Shindig! magazine, really, A4 sized, glossy cover, colorful interior, and covers the same territory, pretty much. San Francisco '60s acid rock act Mad River make the cover, also there's pieces on producer David Axelrod, Linda Hoyle of Affinity, all-girl rockers Fanny, 'folk wizards' Hunter Muskett, and more, including a Richie Unterberger piece delving into the so-called 'Vinyl Renaissance', and an investigation of '50s (not '60s) psych. And, sure to cause arguments, there's an annotated list of the 100 top 'under-rated' guitarists of the '60s and '70s. Plus all the usual magazine things you'd expect, including plenty of REVIEWS!

HEAVY BLANKET s/t (Outer Battery) lp 22.00
NOW ON VINYL!!
For some people, J Mascis' distinctive vocal whine was a make or break element in their appreciation of Dinosaur Jr. But Mascis had more to offer than his peculiar and to us, quite endearing vocal style. He's also a serious shredder, as fans of Dinosaur Jr. no doubt appreciate. Yes, Masics is a master axeman, which brings us to Heavy Blanket. An all instrumental heavy psychedelic blooze trio, with Mascis on guitar. And while these songs are fairly sonically dissimilar to Dinosaur Jr, they do offer Mascis the opportunity to let loose, and he does, six songs, 37 minutes of full on heavy psych jams, no vocals, the rhythm section tight and not flashy, but a little shredding in their own right, locked tight into dense hypnotic grooves, which seem to be made with the express intent of letting Mascis go nuts. Fans of the endless shredding of Earthless will find much to love here, i.e. more endless shredding. And yeah, you really have to be into the sort of heart of the sun, blown out, druggy psych blowouts to get into Heavy Blanket, but then that probably describes a whole lot of you.
And, fans of all that psychedelic space rock like White Hills, The Heads, Mugstar and all the rest, who just want to dispense with all the 'songs' and 'songwriting' and 'arrangements', and just get right to the endless shredding, then this is for you too, with much of this falling squarely in that sort of Hawkwindy psych-rock, droned out druggy psychedelic jam freakout zone, loping, and hypnotic, and the sort of jams, that while not technically or literally endless, sure as shit could be.
Absolute space-psych-shred bliss. Thus obviously WAY recommended.
MPEG Stream: "Galloping Toward The Unknown"
MPEG Stream: "No Telling No Trails"

INTELLIGENCE, THE Everybody's Got It Easy But me (In The Red) lp 14.98
Also here on vinyl...
Brand new record from these aQ beloved lo-fi garage rock noise poppers and right off the bat they're in full on confuse mode. Instead of a wild rollicking blast of crunchy guitars and pounding drums, we're treated to a woozy bit of druggy minimal drum machine driven folk, all steel string strum and Casio skitter, laced with tinkling melodies, it's actually pretty cool, definitely a dramatic shift. But there's more going on that meets the ear. Soon the song devolves into a repetitive groove, the drum machine rhythm now sort of fucked up and skipping and glitching out, with a single strum every measure, over which the vocalist sings a number, starting with one, then two, and he keeps counting, and we honestly had no idea when he would stop, but he does, at 44 for some reason, and then says "Ladies and gentlemen, the band", at which point the band proper kicks in, playing a properly garage rocking version of the song, and suddenly it's all perfect. and that weird whatthefuck intro only makes us love these guys all the more.
From there on out, the band kick down another clutch of twisted garage rock weirdness and warped jangle pop noisiness, but barring a few seriously far out jams, the band are surprisingly polished, as are the songs, fuzzy and hooky and jangly, slipping occasionally into strummy folkiness, or soaring epic shoegaziness, but always returning to some crunchy catchy pop, that for all it's outwards normality, is still quite twisted, whether it's bizarre arrangements, strange effects, maddeningly repeated parts, new wave-y angularity, all deftly woven into a seriously addictive slab of outsider garage pop that while crunchy and fuzzy and jangly enough to appeal to the whole Thee Oh Sees / Bare Wires / Blasted Canyons crowd, might just be a little too weird and warped for heavy rotation with casual listeners, but because of that, seems to transcend the classification of simple 'garage pop', and becomes something much more fucked up and weirdly arty, which makes this a new fast fave.
MPEG Stream: "I Like LA"
MPEG Stream: "Hippy Provider"
MPEG Stream: "Evil Is Easy"
MPEG Stream: "Techno Tuesday"

