RECOMMENDED
From the shake of the band Long Legged Woman, whose sole album Nobody Knows This Is Nowhere holds up as a fine document of a band pushing their way out of a box, comes CCR Headcleaner, in which they’ve soaked the cardboard walls of that box with bongwater and lamp oil, and smoked their way out in a haze of toxins and sweat. True mutants fortify themselves with a three-guitar attack and get winded halfway through the first track “53rd & 420,” leaving the rest of the record to ring out in glorious slo-mo backslide, down into the horrifying world that can appear when you combine too much smoke with psilocybin … or so I’ve heard. I can see the fans of fake psych running for the exits when confronted with people who actually seem to be incredibly fucking high in ways that don’t involve them. Let these emptyheaded bozos stare into a Black Angels CD cover until their eyes go numb from the safety of boredom. The World of Shit is no place for them to be. The rest of us can ride CCR over here in a cloud of inhalants and smeared memories, by-products of a band sacrificing their brain cells to iron us flat with an enormous, twisted, total sound. Highest recommendation. (http://ccrheadclnr.tumblr.com)
(Doug Mosurock)
1 week ago
•
7 notes
RECOMMENDED
Teenage kids living in the oppressive uncertainty of late ‘80s Peru created this masterpiece of shit-fi metal. It sounds like two warring armies of noisy, chitinous insects discovered early black metal (Hellhammer, Bathory, Mayhem) and U.S. thrash/crossover, respectively, and swarmed one another in a battle to the death. Curriculum Mortis was not alone in the hardcore/metal scene of Lima; groups like Ataque Frontal were around to play shows with, but few if any of these groups possessed the single-minded mania at play here. They were a five-piece with two guitars, and everyone in the band is well above competent, even though their studio accomodations and lack of producers with the know-how to record such a band were far less so. Bass is felt instead of heard for the most part, kind of how like Kevin Shields was said to have erased the instrument sounds off the guitars of Isn’t Anything and left the effects instead. The guitars have an incredible presence of playing so tinny and yet totally saturated within the confines of the mix that they stop sounding like guitars and take on the properties of some crushable third-world synth that electrocutes anyone it comes near. Drums thump and the singer screams, mostly in native tongue, though on the penultimate track “Reaper,” sung in English, the phrasing of the lyric “screams from the gutter” is pronounced just so that it becomes clear that their mission might have been elsewhere: all along, they were trying to sound like the bands on their t-shirts (Metallica, Exodus, Slayer), but got lost in the translation and perfected blackened South American thrash instead. This essential reissue encompasses all seven of Curriculum Mortis’ studio recordings, relentless and choked of air and liberty. It’s the sound of a band that played as if tomorrow might not come. I’ve had a long time to think about this record, and if you buy one release on my word in the next few months, make it this one. 500 copies. (http://ultrasonido.bigcartel.com)
(Doug Mosurock)
1 week ago
•
1 note
RECOMMENDED
Somewhere in the ‘90s, Joe McPhee decided to cut to the chase, and since then total improvisation is his main mode of performance. But he hasn’t forgotten all the jazz lore he absorbed through study and practice in the preceding half century, and that knowledge stands him in good stead in his encounters with the English trio Decoy. The instrumentation favored by Alexander Hawkins, Steve Noble, and John Edwards (Hammond B-3 organ, drums, double bass respectively) is freighted with idiomatic associations, but their collective CV (Evan Parker, Peter Brötzmann, Sunny Murray, Veryan Weston, to name but a few) skews more towards the free music than Jimmy Smith-style grooving. This leaves a lot of room to maneuver, and they take full advantage of it on this LP-only release (the second album for the collaboration, the fourth for Decoy). McPhee switches between pocket trumpet and alto sax, squeezing everything from desiccated wheezes to supremely sentimental calls into the space bounded by Edwards and Noble’s space- and shape-conscious jostling. Hawkins likewise spans delicate, flute-like voicings and rumbling swells that sound so hellish, your church won’t allow them to be played. Ornette promised the shape of jazz to come; these guys play jazz for all time. (http://otoroku.cafeoto.co.uk)
