April 26, 2015 at 4:29 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Silo Homes: s/t
Lonesome drone-folk which sounds like it’s being performed in an echo chamber the size of a barn. Seriously lovely chiming guitar, ghostly echoes of vocals, and glorious tape hiss. So heartbroken and lost and desolate. It’s wonderful. I don’t want to go outside, it’s too sunny and people will try to talk to me and make me feel better. Fuck that.
April 11, 2015 at 9:40 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Marie Davidson: Un Autre Voyage
Second LP from a Montreal minimal wave chanteuse who is in Land Of Kush, Les Momies de Palerme (both of which have released albums on Constellation Records), and a few other projects. Her sound combines mostly spoken vocals (in both French and English) with lo-fi drum machine beats and bleepy synth patterns. Some of the beats (particularly on “Excès de Vitesse” and “Balade Aux USA”) approach Italo-disco, while the simmering, pulsating “Kidnap You In The Desert” is as much an abduction scene as its title suggests. Haunted, sparse “Perséphone” is a duet with Pierre Guerineau, who sort of resembles a French Dracula on this song. “Insomnie” is a stunning starscape with less emphasis on vocals than the other tracks.
April 5, 2015 at 10:46 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
How To Cure Our Soul: Saigon
Life has been stressing me out a bit lately, so it’s important to have plenty of warm, soothing drone music on hand to calm me down. This album is entirely hitting the spot right now. Both tracks are over 25 minutes long, and the first one, “Aurea”, basically sounds like staring at the most gorgeous landscape you’ve ever seen, in perfectly warm, comfortable weather, and doing absolutely nothing else. It’s perfect. “Opium” is darker, so maybe it’s more like the same scene at night, but it’s still not cold or unpleasant, so it’s more like enjoying a moonscape. But man, “Aurea”. Another recent hitting-the-spot ambient album is GREYGHOST’s
Meditations On Mindfulness, a free
Bandcamp download on the always-excellent Constellation Tatsu.
April 5, 2015 at 10:31 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Kodak To Graph: ISA
First album from a Florida-based producer who toured with Slow Magic last year and will be headlining a show at the Blind Pig this Friday (4/10). You can draw parallels to “trap” or “chillwave” with this guy’s music, especially with some of the percussion sounds or vocal manipulations, but this album seems to go for more of a widescreen cinematic feel. “Belong” has horns and just keeps building and getting more epic. “Floating” feels soft, lush, and pastoral, but it still has hard-hitting bass. “Los Angeles” is alternately one of the most uptempo, dancey tracks on the album (at least for a few moments in the beginning), as well as one of the most hip-hop-influenced, with deft scratching and half-time beats. “Fake Murblock” come closest to a big-drop dubstep type of track, but not in an obnoxious way (actually it reminds me of Girl Unit’s “Wut” more than anything else, and that’s not a bad thing at all). “Nylon Courtyard” is like a trap song lost in the rainforest, and ends with tribal-sounding vocal samples, disco guitar and 4/4 beats. “IAMANTHEM” is another more explicitly hip-hop-influenced track, complete with Lil Wayne sample. The final few tracks are more mellow and ambient, and have less of an emphasis on hip-hop and more on atmospheric loveliness.
April 4, 2015 at 9:11 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Cambo: Patronage & Pork tape
Lo-fi experimental beats that straddle the line between techno and hip-hop. Refreshingly blown-out, dusty beats with eerie melodies and self-help record samples. Intriguingly detached in a manner somewhat similar to Pursuit Grooves, but this feels like it has more of a distorted noise-scene edge to it. Also kind of reminds me of any late ’90s/early ’00s IDM/hip-hop crossover artists like Push Button Objects, especially during the Nas-sampling closer “Gunmetal”. “Typhoid Mary” is the most straightforward 4/4 techno track here, with a dark Randomer “Bring” kinda vibe that I’m always down for. Available on tape and digitally at
Bandcamp.
April 4, 2015 at 8:38 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Aphasiacs: Debtor’s Paradise tape
Raw, messy analog techno from Detroit. Seems less concerned with igniting dancefloors than with convincing piles of electronic junk to create rhythmic patterns that resemble music. I saw them play with Container once, and it’s definitely in that same ballpark, but this seems more deconstructed and blown-out. “Phaser” starts out with strange concentric circle beat patterns, then ends up with some seemingly random drums and melodies plunked out over the loose 4/4 beats. And then it gets faster and punkier towards the end. Extremely seat-of-the-pants lo-fi but it works. The B-side has 3 remixes by other artists, with Rawaat and Coyote Clean Up emphasizing the techno side and A Sacred Cloud going for more of a noise assault. Coyote Clean Up contributes the most dancefloor-friendly, melodic mix, throwing in that loon sound made famous by 808 State’s “Pacific”, which I guess apparently making some sort of comeback now. I never stopped listening to 808 State so it’s hard for me to notice that it ever went away. Available on tape and digitally from
Bandcamp.
