May 17, 2014 at 11:43 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Bo Ningen: III
This Japanese psych-noise-rock band completely blew me away when I saw them at SXSW. I had no clue what to expect, and they completely tore the place apart. At one point, one of the guitarists came into the crowd and was a few feet away from me and I didn’t even notice because I was rocking out so hard! With such a stage (and crowd) presence, it seems hard for a band like that to really match that excitement on a recording, and sure enough, this album seems a bit more polished and restrained than I remember. Definitely not on the same level of weirdness and unpredictability as the Gezan album we got recently, which is probably one of the craziest albums I’ve ever heard. But what this album does prove is that this band actually knows how to write songs. Really melodic, complex, ecstatic songs, brimming with energy. Don’t expect to be drenched in crazy guitar effects all the time, but there’s plenty of those here. A bit of a dub influence too, including a guest appearance by Roger Robinson of Kevin Martin’s King Midas Sound project. “CC” features Jehnny Beth of Savages, and it the album’s screamiest, most metal track. “Mukaeni Ikenai” is a long, unexpectedly calm and pretty song, similar to the last song on the Gezan album, but this song isn’t quite so slow and heartbreaking. “Maki-Modoshi” is more revved-up, and has some incomprehensible fast mumbling vocals underneath the singing in the second half. “Ogosokana Ao” is a slow ballad with a ticking drum machine and ethereal vocals. Solid album overall, but this is definitely a band that has to be experienced live.
May 17, 2014 at 10:57 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Plaid: Reachy Prints
10th full-length from IDM duo Plaid, who have been at it for 25 years now. This album doesn’t really deviate from their signature sound, but it sort of streamlines it; there’s only 9 songs here and the album’s 40 minutes go by pretty quickly. The duo’s signature intricate melodies and erratic but not overblown beat production are still intact here, and there’s a few danceable moments. “Oh” opens the album with a partially acoustic number, featuring vocals, autoharp and mandolin. The next 2 songs sort of merrily skip along, but “Nafovanny” has a vibrating bassline which is a slight bit sinister. “Slam” has a bit of a Kompakt minimal shuffle beat. “Wallet” has clear melodies and glitchy beats, maybe the most BoC-esque song here. “Matin Lunaire” has a simple synth-pop melody and straightforward beats. “Tether” has kind of a festive melody and minimal but lively beats. “Ropen” has slower, more spaced out beats, also a little bit BoC-ish. “Liverpool St” is really fruity and twinkly, with chiming bells, tooting flutes, sugary strings, and clappy, tambourine-shaking beats.
May 17, 2014 at 2:35 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Tobacco: Ultima II Massage
3rd solo LP from the leader of Black Moth Super Rainbow. Grimier and sleazier than his main band, but with the same type of woozy psych-electro-pop sound, vocodered vocals, and lots of decaying tape hiss. No high-profile guests this time around, just Tobacco being his evil self. In typical Tobacco fashion, the most unexpectedly pretty track here ends up being the one called “Creaming For Beginners”. The first half of the album has more vocal-based sleazy cock-rock jams (just check the opening track’s vocodered growl “ride, motherfucker, ride”, as well as the occasional glam-metal vocal punctuations), and the second half is more like bad-trip Boards Of Canada. The CD version puts the final track (a “bonus beat”) at track 99, separated by digital silence lasting from track 17 through 98. In this way, this album seems to thrive on and exploit technological imperfections, from the extra-track CD gag to the grainy cassette-like sound quality and extended dropouts in the music. I don’t have the vinyl, but I’d almost expect there to be locked grooves cut randomly in the middle of songs, so that every copy was a skipping record.
May 16, 2014 at 12:28 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Velvet Holmes: s/t tape
The only info I can find out about this tape is on some
Twitter, saying that this tape was released at some house show back in February (and a radio
playlist from a station in Wisconsin who played the tape back in March). I have no clue who Velvet Holmes or Tree Tapes are. And of course there’s no tracklist or any info at all on this tape. Popping it in the deck, you start to hear some squirmy slow synth snake sounds. Then after this fades out, there’s some bass widdling and an awkwardly spare kick drum. Side B starts with more squirming, buzzing evil synths. Then it turns into a repetitive, shaky loop, which gradually gets filtered, sometimes more distorted, sometimes more trebly. It’s a bit like being repeatedly bludgeoned by a thin, vibrating sheet of metal.