(Bill Meyer)
1 week ago
•
1 note
Free sax deity Daniel Carter must’ve been stooping pretty low in 1986 to end up backing this calculated-sounding anti-whatever trio, helmed by Ultra Vivid Scene guitarist Kurt Ralske. There are very few moments in which their no-oriented, third stringer SST combo, sounding like late period Flag with nerd vocals and the occasional jokey HC thrash sesh, click with the reedsman. CBs sounds pretty much empty on the night in question, and that was a big room, with all the ambiance of a high school gymnasium when cleared of people. That’s kind of what this sounds like. You’ll strain to hear the guitar, then wish you hadn’t, over the boomy, all-wall sound and goofy in-joke titles – surely a song called “Rock is Dead, Shithead” shouldn’t be played by people who sound like they have an active interest in killing it, but who couldn’t break a string if they tried. Who wants a fusion of jazz and punk, anyway? Second sub-par record in a row to come through here with Pettibon artwork, too. There’s been a gap between them, but there’s no mistaking consistency. (http://www.roaratorio.com)
(Doug Mosurock)
1 week ago
•
0 notes
If this came out on Skin Graft 17 years ago and I happened to play the store’s copy on a brutally-boring Sunday afternoon manning the counter alone, it’s possible that “I might pay $4 for a used copy of a full length by this band if one positioned itself in the crosshairs on a really good day of consumptive confidence” would have gone through my noodle, but the same could be said for “I pray that today will pass without any French body-odor-soldiers pulling up in a cab and making me play each and every second of each and every import $400 Alex Chilton CD compilation we have in stock” or “God, I really love this Hurl LP” or “Oh, I almost forgot, please no dreadlock-and-giant-pants enthusiasts who make me sample eighteen DJ Shadow-or-related 12”s before the inevitable Flying Saucer Attack or Stars of the Lid curiosity makes me clarify, out loud, that ‘no, this record isn’t going to have any beats’ before they exit without buying a damn thing.” Correction: My brain would not have produced the phrase “consumptive confidence” in those days. As for Dope Body, CHRIST-ON-A-CRUTCH what a tragedy of a band name! … what a stunner of stupid this moniker is … carved into music history forever. I’m guessing that it’s “dope” in the sense of life-ruining substance as opposed to hour-ruining encounter with a circa-Y2K DJ-dipshit pilfering breaks from shitty classic rock records (“The breaks on the first Grinderswitch album are dope, yo.”) Unless they are hilarious for the purpose of hilarity, drug references are dirt-dumb at the very least, if not deserved of a good weekly gang-piling by the participants of an N.A. meeting. Not that long ago, Dope Body were piggybacked by a perpetual Pigpen cloud of inappropriate metal and noise-rock tags, making for an extra layer of irritation as gravy on their for-the-sake-of-it obtuseness. I really hate for-the-sake-of-it obtuseness. U.S. Maple is going to kick this band’s ass for pinging all of the bad parts of U.S. Maple albums right back into a topical non-light. Finally, I cannot fucking believe 2013 is almost halfway shot and I’m staring at a cover-art/design/layout decision that Dope Body apparently have no problem sharing with 2,831,932 other bands, most of which shouldn’t be making music in the first place, and this trend in visually-presenting a record serves as a fine warning or red flag. Now that Dope Body and the Dope Body experience up until the release of this 7” has been unfairly smothered in a vile, terminal sheen of shit-crit, a brief foray into the “music at hand” portion of the review turns up some improvement. But can “no longer maddening in its power to irritate” be considered improvement? I’ll put it this way … you should have only read the first 184 words of this review. (http://www.dragcity.com)
(Andrew Earles)
1 week ago
•
0 notes
