May 12, 2013 at 4:51 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Kitchen + The Plastic Spoons: Screams To God
Totally nutty anthology of a Swedish new wave band who only put out 2 singles in their short lifetime, which were compiled onto CD with demos, live tracks and other stuff in 2007. This is basically a vinyl version of that, minus the live tracks. Musically, it’s mostly fast post-punk (although some of the songs are slower and more goth-y) driven by squiggly synthesizers, which sound completely awesome. And the vocals are dramatic, heavily accented, and off the wall. The lyrics are mostly in English, and even if they’re hard to understand, they seem to mix positive feelings with a dark edge. “Happy Funeral” sounds just like that, all dressed in black while dancing to Devo synths. “Fantastic” is a bit slower, and ends with the title word repeated manically under an avalanche of squiggly synths. Track 5 is titled “Ice Cream To God”, even though the singer’s saying “I screamed to God but he didn’t hear”, and it ends with the band clapping excitedly. “(-)” is an instrumental which starts with a collage of frogs, whales, wolves, and one of the band members blowing his nose played backwards, along with a ticking metronome rhythm, and guitars and drums come in along with wolves howling. “The Poet” and “Filmen” feature a male vocalist named Iodine Jupiter, and it’s tempting to compare him to Einar Örn or Fred Schneider, but not really as demented as those guys. “Liberty” is described as the band’s “one true pop song” in the liner notes, which makes you wonder why it was just an unreleased demo, and the song was rarely played live. “Psch” is named after the synth sound that constantly plays throughout the song, and has the most dramatic, almost operatic vocals on the album. It’s also slower than most of the album, sort of gets into a vaguely surfy rhythm, and has some ridiculous synth soloing towards the end.
Reading the liner notes, it seems that this band simply couldn’t get their shit together and the music business didn’t really know what to do with them, which is understandable given how quirky and DIY they were. But at least they were able to put some ideas to tape, and of course it’s awesome that Dark Entries is bringing their music to vinyl again. Nice glossy sleeve, too.
May 11, 2013 at 11:05 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Q4U: Q1 Deluxe Edition 1980-1983
Very generous anthology of early ’80s Iceland post-punk synth-pop band Q4U. Most of the 16 tracks here feature fast drum machine beats, post-punk bass and guitar, and crazed, sometimes screechy female vocals in Icelandic. The few English-sung tracks reveal some dark, disturbed shit going on; “Why” depicts someone killing themself, going to hell, and praying to Jesus to take them away. It’s also way longer than most of the other tracks and has a beatless, wavy-synth intro before the beats come in. “Onward” is the most punk-sounding track here, with live drums and a thick bass guitar line. “Creeps” also has live drums, rips off the melody of Kraftwerk’s “The Model”, and broken English lyrics about killing one’s family. “Sigurinn” is another post-punk song with live drums and guitar, great harmonies and a really catchy melody. “Draugasaga” also has live drums, goblin-like vocals from multiple singers, and a distant, rainy-night sax solo in the middle. “Miracle Man” stands out as being the only English-sung track without really dark lyrics, plus it has synth melody and driving rhythm. “Skemmtistadur” has a super-fast plunky beat, thick bass guitar and distorted vocals. The last three songs on the album are from the same session, and have the same fast beats and distorted vocals, adding some swirly guitar sounds. “Plastic Vision” has English lyrics about television and aimless, bored people wandering in the streets. “Turninn” is even faster and more furious. “Family” starts out slow, then kicks into the beat and sings about being a big, loving family “in the mountain of Halloween”; seems like something sinister is going on here but I can’t entirely tell what. Sounds awesome in any case.
May 11, 2013 at 9:40 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Belaboris: Once Upon A Time
anthologizes short-lived early-’80s Finnish female synth-pop group Belaboris, named after Lugosi and Karloff. Not quite as gothy as you might expect from the name, it’s mostly upbeat, fun minimal synth-pop, with light synths and a touch of new-wave guitar. “Odotus” is the clear standout, just a really catchy, blissfully happy synth-pop anthem. The cover of Serge Gainsbourg’s “Babypop” is up there too. “Monsteribaari” is a tense, speedy one with sinister laughter and some sort of clinking metal or glass sounds. There’s also demo versions of album highlights “Odotus” and “Kolme Askelta”, with “Kolme Askelta” clearly sounding more rock-like than the version on the first side, which has a thudding drum machine, as opposed to the live drums and guitar on the demo. And the demo of “Odotus” isn’t a whole lot different, it just lacks the cool guitar line on the finished version. The album ends on a slow, spooky note with “Rakkauden Jälkeen”, a dark, haunted-chapel ballad that starkly contrasts with the rest of the album.
