December 2009
90 posts
Frank Alpine – “Night Tripper” b/w “Another Land”...
Frank Alpine (better known as Rich Bitch) used to play drums in the band New Collapse (barely remembered over here). Now he farts around on a synthesizer, sending audition tapes to the past so that the producers of horror anthology TV programs like “Monsters” or “Tales from the Darkside” might hire him. Creepy, dark, minimal synth had a bit more value when the best place to hear it was movies....
Bipolar Bear – Manbase 7” EP (Labil)
LA’s Bipolar Bear continue to churn out the releases at a breakneck clip. Their brand of dissonant riffage and catchy vocals sounds better with each successive play. It’s hard to even mind something that could be considered cookie monster grindcore vocals when they are followed by something as catchy as “Bangers and Mash,” an evil, droning song with snaking guitar lines that is surprisingly very...
Capputtini I’Lignu – s/t 7” EP (Shit Music for...
The imprint’s standard-issue garage-rock “Look at us! We’re all a bunch of morally-deficient dirtbags” moniker (which I seem to remember as an older label….this is ‘shit #01’) does not mesh with the beautiful packaging (elaborate band logo, screened onto parchment paper envelopes…all done in a nice and bright red). But it fits like a bad habit once the first few chords are smacked out of what...
Christian Mistress – “Mother of Mercy” b/w “The...
Whoa! Didn’t expect this – heavy ‘80s style metal strut from Olympia, rendered with class by Capt. Trips. Five-piece combo with dual guitars and a raspy female vocalist, chugging along at the tough exterior of metallic outfits gone by. Ripped denim and smoke machines for all, adding a little bit of peace/crust (think Crass, maybe Signal Lost) to an otherwise faithful reconstruction of mirror...
Cortez/Language of Light – split 12” (AntiClock)
I wasn’t sure what side of this record I listened to first, but I am sure that it will remain in mint condition for the duration of its time under this roof. Let me get this straight: it’s 2009 and I just spent 20+ minutes paying close attention to something that makes Stars of the Lid sound like Meshuggah? Was it a field recording of the Labradford practice space circa ‘96, after the band...
The Deadnotes – Orange Trumpet LP (Soft Abuse)
The Deadnotes are a great and very original band from Brisbane, Australia who are hard to get a handle on, but are a rewarding listen once you unlock the band’s unique musical language. The instrumentation is brushed drums, trumpet, guitar, clarinet, and Casio. At times the sound is out-of-tune Blue Note-varietals of jazz; at other times the synth drones; there’s a bit of some wordless...
The Dogmatics – “Gimme the Shakes” b/w “20 Flight...
This is a reissue of the Dogmatics’ first and sole 7” from 1984, preceding their full LP on Homestead. This largely unknown player in the mid-80’s Boston post-punk sweepstakes leaned heavily on psych and garage revival tendencies (see also included the the Neats and the Lyres) without letting it become an overwhelming crutch. “Gimme the Shakes” is as great as anything in the Lyres discography,...
El Jesus de Magico – Klip Aught 7” EP (Columbus...
EJDM’s Scalping the Guru was one weird record, but we’ve got a new single on the realz, and the group is getting back on track. Is it as good as their CDR Singles Club Year One offering? Probably not, because here they lose the sense of drunken majesty to hang back in pre-arranged roles, moping around the early ‘90s a la Galaxie 500 (then) or the Whines (now), reflecting on the Joy Division...
Estrogen Highs – “Echo” b/w “They Told Me I Was...
More of trash-rock’s marginal solidarity as communicated through a self-deprecating imprint name, and more music that’s next-to-impossible to write about because it doesn’t do anything. It’s that simple. The most fascinating musical development in one’s frame of reference will become a tiresome writing venture at some point, but this innocuous effort (that could be one of a gazillion bands...
Facehugger/Pleasure Cruise – split 7” EP (Army of...
Army of Bad Luck (ABL) has some winners in their back catalog and this is another good one. The label’s native Atlanta is once again under the spotlight with vinyl debuts from both Facehugger and Pleasure Cruise. Facehugger creates something very noisy and fascinating on their two tracks. Maybe someone from the dearly departed SIDS. plays with them? Hard to tell, but both groups have a similar,...
