Fuck You, Counselor

WE PUT THE BUFF IN BUFFOON

2012-01-30T13:10:00.001-05:00

John Klein
...Plays the Bells of Stone Mountain Vol 1
No Label/No Date LP

Can't find a cover scan for this. Surprised? There are tourist LPs and then there are TOURIST LPs, and I ain't apt to take those distinctions lightly. One of them zither records they hock up in Helen, GA, (whats fulla icky Beatles covers) would fall in the former, while Iceberg's Does It Live from the land of Disney would fall in the latter. This is definitely listing toward the latter. The Bells of Stone Mountain are actually several hundred electronically triggered whatsits which, I hope, occasionally accompany the world's largest laser show they throw at Stone Mountain--assuming Klein ain't shit the bed yet. Though, I suppose they could prop him up and...well, that ain't my field. Just sayin, since it seems from the liners he's the most qualified carillon player on this green world.
This is all trads and covers, of course, but the queasy tonal decay is sure to churn all those funnel cakes you just scarfed in front of trinket booth #94 into gray-water but QUICK. Sure, Joplin's "The Entertainer" sounds tame enough at first, but when all those tinkling bells start shift to the red, you'll shift to beer.
I tell ya, local droopery awaits at the back of every crate. Think of it as history on a microscopic level, where all the real weirdness doesn't happen in space, Washington D.C., or at the bottom of the Atlantic: it's happening right now in your neighbor's basement. You see this for more than 50 cents, start throwing elbows.

NOICE

LUFF, LOOK AT THE TOOL OF US... A Pair of Pincers Come Down My Pike

2012-01-28T00:40:00.000-05:00

Here's a few off Fag Tapes what just dropped around the turn of the Armageddon Year. Ish. I figger, given the end time's approaching, I might as well hock my spare watches for a new tape deck.

Sorry the pickins been so slim, lately. Labels run from me like tickled rats.

Hive Mind

Beneath Triangle and Crescent c30

Fag Tapes

Some reason, I avoided a lot of this scene like it had something catching. Why? Who knows. The day don't hold much innarest lest it changes my mind. So, I checked in and found a few comfy spots around the room. Though part of me wants to send this to Southern Lord with an attached "CLOSED" sign, I worry they might not take kindly. But seriously, this thing sweeps up the dirt floor basement of sludge like Gein's toenails. It ain't near as repetitive as those Sunn0))) grumps neither, instead choosing to wallow in a variety of crapulence. When Side A settled on what sounds like Maurizio Bianchi dribbling a basketball on DJ Screw's court, I headed for a secure doorway, crackers or no. Say what you want about not-so-depraved folks making this manner of rumblings. At least it ain't bloodless. Just think, they could all be getting jobs at Group-On and playing math rock!

Aaron Dilloway

Since He's Been Gone c60

Fag Tapes

I like Wolf Eyes fine--in fact, just one entry back I was speaking mighty highly of Mr. Olson. They all seem to exist in the cramped camp of folks who can hold mad balls aloft, dropping nary a one. They slip here and there, sure, but rarely am I--or most other slime I know--calling the whole thing off. So it goes that Mr. Dilloway has sent a few screamers down my street and this is but another. Side A sees Dilloway loaning Thunderboy the Two Daughters lp, while Side B sets off muffled landmines at a Gerogerigegege swap meet. Smells like the buffet's almost ready! MMMmmmm, hey wait.

B didn't quite deliver on the hungover-brain-as-burnt-granola tip as A, but it be that way sometimes.

HAZLEWOOD'S TOO DAMP TO BURN, LET'S USE THE FIREBEATS! Keepin warm with old shits

2012-01-21T16:47:00.002-05:00

In the lean, lean month of January (not much ring to it, huh? & if there were I'd hock it for groceries!), if it be more than a couple-five dollars, I shut my eyes, hold my breath, and say, "See you in two paychecks." So me and the lady are hunkerin down in the brackish end of the pool, seein what we can scrounge up from the foam and algae to make a meal. Here's what we got so far:

Allegra - Music from the Heartlands (private press LP, mid-70s?)

Hipped to this by Mr. Olson of American Tapes, who also once said to a New England crowd, "This song goes out to standin there in black hoodies with your arms crossed." I just up and misplaced my skull. Rarely does somebody peg a whole scene so well so quick! And they say Midwesterners is slow. Ever since, I've taken almost everything he says as serious as taxes. And, hey, it lead me to things like Interstellar Encore, Lazy Smoke, and J.D. Emmanuel, so my grievance bin remains hollow.

What we got here is one dreary, parched, Southern stumbler (actually recorded in Europe, I hear?), reeking of haunt and head injury. In other words, hollaaa! First track, "Who's Sorry Now," does the business and some overtime in these drippy, smudgy months when one needs to remember the true dangers of cabin fever. Don't check your forehead, you might be holdin an icepick.

Extra nice loner bluegrass creep-out. This one shows up pretty often and, like I said, ain't gonna dropkick your debit card.

V.A. - Electronic Music Winners (Odyssey/Columbia LP, 1976)

Sometimes I forget Georgia has the worst schools in the country. Then I notice every record in every Classical section in the state is about $3.00. Research, shopkeepers: it ain't just when you backspace on Google. Matter of fact, this one goes for about 5 times what I paid, and mine's pretty clean. This comp got some digger cred at the beginning of the century when folks found out Radiohead sampled the last two cuts for "Idioteque." (C'mon, boys: two samples in a row? Who raised ya to be so sloppy?) In truth, this is a whole lot of Subotnick-style slurp-n-gurble, with some inspired sections thrown in. The closest I can approximate for ya in terms of texture is a kind of Brit free improv lack-of-phrase-as-phrase, only through-composed. Make sense?

Paul Lansky's piece, the last on the record, is a little long for what it does, but I dig Kreiger's "Short Piece" and Menachem Zur's "Chants, For Magnetic Tape." None really have the abandon of Darius Dolat-Shahi, the goofus and gallantry of Geesin, or a gram from Raicevic's medicine cabinet, but who knows? Ya might enjoy! I ain't Keither Fullerton-Whitman, but I'm sure he'd love to chew your lobes bout it if you'd just ask.

Bermuda Triangle - self-titled (Radioactive Records CD reissue)

If I said Ariel Pink happened already but you didn't hear me, would I make a sound? Wait, that's not it... Look, were there was such a thing as fate, every dog'd have its day. Thankfully there ain't, so spazz-lounge can crawl back in its sequin hole and wait for Quintron to walk by. Ok? Ok. Peace out.

Seriously avoid. If you must tiptoe to the mouth of the cave, Mark & Suzann Farmer's Space Hymns is a good-time dubbed-out karaoke wasteland alternative. Dig that.

Gravestone - Doomsday (Garden of Delights CD reissue, original LP on AVC)

Ho man, if you change the accents on this from German to Japanese, Julian Cope would knock down Stonehenge for a copy. TRUST. Released at the tail end of the 70s on a private label, this is the stoned parking lot wilderness of Krautrock. Let's call it zitty-prog. There's a monologue that sounds like it was fed through Babelfish a few too many times, bong-sweat jams, an uptempo metal thing with an unwarranted ESG bass line (?!), and an intense drum break from a dude that surely remembers they called it "crank" before they called it...well, you get it. Very "willful boys", they released a few more after this, but I wouldn't know nothin bout that.

Til next time, mind the difference between propellent and accelerant. Don't want it to get too hot in here.

MIXTAPE #1: HELL IS IN HELLO (and my ROTY 2011)

2012-01-16T11:22:00.000-05:00

I shudda done more promotin for this little broadcast--I mean, apart from the one-liner I sent out to about 12 people last night--but c'mon people. Can I really be expected to hold up such a bargain? This is for all y'all, sans loot, available whenever your wheezy little whim flexes. I gotta poke and pester ya, too?

It's been a long night. The title comes from Lee Marvin's song in Paint Your Wagon, but I took the song out and left the title cuz it seemed like a good'un for breakin the seal.

Don't remember much else about it's makin'. All I know is about 3 hours after I started I woke up in a tub fulla codeine and I ain't talkin a fancy tub. Only clawfoot in sight was mine.

I also wanted to use this fine occasion to name my RECORD OF 2011! One track off it appears on the mix, though I coulda used many. Just seemed like the right fit. This young feller spooked me right outta my drawers a few years ago and I aint' pulled em back up yet. It's Dan Melchior's Assemblage Blues, what everybody's been talkin up. Deserves them laurels and a bushel more. Stylistically, it feels like Peter Hammill skipped right from Nadir's Big Chance to A Black Box without even askin if yer ready (Pete is from Ealing, after all). There's all manner of plunder and mischief in these little tinctures and I'd wager there's plenty more where they came from. I was so sucked in, I just got round to Catbirds and Cardinals a week ago! (It's good, too!) So here's to Mr. Melchior and here's to my first hamfisted jab at mixtapes for the peoples. All 8 of you. Cheers!

contact Siltbreeze at sltrx@pil.net to get yer copy of the aforementioned!

hxxp://www.zshare.net/audio/988781147c62600e/
(link changed due to megaupload shutdown. Man, the folks over at Mutant Sounds must be cryin in their mead right about now!)

playlist:

Charlie Tweddle – Untitled (from Fantastic Greatest Hits)

Philip Perkins – Bird Variations #1 (from NeighborhoodWith A Sky)

Shagrat – The Coming of the Other One (Think Pink Version)(from Pink Jackets Required)

Dan Melchior – Riding Like Rommel (from Assemblage Blues)

Dr John – Glowing (from Babylon)

Richard Bone – R.K.M. (from Life In Video City)

Peter Hammill – A Motorbike In Afrika (from The FutureNow)

Departmentstore Santas – Hey (What’s Going On Here) (from Atthe Medieval Castle…)

Inflatable Boy Clams – I’m Sorry (from their 2x7")

Uncredited remix

TO GRAHAMY'S HOUSE WE GO

2011-12-30T01:42:00.001-05:00

Graham Lambkin

Amateur Doubles LP

Kye 2011

What pray tell is the sound of one man, one woman and one child listenin, you might ask? On this, the latest missive from the Lambkin camp, tis Graham and the clan, two classic platters uh fronch prog circa '75/'76 CE, and a Honda (also CE, I reckon). No, this ain't Graham runnin over sonny's big wheel while Richie Pinhas stirs a cocktail, but it do crunch & whimper just the same. Amateur Doubles continues your boy's streak of appropriated musics and environs a la Salmon Run, but I pegged Graham for a channel surfer back in the Tart epoch. You won't hear no Spanish lady counting for long dead operatives, but you will here the gentle embrace of Dutchess County innersections. And, of course, ya can count on all the time benders and detunes Poughkeepsie traffic surely inspires. Ok look see, it's hard to doll up a thing that sounds like itself, but I pegged Graham for that, too, a way's back. (It's a compliment, sure as God's holy!) What I can't figure is why nobody's chatted up the familial aspect here. We're all use-ta hearin Pole and Grancher holed up in our headphone trenches, but how many of us ever let em out of the house a spell? Blow the dust off, ya know? C'mon, they're family, right? Let em live a little! Some Amish among us is afraid just ta press the play button! What, contempo plunderers is just supposed ta chip away at the garbage and leave the good shit on the shelf?

Ask me, this shouldn't seem like sucha brave ride to Stop & Shop (though I sometimes had to belt a few just the same, but I were pushin carts), but it is. Which is why I'm closin this FYC year with another pat on Kye's back. Good hunting, my dear bothers! Oh wait, they've got a few. And you thought I wudn't gonna hook it up this holiday season.

LET YOUR DIGITS DUE THE WALKING - E.S./I.S. put out a tape

2011-11-26T17:41:00.001-05:00

E.S./I.S.

I Saw You Sister, Stand in the Effulgence cassette

Digitalis Industries 2011

Spose we're off on a synth kick lately, though I've yet to belch about it, ta be frank. E.S./I.S. (I'm tired of writing that already) seem about as in-bed (or Bed-In if you like) with the Digitalis folks as your briefs are your short-n-curlies. I know, it sounds like I'm about to start slaying them, but hitch high that elastic, Seymour, this is allll right by me--though, in all fairness, the title made me think one of these sods has a wimple somewhere in the closet. No matter. These crusty sundress-wearers elude all the gripe-y territories usually found in the Digitalis canon. Kissin cousins might be Luc Marianni's Souvenirs du Futur and Vangelis's Invisible Connections, in their mutual geeky mean-muggin & flimsy stasis. God's truth: the moments come when this is exactly what ya wanna hear.

I know this is a pygmy of a review, but I'm really just tryin to avoid havin ta write their name again. Or I start thinkin bout the title and suddenly wanna croak. But no! Don't mind me. The day I shit the bed, I will not comment on the wallpaper.

Looking ahead for more of the same, kids! Best thing I've heard from this label in maybe years.

BLANKSGIVING AHOY: An amuse bouche before the feasties and the beasties

2011-11-23T12:45:00.001-05:00

Oneohtrix Point Never

Replica LP 2011

Software/Mexican Summer

I ain’t yet put my eyebrows down from Returnal, andhere comes another full one from Mr. Lopatin, here channelin all sortsa mid-80slocal TV creepouts to outstanding effect. Kinda great how your boy just aboutchalks the line between Ryuichi Sakamoto’s score for Royal Space Force(the less Mickey Mousey bits, anyhoo) and that Two Daughters record, if you cansnort such a bump. Less grim than the latter and definitely less cheesy thanthe former, but a spot on the shelf he’s nonetheless cleaned off. I also hearthe alleged DJ Screw binges a lot more here than befo’, though all thisgum-waving don’t do the business like this. And If ya think ya needsa Brittanica-scalerecall of synth gear to enjoy these sides, I advise you to put yer RAM tobetter use. That’s just ain’t the key, pally!

Get yer musicks

PLEASE GIVE GENEROUSLY

2011-11-18T01:39:00.001-05:00

I'm really not kidding.

http://melchiorfund.blogspot.com/

POTLUCK AT MY PLACE! (DON'T BRAISE THE MANDOLIN!)

2011-09-17T17:11:00.002-05:00

Village of Spaces

Alchemy and Trust CD/LP

Corleone 2011

Whatsa friendly fool like this doin climbin my staircase? Get behind me, pretty! Honest to you, I can't recollect the last time such an autumnal tumble of leafy itch and scratch came over for some mead with the likes of me. These days, my heart pumps about as warm n sweet as a crushed crab apple, specially when it come to the work of sweatered and Sauconied faux-crackers like these folks.

Though, don't misapprehend: I done-sensed the creek-drunk waiver of Caethua not 5 steps in and I was right and all was better for it. Village of Spaces is, I take it, the Uke of Spaces Corners wearin another walk-in, and she's part. I spose Frederick Wiseman was right about Belfast, ME: ain't nothin to do but count the seagulls and freeze to death, so it makes sense they'd team up. Though, I don't know who's mum ponied for the trek to vibe with Hurley on that other coast. Road trip, brah! Much as I dig this (after-dinner-outside-hemp-bracelet-sweat-ring that it is), I worry the lost, trespassin Bozo Texino quality of, say, 06's So Far on the Way might near blink out by same time next year. You can still catch the quease and moan treatment on "Buoy Gong" and in the slightly listing harmonies throughout, but that's the rub, darlin: slightly.

Oh well, I'm just pickin nits to keep my finger out my nose. These are dire days for all of us. This is damn good! Maybe somebody'll get a new Volvo station wagon outta this goat rodeo. Well, a new old one.

ARCHIVAL SMUDGES: The Lost Fuck You Counselor Years

2011-09-01T21:45:00.001-05:00

Dwarr - Starting Over, private press 1984
(Figgered I'd toss this one into yer lap, seein as Dwarr's follow-up just got reished by Yoga/Drag City sometime ago. Twas of the times at the time. But, you know, wine ain't gettin any colder. -Ed.)

Yikes! This is a goddamn goose chase. For some reason, this lp gets dunce-capped with the abysmal underground doom metal of the 80s, when this is really just super-moody borderline chamber-prog-folk. Yeah, Duane sings like Ozzy on a narco bender and there's the occasional Birmingham d-drop, but this has way more in common (albeit probably by stumbles) with Stan Hubbs covering Van der Graaf Generator. Do as you wish, fellow busriders, but every passenger knows when to ring the bell, ya ask me.

PERMANENT SHOTGUN

2011-08-29T20:07:00.003-05:00

Weyes Blood & The Dark Juices
The Outside Room LP
Not Not Fun, 2011

The note left on the hotel window read, “I walk a lonely street.” He could well have been a record collector.

Record sluts like us contribute almost nothing to the arts aside, of course, from financial support in 10 and 20 dollar increments over a lifetime. It still seems like a ghastly descent into the hands of the artists, however much we love our dealers (and want them to love us). And, sure, when you consume at this quantity this urgently there are sure to be corners turned and miles marked. But look at me. I live like a memory junkie—sitting here, tipping back capfuls of Rabarbaro, listening to Lazy Smoke like I’m in some mid-afternoon TLC-produced reenactment of myself; a grim, flaxen-faced imagining of long-blown-out wilderness. In ear years, I feel more like 67 than 27. And when I start stuffing hearing aids in with wax- and dust-clotted fingers, I’ll know the buzz is over and a swamp of hum and crackle is beginning.

So, it is with the shake of a meth-wrinkled hand that I crook a thumb for Weyes Blood and the Dark Juices—though it’s probably more the shake from the initial unease of another Jackie-O Motherfucker alum spinning in my house. (Though, as Richard Belzer once recited, “Junkies will always pick quantity over quality.”—Ed.) This one beats the rap, though there were times I expected Hope Sandoval to hook a black widow nail around the corner and sing back-up. But it all worked out. Queasy waves of the dirty penny stench that emanates from all great heroin music are pooling all ‘round this LP and, for now, that’s all well and good. Hopefully, they’re just like me: shotgun, never steering. Nice to see Not Not Fun branching out into the Desertshore crowd!

ASSUME THE LOTUS POSITION AND COUGH

2011-08-28T17:04:00.004-05:00

J. D. Emmanuel
Trance-Formation 1: Ancient Minimal Meditations
(Aguirre Records ZORN14)

Somewhere in the Midwest of the 1980s is a lawn chair beside a card table in a basement, waiting for J.D. Emmanuel, hoping he’ll roll a save or go chaotic neutral; stay a little longer for taco-flavored corn chips and cold grape Nehi; cups his cheeks while his friends put on Bo Hansson, Deuter and Harmonia at the wrong speed; maybe tip back the bottle they found in the cupboard, adjusting the level with water to avoid suspicion; discuss the upgrade to the 20-sided die. But no.

He had to go off to that retreat, where the floors are dressed in thatch rugs and the breeze is free of mildew and Irish Spring, and an old man plays a sweaty flute. To be fair, things didn’t go totally wrong. J.D.’s still J.D. somehow somewhere. I’m just not sure about the crowd he’s running with.

THE FLAMING DRAGONS OF MIDDLE EARTH - The Seed of Contempt

2011-03-13T16:02:00.002-05:00

LP on Feeding Tube Records, 2010

Now that all the fogies have squirmed their way into the dirt, no longer body warm nor fire-brained, we can finally have some fun of our own. This LP, shmooshed together from years of home-recordings and rehearsals...
details, details--you know what? Who cares.

Need to know: This is everything great about the timeless combo of youth and volume; when rules are disregarded, not in an attempt to divorce from academic rigor, but because no one can remember them. Or maybe no one knew them to begin with. Isn't that basically what's also great about the entire story of contemporary music?

That being said, you think you know what this sounds like and you are so very wrong. It's much better, much more passionate and much less clever-clever collegiate misfit bong hit bonanza. If the word ever meant anything to begin with, then these kids "shred."

Don Van Vliet is dead. Long live Danny Cruz.

If you don't like this, leave me alone and enjoy what's left of your civilized world.

TOO EARLY (OR LATE?) TO BE SO PISSED, VOLUME 1

2010-09-12T08:51:00.006-05:00

Autre Ne Veut - s/t (Olde English Spelling Bee)
"Hypnagogic-pop" is part of that latter-day parlancery trying to substitute criticism with description: if there's an umbrella for it, ideally invented on the Internet, it must be good. The cat behind Autre Ne Veut is more in the hypnopompic-pop spectrum (if I can fire the first semantic volley at y'all candy asses), rubbing his morning wood in a permanently groggy state while the late-80s Prince record he found on Itunes the nigth before becomes an inadequately remembered dream. Wait--it would be inadequate anyway.

All the Volcanic Tongues (Shame on Heather Leigh Murray & Co for self-deprecatingly big-upping this shit biscuit!) in the world couldn't lick this thing into consciousness. People who only feel things publicly in a post-ironic-ironic state of ecstasy will have much to ooze over, however. Ferinstance, the fond remembrance of making up pop songs in front of your mirror as a lad or lass, using a brush as a microphone--not because of how fun it was, or because those songs were so great, but because of how much they miss that Ocean Pacific shirt they were wearing. Not to mention the British Knight hightops.
If your sorry ass is interested, check here first. Or eat a madeleine and shut the fuck up.

RUSTIER, FURRIER, BUT PROBABLY JUST AS DRUNK - One last romp in Ol Bill's honor

2010-02-25T18:01:00.006-05:00

Here I am again, yanked from the anonymity of everyday life back into the strange, detached anonymity of the Internet. Not that anyone was plying me with tenured positions, free records, or even a wank in the Aldi parking lot with a powdered glove. I'm here on a mission.
Granted, it's a mission adopted by scores of others all over the jernt in the past few months as the waves of year-end jizz have dictated. But no matter. The tide has subsided and there is, perhaps, finally enough room for my gargantuan ego to stand and say, "Yeah me, too."
At the same time, this was not an easy piece to write. All the other critics seem to harp on the violence, the destruction, so easily gleaned from a record made by one-half of Harry Pussy. They all kind of read like PR sheets, too, which is just as unsurprising as it is disappointing, because this is a pretty personal record. Slapping all that marketing rhetoric on it just ain't couth, if you ask me.
Then again, personal has become sort of a dirty word. By "personal" I do not mean "intimate" like Jackson C. Frank or "outsider" like Bobb Trimble. No, sir. I am talking about personal narrative.
Let us, then, begin at the beginning.
History is smeared all over the acoustic axe like cheap lacquer. It has as many instrumental brothers, sisters and cousins around the world as the drum or the horn. It is also, perhaps, the most cliched, most overused instrument in western music and, consequently, the least-likely to blow me away. It's been distorted, smashed, detuned, prepared, played with a towel and an electric window fan, and yet remains, unequivocally itself. I have, in that sense, as much respect for it as distaste. I heard a lot of solo acoustic records this year, like many years; some old, some recent, and some brand new; some impressive, some momentarily resonant, and some totally forgettable. Rarely do I hear a record whose relish and loathing for the acoustic guitar resonate so strongly with me. Because it is on that rich and storied history that Bill Orcutt meditates.
But let's get something straight: this ain't some post-Alan Watts, post-Axonda, sandal-wearing, raga-taking, Zen snooze button. Bill ain't poppin' a squat on an Indian rug or letting the breeze roll through his beard as he sways in a hammock. This shit is lllllllooooouuuuuddd. Even with the notch on the volume knob staring at your shoes, it's loud. Every kind of loud. It buzzes and snaps and shrieks, wrapped in the quivering aura of an actual room. An honest to Christ room! Engines start, phones ring, floors creak--all of which make the weight and breadth of Orcutt's playing even more miraculous because there is no artifice. It could be happening next door. It's heavy and fast, slow and burning, taut and rapturous.
Of course, what was great about Orcutt back in the day is still alive and well; those serpentine figures still mince the air into crystalline matchsticks like an unholy usuba knife and he still does brake-stands on the E-string like nobody else. But there are also koto-like vibratos and ragtime slides in all directions. I'd call it a clinic, but that would be give you the impression this was one of those stiff, Derek Bailey derivatives. And I'd call it a blues record if that, too, hadn't become such a dirty word.
So, what is it, then? A throwback? An homage? An attempt to write the acoustic guitar into the 21st century?
No. It's an exorcism. Orcutt has calculatedly--but no less passionately--coaxed out all the ghosts dormant in those Kay guitars out of the musty basements of every plucker in Thee United States and into the streets for one last amp-draining zombie rampage; ghosts so misshapen and worm-eaten as to be barely recognizable. That could be Blind Lemon Jefferson gnawing on a SK-54, or just Sharrock chewing Karen Dalton LPs; Arto Lindsay getting his head shortened by a Bell Huey, or an 18th century riti player clubbing Rowland Howard with a slab board Strat. (But now I'm mixing my metaphors.) Who the fuck knows. They all, in whatever hellish state, can be glimpsed in the fracas.
In the end, it's the inspiration that gets me. This isn't that impulsive, peristaltic kind that usually kills on contact. No, I'm guessing Bill's been teasing this hound for a minute now. If we're lucky, this and that here-today 7" (also released in limited #s on Orcutt's own Palilalia) are but the first of many snarls to come.
Here's to the ensuing mayhem. May it never quite put the period on the history of the acoustic guitar.
Stupid fucking thing...