May 12, 2014 at 5:02 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Half Japanese: Volume One: 1981-1985
A few years ago, Fire Records announced that they’d be reissuing the entire Half Japanese discography, which made me super excited, but it seems like the albums are only being released as limited Record Store Day box sets. At least for now. I absolutely had to buy the
1/2 Gentlemen / Not Beasts 4LP reissue last year, I’d wanted to own that album since I was in high school, and that one didn’t disappoint at all. So now we have a limited box of their next 3 albums, tracing their evolution from being just the duo of Jad and David Fair, to a touring band with a revolving lineup of members.
Loud (from 1981) is their first album with an expanded lineup, and is every bit as bracing and raw as its predecessor, but with a much more expanded range of sounds (notably plenty of squonking saxophones). There’s some particularly brutal anti-school numbers on here (“Dumb Animals” and “High School Tonight”, yeowch), and probably my favorite HJ song, the flawless fucked-up love-anxiety song “I Know How It Feels… Bad”. I kind of wish this box included the
Horrible 12″, as Drag City’s CD reissue did a few years back, just because it would be nice to have “Rosemary’s Baby” on vinyl. Maybe some of the future reissues/releases can compile tracks from EP’s and 7″s and whatnot.
Jumping ahead to 1984, we have Our Solar System, which I’d never actually heard before, I missed out on Drag City’s CD reissue of this one, but I had the other ones they put out. This one continues to increase the musicality, with straighter rhythms, a little less distortion (but still plenty noisy, lo-fi, and chaotic), a few more warped covers (Buddy Holly, Roky Erickson, “Louie Louie”, VU), and one of their best monster songs (they’ve claimed all their songs are either love songs or monster songs), “Thing With A Hook”. It’s still very primitive and caveman-like, but there’s a couple songs where it has more of a joyous frat party singalong feel to it, rather than just a bunch of angsty kids bashing away at their instruments in their bedroom.
Then we come to 1985’s Sing No Evil, which streamlines their sound like never before, only featuring a dozen tracks, as opposed to a dozen or so per side. “Firecracker Firecracker” is easily one of their signature tunes, bringing their sound closer to Violent Femmes, with a walking bassline, straightforward rhythm, layers of honking horns, multiple drummers, and clearly upfront, heart-on-sleeve lyrics. The rest of the album is a similar mix of fairly concise 2-4 minute songs, mostly love-themed but with some evil and voodoo songs as well. But this album definitely seems to introduce Jad Fair’s more (relatively) polished songwriting and singing style, which is still pretty freeform and wide-eyed/naive. If we have to wait until next year’s Record Store Day for volume 2 of this series, that means in a year we’ll be treated to vinyl reissues of 3 of the band’s most well known, tuneful, and overall accomplished works, the albums they released on their revamped 50 Skidillion Watts label: Music To Strip By, Charmed Life, and The Band That Would Be King. The bonus download card that comes with this vinyl box mentions that if you collect all 4 volumes, you get a bonus, and I’m totally going to buy all of them, even if it takes several more years.
May 10, 2014 at 4:58 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
v/a: Bleep: 10
10 years ago, Warp Records launched Bleep.com, an online retailer functioning as a well-curated underground electronic music version of iTunes. This compilation (released on CD, vinyl and digital formats) features unreleased tracks by plenty of big names whose music can be found on the site. A few Warp mainstays appear (unreleased Autechre is always cause for excitement), but the album reaches to many corners of the IDM and techno underground. Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas project resurfaces with another beginningless, endless ambient techno cloud, with plenty of strings attached. Lone and Machinedrum both offer pastel, choppy-breakbeat rave flashbacks. The OPN track is typically lovely, but short, and honestly kind of a throwaway. Modeselektor cheekily titled their track “I’m Not Into Twerk, I’m Into KrafTwerk”, but more than anything it sounds like a tribute to LFO and “Spastik”-era Plastikman. Untold, Shackleton, Byetone and Nathan Fake all do various forms of scuffed, distorted, bass-heavy techno, with Nathan Fake’s track being the most widescreen epic and melodic. Fuck Buttons conjure up a hazy ghost of slowed-down jungle, and sneaks in some “My Sharona” guitar chord at the end. Ann Arbor’s own Tadd Mullinix brings back his Dabrye project for 2 minutes of instrumental glitch-hop. Nosaj Thing shows up in his more reflective, less hip-hop mood. Probably the most surprising track is µ-Ziq’s “Hedges”, a surprisingly legit instrumental grime track, probably written around the time he was releasing Virus Syndicate albums and dubstep 12″s on Planet Mu. Lots of gems to dig into on this compilation.