JARVIS STREET REVUE Mr. Oil Man (Lion Productions) cd 14.98
Canadian '60s artifact, well actually it's from 1971 but sounds way more sixties boomer rock. From remote Thunder Bay, they were hippies with environmental concerns, hence this album's biggest claim to fame, the heavy protest rocker "Mr. Oil Man", all 12 minutes of it. They also do a "Mr. Business Man" for good measure. This digipak reissue includes 9 bonus tracks and a booklet of liner notes and sheet music! Though the booklet is for some reason on the outside of the digipak, not the best packaging concept in our opinion.
MPEG Stream: "Mr. Oil Man"
MPEG Stream: "20 Years"

LAMBKIN, GRAHAM Millows (Penultimate Press) book+cd 29.00
BACK IN STOCK!!
This is a gorgeous and confusional archival release from Graham Lambkin, leader of weirdo outsider 'rock' combo Shadow Ring, this recording, from 2004, features just voice, tapes and piano, and is a curious landscape of spoken word, distant swirls of tape hiss, and haunting funereal piano, not to mention all manner of creaks and buzzes, cobbled together from what sounds like some strange spoken word diary, recorded on a hand held tape player, various fragments strung together, peppered with the 'kthunk' of the buttons on the tape player being depressed, the track shifting haphazardly from some strange description of random goings on, weird bits of random tape sounds, pulsing non-rhythms, static and rumbles, quacking ducks, bits of orchestra, snippets from programs, other voices, always returning to that creepy echo drenched piano, while Lambkin/Shadow Ring newbies might be a bit put off by the sounds here, fans of either or both will definitely feel right at home, a strangely intimate glimpse inside strange and twisted musical mind, one that unfurls soundscapes like this as an entreaty to the brave to wander in and get lost. Very cool, and very bizarre.
But that's really only half of Millows, the other is a strange, dizzying photographic project, that according to the liner notes, is a "series of 450 photographic combinations documenting a solitary drunken non-event", which in reality appears to be a series of combined photos / photo collages, of Lambkin in what appears to be a festive mood, laughing, and smiling, drinking, and conversing, but knowing that said photos were culled from a solitary event, makes the project a bit creepy, and the way the photos have been manipulated, often multiple faces layered into one, colors bleeding, strange projections, textures and overexposures, some like ordinary snapshots, others like wild impressionistic splashes of colors and shapes, and all presented one after the other, nine to a page, almost make it seem like someone took a short bit of filmstrip and laid it out one frame at a time, offering a visual analogue to the strange sounds on the accompanying cd.
All presented in a super striking full color hard cover book, LIMITED TO 500 COPIES, each one hand numbered, with the cd affixed to the inside back cover.
MPEG Stream: "Millows"

NADLER, MARISSA The Sister (Box Of Cedar) lp 15.98
The Sister, Marissa Nadler's second self-released lp, is a vehicle for her amazing voice. The instrumentation and melodies are kept quite minimal, at least on the surface. Sometimes on songs like "Christine", once the chorus has time to build, the song crescendoes into soft layers of swirling synths and swelling cymbal washes. These always take second chair to Nadler's effortless vocal melodies, the fingerpicked guitar her primary companion throughout the record. The Sister has a subdued quality to it, never rising too high or sinking too low, and although these are beautiful songs executed with skill, there's not a stand-out number that especially stands apart from the rest. Her last, self-titled record had the synth-driven "Wedding" and the poppy Mazzy Star-esque "The Sun Always Reminds Me of You" which made that really good record great. The Sister is a record that longtime fans of Marissa Nadler's magic will enjoy, but newcomers might find Little Hells or her previous self-titled record more memorable. Still, this is an excellent record for sleepy Sunday mornings and dreamy summer nights.
MPEG Stream: "The Wrecking Ball"
MPEG Stream: "In A Little Town"
MPEG Stream: "Constantine"