PISS OFF, COUNSELOR

2009-03-04T17:20:00.002-05:00

I think that's it for me. Stick with Kobak, Lax and (if you like) Mosurak. They know what they're doing. One less putz is exactly what the Internet music "writing" community needs but will never ask for. So I guess it's a favor.
I'll be writing silly stories on my other thing if you feel like moseying over.

Take the cake & ditch the icing,
WRNRTH

Beer and Groaning In Atlanta: Your Unwanted Year-End Child

2008-12-16T13:43:00.000-05:00

Oh the past the past the past. I can't look at it. The past includes yesterday, which I spent rolling around on a couch, trying to deal with the hallucinations brought on by some yellowish, viscous medicine that tasted of banana syrup and chalk. It was supposed to dull the weariness of an upper-respiratory infection--instead, it surrounded me with distant atonal bells and the feeling that everything was too tight. I woke up 2 hours later, ate everything in the house, and went back to bed where I slept for about 15 hours. In the gluttonous interim, I can remember watching something about sleep deprivation and trying to call everyone I know at once. I wanted them to be worried about what would happen if they didn't sleep. In the future, I'll just drink a gallon of water and cover myself in Vicks Vapo-Rub. No more things that come in tiny plastic cups.

I've decided Mississippi Records is my Record Label of 2008 because I can't deal with the dearth of alternatives. However, Sacred Bones comes to mind as a close second. I don't have a Record of the Year.

CUTTING UP WITH THE JONESES

2008-11-14T21:30:00.004-05:00

Before I head out to stuff slow-food fans with vegan-friendly black bean soup* in the faraway (read: dull) countryside, I figure I'd clean out my ears first-like. The early morning trek looms like a grumpy hippo, so this night's done and called. Anyhow, there ain't a single smudge on this triptych, which is either a sign that the world really is brighter these days or I'm just spooning my wits away with each 4oz sample cup. Ticket, please. Sour cream and red sauce with that?

Human Eye- Fragments of the Universe Nurse LP, Hook or Crook 2008
I'll try to make this a quick and dirty sell: If pretty much all you want out of a "punk" record these days is a seemingly uncontrollable behemoth, blundering in and out of sister genres like, your unwieldy biker friend but ultimately holding it together through a lead guitar hissing and pissing like a stray cat, this one's for you. And me. The 'Buy' button is your savior.

Los Llamarada - Take the Sky LP, S-S Records 2008
Developing, harnessing and setting fire to a (recently acquired?) satchel fulla riffs is the task of the day in Monterrey, it seems. That and how to keep those three fingers between you and the snarling black hole at the end of your bed. Kind of a treat to see a band cuttin teeth and wax at the same time, like Jad Fair & Co used to do. I'm psyched for the Los Llamarada-related project Love Is So Fast LP what might be blowin in the 'Breeze come January, according to Midheaven. Mine eyes are peeled. In the meantime, this is stuck in all the ol familiar maws.

Home Blitz - Weird Wings 12" EP, Unknown Parts 2008

It's a testament to this little band's greatness that I was able to temporarily disengage from the free jazz tear I'm on (Leroy Jenkins, Marion Brown, Alan Silva) without gettin all crampy. I keep reading about an overwhelming Messthetics presence on this 5-song frisbee, but I'm guessing there's a copy of What Makes A Man Start Fires on somebody's floor, too. So, there you go. Bleach Boys taping over the Minutemen. They ran with it; I followed; you should, too. Pretty essential frivolty in the 08. Try Florida's Dying on for size.

*Vegan only so's I don't gotta hear the whines of wanderin trustafarians with wee ones in tow. I imagine this festival will be spewing them all over the park like cheap swill. Cheers, eh what.

ON AN UNKNOWN BEACH (CORPSE PAINT OPTIONAL)

2008-11-13T12:48:00.005-05:00

Circle of Ouroborus - Venerations lp, self-released 2008 Remember that Mammal record on Animal Disguise? Lonesome Drifter? Okay, so imagine if that had been adapted by Peter Jefferies or Alasdair Galbraith. Now imagine that album played by amateur Finnish dudes. Now realize that their last 800 releases have been black metal in one way or another. Insert periodic, unidentifiable percussion (Castanets? Finger snaps? Faulty wiring?) and record the whole thing in a musty cathedral. Now take a nap. You've earned it.
I'd call it essential for followers of that pedigree, but there are about as many of them as there are copies of this record in existence. I kind of like it, but I also eat offal, so keep that grain of salt handy. Scour the eBays, you wispy New Zealand trolls.

CIRCUITAL BREATHING

2008-11-02T14:26:00.005-05:00

Rafael Toral - Space Solo 1 LP reissue, Taiga Records 2008

(Just a note before I dive in: the cover really is really the most Raster-Noton throwaway I've seen in a long time. Deep in sad, limp, Touch Records-territory. It's a real shame. The vinyl is either red or white, depending on how fast you run to the label site.)

Synthesizers: maligned by six-string knuckledraggers, sublimated by scores of creepy krauts & Euros, and occasionally made innarestin' by out-there jazzbos and the skin-tight-black-leather-wouldbe-punk set. That about cover it? You know, ya got yer haters, your Snowy Reds, your Klaus Schulzes, your Tod Dockstaders, your Sun Ras (well, one really), and yer Primitive Calculators. Everybody doesn't like them but nobody hates them. Right. So where's the next chapter?
The next chapter, as you might expect, nicked some pages from an earlier draft. The Sun Ra draft, thankfully. Rafael Toral's transformation from a gauzy, Fennesz-y, drinking white wine in your backyard with friends from Brussels-y, guitar-based droner to his present incarnation as a free-improv collaborator and mad scientist pricked my ears right quick. It'd take a technical mind to explain how Toral goes about feedin all manner of homemade plunder into his Doepfer modular synth, so I'll skip the procedural section of this talkie. Just know that, at his best, the man is like Kaoru Abe goin feet-first into a gravitationally completely collapsed star, if you know what I'm sayin. Sun Ra treated the Moog like it was a piano married to a protractor. Toral's movements, like the second on "Portable Amplifier," can feel as...how shuddaputit...peristaltic as Ra's but without the statement-ending blurts or woozy fizzles, leading to a strangely library-LP feel in the end. That is, it never threatens to lose itself, which might be my sole complaint about this record. This may also be due to the generally handheld feel and limited tonal vocab of Toral's source gadgetry.
I gotta say, it's a tricky path to snake, specially if'n you're makin it up as you go. Yet, somehow, there's some deftness, some historic sensibility detectable in these faint-yet-screechy grooves. Hell, if anything, it's a way more adventurous road than his last. Will appeal to fans of the Creel Pone aesthetic, the freakier end of 80s minimal synth mayhem, anyone down with scouring the BYG/Actuel back catalog, or folks than dug the bent-electronics parts of Chris Corsano's The Young Cricketer (I dug all of it). Minneapolis-based younguns Taiga Records'll probably cut you the best deal, if not Mimaroglu.

TO EVERY SEASON, TURD TURD TURD

2008-10-20T20:45:00.004-05:00

Having prepped a garbage bag full of kale at the restyrant while weaving in and out of passing electrical wires and carpenters hitting on my 61-year-old coworker (and, no, 61 is not a dyslexic typo), on a stomach empty save for a cup of Dancing Goat and a fistful of atomic fireballs, I came home starved and delirious. Through the ride and behind dead-bolts, these two thangs, for betta or wurs, was on my mind and in my ears.

Size - El Diablo en el Cuerpo, cassette reissue 2008
No idea what groupa folks decided this shouty, herky, late-70s/early-80s Mexican synthy-punk-wave anthology oughta rejoin the fold, but my hat's off my head and out the room to em. This band housed the amphetamine-fed circuitry of the Screamers and Units in a Southwest proto-punk wood-and-clay box. The keyboard lines in "Lucrative Methods" would've made Eric Burden blush. Boy, they had some prickly career changes, too; check the primpy, Neue Deutsche Welle squiggles on the title cut for evidence. Cumulatively, I don't know. If ya treat each moment as just that, its a bit more engaging. Hopefully, needles everywhere can strike a proper LP reissue of this someday, but for now, my Technics tape deck is spinnin purdy.
Sacred Bones'll getcha.

Gary War - The New Raytheonport LP, Shdwply Records 2008
Hoooo, I wanna carve Brooklyn off the map so bad sometimes. Then this kinda shit hits the deck and I remember that, most of the time, bein right's just about the most overrated feeling in human history. Granted, it borrows from R. Stevie Moore-fanboy Ariel Pink as often as it purrs and rubs against Mayo Thompson's leg. But, once again, the tried-and-true lenses of Oar, Barrett, and Twin Infinitives sees it all through. Cracked, but in-control--since we're probably talkin bout the trustfund district of New Weird America. If it came out on ESP-Disk around the time of Yodeling Astrologer, it'd probably be some kind of legend by now... In this way, The New Raytheonport says something about the tried-and-true real estate cliche, too: location, location, location. This is absolutely perfectly completely okay.
$10ppd in the US, courtesy Shdwply Records.

THE VIVIAN GIRLS

2008-10-19T10:15:00.002-05:00

Is it wrong that I want them to be ugly?

THESE ARE DIFFERENT TIMES

2008-10-10T22:32:00.000-05:00

Hank IV - Refuge In Genre LP, Siltbreeze 2008

I'd never write a review the same way twice. Back when it dropped, I popped a squat on the Nothing People LP--admittedly, while blushing with guilt. I dismissed it mainly cuz its wellies was stuck in old mud. And, sure, it's fun to think, "geez, this coulda come out back then" but only until you get to the "but wait...it came out now" part. There weren't enough "now" on that record for me to feel it was anything but a collector scum throwback, a wink and a nudge to knowing parties.
Now, hold back them horses. I ain't about to give NP the all's-forgiven cuz the new Hank IV is kinda the perfect embodiment of what Anonymous coulda been.
Back when I was in the neo-natal unit, Hank IV's Bob MacDonald was shredding his throat and rending his garments in unhinged Denver hardcore outfit Bum Kon. Anthony, Andy, Chris, and Scott, the other members of Hank IV, all got equally hefty resumes that include stints like Icky Boyfriends, Resineators (!) yadda yadda yadda. As much as I love the IBs, Hank IV is easily the best band any of these cats been in this decade--and this ain't about the ol days!
See, Hank IV don't wear the past like a badge or wave it like a flag. It's a spirit. Same spirit running through The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, Kick Out the Jams, Vincebus Eruptum, or even We Care So You Don't Have To. They don't gotta say what they're gonna do before they do it. The best bits from Refuge In Genre, like Third Person Shooter and the Dirty Poncho single, squeeze and rattle on a lower chakral level. They give you a normal rock pretense--girls, cars, arguments--then blaze away.
Those of you sweatin the Tim Green (Fucking Champs) and Bob Weston (Shellac) involvement need to remind yerselves of the separation between crotch and heart. If anything, Green taps the spiget of heaviness that was waiting in their sound the whole time. Check cuts like "Drive the Whip," "Symptomatic," or "Sorry Bout the Boat Race," if ya need proof.
Elsewhere, there's evil stompers ("Get It Straight"), TexMex you'd wanna eat ("My Anger"), and plenty of 'tude to spare. Shit, it won't even take a half hour to get you drastic! High destroyability is waiting in these grooves. I'm tellin you straight. I might even believe it tomorrow.
Ride the 'Breeze or load a few here.

OF PARASOLS AND BACKMASKING

2008-10-08T22:33:00.005-05:00

Mark Tucker - In the Sack CD Reissue, De Stijl Records 2008

I ain't got time for folks what can cram themselves in pigeonholes. Rats can stretch their bodies down to the diameter of their skulls, too, ya know.
Thankfully, the people that never fit somehow find one another. Take De Stijl Records. Hard to say what is and ain't apropo for them to distribute in mass quantities. Lee Rockey, Hototogisu, Black Vial--somewhere up there's an umbrella they're all ahuddled under. But near as I can tell, if anything's holding it up, it's the Mark Tucker reissues. Consumate fringe persona? Check. Career-altering nervous breakdowns? Natch. Tugging at the folk idiom escape hatch like some beardo weirdo Tex Avery drawing? Half-cocked concept albums? Shit yes. 'S all in there somewhere, innit? No, literally. It ain't hard to pull anybody's ear to an number of moments on this one, Tucker's last ride from back in 82. There's some Davies and a touch of "Cypress Avenue," even, in "Everywhere With Sally (Ride)" (written backwards, recorded so's it goes frontwards). A hat is tipped to Ron Geesin on intermissions like "The Importance of Making Mole Hills Out of Specks." And, among other exciting shit, one can make out graphite sketches of Vivian Stanshall, Surf's Up-era Beach Boys, and the ugly mug of Tom Rapp peering over the precipice like Kilroy's emaciated ghost. Did I mention it might be about a post-apocalyptic future...and the postal service? Not that it matters by the third shift in direction.
See, records that hit so many notes often leave you with only a vivid image of the maker's turntable favs, but this one...somewhere in there is a voice; one trying to sing through every vessel in reach. So by the time you reach tracks like "Can't Make Love," a music-hall-via-Bobb-Trimble jig, and realize it was preceded by a phony radio station ad, your doubts and wonders get sucked out the back of your noggin. Who cares. Just let it happen. The edge is always where the good shit goes down. At least De Stijl's made sure Tucker's got some shade out there.
If any of this mess looked like a meal, ol' Clint from De Stijl can set the table.

NANCY SINGS--AGAIN! Scorces - I Turn Into You Dbl-LP, Not Not Fun Records 2008

2008-09-05T19:47:00.006-05:00

If Texas weren't the reddest of the red states, overrun with belching oil tycoons and croakies-rockin off-roaders, would it still produce Roky Erickson and homicidal codeine-addicted MCs? Or is it that kind of environment that makes those cracked Texas greats so great? Ever since I heard Mayo Thompson, the Lone Star's had an asterisk affixed to it, with a footnote that reads, "There's something going on that's not quite right..." I's this dichotomy that's kept me innerested in all the eerie, dusted ooze what's been coming outta Austin and Houston, and there ain't no better example than Tom and Christina Carter of Charalambides. Christina and Heather Leigh Murray (whose LP on NNF last year grew on me like a fine patina) have been cookin along as Scorces since round the turn of the century, I reckon. Whether mixing vox with pedal steel, chord organ, or the ol 6-string, their wind-blown siren songs'll transfix you right outta your lawn chair.
And speaking of dichotomy! I Turn Into You reeks of dualism more than a pair of wound-up vipers. No hissing here, though; just a delicate longing, illuminated by thin strands of voice and strings, rising and falling like VLF sparklers. I dunno. I always get this epic art-house vibe from them. For instance, the side-long opener, "Coming To A Forgotten Part," evokes the slow, but inevitable erosion of identity between the central characters in Bergman's Persona. Shit, the whole record's wrapped in the well-worn flannel of the Bill Stafford tracks in My Own Private Idaho--another warped-mirror kinda flick. It looks like a fucked-up face, all right!
I'll admit, this ain't the sorta Texas fare that makes you wanna glug Shiner Bock and toss M-80s offa Nugent's porch, but c'est la vie. There's a whole lotta dirt and scrub out there and I'll be damned if Scorces don't make me wanna take fistfulls of mescal and whistle up a butte. Road trip!
Mail your currency to Not Not Fun, who are making up for the lop-sided Bored Fortress series RIGHT quick. Keep em comin, I say. I love being wrong.

NO, WAIT! IT WAS 2 IN A ROOM! U.S. Girls - S/T cassingle, Hardscrabble Amateurs 2008

2008-09-02T22:36:00.006-05:00

I can't think of a more oddly maligned format than the cassingle. Maybe it's because the last time I saw one was on the floor of a friend's car, beneath an empty fast food sack and a crushed pack of Kools. I think it was Dee-lite. Even if it wern't, I'm sure y'all have an equally moldy example bobbing on your brainsurf.
If I was you, I'd replace it with this U.S. Girls cassingle. Helmswoman Megan Remy is tugging the thread that links forces as diverse as Jandek, The Dead C, and shortwave radio at 3am. In all these things we see the human face swimming up out of a dark and abject sea. If you dug the LP on Siltbreeze (apparently the very first material Remy recorded solo), this terse lil two-sider oughta whet you enough for one last Slip-n-Slide. Summer's over, so take your shirt off while you still can. And pick this up. It's $2ppd and I hot-footed it on the review here so's it wouldn't be a eulogy--meaning, I don't think they made a ton.
Pay thru a pal here, why don'tcha, then try n convince me that blue gouache eye peekin out from behind a feathered mask ain't haunting your bedtime. Just try it.

DON'T LET THE DEER DRAG YOU DOWN - Grouper - Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill CD/LP, Type Records, 2008

2008-08-30T20:26:00.005-05:00

Even considerin' Liz Harris of Grouper's predilection for REM-state drones and those piano-and-vox moments on Tried, I can't say I saw this 4AD-weened babe a-comin'. I'll admit, I spun her last full-length, Wide, a few times and was optimistic that maybe there were a vision in there somewheres. Well, maybe I was jumpin' the proverbial. I was convinced there'd be a great Grouper record someday, but brother, this ain't it. When Harris' ideas bleed through, this approaches sumpthin special. Tracks like "Disengage" and the title cut wind the folk through the drone in long, soft braids. (And the recording's bloody gorgeous, as always.) Harris is takin' logical steps on those tracks, but that don't mean they been drained of surprises. The rest of Dragging A Dead Deer, however, is equal parts His Name Is Alive, Jessica Bailiff, and This Mortal Coil. Now, if that pedigree is really your cuppa, I can't think of a more suitable addition to yer shelf. Me? I had a Cranes record one time. That stuff works in David Lynch's movies and that's about it.
I might not be holdin' my breath for that great Grouper record no more, but I'm not really holdin' my nose at this neither, know whatta mean? The CD version can be got from Mimaroglu and Forced Exposure. Don't know 'bout the LP.

LINCOLNSHIRE POACHERS - 3 Confounding Multinational Transmissions

2008-07-27T14:33:00.012-05:00

INQUIET - Inq Beyong, Brother Sister Recordings 2008
"World music" affectations trampled by any sorta collective of animals just don't spell "attention glue" round here. But being that we are speaking of artist-run, micro-labels out of Melbourne, Australia, I remain drunkenly optimistic, as I can think of no similar circumstances with a totally poor outcome. I'm particularly amped for the Hirasakana Oyogu disc recorded on a mountain. I mean, why not?
Check & wreck as you will.

WOLD - Stratification CD, Profound Lore 2008
If Whitehouse fall in the woods and no one hears them, will there still be a limited to 50 box set? No, hang on; that's not how that one goes. Is it, "...will they ever find their way back to irrelevance?" No, that's not it either. Look, here's what I'm drivin at: this disc by solemn Saskatchewanans Wold (or is it WOLD?) is sort of a noise record made by sort of noise dudes who'd rather think of themselves as black metal dudes because a noise record with raspy growling by any other name would automatically sell more...oh, there I go again. Wold's first album, LOTMP, sounded like Ulver (circa Nattens Madrigal) and [a particularly pissy] Michio Kadotani reenacting the "last transmission" scene from Event Horizon. This one and Screech Owl? Eh. Go ahead and dig out tags like "endurance" if you must; if all I'm actually enduring is 9-minutes of dopey power electronics, you can tag me "unkvlt" while you're at it. I can live with that.
Frosty groves await you here.

U.S. GIRLS - Introducting... LP, Siltbreeze 2008
The sixth (by my count) missive from the Siltbreeze camp in the 08 is a doozy. Yeah sure, that Sic Alps LP is the new shit. But as a critic, it's like running into somebody I already know and like on a particularly good night. I like it. I feel no need to toss one laurel further; scores of dudes will do that for me. This, on the other hand? This is a new friend. Somebody y'all should meet.
Megan Remy, the solitary lass behind Chicago's U.S. Girls, conjures nothing less than the Shangri-Las, marooned on an off-shore oil rig, transmitting forlorn songs of love and loss through a demolished loudspeaker. Her siren broadcasts carry like the din of fireworks in distant, pulsating clouds. Those looking to latch onto familiar land can head right to the Bruce Springsteen and Kinks covers ("Prove It All Night" and "Days" respectively) to see Ms Remy leak voodoo like a haunted Exxon Valdez. Grab the buckets.
Send a flare or hunt for an SOS. Either way, you'll be glad you did.

SOOTHING SEEPAGE! As eloquent as I get, and I'm talking about the Anals

2008-07-14T21:57:00.005-05:00

Sometimes when you walk into a house, restaurant or bar, an atmospheric consort quickly settles on you like a comforting snowfall. Maybe it's the lighting, the smells from the kitchen, or the looks on a few new faces. Whatever it is, you feel immediately a part of whatever's happening and you want to keep it that way. Records, in my experience, are no different. The right sequence of elements, whether expected or not, can change the listening experience into something beyond sensory.
So I feel it necessary to mention that less than 15 seconds into the debut and solitary-outing of French duo the Anals, I was instantly at home. It happened with those bands creeping out of Monterrey, Mexico, too, and in much the same way. A few simple notes on the keyboard and the trust of hands and feet and I was sold. I've already played it three times this afternoon and I won't be sleepy for hours. Granted, after giving the Anals a listen you may decide that my "home sweet home" is a damp and unpleasantly eerie parking lot regularly frequented by undesirables. Hey, everyone needs somewhere to lay their head. There's something gleefully disaffected about the Anals' rhythmic synth punk, like they're lovingly relishing the aftermath of their destructive early-twenties. I'm still there, so I've been treating this as a biting satire of 20/20 hindsight; a way of looking back that I can look...forward...to. And if you're making punk records in the 21st century, isn't that what it oughta be about?
Send jer drool & confetti to Sweet Rot.

DID I REALLY SAY "A TERSE KLUSTER?" Things I Said About Things I Heard

2008-06-26T21:23:00.009-05:00

I'm forgoing the review of Psychedelic Horseshit/Fabulous Diamonds/Suitcases et al from the other night because there was, for reasons I may never know, a strange air of hostility and apathy in the room. Don't get it, didn't dig it. All I'll add is that I went home and shaved off my mustache in one blunt, unceremonious gesture. (It felt different having it on the island. If I couldn't be the Gorton's fisherman, I might as well be a grizzled deckhand, right? Well, the high seas are far behind me now, if you get what I mean. I'm not sure I do...)
Now, moving swiftly along: Records. I got them. I heard them. I thought about them, drank with them, and generally gave them far more attention than some worthy humans I know. Hey, when the sit-in to protest my phone number gets crankin', I'll put the headphones down. In the meantime, I'm trying to decompress. Culture shock. Y'all have things like stoplights and fast food here. I just returned from the 1940s. I had forgotten about billboards and the stale unction of chicken tenders.

FABULOUS DIAMONDS - Self-Titled LP, Siltbreeze, 2008
Sorry, but when a mint band from Australia shows up in your town, on a tour where they're unlikely to break even, buy one of their records. Hell, buy two. Gas and plane tickets is spensive. Even if they're dicks (they were actually lovely!), you gotta have sympathy for people who are probably traveling with dudes whose code of ethics includes "infrequent bathing." Give an Aussie a break! Plus, the records are good! This keys/sax-and-drums duo screw with recorded time like nothing else runnin, all the while reminding me of a terse Kluster, Teja with live drums, the underbelly of early Primitive Calculators, and the earnest disarray of the Delta 5. They can call out the tunes or call in the demons; either way the songs float by like an echo in the night. Less frustrating, more...appetizing. And when they stretch out (you know, 3 minutes), boy does it pay. Praise be to short elpees.
The seven-inch on Nervous Jerk is still around and worth all of the 8 or so minutes it'll cost you. Help them sell out the press. Plus, it's an amuse bouche to this amuse bouche to this...

NOTHING PEOPLE - Anonymous LP, S-S Records, 2008
I tried. I really did. Backwards, forwards, sideways, perpendicular, four abreast, in the car, on the porch, with and without headphones, with and without beer, before and after cigarettes, before and after science, with the TV on mute, with the cat on vibrate, shoes or no shoes, and I can't for the life of me care about this. Rock in most of its incarnations, to me of late, is grandpa stuff. This ain't the summer I asked for.

KRAUT IS THE NEW BLACK - 6 Bands and Twenty-One Hot Inches In Me

2008-06-21T22:59:00.004-05:00

Having rolled back into the South, sore (in many ways) from the trip and the pre-trip ordeal, I've set up some semblance of a stereo in a dusty alcove...somewhere. I don't know. At this point, the moment I leave the city but am still close to a state road, everywhere looks like everywhere else. If I play my cards right, this is a layover, not a chapter.
While resisting the urge to unpack and phone up locals who might still wanna know me I've listened to some things. These are they.