Hallow – Soundtrack 2xLP (Youth Attack)
The Troy McClure style intro: You might know Hallow mainman Mark McCoy from such ‘90s and ‘00s noisemakers as Charles Bronson, Das Oath, and Ancestors. He runs Youth Attack, takes photos in the blurry, kinda porny, are-those-Polaroids-or-what school of enough-already and his collages would scan as half-transgressive half-RRR Records covers if there was anything left to transgress. But his...
Jana Hunter/Inoculist – split 7” (Heart Break...
A family jam of a split 7”, this single features the music of siblings Jana and John Hunter, both of whom used to play together as Matty & Mossy. Jana Hunter has been birthing minimal, haunting tunes for at least five years now, seemingly with less recognition that many of her comparatively sub-par contemporaries. Here she pairs prickly guitars with an even pricklier title: “Two Cocks Waving...
The Last Rapes of Mr. Teach – s/t 7” EP (Les...
Yes! Here’s proof that no matter how saturated, over-exposed, or unsavory the genre, there will always be the special participants that call the top-shelf home and transcend the nest to stand on their own. These Frenchmen close out a garage/trash-rock and punk gauntlet with chops so good they sound inborn and unavoidable. It’s always nice to discover a band so adept at sounding fantastic that...
Love Collector – “My Baby Goes Waaah” b/w “Tell Me...
Generic Fonzie garage is the hardest music to review. Do people really care to split hairs whether this sounds like The Infections or The Motards? It’s snotty, the guitars go “NaNaNaNaNaNa” and overall, this doesn’t exceed mid-period Rip Off catalog quality, except “My Baby Goes Waaaah (Wah Wah Wah Wah Wah)” is pretty irritating the first time, and it’s repeated over and over...
Prunalogsusan Pentagram – 23 7” EP (Trigger on the...
Prunalogsusan Pentagram must be some kind of inside joke. These are recordings from fall 2008 in the group’s native Wisconsin. It sounds like this was rendered in Windows 95 sound recorder, Walkman-taped off of the speakers, and ripped back into someone’s laptop in Real Audio format. Pretty impressive. The tracks (17 of them, to be exact) range from grindcore with pitch-shifted vocals, amateur...
Sentence Diagrams – “Always Try Your Best at...
Sentence Diagrams play very upbeat, anthemic power pop. To be clear, this is not rooster-haircut and Italian boots power pop; it seems more like the perfect soundtrack for a bored kid with a bobo Walkman whose summer job is to clean up puke at Six Flags. The double-tracked vocals soar and beat against loose but furious drumming. “Always Try Your Best at Stuff” is a smoker that incorporates some...
Spider Bags – “Teenage Eyes” b/w “Eileen” 7”...
With this great single, which expands on the promise of their debut LP, ex-DC Snipers outfit the Spider Bags sound a bit more comfortable, having relocated to Chapel Hill, NC, done a whirl around the Northeast with the Golden Boys, and absorbing all of those environmental changes into their approach. “Teenage Eyes,” the fast one, opens with some clean guitar, boogie piano, and big hooks...
The Tobacconists – The Dark Secrets of Doctor...
Duo found sound/synth textures from the duo of Frans de Waard (Kapotte Muziek, Beequeen) and Scott Foust (Idea Fire Company), rolling through two sides of dissected radio theatre. Sounds drift in and out in sequence, from percussive, cyclical rattling to choral snippets, building up and out of a deep, bassy, cosmic synth bed. Those recent Idea Fire Company releases made tell of Foust’s mastery...
The Tunnels – “No Love” b/w “Pretty Things” 7”...
The Tunnels give the world their first two songs on this 7” (with artwork by the unfortunate, but appropriately titled, Bland Design). This Austin group deals in hazy, woozy, organ-tinged psychedelia. The A-side, “No Love,” sounds pleasantly familiar, crash-landing somewhere around the Spacemen 3/13th Floor Elevators axis. It’s a fine tune, but too by-the-books; we’ve heard it already many times...
