October 24, 2014 at 10:43 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
The Pen Test: Interstate LP
On The Pen Test’s debut LP, they explore the highway as a dark, lonely, mania-inducing place. Musically, it might be indebted to
Autobahn (complete with side-long opening title track), but thematically it might be a little closer to The Magnetic Fields’
The Charm Of The Highway Strip. The epic 21-minute “Interstate” has an icy pulse and Suicide-like vocals, with synth sounds approximating late-night traffic passing by in the dead of night. The song comes to a standstill around the 10-minute mark, with just a faint, nervous heartbeat, which fades away and reappears towards the end. “Za-Zen” is quirky, bloopy electro-pop with more straightforward vocals, which seem content to simply “let the interstate have its way”. “Like Machine” is a shorter track with a faster, more Drexciyan electro beat, and off-the-wall vocal stylings. “CEO” is another uptempo nervous-pop number, in which the singer claims that he’s “solving all your problems with money”, and it seems doubtful that you should trust him. The song ends with the most dramatic flute solo you could ever hope to hear from a minimal-synth song. “The Great Eroder” ends the album with some pretty credible Detroit-flavored dancefloor electro, complete with down-pitched vocals and grubby, filtered synth sweeps and arpeggios. Music to hopefully not crash your car to. Vinyl and digital available from
Bandcamp.
October 24, 2014 at 9:52 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Weyes Blood: The Innocents LP
Weyes Blood’s 2011 album on Not Not Fun,
The Outside Room, was a fantastic experimental psych-folk album that I discovered 2 years after the fact (after I saw her live at SXSW) and was blown away by. This is the follow-up on a bigger label (the same one that fellow NNF alumni Peaking Lights graduated to), and it’s much brighter, clearer, and more expansive in sound. Her vibrato-laced voice sounds fantastic, and the arrangements are complex and accomplished, with bright chiming acoustic guitars and vintage synths. The tape-drift opening to 6-minute highlight “Some Winters” nods to her lo-fi tape-scene past, but it flows into some truly beautiful vocals and cascading pianos. A few other songs such as “Summer” have simpler arrangements which showcase her voice more, but the beginning of “Requiem For Forgiveness” covers her voice in eerie, Goblin-like vocoders, before stripping away the instruments and leaving her multi-tracked vocals coo “I forgive you” by the song’s end. Seasons play heavily into the album, not just with the two consecutive seasonally-titled songs near the beginning of the album, but in “February Skies”, where she sings “first day of spring, winter must bring”. “Montrose” is a drifting ambient instrumental with some film dialogue at the end, and then the album ends with another strummy, layered-vocal ballad, “Bound To Earth”. Definitely recommended for all fans of ethereal psych-folk/dream-pop artists such as Vashti Bunyan, Grouper, White Poppy, Marissa Nadler, etc.
October 24, 2014 at 9:06 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Dream Police: Hypnotized
The Men used to be a hardcore band, but now they’ve morphed into some sort of alt-country/Northern soul-influenced college-rock band. This side project shows that they’ve actually been making music even further removed from their roots. This project explores synths and drum machines, and repetitive motorik rhythms. “My Mama’s Dead” is like a 21st century update on “Hey Joe” in which the titular character becomes a woman. “Iris” is kind of a space-country ballad, as if “Planet Caravan” was written around a campfire in the desert. “Pouring Rain” is an uptempo steady drum machine driven new wave song. “All We Are” is a slower song with some wavey MBV guitar as well as acoustic guitar. “John” is kind of a bluesy stomp with organ and sliding guitar. “Let It Be” is even more of a new wave/Krautrock synthesis, with another steady drum machine beat, Neu!-like synths, and more layered guitar melodies. “Sandy” begins with tolling bells and some sort of squeezebox drone, and then turns into something approximating a droney English folk ballad, with a calm male/female vocal duet. I have to be honest and say that The Men only really caught my interest with one or two songs from one of their earlier albums and the directions they’ve gone in since haven’t really grabbed me. But this is another band entirely with several other different sounds, so I probably shouldn’t even be mentioning that it’s a side project because it can be enjoyed on its own terms.