PSYCHIC TEENS Tape (Video Horror Show) VHS + download 14.98
LAST COPIES!!!
While the rest of the world has been reveling in the resurgence of the cassette tape, some folks have been taking it a step further, and going full VHS! Video Horror Show is a label who releases VHS tapes, which feature not only music, but also appropriately enough accompanying psychedelic visuals. Past releases have included the electro goth witch house of Masacara, and the droned out abstract psychedelic black metal of Suffer The Shards Of The Lost Cult Of Silence, which was in fact members of Woe and Absu, and now comes Psychic Teens, which weirdly enough might sonically fall right in between. Described by the band as "the time you saw your creepy metalhead brother at 80's night" which isn't really that far off. Imagine a sound that was equal parts dirgey psychedelic metal, and broody deep vocal-ed goth, and you'd have the Psychic Teens, and we have to say, it's a pretty bad ass sound. Especially if you're tired of all the wimpy twee eighties throwbacks, this is more like a metalized Sisters Of Mercy or Kommunity FK or Fields Of The Nephilim, with some thick squalls of blown out shoegaze psychedelia mixed in for good measure. The sound is dark and gloomy, a little poppy, a lot heavy, the guitars thick and crunchy, the vocals deep and dramatic and wreathed in echo, this is the sort of eighties throwback we can get behind for sure. And these three songs have definitely whetted our appetite big time!
The accompanying video is appropriately VHS looking, mostly live footage of the band, but super grainy and gristly, with plenty of old school interference, the pic flickering and flipping, as if it was being viewed on an old TV with a busted horizontal hold, a playback of an old videotape that had been in a box under the stairs for the last twenty years. Awesome.
Nicely packaged in a cool old school style VHS case, with printed grey on white covers, and recorded onto a white VHS tape, includes a download coupon as well!
LIMITED TO 75 COPIES!!
MPEG Stream: "Rose"
MPEG Stream: "Arm"

----*
----* In Stock, Not Yet Reviewed :
----*

If you want to order one of these, just search for the item, then click on the buy button and it will be added to your cart!