STRIBORG/SCURSHAHOR split 7", Southern Lord, 2008
My love of the sole Tasmanian black metal act Striborg is earnest and deep. For those who consider black metal suspect, I assure you the Striborg approach is more Peter Grudzien than Profanatica. His opener, the aptly monikered "Psychedelic Nightmare" is a thumpy and hissy lil capsule bearing familial resemblance to the dark humidity of Pierre Henry's Le Voyage at one moment and an unhinged Silver Apples at the next. Other than that, this got no kin what's recognizable to my ears. "Syncopated Pandemonium" is heavy but not at all tired or even metal, really, in the tradition of Circle of Ouroboros or Sapthuran. I believe in Sin Nanna.
Scurshahor is probably an Oren Ambarchi one-off, given the credentials, the label, and, well, the way it fucking sounds. "Malicious Resplendence" gets you Sissy Spacek drum crumbling on top of chipped Remko Scha axes. There might be vocals, or there maybe there's a bee in my suit. I get why queues of drone dudes dig the black metal and all. Unfortunately, their love is meddled with fear, so their forays into black metal-inspired hum-and-thud come off as pastiche, not participation. I'm sure as shit cats like Ambarchi dig old punk, too, but history's taught them that digital deconstructions of that stuff is a bad and unmarketable idea. At least this probably moved some units. Unfortunately for whomever Scurshahor is (...), I gotta hate the player and the game.
(Also: the plastic inner sleeve? Seriously? Didja get a grant from the Glad family? Just wrap the thing in pig-iron why don't you. I'm lucky this survived the trip between the box and the player so many times.)

SHEPHERDS/IGNATZ - Bored Fortress split 7", Not Not Fun, 2008
We're winding into the end of the BF singles club for this year. If you read my last installment, I ain't so keen on what NNF's been shipping me lately. This chapter, however, is a crispy change of pace. This ain't the Shepherds I was expecting. (I mean, technically, it is.) This bears none of the loft-jazz touchstones nor is it infested with the Borbetomaggots I read about elsewhere. In fact, this is some distillation of the dark and perverse elements of post-punk. Repetitive percussion supports a particularly Aussie/Kiwi clang, capturing that rapturous and sweaty state everyone loves to achieve in the recording space. If this is the energy they always cast about, I'll buy all that balloon juice 'bout the "physical noise" they usually blow. I need a discography...
Ignatz seem to have aligned with the same sonic longitude as Shepherds for this slab, only their branches seed from the Great Unwashed rather than Wreck Small Speakers or One Stop Shopping. Their lone track rises and falls like a string of mountains. We start at the foothills and end in the clouds. It might grow a little long in the tooth, but that's how mountains work I suppose. The surprises keep me listening, like they do. The Ignatz side is what pushed this into my vote for the best of the Bored Fortress 08 class. Doubtful? Read on.

INCA ORE/SECRET ABUSE - Bored Fortress split 7", Not Not Fun, 2008
I can't say I love or even like either of these acts after sitting with this single for a fistful of sessions--and I ain't talkin those kinda sessions. Inca Ore are like the worst portrayal of the Blues Control aesthetic dining on the worst portrayal of Scorces. They've got a pedigree way more interesting than their actual output. Like Pocahaunted and that aforementioned Scurshahor mishap, there's something real disingenuous about good-looking youngsters aping sounds made by lumpy nutjobs from ages past. Hey, I love those records, too, but that don't mean I wanna be them!
Secret Abuse are soundtracky and dull. Touchstones might include the third White Noise lp, if ya must know. It kinda feels like storming out of your parents house in a teenage rage, then going to all the suit-n-tie restaurants they haunt and pretending to be them: nobody's buyin it.
In the end, I suppose I oughta let the kids have their say and maybe somebody'll buy one of those Kluster reissues as a result of all this horse-hockey. (That live Eruption lp is the kitty's p-jays!)

NEXT ON THE BOX: Maybe a live review of Psychedelic Horseshit/Fabulous Diamonds/Suitcases @ Eyedrum? Wayne Rogers? That Nothing People LP somebody tossed at me? For now, a smoke and a steaming lake are calling.

AIN'T NO WRONG NOTES - A Free-Jazz Playlist

2008-06-09T08:19:00.003-05:00

Unless I'm mistaken, my days on the island are numbered. The neighbors are steadily returning and I doubt they're down with the kinda rumblings my house typically produces in the wee small hours. Then again, my frat boy roommates'd probably love to pick that bone, too. They make rumblings of their own, but they've got nothing to do with alternate tunings, if you catch my drift. So unless my bread baker job interview goes stunningly well today and they offer me shit-ton money, I'll be packed and on the ferry by week's end. (I got my fingers crucified.) Where to? I ain't certain.
While I try to figure it all out, here's some free jazz or creative modern or "new music" or whatever tag's been hung on the Ayler & Co. lineage, that I love. I gotta go wring my wash out by the shore.

JOE MORRIS, ROB BROWN, KAREN BORCA, ANDREA PARKINS - Many Rings, Knitting Factory 1999
Any of these players could lead me to a cliff and I just might drink. But the most fascinating part about these sessions is that nobody sounds like themselves! Okay, Parkins can only stretch in so many directions, but even she's kept me guessing all these years. Her shimmering accordion slivers and loping percussion samples alternate between underpinning strokes and wide watercolors. Brown forgoes his usual misbegotten seagull cries for some lyrical, Steve Lacy-inspired lines. Borca might be the most unsung player in the world, so any chance you get to hear her pour spools of deep-red yarn from her bassoon, you do so. Her work with Jimmy Lyons oughta be legendary by now. You mightcould say she's the bassist to this bass-and-drums-free disc. And Joe Morris, well, I've heard a lot of words used to describe his guitar-playing. "Squirrelly" and "obtuse" are among the most apropos. Forget your notions of free-jazz guitar players being weened on Sharrock and Ulmer, cuz although he might use a "Blood" tuning, Joe's sound is always clean and skronk-free. For my money, his ink draws the defining lines here.
Ignore the crummy cover art, if you happen to snatch this up. The artist, Anne, once told me "black is the new 'black'," so, uh, you can imagine...

IDRIS ACKAMOOR - The Music of Idris Ackamoor 1971-2004, EM Records 2006?
If you ask the cats at Aquarius Records, they'll tell you 1971 is the most important year for music in the last 1/2 of the 20th century. Me? I think that date's a movable feast, but after hearing this double-disc, I might stick around for dessert. Typically, I head straight for the Pyramids tracks because they define all that is good about the horrendously-monikered "spiritual jazz" movement. We're talking big, wide organically developing passages that, to my ears, are carved out right between Sun Ra and the exhausted pace of late-afternoon field hollers. Makes me wanna curl up and spoon with them. "Birth/Speed/Merging" and "Black Man of the Nile" are top of my list. The more rigid cat in me thinks "Spiritual Rebirth," a piece by the Idris Ackamoor Quartet, is pretty tight, and lets you know Ackamoor can wrangle structured beauty from his cortices, too.
Ackamoor has gone more of the Threadgill route since the heyday of these recordings, on top of becoming some sort of "cultural consultant" or some damn thing. I don't know; Google him, and then gobble this up before EM runs out.

THE GREAT MUSAURIAN SONGBOOK - Out of a Suitcase, Musikszene Schweiz/Grammont portrait 1998
Hoo, what a puzzler. I've had this for about 5 years and it reveals less and less about itself as time goes on. Maybe that's just me growing stupider, but I think you'll agree that a loose-improv record based on documents found in a suitcase like a postcard from a little kid, a page from a diary, a bill from a public house, a doctor's note, or a random telegram, all played by the national band of a made-up country that doesn't in any way involve the Hafler Trio is deep in "I need a lie-down" territory. What's it sound like? Europe, in all the ways you can conjure: Iskra, Evan Parker-led screech-and-crumble parties, indigenous folk musics, and a bucketful of Dada. I have no clue what Claudia Ulla Binder, Dieter Ulrich, or Alfred Zimmerlin did after this, aside from continue on in the "creative music" camp and sell out tents in Switzerland. If anyone knows anything of note about their more-recent endeavors, give a holler. In the meantime, pick this up and smirk at it for a while; you might be glad you did.

V.A. - Golden Age of Soviet New Jazz, Volumes I&II, Leo Records, 2001
I never got a chance to pick up volumes III and IV, but as I've been slowly picking through these 8 discs (!) for--wow, seven years, maybe I'll finally be familiar enough with them to move on by the age of 50. Aligned under the banner of "Soviet New Jazz" is all kinds of bucket-on-the-head performance art, collective improv, free-rock, berserk prepared piano rolls, and warehouse caterwauling recorded behind the Iron Curtain. Aside from that, the main reason it's taken me so long to drink these in is that each disk is a chronicle of an entire career. So, in reality, we're talkin 8 anthologies! Sometimes, all of the aforementioned buggery is included in a single piece! Who knew so many Noah Howard, Jellyroll Morton, Ya Ho Wa 13, Alexander von Schlippenbach, Henry Flynt, and Butch Morris records got smuggled into Leningrad?
Highlights for me include Sergey Kuryokhin's maniacal, dual-piano history lessons and the larger ensemble stuff like Jazz Group Arkhangelsk--basically, any of the stuff where someone isn't just shouting into a trashcan. Hell, with enough time, I might get my head 'round that, too.

THE BALLAD OF BILBO BAGGIES - Scarlett Johansson, Anywhere I Lay My Head CD, Atco 2008

2008-05-21T20:16:00.001-05:00

This here disc, released on the 20th I believe, will join the kind of Accidental Pantheon featuring records like Mr. Spock's Music from Outer Space and Ethel Merman's disco platter. But I will say, this is ripe with far more jokes than a loungy Nimoy frolick. (Unfortunately, several of those jokes are the sad sort.) In terms of execution, this sits closer to Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue--which really means it sits close to the white & powdery. Many people of bloggy repute (though not this one!) contributed to the creation of this smug and murky goof, I'm sure with the idea that they were participating in one of "those" records, or totally ignorant and therefore as dumb as I suspected. Incidentally, some of these fools include the guitarist from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (okay, sure), one of the dudes from TV On the Radio (uh-huh), and...umm...David Bowie.
If you're wondering how this record ended up in the pile to be reviewed on Fuck You Counselor, you oughta look above the reviews to the header sometime. The new subtitle--take it as a revised Mission Statement--reads: "Unfit to be tied." Gunky, trashy, warped, absurd, artless, and downright un-fancy records are to be found in all strata of the music biz. The assertion that some bleached and Botox'd celeb doesn't have the same right to produce an embarrassing record as some dude in the basement of a record store is romantic nonsense. I'll have no piece of that pie. Stupidity and self-indulgence are not class-specific. And, as a matter of fact, both of those embarrassing kinda records can suck in similar ways! Ms. Johansson's full-length debut is, if nothing else, a testament to that.
On the factual tip, this is 10 Tom Waits covers and one original. I'll allows that to swirl about in your head before you continue.
...
...
...
The production sinks Scarlett's voice somewhere in the 3rd-chair-oboe range, prolly cuz she couldna pluck a note from a knee-high bush. There are bad synth wash-ups, unnecessary drumbs and an Aimee Mann outtake vibe that push this into absurdly Pro-Tools territory. I don't think her voice is as atrocious (assuming these weren't from multiple takes) as the arrangements; they're just amateur, which has a kinda charm at times. The versions of "Anywhere I Lay My Head," "I Wish I Was In New Orleans," and especially "Town With No Cheer" are heartbreakingly inept. Seriously. Like coming back to your hometown and discovering everyone you knew got into meth; too late to do something about it, so it just makes ya sad. Though, I found it quite shrewd that she picked all the songs about being drunk and/or sad. Oh wait; that's most of 'em anyhow!
So in the end, this shouldn't just be dismissed as some celebrity vanity record. That's as plain as day. This should be considered a humiliating slab for anyone to have produced. Except the irony of the whole affair will keep this afloat, just like all the schlocky claptards aforementioned. Who knows: maybe someday Ms. Johansson will stride to the mic at a sci-fi convention, arm-in-arm with Mr. Shatner, reveling in the glittery murk of that most American of dreams: the Cheap Laugh.

HEARTWORM HIGHWAYS, Television Ghost - Self-Titled LP, Die Stasi Records

2008-05-09T12:51:00.004-05:00

The Midwest is Hell. But as most of us know, Hell spits out the good stuff. The first coupla flares from the Indiana-born TV Ghost firepit missed my ears. I feel like I heard'em, but I can't remember a goddamn thing about'em. Who knows what I was bent about that week to find this band ignorable, because this LP's got some muscles. Like the other peaks of the cracked-rock contingent, TV Ghost's got a lot of touchstones, but none so chunky as to tumble the whole mess into revisionism. Yes, there's some KBD, some stumbly 60's punk, and some murky 80's creepers in their collections. But so what? Who am I to drool at an imaginary shelf? This damn thing's right in fronta me and it kinda cooks. I'm still not sure they're totally ready for the big-boy format, though, cuz there's some lagging. The drunken see-saw quality to some of these songs gets my gut in a vice. That's not a bad thing in general, but when it's repeated more than a handful of times, it gets to be like dinner at the nursing home. A little further expansion for these guys and the grooves will glow. In the meantime, cuts like "The Nihilist," a maniacal basement smoker, "Lee Is Free," and the Tyvekesque (?) closer "Long Talk (King Matt's Badness Due)" should keep you musty and frightened for at least a few sessions. Ain't it funny that "sounds like it's from Ohio" is a compliment?
Go here for further details and maybe a sip or two.

GROPING AUNT MARY - Vinyl On Demand and the Reissue Saga

2008-05-06T13:16:00.004-05:00

When I feel like touching computers, I usually end up wandering the alleys of re-ish haunts like Vinyl-On-Demand, Akarma, and, to a lesser extent, Lilith. There's often a patch of pining and sheep-counting before I finally retire and dream of the days when I'm so cashy I can drop 100 G-dubs on a 5-lp box set of unfamiliar things. But is that really what we're hoping for? What draws us to these things?

I think the tombstone on crate-digging ought to be carved and set by now. Most of these gems probably ain't finna swim up out of the darkened stacks of a thrift store in Moose Jaw or an estate sale in Plano. They're on somebody's shelf, accumulating value or in-queue to be played for honored guests. Maybe they'll find new life in 2am radio racket. Maybe someone will throw them on a tape or upload them for scouring fans to rub their mouse all over. Needless to say, most of the fun of digging has been replaced by the obligatory feeling of deliberate searching. When I walk into a record store, my mind is empty. I forget what music is or what it looks like. When I get on the Internet, my mind is flooded by the knowledge of treasures within reach.
Is my generation destined to lose that gratifying feeling of discovery? I mean, which is worse: having someone hand you an annotated, footnoted, rare photo-drenched slab of audionecrophilia, or be trapped in that nostalgic notion of the undiscovered gem, feeding on the failed dreams of bands and artists in the wrong place at the right time? Is there a difference? Is it because we need a way of making the past and the present more clear?
One of the reasons I hit so many record stores every time I drop a toe in a new town is the search for history. There are the local scenes that petered out, the remains scattered thru the A to Z. There are the almost-movements, where three or four customers made avid requests then never returned to put up the dough. There is the local lore, tacked to the wall or dusty and framed. There are the regulars, regaling you with tales of when this place was that. They're cultural documents.
The Internet, on the other hand? I can't decide. Neither fate seems comfortable. So there it is. An unresolved argument for and a little against an unresolved conflict. Go buy the Severed Heads 5-lp box set from Vinyl-On-Demand if you just can't let the dead lie. Or download as much as you can and try to ignore the feeling that you're picking the corpse's pockets. Maybe you'll find a 5-spot.

THE EMPEROR'S NEW CREW Shadow Music of Thailand LP, Sublime Frequencies

2008-04-27T23:17:00.005-05:00

It's a fifteen minute drive home from the grocery store. At the store, I sell cigarettes, lotto, and cater to dissatisfied consumers who want to know why their moldy tomatoes cost $5/lb, but mostly just handle Western Union transactions. All the while, a sequence of perhaps 100 songs taken from the last 16 years of ass-pop blurt over the loudspeakers. When it's time for that drive home, past African fields and lonely water towers, I watch for deer, try not to smoke, and think about what will swab out my ears best.
There were some moments on those Bored Fortress singles I really liked. But to be honest, I'm not sure I can wholeheartedly recommend any one of them. The best bits are curious; they resemble that good ol 45rpm handshake you want from some shit you ain't heard 'fo. But otherwise, who really cares? All them acts will be (or have been) heard by the likes of many folks who look like me. They didn't need my help; I tossed my piss into the crowd because you don't read a lot of smack about the New Queered America contingent, even though I know many are thinkin it.
And to keep up the honesty racket, I ain't read much of anything about this LP from Sublime Frequencies. I saw the cover, I realized what it meant, peeped the label, and laid down the cash. No chance taken; they had me at "sawatdee."
Then again, I haven't tried to read what the hoi polloi think about because I don't care. I know where I stand and I'm smiling there. The moment the needle drops, you forget all the English touchstones the name inspires, because you realize you're hearing things like...fuzz and farfisa with imperial percussion. That's all I'll give you and, really, that's too much. Any more and I'll have totally robbed you of all the thrills this slab offers.
You can find it in stores where people don't pay attention. You can also probably get it from the chummy chums at Aquarius Records. Other than that, this finna slip into the night. Don't let that happen. Pay the 30 bucks before you have to pay 300. If you don't like it, send your copy to me and you'll be reimbursed. Trust.

BE SURE TO WEAR FLOUR IN YOUR HAIR - Bored Fortress Round-Up (So Far)

2008-04-22T08:18:00.011-05:00

The o'fishul Not Not Fun blinky place tells me the Bored Fortress Singles Extravaganza of 2008 (it's third year, I believe) is closed. However, that don't mean these tidy little slices of currency (for better or...ahem, worse) won't be hitting ebay the moment the last package is mailed. I signed up cuz I was cashy and a few of the bands excited me. & c'mon, who doesn't love a surprise in the mail--except for the flaming sack variety.

1. Magik Markers/Vampire Belt
I'm a MM hater so I'm going to skip talking about them altogether to keep everyone happy. Now, I'm not sure I love Vampire Belt's half, but it's a grower. They come at the rumbly noise world from a NYC loft-jazz angle and they've got a drummer who doesn't sound like he was on Load Records! They might even be listening to each other! Get these guys a slice of cake; they might make me hold onto a record with the Magik Markers on it.
(The cover sucks, though.)

2. Slither/Moore+Flaherty
Slither sounds like "The Education of Lars Jerry" if it had been released on one of them lost German tape labels. Seagull saxophones pulled apart like fresh bread and cast into the ocean. I'm lacking the proper touchstones to make it read like anything less that snooze metal, but I was impressed. I might even wanna hear more! Who knew a singles club could be a window onta new ground? Ha!
Thurston and Pauly do their best to sound like they can keep up with the kids, but c'mon. You don't want Moore crankin the out-jazz. I'm okay with Flaherty and if he's the only free jazz titan my home state has produced ('ceptin ma uncle, Joe Morris), well all the more power to him. The man can blow, if nothing else. If this'd been [Wayne] Rogers + Flaherty, I'd be sittin pretty. They coulda named it after Tolland County and we'd all have a good laugh. Instead it's called "Western Mass Hardcore Rules Ok" and I'm struggling to smirk.
Once again, only half good. And, again, the cover is dumpy.

3. Skullflower/Axolotl
The best thing about Skullflower is the transformation of time. Every album feels like a few stitches in a cosmic tapestry, compressing miles of strings into infinitely dense thread. It might be, paradoxically, the busiest drone you'll ever hear. This one is only the length of a single 7" side but feels like it could be hours. You want it to be hours long. It's no small feat to make 8 or 9 minutes feel like a beautiful eternity.
Now, I'll admit I know nothing of Axolotl, except that I see the name scattered everywhere and I get them confused with Avarus, for some reason. I like Avarus; it's the same every time, but it's a great formula and they know how to edit.
What distinguishes this from the Skullflower side, seeing as they're both preoccupied with sustained chords and chiseled feedback, and much like Avarus, is editing. This doesn't stretch time, so much as magnifies it. It takes a long-form, Birchville-style structure and cuts it down to a curt 5 or 6 minutes. Hey, if Mr. Kneale can pull it off...well, so can these cats. And if you dig 'em, go check 'em out in Baltimore on the 18th of May with Blues Control, Daniel Higgs, and Cluster and/or 6 days later with Skaters and some of my favorite Fins, Kemialliset Ystavat. No, I didn't book those; yes, I wish I had.
I'm okay with the cover, but the record inside is better.

4. Charalambides/Pocahaunted
Apparently Christina & Tom Carter dig those cute lil spinsters, because they've been working together everywhere. Oh well. It's not like a half-good seven-inch is any kinda surprise at this point.
First up is the Texas twosome. The tune and lyrics are simple, a strange mix of hypnotized and desperate--a Texas mark of quality, if ever there was one. In someone else's hands, this might be forgettable.
Charalambides have heart.
Pocahaunted have t-shirts with hearts on them. You can talk all you want about the Amon Duudling that goes on throughout side B, but I ain't buying. They're hucksters.
I like the sleeve, though. It would look good on a dinner plate.

Mint. This is suitably disastrous. Hopefully Ignatz will share their record with Shepherds so I can put the rest to bed.

Next up: ????????????????????????????????

MORE SONGS ABOUT A CIGARETTE ON THE ROOF

2008-04-19T13:33:00.012-05:00

While the lass is away, I been cuddlin close to the spinning music makers, stacking the empty matchbooks ceiling-high, and eating whenever the crumb tray in the toaster feels cashy. The latter two don't have much place on this thing, so I'll home in on the first. Brace yourselves; I got a lotta wind to blow.

Dan Melchior Und Das Menace - Christmas For the Crows (Daggerman LP)
Danny Boy's an other-day-find for me. I try not to hate on shit outright, like the ladies tell me, but it's hard. I live in New England. If you don't have a slice of misery on your plate, people start asking, "D'ja eat?" So before I stuck Mr. Melchior in my ear, I had to do all kindsa exorcisms (like smudging the cable modem) or it woulda been oogly. Too many folks I never met telling me what's what cuz they got a label or a new pair of socks...well, it wears me out. I worry some days I might be whispering in people's ears myself with this thing, but that's doubtful. Anyone who can wade through the snake-oil I hock about island solitude and midnight brandy stumbling to get to the actual musicspeak is committed in a way I have a hard time understanding. Maybe they just need to be committed. Like, to a place.
Anyhow, post-hopping-the-hate-hurdle, I've come to like everything this Daniel bloke's laid out. This new LP on Daggerman (also home to the Hubble Bubble reishes!) is all kindsa swank. On this one, Melchior seems to be narrating a neighborhood like it's a bunch of contingent stories. They've all got their moods and movements, like folk got faces and rumps. I love the holler down an alley feel to the uptempo numbers. (Crank the loud and you'll wanna crank the ABV, too.) And, per usual, you can expect some mint lines and creepy-creaky production. In the proper musicspeak segment you'd normally read about the cheeky Brit loner-psych dudes Melchior might dig, but I ain't got it in me for another list of people you either know or don't. It doesn't matter anyway. Find them and find this--no matter which comes first, you're in for a few good MEN.

Graham Lambkin & Jason Lescalleet - The Breadwinner (Erstwhile CD)
I was thinkin today about Chris Watson's Outside the Circle of Fire and Stepping Into the Dark in relation to this record; about how Watson wields the mic like a telescope. In those burping rhinos is a galaxy. That's great & all, but what's funny is that his past in Cabaret Voltaire would make you think he still considers boredom and everyday happenings to be the crucible of great art. But what's everyday about hiding in the bushes in Madagascar with a $10,000 boom and a mini-disc recorder? Kinda changes things. Suddenly, listening to Chris Watson puts you in his head rather than the other way 'round.
So who's carrying the flag?
Well, what review are you reading?
Salmon Run sneaked in the backdoor both literally and figuratively (but not in the hey-that's-exit-only sense, y'know?) on the heels of some Idea Fire Company collabs & a few group efforts && stole my mafuckin heart. On The Breadwinner, Lambkin & master-unwinder Lescalleet coax magic out of humid rooms, muddy boots, distant fireworks & filled glasses. Those boys know how to make the mundane sing like nothin else running, but that should come as no surprise.
Speaking of surprises, if you find a chill tickling your ankle when the door creaks or the thunder cracks, then you'll know you've let this album in. I speak from experience, cuz that's all I got. Good show, y'all.

Next time: the Bored Fortress 08 Singles Club (thus far). I come bearing teeth and laurels alike.

A SCREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN Blues Control - Self-Titled CD, 2007

2008-04-09T20:47:00.008-05:00

Blues Control's first LP, Puff, has been kindly reissued by Fusetron, much to the oblige of many folks who mighta missed out on the wax the 1st and 2nd times around. So, in light of this, and considering I already spilled my seed about Puff earlier in the life of FYC, I thought it might be good to talk a little about their strangely less-publicized plastic debut on Holy Mountain.
When someone tells you remarkable slop is gurgling out of the Brooklyn/Williamsburg contingent, first you doubt...then you're curious..and finally you bite. And of course, you're met with the kind of fashionably meandering schtick that too-often follows the hyperbolic swill of music critics. What can you do, really? In the zeal for platinum, some people will settle for fool's gold.
Blues Control is fool-proof.
Over the course of Puff's A & B, BC stretched out ideas and notions until gossamer, hypnotic, nauseating and ultimately kinda beautiful. Same went for the Riverboat Styx tape. But on their self-titled CD, Blues Control lay down songs. Not songs like most folk know'em; songs carved from the Faust mold. Blues Control seem to think of a song as a sequence of steps. There's a feeling of travel that comes with this disc. Not layovers and hostels travel; more like the distance between the bodega on the corner and the laundromat down the block. In between are all those cracked windows, passing cars, opening and closing doors. It's the sound of chances, of glancing encounters. Even the recording seem to place their sound everywhere at once, glowing under a million tiny spotlights.
I'm sure they have influences, some of which probably include illegal substances and assorted second-hand Svenska. Whatever. Some of my influences include chatpata relish, Mantronix, and pro-wrestling journalism; don't really say a lick about what I do, do it? So rather than gettin tangled in the roots, get yer maw around the fruits. I can think of at least two Brooklynites who'll be tickled plaid if you did. Go ahead. Ask any neighborhood man.

BIG BROTHERS AND LIL COUSINS - Releases of the Music Sort

2008-03-25T12:10:00.006-05:00

A breather's been took and now I'm back, typing at you again. Another missive from the off-season crescent island.
I liked some things, I was bored by some other things. Read on, you intrepid stooges! Read on!
First up, the conclusion of the black metal saga...for now.

Peste Noire - Mors Orbis Terrarum, self-released 2xcass box
This here contraption compiles all the demos of these Fronch nutzoids in a tidy lil box. It's cute, I swear! You know, in a Satan-approved way.
The earlier songs kinda lack the punch I've come to love from records like Folkfuck Folie and that full-length rehearsal thing they pressed up a while back. They never romp and fizzle like Furze do, but then again they don't wander into Windham Hill snooze-core like Alcest or Amesoeurs neither. Mostly, they wad the black metal in all sorts of gnarly knots and expect you to untie 'em. Nowhere on this set do they ever get mathy and smart-mark like the aforementioned noodlers, and that's something to crow about. And did I mention the box is really cute? That gryphon's got such a button nose...

Sapthuran & Hills of Sefiroth split - Heralding the New Song of Ruin, Wolfrune Worxxx cass
I mark out for Sapthuran like almost nothin else in the black metal camp, what with his solitary, warped nature-enthusiast-turned-antihumanist vision. Imagine a hollow-sounding merger between the Twenty-Six sensibility and the speed of the Ulver black metal triumvirate. Now we're talkin! Plus there's the added mystery of something like this coming from Northern Kentucky. (Is that landscape really worth fighting for?)
Unfortunately, I had to sit through the HoS side first. I advise the cautious reader to use the fast-forward as a PLP, lest you will find yourself curled up on the corner of the mattress wondering who put on the Judas Iscariot outtakes. And, no, I ain't talkin bout the two-piece improv grind outfit. I'm talking mumbly, tired, Midwestern fudge. I'm all for a rollick in a drone-y field, but this is ridiculous. If you's gonna work on one or two riffs for 45 minutes, you better make 'em good. HoS is about two-notches below "musty carny" on the evil scale.
I'm sure the Sapthuran side was better, but I was so blinded by the lack of science on the HoS flip, I had to dunk my head a bathtub fulla akvavit to cleanse the palette and by then, I just wanted some Danish coffee and a hunk of silence. Sorry, Sappy, honey. Invite me over next time you're alone; then we can talk.

Lascowiec - Gesamkunstwerk, Funeral Agency cass
Lascowiec - Gunshots Ring Out Over Vinland Streets, Funeral Agency cass
I was convinced this solemn little moper was Polish, but apparently, "In Slavonic [sic] mythology, Lascowiec is a woodspirit; a wolf riding atop another wolf, who protects all the wild animals of the woods." (I suppose that's tougher sounding than David the Gnome.) Alas, Lascowiec, the good witch of the Slavic forest, is from the grim and frozen land of Frisco, CA. Go figure. Granted, he shares those mean streets with spooks like Malefic, Wrest, and Ancalagon the Black (of Crebain). Maybe they can have a bike gang or a discussion salon!
Gesamkunstwerk is the earliest of the Lascowiec demos and boy do I like it. Half-time, crumbly guitars, blown out factory vocals, and the icing of dubby drums, all submerged in the bog of tape distortion. Minimal isn't a term I use often in reference to the black metal or anything else--mostly cuz sound is so live and busy as is--but the Lascowiec approach of stretching ideas, but knowing when to reign them in, fits the title. It's kind of like if Hills of Sefiroth got their shit together--which ain't gonna happen, so we have this guy to carry the crusty black torch. Fine by me.
Gunshots begins with some classy Slavic Romanticism before bottoming out into Sapthuran-style Appalach raga-ness. At its worst it's a wrong-speed Robotic Empire release where they forgot to mix the drums in. At its best, it's a codeine-fed Kiwi freakout. I can live between those two poles, no problem, so this gets the seal of approval, too. Good luck and good selling, you tanned wood sprite!

Cheveu - Cheveu, S-S Records LP
Did these cats survive the jump from kid to parent? Can they sustain interest for longer than a 7"? It's a little less than cold turkey, since there are 4 tracks on here from previous singles. However, their power isn't what sustains this album. What does is a voracious style-hopping that I had never really noticed. "Happiness" turns Philip Seymour Hoffman's schpiel from the Solondz flick into Jonathan Richman's submission to the Penthouse forum. "Unemployment Blues" perfectly captures that squinty, alienated feeling you get when you hop off the couch, hungover, and realize...you don't...actually have anywhere...to be...at all...any time soon. Or maybe ever. Talk about a 21st century blues! If they mentioned Xbox, it could be the anthem of my generation.
Wow, that's actually horribly depressing.
Good show, anyhoo.
I BELIEVE IN THE CHEVEU

KIND OF LIKE A REVIEW SORT OF MAYBE, Tomb Of... - Those Dismal Moments, Tour de Garde cassette 2007

2008-03-01T20:34:00.004-05:00

I'm in a new place. I've found myself at a strange distance from what I'm listening to and reviewing. It's not the music; certainly I've been marveling at the stuff since my age was a single digit. So...I guess it's the writing aspect.
I'm sure this is something everyone that writes about music, whether it's on a blog that 6 people read (like this one!) or in a proper magazine goes through. Shit, it's probably something everyone goes through with everything. This isn't a new impasse.
Thankfully, the ripe and wild whiff of the black metal has called me back to my senses. The black metal is sometimes sloppy, frequently bleak, politically naive or just plain stupid, DIY, and always reaching around in the dark for ideas and identity. In short, it's perfect outsider art, to use a term I hate as much as the aforementioned "DIY." Maybe it's got something to do with hearing stuff like this Tomb Of... tape and wondering what the hell is going on inside their grease-painted Grecian domes, but I've been drawn back inside the speakers at last. I can't tell what's good--actually good--and what is a personal revelation poppin' out of a tangent anymore. I know that I like this tape, but I can't say why--at least not definitively.
I can tell you that this sounds like an unholy blend of an imaginary soundtrack for Zombie Nightmare (not the Motorhead song that opens the real movie) and the whispery, hissy atmosphere of the Constellation Records crew if they didn't have their Galois-smoking heads so far up their anarcho-rumps. The guitars are buried and ring out in the distance like the tinnitus that closes a long night of fruitless mischief. I'm not even sure if that amounts to a good listen or something that will make me want to spin these reels in future days. But whatever. I had a moment and I ain't gonna loosen my grip on it til I'm good'n'ready.

LONESOME WINTER WAILING (Whaling?) - More Black Metal Tapes For Dat Ass

2008-02-28T20:29:00.005-05:00

This week was a bag of shit until my tape order came in. But rather than regale y'all with stories of The Girl That Disappeared or What Officer Bates Did, I'll jump right to the turning point(s). Okay, so black metal is meaningless as a term, right? Kind of like industrial, or any genre, really. Is anyone actually making things specifically rooted in genre anymore? I think there's enough influential back-clapping goin' 'round to have successfully killed the notion, what with everyone listening to everything, but that don't mean it's left anybody's lips. Tis a shame, I reckon, for black metal's one of them there ghettos, in much the way Vonnegut termed sci-fi. Then again, maybe "black metal" oughta stick around, as a "for fanatics only" kinda thing, in much the same way some smartypants termed Lovecraft. It does have that "dig it or leave it" vibe, doesn't it? I'll let real critics work it all out. For now, I'm going to love it, contradictions and mainstream cultural irrelevance and all. At any rate, here's the first installment of the 8-piece whateveryouwannacallit tape order.

Korium - Hradby Samoty, demo tape Ravenheart, 2005
I raved and convulsed about the 1st Korium tape, which sounded like cavemen perverting the Slovak Price Is Right, and so was monstrously pumped for this. What's unfortunate, in an ostensible (read:irrelevant) way, is that all the instruments I loved from Mraziva Noc Prinasa Pokoj are gone. No keys, no drum machine. I kinda thought the boy was on ta sumpthin there, but I guess I was only half-right, because Hradby is equally compelling in a totally different way. I'm guessing some of the stuff from Frisco and Germany found it's way into Slovakia, because this one smacks of Xasthur, Drastus, and all those super-cold blade-at-the-ready choons made by guys that carry whiskey and rope wherever they roam. But then there's a sideways Trad Gras Och Stenar tone to a lot of the strings, which has me puzzleder than whatall. Korium is dragging an eraser behind him, and for that, I love him. The boy's got me guessing, and that's a smart way to keep me around. Maybe I'll check out the split with Trist from last year...next.

Circle of Ouroborus - Shores, Heidens Hart 2007
Circle of Ouroborus - Streams, Northern Sky Productions 2007
Speaking of guessing, hoo! I've been following these two Finns ever since the split with Ethum Burzman-sounding* outfit Urfaust, where they put some Yeats to some mostly-acoustic stumblemumps. Some of it was like if Alice In Chains channeled Henry Flynt's I Don't Wanna, and then some of it straight up sucked. (Sorry to bust out the crate-digger analogies, but sometimes the music just demands it!) Anyhow, I was hooked. I'll take wacky and only-half-successful over wack and always failing about as often as the next guy.
Admittedly, I slipped a little. Never heard the Star/Rise acoustic tape since the press was mad ltd or the Night Radiance demo, but I did check out the Knives Beneath 7" what came out a little before Shores dropped. What a beaut. But, per usual with CoS, it was a mcguffin: too straightforward compared to what they usually concoct, but still brimmin with the ideas they'd later expand on with these two LPs--which is what an EP's supposed to do!
Shores got a ton of press in 07, thanks to Siltblog and some other folks thinkin it was the outsider masterpiece of the year. I'm here to tell you it is, even if it actually came out in 06. But, whatevs. Time's a bagattella. Point is, it worked then and it worked me over this week. On Shores, CoS channels a fussy blend of 80s Italian hardcore and contemporaries like Aluk Todolo (specifically songs like "Burial Ground" and the self-titled single) and Black Vomit into something sort of dementedly new. And like all great convoluters, they aren't quite technically up to those assignments, making the whole mess way more compelling to me. The cover of "She's Lost Control" is understandably impassioned, soaked in atonal dub singspeak and drums covered in sugar glass. Did I mention it's also really heavy?
Streams is rapidly becoming my favorite. I been squatting on a review of it for months now, tryin'ta to lay it down the way it laid me out. I mean, it's the vocals from Crash Action Winners doin "Hurricane Fighter Plane" backed by a dissonant-er Acid Drops, but still wasted and bleak enough to be called--there it is, again!--black metal. Hope making this was as much of a relevatory moment as hearing it. This is getting more play than anyone I know. Finland is definitely not for lovers.

Next up: 2x Lascowiec, Tomb Of..., Hills of Sefiroth/Sapthuran, and the self-released Peste Noire demos collection. Start the foam and light the piano; I'll be there in a minute.

*Ethel Merman+Burzum=Ethum Burzman. It's algebraic!

DO YOU KNEAD ANYBODY? The Better Beatles - Mercy Beat LP, Hook Or Crook

2008-02-12T19:03:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine called me weeks back and left the following message: "Hey. I just wanted to call you...because I'm listening to Nick Cave and Lydia Lunch cover 'Some Velvet Morning'...? And it's...awful! It's... [long pause] uhhhhhhhhh!" Click. I figured I oughta find it out before I call back otherwise it'd just be more of that. Only when I heard it, I was at a comparable loss for appropriately-pissed-and-insulted jive. Of all the Top 20 horseysauce to mash your fingers in and call it painting! Why does "Some Velvet Morning" deserve a piss-take? Who wakes up in the morning, wonky and fried from the previous evening, and says, "That Lee Hazlewood is gonna get a piece of my mind today." What a tubesteak. Fuck a Nick Cave and fuck a Lydia Lunch. I hated the cover of "In the Ghetto", too, but I can at least understand which way it was going. It just happened to be stupid.

On the other hand, I've been spinning this Better Beatles LP for weeks now and it never gets tired. In fact, it's lit a little different every time. Some folk finna tell you this is some wry DIY cats from deep in the heart of Nebraska knockin' the Fat Four off their throne as some arty/pissy punk gesture, but I'm here to tell you that's some boiled air. I don't think it's anywhere near that incendiary. The indifference to the legend of these songs ("I'm Down", "Hello Goodbye", "Penny Lane", "Eleanor Rigby") is definitely in there, but the key is the exhaustion. How many times do you gotta hear "Penny Lane" as you're passin Big D one-oh-three good times/grating oldies before the craft and the beauty and all that is finally lost & you're psyched that JL is molting beneath the Earth? Not many. In fact, it probably already happened. So what you end up with is a song drained of whatever significance it had back when it was still wet from birth, wandering the airwaves like a lobotomized hippie trying to remind us of the days when music meant sumpthin. "Maybe," the Better Beatles might've pondered, "what these songs need is to literally sound exhausted and indifferent for once and, in doing so, they'll become new again; like a funny little awakening." Scott Soriano of Static Part/Crud Crud/Z-Gun/S-S Records fame said their take on "Penny Lane" got him to "actually appreciate the old saw and that is tough to do." Hey, what else are great covers for?

Get this on wax or plastic from Hook Or Crook or S-S Records, as I think Soriano's still got a few. And while you're at it, throw out your Nick Cave records. Do it for me. Do it for Lee.

OPEN MOUTH, WIPE SOCK, or A BIG SWEATY REPRIEVE - Blank Dogs - The Doorbell Fire 7", Sweet Rot Records, Repress

2008-02-07T16:26:00.000-05:00

You know that dream where you're naked at school? Well, writing this here blargh is like living that: learning in public, naked.
While back I'm pretty sure I dug Blank Dogs a hole & told him to hop in. Now, I'm glad he didn't and I don't really know why I ever asked him in the first place. I'm sure I had some half-cocked reasoning where I drew some conclusions and judged the conclusions rather than what inspired them (i.e. the fucking music). Even if I'd been on to something, that's a bad system.
So just in time for The Doorbell Fire to get repressed so late-comers like me can froth and gape at our record players like you always dream of doing when you bring something home, I'm here to say I was wrong. There was and is something in this Blank Dogs business. Somebody somewhere maybe in person maybe on a screen pointed out the loner element, then it started to sink in. (What can I say? I'm a slow poke in the thinkin dept.) So I listened to it all anew and ended up liking it much more. That was a lil more than a week back. Now I've had plenty of time to live with them under new circumstances. If it were a perfecter world, "Outside Alarmer," one of the B-sides on this record, would be trumpin that Times New Viking business as one of them there anthem thangs of last year.
The thing I'm starting to appreciate is how familiarly-unfamiliar all the noises are on this and the other BD releases. The first few notes of the A-side coulda been lifted from the opening of Steve Treatment's "Danger Zone", but then it drops me somewhere where the clothes and food are the same, maybe even the same stores, but my shoes are on the opposite feet and the hummus pita in my hand's turned into a wad of chicken wire. How'm I gonna get outta here? Am I sure I want to?
I don't think so!
Whatever prompted my earlier attitude or my current 1 isn't really important, right? What's important is I got over it and have something else to spend my money on. There are no proper venues on the island, so why not play the front yard? You bring your equipment, Mr. Dogs, and we can run them through the stereo on the second floor. Deal? I'll have the papers to you in a fortnight.

IT'S NO FUN HATIN SO LETS GO SKATIN INSTEAD

OH WHERE OH WHERE HAS MY YEAH YOU GET IT - Lost Frog Slips Me A Five-Spot

2008-02-07T12:18:00.000-05:00

Whilst I wait for my order from Northern Sky Productions, so I can continue on my black metal filibuster, there ain't no use in sitting all up on my hands. So usually you have to pay for good music? So what? That don't mean there ain't places you can go to get it gratis, and I'm not talkin bout no multi-digited discount neither. Lost Frog works both sides of the street: the official, physical, ducet-requiring releases and the for-the-taking mp3 albums, both from a litany of international and domestic white people. Oh, and Tsuyama Atsushi of AMT etc and someone called Tenouti Yomezou, repping Lost Frog's Nippon origins. A chunk of it is made up of bike ensembles and Sockeye. Rather than write about songs named "Poopy Dildos, Mommy", I figured I'd actually write some things I legit enjoyed.

Avarus - Arus (LF061MP3)
Great thang bout these Finnish boys is you always know what to expect. They gots a keen collective ear for what parts of a druggy, stumbly rollick are worth sending to friends and family and which are best committed to closets and boxes. Plenty of ink has been spilled bout the Finnish underground--which I'm pretty sure nullifies the underground part--so I will say this is a fine and free way to get your foot in if you're lookin to do so.

R. Stevie Moore - Hobbies Galore (LF060MP3)
See, it's kinda awesome being ignorant to lots of things, movements, people, because at some point, logic would follow, you'll have a moment when that changes. And if you go around proporting to have already seen and done it, those moments will pass and you'll be left wondering whose life you've been trying to augment with that attitude. Good luck to you. I was completely ignorant of Mr. Moore until earlier this week and his 5-decade contribution to homemade musics.
"Yeah so it's historically significant. Is it actually good?" For rill. As a matter of fact, it's only historically significant in a temporal sense; I doubt many folks have been stealing from him over the years. That's because most of what he pedals on this 16-track career-spanning best-of is legit tunesmithery. A little bit skewed, but never the same way twice. Sometimes it's the hospital-gowned Syd Barrett kinda-skewed, and, on "Don't Let Me Go to the Dogs," it's the Dennis Wilson sort. Fans of Nick Nicely will also appreciate this in a way I can't quite unpack.

Tsuyama Atsushi - Raichou (LF073MP3)
Atsushi's kinda the unsung Acid Mother, or maybe just one of the less-exposed. Then ya hear something like Raichou and it makes even less sense than when you marvel at his playing in AMT. Somewhere there is a leather- and fur-covered time portal, and you know when you find it, Atsushi will be holding the flap open. So go on in; not like it's costing you a cent.

Stop stealing for a minute and go get these (& many others).

BURLY, WOODY, JAMES, AND SOMETIMES CANADIAN - Aquarius drops another Black Metal bundle at my door

2008-01-26T12:52:00.000-05:00

I've been runnin thru some kinda Euler circuit lately, taking deserved breaks between selling folks lottery tickets/Dorals (well, Parliaments and Newports, mostly) and drawing mythologies about omnipotent beings who always make large-scale mistakes so's I can check the pee-oh box for new jams. It was a long road getting to this order, since releases were appearing and vanishing like they do. But Aquarius is good to me. They're starting to understand that I will take my order in dribbles so long as I get some-bleedin-thang.

Well, the circuit is broken. I got my order. 2 of 'em ain't black metal related in the slightest and one's another Drommer cd-r, which is only tangentially black metal-related (as redundant as that sounds). Today, we're sticking to the guys in black. Rest'vem got too many colors.

VARGHKOGHARGASMAL - Call of the Raven demo tape, German, Funeral Agency re-release, 2006
Literally every part of this release represents why I love the black metal. We'll start with the cover and work inward, cuz that strikes me as the most kvlty approach. The cover is a take on the creepy forest iconography I was getting super-tired of, but considering this is also labelled as "Wooden Metal!" on the little part of the J-card, not only does it make sense in an obvious and thematic way (which is very metal), it also looks like a blockprint of a rotting 2x4. Lo and Beherit, inside it reads, "This demo tape was recorded for nature and in total hate to the human race which is destroying it!!!" Which human race? Oh, THAT one. It also informs me this is the...2nd edition? The 2nd edition of a demo tape? Clinging like a shirtless Stallone to the format, guys. That's commitment. What makes this the 2nd edition is that it includes 2 songs from their official 7" ep. A quick look-up on the humming and glowing box on my dresser tells me the 7" is 2 songs. So, really, the 2nd edition of the demo tape is the discography.
By now I'm totally immersed and I haven't even heard a note. Basically, black metal is like the outsider art of the totally uninteresting and rollicking towards a nudge-nudge joke or a symbolic economy that is contemporary art--I mean, contemporary metal. Contemporary metal is about speed and theatrics. Black metal, you mightcould say, is about sound as soul and theater. Same way you had to dash your prior thinkin 'bout jazz structures the 1st time you heard Ayler or Schlippenbach or any of those guys and remember what you were actually listening to was new forms of "soul" music, great black metal is like some unholy, messy palette-cleaner.
So now the tape is in the deck and the reels are rolling. Varghkoghargasmal sounds like a two-piece but I guess it's a solo affair by a cat named Avenger. He don't use no distortion--no buzz! no hiss!--and there ain't no vocals. But there are some occasional field recordings. (Wind is the new bass.) So, without two of the major touchstones of the black metal thang removed, what am I left with? Basically, a strange little mystery. Varghkoghargasmal could be any of those mysterious bands on Songs from the Lowland or Big Southern Hits or any of the Kiwi DIY comps. Raith Rovers! It's an angry, long-form Raith Rovers! Or maybe Jane Dancing...without the dancing. At times, this is downright pretty, even when the drums are wandering off down an alley or squeezing and bulging like a stress ball. I would say somebody oughta tell Avenger he can stop recording by hitting "pause," but then I'd be left without all the cue marks. There should be more cue marks in music. There should be more Varghkoghargasmal in my life. Except now I have everything. Stupid second editions, ruining everything.

GEHEIMNIS - Das Negras Montanhas demo tape, Brazilian, Gungnir Productions, 2005
See, but then there's Brazil. I don't know what it is about Brazilian black metal, but once they stop working from Sarcofago and Vulcano LPs and start trying to be Norwegian, I'm lost and hurrying away. This is really short (so many of these tapes are secretly one-sided) and not terribly exciting. And it ends with the kind of mopey guitar ballad that could bookend a One AM Radio ep but somehow ends up on most of these releases. (Varghkoghargasmal is an exception! And Korium!)
Not changing my world, not even changing my socks.

JABLADAV - Black as Pitch demo tape, North Carolina, self-released, 2007
Another could-be-two-piece, but again, James is all by his lonesome, doing duty on guitars, vocals, and drumbs. Jabladav is much in line with Weakling, as far as the riff-as-drone theory and the smart-mark approach. Weakling came from smart-mark metalheads Fucking Champs. Thankfully, this never gets smarmy-clever. This sounds less record-clerk than Weakling ever did. Songs are shorter, too. And when he does a quieter track, it still sounds like it was produced by Mike Dixon or Fenriz. James gets all busted-concrete tunnel on the vocals. This is amazingly heavy and creepy for a guy counting talk radio and The Simpsons among his influences. Dial this up.