May 7, 2013 at 10:50 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Jenny Hval: Innocence Is Kinky
Heavily hyped new album from Norwegian vocalist, guitar player and author Jenny Hval, who formerly released music under the name Rockettothesky and as part of duo Nude On Sand. Produced by John Parish, and there’s definitely a PJ Harvey vibe here in some ways, but it’s less aggressive than PJ can be, maybe a bit more lush and more delicate instrumentation. Very sexually charged (the first few seconds of the first track will make your ears perk up), uses both drum machines and live drums, has ethereal moments as well as more rocking ones, and plenty of Scandinavian strangeness. The opening title track has throbbing drum machines, sexy sometimes-whispered vocals, and provocative minimal guitar and atmosphere. “Mephisto In The Water” has light drum machine beats, lots of ethereal vocal harmonies, and twinkly keyboards. Reminds me of Julia Holter a lot. “I Called” is more rockin’ and has lots of weird noisy guitar offsetting the vocals, which sounds cool. “Oslo Oedipus” has ethereal vocals and atmosphere in the beginning, then spoken word over a squished, background hip-hop loop and some weird talking. “Renée Falconetti Of Orléans” starts with more spoken word referencing the album’s title again, then after a minute of that goes into singing over a minimal throbbing beat. After about 3 minutes it all seems to dissolve into mist. “Give Me That Sound” starts with brief spoken word, then goes into some hard-panned noises, and heavily feedback-damaged and sexually charged spoken word in the left channel, with some slowed down creepy voices and sludgy, droney music in the right channel. Track 7 is called “I Got No Strings” but has nothing to do with Pinnochio. Well, actually it does lyrically, but it’s not a cover. Instead, it’s kind of a nervous, shapeshifting rocker with scraggly drums and alternately piercing and shy, introspective vocals. “Is There Anything On Me That Doesn’t Speak?” starts with more spoken word, then does more often-changing sometimes-dramatic vocals and guitar and drum driven music. “Amphibious, Androgynous” is atmospheric and ethereal vocals with some strumming guitar slowly fading in. Quite lovely. “Death Of the Author” continues in the haunting, ethereal vibe of the previous track, with softly shuddering drums and simmering guitars, until about 2 minutes in when the rhythm picks up and the song kicks into gear. Album closer “The Seer” starts droney and drumless with Sinead O’Connor-esque vocals, then briefly featuring some sputtering drum machines and spoken vocals before dissolving and ending the album.
Overall, I’m not entirely getting a hold on this album yet, but there’s definitely some immediately striking, beautiful moments, so it seems worth investigating.
May 7, 2013 at 9:36 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Hedvig Mollestad Trio: All Of Them Witches
Avant prog-rock, with a meaty, weighty classic rock sound, but enough hairpin turns and timesig trickery to thoroughly confuse your average classic rock fan. Strictly guitar/bass/drums recorded live, so it’s pretty minimal in that regard, but the musicianship is tight and they go off in a few different directions with each track. Opener “Sing, Goddess” alternates between lumbering rhythms, swinging boogie-rock and smoldering guitar solos, all with complex time signatures. “The Rex” has a heavy groove with a layer of unsettling electric guitar feedback on top, at least until the breakdown. “Lake Acid” has carefully measured yet free-spirited guitar soloing over a thick bass groove. “Achilles” is a step down-tempo, but by no means weak compared to the previous tracks, with lovely guitar lines over nice jazzy bass (a big, possibly upright sound, definitely not like rock bass guitar). “The New Judas” is a fast, thundering riff-monster, and then “Code Of Hammurabi” sludges things down a bit, although it gets a bit prog-twitchy during the closing minute or two. “Indian Driving” starts out sounding like a convoluted funk song, but quickly unravels to fractured riffs and spazzy drum soloing. “Shawshank” is a short, unassuming interlude, and “Ghrá Rúnda” continues the mood a bit with some subdued feedback-heavy yet delicate guitar. “Kathmandu” ends the album with more heavy riffery and lumbering groove, but also more jazzy bass during the breakdown.
As with most releases on Rune Grammofon (or Cuneiform for that matter), it can be hard to tell whether to file this under rock, jazz, or avant-garde, and different music directors or DJs might argue that it should be filed as one and not another. We at WCBN are filing the recent batch of RG releases under rock, as they all seem a lot closer to prog-rock than jazz, especially given the classic rock riffery on display here.
