March 31, 2013 at 2:36 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Isengrind/TwinSisterMoon/Natural Snow Buildings: The Snowbringer Cult
I guess I’ve been missing out on Natural Snow Buildings, they’ve been releasing CD-Rs for over a decade, and only in recent years have there been larger-scale CD and vinyl releases. Last year Ba Da Bing reissued a triple CDR from 2008 called
Night Coercion Into The Company Of Witches, and I dug what I heard from that when we got it at the radio station, but now we got this double CD featuring music from both the duo’s solo projects as well as NSB proper, and I’m pretty enthralled by the whole thing. The general tone seems to be dark psychedelic raga-drone-folk, with sitars and flutes and some percussion. The Isengrind tracks tend to feature far-off wordless vocals and small handheld rattly percussion, while the TwinSisterMoon tracks tend to feature more pounding drum rhythms, and harsh droning textures mixed with gentle acoustic melodies. There’s also a few tracks of fragile, close-miked acoustic folk, sort of like Vashti Bunyan, but with more of an amplified contact mic sort of feel. The disc’s final track, “Understars”, has a more distorted vocal and just a really heartbreaking melody. Just an absolutely devastating song. The second disc, which is all Natural Snow Buildings, obviously has a little bit more of a fuller sound, being a collaborative project instead of solo, and there’s a bit more room to stretch out, with a few tracks topping 10 minutes. Again, just really dark, transformative, hypnotic drones. Being 4 vinyl LP’s worth of music, it’s a lot to digest, but it’s easy to get lost in, so this has been on repeat a lot more than most things I listen to for review purposes. Incredible stuff.
March 28, 2013 at 12:04 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Stygian Stride
New solo kosmische synth project of Jimy SeiTang of Psychic Ills and Rhyton. Abandons the jammy psych-rock of his other bands for free-flowing synth explorations, and a few beat excursions. “Celestial Stems” starts things off and basically describes itself, a shimmering star-gazing beatless mood-setter. “Hindsight” ventures into pastoral downtempo techno, with lush synths and cavernous dripping effects. “Drift” has blippy beats and kind of a cool snarl to the synths, sort of feeling like it’s strutting past you wearing pitch-black shades, but not entirely in an aggressive or cocky way. “Taiga” has a similar type of cool electro-pulse, with gently pulsating arpeggios and some icy synths making their way to the forefront at about 2 minutes in, and remaining there for the rest of the track, growing a bit more towards the end. “Athanor Ascension” gets slightly more sinister, with a tense bassline and slow but considered beat structure. A few shades/patterns of synth textures are layered, leaving you with a clever stargazey sequence as the track ends. “Fade Into Bolivian” ends the album on a real ponder-the-cosmos note, with some very sci-fi alien-seeking synths, plus some birdcalls and dripping rainfall for good measure. Overall, a really good synth album, not too high-concept or complex, but appropriately cosmic and cool, without being too cool for school.
March 24, 2013 at 10:42 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Wild Belle: Isles
Elliot Bergman from NOMO started a group with his sister Natalie. They released an excellent 12″ a year ago (the first and last tracks on this album), and now they’re on a major label, playing major TV shows, and just getting the major “up-and-coming band” hype. As a longtime NOMO fan, this project definitely sounds like a logical extension of that band’s sound into the realm of pop music. There’s still the tight Afrobeat rhythms and horns, some dubby reggae elements, but a bit more streamlined and poppy than NOMO. Natalie’s vocals do a sleek neo-soul thing, kind of like Amy Winehouse but not nearly as much of a powerhouse. Elliot takes the mic during “When It’s Over”, warning someone that “he’s no good for you”. Otherwise, it’s Natalie’s show. 1, 8, 10 are the most reggae-heavy cuts, 4 is maybe the most Afrobeat-inspired. Really a solid album, I’m curious if it’ll actually live up to the hype.
March 24, 2013 at 7:22 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Bill Baird: Spring Break Of The Soul
I reviewed one of this guy’s older albums for the radio station a few years ago, but that was more of a droney experimental thing. This one is sunny, beachy indie-pop, with detailed instrumentation and quirky, playful humor. The first side of this 2LP monster contains a chillwave cover of Christopher Cross’s “Sailing”, which you think would’ve happened in 2009, but somehow it didn’t. It’s actually kind of perfect. On side 2, “Sewage Sirens” segues into “Bow Down To The Brain”, and both have pitched down vocals which definitely bring to mind Ween. Which makes me consider that this album might be a modern, post-chillwave era update of
The Mollusk, with a pleasant spring break theme replacing shiver-me-timbers piratry. “Lost At Sea” is a bright, echo-heavy pop song with lots of pianos and cellos. Tracks 7-10 are mostly instrumental, with “Big Sur Reverie” being more light and uptempo, and “Marooned” sounding appropriately lost. “Black Fritz” is more lowdown and bluesy, with distorted guitar licks and cello. “Lake Eerie” features more heavy, deep strings, but in a twisted, sinister manner. “Shave” brings back vocals, with a laidback beat and more strings, and this beat leads into “Blob”, a spoken word rant about mass consumerism, which seems to introduce a story but I’m not sure if the rest of the songs are supposed to be part of that story. “Inflated Head” is another brief spoken word piece over some clanky percussion. “Les Paul Pointillistic” is another jaunty guitar instrumental which again can’t help but bring to mind Ween for some reason. The album ends with “Santa Claus Of The South”, another fuzz-heavy epic with a hidden ending.