As we all wait and wait (and wait) for that Factory Floor album to ever materialize, the singles keep piling up. The excellent “Two Different Ways” received the remix treatment last year via works by Perc and Richard H. Kirk. There goes Rhymin’ Simon. As for the record, Perc muscles up the A-side, adding ballast and more bounce to the original while removing some of the angles. It’s definitely more club ready and energized, though I’d rather dance to regular old Factory Floor. Kirk clips the beats and dusts for prints, maintaining the dynamic progressive rock feel to the source material while making it a little more slippery. Perc closes it out with an ambient slab dubbed the “Noisy” mix; it is that, indeed, if not pure noise like you might hope. The group’s work on “Fall Back” is among their best to date, mainly because it seems focused on the drums, the most pertinent element this group has: without that live drummer, without those beats, I’m not sure where these tracks would end up. It’s a great one, too, eight minutes of free falling sleep-speech and repeatedly triggered samples that drift over the furiously dialed-in synth-bass and drum pattern. Their collaborations with saxophonist Peter Gordon (Love of Life Orchestra), on their latest single, aren’t full group works; Gordon performs with two members on “Beachcombing” and the third on “C-Side.” There’s a nagging sense that they may have submitted some middling material here, but maybe it’s just because it’s a bit different and closer to the center than a lot of their prior output has been. The drums are gone on both, reduced to a pulse, as the keys and vocals ebb and fade against root melodies and Gordon’s hyperactive sax squeals. Curious parties will collect ‘em all, but if you have to pick one, go with “Fall Back,” or 2011’s Two Different Ways. (http://www.dfarecords.com) (http://www.optimomusic.com)
(Doug Mosurock)
1 week ago
•
0 notes
I shortsightedly entered into this engagement with too much Boris on the mind, due entirely to one of them being involved in this seven or eight-person super-group. When Boris have friends over for an album, I believe that the trio could turn even the most torturous of tedium into gold (they have yet the opportunity, but I have 100% faith in this claim), but when the sitch is flip-flopped, one shouldn’t expect anything more than the sum of the parts trimmed by about 90% of its potential greatness, which is what happens when the gazillion-headed collaboration miscalculation is made … the cancel-out.
But that’s not totally accurate here, either. For starters, this began as a soundtrack project, and it began and ended as Stephen O’Malley’s vision. He just invited some friends along, so we get the aforementioned one part Sunn O))/Burning Witch, three “multi-instrumentalists” (can we stop using that meatless term, please?!?) that I am somewhat familiar with but totally indifferent to, one-part Boris: Atsuo and one-part Ghost (Japan, Mr. Michio Kurihara).
When rhythm is found and locked-into, the affair never really takes off and stays firmly within the boundaries of ambient drone that flirts with rock after winking at Krautrock. Kind of like diet-Magnog or the Bardo Pond stuff you’ve only heard once or some other late ‘90s space-lowercase-rock band with pulsating swell where drum and bass should be and drum and bass where freakouts should be. Still, there’s often more happening in a dynamic sense than much of the Sunn 0))) discography, but “heavy” is nowhere to be found, nor is it the point. Once I stepped back and processed this for what it was (a bunch of people, one of which happens to be in Boris, and a soundtrack vision by the personality that is not Greg Anderson) rather than what it wasn’t (something touched by Boris), it allowed for the review you have just read. This is a good thing for all parties (I don’t have all night to be writing myself out of being a horse’s ass). (http://www.dragcity.com)
(Andrew Earles)
1 week ago
•
2 notes
RECOMMENDED
German pressing of Hoax’s three 7”s and their track from the split tour flexi with Sewn Leather. This is an easy way to spend the proper time with these releases, and realize the bleeding conviction of this band for what it is, just about the best hardcore band in the country. You read these lyrics and hear how they’re delivered and there is immediately the sense that singer Jesse fully buys into it, and as each song ends and another begins, you sense the hell that they depict in each track – one of suffering, ridicule, failure, violence, and waste, of opportunity that never comes, of being forced to play with all the broken toys until they hurt you or break some more. You think it can’t get any more difficult to bear, and then it does, thirteen times over. I’ve had enough to say about Hoax’s visceral live show, but really these songs can live on their own now, and the continuity presented here against having to flip a bunch of singles over is welcome. Will Killingsworth’s production gets heavier with each batch of songs, too, something that cannot be overstated in its importance of bringing the cold and miserable reality Hoax envisions into your home, and something which this collection makes more apparent than was on the original releases. If you posed, now’s your chance to clear your name, though you really should try to own the second EP on Youth Attack; it’s a real spectacle, and perhaps their best collection of songs in a single release. (http://www.adagio830.de)
