May 4, 2014 at 10:23 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Liz Allbee/Hans Grusel: Strategies For Failure/Zuckerkrieg (Part I) split LP
Liz Allbee’s side starts with an ominous, bassy sine wave that hobbles along for a while, combined with softly spoken lyrics and screeching, yet muted trumpet. Then at 7 minutes it explodes into the best searing, shredding noise burst I’ve heard all year, just drilling into your ears at different angles with several different instruments with different serrated edges. It feels great. Then there’s spare notes of trumpet, spaced out over several minutes, then an elongated piano note, and slowly spaced out bass thumps, and strange spitting and scowling noises. Snorting, coughing, even meowing. Partly sung poetry about pills and your medicine lasting longer, and mournful trumpets. Hans Grusel’s side starts with building, overlapping heartbeat-like electronic thumps, crawls through some shifting electronic waves, then tapping rain and creaking sounds. The rain starts to feel like it’s falling backwards. It gets really windy. Then there’s crunching, squealing, glitching machine sounds, and thumpy beats. It gets swarming and intense and kind of queasy (I’m thinking like Cotton Museum but with more non-electronic instruments in the mix) but not overtly harsh. It swells up, but it doesn’t burst or really peak, and it just kind of fades out before the end.
May 2, 2014 at 11:51 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Arto Lindsay: Encyclopedia Of Arto
2CD anthology of the solo career of legendary no wave guitarist Arto Lindsay, spanning 6 solo albums from 1995 to 2004, released on Bar/None, Rykodisc, and Righteous Babe. The liner notes list lyrics and songwriters/musicians (which include Brian Eno, Ryuichi Sakamoto, DJ Spooky, and many others), but doesn’t mention which albums the tracks are from or when they were recorded, forcing you to take his oeuvre as a whole, rather than dissecting it by era. Several tracks are in Portuguese, reflecting Lindsay’s Brazilian roots, and his vocals are always smooth and suave, and while there’s hints of his abrasive guitar shredding, the songs are mostly pretty laid back and accessible, but with their share of weirdness, and plenty of detailed, exploratory arrangements. There’s ventures into slow jam R&B (“Illuminated”), drum’n’bass (“Complicity”), trip-hop (“Ridiculously Deep”), modernized samba (“Personagem”), and airy, drum machine-driven indie-rock (“Reentry”). The second disc consists of solo live performances, stripping his sound back to his noisy, abrasive no wave guitar shredding, but still paying tribute to his influences, turning songs by Prince (“Erotic City”!), Al Green and Chico Buarque on their heads. If you prefer DNA to Arto’s slicker solo recordings, this disc will be of greater interest to you. The best moments are when he just attacks his guitar, throwing effects left and right through the speakers and ranting abstract poetry. The whole disc is just a bracing trip of no wave electro-shock therapy.
May 2, 2014 at 10:58 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Lightfoils: Hierarchy
The case for this album does contain lyrics for these songs, but they mostly appear to be dots and dashes with a few words sprinkled here and there. It’s hard to even identify these lyrics when listening; this band definitely seems to take a lesson from Cocteau Twins in regards to lyric comprehensibility. The music definitely works its way up to noisy, fast wall of sound shoegaze, but sometimes it starts out relatively clean and normal sounding (as on “Last One”), and sometimes there’s even hints of country slide guitar. “Diastolic” has more of an uptempo, vaguely funky rhythm, and “Mock Sun” kicks the guitars into MBV overdrive. Track 7 is a slow, drifting drone which sounds like it was created using Paulstretch. This crashes into “alovetodestroy”, a loud uptempo shoegaze anthem with a vocal melody that totally reminds me of early ’90s college radio, hearing something that I misremembered as being by the Sugarcubes but not recognizing it when I actually listened to that band’s albums years later. The album ends with another drifting piece, with backwards vocals and slide guitar, which stops suddenly, bringing the album to a sudden death.