October 23, 2014 at 9:14 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Tochigi: The Gang East Of The River
Self-described “Japanese apartment compact rock” from Seattle. Which means that the 25 songs on this 32-minute album are tightly packed and to-the-point. Some of them are punk-ish, like opener “Dictator”, but others have more of a shambling C86/Pastels vibe. Plenty of the songs cut off very suddenly and awkwardly. In some ways, this reminds me of the great, sadly-defunct Chinese noise-punk duo Pairs, except not as blown out and distorted. Scott And Charlene’s Wedding also comes to mind, for the matter-of-fact tales of mundane city life. Somehow I’m even reminded of the Dead Milkmen on some of the midtempo tracks, at least musically (I’m thinking songs like “The Thing That Only Eats Hippies”), but without overtly jokey lyrics. Like
Pink Flag-era Wire and Guided By Voices, Tochigi manages to pack plenty of ideas and even time changes in these short, abstract skewed-pop songs, although these songs aren’t quite as earworm-catchy as their forebears. Still, this is a promising, slightly perplexing, certainly enjoyable effort from a group with an abundance of ideas and no time to waste. Also, bonus points for minute-long apocalypse-sigh “The World Is Coming To And End”, because I always love simple, pretty songs about the end of the world.
October 21, 2014 at 8:28 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Wrekmeister Harmonies: Then It All Came Down
Last year, Thrill Jockey released Wrekmeister Harmonies’
You’ve Always Meant So Much To Me on vinyl. That was my introduction to this project and it blew me away. This week, the follow-up came out, and both albums were released on one CD. You can read my review of
You’ve Always Meant… here, so I’m just reviewing the newer LP now.
Then It All Came Down, like its predecessor, takes a very long time to build, with some faintly chiming bells and plucked guitars, and angelic vocals, over arctic drone. Around 10 minutes the storm sets in. Anything light and angelic goes away, and then the growling metal vocals drift in, and there’s crashing thunder sounds. Mournful strings swell up, along with guitar feedback and phantom-like non-metal vocals, and the tension just mounts. Finally, around the 19.5 minute mark, metal guitar chords and drums slowly crash in, and the vocals become more deformed and depraved, finally letting loose a scream at 21:00. Around 23.5 minutes, it fully kicks into a sludgy, torrential rhythm with abrasive guitar squeals. It seems to calm down and there’s a calm, melodic plucked guitar pattern, but that just sets the scene for even more intense screamed metal vocals and guitar blasts. It doesn’t take as long for this piece to end as it does for it to begin, it’s only a few minutes to the end after the screaming stops.
October 18, 2014 at 9:20 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Locust: After The Rain
Mark Van Hoen (ex-Seefeel) continues to resurrect his Locust project, which released its first album since 2001 last year, on new home Editions Mego. This autumnal album definitely feels like a soundtrack of sorts, with the songs all blending into each other and having a common mood. Most of them are pretty short, which further makes them feel like variations on a theme. The songs generally feature immersive synth tones reminsicent of classic ’70s/’80s European ambient music and occasionally downtempo beats and shadowy vocals. “To Lonely Shores” in particular has kind of a spooky
Twin Peaks/
Rosemary’s Baby feel, with its sighing wordless vocals. “Shadows Cast By Planes” has loping tabla-like beats during its first half, then settles into ambience during the second. “I’ll Be There” is the most uptempo, poppy track, with harp-like sounds and melodies reminiscent of Plaid at their prettiest and most accessible, but like the previous track, it switches gears halfway through and goes into a dream-like second part with a slow heartbeat-like rhythm. “Signals” has some spoken word samples which are submerged enough that you can’t make out what they’re saying, along with a few bits of backwards harp notes and carefully measured synths. “Sky Black Horses” features eerie backwards shuddering beats which slowly fade in and out like a percussive tornado appearing, moving away, reappearing, and then repeating the cycle. “Won’t Be Long” ends the album with more shadowy vocals, and Ryuichi Sakamoto soundtrack atmospheres.
