September 2011
29 posts
Rank/Xerox review from Dusted
Here you go.
Borrowed Beams of Light – Stellar Hoax LP...
Uproarious coed-led melodic pop guitar/voice/sunshine crash, citing the ancient text of the Voynich Manuscript as the basis of its lyric book. The band members are capable arrangers but the sort of Lindsay Buckingham-esque excitement present here doesn’t particularly push many buttons. Elephant 6 fans might want to get into this, and its disposition certainly is sunny and unafraid, but I can’t...
Botany – Feeling Today 12” EP (Western Vinyl)
Botany plays sampler-based drone-pop grooves with shuffling beats and a peaceful easy feelin’, not unlike watching a baby’s mobile twinkle and chime in the night. Vocalist Ashley Rathburn is positioned nicely here, her clean, pure voice recalling other austere winners like Soft Location’s Kathy Leisen or Beach House’s Victoria Legrand. Musically this is about as far as I want to go in this...
Call Back the Giants – The Rising LP (Kye)
Shadow Ringer Tim Goss resurfaces with his teenage daughter Chloe Mutter for another round of Call Back the Giants, trafficking in VHS/New Age/alien abduction support group profundity amidst the moan of battered synthesizers and repetitive vocals. Records with big blue Egyptian pyramids on their covers usually don’t lie. This is some weird shit. (Doug Mosurock)
Idea Fire Company – Music from the Impossible...
No one expects the Idea Fire Company, who’ve retreated from their former stance (field recordings and plangent synths) to a piano/vs. duo of Karla Borecky and Scott Foust. Most tracks consist of Borecky repeating melodic/discordant chord clusters against whatever Foust is holding onto – a trombone, a radio, and a synthesizer, which add minimalistic counterpart to the plagued desperation of the...
Kid Icarus – American Ghosts LP (Big School)
Other Kid Icarus records have passed through here and my description of those is now tempered by the band’s ambition, which seems to be to make big ‘90s rock product in an N-scale universe. Eric Schlittler is still a good songwriter but the longer this project continues, the more it starts to sound like the kind of music bands like his once rebelled against. The dirt has been washed out of its...
The Living Kills – Faceless Angels LP...
Shapeless, aimless rock ‘n’ roll pout with a ‘60s garage/psych flavor. Maybe you haven’t listened to 30 records today like I did, but at the end of a run like that you start wondering why some bands bother. This would have been a fun thing for these folks to do after work, but of course they have to make a record/paean to rudiments. So tiring. Blue vinyl and 3D glasses included....
Lord Foul – Killing Raping Burning/The Devil’s...
Archival demo tapes from an early ‘90s American black metal project with Agents of Satan connections. The sound is suitably dingy and grim, ugly grunts from a diseased mindset in the blender with nasty distorted guitars and fall-down-the-stairs drumming. Gets mighty relentless in spots and the whole thing is such a quick and brutal listen you’ll be left wondering what hit you. Excellent...
Memorize the Sky – Creeks LP (Brokenresearch)
Electronics and random percussion from some Brooklyn practice room, sounding for all the world like bionic crickets and treefrogs singing to one another in the electronic night. Incredibly subtle, and even gripping on the B-side, the breath of a flute in prickly, muted argument with plucked strings, woodwinds and creeping fear. (http://brokenresearch.com) (Doug Mosurock)
Mudboy – Volume IV: This is Folk Music LP (Weird...
Solo synth explorations from a guy who likes it outside. CD trays with grass and shit in them are gross and bum me out, and it’s a little presumptuous for the artist to slap a large picture of this album on CD up as the cover art for the vinyl. Needless to say, Mr. Boy has his work cut out for him, and to his credit, IV is a wonderful little record, full of church organ-intuned electronic...
Muscle Drum – Fog Hag LP (Break Up)
The one-sheet for Rob Spector’s new band reads more like a rap sheet (Bronze? Really.) but this debut solo project, Muscle Drum, is OK. Sounds like dude got caught up in all the lo-fi pop music happening around him in the Bay, and decided to do his own one-against-the-world take on it, applying those severe pronouncements of groups like Tuxedomoon or Factrix against quick-n-filthy four track...
Sore Eros – Just Fuzz 12” EP (Blackburn)
Sore Eros explores some of their more recessive traits (long songs, quietude, syrupy momentum) on this new five-song EP, following their full-length from last year, and no doubt a little more. Their stance is so fragile and mellow, yet rooted in this sturdy post-Beatles zone – can’t help but think about late-period John Lennon when I hear these songs, even though these treatments couldn’t be...
Squalora – Hell is Other People LP (Minor Bird)
Thrashy, technically-minded metal from Portland, with a sound forged from the used CD bins of pre-collapse America. There’s a lotta Neurosis, a little Hammerhead (which is cool, and surprising), some outwardly crustaceous stances, and the design aesthetics that go along with this sort of mystic wolfpunk narrative. Just so you know what you’re getting here. (http://minorbirdrecords.blogspot.com) ...
The Trashies – Space Jam LP (Minor Bird)
The Trashies sent in an album long ago with a fine song on it called “In the Gutter Together.” We go through al lot of records over here, so to remember one specific song so fondly is a rarity, Now comes a new album with nothing nearly so profound or lasting. At its best, Space Jam plays like a low-rent Lifter Puller fronted by High Pitch Erik. This is straight killing me to get through. It...