May 2, 2014 at 10:30 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Trick Mammoth: Floristry
Good old New Zealand twee pop. All songs between 2 and 4 minutes, all nice and sweet and catchy (almost commercial jingle catchy, sometimes reminds me of the “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing” Coke commercial). Male and female vocals, very Pastels-y, lots of “la la la”s. Has its “awww, sweet” moments. A bit too many slower songs/ballads, but it’s enjoyable.
April 30, 2014 at 11:32 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Young Magic: Breathing Statues
I barely remember this band’s debut, but I reviewed it for the radio station when it came out and apparently I thought it was decent but very hipster, very Pitchfork, very post-this-and-that-and-Animal-Collective. I’ve pretty much forgotten about it, though, so listening to this band with fresh ears, this new album sounds pretty good. It still brings to mind plenty of other things that have been some degree of fashionable for the past few years, but the band seems closer to having their own sound. It just sticks out more, and the songs are more memorable. Some cool trip-hop beats (“Fall In” is just groovy), some sensuous grooves, kind of like a more perky version of the new HTRK album (especially “Foxglove”), and “Holographic” totally sounds like mid-90s IDM, but with vocals and more song structure. This band toured with Purity Ring, and “Something In The Water” reminds me of that band the most. “Mythnomer” has some slow, sick beats and obscured, filthy rapping. “Waiting For The Ground To Open” is an airy ballad with thumb piano and hand drums. “Captcha” ends the album with a captivating drum machine ballad. It’s one of 5 tracks on the album that features harp, but this is the one where it seemed most effective to me, with the second closest being the intro to “Holographic”.
April 27, 2014 at 9:40 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Farben & James Din A4: Farben Presents James Din A4
Loose, casual, playful collaborative LP between Jan Jelinek’s most well-loved pseudonym, and the lesser-known but equally prolific James Din A4 (Dennis Busch). Has kind of a gritty, grainy feel to it, and occasionally some trippy rhythms (just try dancing to “Heimkehr Der Vulgaren”). Lots of stray voices trapped in the machine, and looped and processed beyond recognition or comprehension. There’s also a few bizarre beatless interludes, the oddest being the disturbing chanting of “Rettung”. “Please Excuse My Face” sounds like a microhouse track arranged with a part for dot matrix printer, with discordant noise bursts smoothed into a constant rhythm. Otherwise, lots of dubby, bubbly minimal techno which doesn’t take itself too seriously.
April 27, 2014 at 9:03 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Lassigue Bendthaus: Matter LP + 7″
Dark Entries vinyl reissue of the first album from Uwe Schmidt’s early-’90s electro-industrial project, which was a far cry from his later work as Atom Heart, Senor Coconut, and close to a hundred other names. Even close to 25 years ago, he still had such an acute mastery of technology, there’s definitely the building blocks for the later hyper-glitchy sound he’d become known for, but instead of fusing it with Latin music, gospel, or classic rock, this is clearly identifiable as coldwave electro-industrial, with distorted monotone vocals and all. The rhythms here change on a dime, this is hard music to DJ or dance to. Even the more ambient tracks like “Transitory” don’t stick to one sound, and change pretty unexpectedly. The first 4 tracks are all over 6 minutes and get pretty sprawling, but everything after than is under 5 minutes, and maybe a bit more accessible. “Mortal Immortal” is maybe the most straightforward track here, with a stomping beat and circuit-bent Speak’N’Spell vocals, which also feature on the slower, trippier following track, “Rotation Mécanique”. “Velocity Life” sounds like Kraftwerk’s “Pocket Calculator” hobbling with a fractured leg, and more Depeche Mode-like vocals. This LP issue contains a bonus 7″, featuring a remix by Pink Elln (Tobias Freund of NSI) and an incredible downtempo track called “Relate”, which sounds way more chillout than you’d expect from industrial music of that era.