(Doug Mosurock)
1 week ago
•
2 notes
Readers of a certain age probably remember the Columbia and RCA Record Clubs, whose six for a penny deals surely helped set the stage for a world that thinks it shouldn’t pay for its records. The Grapefruit Record Club seeks to reverse that trend by offering exclusive limited edition, vinyl-only releases that’ll cost you, but sure look swell on your shelf or on the turntable. And how do they sound? Based on the first record from year two, a split release by New Zealanders Bruce Russell (Dead C, A Handful Of Dust) and Roy Montgomery (Pin Group, Dadamah, etc.), highly faithful to idiosyncratic notions of sound quality. Russell’s side is taken from a concert he played in 2009 at the High Street Project, a Christchurch art space that has since been demolished due to earthquake damage. Although the music was executed in real time using one guitar, Russell’s use of two amps at the end of two different chains of effects sounds more like a duel between a theremin and a walkie-talkie. There’s a special element to this music that is especially well served by the vinyl medium; somehow the physical action of a stylus dragging through a groove makes the music’s hugeness and harshness especially evident.
Montgomery’s piece also has an association with life in earthquake time. It was recorded in 1994, as part of the same extraordinarily productive phase that yielded a stack of singles and the excellent Scenes From The South Island and Temple IV albums, but he’d forgotten about it until he happened upon the tape in a post-quake clean-up. Montgomery’s approach, derived from the atmospheric sweep of Popul Vuh, is simplicity itself. Using reverb and overdubbing, he overlays chiming chords until they surge like an incoming tide; buried deep within, descending lines like submerged surf guitar licks impart an epic quality to the music. “Tarkovsky Tone Poem” departs from Montgomery’s work in one crucial way; the music is enshrouded by a cloud of static, which may or may not have been intentional, but which gives it an edge that makes it pair up well with Russell’s side. (http://grapefruitrecordclub.com)
(Bill Meyer)
1 week ago
•
3 notes
RECOMMENDED
The premiere “Real People” discovery of 2013 comes from the Richmond, VA store-run label Steady Sounds, and it’s one that sets the pace for future discoveries in terms of its depth, vision, and backstory. Max Monroe is an African-American songwriter and musician who for nearly 15 years occupied Room 111 at the Earle, a downtown Richmond hotel that was caught in a tailspin of decay and decline. Monroe’s lifelong outlet, The Trash Company, started as a larger concern in the vein of Funkadelic, but soon winnowed down to just him and a friend who’d join in on guitar. Apart from one double-sided 45, the studio-cut queasy listening gem “Come To Me Softly” which opens this collection, all of the material here was collected from four-track recordings made in and near the hotel. Monroe quickly shed the trappings of R&B, opting instead for an ominous, homemade sound that encompasses doom, pomp/glam moves, Cramps-style trash rock, lounge-core, new wave, and end-of-the-world downers that are unlike anything I can think of, outside of some of the recent Obnox releases, and maybe Gary Wilson, some of the Jade Stone & Luv tracks, or the very edges of Mick Collins’ catalogue. He’s got a great voice with deep, natural intonation, and proves to be an inventive arranger, particularly when it comes to his rhythm tracks (the drum machine eventually departs, never to return). There’s a rich seam of talent here, mitigated by satisfyingly harsh home recordings draped in fuzz, dirge and reverb. Very few records of this stripe achieve the heaviness on offer here, but it goes deeper than just noise and distortion – the threadbare sound of pulsing bass and pounding drum machine on most of side A rattles the bones of these tracks, and will likely shake yours in the process. At its deepest, Earle Hotel Tapes approaches a level of soulful desolation most commonly associated with Leonard Cohen; no joke. Show me any other records of this caliber that can make that claim. PPU has already released a couple of EPs from the Trash Company stockpile that are also worth examining. (http://www.steadysounds.com)