April 4, 2015 at 5:36 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Suburbo: Sueño Ligero
Local group founded by a coworker of mine. Mostly instrumental, sample-happy electronic rock music. Opener “Light Sleeper” is a short surf-rock song, and “A.M. Independence” is a quiet atmospheric track with a cutup voice that sounds somewhere in between Sun City Girls and The Weatherman from Negativland. “Sexual Toad” is a swingin’ breakbeat-driven track that sort of resembles Land Of The Loops but with a more fleshed out guitar-based sound, and possibly some porn samples thrown in (nothing too explicit though). “La Femme d’Quagmire” is a more heavily layered soundtrackscape, with strangely distorted vocals, and a complete shift in the middle, with bizarre stadium crowd noises and CB radio speech, before a more calm, dreamy groove wanders in, covered in many layers of weird voices. “Mighty White” is sort of a warped country tune, with vocals that end up reversing by the end of the song. “Everyone Knows What We Bring” is a trippy sample collage, starting out with laidback drums and a confusing mass of drunk-sounding vocals, before giving way to cinematic dialogue about fighting Hitler in WWII, along with strings and gunshots. Then there’s a Negativland-like cutup sample talking about extortion and drugs, and some more vocals like in the beginning of the track. “Mogul” brings numbers station recordings into the mix, with another dense musical collage of shifting voices and rhythms. “Sueño Ligero” is another surf-leaning song with buzzing organ and backwards guitars, and movie samples. “All My Life” is a sentimental love ballad closing out the album, playing it mostly straightforward, except for some backwards effects on the guitars. Free download from
Bandcamp.
April 1, 2015 at 9:59 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Austin noise-punks Quttinirpaaq follow both of their 2013 LPs on Rural Isolation Project with a third one. This is bleeding-noise industrial electronic rock, with sheets of noisy guitar pushing far beyond Psychocandy levels of harshness. There’s usually a drum machine bashing away, and vocals are distorted far beyond any semblance of comprehensibility. It sounds like punk rock thrown violently into a paper shredder with no fucks given. “Dead Birds” starts out not as noisy, with an almost pleasant sounding drum/guitar loop, but it keeps going on forever and gets drowned out by obscene levels of noise and distortion, before cutting off suddenly, “I Want You/She’s So Heavy” style. “Lifestyles USSR” goes on forever too, with rumbling, thudding rhythms surrounded by computer glitches. “Spine Tree” has a techno beat buried underneath the noise, and another sharp ending. “Walk Into The Sea” has more of a sludge-metal tempo, and seems to have more of a proper ending, even as the sludge takes over the metal. I can’t find cover art online, so I guess it’s not actually out yet, but keep tuned to their Bandcamp and I’m sure it’ll be up pretty soon.
April 1, 2015 at 8:32 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Bouquet: In A Dream 10″ EP
Bouquet are an LA-based duo joining the ranks of Sales, Love Inks and other recent groups updating the pleasant, minimalist drum-machine pop sounds of Young Marble Giants. The group needs nothing more than vocals, guitar, keys and Casio-esque drum machines to put forth its catchy tunes. Sometimes you can’t argue with a soothing voice repeating the lyric “I wanna come to your house” over warm synths. “Falling” is another winner, starting out beatless and sounding like it’s gently falling, but gaining traction with a brisk beat. The EP’s shortest track, “Over Mountains”, is the most weightless, sounding like it’s flying rather than falling, but otherwise the EP sticks to pleasing drum machine beats.
March 29, 2015 at 2:13 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Scissor Now!: Shear Immediacy!
New EP from one of Ann Arbor’s best current bands, and a preview of their second LP (and first with Jef Porkins on bass). The first LP featured their original lineup, with Laura Leonard on bass, and this EP has re-recordings of two of the songs from that album (“Pee On My Butt” and “Corporate Deodorant”). Of the two newer songs, “Camelbak” is the better one, with a nice easygoing rhythm, and fast lyrics about moving to Portland even though everyone who does so moves back anyway. The new songs seem less spazzy/no-wavey than their older songs (not to mention they’re over 2 minutes), which is not to say that they sound altogether straightforward. The EP ends with their cover of “Billie Jean”, which was the highlight of their 2013 Halloween show as Michael Jackson. It definitely gets the Scissor Now! treatment, playing with time signatures and intensity levels, mostly keeping to a danceable uptempo, but slowing down for the “think twice” part, matching the way the band slows down for the same lyric in their song “Bail Out”. Hope the album comes soon, but in the meantime, you can check this EP out on
Bandcamp.
« Previous Page —
Next Page »
The Answer Is In The Beat 