ABRAHAMSSON, CARL "Fanzinera" (Trapart) book 37.00
ACEPHALIX "Deathless Master" (Southern Lord) cd 14.98
ADVANCE BASE "A Shut-In's Prayer" (Orindal Records) lp 12.98
AMPS FOR CHRIST "Circuits" (Tuned Word / Water Wing) 2lp 17.98
APHEX TWIN "Selected Ambient Works Volume II" (1972) 3lp 34.00
AQUARIAN, DJIN "Destiny Of Aquarius" (Global Recording Artists) cd-r 14.98
ASH RA TEMPEL "Schwingungen" (MG-Art) cd 17.98
AUFGEHOBEN "Fragments Of The Marble Plan" (Holy Mountain) lp 17.98
AVENGERS, THE "s/t" (Water) 2cd/lp 19.98/19.98
BIRRA, ALI "Ammalele" (Domino / Mississippi) lp 14.98
BISHOP, SIR RICHARD "Intermezzo" (Ideologic Organ) lp 22.00
BLACKQUEEN "March Of The Obsidian Triumvirate" (Silentium Spells) cd ep 6.98
BLACKQUEEN / THE FAMILY CURSE "split" (Fainting Room) 7" 6.98
BLOWFLY "Disco" (Weird World) lp 14.98
BLUNT, DEAN & INGA COPELAND (AKA HYPE WILLIAMS) "Black Is Beautiful" (Hyperdub) cd/lp 17.98/23.00
BREAKFAST CLUB, THE "OST" (A&M Records) lp 21.00
BROKEN WATER "Tempest" (Hardly Art) lp 13.98
BURIAL HEX "Book Of Delusions" (Cold Spring) cd 17.98
CEYLEIB PEOPLE "Tanyet" (Vault) lp 16.98
CHANCE, BOB "It's Broken" (Trunk) cd 16.98
CIRCLE "Serpent" (Ektro) cd 17.98
CLUBROOT "Scars / Hellion" (Solace Records) 12" 12.98
DEAD MOON "Too Many People" (Mississippi) 7" 7.98
DEATHHAMMER "Onward To The Pits" (Hells Headbangers) cd/lp 12.98/22.00
DISTAL "Civilization" (Tectonic) cd 12.98
DNTEL "Aimlessness" (Pampa Records) cd 16.98
DOPE BODY "Natural History" (Drag City) cd/lp 14.98/15.98
EARLES, ANDREW "Husker Du: The Story Of The Noise-Pop Pioneers Who Launched Modern Rock" (Voyageur Press) book 24.00
ELEH "Radiant Intervals" (Important Records) cd 14.98
FATHER YOD "Ya Ho Wa's Morning Meditations" (Global Recording Artists) cd-r 25.00
FATHER YOD & THE SOURCE FAMILY "The Thought Adjusters" (Drag City) lp 22.00
FAUST / LIKE A STUNTMAN "split" (Bureau B) 12" 12.98
FRESH & ONLYS, THE "Yes Or No" (Mexican Summer) 7" 5.98
GAY WITCH ABORTION "Halo Of Flies Sessions" (Learning Curve) 10" 15.98
GOLD PANDA "Mountain / Financial District" (Ghostly International) 7" 7.50
GRINDERMAN 2 "Rmx" (Mute) 2lp 30.00
GULTSKRA ARTIKLER "Abtu Anet" (Miasmah) lp 19.98
HALO, LAUREL "Quarantine" (Hyperdub) cd/lp 17.98/25.00
HAWKS "Pushover" (Learning Curve) lp 15.98
HAYDEN, BRIDGET "A Siren Blares In An Indifferent Ocean" (KRAAK) lp 15.98
HEATHEN HOOF "Rock Crusader" (Iron Shield Records) cd 13.98
HENNIX, CATHERINE CHRISTER & CHORA(S)SAN TIME-COURT MIRAGE "Live At The Grimm Museum Volume One" (Sonic Acts / Important Records) cd 17.98
HIGH ON FIRE "De Vermis Mysteriis" (E One) 2lp 29.00
HOUSTON, PENELOPE "On Market Street" (Glitterhouse) lp 19.98
IVES, BURL "Sweet Sad & Salty" (The Omni Recording Corporation) cd 17.98
JEREBINE, DOUG "Doug Jerebine Is Jesse Harper" (Drag City) lp 17.98
JESUS & MARY CHAIN "Stoned & Dethroned" (1972) lp 15.98
KREIDLER / TARWATER "split" (Bureau B) 12" 12.98
LA PLANETE SAUVAGE "OST" (Pathe Marconi) lp 16.98
LAMB, GARRY BRADBURY, DAVID BURRASTON, OREN AMBARCHI & ROBIN FOX, ALAN "The Wired Lab : Wired Open Day 2009" (Taiga Records) 2lp 35.00
LANHAM, ERIC "The Sincere Interruption" (Spectrum Spools) lp 22.00
LECKEY, MARK "Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore" (The Death Of Rave) lp 24.00
LES BLOUSONS NOIRS "Les Blousons Noirs 1961 - 1962" (Born Bad) cd 17.98
LIARS "Wixiw" (Mute) cd/lp 14.98/17.98
LINDSTROM, MATS "Mig" (Ideologic Organ) lp 22.00
LOLLIPOP SHOPPE "Just Colour" (Rev-Ola) cd 16.98
LORD TANG "s/t" (Gigante Sound) cd-r/cassette 7.98/