AUFKREMA - Rehearsals 2002-2003 tape, Quebec, Tour de Garde, 2003
Another thing I love about black metal is being put in positions where judgment becomes irrelevant. Sometimes it's through an intensely personal, almost internal approach. Sometimes it's by being so obtuse, I find I'm trying to develop stage plays to act out what I'm hearing so it makes more sense. Sometimes it's by exposing parts of the creative process most of us aren't used to or necessarily have any interest in peepin in at. How am I supposed to judge improvised rehearsals from 5 years ago, especially from two dudes who haven't released anything else?
Well, I guess I'll start with details. The booklet has a long explanation about there needing to be more spontaneity in metal and I was going to do go on a similarly lengthy rant about how that's an excuse to feel creatively justified in releasing what most people would consider unfinished music, since you're still calling them "rehearsals," but then I realized that's a weak argument. Basically philosophy is a supermarket full of differently colored and scented bullshit that people peruse and decide which needs to come home with them. Something we don't know may or may not be doing something that may or may not be affecting another thing--that's what our knowledge amounts to. In black metal, there are no bands; there are only movements. If Aufkrema consider themselves a movement toward a looser, improv-friendly French Canadian black metal scene, who am I to argue how legitimate that is? If you decide you aren't going to affect the rest of the world for most of your life, which is more personally rewarding: making music in your basement with people you love and trust or sitting in a brick building thinking about fish?
Do I like this? I'm not sure it matters. For the count, the parts themselves are kind of generic with some okay riffs and jars of absurdly fast percussion. Going from one part to another isn't causing me to levitate out of my seat, so as a movement it doesn't really hit me. Who knows. A Quebecois (or Quebecoise!) kid might hear this and fill his briefs.
I say, let the movements flow.

LOPING, NOT LARPING! The Stirring Conclusion of the 1st BM Cassette Order

2008-01-11T21:50:00.000-05:00

DESASTER - Hellfire's Dominion, Night Birds
German
Gongs get that slurred cooking pot tone
1/2 speed Art of Noise?
woah, 70s Italo horror w/budget of DOLLARI ZERO
oh, and then it begins
not so psyched about the vocals, but they seem to fit the 80s-ness of the whole affair
Judas Priest Blizzard Beast From the East Norwegian Tour t-shirts would be something else
they do dated well, but let's be honest about what that statement is actually saying

A.E.P./ABSTRAKT TORMENT split
oh fuck, here's that other AEP thing
the first one was all kindsa boring
[here is a drawing of a hunched figure with rectangular eyes, standing next to a road sign that says "STOOP" instead of "STOP"]
N O
I don't even care what Abstrakt Torment sounds like
my sleeping for the day is thruuuuuuuuuu
ltd 317 copies
I'm sure there's some smoky significance to that number
MMMBEE MUMBEY MUMMBE

YPERITE/CHAROGNE split, Infernal Kommando
French, again, so you know it'll be good
also includes both bands' first demos
cover is really dumb, I'm not gonna fool you
Yperite:
Sutek Conspiracy?!?!
Hirax fed through a toaster, or UT as a hardcore band
some Italian goth-wave influence that I can't quite get words/references around
suddenly that Furze record has context! what is happening in France?
samples of bad porn, air raid sirens, bombs dropped
drum mach
warbly prod, sort of slipping in and out of physical time
really dug this side
Charogne:
opens with an opera bootleg circa 1892--scalped that shit from Edison
I'd know what it's from if I knew those kind of things, but c'est la vie: I don't wear sandals with socks
I really dig all these blown-mind intros; kind of wish they got worked into the compositions of the rest of the records more--kinda like Korium did! Shit, gotta stop thinkin about Korium for a min or I'll stop listening to this...
production makes all the aggression pocket-sized
drums sound like irregular hummingbirds, seriously--barely audible, totally brilliant!
ever heard Vomited Broth? Progeria? or any of that mumbly pterodactyl grind? there you go
non-non-non-non-plussed
wow, i turned on that right-quick
why couldna this been one-sided?
fuck a Charogne

DEMONCY - Joined In Darkness, Ravenheart Records (Czech label)
ltd 500
ATL, my former home, prod'd these musty chaps
leathery bat wing logo
you know those late-night college radio extreme metal shows and all the shit where you wonder who cares or who listens or who puts so much effort into something that is such a non-event?
Demoncy are all of those bands
loping, unfocused, not really anything in any anyness
sorry guys, for a BM band from the south you coulda been mad evil-er--like
say
Sapthuran or Hills of Sefiroth
get out of the city and into the hills like the above
the mean streets of East Lake ain't teachin you squat

EXCESSUM - Death Redemption, Tour de Garde
Swedes
has that jumpiness of classic triumphant Swedish metaal--
mid-tempo parts are almost groovy
droopy-eyed melodies
the singer is speaking to his army in a burned out basement--dry, muffled, chalky
they know how to take a sound that has become sort of anonymous + make it theirs through odd sound techniques--the vox, for instance, totally rescue this for me
and the drums are snappy and poppy like burning sap
this is a grow-er

BESTIAL MOCKERY - Sepulchral Wrath, Unholy Horde Records
Swee-dish, again
2006 demo, ltd 666 and so on
this is really short
tapes are pro-printed, though, including the phrase "UNHOLY -- UNPURE -- UNTIGHT"
was a guy in my old neighborhood with something like the cover painted on the side of his tinted-window'd Dodge van with the teardrop bubble window and all
of course, i mean
south-cali hardcore guitar-work
exhibition metal--not to be confused with the actual deal
(cooperative, as opposed to full-contact??)
can't win wars with yaw-ning
can't win wars with yaw-ning
c'mon, this mess of tapes needs another gem

NAZROTH/PUTRIDE split
Nazroth: you-ess-ey!
Putride: toques and back-bacon!
wow, this is the most boring one yet
i can't even write about it
i will never think about this again

One to go. Can this lot be saved?

SATANIC WARMASTER - Carelian Satanist Madness, Tour de Garde
Finnish solo
originally unleashed on No Colours
SOOOOOOOOOO JAUNTY!
fuzzy elves swing cudgels to this like erryday
really goofy, so I'm assuming this is NSBM
cover is such a flea market t-shirt from Singapore, it's kind of incredible
if Hello Kitty were clinging to his gauntlets I'd say it actually was
he reaches deep down inside and finds bloody muppets
not the salvation I was looking for
still, it was funny

CONCLUDING SOME TERMS:
So it goes. This was obviously a gamble, but not without rewards. And I guess I'm addicted, cuz I placed another order with AQ for some more bm reels from the likes of Aufkrema (improvised black metal!), Geheimnis, Jabladav, and Varghkoghargasmal. I wait with baited breath and gnashing maw.

"OH, AND"-ING IT UP - The Rest of My Two Cents

2008-01-10T20:05:00.000-05:00

Album of the Year:
Graham Lambkin - Salmon Run

Somehow I forgot to mention that in my thing about the thing. So, there it is.

Also, this is quite possibly the best record to put on in the other room while you lie in a near-scalding bath. A crucial thing in my hermitage.

The balance of black metal tapes is on the way. Stay frosty.

FRIENDS ARE VISITING FROM HELL - A 20-pack of black metal magnetics

2007-12-23T00:23:00.000-05:00

My birthday present to myself was to buy 24 releases, one for each year of my measly life, from Aquarius records, preferably things I ain't never laid ears on. Thankfully, they offer a twenty-piece black metal grab-bag of all the cassettes they've been sent that they're too busy to review. Priority confusion, thankfully, has lead me to a takeaway sack of mystery for several evenings' diversion. Lord knows I need more diversion. They got here about 6 days late, but whatever. I remember little of my birthday anyhow, other than a trip to the local distillery/brewery and a stumbly trip home, so it may as well be the 14th again! After six dozen cups of light roast coffee (less roast=more caff!), I was ready to tackle the tower. (By the way, the others were 2 releases by Norwegian reel-melters Drommer and a Tomb Of... cassette that they were out of. So apparently it's for my 22nd berfday.) Rather than refine this whole mess, I thought I'd toss up the notes I kept to maintain the delirium. I mean, for a good while I tried to consider how much it would cost to buy 19 other boomboxes and spread them through the house so I could put them all on at once. I need to have a lie-down just thinkin' about it.
At any rate, let me present the first installment of a two-part series. I had to split it up to keep my ears fresh and to ensure the urges to don corpsepaint (Donald Corpsepaint!), invade countries, and invoke flaming-chariot-riding ghosts remained as such. Exceptin the last one. Who can resist, really?

12/19/07
Istorn - Demo 1, 2004, Fossbrenna Productions (distributed domestically by Tour de Garde) norwegian, natch cooing in background??? on tracks 2+3
what i call "big toe fixation"
neaderthal hypnotism, accidental krautrock/d-beat
what else is there to do in Norway except drink beer and wait patiently for Hammafest?
oh and mountains of course

Natural Change - Helvetica (Espace Mitterlland) 1, 2006, Northern Sky Productions
northern sky folded, too bad
distro says something like "made by someone who is probably not right in the head"
hmm
can't find any further info guessing this is american
wow! 94 stars!
i love all the black metal stuff that, if it were released in 1982 on a German synth tape imprint would be worth mad $$$$$$ deez dayz
ethnomusicological context dispute:
pierre henry/glenn branca approach
vs
mad scientist/meth lab approach::
who thought more and why should i care?
(wow, there is a lot about my attitude toward music that's just been reconsidered)
bad titles oops
CHECK OUT CHECK OUT CHECK OUT

Lado Obscuro - O Inferno por ..., Intolerant Records, 2006
Braziiiiiiiiiillllll
flames of hell play the best of Mayhem
"adolfo hitleramirez on vibes..."
charred muppet voxxx
what's more "black metal": # of trips to the boneyard or musicianship?

Burning Blood - Unholy, self-released, don't know the year
Cherman...and national socialist--whoops!
super-treated, WREST-ian vocals
messy and stumbly, but kind of appealing
i mean, who really agrees with any musician's politics?
burzum cover
I read this is supposed to be "hand-#'d in blood" for the first 50 (of 60 made; odd choice of privilege) but mine--#13--is definitely written in ball-point pen
waiter! oh, waiter! there's a lie in my soup! C'mon, I want some National Socialist blood on my cassette insert! Is that so much to ask?
this one deserves another spin

Aymrev Erkroz Prevre (A.E.P.) - Noir voyage obstrue de rencontres difformes, Infernal Kommando, distributed domestically by Tour de Garde
fronch with giger-y cover ta boot, so i probably wouldn't pass this up if i saw it in a shop
dark ambient in possibly the most obvious way...possible
left the earth and won't ask which way to cthulu--he's gonna find it himself!
kinda the least memorable so far on a split with Abstrakkt Torment later...fuck

Loits - Ei Kahetse Midagi, Night Birds Records, ltd 500
Estonian
self-described as "flak'n'roll" as in the anti-aircraft gun--but isn't that a stinger? or are those just the shoulder-mounted ones?
not gettin the rock'n'roll bit they were talkin on
much much graveland
nocturnal projections guitar sound!
rites of spring parts--no, as in dischord recs
instrumental sounds like "battle of epping forest" if it were on "ride the lightning"
& i'm picturing slo-mo deposed military statues
not sure where that leaves us

Korium - Mraziva noc prinasa pokoj, Ravenheart Productions,
ltd 500 one-man Slovakian side-scroller nightmares
barks-and-bugs-eating cave dwellers storm a Slovak game show and pummel Rod Roddy to death with mossy boulders, then try to roll themselves up in his rhine-stone-dotted glittery skin like a sleeping bag Toby Hooper-style
then some tyrant trooper parts for added debauchery
inside it reads "Magnificent Winter Is the Gallery Of Real Dream"
here here!
i could live on inspiration like this for months--when can he move in?
worth all 80 ducets
6 TRILLION STARS

I'm taking a 24hr break, otherwise the rest of this will end up in the trash, thanks to my newly discovered Korium bias .

12/21/07
Lubrik Hate - Negative Destiny, re-release on Infernal Kommando, distributed domestically by Tour de Garde
ltd 250 one-man, Fronch
Smell & Quim-y porno noises + "corpses rolling down a hill" black metal
=
new kind of necrophilia
plus the track's called "spectranal"--was this the payoff of a dare?
got that monastic echo by way of Urfaust vocals, although the chant bits could be any instrument including a vacuum or a bowed fjord
skronky solo--a superbly bad idea superbly done
fade from "Human's Fate" to "Negative" life is fucking great: old sad Euro strings on a distant radio, or maybe just deserted in a snowstorm
if Abruptum had they're shit together ... well, they wouldn't be Abruptum
strangely melodious, also strangely triumphant for something that professes such allegiance to frumpy funerals
i mean shit there's a toothless skull with a point-blank bullet wound on the cover
drum machine good idea, especially for the unwarranted dub-step intro-fills
of course, no bm cass is complete w/o a slippery acoustic number
BLOW OUT THE CANDLES AND LET'S GO PILLAGE

Portal - Lurker At the Threshold, Beer In Your Ear Records 2006
Aussie
this is the only band in the batch I've heard before
OOP already
guess this is 3 rehearsals/demos from the new rec --so it's like an ultra-rare promo?
rattly, stumbly, droney, muddy--yup, sounds like Portal
wow, IQ-droppingly heavy
got those inexplicable Dusk (the one from Green Bay) slurpy basslines
parts don't "match" per se, but they feel right
how do you really judge rehearsals?
I guess I'm curious to see what they're like all finalized and purdy
CURIOUSER

Szarlem - Cryptic Winter demo, 2006, Northern Sky Production
Ger-one-man
ltd 300
insert is all folded with hand-writ bm scrawl
"Black Metal" looks like "Blair Metal"
"Bathory" looks like "Berfday"--how fitting!
never before has Baphomet and his crescent moon-juggling looked so lonely. Maybe it's all that white paper; he's like a forgotten chess piece.
surprisingly short, kinda average straight-up Norwegian stompers

Darkened Nocturn Slaughtercult - Hora Nocturna, Propaganda Records
Ger-men
ltd 666, cd version is ltd 2500 from a different label
I'm pretty sure everything on Propaganda is ltd to 666
es der steaz
figure it's worth mentioning that they're fronted by a lay-dee
Dissection and Watain big time with some minor Emperor presence, though I like this more than both Dissection and Emperor of late
almost as fast as Thunderbolt, which is saying something; probably tighter, too
appropriately trollish at times
layout's all professional, which makes sense seeing as this is the most pro-sounding tape yet
why isn't this huge? it could be, for all i know. super-fast and oh-so cult
this also has the longest running time so far
I'm a little sad this didn't come with the sticker the label promised. Maybe I'll return my unused portion.
I LET THIS TAPE ROCK TIL THIS TAPE POP

Isolation - Striding on the Path of Nihil, Tour de Garde
another German
originally self-released as a CD-r
Is it just me or was the CD-r the new tape until the tape was the new CD-r? or is it the new tape? again?
Does every German bm band have a song called "Einsamkeit" or have I dipped over the edge?
BETHLEHEM! especially the one that comes in the DVD case with the remix disc, whose name I can't remember
some Winter, too; real sludgy, peering into some dark and whispery old well
vocals just shy of Lennon's widow in the disenfranchised bird department
it must've been recorded/dubbed from some weak deck because this gets dunked into a cottony phase ocean every 15 or so seconds for quite a while; kinda adds to it though, for me anyhoo
drums are so un-seaworthy, like when you start your Evinrude and it spits out green porridge
this is kinda mint. The melodies are all sideways and chimey.
I want moor

Just 8 to go...stay tune-d.

DING DONG DING DONG CHRISTMAS BELLS ADDENDUMB - SPAM emails bring tidings of great poetry

2007-12-20T18:35:00.000-05:00

I suppose because I'd rather find spam hysterical than irritating, I've decided that the best pomo assemblage poetry going on in the world is contained therein. This shit, as you will discover, reads like Wallace Stevens with a crippling intestinal virus. So, in the spirit of giving, I present the best poetry the spam I receive on the regular has to offer. You know, like ya do.

"turnpike" by Dougher Seleg
Indeed worthy to figure in the stables of the to it often,
years ago, he might have cultivated follow upon emancipation.
schemes for colonial shining river, her rebellion and pain
mounted thick green glass. They were the usual demijohnsgaraffons,
the shore. To prevent instant pursuit, he, for treatment
in a sanatorium some years ago had, unsold till the others
are of age in turn. This for winchester tomorrow. With a
few grateful words that he leant against a tree lest he
should what.

"locomotory" by Scialpi Lukianov
Ism don't suppose we ever shall know. I don't the daily dispatch,
a manchester newspaper. A to profess to be, but to be willing
to do anything benjamin wade, whom we have met already such
military are things going? You know what poirot shrugged
to the flames. We do not know how early cremation in a little
clearing of the forest. It is related i am? How old, my
dear? Why, let me see! He exclaimed. ? very fond of you,
she was. Oh yes, she used our military force, and place
in the hands of.

"assimilation" by Ahmad Romanik
Or two horses and wagons. When they came to yellow he. And
he knew that it was gwalchmai, but gwalchmai position that
the guard suspected the passengers, he thought of the possibilities
of having the i know where to dine well in town, and where
to her right hand in the fire until it was burned he, and
one told me that he was well skilled in and the gentle ripple
took up its old story again as a gigantic game carry him
through successfully? Know,3' she admitted. It does seem
a bit screwy.

"overcrowds" by Panciera Rumpel
'having heard these words of vrihaspati, purandara, really
has in it a very slight preponderance of worlds, viz. Kurukshetra,
o kesava. O thou of.

"dayroom" by Vangorder Madise
With brush and plastered with mud, and designed of wearing
these costly ornaments was much followed the worthy woman
to my indeed i am, mrs. Bloomfield. Imp, a grandame's child
but half a plague, and pipkin of five quarts, with raisins
of the sun, has been secretary to sir bartholomew strange
so i tried to understand them all, and their ways was trying
to make up her mind whether he was husband's head. It is
i who asked his hand. But him as he hath done to others.
so, my child, my.

"nosology" by Seward Russnak
The maidatarms, i read aloud. Then there came and suspicion.
i have now told ye everything about it to their lips, they
began to play and the music of righteous deeds, all of whom
are best of men, of five emerged from merishall's room with
two down on the earth's surface. Animals of diverse days
after, will be the day of the new moon. Let that i have
to live with him until i am married. Through the organs
of sense, becomes duly cognisant away. She's asked me to
persuade you to go out..

Oh Goodness, It's Turtles All the Way Down! A "Year" In Respew

2007-12-13T20:18:00.000-05:00

What's a year? Does it hafta start on January 1st? Is it January 1st and 1 second? Is it the instant, the remote and incomprehensible moment when it is exactly the end of one year and the beginning of another? If that moment can't be reach or achieved because we'd just run out of decimal-zeroes long before, isn't that saying the year never really starts in any knowable way and, consequently, never ends? Where does its lil temporal seed find purchase?
Before embarking on any serious paper, article, list, essay, meal, shower, or shoe purchase, I get caught in deontological chappaquas like this. Sometimes it's a cleansing thang. The infinite regress can be kinda relaxing! Just imagine yourself falling & shrinking simultaneous, finally smashing into the Strangeness quark and being blown to eetsy-beetsies. Yeah. Sometimes it's my happy place, but devoid of the sandy beaches and omniprent margaritas that most folk imagine. But mostly, it's the lock and key on the old New Englander trap of "Why do anything?"
So now that I've let that slide down my gullet where it will eventually ferment like that inedible Viking shark dish I read about in Fierce Food (durian actually ain't so bad, provided you can't smell it), I suppose it's time I got around to listing the things I enjoyed pointing my senses to this "year." (Although, I will probably have to update it after I get the shipment of 20 unidentified black metal cassettes coming my way from a certain record shop in Frisco. Look, tomorrie's my birthday and I felt I needed to indulge myself.) Some of them are from approximately now, some of them from long before, and some of them are just signs that I really have no fucking clue what is going on at any given time. Apparently my mom knows me weller than I thought; she bought me a Bhutanese flag and a copy of Pere Ubu's Shape of Things for my berfday! Whutta ladee. Hoooo

Labels that smoked me or just really impressed me:
Northern Heritage
SS Records
E.E.E Recordings
Woodsist
Holy Mountain
Swill Radio
Trunk
Siltbreeze
Kernkrach
and my personal favorite, SELF-RELEASED

Bands that knocked me down and stood on my face with delicious-smelling shoes--some new odors, some familiar, some rediscovered:
Los Llamarada
The Prats
Picky Picnic
Meadow Meal
Forgotten Woods
Wold
Blues Control
Nuclear Socketts
Gerry + The Holograms
Emak
Axemen
Psychedelic Horseshit
Notekillers
Rema Rema
G*Park
Nocturnal Projections
Where's Lisse
Avia (Russian)
Cherry Blossoms
Sic Alps
Baby Grandmothers
Those Lovely Hula Hands
The Sperm
Lionel Belasco
Smersh
Snowy Red

I'm a pointer. Der it is. Der it is. Gudknight + may Gobbless

I WISH I WAS A MOLE IN THE CLOUDS - Daniel Higgs - Metempsychotic Melodies (Holy Mountain, LP or CD 2007)

2007-12-09T13:56:00.000-05:00

I almost went back and took the title of "six string sampo" from that Barn Owl record to apply it to Herr Higgs. What a strange moment of haphazard prophecy--that I'd review a record by a guy who fits the bill I handed to some other yokels!
The schpiel as I sees it: There's a ton of aforementioned-yokels stroking and petting and nudging the ghosts of inspired pickers back into the light with varied results. Hell, even some of the still-kickin' ones have been handed the cushy tombstone of "living legend" and the peculiar luxury of a crop of young folks to play with who'd be happy just to polish their bar stool. In our freshly-minted service economy, you get more mileage out of catering to a thing rather than being a thing, it would seem. Sucks on toast, if you ask me. Given the chance to be the only one applauding in a crowd of 4 or add my two hands to the din of 400 others, I'll take the former blindfolded and stripped bare by my bachelorettes.
The problem with all the folk-raga revival is that it's just that--something old dressed up like a debutante. The generic thing, the genre run-down isn't going to earn you a place in someone's regular rotation and a burn-mark on their consciousness and really what else is music released in mass quantities meant to do? Who says, "I really want to make records that people listen to once and then sell"? If you're really going to stand out, you've got to make it part of you--or vice versa.
Well, here you go.
I don't think there's a doubter in the room as to whether Daniel AIU Higgs walks the talk. His records are conspicuously bloodstained--or tattoo-inked, but that don't seem so dramatical--like everything he does. The threads, therefore, are bright, so it's easy to imagine this man making that song, making that image, writing that poem and so on. Higgs is Higgs and seems to have come into his own on his lonesome, even if he's plumbing the depths with chant-riffers Lungfish on the side. You can tell where the love really lives.
Metempsychotic Melodies walks a lot of the same roads Ancestral Songs mapped, so if you're lookin for discographic context, there ya go. (But who needs it? Either you're with this stuff or running away from it, right?) Higgs continues to draw long lines, then abruptly tie them in knots like he's marking time. His compositions work like astrological levers and pulleys, eventually dropping you in a timeless place with all the previous accumulation dragging from your heels. I say, feel the dirt. Smell the dirt. Know the place. The production is much cleaner, though the parts feel more disjointed. Hands and feet and voice are separate somehow. Can't decide how that affects the whole figure, but I suppose it's a part of it anyways. Certainly adds to the isolation, like he can't even feel connected to his damn limbs.
"Love Abides" seems to be getting the most play, but "Universal Salutation" and "All Cherished Things" are my jams of choice. The first is like a stringed mission statement. The second is like a reworking of "Love Abides" to include even more mystical leave-taking. But all around, I dig this like almost nothing of the sort he's dropped before.
If the music seems like only a part of the story you feel he's telling--which I reckon is a fair argument--try actually buying the record. No, seriously. You could probably sum up all the underground music blogs in 3 words: champion the nerd. I think I'd rather see him get paid. Except for a few. I mean, you can't empower everybody.

IS IT RAINING IN SPACE?

SIX STRING SAMPO (MAYBE) Barn Owl - Bridge of Clouds, Not Not Fun CDR 2007

2007-12-03T18:35:00.001-05:00

It's a touch reassuring that living alone on an island hasn't softened me one bit. Initially, I figured all this solitude would make me embrace any sorta aural (or oral, for that matter) company as somebody to sip rye and chew green beans with. Not so. My ears are the sharp and cavernous slivers of pork I've forever relied on them being.
I'd been thinking about this Barn Owl thing for a piece; wondering how it had the look [read: packaging] of something they'd schlep but sounded far more polished than normal. Then I discovered it was a tour release BO'd been schlepping on their own! Ah, now it makes a bit more sense.
I've come to expect NNF to wallow in pseudo-hipster post-Fort Thunder dust with a few sizeable gems a-mixed up inside. Hey, they dig Robedoor. Oh, but then there's that Raccoo-oo-oon thing, staring at me and tapping its big stupid foot. And hey, we can't forget Pink Luminous Invocation! Oh wow. Magic Markers. Oops. Frustrating, innit? Like they don't know what they do right and what they...doo.
I kind of like this Barn Owl cd. And it's part of the endless amusement of watching 2 or 3 people try to do what one John Fahey did (drunk, I might add, and on a borrowed guitar while living in a hotel room and eating old beef when he could find it). They do it well, I must say. Kinda plows the same parched and endless field that Flying Canyon found. This isn't going to change anyone's life considering all its debts, but it is interesting to see NNF carrying something so clean, clear, and produced--with pride, no less! They butter this thing up like they were gettin paid!
Maybe it's the shock of something so professional coming out of the Not Not Fun camp, but this is okay by me. Be a landscape or see a landscape; as long as there's a landscape involved, I'll give it a whirl. And for the moment, that feels right.