April 27, 2014 at 8:03 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Psyche: Re-Membering Dwayne LP
This is actually the vinyl issue of an album that came out on CD in 2010 on Artoffact Records, but this version contains half as many tracks as the CD, which had lots of remixes and additional tracks that aren’t on this release. But this is an archival release of music by legendary Canadian industrial band Psyche, recorded in 1983 with Dwayne Goettel, who would eventually be known as a key member of Skinny Puppy, as well as many of their side projects (Hilt, Doubting Thomas, Tear Garden, Download, etc.). As with a lot of Dark Entries releases of early material by bands that would end up becoming more famous and commercial, this is raw, noisy, lo-fi early ’80s synth music, recorded to cassette or 4-track, with primitive drum machines, naive vocals, heaps of distortion, and plenty of isolation-induced panic. Two different versions of the song “Torture” bookend the release, the “alternative mix” featuring a rougher sound and spoken word intro, and both mixes featuring air-raid siren synths and pained screaming. There’s also two versions of “Krieg”, a sleeker, midtempo track that could be from a less active scene of an action movie or show, with spoken lyrics about, what else, isolation. “Eye Of The Hurricane” and “The Crawler Theme” are more soundtrack-like instrumentals (there’s also a vocal version of “The Crawler”), and “Screaming Fire” is an excellent Skinny Puppy-ish noisy industrial-punk song, easily my favorite on the album.
April 27, 2014 at 6:26 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Brett Naucke: Seed LP
Spectrum Spools’ latest uncovering from the American synth underground, this is the newest album from Chicago-based artist Brett Naucke. This is an incredibly diverse modular synth album, which is even more impressive given that all of the tracks were recorded using the same synth patch. “Up From the Sun” starts out sounding like it’s slowly peeling away at something, until it finally reveals a source of light. “Luau” starts with some rocketship-console blips, then happens upon a 3-dimensional abstract rhythm, with floating spectre-like vocals. “Pala” trickles in at first, bumping into a strong, bass-heavy rhythm, and drizzling fluid synth tones and melodies over everything. “Sorrel & Grays” is a more exploratory piece, which uses tabla rhythms, and drifts about wide-eyed in open space. “Lost Inside Your Houses” is more shut-in and paranoid as its title suggests, feeling like it can’t get out of a locked basement, and there’s no light, so it can’t see what’s crawling around the floor. “Harp Of The Evening Garden” has traces of muffled voices and radio dial flipping, and another clicky IDM rhythm. “Transmission From The Evening Garden” feels even more scrambled, with more strange voices and frazzled sounds. “Seed” ends the album with lots of colorful, bubbling Bee Mask-like tones, slowly building up with bright, shimmering waves, and then all suddenly melting away as the album ends. It should be noted that this album is a great headphone listen, lots of strange miniature sounds buzzing from ear to ear.
April 27, 2014 at 5:26 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Kangding Ray: Solens Arc
4th album on Raster-Noton from producer David Letellier. His tracks verge from rough-edged techno to dark industrialisms, providing minimal knocking beats as well as stark atmospheres. Opener “Serendipity March” slowly trudges for a few minutes before a thumping 4/4 kicks in. Two short interludes called “The River” bookend “Evento”, probably the most progressive techno track on the album. But then there’s the glorious void-stare that is “Blank Empire”, a vibrating coil of a track which segues gracefully into the distorted ambient wash of “L’envoi”. “Amber Decay” follow, a dark stomping techno track with a sticky beat which sounds like there’s some (virtual) gum stuck to the kick drum, and features a goth melody along with corroded, spiraling textures. These take over for the ambient “Apogee”, then this tumbles into the downtempo, dubby “History of Obscurity”. The hazy cosmos melody of “Crystal” leads into the fizzing, stumbling “Transitional Ballistics”, and the album ends with “Son”, which pushes a decayed ember of a melody through a light beat pattern which shows up two minutes into the track, before expiring altogether.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 