LOVELOCK "Burning Feeling" (What People Play) cd 17.98
LUNGFISH "A.C.R. 1999" (Dischord) cd/lp 12.98/14.98
MANCO, BARIS "Dunden Bugune" (Guerssen) cd 17.98
MANTRONIX "King of the Beats" (Warlock Records) 2cd 23.00
MARSHALL, OWEN "The Naked Truth" (Jazzman) cd/lp+7" 17.98/17.98
MASATO, MINAMI "The Tropics" (Klimt) lp 24.00
MELVINS LITE, THE "Freak Puke" (Ipecac) cd 14.98
MY BLOODY VALENTINE "Loveless" (Sony) 2cd 31.00
NABAY, JANKA & THE BUBU GANG "An Letah" (True Panther) 12" 10.98
NILES, JOHN JACOB "The Boone - Tolliver Recordings" (LM) cd 14.98
NOBEL, STEVE & STEPHEN O'MALLEY "St. Francis Duo" (Bo' Weevil) 2lp 40.00
NORTON, DORIS "Norton Computer For Peace" (Durium) lp 21.00
OBITS "Let Me Dream If I Want To / The City Is Dead" (Sub Pop) 7" 5.50
OH NO "Ohnomite" (Five Day Weekend) cd/2lp 17.98/23.00
PACO SALA "Ro-Me-Ro" (Digitalis) lp 19.98
PART WILD HORSES MANE ON BOTH SIDES "Poisson" (Mie) lp 27.00
PARTY, THE (HENRY MANCINI) "OST" (Reel Time) cd 17.98
PEACOCK, ANNETTE "I'm The One" (Future Days Recordings / Light In The Attic) cd 15.98
PEAKING LIGHTS "Lucifer" (Mexican Summer) lp 17.98
PLANKTON WAT "Spirits" (Thrill Jockey) cd/lp 15.98/15.98
PLVS VLTRA "Parthenon" (Spectrum Spools) lp 22.00
RETRIBUTION GOSPEL CHOIR "The Revolution" (Sub Pop) 7" 5.98
ROBINSON, CHRIS (CHRIS ROBINSON BROTHERHOOD) "Big Moon Ritual" (Silver Arrow) lp 16.98
ROOT "Heritage Of Satan" (Agonia) cd 16.98
RROPE "We Are You There" (Deathbomb Arc) 3lp 42.00
SAINT VITUS "Lillie: F-65" (Season Of Mist) cd/lp 14.98/21.00
SHIT AND SHINE "Jream Baby Jream" (Riot Season) lp 23.00
SHIT YOR PANTS AND DO THE DEATH DANCE zine 3.00
SLUSSENANALYS "Aquila Helvetos Asfaltos" (Ektro) lp 22.00
SMITH, PATTI "Banga" (Columbia) cd 14.98
SOEBARDJA, BENNY "Gut Rock" (Strawberry Rain) lp 28.00
SOEBARDJA, BENNY "Night Train" (Strawberry Rain) 2lp 35.00
SOEBARDJA, BENNY "The Lizard Years" (Strawberry Rain) 2cd 17.98
SPECTRUM "Soul Kiss" (Vinilissimo) lp 27.00
SUN ARAW & M. GEDDES GENDRAS MEET THE CONGOS "FRKWYS Vol. 9" (RVNG) cd 15.98
SUN KIL MOON "Among The Leaves (deluxe edition)" (Caldo Verde) 2cd 15.98
SUTEKH HEXEN "Behind The Throne" (Magic Bullet) cd 10.98
TALK TALK "Colour of Spring" (Parlophone) lp 44.00
TALK TALK "Spirit of Eden" (Parlophone) lp + dvd 44.00
TRANS AM "s/t" (Thrill Jockey) lp 15.98
UGLY CUSTARD "s/t" (Relics) cd/lp 17.98/17.98
ULAAN MARKHOR "s/t" (Soft Abuse) cd/lp 11.98/15.98
URSPRUNG "s/t" (Dial) cd 17.98
V/A "Eat The Dream: Gnawa Music From Essaouira" (Sublime Frequencies) lp 21.00
V/A "Spiritual Jazz Volume 2 : Esoteric, Modal, And Deep European Jazz 1960-78" (Jazzman) cd/2lp 17.98/26.00
V/A "Underground Praha : Musical Activism Under Communism 1975-1990" (Oloj Records) lp 25.00
V/A "Wizzz Volume 1" (Born Bad) lp 21.00
V/A "WTNG 89.9 FM: Solid Bronze" (Numero) cd 11.98
VOCODER "Cuadro Sinoptico" (Dark Entries) 12" 11.98
WALKMEN, THE "Heaven" (Fat Possum) cd/lp 13.98/14.98
WEXLER, MIKE "Dispossession" (Mexican Summer) lp 17.98
WHITE MANNA "s/t" (Holy Mountain) cd/lp 14.98/15.98
WHITE, JACK "Blunderbuss" (Columbia) cd/lp 14.98/27.00
WHITMAN, KEITH FULLERTON "Occlusions" (Editions Mego) lp 22.00
WINDHAND "s/t" (Forcefield) lp 14.98
WINO & CONNY OCHS "Heavy Kingdom" (Exile On Mainstream) cd 16.98
WITCH MOUNTAIN "Cauldron of the Wild" (Profound Lore) cd
XIU XIU / FATHER MURPHY "split" (Aagoo) 7" 8.98
YOUNG, LARRY "Larry Young's Fuel / Spaceball" (Arista) cd 19.98
YOUNG, NEIL "Americana" (Reprise) cd 13.98
YOUNG, THE "Dub Egg" (Matador) lp 15.98
YOUNGS, RICHARD "Amaranthine" (Mie) lp 25.00