(Doug Mosurock)
1 week ago
•
0 notes
Time capsule laced-up synth master control pop, like a decade too late for Berliniamsburg. Glassy, cool/warm sounds from this French-Canadian outfit, which puts forth the ultimate façade of perfection and very nearly get away with it. Imagine a velvet rope with you on the wrong side: you’ve just nailed Violence’s brand of totalitarian, steamroller ambiance. The music is good and evocative but there’s definitely not enough here to make for any meaningful additions to the dialogue about where we are now in terms of this kind of music. Vocals are sung in perfect beauty (female) and spoken/bored (male); the bass pumps; the synths fuzz and blitter and phase; the beats pound, splashy and with purpose. The whole session is pitched somewhere between earlier/funkier Gomma label output and something like Ladytron, and Violence seems to revel in this sentiment, feet planted firmly and proud of it. The production is crystalline, the presence is coiffed and buttoned to the top, not a drop of sweat or smudge of mascara in sight. Clear vinyl, acetate sleeve, flat-out oppressive edition of 150. Reading about this record right now is almost a guarantee that you’ll never own a copy (though you’re free to listen to the first five of its six tracks via Bandcamp), and of course, the one song you can’t get, “Istiyorum,” is like the best one here. I had to borrow this record from a friend! And there is no way I am paying $65 to get a copy shipped from Europe, especially since the market for OG electroclash has been bottomed out for quite some time now. I gave up on finding a copy of the Toktok Vs Soffy O album in 2003 or so, but I got one a year ago for $3 and it sounds more successful to me than this. But this is nice, no question. Can’t wait for people to rediscover Kiki or Smash TV though. Felix Da Housecat, Mommy & Daddy, and many others are better left buried in the empty $20 bags of time. (http://www.visagemusique.com)
(Doug Mosurock)
1 week ago
•
0 notes
Teri Morris drummed in Crystalized Movements, and after that Tizzy. That latter band is where she and multi-instrumentalist Matt Weston played for a time. In 2011 Morris died from breast cancer, and this is Weston’s tribute to her. You won’t hear much of the Movements’ psychedelic excess of Tizzy’s crisp power pop here, though. Weston’s a restless, plugged into the improv as well as rock worlds, so the sounds are his, and the connection to Morris is on a conceptual level; it’s all about rhythm. “Coiling For The Kickback” has a full on bass and drums attack that I could imagine Watt and Hurley gifting to someone they like, but I’m not sure how they’d feel about the Fred Frith-ian spider-walking guitars and Mellotron interjections. Not that it matters, since it’s not theirs anymore. “Walking Through The Undertow” has less to do with rock linguistics. It’s an assembly of played and programmed drum tracks, chopped and shuffled but not so much as to compromise the groove. Perhaps Weston wants to say that while people and styles come and go, the beat goes on? Only 150 of this single were pressed, and the uneven borders of the sleeve’s components makes me thing that a scissors was used to cut them to size, which only makes the record feel that much more personal.. There’s no download coupon, but if you feel moved to step over to your computer after playing the record, there is an invitation to head to http://cancer-connection.org and make a donation. (http://www.7272music.com)
(Bill Meyer)
1 week ago
•
1 note
RECOMMENDED
