December 2009
90 posts
Dialing In – The Islamic Bomb LP (Music...
There’s something about this release by Dialing In, the solo moniker of one Reita Piecuch of Seattle, which rubs me the wrong way, and it’s not just the semi-offensive title. Basically, the album is a collage consisting of street sounds from a trip Piecuch took to Pakistan, cut up and made into her own brutally tough music. However, the methodology isn’t the problem: it’s the end result, which...
Eleh/Nana April Jun – Observations & Momentum...
For the first three, maybe four years of this decade, the Touch label couldn’t really do wrong when it came to releasing some spare-ass music. From the first non-Mego Fennesz releases, to Ryoji Ikeda’s primary forays outside of Japan, to a million other fantastic yet stereotypically dry recordings, Touch seemingly had the finger on the pulse of post-academic, post-minimalist electronic music....
James Ferraro – CITRAC 2xLP (Arbor)
Some pretty strange stuff on this mishmash of a double album from James Ferraro, who you may also know as one-half of Skaters. The first album, subtitled Left Behind: Postremo Mundus Techno-Symposium (and previously released elsewhere), is some sort of meditation on the creepy Christian Left Behind series of books and movies, Kirk Cameron, tribal tattoos, homoeroticism, one-world order...
Gay Beast – Multi-Purpose Anti-Form 7” EP...
More from this Minneapolis science trio, having produced two albums’ worth of digitally informed prog-punk, roboticizing and distorting their voices, allowing the thick, squalling tones of synthesizers to replace the bass guitar, adding saxophone and jamming against jarring shifts in time sig and effects switches hit. Here we have one of their catchiest songs to date in the title track, a dirge...
Life Partners – Men Are Talking LP (Ride the...
I imagine Life Partners’ live show is a hot tub full of dogpiles, spilled beer, brass blurts, microphone-less screaming, irritated sound guys, kids hanging from the rafters and copious amounts of male nudity; a general “BMX Bandits” foam party vibe. This group exists in a world where even that one guy’s questionable pink glasses make sense; that is to say, on the stage (and one not far from...
Locrian/Harpoon – split 7” (Hewhocorrupts, Inc.)
Locrian has sent in several releases to Still Single in a duo formation. Adding a drummer seems to have forced the Chicago dark ambient/black metal firmly into the forest of despair. With “Ancestral Brutalism,” they have snapped into full-on mournful black metal with gigantic drums that eventually break out of the blast beat into martial bursts of punctuation under a veil of atomized gray...
Medicine and Duty – The Imperial Black Fracture 7”...
“The Imperial Black Fracture” is a pretty cool stab at industrial-strength This Heat worship funneled through a machine shop where androids actually do dream of electric sheep. You know those warehouse factories that exist solely in horror/sci-fi movies and music videos, where the main export seems to be fire and sparks? This record is the soundtrack for the robotic worker drones in those...
Oneohtrix Point Never – Zones Without People LP...
Oneohtrix Point Never is a project by Daniel Lopatin, who seems to be upping the ante in the retro-synth sweepstakes. Zones Without People begins as a pretty fantastic set of deceptively-simple melodic pieces set somewhere between the futurism of early ‘70s Cluster or Tangerine Dream, the pastoralism of Boards of Canada (without the beats), and the looking-backwards-yet-forward sensibilities of...
Jen Paul/Jeans Wilder – s/t split LP (La Station...
Jen Paul dials in some heavy reverb guitar, with occasional singing and percussion – that is whenever he/they bother to write a song that lasts longer than 30 seconds. Nothing special, at least nothing that you haven’t heard tried in the past decade or two since Loveless. The Jeans Wilder side is some poorly played, out-of-tune, lower-than-lo-fi grit that even Kurt Vile wouldn’t release as a...
Railcars – Cathedral with No Eyes 12” EP...
Having had the pleasure of seeing Railcars perform in a burnt-out post-apocalyptic jerry-rigged lean-to somewhere in the middle of the Black Forest in Germany, I can attest to a memorable live performance replete with projections of glitchy graphix, shiny lights and an overwhelming sense of “having gone to plaid.” Unfortunately I can’t remember much of what they sounded like. Cathedral with No...