_______________________________________________________________________

Please place your order via our website.

[1] We will contact you to verify your order and let you know when it will be shipped. Please note that occasionally it may take a day or two for us to reply. We are not a faceless bunch of computers replying to your order -- we are human beings!

[2] If we are out of some of your items and we think we will get them within the same week, we can wait to ship. Or... If it's going to be more than a few days to complete your order, we will ship what we have and then will contact you as the remainders arrive.

[ note ] Due to the everchanging nature of the independent record business, we are not responsible for listed price changes (due to supplier price changes) and often cannot update our site fast enough to reflect these changes, but we will always try to let you know of any differences.


NEW DOMESTIC SHIPPING RATES :
--------------------------------
STANDARD (DEFAULT):

1 CD (or cassette or DVD or 7") : $2.95 USPS First Class

1-3 CD (or cassette or DVD, but not 7"s) : $5.00 USPS Priority Mail via flat rate box

4+ CD,ÊorÊany package with LPs in it (also books & box sets), any number of items: $9.95 UPS Ground

Also, please note that UPS will not ship to PO Boxes, so those packages that would have gone UPS will be sent USPS Priority for $9.95, or you may select USPS Media Mail instead, see below.

UPS shipments are automatically trackable and include insurance up to $100.
USPS shipments (First Class, Priority, and Media Mail) are all automatically trackable.

OR, you can choose instead to have your order shipped by MEDIA MAIL:

1-3 items (i.e. w/ LPs) : $5.95 USPS Media Mail

4+ items : $7.95 USPS Media Mail


Special shipping needs (e.g. UPS Next Day) are also doable, just ask for a quote.
Also, if you are just getting 1 item that would therefore ship USPS First Class, and for some reason you would rather have it sent Priority, then you could say so in the comments field. (Note: however, 7"s are too big for the Priority flat rate boxes.)

NOTE: UPS permits their drivers to determine if there is a secure location at the shipping address to leave the package if no one is there to receive it (unfortunately some are less cautious than others!). If you'd prefer that they not do this or if you have specific instructions for the driver, please include a note in the comments section of your weborder form.

PLEASE DOUBLE CHECK SHIPPING ADDRESSES BEFORE SUBMITTING YOUR ORDER. Aquarius is not responsible for orders delayed or returnedÊdue to incorrect or undeliverable addresses provided by the customer. Returned packages will be reshipped at the customer's expense.

Shipping rates are charged per shipment.


INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING :
-------------------------------- For foreign customers we ship via US AIRMAIL ("First Class International"). Your price is based on the actual cost of shipping plus $1. You can check the US Postal Service international rate calculator: http://ircalc.usps.gov/. (Use the "Package" category and see the price for "First Class International". 1-3 cds is usually 1 pound.)

We highly recommend insurance for your international package, but it is very expensive! You can check the US Postal Service international rate calculator: http://ircalc.usps.gov/. (Use the "Package" category and see the price for "Priority Mail International". 1-3 cds is usually 1 pound. 1 lp is usually a little over 1.5 pounds.)


INTERNATIONAL INSURANCE :
-------------------------------- You are hereby forewarned that Aquarius is not responsible if your international package gets lost in the mail. Insurance is your only recourse if your records never show up. Since the terrible events of 9/11, mail service has been slow and undependable... and while we haven't experienced any *confirmed* permanently lost mail, insurance might provide some additional piece of mind in this time of upheaval. We strongly recommend it. But yes, it is very expensive. It's your choice. Again: Aquarius is not responsible for lost mail, so if you aren't willing to take a (slight but real) risk, please buy the insurance.

International insurance is very expensive! In fact often the insurance costs more than the value of your package, in which case it obviously does not make sense to insure it. You can check the US Postal Service international rate calculator: http://ircalc.usps.gov/. (Use the "Package" category and see the price for "Priority Mail International", which is the way insured packages are sent. 1-3 cds is usually 1 pound. 1 lp is usually a little over 1.5 pounds.)

For example: for a one-pound package worth $18 going to England, shipping without insurance is about $11.00. But with insurance, the shipping / insurance total is over $26.00!