October 16, 2014 at 8:32 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Oren Ambarchi: Quixotism
On Oren Ambarchi’s latest release, he teams up with an all-star cast to realize an excellent work of steady, pulsating minimalism. Thomas Brinkmann provides a steady electronic rhythm which courses throughout the album’s entire 47-minute runtime, which constantly simmers and gradually adds flourishes and variations, and sometimes seems to play with the other instruments, which add accents in time to the rhythm. The second, third and fourth parts seem to be most influenced by minimal techno and clicks’n’cuts, with the third part having a bit more rhythmic variation and additional percussion. On the 18-minute first part, the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra provides a dissonant sound bed, while piano notes from John Tilbury and delicate, panned guitar notes from Ambarchi resonate in the foreground. Eyvind Kang provides bowed instruments in the first and last parts, and Jim O’Rourke adds rippling synths to the last two. The last part unexpectedly features delicate tabla playing accompanying the solemn viola and chiming synths. It builds up to a wondrous, quietly intense part around 10 minutes, then strips back down to a pulse for the remaining minutes.
October 14, 2014 at 11:40 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Pharmakon: Bestial Burden
Second full-length from Margaret Chardiet’s industrial/power electronics project, which has recently toured with Swans, Godflesh and Cut Hands (William Bennett of Whitehouse). This is every bit as gory and sickness-inducing as its artwork suggests. Opener “Vacuum” is 90 seconds of heavy breathing which escalates into hyperventilating, and “Intent or Instinct” is 8 minutes of slow throbbing beats, feedback, and larynx-shredding vocals. “Body Betrays Itself” is a bit more concise and approachable, the vocals come in earlier and aren’t quite as screamy in the beginning, and the synths sort of melt into a haze during the last couple minutes. “Primitive Struggle” is 2 minutes of choking and coughing to a beat. “Autoimmune” is far and away the highlight of the album, just a total stormer which could even fit next to Skinny Puppy at your next hard industrial dance party. “Bestial Burden” is the most disturbing track on the album, in which Chardiet alternates between a girlish voice, hellish screaming, and nervous, pained laughter, all while repeatedly exclaiming “I don’t belong here”, in some sort of Alice In Hades nightmare. I’m not really well versed enough in power electronics as a genre to be able to compare Pharmakon to anyone else, so I’m inevitably reminded of Wolf Eyes and Whitehouse just because they’re more well known, and I’m sure being on Sacred Bones gives her exposure to a much different fanbase than if she’d just stuck to tape labels. But this is a bloody, infected, diseased, fascinating album.
October 5, 2014 at 2:27 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Failed Flowers: Demo 2014
One of the newest ventures from the Ann Arbor indie-pop community that includes members of Saturday Looks Good To Me and Bad Indians. This is a sharp, jangly, mostly speedy C86-indebted lo-fi group, with Autumn and Fred both handling vocals. Almost all of the songs are under 2 minutes, and while the tape starts out punky, the song called “Fuck You” is actually slower, quieter, and sadder. Kind of fitting, as is the band’s name, and the lyrics and the general feel of the music; it all just suggests disconnection, things not working out. After all the brooding tension of the short, punkier songs, it takes a 4 minute instrumental called “Episodes” to clear everything out, before the last burst “Matters”. Tape and download available on
Bandcamp.
October 4, 2014 at 11:28 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Synthek & Audiolouis: Unwise 2LP
First album from Tresor resident Synthek and his partner Audiolouis, who are both founders of Natch Records. Broken techno similar to the Stroboscopic Artefacts label, in which beats rarely stick to solid 4/4 and instead bustle up and are tough and jagged. “Spiral Path”, however, does indeed have some spiraling synths around a 4/4 stomp, and “Headroom” is a crunchy, peaktime dark techno anthem. But the duo definitely excels in melding dark atmospheres with inventive industrial-strength beats, and there’s no shortage of tracks here which do that.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 