April 21, 2013 at 10:33 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Gay Cat Park: Synthetic Woman
File under Records Paul Never Imagined Would Ever Exist But Now They Do And Paul Is Overjoyed. Sometime shortly after graduating college, I got really heavily into Italo-disco, and thanks to the Internet being a lot faster than it previously was, I was able to hear all sorts of incredibly obscure records I never would’ve known existed otherwise, and I absolutely fell in love with all sorts of ’80s Euro-dance oddities. Particularly exciting to me were the sort of obscure, cult-classic one-shots like
“I’m A Vocoder” by Gary Cat Park, who apparently were group of teenagers from Italy in the early ’80s. The track was the first release on legendary label Il Discotto Productions, and it’s such a simple, catchy song, with charmingly mispronounced English lyrics (“circulator” instead of “calculator”, “microprocessor” pronounced “microprochessor”) about, well, being a Vocoder, a synthetic voice. The track’s about 8 minutes, has an extended instrumental intro, and maddeningly fades out mid-verse, like the album version of Talking Heads’ “Life During Wartime”. It’s an absolutely classic song, and I was so excited a few years ago when Clone Classic Cuts reissued the song on a 12″, along with new vocal and instrumental mixes which truthfully are not better than the original. For 30 years “I’m A Vocoder” was the only released Gay Cat Park song, and now Medical Records (a reissue label that I absolutely need to check out more releases from) has released a see-through red-splattered LP of GCP material. Of course “I’m A Vocoder” is on here, but now we can hear what else was up these guy’s sleeves. Turns out the rest of their material isn’t quite as dancefloor-ready as “Vocoder”, it’s more uptempo and minimal-wave. I know, dumb made-up categories, whatever. The point is, it’s more synth-pop and less disco than I expected. It’s still every bit as amazing as I expected, though, of course. The LP comes with a huge sheet of liner notes, explaining how they modified cheap toy-like keyboards to function as real synthesizers. The first track on this LP contains a Speak ‘N’ Spell saying the band’s name, so you know this was such a homemade lo-fi project. Eventually they got hold of proper synths, but all the songs were still recorded lo-tech in real time; the liner notes state that “no sequencers were harmed in the making of this song” next to every track, although one of them contains a TB-303 bassline. Musically, Depeche Mode is definitely a major influence (the bands claim to own the entire discography and have seen them every time they’ve played Italy), and while it’s definitely easy to hear the early DM sound in this band, they still did something really original and creative. Aside from “Vocoder” my favorite track has to be the romantic instrumental “A Bunch Of Flowers”, which is just smiling-ear-to-ear synth-disco bliss. More than anything else, I just can’t believe they did all this stuff when they were teenagers, and that only one of these tracks actually ended up getting released at the time. How do you just come home from school one day and hook up some cheap keyboards and drum machines and record music like this? And why does it take 30 years for anyone to realize how brilliant it was?
The vinyl is probably all sold out by now, as it was limited to 650 copies, but you can stream and purchase the digital version on Bandcamp. And the fact that Medical Records has a Bandcamp means I have a ton of catching up to do now.
April 21, 2013 at 9:39 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Dan Deacon: Konono Ripoff No 1 7″
So, Record Store Day. I waited a half hour in line at Wazoo Records to see if they got the reissue of the first Half Japanese album, and they didn’t (I found it somewhere else, maybe I’ll review it soon), but I got this Dan Deacon 7″ instead. The title, of course, is in tribute to Congolese group
Konono Nº1, who create amplified percussion instruments made from salvaged junkyard parts. Dan Deacon’s own recent music has been heavily percussion-based and polyrhythmic, so it’s easy to see the influence of Konono on his music. This 7″ has two versions of the same song, the A-side featuring regular Deacon collaborators Jeremy Hyman (ex-Ponytail) and Kevin O’Meara (of Videohippos, are they still around? I only saw them once briefly during a Wham City Round Robin and I always wanted to see them again) on drums, and some typical Deacon vocals layered (some wacky and pitched, others majestic and chanty). The B-side version is instrumental and has Denny Bowen of Double Dagger and Dave Jacober (Future Islands collaborator) on drums, and a bit of buzzing electronics. Both sides go by quickly and put a smile on your face (as would be expected of a Dan Deacon 7″), but I think I like the B-side version better.