It is your reponsibility to check the international rate calculator in order to determine whether or not you want international insurance. If you tell us you want international insurance, we will add it to your order no matter how much it costs!


PAYMENT :
-------------------------------- We accept the following credit cards: Visa, MC, Discover, and Amex. We will not charge your credit card until your order is ready to ship.

Money orders are accepted, but only in $USD. International customers please note that they must beÊinternational postal money orders purchased at a post office. Additional processing fees may apply.Ê

If you wish to pay by money order, you must confirm the order with us through email or phone BEFORE you send any payment. It's best to just use the secure order form on the website, and when checking out mark money order as your payment choice. We will then process your order and respond with all the crucial payment info.

We also accept payment by Paypal. If you opt for this payment method, we will send you a paypal total and payment instructions as soon as we've confirmed your order with you. Please do not send payment until you have received human contact from our mailorder department.

Unfortunately, we cannot take personal checks for mailorder, sorry!


QUESTION?
-------------------------------- Email the mailorder department: mailorder@aquariusrecords.org
______________________________________________________________________

SOME SELECTED UPCOMING RELEASES

----} June 12th
Eternal Tapestry "Drawn In 2 Dimensions" lp on Thrill Jockey
Kandodo (Simon Price of The Heads) "s/t" cd on Thrill Jockey
Jaill "Traps" cd/lp on Sub Pop
Magic Trick "Ruler Of The Night" cd/lp on Sub Pop
Sun Araw & M. Geddes Gengras meet The Congos "Icon Give Thank" lp version on RVNG Intl.
Mike Scheidt (of Yob) "Stay Awake" cd/lp on Thrill Jockey
Candlemass "Psalms For The Dead" cd on Napalm
Grand Magus "Hunt" cd on Nuclear Blast
Scott Kelly / Steve Von Til / Wino "Songs Of Townes Van Zandt" cd on Neurot
Wymond Miles "Under The Pale Moon" cd/lp on Sacred Bones
Rolf Julius "Raining" cd on Western Vinyl
Vestals "Forever Falling Toward The Sky" lp on Root Strata
Maggi Payne "Ahh-ahh Music For Ed Tannenbaum's Technological Feets 1984-1987" lp on Root Strata

----} June 10th
Thin Lizzy "s/t" reissue on Light In The Attic

----} June 19th
Factrix "Scheintot" cd/lp reissue on Superior Viaduct
Factrix/Cazzaza "California Babylon" cd/lp reissue on Superior Viaduct
Codeine "When I See The Sun" 6lp+3cd+7" box set on Numero Group
Codeine "Frigid Stars" 2lp+cd reissue on Numero Group
Codeine "Barely Real" 2lp+cd reissue on Numero Group
Codeine "White Birch" 2lp+cd reissue on Numero Group
Blues Control "Valley Tangents" cd/lp/cassette on Drag City
Mantas "Death By Metal" cd/lp reissue on Relapse
Galactic Zoo Dossier "Issue # 9" magazine + cd
Silver Jews "Early Times" cd/lp/cassette on Drag City

----} June 26th
Old Man Gloom "No" cd/2lp/cassette on Hydra Head
A Place To Bury Strangers "Worship" cd/lp on Dead Oceans
Chain & The Gang "In Cool Blood" cd/lp on Kill Rock Stars
The Books "A Dot In Time." 7lp+dvd+book+usb box set on Temporary Residence, Ltd.
Milk Maid "Mostly No" cd on Fatcat
Iron & Wine "One More Try b/w Trouble" 7" on Suicide Squeeze
Tony Conrad + Hanged Up / Kanada 70 / Pacha "Musique Fragile Vol.02" 3lp on Constellation
Jay Dee "Welcome To Detroit Instrumentals" cd on BBE
The Cinematic Orchestra "In Motion #1" cd on Ninjatune
P.I.L. "This Is P.I.L." cd+dvd
Bosse-De-Nage "III" cd on Profound Lore
Echo Lake "Wild Peace" cd/lp on Slumberland
Kylesa "To Walk A Middle Course" cd/lp on Alternative Tentacles
Lost Sounds "Lost Lost Demos, Sounds, Alternate" cd/lp+7" on Goner
Mountain Goats "Hound Chronicles / Hot Garden Stomp" 2cd on Shrimper
Ty Segall Band "Slaughterhouse" cd on In The Red
Stereolab "Transient Random-Noise Bursts With..." 2lp reissue on 1972
Stereolab "Mars Audiac Quintet" 2lp reissue on 1972
Vibracathedral "s/t" 2lp+dvd on VHF
Flaming Lips & Heady Fwends cd version on Warners