UPDATE! No sooner did I post this than NNF declared this out of print. For serious. I went back to their new releases page this morning and it had been bumped down to past efforts. I meant what I said about pracariousness! However, if this review sprinkled mystery dust all over ya, you mightcould still get it from folks like Fusetron, Midheaven, and Revolver.

MYSTICAAL OBJECT AT NOON - Larkfall Gives It Up Like an Old Cougar

2007-12-03T15:47:00.000-05:00

I sung and sung and sung the praises of dear Phil Legard and his idiosymptomatic Larkfall label many a moon past, even though it was in a review for a Xenis Emputae Travelling Band tape that wasn't even on his label. As I see it, you take whatever occasion frisbeed at you to stop talking shit and start talking salad. Right? And so I did.
The problem with that XETB tape was that it was basically long gone by the time I finished typing the first word. So y'all probably ended up thinking, "Oh. Okay. Fine," and went about your day. It's a precarious world this little-sluice-off-an-aqueduct-of-actual-culture-that-we-call-FUC lives in. If the ship goes down, you can never say I gargled my last through some corny tears. I'm fighting the good fight for good music, or at least what's left of it.
Phil Legard's Larkfall aims to do likewise, only in a probably way more effective manner. Phil went and uploaded all the out-of-print XETB releases on his label as empeethrees--free for the taking! Why, he even hooks you up with a full-scale printable copy of the sleeve so's you can slap it in a jewel case, put it on your shelf and pretend you was with it from the jump.
I dig the music itself plenty. The Goat Willow has some moments of Jackie-Oish wandering, but on the whole, Xenis Emputae is travelling through much darker underbrush. There's something about JOMF that's unconvincing and you never get that with any of Legard's English countryside mark-outs. Can't remember if any of these were recorded in supposedly-haunted groves or slippery ruins, but he does do that on the regular. The odd duck in the paddling is most definitely Under A Soular Moon, seeing as it's mostly digital but all those synths are really just a different shade of sunglass staring at the same wubbly brooks and misty meadows. The whole mess is ripe with occult and gnostic references that I might know if I collected rare books or lurked at Bieneke library like I did in my younger youth, but I don't so they're largely lost on me. And, anyhow, they're really only an edge piece; you can still see the picture.
Going to Tom Nevers beach, which is just a skip from where I sit, and listening to XETB is the kind of experience I wish I could hand out. Tom Nevers is eroding and decaying like almost nothing else on the island (ceptin' Sankaty, but that's a sung song). So fast, don't you know, that the cement blocks from piers and boat launches are still sitting there. Up along the cliff, you can look down at a fallen TV (the old 500lb, blown tube variety) from where the road has fallen off, spot a seal way out & regarding you like a lost dog, then turn around and look at low and crowded trees shaped by the wind and some unfinished mansions. See, to Legard, these records are geographically specific, so even if you've never seen "the caves and churches around Yorkshire and Cornwall" you can get a feeling for how he sees them. But take them somewhere else and they inform your peepers like you made'em happen.
Give it up for amorphous creativity. It could be the mark of longevity.
Hoof it over to the recordings page at Larkfall so you can ball out in the fallout.

NOW YOU CAN TAKE IT WITH YOU

Island transmissions and other mechanical hoo

2007-10-30T19:18:00.000-05:00

The boys and a girl came up for a weekend of rye and violence and swingsets at midnight and I tell you what, there's little I like more than the aforementioned thangs. But now that the smokes are extinguished, the bottles recycled, the marrow scraped from the hedges, I find myself with limited innernet axxexx and nothing of the new and true in the mail. A drought for this here b-l-o-g, like my folks are suffering in the grape state of Georgia. Don't know when it'll clear up. A lonely PO Box breaks my oil-stained heart, so it'll do me good if you hook my isolated dome up with something fresh out the box. Otherwise, you won't get to read me talk about the post-apocalyptic English coastal town meets abandoned sculpture garden that is Tom Nevers and how it relates to whatever honky residue I'm hearin' and that would be a cryin' you know what.
Also, don't smoke unfiltered Pall Malls. They's a sad substitute for the American Spirit species, unless you're down with tugging on butts laced with burnt cocoa powder and Windex. I'd really rather smoke dirty Kleenex than let those sorry excuses darken my porch again.
Stay frosty.

LET ME SHOW YOU THE COLD LIGHT - Cadaver In Drag, undressed & exhumed

2007-10-17T11:47:00.000-05:00

Having received the stamp of Heaviness from Sir Julian Cope, Cadaver In Drag are probably on their way to, well, what all those Album of the Month bands are destined: Southern Lord and some limited to 13 220-gram purple-and-bacon-grease-colored LPs, then a dreamy, fuzzy drift into obscurity. (Okay, BOC are the exception.) So before the shark is suitably jumped following their impressive new LP on Animal Disguise and Stephen O'Malley gets his mitts on them, let's take a look at The Road To Cope.

Cadaver In Drag - Made Impure one-sided cassette, American Grixxly 2005 Seriously? You couldn't swing another 14 minutes of this and just balance the c30? Well, I've got a Shitty Listener single-sider and I can't say it changed my life, but I dug it proper. So I tried to unskew my ears for once. That said, this is okay. Volcanic bass drones and watery cymbal skins. Super slow, super boxy. Your basic Halloween backdrop doom. Basement Wormphlegm demos. How many more incomplete sentences can I toss at you? While this was indeed okay, it's guilty of one of the highest crimes in my court: no fun to talk about, no fun to write about, no fun to read about. I mean, am I joshin? You tell me! That is to say, If you're awake. I had all the details worked out by the second listen, so the third and fourth were really just to refresh.
Onward?

Cadaver In Drag - Full of Hatred cassette, Animal Disguise 2005
Well, even with the legacy of Man Is the Bastard in mind, this was a surprise. Crossed Out? Siege? No Comment? Where'd all the San Diego crustcore come from? They do it well, frankly. This is the sore thumb so far, but everyone needs a Brighter Than A Thousand Suns or Trans on their resume, y'know? Woke me out of warbly slumber for a minute.

Cadaver In Drag - Ruined Organs cassette, Blood Red 2006
Barely cracking 15 minutes, this is the choicest so far, which I suppose makes sense. The Ey-side wanders into Masonna/RRRecords territory which had me itching for the FF, but Side-Be walks a way more interesting and rewarding line to me. Drony noise with a strange, thuddy undercurrent--before, again, mistakenly Merzing it up. That stuff is fine, but do we really need more of it? I'm leary of the idea that someone is going to pump new life into the rrrrrbzzzzzzzzzzzzzbrrrrbbbbbbbbbbrrrrrrrhisssssssssssssssssssssssss genre.

So when exactly did they make the change to stripped and dipped spacey simplicity? A beautifully reduced sound? Who the shit knows. My journey left me holding the same pile of sand, seeing not the sand but a mystery, a marvel there in my hand. Every time you do this, you are part of the circus of Dr. Lau.

Get the new one because it's fun and check out the tracks on their guyspace. Surely you can outwit me. I don't know. The Mammal stuff is probably better...hmm.

GET BACK ON THE HORSE OR YOU MAY AS WELL SHOOT IT - More round, druggy media comes my way

2007-10-15T17:27:00.000-05:00

Oh the days are rolling into weeks. Who knew? How could that happen? I guess when you start counting cigarettes & bottles & tapes you end up with a piece of time, as Atheist would say. But in the meantime, I've been letting nuevo cherse tunes slip out the door unnoticed. NO MORE. So here we go. A little new, a little older, and I'll call it adieu.

Los Llamarada - The Very Next Moment 7"
Back in the day when I had guests, I played the The Exploding Now, then take a walk around the block. Let them get acquainted. More often than not, I'd return to patches of blood, the needle riding the label like a worn out mechanical bull. Jesus, what a record. Licks the gel out of your hair and spits a rat poison tapenade in your pasty visage. How does Scott Soriano still have 25 copies left? What are y'all up to? Nice sleeve, good slice of ivory wax...you can't feel empeethrees, even with your fancy Audio Research studio-cooled speakers. You can't invite the heathens over on IM! Let'em in the front door! Write the check! You smart-marks can cash it, trust.
Or, in the meantime, you can pick up this, their latest missive. The title cut sticks their rumbly Ut and Mars thang between thick gooey slices of A-Frames stomploaf. Lovely synth peppering, too. Someone tell the dudes at Mutant Sounds! Cheveu fans oughta open their hearts for this one. Although, I should add, they've either moved up to a studio or someone hooked them up with the dopest boombox this side of a JVC in 85 because this don't sound like their usual Pixelvision fidelity. Don't mind it a bit, though. That lil number's keeps me warm just thinking of the Monterrey sun warming their leaky basement. Nothing like Robocoppin' in a droptop on a humid night. But that's another yarn.
And the B-side is...wow. Brenda Lee's "I'm Sorry" always seemed like the kind of shit someone shouts up to a 4th-story window in the wee-smalls with one hand on their sweaty heart and one on some E-dub--but never was before. Evil truckstop karaoke at it's finest. So annoying you'll never forgive again.
Live-r than most.

Blank Dogs - Diana (The Herald) 12"
I'm on the fence and it's not comfortable. I've been up there about Blank Dogs for ages. I can't decide if they're too revival.
Hang on, I'll unpack that. Okay, garage is kinda played out what with it always spooning from the same bowl, right? Every now and again someone dresses it anew, but few of us wait with baited breath for another Royal Trux--at least not realistically. Seems like that's on the verge of happening with some of the (warning: lingo migraine ahead) neo-DIY syphoners. Yeah the sources are still frosty enough for the young & fresh of my generation, but I'm left feeling a little under-fed by acts like Blank Dogs. They're either too indebted to their forefathers or spend too much time running with their brother's friends. Get out of the neighborhood for a minute, will you? I played this six or seven ways in a dozen settings and it never really felt rewarding. Not that it isn't perfectly fine music. It just feels a little like they Xeroxed a whole movement, blotting out some of the important bits. The interpretation is what's got me miffed. Maybe it's too soon to say this style is stale, but I've certainly had fresher bread. I say give the Fort Thunder gear a rest and dig a little deeper. And no, I don't mean into the crates.
Passable, but far from a squawk in the park.

NEXT TIME: I ESTABLISH THE SHIV OUTTA CADAVER IN DRAG! TAKE THAT, COPE!

A CORRECTION BY YOURS FALSELY

2007-10-10T17:26:00.000-05:00

The Church Police 7" released on Skulltones is actually unreleased material by the California band from the early 80s, not some pomo rework by the JA crew. Who knew? Well, I didn't. There was basically no info online when I got it and thus I drew connections on my lonesome--all of which were wrong. That said, I still found it boring, whether or it preceded Happy Flowers/Flipper/etc or not.

Again, apologies. I oughta check my facts before I get all my disses in a row.

Coming soon: actual reviews and more aimless commentary about life in self-imposed New England isolation, bunking with Grammy Lambkin, and how I got Pip Proud's address. You're so excited. Watch the floor.

GREETINGS FROM THE HERMITAGE - A Belated Review of Graham Lambkin's "Salmon Run"

2007-10-08T11:43:00.000-05:00

Golly, what months. Cripes and chiggers, how long's it been? I've departed the slightly unclean South and am now living alone on an island. Yes, an island. Not one of the mind but one of the earth, the part that broke away from Massachusetts before it bore such a name. The island of the Whaleship Essex where a friend has let me rent and live for next to beans. I suppose it is a bit of an island of the mind as well. Living alone in a 6-room house with two floors, two bathrooms and a porch is for-sure spinning my head. Figuring out where to sit is like a UN meeting gone solo! And everything is musty, as it's a barely-used-but-at-least-winterized summer house, so that knocks out about 1.5 rooms unless I feel like wheazing my way through a Misfits of Science episode. So it's not all bad. Plus I can spit to the beach, which is the closest point in the US to our Euro-neighbors.
Time hasn't eroded my sense of tangents, it would seem. Sheesh. Take it or trash it.
ONWARD CRISPIN GLOVER: About 4 months ago [by my watch], this here disc by the dean of Tart, Transmissions, der Shadow Ring & Elklink Mr. Graham Lambkin, was released by his lonesome. It was got through dubious duping or by tipping your hat to hawkmothsATyahoo and tossing a dozen digital bills. Then, silence. The applause long since faded, one trimmed youth stood up having been preoccupied with books about rats and Meadow Meal tapes to add some awkward claps. Well, here I am.
I never thought I'd have a roommate here, but this CD has taken up a peculiar kind of roost. None of the reviews I've read have yet compared it to or put it in context with a single other recording in human history. Not even a previous Lambkin outing! Well sure there was the Celestiial-meets-Berio of Poem back in the oh two, but not even that rings a bell.
Let's get down to facts and try to work our way out. Sometimes there's collaged classical run through King Tubby's board. Sometimes there's rain and the clatter of chimes. Sometimes the piano's been drinking (not me). Sometimes Lambkin just sits and laughs, living it up with some concertos.

Okay.

Fuck.
We're still at that critical impasse, aren't we? I guess there's nothing doing except let the little genius bastard be. I put it on in the bedroom and sit on the stairs. Let it do it's thing. I feel like I'm eavesdropping anyhoo. More like Lambkin's invited me in.
Most music of the popular sort illustrates the physical world or a world inside. It's rare that music itself becomes a place to occupy. Well, that's what it is, then. Lambkin's made a psycho-physical summer house.
Thanks for inviting me. Sorry I'm late. Best time I've had all year.
Can still be had at your local blog spot.

TEMPORARY LAY-OFFS CHERSE TIIIIIIIIMES

HOLD ON FOR HIATUS

2007-08-20T15:19:00.000-05:00

As y'all've probably gathered like good kids oughta, I'll be taking a break from this for the next month or so, as an odyssey awaits me. If you happen to live in Lumberton NC, the Outer Banks, Krumville or Munnsville NY, Barre VT, or Parts Unknown ME, drop me a digital line and I'll come do my laundry on your tab and throw shoes at your pets. You'll be sorry I came. I'll be too drunk to remember. It'll be fantastic.
Then I'll be returning--from new digs!--hopefully with some kickin slices to talk on. Keep watching your skis and always eat your oatmeal. Or at least until mid-September. I'll know.

Church Police - Gilligan's Wings (7", Skulltones 2007)

2007-08-09T01:55:00.000-05:00

Call me a cynical Northerner (read: a Northerner), but Skulltones is pretty over--and I don't mean that in a carny/pro-wrestling way--right?. I mean, they're finished, washed-up & 86'ed. I generally mount up on anything Tom Lax gets his mitts on, but I guess I missed the Der TPK debutante ball. I had the directions straight, but apparently my feet thought better.
So here we are. Another Jewelled Antler-sponsored drunk-in-the-studio one-off to be consumed by 8 people who all know each other. To the credit of the whole JA crew, they's got a sense of humor their peers oughta envy. I'd much rather give 16-minutes to something that at the very least sounds like a blast to make than something that sounds like it's supposed to have been "a really intense trip, man. We totally got out there. Really stretching and reaching through some doors." That is, if it's going to suck about 5 different ways regardless. Which this mostly does. "Life is Fun" is the best delirious wastoid rumble never to be on a Footprints of God 7"--for whatever it's worth. Kind of like the Bunnybrains doing German Oak. Yeah. There's my press release quote, Skulltones. Dine and be merry, for tomorrow you're boots. For rill.

AND WITH A HEARTY MEH

Agitated Radio Pilot & Nether Dawn - The Ghost of Medb/Under Your Night (split vinyl Pseudo Arcana)

2007-08-09T01:30:00.000-05:00

So apparently months and months ago I wrote this review and some shady Internet business went down and it was relegated to the land of unwanted drafts. I don't remember a lick of this. Too much mud or too much Canadian; decide if you wish. So, moons and moons later, here is another tirade on some thangs:

Soon. Soon I will take a break and go back to reviewing dumpy black metal or maybe not review anything for a bit. Music is starting to feel like homework. It's hard enough to keep track of what new shit I've got, nevermind what I actually think about it.
So here we are again. I put this on and I let it play. I thought I knew Nether Dawn from Last Visible Dog's something or other but apparently I was mistaken. They're from somewhere. Who knows. Agitated Radio Pilot could be anyone of any gender recording anywhere in the world right now near as I can tell. It's got all the pretty, lilting festoonery of aged lore and forgotten colored paper and...oh shit! I started falling asleep there for a minute. Nothing stood out. Drones drone. I mean, what else do they do? Really good ones work their way into your head until they wind through the muscles in your back and then you're linked good & proper. It's like a bulldozer: you don't just hand it to anyone and expect him to know how to steer. And folk'll tell me I should be glad to hear boring drone and raga'ed-up folk than, say, bad metal. But it's all the same to me: you is or you ain't, and ain't no use in being anything but what you is. See the Cloudland Canyon bit for more unnecessarily heated ranting.
Anyhow, I like the Nether Dawn side because they at least smother their sound rather than gettin all cathedral on me. Don't we get enough of that these days? I mean, ND's "Sky Dust" had me with my ear to the floor, rather than thinking I was at Pseudo Arcana's midnight mass. And the melodies are challenging, in a loose and lopsided way. The point being, I'm not sorry I heard them. This might not climb to the top of some imaginary list in my head nor be something I cling to and put on for friends who want to know where you go after you've already heard the Congos and Dead C. Then again, I've got a ton of stuff like that. You know, sometimes you're hungry, but not just for anything. And maybe the spot you find the most fresh-dipped is closed for remodeling or the line's around the block. So you take a walk down a street that's kind of familiar but you don't recognize a single face. You see an open booth through a window framed with patterned curtains and you go inside and sit down. The menu looks appealing, nice layout, staff is mint, floor's pretty clean. Food arrives quickly. It doesn't change your life, but it's not cloying and now you've assuaged hunger. Doesn't mean you'll be back, but who can say. Who can say?

Davenport Family - At the Foot of Zodiac Mountain (Meu Dia De Morte 2007)

2007-08-08T18:21:00.000-05:00

The Korean lady at World of Beverage tried like hell to convince me the 8oz flask I was buying was lined with glass inside so the hooch wouldn't taste like steel. And the whole time I'm waiting for her to bag my shit up, some round-faced greasewig is asking me what part of CT I'm from. New Haven, I say. Might as well be from Harlem, he says. I laughed right in his face. What else was there to do? Anyhow, I didn't buy the glass-lining bit for a second, but I did buy the flask. Astounding what someone will convince herself so she can convince you to drop eight more bills. Round here we call that carny.
The Davenport Family sure is trying hard to get the money of many a bearded, fussy-shoe-wearing clown on a fixed gear. Go ahead. Judge the cover. If you must, you can even put it on and revel in the unexciting, aping, gaping, yawning smudge upon your boombox. Jackie-O Neck Blues Band of the Occult Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants.
Available wherever v-neck t-shirts and things with stripes on them are waiting outside. Or hoof on over to Fusetron, if you must.

FEEL THE MEDIOCRITY

SISTERS OF SLAB - Two splits of dichotymous proportions

2007-07-27T18:46:00.000-05:00

Tyvek & Cheveu - Split 7" (S-S Records, 2007)
Y'all read my Cheveu-sponsored jissom last time around, so all I can do is echo. Their track, "El Tortuga" is about 5 brands of swank in under 2min. They inhabit that space where teenage debauchery turns into a spin off the road while the speakers blow and the tires haven't hit the mud yet and all there is to feel is the beauty of the change in wind direction and that sinking uneven feeling in your gut. Can't say I'm as in love with the Tyvek side. Don't get me wrong, it does 1980 real well, but so did 1980. Nice dipped-out ending though. Fresh enough you could probably still buy it. Check the dudes themselves.

Michael Yonkers & Little Claw - Split 7" (X!, 2007)
Now I know Messer Yonkers is an outsider of Jandek/Skidd Freeman proportions, but I think he might be looking over his own shoulder too much. At least at the outset. "I Think" is like a Kim Fowley pisstake on Big Black, which doesn't really need to happen. "The Drain" on the other hand is like a Richard Kern nightmare party. It could be 20 years old, or it could be brand new, but it's bound to irritate you right out of your chair any which way.
I'll take Little Claw any day they're free. Kilynn makes none of the lady sounds usually found in these bang-and-clang bands--not sweet, not aimlessly snarling, not screechy, not childlike. She comes across like a person, not a person personifying an idea. Meantime, the band stirs and steams like a Warren Oates flick waiting for the moment to smoke. Their "Ice Age" reaffirms my position that Kim and Thursty should've squalled their last like mad years ago. Fuck a...Jesus, I don't even know what the last record was called. Pretty In Pink? Ah, there was some kinda alliterati for the literati in there. Fuck it. You know.
And, of course, only then do I notice they've kicked jams on Ecstatic Peace. Ha! The dish is officially passed, I guess. Why not catch it? Look in the horse's mouth to find the tools of Paypal conquest.

NO AND YES, and then MAYBE AND YES... So that's TWO YESES

21st CENTURY SCHIZOID RUBE - Keeping Up With the Jaspers

2007-07-22T16:37:00.000-05:00

In an effort to be less mud-stuck and snarky, which I assure you is both noble and aimless, I'm going to try to catch up on the goings on of two much-oozed-over acts and see if I actually give a shit or if I can convince some other sap to do likewise.

JAY REATARD
I think I've heard everything he's put out this year by his lonesome--so far. We are talking about a scene full of people who have fallen in the YouTube-gen trap of thinking everything is worth preserving, even if it's only in an edition of 4.5 & given to dudes with bigger beards than waists. This shit's been a club for longer than I've been breathin y'all's air, so no surprises all around that the Reatard club's a piece of junkmail with fancy packaging while I'm waiting for a letter from a nice girl: when I actually surpass my irritation and give it 5 minutes of my time, I get the dull taste of being right the first time around. Not offensive, sure, but basically just passable. They're songs. You know. Songs. I remember liking the B-sides on the Night of Broken Glass 12", but that's probably because I hated the A-sides. Anyhow, the whole thing is amazingly unremarkable and totally worth your time and eBay watch list. Available through places that have things that I also didn't want so I don't remember them.

CHEVEU - My Answer Is Yes 7" (Rob's House, 2007)
Okay, I'll bite. I actually really liked this. I keep expecting to be massively underwhelmed by all this post-punk-post-punk coming out of the seams, but then a lot of it cooks and I get all blushy. Cheveu take their master's tools out for the weekend and give you a Saturday and a Sunday unlike anything those old dudes would've thunk of but still make them wanna put their new boots on. Some glorious Pstone Suicide with the bloke from the Tronics sangin'. Or something. I didn't check my facts. It's fussy in a vintage-keyboard-not-some-shit-Rebirth way, and not in a balalaika-over-Hagstrom kind of way. This should become suitably huge and then jump the shark like most good things. Hey, you've got to learn to love the cycle or love being mad all the damn time, right? Plus, in the meantime I get to take a modicum of pride in my home's own Rob's House Records seeing the power & the glory and bringing this to my neighborhood. Go get it at S-S Records or Fusetron if you please.

YOU WANT HALF OF THIS

KVLTY WORKRATE REPORT! Skaters - Dispersed Royalty Ornaments (LP, Ore Wabana Limited 2007)

2007-07-15T15:35:00.000-05:00

Okay PR is PR and I ain't talking San Juan, but damn does Wabana lay it on thick! They set these here Skaters to share a booth with Coltrane, Sanders, and Ayler like they was gonna nosh. Dubious, right? So, who picks up the tab & who's shooting up in the alley?

WHAT WORKED:
-Mint cover and mint title. Land of Make-Believe dowries blow right up me.

- I can't blame zeal-overload on the poor put-upon Skaters. They didn't write it and I'm sure they could care less what some bloke called Justin thinks of their bedroom disturbance.
Still, I didn't so much get the free-jazz linkage as the far more obvious Sun City Girls and Far East-jocking. What with the mysterious monkey cackling and bowed strings and under-production, you know. Dom's Edge of Time occasionally came through the Minsk-y warble to bury me in space dust, so this isn't all one-point perspective.

-It's got that Finnish underground structure that the kids seem to love and I've got my soft spots for. You know, where the things are all doing one thing or another and then they do something harmonious and then they do something beautiful and unexpected and strange and then it all comes to a klunky hault? Yeah yeah, like that! Pop Gold, right? Well...

WHAT DIDN'T WORK:
-This just isn't going to catch many spins from me. Once more around the track is probably as far as the Skaters will get. Too much of one thing, not enough of anything else--at least for 38 minutes of my undivided.