Total Control review from Dusted
N-Joi
Arctic Flowers – Reveries 12” EP (Inimical)
In many ways, Arctic Flowers is the kind of punk band that ably fills a void until the next one of its kind comes along. Toe-holds in a consistent narrative across a genre of music are not necessarily bad things, and in this case it’s coming directly from the last link in the chain (Signal Lost guitarist Stan Wright, formerly of Deathreat and Talk is Poison and now an accomplished audio engineer...
The Collection of the Late Howell Bend – Beasts...
That’s right, an 11”. Longform, thoroughly haunted, bewitched chamber creepers for synth, piano and voice. I was a bit cheesed of at the preciousness of another recent Ownness release that probably featured some of the players on this here record. I gotta blame the dude, because these women are holding it down hard, finding the dark gray void between ultra-low-budg soundtrack work and the...
Dark Ages – Can America Survive? 12” EP (Sorry...
If it means bands like Dark Ages get a pass, then I hope not. Pretty dry, stale early ‘80s HC retread out of this Kansas City outfit, leaning heavily on their imagery to remind listeners of times gone by, and the political turmoil against the poor and middle class that we suffered both then and now. Sadly, it’s not compelling at all this time: bone-dry fast hardcore with a barking singer and no...
Dog Day – Deformer LP (self-released)
Pleasant ramblings and surprise profundity flank both sides of this husband/wife duo’s new LP. I remember a single from a while back that didn’t make much of an impression, and for chunks of its runtime, Deformer plays more as a collection of songs cast against human error rather than the sound of any one band, both to detriment and happy accident (this is total Etsy-core in many ways, no sharp...
Anthony Levin-Decanini – Pairings/Birth Plan LP...
Some manner of electronic/percussive pad, various controllers, strings, contact mics, and perhaps some sheet metal went into Chicago improviser Anthony Levin-Decanini’s latest album, a winning case of inventiveness trumping form. He dedicates this work “for my family” and its titles would indicate the time between courtship and family planning (here, the second half of 2008). Tracks are composed...
The Normals – Vacation to Nowhere LP (Last Laugh)
The Normals earned their place in punk history with their rock-infused classic single “Almost Ready,” a woulda/coulda/shoulda sort of record that should have propelled them to stardom. The band’s trek from New Orleans to NYC in order to “make it” resulted in the crushed dreams usually associated with such moves, but moreover it may have prevented these LP sessions, recorded in Memphis in 1979,...
Noveller – Desert Fires LP (Weird Forest)
Sarah Lipstate’s guitar soundscapes on Desert Fires have a calming, cavernous quality to them; interesting, as they are composed of the tiniest movements, layered and delayed against one another in a matte kaleidoscope of sound, the gloss giving way to precision of movement and trueness of tone. These songs are impressive enough as balancing acts, but it is very easy to get completely lost in...
Psychic Ills – Telesthetic Tape LP (Skrot Up)
Practice jams from the entire run of this Philly-to-NYC psych/improv group’s existence, cut together to influence the vibes in the space around you. This is some deep, heavy wander, both long and short, and the musicians are wise enough to keep the audience at arms’ length as they play behind the basement walls. There is a long, Muslingauze-esque track (at least in the sense that it has a tabla...
Omar Souleyman – Haflat Gharbia: The Western...
Compared to the compressed sound and improvised studio setups of the music Sublime Frequencies has let us hear of Omar Souleyman’s, these live recordings from Europe, America and Australia are eye-opening, deft works of Middle Eastern tradition, club beats and rhythmic expediency. Souleyman serves as the frontman and hypeman, flanked by incredible talent: keyboard player/percussionist Rizan...
Ghédalia Tazartès – Diasporas LP (Dais)
If you wanted to own a record of music that is absolutely different from almost anything you’ve known or heard, snap to it: Dais’ reissue of the NWW List-approved vocal melee by Parisian pyrrhic warbler Ghédalia Tazartès is instantly one of the most difficult records of my nearly 35 years aboard this dying mudball. Calls to prayer meets calls of strangulation, calls of possession, a spiritual...
Life Partners – Music is Hard LP (Ride the Snake)
“Music is Hard” = best song of 2011, 2010, and I’m adopting it as the official theme song of Still Single. You should just listen to it right now. There are no words now that this song exists. The rest of it is sublime, vacillating between confessional-style divorce pop (in this case, a divorce from liquor, as far as the story of “I Didn’t Get the Joke” is concerned), played straight in the way...
White Life – s/t LP (Ehse)
Imagine a synth-laden Sea & Cake style band playing both sides of the ‘80s pop ballad: the mysterious, impassioned guysong and the bulletproof ladies’ vocal electrohopsong. Making up words is easier than listing the bands these people sound like, but they do have something going for them that few of their Baltimore retro/weird/YBN contemps have: great songs. In terms of delivery and...
Womankind – s/t 12” EP (Nominal)
Nominal is keeping the identity of this band somewhat obscured (if you’re not now, you never were, I guess) but it’s safe to say they’re Vancouver dudes who claim this to be their last band. The band isn’t over or anything just yet, so “last” could be a while – and from the strength of this EP, which cherrypicks the toothiest elements from a history of American noise rock starting with the Jesus...
Cop City/Chill Pillars – Held Hostage on Planet...
You’d have to be an insane person to expect anything great from a record that looks like this, but little could be further from the truth: this is one supremely weird, engrossing bedroom surf/twang/take me 2 yr dealer trip, nailed to the kush bush like Beardo on the Mount. Cop City/Chill Pillars (Christ, that name!) hail from Lake Worth, Florida, just north of Palm Beach, and I am having a hard...