----} July 10th
Beak> "II" cd/lp on Invada
The Sea And The Cake "Nassau" & "The Fawn" lp reissues on Thrill Jockey

----} July 17th
Baroness "Yellow & Green" 2cd/2lp on Relapse
Dicks "Kill From The Heart + Hate The Police" twofer cd reissue on Alternative Tentacles
Dicks "These People + Peace?" twofer cd reissue on Alternative Tentacles
Dicks "Kill From The Heart" lp reissue on Alternative Tentacles
Dicks "These People" lp reissue on Alternative Tentacles
Hot Panda "Go Outside" cd/lp on Mint
Howling Wind "Of Babalon" cd on Profound Lore
Ty Segall Band "Slaughterhouse" 2x10" version on In The Red
The Sound "Jeopardy" lp reissue on 1972
The Sound "From The Lions Mouth" lp reissue on 1972
Timmy's Organism "Raw Sewage Roq" cd/lp on In The Red
White Fence "(vol. 1 & 2) Family Perfume" 2lp on Woodsist

----} and more stuff that's upcoming too, sooner or later
Pinkish Black cd version!!!!
Wreck And Reference "No Youth" lp on Flenser
Sutekh Hexen "Behind The Throne" lp version on Magic Bullet
Carlton Melton "Smoke Drip" lp on Agitated
Annette Peacock "I'm The One" lp reissue on Light In The Attic
Burzum "Umskiptar" cd
Smog "Forgotten Foundation" lp reissue on Drag City
Father You See Queen "47" cdep on Flingco
Castle "Blacklands" cd on Van
Space Vacation "Heart Attack" lp
oOoOO "Our Loving Is Hurting Us" cd/lp on Tri Angle
Pulse Emitter / Date Palms / Expo 70 / Faceplant 4-way split 2lp on Immune (delayed from RSD)
Funky Junction "Play A Tribute To Deep Purple" cd reissue on Kismet
v/a "Air Texture Volume II" 2cd
Thomas Koner "Novaya Zemlya" cd on Touch
Chelsea Wolfe "Apokalpysis" lp reissue on Pendu
Gunter Schickert "Uberfallig" cd/lp reissue on Bureau B
Apache Dropout "s/t" cd on Family Vineyard
Mum "Early Birds" cd collection on Morr
DNTEL "Aimlessness" lp version on Pampa
Luther Dickinson "Handbone's Meditations" lp on Sutro Park
Trapist "The Golden Years" cd/lp on Staubgold
Egisto Macchi "Voix" lp reissue on The Omni Recording Corporation
Alessandro Alessandroni "Prisma Sonoro" lp reissue on The Omni Recording Corporation
Fabio Frizzi "Zombi 2" OST lp version on Death Waltz Recordings
John Carpenter "Escape From New York" OST lp version with bonus tracks on Death Waltz Recordings
Sewer Goddess/Mourner split 10" on Apop
Steve Roden & Steve Peters "Not A Leaf Remains As It Was" cd on 12K
Great Society Mind Destroyers "Spirit Smoke" cd version on Slow Knife
Darkthrone "Sempiternal Past"
Blind Guardian "Memories Of A Time To Come" 2cd
Golden Dawn "Return To Provenance"
J.D. Emmanuel live cassette from '82, on Sonic Mediations
John Gallow (Blizaro) "Violet Dreams" cd on Blind Men And Occult Forces
Bong "Beyond Ancient Space" lp version w/ bonus track on Ritual Productions
Bee Mask / Envenomist "Bee Mask v. Envenomist" lp on A Soundesign Recording
Tecumseh "Return to Everything" cd on Beta-Lactam Ring
Marijata "This Is Marijata" cd on Academy
Marijata "Pat Thomas Presents Marijata" cd/lp on Academy
Jonathan Coleclough "Flutter" 2cd-r on October


_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________


Lots of love from your devoted AQ staff

Andee Cup Jim AllanIrwinScottNickAndrewandMatt