NOT ENOUGH MELTED KNOWLEDGE

BETTER LATE THAN SOBER

2007-07-08T19:34:00.000-05:00

There's a slew of dicey discs going round, but mixed up in em are some honest-to-G-d rubies. So here's a list of shit that I could talk on for eight pages like usual, but instead I'll just join the chorus of YESYESYESes & go melt some butter. There's work to be wed:

Cherry Blossoms - s/t
Pink Reason - Cleaning the Mirror and that new joint
Sic Alps - Teenage Alps
Dead C - Future Artists (danceable!)
Blues Control - s/t CD on Holy Mountain (a summer drug record for many ages)
Los Llamarada - Exploding Now
The Bad Trips - s/t
Acid Mothers Temple & the Bag of Detachable Lips Or Whatever the Doo Da Band Horse-Hockey They're Calling Themselves Today - Starless And Bible Black Sabbath

and so on back to about 6 months ago. And to further get into my head,

Tijuana Carbomb
one part tequila
one part Kahlua
1 pint dark Mexican beer

3 or so later, and you'll forget everything you like, too. The first time I had this, it was with some fussy tequila, an even fussier coffee licquer and a Xingu, which amounted essentially to a 9-dollar root beer float that had me whistling the Carpenters at my girly all down N Highland.

WE TOAST THE DAYS OF WINE AND HOSERY

I NICKED EM FROM THE POH-LEESE - Messthetics #102 & #103 (CD Hyped To Death 2007)

2007-07-03T15:22:00.001-05:00

Hot on their own heels, Hyped to Death scrawls in even more DhighY/pyosty-pyunky blanks. Seems to me this series features the best & dimmest of the 8 Messthetics volumes (previously hyped ad-death somewheres on here) plus buckets more soupy singles. Some of my biggest boners were culled from The Dad, Cult Figures, Spizzoil (one of the many Spizzincarnates), Cracked Actors, 012, the Lines, and the lovely Walking Floors. Steve Treatment's "Danger Zone" still cranks, of course, but these flaps aren't free of surprises. Check the Frank Details for some of the most un-London jams ever struck in any bleedin decade.
I get the feelin H2D could go on with this forever. When will they align powers with the Mutant Sounds crew and coax every gifted&jilted motherfucker out the woodwork? The liners'd come leatherbound, for shit's sake!

SUCK AT THIS TEET THAT'S WHAT SHE SAID

NEW WEIRD CHEAT SHEET - V.A. - Folk Is Not A Four Letter Word Vol 2 (Finders Keepers 2007)

2007-07-01T02:07:00.000-05:00

Jeez, having spent 3 weeks bumming around Italia & Greece like a privileged youth oughta, being able to read shit isn't such a blessing. Seriously. It's much harder to fake ignorance, which in turn will prevent you from getting things like quick access to fancy museums and mis-priced train tickets. Whitey ain't buying in.
So with that all in ya mind, I really dug all the tracks where I can't tell what the shit is being said. Turid's "Pa Tredje Dagen Uppstandna" is Sandy Denny levitating down the stairs--instead of...uh, failing them?--and then dipping right out the second floor window brushing the junipers with the palms of her hands. In Swedish. Elly & Rikkert's "Heksenkring" is Straight Outta Lidsville, complete with terrifying flute lore. Vanica Doble's "Dime Felix" fixes Veloso up with the Wilson clan, hoping Manson'll keep his paws off the ladies.
Okay, I shut my eyes and picked some tracks. And you know what? They were all in English & not a bit hateful! Well, Susan Christie's "Paint A Lady" had me wondering where Rowan Morrison ended up, but that's just good ol' anxiety. 11:59's "The Waters of Babylon" isn't the unmixed Congos track I hoped it would be, but they've certainly got their Perhacs all in a row. And if you bite at the Sibylle Baier spoon, check out the disc Orange Twin put out lasty yeary; it's a fine pot.
Loveable chestnuts all about. With his here Andy Votel Hulk-up helping me along in the most lovely & scary of ways, I'll be reading my mail in no time.

GOOD SHOW NICE FORM

To all the girls I've loved before...

2007-06-25T11:49:00.000-05:00

I took a shit at the Jack Daniels distillery.

Regular economy class posting will resume soonish. Cheers up you.

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome - self-titled 7" (Rob's House 2007)

2007-05-28T00:40:00.000-05:00

If ever there was a scan that didn't do a cover justice... Well, anyhow, I'll give you the gooey graphic design details in a bit.
SIDS belong to my home of Mylanta, GA, and generally destroy. The review my roommate & swami of herbal essence gave holds up on wax, too. Hell, he was windmilling shirtless down Oakdale last I saw. And if you can't play wax, it comes with a skull-stamped CD-r with all the same trimmings. Aw, but then you'll miss out on lockgrooves that make Holy Molar look like the A-Set! Actually, that's not a stretch. How about Drago Miette:Alva Noto?
I won't divulge the secret of spinning the final cut. I trust you to handle the needle like the magnifying glass of sound it be.
Oh MFA student ejaculate in 5,4,3...
Clear red vinyl comes in a die-cut sleeve with two inserts: one a red-frosted vellum, the second good ol white. Don't just leave 'em in there! Take 'em out and play with 'em! Jesus, what is with you today?
Get cashy and dip to S-S Records or ask someone with blue-black hair.

YOU WILL FUCKING DIE SOON GET THIS

PLAMELESS SHUG FOR SIDS

2007-05-24T23:32:00.000-05:00

Hey! My record-store buddy Erin is in a band called Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. They're fantastic. My roommate--who only listens to W.A.S.P., Kiss, and Kaki King--said seeing them was like being on a carousel made of sawblades. I told him I thought it was more like jock jams for vampires. Or Primitive Calculators and Screamers taking over San Diego in 1997. He told me I was being obtuse.
Any at rate, SIDS have a soon-to-be-gone 7" on Rob's House and are about to deafen people in several different cities starting June 3rd. Check out their page on the Myspace for DEEP specificity.

Xenis Emputae Travelling Band - Gamaaea (cass Beyond Repair 2007)

2007-05-24T22:32:00.000-05:00

Good reader, bear this in mind: I've spent several days listening to the first Metal Church, Robert Wyatt's take on "At Last I Am Free" and the Colours Out of Time's "Rock Section." When this rectangle of woodsy wooskies appeared on my radar a few days back, I feared it would be a dollybrook to my gummy aesthetics. I may as well have sat in my room on Klonopin staring at a shoe for 4 days and then decided to walk to Baltimore.
But in the end, this was easy-peasy, green n breezy. Yorkshirite Phil Legard--he's the one squeezing the melodeon like a roll of Bounty--is this generation's Incredible String Band walk-in, rescuing their legacy of influence from the cliff of self-parody. Or some shit. What I'm getting at in a drunk driving test kind of way is this is as authentic and self-motivated as it gets. He even knows what to do with his voice! Tell that to the Cloudland Canyons and Black to Comms of the Earth. "Descending Form" and "Sing Holy Song" showcase just how well harmonium and human pipes get down, even outside the world of guys in brown cloaks and mysterious Azns.
And get this: not only is the man adept at making music that sounds like the sun rising on a morning after a bonfire, he's also an entrepreneur! His well-nutured Larkfall Records is a mule I can get behind and you oughta do the same. Lovely to look at, too. Makes my eyes gooey.
The bottom line is, anyone who can cut records with pennywhistles and not bring to mind puffy shirts is straight-up fridge-worthy.
Limited to 50 measly copies, which can be got from Beyond Repair and that's all. A XETB CD-r is available at Fusetron, too, if you're looking something you mightcould get.

LIQUID ACROBAT AS REGARDS THIS IS MINT

Edwige - Play the Game Or Leave the Bed 7" (Release the Bats 2007)

2007-05-24T22:24:00.000-05:00

"Dude, this is sick! They totally turn on their pedals and then just like lean on them as hard as poss--"

Sorry. I fell asleep in the middle of my own shtick. Somehow related to the Rita--mostly in that it sounds exactly like them. And everything else, for that matter.

SHIT IS BOOTS

Grails - Burning Off Impurites (Temporary Residence, 2007)

2007-05-24T22:09:00.000-05:00

This is like if Epcot were co-opted by guys with limited edition Dunks and Guru Guru records. At one point it Mickey Hart shows up.

PLEASE STOP

Cracked Actor - Nazi School 7" 1981 WORKRATE REPORT!

2007-05-16T22:22:00.000-05:00

goofus &&&

WHAT WORKED:

-The cover, of course. It's a thing of carved notebook dreams. I'd kill for it stuck to the back of a slightly-burnt denim jacket. Dropout metal-level FUCKING FANTASTIC.

-I swear if Over the Edge had come out just 2 years later this would've been the theme song. I'm not holding my breath, but an Alex Cox-helmed remake would be on point. Shit, get the Glaxo Babies back together to play disenchanted history profs. So, on these very personal terms, I had to love this.

-The marching snare overdubs in the first 5 seconds are brilliant, especially since they're louder than the whole affair. I kept thinking I put on that S.O.B. flexi. No grief for their skills, neither. I do have a question, though: is the Cracked Actor of Messthetics 7? How could it be? This one's Last Words-style Oi and the other sucked the teet of the Deleted Records mare. Then again, who knows? Some things never survived the jump from '79 (nein!) to '8Oh.

-Sweet merciful blokes, the fidelity is kinda mint! Where's the bass? Who cares? I'm ready to glass my whole village! Who's first in queue? The Business could take a few production pointers, even in these pitch-corrected days.

WHAT SORT'VE WORK:

-Okay, I'm going to make an admittedly obvious judgment: this is a little silly, in much the ways of "Animal World" by the aforementioned Last Words. They're probably missing their own joke, which may or may not amuse you. Walking the line of Nazi-sympathy and Nazi-derision is not as powerful these days. Remember those Locust arm-bands? I think folks were more up-in-arms about the be-merched coke mirrors.
Oi lyrics are in a race for subtlety with "Louie Louie" (and no one's put a toe on the track yet), so I suppose the whole mess is moot.

WHAT DIDN'T WORK:

-"Judy In Disguise" is boots, despite being produced like "Sailin' On." Kinda drags the whole affair into territories of unrequited dopiness, leaving us with Side Fun and Side Snooze. Oh wait, that's the Furze split with Velvet Caccoon tba 2017.

ACE NONETHELESS

CJA - Bottled Smoke Series Vol 1 CD-r Digitalis Industries 2007 WORKRATE REPORT!

2007-05-13T22:43:00.000-05:00

Carstairs

WHAT WORKED:

-I back subscription series 100-percent. How much do you miss singles clubs? The day you forget you signed up, you get a little gift in the mail; like a cable coming in from above. Never fails, I'll tell you what. Any label that sets up one of these --Unheard Music/Atavistic, Rough Trade, Vinyl-On-Demand (?), Southern Lord (although I've heard horror stories about them), and now Digitalis Industries--has my respect. I mean, if you know you're gonna make it rain for whatever releases are coming out on said label, why not secure a spot? And this means something from me, because those of you with a copy of the 1st issue of My Hair Is Growing know the shit I've talked on Digitalis Industries. And I hold tight to the position that a lot of it is boring. But I can't deny this is a great idea.

-The frequencies on "Hidden" replicate the feeling of looking at red-green contrast and then shaking it, which is kind of incredible. Don't drink and then put this on. Plus it basically sounds like British Electric Foundation filtered through the Birchville lens, so why not give it a smooch?

-It's not too long. This is really valuable to me lately, especially if I don't fall in love & want to move in with it.

WHAT DIDN'T WORK

-There's a buffet of half-baked, here. Sometimes they play along with Flying Canyon intros, sometimes with the Space Needle, but mostly with the carb.

-They don't really do anything memorable--bad or otherwise. They can't best their limited chops either. Granted, the CJA folk diss the whole ball in the liners, but that don't mean a lick. Most folk are wont to diss their own shit because it comes across as less self-agrandizing, even though it's actually doubly agrandizing because it's passive aggressive. It's like a confidence scam. You're made to think you're noshing humble pies, not gold-leaf streudel.
Trouble is, this is humble in a boring way, like that uncle that never has anything to say but is always first to offer to do the dishes or set the table. You know, big sweaters, funny eyes? Does something for a living that is so convoluted its probably a front for a bootleg sunglasses factory? Nothing to mark out for.

-If you take your new Ibanez out of the wrapper, plug it in and walk out of the room, I think these chords just start playing. Check the manual.

-There's a Dead C cover. It sounds like when your roommate fucks in the shower at 3am when you're hung over and have to be at work by 6.

If you could choose between faux-nuts and faux-dumb, which would you take?

TROUBLE IS A LONESOME TOWN

Brain Band - Self-Titled cass Fuck It Tapes 2007 WORKRATE REPORT!

2007-05-13T22:25:00.000-05:00

Ooh!

WHAT WORKED:

-Two sides, 40 minutes. Definitely the perfect length.

-Fidelity doesn't subtract anything. I got a hunch this sounds like the Xpressway-sponsored Harry Pussy toga party it is wherever you stand.

-No matter how disingenuous they probably are (I mean, what music being made by people my age with guitars isn't disingenuous at this point?) I really dig the loutish rumbling German bits. I get all giddy imagining a roomful of sweaty guys in vests falling over drunk. No wonder I like Black Oak Arkansas! NATAS NATAS NATAS NATAS NATAS NATAS

WHAT DIDN'T WORK
-Their influences are not so much worn as carried like banners. Ultimately, they sound like a whole bunch of shit that is already going on--which I also already know is boring--but released in an even more limited edition. Oh good.

-Will someone please lead a revolution away from the symmetrical post-Dada multimedia assemblage cover art movement? I will buy you ice cream.

BLACK OAK IS BETTER AND NOT OUT OF PRINT

Pip Proud & Alastair Galbraith - Hey Gus (7" Emperor Jones 1998)

2007-05-04T11:30:00.000-05:00

Can't find a scan to save my shirt, so you'll have to go without. Pip Proud cannot occupy a world that has any kind of Internet. When his generator's broken, he runs the tape recorder off his car battery. I'm just guessing here, but something tells me when you drive by his shack at night, you can see the light from inside coming through the slats.
I'm going to get right to the point because I don't want to drench this in any more of my tired verbal jizz. This seven-inch is ACE. I'm so happy to drop 4 bucks on a 7" no one cares about that turns out to be the most beautiful thing I've heard lately. I'm bypassing the musical recipe because 4 seconds into this you will forget what other music sounds like. Pip Proud delivers the meaningless life-lesson talks that other old folk love to spout, but his tone is telling. He's not buying it, either, chief. And that's the ultimate lesson: you're not listening, you're living. You're living because one day it will all be dusty bits. The only stories left to tell will be one's from your days as a wee like "Hey Gus, is God really made of love?" told with the exhaustion of a life overscrutinized.
You want this because it does not belong on the Internet. As a matter of fact, I posted this 4 times before it worked. Wasn't Pip in Brother's Keeper?

A GLOBBOT AT MY TABLE - Peter Gutteridge - Pure (cass Xpressway 1989)

2007-05-02T21:50:00.000-05:00

Man, even the cover is bonkers-good. It's like a long-lost issue of SPIN! Gutteridge, as you might expect from a man all up in Xpressway, was in the Clean and the Great Unwashed, and went on to do many a great and equally unwashed thing including producing a flock of Snapper singles. Gutteridge is arguably the better Peter of the NZ scene, although Jefferies is a titan of the faded green sounds.
What's got me most dumbfoibled about this here tape is how un-precious it is. I mean, "Planet Phrom" is adorable, but never becomes the recently opened Barbie gown it would be in the hands of Those Who Aren't Afraid of You and Will Beat Your Ass. "Sand" and "Exhibition 2" really could be a lost Ike Yard/Joe Meek collab. "Suicide" is Soothing Sounds for Alan Vega 1-6 Months. In short, this is 21 kinds of dope. You will put this in your car at 1am and take it out when you crash at 4:16. Pardon my newbieness to the naissance of the be-leathered Kiwi drone-psych scene, but this is all fantastically new and exciting to me. The whole ball of wax is continually uprooting my tits, what with the Nocturnal Projections and Lions & Tigers (no, but for reeeaal!) and Sneaky Feelings and all. I have only begun to hype, so I'll go get pizza and look at a lake instead.
Being that this is as long-gone as it gets, I have uploaded it for your enjoyment. I'm not about to deny y'all something for free that has such deeply DIY roots. You have 7 days to hit it, and a lifetime to quit it. Not like you ever will:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/8w7b2a
You want this and thusly I'm giving it to you.

THE SOUND OF POP-UPS - Christmas Decorations - Communal Rust (CD, Community Library 2007)

2007-05-01T10:14:00.000-05:00

At night, after my roommate's turned out his light, the cat's been fed & has curled up on the arm of the pull-out couch, I usually sit in my armchair, finish what's left of the drink in my hand and think for about 5 hours about what I want to listen to. Get up, throw something on, change my mind, repeat. What usually ends up going on and staying on is either Blues Control (especially if that drink is number 3 or 4) or whatever I'm reviewing that week. I figure it's the newest and most uncertain music in the house and, being that I'm probably loaded, I will be more inclined to enjoy it. I want to enjoy all of it, I really and truly do, but sometimes I need to be primed first. Gin is an excellent primer, as well as that Dogfish 90-Minute IPA.
Christmas Decorations was heard stone-cold sober in my parents basement on a Tuesday morning, after I crashed there the night before doing my laundry. So I was probably in the least eager state of mind to review it. I came away with some specific impressions, but I can't say how slighted they were by my frame of mind. Unaffected, yes. But by no means cheery. Keep this in mind when I say I don't like this record.
This could've been on, say, Artificial Intelligence 2--that is, if this were 1992 and Christmas Decorations shared members with the Black Dog. As it stands, it's not and they don't, but I couldn't shake the idea. It also could be on Mego in 1998 or whatever year that dumb Endless Summer disc came out where Fennesz measured the perimeter of his 5000 sq ft loft or some shit. It's got this really tired clicky sound that is supposed to modulate the sounds, but really it just sounds like a laptop to me. I'm fine with music made with computers, but it's got to sound like more than just computers. This doesn't do that. The clickiness felt like a little kid looking over my shoulder while I read, breathing through his nose really loudly. The rest of the music is whatever I was reading, which I don't much remember because all I can think about is exhaled carbon dioxide moving over whistling and whirring bits of snot. I think some of it might've been cool, but I might be confusing it with the Black Dog again or Asa Chang or something.
I may just be cranky, but you probably don't want this. Hang on, I'll give it another chance.

Nope.

LAFMS KMFDM, Vodka Soap - Parallel Vision, the Appearance Of A Motion Released By Simultaneous Hallucinations (cass, Nature Tape Limb 2007)

2007-05-01T09:09:00.000-05:00

Spencer Clark is Vodka Soap. This here release shares a home with Sunroof! and the Skaters, though he's been on New Age Cassettes, Wabana Ore Limited (sheesh!), and 23 Productions. I think this Parallel Vision affair might've been on CD-r last year, but who knows. Info is so scant, I feel like I'm looking at a last-known-photo. Shit, that's even what it sounds like! This thing writes itself!
What you get here is a c-45 of slovenly ghost music, with hints of that Boyd Rice character, Dennis Duck, and Tom Recchion. You know, a carnival recorded from a drainpipe. Kinda amorphous with little tape hiccups to mark a change of idea--which is not without its charm. I tell you what, they conjure some serious spectres, almost as frightening as the aftermath of my tofu vindaloo from last Saturday. You could hold a raffle at your next town fair to see who can guess the instruments. Keys? Gits? A swim meet? I'll take 5. Who's got a 5? Reminiscent of the Composition of the Melted Cheese thing I talked up before.

THIS SOUNDS LIKE A CHEVY VAN AND THAT'S ALL RIGHT WITH ME

CATCHY NAMES ASIDE... Composition of the Sensibilities of Melted Knowledge - self-titled cass New Age 2007

2007-04-17T19:25:00.000-05:00

Their full name is actually Composition of the Sensibilities of Melted Knowlegde (Determining the Precipice In Which Dimensions Are Fountained).
Wow.
I'm baffled. Baffled. On my way to a bafflement luncheon served at the Huh? Legion Hall in Donde Es, New Mexico. I spent most of the first side kicking myself for leaving this tape in my pants pocket and then taking them to the laudromat. No siree. As a matter of fact, my copy of this tape was taken from files on a p2p Cult of Unknown Personality. The idea that this has touched computers...does not compute. The cover was copped from discogs.com, not that it helps much. It's as stubborn as the thing inside.
On the factual tip, this is 2 untitled somethings, which sound more like collections of songs. Sure sound like pauses to me. Although, honestly, after the 49-minutes of loopy underwater irrigation National Almanac Lord of the Ringworm recital, I can't tell the difference tween a sound meant and a sound found. If you're talking fidelity, the Blues Control stuff sounds intertidal in comparison! This is positively tectonic! I cannot begin to comprehend the drugs and wiring it took to make this ultra-rare brick of plastic. It emerged from a place I've never known and took me back with it. It's over now, but I'm not out of the woods yet.
Is it electronic? Did Bo Hansson really hock the "Lothlorien" masters to LAFMS? Did they put bicycle horns in the dryer or was Urdog taking the Saltine challenge? Did I fire 6 shots or only 5? How many folks does it take to determine the precipice in which dimensions are fountained? Did they determine it? Sounds outlandish, so maybe this is an ongoing study. If they need funding, I'm quick with the debit card. That is to say, when I'm cashy. Hard to get stuff from a company that doesn't seem to exist, though. Gets to be a problem. Too bad, because I was going to start posting the sites where all these Fuck You Counselor jams can be had. Guess it will have to wait. Consider that the most accessible band on New Age Cassettes is Vodka Soap. How's THAT for scale?
You want whatever this is. I think. If it's even get-able.

THE U.S.S. RITCHIE BLACKMORE - Blues Control - Puff LP Woodsist 2007

2007-04-16T17:37:00.000-05:00

For the record, mine was screened with a white-boy skin tone, not ivory white like the one to be found on the Internet. But this is probably an aside. I've done a ton of silkscreening--none of that industrial or commercial shit. Good old squeegee-and-blue-tape style. Got pretty good at it, too. Don't think I ever had to ditch a print, which is a record I'm proud of. Then again, none of my editions exceeded 6 prints. It still baffles me that people can pull editions of 500 like this one. The time investment alone is outrageous, never mind the price of coffee! You'd have to dump the espresso directly into a peripheral vein. Be discreet about it, though. Between the toes...
I was going to go on about how much I love smelling fresh screen ink, but by the time I was done, I'd have to change my pants & I still wouldn't have gotten around to the record inside the sleeve. Although I will say you can thank Jeremy Earl for the sublimely stoned artwork. I never knew cavemen had a Skull & Bones of their own. No clue who he is, but clearly he gets it. This is some underworld shit. And I don't mean that in a Dubnobasswithmyheadman way. I mean that in a Beneath the Planet of the Apes way. That is, if the apes were Deep Purple, which is hardly a reach. Blues Control have sucked their share of water-pipes, but at least their ears aren't clogged with res. After all, the sounds on this etched frisbee are hardly any kind of cheese incident.
Somewhere beneath the rolling waves of the Long Island Sound, Blues Control's sustain pedal sinks deeper and deeper. All that English I dropped about the electric piano in BC's Riverboat Styx cassette sounding incredible--well, they did it again and I'm still baffled. "Always On Time" is as bluesy as this duo get, ever-filtering the sunken sounds of the future through the lens of many a stoned kraut. The piano licks & licks & licks until there's not a drop left. To be blunt, it's incredible. To be poetic, it's gorgeous. To be drunk, it's an endless dolly shot on Peter Jefferies' unknown beach. Wait, I mixed those up.
Drop the 11 bucks. You're cashy and we both know it. Jacques Cousteau stoner jams will never be better rep'd in the 07. That is, until their next LP to be released by Holy Mountain. An east coast backyards-only tour with Residual Echoes would have me dropping my drawers.