Saw Fist Tree – s/t 12” EP (self-released)
Outside of having one of the worst names I’ve heard lately (what happened guys, did you each pick random words out of Webster’s?), Saw Fist Tree’s debut 12” is an entirely not-too-bad slab of post Tortoise navel gazing, jaunty acoustic Ichabod Crane-style hootenanny and some other psychedelic horseshit. My ears perked up at “Antebellum Estate,” which starts off as the world’s first frat-dub cut,...
The School/George Washington Brown – Searching for...
Back in my day we called these split 7”s, but you get some of that Pains of Being Pure at Heart juice, and I guess it’s a comp. Searching For The Now Vol. 6 starts off with un-Googleable Welsh band The School, and its sumptuous cover of The Left Banke’s “And Suddenly.” It’s rich, booming, and smoky, and sounds exactly like an outtake from Camera Obscura’s My Maudlin...
Sissy Spacek – Fortune b/w The Eyes of Men 7” EP...
As far as deconstructionist hardcore/BM goes, there is an interesting, subverted dynamic at play here: across 26 tracks, evenly split and banded on sides that play like a live set, with few breaks, Corydon Ronnau’s vocals are completely manipulated and obscured by John Wiese’s electronics, and flattened so that Charlie Mumma’s drumming (single-minded in every sense, the same blast beat against...
TV Torso – “Black Mask” b/w “The Eye in the...
Two members of Austin’s major label also-rans Sound Team get back to basics on this dark, but sweet single. They’ve ditched the dance numbers and wall of guitars for an upbeat melancholy that despite an effort to avoid the comparison sounds a bit like a subdued Tom Petty. The recording has a pleasant, dusky, organic warmth, with gorgeous stripped down, overdriven guitar ring, smooth...
Dark Lingo – Little Black Glasses 7” EP (Dear...
Dark Lingo is a duo of Sandy Patton, of Memphis, Tennessee’s Wet Labia (who I’m not familiar with) and Nick Patton of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s Centipede Eest (who I am), and what we have here is the rare single which actually sounds kinda fun. An art product germinated in the much-ballyhooed creative class crater that is Braddock, PA, they market themselves as some manner of “ESG meets...
The Drastics featuring MC Zulu – “Love is War” b/w...
Uh, yeah … this is a ska record. This is Still Single. Still Skankin’ is somewhere else! Complete with reggae vocalist and two-piece horn section, hopping on the silkscreen abuse train (this thing looks worse than a Submission Hold record), here’s some vaguely activist-oriented jam, sounding like half the band could play funk if it wanted to, and the other half taking direct influence from the...
Explode Into Colors – “Coffins” b/w “Sharpen the...
Sleater-Kinney (or maybe Karen O) meets “Drumline,” with baritone guitar contributing to the flip. I don’t know. Seriously, three ladies play drums while one of them sings, and that’s their record … wow. I hate to piss on anyone’s parade, but I feel like we’ve come a bit too far from this. Features a one-time member of Japanther (bummer x 1000). The recording sounds pretty great but this is a...
Follow That Bird – s/t one-sided 10” EP (Monofonus...
Austin’s Follow That Bird are a fine enough band; opening-strength, female-led rock ‘n’ roll with smoky, Stevie Nicks-acolyte vocals. These two ladies and a gentleman are way stronger than they let on, as several listens to this record revealed a casual durability to what would otherwise be a formulaic run through occupied territory. What makes it is their attitude – it’s very easy to envision...
Jesu – Opiate Sun 12” EP (Caldo Verde)
I remember chiding an old friend (who hasn’t spoken to me in a while, come to think of it …) who was raving about Jesu circa Conqueror, telling him it reminded me of Hydra Head’s answer to Richard Marx. So glibly I dismissed Broadrick’s day job, more appealing to me in its earlier, more amorphous stages at time of comment, but I’m glad I’ve persisted, and been so selective in that persistence....
Krysmopompas – “Gesa” b/w “Volker 7” (Avant!)
Krysmopomaps is a four piece post punk band from Berlin who came to the attention of most Americans via their Heute Schlafen-Morgan Aufwachen double album on S-S last year, which compiled their two self released CD-Rs. They claimed the influences of Ionesco and Fassbinder, but what’s here is a hefty dose of 154 era Wire, and NDW bands like Die Tödliche Doris and F.S.K. if they had deadpan,...