The musical trajectory of actress/entrepreneur/adult film star/noise fan Sasha Grey has been a divisive one at best, and a sizable void within her burgeoning, non-sex-work-oriented creative output at worst. Entkopplung changes all that, a soundtrack for a yet-to-be-released science fiction film for which few details could be obtained. Here, at last, aTelecine finds a voice, something to play off of (in this case, the movie’s sprawling screenplay and a section of dailies), creating a distant yet absorbing sound profile somewhere between the Hafler Trio and Emeralds under the boiling, oppressive atmosphere of the planet Venus. Maybe this has something to to with the supposed absence of Ms. Grey from this session? Tracks seem to melt into one another, with few profiles of melody to get in the way of the insect colony buzz, low-end thrum and percussive fractals on play here, which have a way of burrowing into the music rather than spreading out into themes. It’s a very compelling work that doesn’t immediately sound like anything else going right now, but at least like something recognizably musical – a big step forward for aTelecine, and an even bigger one if you were as confused by their earlier releases as I was. (http://www.daisrecords.com)
(Doug Mosurock)
3 weeks ago
•
3 notes
From somewhere in Michigan comes this unfortunately-named outfit (I fully agree with Talya Cooper’s earlier assessment of their handle from the Still Single review of their seven inch). This debut album is pretty long on ‘60s “Teenage Shutdown” styled garage psych affectation, and not as long on good ideas – the best songs here, like the twee-minded “She Is Gone,” the throbbing “Hate” and the shambling closer “Babydoll” sound like they were written for another bands. Mostly Bad Indians stick to garage orthodoxy, particularly in their instrument tones, like the roller rink organ and over-reliance on twangy reverb guitar. Amid all the unfortunate marketing shtick that’s gone into calling music “psychedelic” when it really isn’t, Bad Indians pass the test – they sound authentically like a number of bands from a very specific moment in early psych/acid rock history, so they’re not “fake psych”. But the best latter-day psych bands trade on how unobvious they are in their approaches. A band like Prince Rupert’s Drops has a lot going on, more fully-digested influences, and minds that truly go beyond the stencils. Apache Dropout is another example – they hew closely to a lot of stylistic signposts of psychedelia, but they play with such reckless abandon, even in their more recent poppy moments, that such worries are not their concern. Bad Indians have a few moments here and there but they really need to worry about making more of those, and less about the pursuit of affectations. (http://cqrecords.com)
(Doug Mosurock)
3 weeks ago
•
2 notes
RECOMMENDED
John Butcher’s music isn’t an obvious match to the vinyl medium. His saxophone playing can leap from quiet whispers to harsh barks in a second, and there’s enough silence and room sound in his playing to show up the flaws in any pressing. But Kukuruku, a London-based label with Greek roots, has done the job quite nicely; flawless black vinyl, three-dimensional sound with an impressively lofty pitch ceiling, and elegant sleeve design (with a nicely grotesque illustration) to boot.
Now, on to the music, which is even more worthy of note. This record is drawn from two performances recorded during the shorter months; an acoustic concert at a London church in December 2011, and an amplified one in Milwaukee at the end of October 2011. If that seems to be stretching the definition of winter, I can only say that when I saw Butcher in Chicago the next week, the weather was cold, dark, and shitty enough to feel like winter to any Western European. But there’s no gloom in this music, just single-minded engagement. Butcher’s not the guy to dictate emotional responses; rather, he invites excitement by making music that changes so quickly, and making it out of sounds that can still surprise a person who has been listening to Butcher for many years. He’s not one to stand still, and there are segments where his amplified tenor sax sounds more like an electronic percussion ensemble realizing some hitherto unperformed Xenakis score. The acoustic passages dart and swoop like swallows negotiating a funnel cloud, yet even at speed they retain such poise that they might inspire a Zen master to jealousy.
It must be said – Butcher has oodles of solo albums out, and while this one is pretty great, so are Resonant Spaces, Invisible Ear, and Fixations (14), to name a few. If you already have some, you might fairly ask if you need another typically great record. But we’re talking about buying records; it’s not about need, it’s about want. Winter Gardens does advance the documentation of his vocabulary, it preserves a pair of excellent performances in sterling sound, and it’s the only one on vinyl. If that’s not enough to make you want it, so be it. (http://http://www.kukurukurecordings.com)
(Bill Meyer)
3 weeks ago
•
3 notes