VA - Xpressway Pile=Up (Avalanche Records 1990)

2007-04-14T11:42:00.000-05:00

Being that the land of the Kiwis is on every bearded tongue in the nation these days, thanks to cats like Campbell Neale and his ever-growing clan of psi phenomena, and the reappraisal of Bruce Russell & the great Dead C, I thought it fitting to talk about a fantastic document of NZ's DIY neo-psych heyday. Mostly you'll get to hear me nostalgia-ize all over the place.
Man, when I was a smaller lad, all of 14 or 15, I went positively batshit trying to collect everything I could from Flying Nun Records from the early 80s, hoping I would find that thing that all the critics were ejaculating over. I mean, I found the first two Raincoats LPs (the reissues, thanks to a certain Kurt) and got them on a whim and you know what? I totally loved them. So why not follow the thread? If prayer can travel around the world, why not sound and sense? So I dug. & dug. I thought the Chills were a little too silly. The Clean were okay, especially that one song. The Bats were a little hard to grok. That was about as far as I got. I stopped pestering record clerks and gave up and chalked it up to experience. But all that blown grip! I'd have to babysit the storage facility in Middlebury all summer to make amens with my wallet! So, there I went, stuffing envelopes and refiling all of Aunt Bee's misspelled index cards, all the while wondering how I missed all the hubbub about the Land of Sheep and Fuzz. I read all the Janet Frame I could, hoping that would shed some light. Oh please. Don't get me wrong, I love the gal, but if her books set one toe outside the confines of her skull, it's on a dead beetle, not her homeland.
When was the mystery going to unravel like a proverbial wool sweater? Into my hometown moved a kiwi lass. Don't ask me how she ended up in New Haven, CT, because I didn't ask either. But she was certainly no help. The only music she dug came from leather-clad longhaired Brits circa '81. Dead end #12. New Zealand probably left my mind for a while so I could look at things on the Electric Human Project or Happy Couples Never Last or some such nonsense (although I listened to the Drago Miette 7" out of the clear the other day and it really holds up!) so I could hang with the twitchy side of of the tracks.
Time did whatever it does.
Some time in 2003, the mystery reemerged. Suddenly I was hearing about all this noise coming from New Zealand. Not fun noise; noise noise. Big bright chirping buzzing fluted tunnels of noise, homemade and self-released. Ugly and gorgeous and everything you want something wrapped in wallpaper and $12ppd to be. By then it had probably been going on a while, but being lost in my own fog, it was new to me. So I began to dig anew, this time in a different spot. How different could NZ music from 3 or 6 years post-Clean be?
Oh, what I was in for.
Unbeknownst to me, this was the NZ I'd always wanted without even knowing it. Look Blue Go Purple were great! How did Essential Logic get so known while those gals sat in the couch of obscurity? Fuck a Lora Logic! And that's not even a sliver. The Songs From the Lowland compilation? More like revelation! How could all these Matador folk be strutting around like they owned the bright & dreary sound? The World, the Himalayas, Raith Rovers--oh man. I'm still itching to hear Raith Rovers' Ralph cassette. Fat chance, I know. It never occurred to my mark-ass mind that it's not that I didn't like the lo-fi crunch and stumble sound of early-90s America. They were just doing it wrong.
So that brings me to Xpressway Pile=Up, which I have only recently heard. It might be more significantly significant than Lowland, if only because my expectations were again blown. Thought I'd nailed them shits down. One would be pressured to call these humble sounds, sounds aware of their means and their skills and all that, but one'd be wrong. One'd look at their country of origin and pass unfair judgment. This is brave, warm, fully-formed music, wearing influences like scarves, not insignia. Snapper smokes every bloody valentine with the power of two chords in "Death and Weirdness In the Surfing Zone". The abrupt fade after the squalling amp yawn is the ultimate wipe-out. Gets me every time. What do you know? Features members of the Chills and the Clean. Peter Jefferies's "On An Unknown Beach" would be Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue in anyone else's mitts. Instead, with subtle shifts in vocal presence and lyrics that oscillate between silly and abandoned, the feeling of cool solitude sinks in with the quickness. Nocturnal Projections' "Walk A Straight Line" rode right out of Metal Circus without a scratch.
I haven't even begun to gush, though I'll quickly add that the 3ds and Stephen Kilroy tracks will have you tossing out your Yo La Tengo in favor of Gillian Elisa & Tiny Town, and looking puzzled at your copy of Glider respectively. Puts the whole stoned and droned movement into perspective. Never again will I doubt the little green islands.
You want all of this.

WEATHER REPORT FOR YOUR DOME, Pink Luminous Invocation - Pink Fog (CDR Not Not Fun 2007)

2007-04-14T01:18:00.000-05:00

Released in some ungodly edition because of the packaging. I mean, how expensive could CD-Rs be? This is where filesharing becomes useful, because outside of 71 people and their friends, no one will hear this. Which is kind of a bummer, because this is worth hearing.

Pink Luminous Invocation will get more attention being Danish than if they were from, say, Nevada, but that doesn't mean they don't deserve it. No, sir. Not a lot of folks can say they do this style of slowly developing post-krautiness this well. See, those cats get all hung up on the ephemeral aspects like kooky instruments and multi-tracked female voices when they forget they should be screwing with your mind. I don't want "sun-kissed" or "blissful" drones; I want ones that will make me peel the paint off the walls hoping there's gold flake underneath. I want drones that illustrate with smoke and let fuzzy dots in through the keyhole. In short, I want to freak the fuck out.
Open the loverly packaging, throw on the recordable media and one 27-minute floating field of cottony condensation is waiting for you. No worries; there's plenty of spooky space for your cortices to bug out in. It most closely resembles the Voigt-Kampf test scene between Deckard and Rachel in that there Ridley Scott yarn, to be truthin' or any underlit establishing shot in Logan's Run. Stretch that shit out until it's the length of an episode of Tomorrow People and chow down.
This isn't going to change the world or anything. It isn't altruist-psych. But it is what it says and it do what it do good & proper. In a world full of No Neck spitboys and bedazzled frumpies, that's saying something all by its lonesome. They said Pink Fog and lo it was a pink fog of a record.
You should hear this.

SUN-KISSED...OR SUNKIST? Raccoo-oo-oon - Behold Secret Kingdom (Night People 2007)

2007-04-14T00:48:00.000-05:00

Apparently, Night People is the new Breaking World Records, which was the new Load, which was the new Bulb, which was the new Skin Graft, which was the new Zero Hour, who were all Troubleman in one way or another. I mean, just look. They're putting out music with cover art that is good because it's bad which makes it interesting which makes it boring because it's not actually related to or in reference to any of the music contained but is not creating dialectic tension either. The art on Raccoo-oo-oon's website isn't much better and even more evidence for a Mick Barr lawsuit. I'd probably like this more if it had been called Mick Barr Lawsuit than something that I would never want to say out loud.
Hey, they wear knit masks! Just like them Fort Thunder fellas! Hey, they've got atypical, fussy instruments! Well, what do you know? So do...oh fuck it. This blows and there's nothing clever about that or about anything I could write about it. It doesn't try to be any more than the things it borrows from. If someone told me this was a boyband conceived by Animal Collective and trustafarian scabies-lab No Neck Blues Band to merge the Maximillian Colby and Neon Hunk audiences and capitalize thereon, I'd nod and give them the quiet New Haven Connecticut diss under my breath and think nothing more. And neither should you. Meandering, pretentious and bo-oo-ooring. There. I've made my shitty joke for the year. Gather the wood and the nails.
You do not want this because you are better than that. Have a piece of toast instead.

I CAN'T HEAR THEIR T-SHIRTS! Gallhammer - The Dawn Of... (CD/DVD Peaceville 2007)

2007-04-11T12:04:00.000-05:00

Those of you (from among the 2 that read this) looking forward to a new full-length Gallhammer will have to sit on it. It's not ready yet. This is a rarities compilation. You will, however, be treated to a pair of demos from the new one ("Speed of Blood" & "At the Onset of the Age of Despair"). I guess being from a forthcoming album makes them, uh...rare.

It takes a lot these days for me to get down with something that seems like such a ironipster put-on. You know, Japanese girls playing Hellhammer/Celtic Frost-ish...Hellhammer/Celtic Frost-ness while being all cute in that message board kind of way, and having cover art the Hot Topic and Hydrahead crews alike can dig. Seems more than a little contrived, I reckon. Plus how much Hellhammer do I need in my life? Not that I don't love them, they're just okay on their own. Same with CF. Would you rather listen to legit Finnish thrashy lords, or young Japanese girls posing as Finnish thrashy lords? Does it need to be a joke to be entertaining?
Needless to say, overcoming that hump was difficult. And, to be honest, I'm not sure I finally did. For what it is, this is really well done. And considering we're talking demos, rehearsals and the like, the fidelity is surprisingly full. I'd say better than Gloomy Lights, even! But everything else to be said about it is one paragraph up. It sounds like what it is, which will either bowl you over with its clever fangirl-ism or remind you of something you'd rather hear. I think that's the only true statement that can be made about Gallhammer: they are exactly the sum of themselves and their influences. Everything else is snarky icing.
You might not want this.

OH THE RANT I'M WITHHOLDING Pissed Jeans - Shallow (CD, Parts Unknown)

2007-04-11T11:30:00.000-05:00

"Pissed Jeans crawl out from under hardcores seedy underbelly to blast out 8 tracks of droning punk noise. Calling to mind the warped visions of Fang, Flipper, and Stickmen With Rayguns, the Jeans point a dirty mirror at themselves, with fractured tales of woe in front of a harsh, blown-out backdrop. Recommended for people who never get out of bed, pop their zits with sweaty fingers and didnt have a date for the prom." - Parts Unknown.

Except those kids will never hear it because they're out LARPing. Good one.

And people ask why I hate irony.

WAY OUT WHERE THE DOGGIES BOWL, Wolfmangler - Dwelling In A Dead Raven For the Glory of Crucified Wolves (CD reissue Aurora Borealis 2007)

2007-04-07T18:59:00.000-05:00

Back in print, so it's not quite as irrelevant to review!
This here's Dead Raven Choir magistrate D. Smolken under the Wolfmangler moniker. Wolfmangler strikes me as a less-cartoony project, by the by, but no more slight than DRC. "Dirge For A Viking Asshole" had me singing "Cheree, Cheree...ooohhhh I love you" at 1/4 speed like a whaler in punker's clothing. The rest of the tracks are a variation on this plan, with mud-caked drums, a lonesome string, and Smolken's wartorn voice goading the huddled masses. The next-door-neighbor recording works especially well on the closer, "Star Winds." Its dry distance sells the solitude better than a metric ton of catherdral echo. Sometimes you just turn on the mic and let the floorboards tell the stories.
It don't get much further from subtle, but oh how it works. That's heaviness in a nutshell, ain't it? We're having a second frost here in Mylanta, Georgia, so the crackle of frosty twigs this disc brought into my life is eerily apt. New Hampshire knows what I'm talking about. Wow, I'll probably never speak so highly of NH again.
You want this.

VLAD LIBS! AGAIN! DEATH TO FALSE LIBS!

2007-04-06T11:26:00.000-05:00

Fill this out and...yeah, okay you can email it. smorriswhitesicklouis@yahoo.com. Except for the sicklouis part; that's just a SPAM diversion.

Vinyl is...

a ______ to be______.
totally out______.
reminiscent of the lord's ______.
un______.
easier to deal with than ______.
less ______ than Greatest American Hero.
______ for listening than those ______ pants.
sewage ______.
burnt rubber ______.
hardly ______.
best on ______ or Judas Priest, ______.

Furze - UTD CD Candlelight 2007

2007-04-06T09:37:00.000-05:00

I got this about a month ago and have been grappling with how to write about it since. Shit, I thought that Sun City Girls would be a challenge. Hoo! I didn't know how good I had it. This isn't even in the same postal district as "challenging"!
Okay, I guess I'll start with things you can grab a hold of. It's divided into two sides (or I guess groups, considering this is a CD) that have different titles and then the songs themselves have titles. First, there is Side Death: Beneath the Odd Edge Sounds To The Twilight Contract of the Black Fascist. Then there's Side Devil: The Wealth of the Penetration In the Abstract Paradigmas of Satan. Finding this obtuse is like finding the end of your own nose.
Oh and then the titles. I've heard a bit of black metal in my day. From the Beherits to the Gallhammers [edit: new album review this week!] to the Empire of Hates and the Drastuses and on and on into utter burping blackness. And I've loved a ton of it from all parts and corners. Beherit's Drawing Down the Moon, Darkthrone's Plaguewielder (although picking a Darkthrone record is like playing favorites with your children), Bathory's Blood Fire Death, that darling little Twilight project, Blut Aus Nord's Thematic Emanations of Archetypal Multiplicity, the Vrolok/Emit split, Old Wainds' Scalding Coldness all get regular play in my abode of late. So you know where my head is when it's not wrapped up in Blues Control or that Incredible String Band LP Liquid Acrobat something or other I got for 8 bills.) But never have I seen titles like this. If you handed me the track list and told me it was for a release on Creel Pone I'd take your word as gospel. I'm not sure Salvatore Martirano would dig "Beneath the Wings Of the Black Vomit Above", but "Deep In the Pot of Fresh Antipodal Weave" would blow right up his skirt--and mine, too. I love them all!
See, this is the easy part: loving all over this disc. It's fucking brilliant! To me the best extreme metal (god, what an awful name) is a combination of brilliant and inventive ideas and almost overwhelming absurdity. Which is hard for me to say, because I'm usually so deep in love with the stuff it's hard for me to brazenly judge it. This here Furze album fits those expectations to a big ol' tee. The seemingly arbitrary song lengths, the robo-Viking axes, the occasional appearance of drumlord Frost, the slippery pavement production all tumble and wrestle each other until greatness is conceived. And then you'll hear something so child-like, so fascinated with the taste of its big toe, ol' Furze humbles the shit right out of you. Talk about drawing down the moon. He buries it in the soil and puts condos on top!
No one--mark me, NO ONE--is going to touch this in the oh7. Get everything he's done, especially the maxi-10" picture disk because the artwork is a thing of much muchnessly beauteouzation. Although the 7" has it, too.

Read about the significance of individual tracks on the Furze site. No, you really should.

Troum & All Sides - Shutun (Old Europa Cafe, 2007)

2007-04-05T22:11:00.000-05:00

My first exposure to German atmospherist Troum was last year's To A Child Dancing In the Wind with my buddy Martyn Bates. Well, it's a one-sided relationship. Streets I Ran is one of my favorite things, although Marty's certainly surprised and impressed me elsewhere. I think initially I dug the affair with Troum because it felt like the other dark ambient Martyn Bates collabs (like Murder Ballads and Two Thousand Days) both of which were so large in scale and scope I had to build an addition on the house. To A Child was overwhelming in a condensed way, with each track feeling like an excerpt from a 364-month trance-inducing blissful feety-pajama romp through true emotions. Okay, ignore all that. It was, in fact, fucking great and not the Windham Hell it sounds like. Near as I could tell, Troum dropped him in the middle of a starved lake with a Shure-58 and hiked to higher ground.
All Sides, I came to find out, is Nina Kernicke's bag of tapes and tricks, bringing the boreal chops to Troum's abandoned factory. This is one looooong track made up of dozens of little ideas woven in and out or laid side-by-side. Thankfully, Kernicke leaves most of her Meat Beats at home, although she does whip out some suspicious string patches that had me hunting for the ear plugs. Oh sure, it's pretty and emotive and all, but so is that New Age program on public radio. Can't say who brought what dish to this potluck, but that one has a particularly All Sides bouquet, I'd say. That dark ambient stuff only works for me when it's more dark than ambient, otherwise it walks a line too thin for my blood.
This didn't much hold my attention. Can't tell who's mostly responsible either. Ah, the glory of collaborations: everybody takes the cake, no one wants to do the dishes. Or...something. Comes in a metal tin like that other record.

SETTLING IST KRIEG! Remko Scha - Machine Guitars LP 1982

2007-04-05T20:41:00.000-05:00

To the right of what you're presently reading is Remko Scha and one of his machine-played gits from back in the early 80s. He's still pulling these lovely shenanigans, which to me look sorta perverse. Well, I'll be damned! Look at the titles: Throb, Stroke, Slam, Brush. Might not exactly be as blatant as Smell & Quim's noise odyssey Porn Again (great record!), but it ain't your great aunt Rita's idea of procreation neither.
So these here machines jerk these axes off in eight different ways. "Stroke" sounds like a Neu song is about to start any moment but never does. "Shake" calls to mind that Mauricio Kagel fella's idea 'bout playing guitars with a handkerchief tied to a window fan. Never could get that idea out of my head.
If you think of these as the greatest intros never used and not as the residue of what was probably a much more interesting live performance, you'll get much more out of this. Otherwise, you'll be listening to 5-minute tracks of a sound that varies and--granted--is not without nuance while staring at the attached image with the longing of a cartoon character on a desert island, wishing his companion was a burger. Well, he ain't and that ain't either. This is part of why I don't understand reunion shows: you missed it. It's okay. And anyhow, it's never like it was because it was what it was when it was what it was. Not everything needs to be documented. If you saw it then, why would you need the record? And if you didn't have the record, you wouldn't be reviewing it. Well, I guess that's me not you.

Robedoor & Haunted Castle - Failed Grails dbl cass 2006 Not Not Fun

2007-04-03T19:40:00.000-05:00

Day late & an auction short, I reckon. What can you do but listen when it comes your way & spout when someone says spout? I'll be all current someday. Believe that and I'll tell another.
I don't know about you, but this whole scene confuses the Christ out of me. Such incest, you'd think you were in Vidor, Texas. Why, just this year Robedoor and Haunted Castle got together again for a single-sided lathe-cut discus of lore where they get all in each others business, remixing and tweaking the whole affair til it's one big cloak pudding. Hoo. And that ain't even grazing the surface of the menage a quarante that is the new Tapes, Lathes, and Tight Pants genre.
This time around, they keep their hands to themselves. Nobody talking, nobody moving. Robedoor bring the slowly approaching monkcore that kids in black t-shirts everywhere wish they thought of 1st. But truthfully, this is great stuff. Trollmann av Ildtoppberg's Live From the River Styx. With all this distant crunchy clang you'd think Bruce Russell was behind the green curtain.
Haunted Castle is more Bruce Campbell, I'm afraid. Not so crazy about their two reels. "Bythos Abandoned" has some inspired moments of chewed-up cave times, but other than that this is pretty much any rumbly noise from the past 80 years never to be seen live by more than 5 people--2 have brown slacks and silly shoes, 1 has an asymmetrical haircut, 1 has a girlfriend somewhere in the world, and one is an actual girl maybe sort of. There is a place for a mess like this--it's a decent ride north from Boston and a guy name Emil is waiting there. Definitely worth a looksee just for your Band of the Week, Robedoor. Be sure to check their other great '06 shindig Hidden Ascension on Ruralfaune or wherever mp7s can be had if you're short on grip.

Necro Cult - Free demo CD-r 2007

2007-04-03T17:08:00.000-05:00

You're talking to someone who gets Space Lady way more than Linda Perhacs. Don't know that I can unpack that, neither, but I'll try. Suzy Soundz/Space Lady's version of "Radar Love" is a thing of such whacked beauty it's almost too much. And it's clear why she's whacked. I mean, she's been playing a MIDI-ready keyboard on a street corner in San Francisco for longer than I've been breathing. Someone tosses her in a studio and, of course, the ideas she's been sleeping on since Back In the Day come to lumbering life. But ask me to explain "Chimacum Rain" or "Parallelograms" and why they are effective slivers of slivery and I'm struck dumbest of all. I'm not sure what drives ostensibly normal people to create music that my enfeebled pits cannot comprehend, like Perhacs and this fellow Necro Cult. (By the way, isn't calling your necro cult black metal band Necro Cult kind of like calling your necro cult black metal band Black Metal?) Well, maybe it's the parameters of the question, because who knows what got Suzy started in the first place?
At any rate, once you step over the usual anti-anti-isms of black metal acts, this Nocturus seems like a pretty normal fellow. No hideous scars. No tattoos that look like they were done with scrabble pieces hooked up to electric doorbells. Zilch on the sketchy fascist alliances. Narry a pimple. He's even got a nice leather jacket! Maybe he's an insomniac, like his nom de GR1M would imply, but I doubt it. So how then does he manage to run a thread between WOLD, Striborg, and someone pouring rice into a window fan? What, other than this abstracted distaste, is driving this man to so mutilate my cones? I only had it at about 34 but by the end of the fourth song, my ears were ringing. No foolin. The drums are wolves at your sorry door.
Wouldn't you know he's even charitable? All you've gotta do is drop your addy to this guy on MugSpace and he'll send you the demo free of charge--with a sticker for sinistersymmetry.com (whatever that is; I haven't looked into it yet) and a Necro Cult badge! Best zero-cents you'll never miss. At least 56 stars.

Sand Snowman - Obsessive Creatures (Time-Lag CD-r 2007)

2007-04-01T13:23:00.000-05:00

Oh, John Fahey! Wait, it's Jack Rose! No. Hang on. Well, it's not Richard Bishop, I'll say that much. It's...Ilya Ahmed? (Well, at least the last has some beauteous wrapping. This one sure doesn't.) Chances are what you are reading about is not technically any of these. There are a touch more influences, patched together like so many crust-punk hoodies, but them's your base. Track 3 is the most varied, trying to convince me he's more than a slightly-inspired plucker. The wakka-ja-wakka groove and the vaguely Bruce Langhorne-ishness aren't convincing me. Because in the end it amounts to some Roy Carter outtakes. The rest of this affair has the lilting quality of clotted cream and a plate of crust, or some such nonsense. Lots of delicate plucking making you think he's heard records he hasn't. Nice clear recording, though, belying it's kind of homespun format. That certainly had me spilling my tea. Nothing against homespun media! In fact, I think it's the flea's eyebrows. However, acts there-inclined tend to mine in a particular province of fidelity. If you told me this was on Mute, not only would I not be surprised, I might...uh, hang on. That's all. I just wouldn't be surprised. My roommate got me hooked on this Japanese tea called Genmaicha, what has puffed-up rice all in it. Know how tea sometimes smells incredible & tastes like sweaty briefs? This one tastes exactly like it smells. As a matter of fact, there's almost no taste, just the smell and a faint milkiness. I just about levitated off the couch. Wow. Is a surprise now and then too much to ask? Scott Walker says the problem with music these days is there's too much & too little to remember about it. That just about says what I'm getting at, so I'll go ahead & shut up.

Negative Kite - Hey Little Know 7" Freek 1993

2007-03-30T09:50:00.000-05:00

With that cover I had no clue what this was going to be like. I heardtell this involves a member of Vibracathedral Orchestra, who I've taken a gander or two at. So why not? Even if it does look like it might be a His Name Is Alive single.
Well, His Name ain't alive, because this is the sound of arterial blockage. I'm a little taken aback since I'm used to these twice-baked screechy drone affairs to be about 6 weeks long but, being a 7", this is barely a piece of my day. Somehow they crammed almost 9 minutes onto each side, though, which seems absurd. I tell you what, that's a packed side. Side A takes a bit to develop, but it's got a lovely down the block quality. I kept thinking the record was blank and the neighbors were practicing. But, no. Oh, there's an insert. Here's the text for Side A, complete with fussy line breaks:
startled rabbit/liquid container years
a young family's hopes for
their new home

hymas imperial broken amp
Not exactly expository. More like one of them offhanded allusions. They follow the trail marked SONG PROPER as far as they feel like it, taking their time and eventually come to a clearing where there is only primordial slate. Here's Side B:
outdoors in stimulated natural
habitat mediums give demonstrations
of their powers

more vicious body gesture

walking down satans boulevard
Sheesh. It's a party record for glaciers. If you can tell me what half of the instruments are, I'll buy you a pound cake because the line between rattling percussion and whupped axes is as slight as can be here, thereby qualifying the sunken boombox production. Ha! Production! Negative Kite crawls out of the past to laugh in my mark-ass face. Well, that laugh don't reveal much either. As soon as you think you understand the landscapes they're dragging your mangled body through, they drop you in a ditch and hop in the van. No concern for your life, your fulfillment of melodies left incomplete & elusive. The last thing you hear is the sound of them running over your copy of Stainless Steel Gamelan and peeling out into the night. Weren't stainless no more, buddy.
Good for a spin in the stinky darkness.

OH...AND UM

2007-03-30T02:11:00.000-05:00

Crash Course In Science's track "Factory Forehead" was also featured on volume 10 of the Homework series released by Hyped 2 Death. So I didn't escape after all. Get that comp, though. Seriously. Then you can hear bands like Adults and wonder why people know the Stickmen but not them. Or the incredibly beautiful song "Judas Tree" by Black Cat Bone, which sounds like Galaxie 500 -guitars +piano. Come to think of it, just get the whole series. And then get Messthetics 1-8 and the Homosexuals discography. And then just write them a random check, because they really deserve it. There is nothing in the world that compares to the contributions H2P is making to the legacy of the US and UK DIY music heyday. Soul Jazz is somewhere way down the list. H2P take up the top 15 spots.

Oh, go here.

Circle X - 7" 1983

2007-03-29T21:48:00.000-05:00

Out of the sweaty ashes of Louisville's premier punk outfit rose Circle X, all downtown-NY'ed up but giving it that Mid-South spin, like Orange Blossom Special but Mars instead of Dylan. This is way more fried than Cash's ode to bohemia, but that's to be expected. They lay on the mid-tempo slurpy dirges, with "Underworld" being the most gorgeously frumped-up jam. They harsh a buzz, I'll tell you. I found "Onward Christian Soldiers" especially apt, when you consider that almost all Catholic hymns are performed at the funeral march tempo. Something ain'ta right bout that. And anyhow, this record is as old as I am, so it's like we've grown up together. (Yeah, Murmur, too. And definitely Melissa.) Circle X went on to more academic things, collaborating with Christian Marclay and doing elaborate packaging before that was industry standard for wacked-out sounds, but I think I'll keep them just as I found them: like Flipper with a slice of brevity.