May 7, 2014 at 11:04 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Swans: To Be Kind
The first 2 albums by the reunited Swans piqued my interest, but it wasn’t until I saw them live at the Magic Stick last year that I finally understood what was going on. I seriously felt like Swans was something that was missing from my life up until that point. It was one of the best shows I’ve ever been to, easily. Late last year, the band released
Not Here/Not Now, a limited 2CD live album documenting that tour, previewing nearly all of the songs on this album. This album takes the transcendental fury of their current live lineup/material and perfectly transcribes it to a studio environment, adding all sorts of flourishes and sounds (guest backup vocals from St. Vincent, Little Annie and Cold Specks, acoustic instruments, synth noise, laughter, sawing, horns) to their hypnotic compositions. The songs are generally repetitive and mantra-like, running words or phrases or themes into the ground, building them up and surrounding them with ecstatic noise. “Just A Little Boy” finds Gira doing his best Howlin’ Wolf impression (the song is dedicated to him), “A Little God In My Hands” is built on a stiff yet funky rhythm, and the half-hour “Bring The Sun/Toussaint L’Ouverture” is the logical continuation of
The Seer‘s title track (and the two pieces join together to form one 45-minute towering epic on
Not Here/Not Now). And as with their live shows and recent recordings, these long, drawn-out epics do not feel like they’re meandering or wasting your time, they are truly engrossing and enthralling, and you don’t even realize how much time is going by while you’re listening to them. The album does break from the maelstrom for one shorter (5 minute), quieter piece, “Some Things We Do”, a curious string-laden list of verbs, ending with an assuring chant of “we love, we love, we love.” Indeed, love and kindness are consistent themes here; not necessarily what you might expect if you’re familiar with the band’s early, physically violent incarnation, but it totally makese sense if you’ve traced their/Gira’s work from then until now. This is just truly ecstatic, life-affirming music, and there’s nothing I’m more excited about right now than seeing this band in Toronto next month.
May 6, 2014 at 10:25 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Makthaverskan: II
Angsty Swedish post-punk with reverb-covered female vocals and jangly guitars. The vocals are what really drives this album home, especially the lyrics. “Antabus” and “No Mercy” have exuberant “fuck you!”s, which sound like they felt very refreshing to belt out. Besides that, there’s plenty of scathing lyrics about loneliness and desire for love, with “Outshine”‘s cry of “my heart is burning and I’ve got no one to talk to” hitting the hardest. Even at the band’s most furious punk speedrush, such as “Distance”, there’s still a dreaminess, tenderness and vulnerability. “Volga” brings the album to a bit more of a delicate close, but only musically. Lyrically it’s one of the most soul-baring songs here. Definitely a surprise hit of an album.
May 6, 2014 at 6:26 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Stalins of Sound: Tank Tracks
Evil Communist robo-synth-punk with drum machines, synths, and sheets of guitars, which are big, loud, and hooky, but not harsh, you can discern notes. Vocals are kind of Devo-ish at times, but the music is pumped up more in the mix. Lyrics aren’t too distorted, but it’s still hard to tell what’s being said, and where there’s curses. Sort of reminds me of the excellent Black Bug album on HoZaC from last year, but not quite as noisy/scorched, this one’s a little bit clearer, but still chaotic angry robot punk. Available to purchase on
Bandcamp.
May 4, 2014 at 11:04 pm | Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment
Lidless Dogs: tape
This is Jargon Scott. You guy’s don’t know what you’re missing. I got hot… Lidless…
Dooogs.
Damned Dogs + Lidless Eye collaborated on a session, apparently Kuma Tapes and Green Records And Tapes have released different recordings of the same sessions, but this is the only one I’ve found. It starts out sounding like the tape is unraveling in my tape deck, then it suddenly straightens out and organs start droning. It definitely feels like everyone’s in a different corner of the room, it all blends together but there’s definitely pronounced room placement of the different instruments. The flutes/woodwinds are clearly in one part of the speakers, and the noisy synth parts are in another. Crashing drums are underneath everything, it sounds like barrels being bashed on the beach during high tide. The second side sounds so lonely and solitary, with bird-like synths chirping overhead, and clear, shining sun drone. The second part gets a little rougher and shiftier, with noisy bass pulses and growing feedback and tension. It gets pretty turbulent, but ends up shining and beautiful, before starting to get all warped and unravelly, just like how the other side begins. I could totally be wrong about which side is which. The Life Like Soundcloud has audio samples, plus the Green Records mix, but they sound a little different than the tape, but probably because it’s a tape and these are MP3s:
https://soundcloud.com/life-like-tapes/lidless-dogs-2
https://soundcloud.com/life-like-tapes/lidless-dogs-1
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