April 19, 2013 at 10:20 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Quicksails: Mayville Dream LP
Continuing Spectrum Spools’ quest to unearth the best of the current American underground experimental scene, we have an album from Quicksails, AKA Ben Billington of Tiger Hatchery, Moonrises, Circuit De Yeux and others. He’s already put out tapes and LPs on Digitalis Limited, NNA Tapes, Pizza Night, 905 Tapes, and more. At times, this effort has kind of a slick, almost jazzy tone that I wasn’t expecting, but it’s very welcome. There’s plenty of distortion and smeared guitar noise, and of course analog synths, but there’s some clean pianos (see “Institute’s Innards”) and hand percussion (as on opener “The Many Roads Towards Mayville”) along with the sparky synths. “As High Above The Lightning” contains several layers of synths spouting off radioactive shards arrhythmically, but still in kind of a melodic way. “Only Escape” is a quiet melty-chime ambient track. “Bemus Has Wings To Fly” has clicking arpeggiated synths with warped, wacked out dialogue. “Closer To Towanda” is where we get into some slow, dramatic, down-and-out organ, drums and clapping, which ends up getting fast and freaky with some flutes and tweeting synths for the last 45 seconds or so. “Night Bats” has a cool new agey melody, a slow 3/4 beat, live drums with lots of cymbals, and plenty of synths buzzing and blooping around. “Dancing By Yourself” is a straight-up Krautrock synth rhythm, but with tons of hand percussion, and all sorts of bizarre noises whizzing around underneath. “A Late Realization” ends the album on kind of a strange downer note, with frowning synths and rapidfire noises which sound like the electronic equivalent of several sticks of dynamite going off in succession, but it ends up with with a fuzzy abstract rhythm over some strange disconnected synth sounds. Overall, a varied, exciting and sometimes classy (sure, why not) LP.
April 18, 2013 at 12:34 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Troller
TROLLER! Easily one of my favorite new groups right now.
Brad Rose is already calling this as the best album so far this year (regardless of the fact that it actually came out on tape last year), and I am entirely in agreement. And of course, the cover and band name make you think it’s going to end up being either doom or stoner metal, or something close to that realm, so first hearing a preview track online shattered all those preconceptions and really got me interested. I wasn’t sure what I was hearing, but it sounding incredible. So I was really lucky to score a review copy (especially since it sold out FAST, and probably will do so again when the second pressing comes out this summer) so I can enjoy this in all its full vinyl glory.
So what does it sound like? Well, it’s slow, dark, heavy, and haunted by some sort of ghosts. There’s six songs listed on the back, but there’s a few untitled instrumental interludes. The drum machines are evenly-paced (pacing is crucial here), seemingly basic but reverb-covered to the point of being almost explosive. There’s some gritty bass guitar lurking underneath. Heavy, heavy black atmosphere, and on the interludes (which unfortunately are truncated or left out entirely on the vinyl version), there’s a few reflective periods of kosmische synth meditation. Most importantly of all are the banshee-like vocals by Amber Star Ormand, which float spectre-like above the synths, but still ground them as structured songs. No clue what she’s actually singing (not at all a problem in my book), but they perfectly convey the sort of dark, sad, hope-possibly-lost-forever feeling the music works at. For some reason I keep getting the vocal melodies on this album mixed up in my head with that of the last track on Silver Dapple’s slept-on 2011 LP English Girlfriend (it’s not even on Discogs for some reason, jeez), mostly because of the pacing, vocal effects, letting-it-all-go feeling, and the fact that I can’t tell what she’s saying. Except the Silver Dapple song is fast, guitar-driven indie-pop, and Troller is dark, slow electronic music. I should also mention that I saw Troller live twice (in the same afternoon, actually) at SXSW this year, and the vocals sounded way different live. Instead of the sort of ethereal blur that they appear on the album, they were harshly distorted, almost industrial-sounding, and there was plenty of screaming, adding some violent terror to their sound. You’ll probably have to make it down to Austin to actually see them, but if you dig the album, their live show will still surprise and possibly frighten you even more. Also, one of the members of this band is also in S U R V I V E, who I also saw at SXSW, but I didn’t hear their album first and was overwhelmed at what I saw and heard. 4 musicians, mountains of synths, and more lasers than I could process. Unbelievable.
Anyway, this Troller album, seriously, get on this, now.
April 17, 2013 at 10:23 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Lower Plenty: Hard Rubbish
Domestic issue of an LP from last year. Australian lo-fi indie-pop, which is curiously quiet and laid-back considering the other bands these folks are in (Total Control, Deaf Wish, UV Race, Dick Diver). The songs are mostly acoustic, scruffy-sounding, and short (the entire album is 23 minutes long), and alternate between male and female vocals. There’s kind of a nervous demeanor to these songs, with the occasional cryptic lyric (such as “Strange Beast”‘s “the mirror is science fiction”) and a few bursts of controlled noise, like the guitar mess underneath “Dirty Flowers”. “How Low Can A Punk Get” (which has nothing to do with the Bad Brains song of the same name) has some sort of rattling or scraping sound in the background, and sad yet hopeful lyrics. Really the main reason this caught my attention is the last song, “Close Enough”, which is just awesome. Awkwardly crashing cymbals, nervous girl vocals, buzzing strings (not really bass-like), and great lyrics (variations on “I was close enough to the light just to see the fading of the dark”, “In my mind you had no legs to stand on”), and some more controlled guitar noise at the end of the song. Charming and strangely hopeful in spite of its sadness and uneasiness.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 