Univox – s/t 7” EP (ROIR)
Univox are a band from Philadelphia that plays nondescript ROCK that is pretty hard to categorize. It doesn’t necessarily sound like anything, but that’s not to say it’s really original. It somehow makes perfect sense they are on ROIR. Anyway, you can pretty much imagine what’s going on here: some aggro guitars, 1-2-3-4 countoffs, a song with the word “fuck” in the title, and so on. “Pi” is the...
WRNLRD – Myrmidon LP (FSS)
The New York Times reported Dec. 15 on a symposium on black metal that took place in Brooklyn the previous week. The jokes that arise from that image kinda make their own gravy, so we’re not gonna bother supplying what you can think up yourself, except to say that a) there was, in the article, a distinct lack of context regarding BM’s let’s-call-it-checkered political history...
Zea – We Better Boil Soup of the Grown Ups 7" EP...
Rough record. Zea is a one man band from Amsterdam, who plays starry-eyed, happy-sounding acoustic indie pop over busy, low-rent glitch beats. The beats themselves sound overly busy and clumsy, and he’s not much of a pop song-smith either. He’s at his best when he leaves the beats alone and just sticks to singing and playing guitar and singing, but he has a way to go before he writes...
Various Artists – Skulls Without Borders 10” EP...
Guaranteed to underperform, here’s an odds-n-sods collection of six sounds attracted to the porchlight at Roland Woodbe’s uncle’s cabin out in the sticks. They all threaten to eat you alive. First (and best) is the Chickins – same band as the Chickens, one of those sub-normals from FNU Ronnies – with a stutterin’, skankin’ short jitter called “Chickins Den.” Sounds French – deadpan vocals,...
Burmese – Colony Collapse Disorder 10” picture...
Been a while since we’ve checked in with Burmese … honestly I think the last time I saw them was Dwyer’s last show, when he tried to pick up the drums and throw them at the crowd at the 996 Club in Greenpoint, Brooklyn (now a successful rotisserie chicken establishment). The enervating, laborious screaming I heard that night, nearly ten years ago, is still here, but fortified with a power they...
Homostupids – The Load LP (Load)
Gangly, loud, and hell of stupid. Cleveland’s same-shtoops piledrive their way through a second full-length, gritting up a handful of tracks from singles into the tumultuous rip of a record, leveraging the technical skills they’ve picked up over the past few releases into a free-for-all, ungoverned and ridiculous. Tracks like “The Glow” surge forward at the insistence of the tape reels, which...
Dan Melchior’s Broke Revue – O, Clouds Unfold!...
Dan Melchior’s finest hour now sees an official release for the first time. Shelved for most of the decade due to a petty dispute between artist and fartist, the making of this double album, just over 80 minutes in length. Their fortunes tangled up in this release, its members having played with and around one another in the years leading up through 2003, the non-release of this record, along...
Bill Orcutt – A New Way to Pay Old Debts LP...
Harry Pussy guitarist Orcutt resurfaces after over a decade of absence, found in the kitchen of a San Francisco, CA apartment, recording the death throes of his four-string Kay guitar as he works on it with a hacksaw. Mangled folk, out of the Fahey/Derek Bailey scrimmage, ensues; Orcutt’s demeanor and tone, coupled with the odd vocal yelp, text message received, or street sound, makes for an...
Purling Hiss – s/t LP (Permanent)
The trouble with year-end lists: records like this one, which come out quietly and without fanfare, and run the table on all of the others you’ve chosen. Had this record, the solo debut of Birds of Maya guitarist Mike Polizze, as Purling Hiss, crossed my path even a few weeks earlier, it would have completely dominated. As such, this gets my highest recommendation: extremely thick, dense,...
Bad Drumlin Grass – Live At Timber Cove LP (Milvia...
Picture perfect photo collages of rockets and cats in weird stage sets, framed with the worst color & font choices one could make, could cast this one off into the bin of anonymity for good. But after listening to this record for just a few minutes I was in awe of how truly original and bizarre it was. Bad Drumlin Grass goes right into the A side with a dark, heavy electro-drone mood piece,...
DAO+COH – Dzerzhinsk-B LP (Tourette)
Half of this duo is Ivan Pavlov, a.k.a COH, who is better known for currently formulating Soisong with Sleazy Christopherson of Coil. The other half is Andrej Kolesov, a relatively unknown and obscure electronic improvisor. One would think that this type of pedigree would amount to something groundbreaking and different … but no, just two out of touch electro-whiz masters rambling off track...
Ricardo Donoso – Zerovinteum 7” EP (Semata...
Taking a step back from his usual drumming chores from his current industrial project Ehnahre, Ricardo Donoso tries his hand at a solo single. Structured perfectly to fit into the mood of desolation and loneliness, Donoso used a clever balance of tone generated drone along with various guitar effects to ebb back and forth through his new medium of minimalist composition. Each piece uses hush...
Peter Downsbrough – And That LP (Sub Rosa)
Sub Rosa sets forth with its ongoing presentations of high-brow recordings with another incredible work, showcasing a collaboration by world renowned visual artist Peter Downsbrough with the talents of Xavier Garcia-Bardon and Benjamin Franklin, both of the improv collective Buffle. Blending simple lucid sound structure in your usual minimalist fashion but cutting them in and out without...
Etienne Jaumet – Entropy 12” EP (Versatile)
From the cover alone I had thought that Klaus Schulze was sending out review copies of a new project (and that is a compliment), but lo and behold, it is the new-ish electro-house single by Etienne Jaumet of Zombie-Zombie. Mr. Jaumet mixes up a solid mesh of basic minimal synth beats, the kind you’d find easily found on old Stem Band or L’an III tapes (Easily?!? – Ed.), remixed by someone...
Lesson Lesson Lessen Relearn / Russian Tsarlag –...
Outsider mix-up of two close friends leading parallel lives in some dark bizarro underbelly. Lesson Lesson Lessen Relearn is the found object synth sampler outfit of What’s Yr Damage? member Nelson Hallonquist, plying distorted sound collage with piles of analog synth hums, various delay effects and oscillations, accompanied by fucked tape swirls from the ether, containing random nonsensical...
Love Is All – Last Choice 12" EP (What's Your...
How you feel about this record is going to depend on how you feel about affected cutesiness in music. There is a lot of twee going on here, especially in the female singer’s vocals. How do you feel the thought of kittens hugging in a dewy meadow? What about while a young couple in anoraks holds hands while skipping through rainy Glasgow town on their way to a secret picnic spot? What about...
Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville – “Au Clair de...
While there is no question that this is an interesting and well put together package, I’m not sure why anyone would pay $9 for what basically sounds like a twenty second excerpt from a Crank Sturgeon vocal noise tape that you can listen to for free on Leon-Scott’s wikipedia page. Way back in April 1860, French printer and book seller Edouard-Leon Scott de Martinville invented the...
PC Worship – NYC Stone Age LP (SHDWPLY)
Weirdo loose knit freak happening from Justin Frye (Gary War, Teeth Mountain) – plenty of detuned harmonizing, loosely thrown together to the backdrop of random off-beat drums, fumbled bass lines, freeform sax and the occasional synth bump for good measure. People may check this out being a fan of the more “in tune” jams of their regular bands, but don’t go looking to this release for any...
Benoît Pioulard – Flocks 7” (Blue Flea)
By age 25, Thomas Meluch has amassed a notable reputation for blending home field recordings into his own strain of shoegazer folk using the pseudonym of Benoît Pioulard. He’s released a handful of DIY CD-Rs and cassettes, as well as full lengths for Kranky and his own Ghostly International imprint. Pioulard’s latest single showcases the perfect example of the dynamic contrast in his music and...
Pollution – N.S. Drugs 7” EP (Desensitized)
When I was below drinking age, we had bands like Pollution everywhere you looked: loading in gear, salting Coke machines, opening for Meatjack, delivering food or bike messengering for meager pay, ripping off Kinko’s, copying cassettes out of a dual deck, furtively leering around the edges of the dating puddle. This was before everyone was in a band, and the countercultural shift of the ‘90s was...
Pygmy Shrews – “Lord Got Busted” b/w “Kill...
A supergroup for people who do nothing but look for Cherubs’ Heroin Man on vinyl (you find it, you call me), Pygmy Shrews embody the New Wave of American Noise Rock as well or better than anyone taking up space in Brooklyn. Guitarist Ben Greenberg (Zs, the Fugue) bass-abuser Tia Vincent (the Fugue, FACE!), and drummer Jeremy Villalobos (Drunkdriver, Whip and the Body) pound something into...
Rale – Whispering Gallery 12" EP (Arbor)
Rale is the moniker of Bill Huston, a man who seems to dwell in the low-end frequency of noise drone. This record slowly builds throughout each side, creating a damaging effect on the sounds he is manipulating. Both sides start off almost in a hushed ambient style, but soon get consumed by crunching feedback that would normally be punishing to your average listener, but in this case act as a...
Rank/Xerox – s/t 7” EP (Mongo Bongo/Top Ten Hits)
The guitar has bite, the vocals have that spoken-sung urgency, and the beat is relentless at first, but reduces to a thick, martial pound when required. Rank/Xerox has a lot in common with the punkier, noisier bands of today, but probably would have fit in during the GSL/31G boom of 1999. I wish I could find more to say, but really, they just nail it – a lotta people (alright, two people) have...
Stone Breath – The Shepherdess and the Bone-White...
Simple throwback revivalists and paeans to UK psych-folk yesteryears, Stone Breath keep things crisp and quaint with their string-based melodies, churning up the spirits of early Incredible String Band and Pentangle. The duo does well enough by the instrumentation, but leave a bit left to work on with vocals. The songs are allowed to develop as things get warned up, adding in touches of mandolin...
Taco Leg – “Freemason’s Hall” b/w “Sunbathing in...
Fumbling, primitive broken string bash from the musical beginners of Perth, Australia. Both songs take that whole two-note approach and lay into the rudiments with refreshing, if well-trodden enthusiasm. It’s rickety, wacky-shack DIY punk like it’s always been, which is part of the problem, but what the fuck else is there to do in Perth, other than surf? I’m well fascinated by this city, and...
Total Control – “Retiree” b/w “Meds II” 7” (Iron...
More records from Australia! What got into them? No beef, just curious. They’re taking over, many of the things that pass by here, from there, of a consistency not found in the digital dumps of American counterparts. This is a side project of a guy named Mikey, who plays guitar in Eddy Current Suppression Ring, and DX from the UV Race/Stained Circles record label. I haven’t heard the first Total...
When Dinosaurs Ruled The Earth – Jandek Cat 7”...
Not only does it sport the best cover art of 2009, but this single by Austin art-punk noise makers When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth backs it up with stellar yet chaotic results, dealing heavy dual drumming against unrelenting vocals, and drunk rock riffs going over the same familiar ground as their drug-addled predecessors before them. Slivers of their Texas psychedelic roots shine through these...
David Bernabo + Assembly – Happener Magicker LP...
Happener Magicker is a tasteful hodgepodge of jazzy, proggy rock songs that twist and turn and sneak down different avenues, but never completely lose their way or wind up with heads in their asses (well, maybe just a bit at the end of Side 2). There are horns and strings and all sorts of things in these numbers; some go straight for the jugular while others meander into bedroom...
Big Nurse – American Waste LP (High-Density...
It may not be obvious to you lucky people who live on either coast and can walk/run/take public transportation to whatever good record store you happen to live by, but living in a flyover state, much less a red state, can be rough, music-wise. For every gem-in-the-rough such as Big Nurse one might uncover, one still has to endure a fair amount of friends who still want to express how “cutting...
Tim Cohen – The Two Sides of Tim Cohen LP (Empty...
The songs on The Two Sides of Tim Cohen alternate between morose college-folkie-in-the-dorm aural Ambien and dreary minimalist post-punk-cum-darkwave tomfoolery, and often contain elements of both. Said tomfoolery includes “Burn My Martyr,” which I kinda dig because it’s trying to be eerie and succeeds, sounding sort of like a low-rent “In the Air Tonight,” except without the huge spotlight to...