March 24, 2013 at 5:30 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Destruction Unit: Void
I had never heard of this group, but
Kristin told me to see them at SXSW and get their record for
the station, so I did. Turns out they’ve been around for over a decade and Jay Reatard and Alicja Trout both used to be in this band. When I saw them, they were playing on the outside porch of a bar on Red River (one of the main streets in Austin), in the middle of a hot day. It was pretty chaotic and I couldn’t really get a good photo from where I was standing. This LP is 6 tracks of spacey psych-punk, and a bit more out-there than I expected from when I saw them. “Evil Man” starts the album out well on a riff-heavy note, tunneling layers of guitars through a bashy rhythm. “Blame” alternates between druid-like vocals and frantic screaming, with more spaced-out riffs and crashing drums. “Druglore” is a long, wordless, beatless feedback trip, with a small, insistent guitar riff spiralling its way through an ethereal void. “Great Wall” is a fast, kind of dark thrasher, and “Exterminate” is even more furious, with vocals slathered in echo and wailing riffs. “Smoke Dreams” ends the album with another long instrumental, but instead of a beatless drone, this one starts out quiet but then kicks into a steady, repetitive riff-stormer.
March 24, 2013 at 3:13 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Akio Suzuki and Lawrence English: Boombana Echoes
Short CD, only 3 tracks with the longest being less than 9 minutes. I just have a promo CDR so there’s no liner notes or anything, so it’s hard to tell what’s going on, but it sounds like someone trapped at the bottom of a well with only one small buzzing electronic device to keep him company. Very cold, shivering, wet sounds, almost sounding like some sort of alien birdcalls. The last track comes closest to resembling some sort of rhythm, mostly in the way the sounds reverberate and echo, but there seems to be some sort of consistency to how some of the sounds are produced. Just a really bizarre recording, sounding like a field recording from a very strange environment.
March 24, 2013 at 2:35 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Primitive Motion: Two Ellipses
Really cool psych-dub-drone from Leighton Craig, who released an album on Room40 a few years ago. Gorgeous echo-chamber drone with distorted organs and spacey horns. I’m sick right now and this is definitely hitting the spot. Some of the tracks are instrumental, but most of them feature ethereal vocals, and some sort of hypnotic rhythm. “Unchanging Light” even has Suicide/Spacemen 3-like organ chords. “Upwelling” uses blipping drum machines not as a guiding rhythm, but spacing the sounds out slowly. “Starlight On The Sea” doesn’t have beats, but it uses chimes over a somewhat bouncy rhythm. “Window” ends the album with 9 minutes of sad keyboards, tape hiss, horns and vocals. Really gorgeous, I’m enjoying this one a lot.
March 23, 2013 at 11:02 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Grant Evans: Jewels From The House Of Worms
Grant Evans is half of Quiet Evenings (with his wife Rachel Evans, AKA Motion Sickness Of Time Travel) and he records solo material under the name Nova Scotian Arms, but lately he seems to have been using his own name. This is a recent tape on an Australian label, and it does a sort of swirling psych-drone thing, with (on the first side, “House Of Illusions”) a constantly revolving flange effect tying together several strands of electrified organ drone. It erupts into shattering noise around the 10 minute mark, smooths out a bit, and then loops sheets of feedback, all while using the same revolving flange effect. The second side (“Subterfuge”) is a bit calmer, but still has several subtle layers of feedback and static over a contemplative keyboard drone. Around the second half, the noises slowly start to become more aggressive and dismantle the calm drone, and the last 5 minutes or so are more noisy (but not quite harsh) with some elements of the calmer drone flaring up.
March 23, 2013 at 11:00 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
The Hecks: Trust And Order 7″
Debut 7″ from abstract Chicago duo. “Trust And Order” walks the line between poppy Sonic Youth and zombified psych-rock. Drums shift from a snare-heavy cadence to cymbal-crazy bashing, and the vocals tend to stare in a straight line. The lead guitar plucks out a simple, memorable riff, while a mess of feedback swells underneath. Not bad, but the B-side catches my ear more. “The Time I Play With My Puppy” starts out with some rambling geezer with effects on his voice talking about playing with his puppy, with jittery guitar and shaker. The guitar bursts into this noisy, fractured part, then you hear the rambling geezer for a few more seconds, and you think you’re going to hear more of him, but the music strips down to just the guitar strumming, and then all sorts of feedback noises are gradually layered, totally derailing the song from where you thought the song was going to go. Eventually it’s just feedback noise, with some scrambled, unintelligible radio voices buried underneath, and then the record ends cold. Pretty bizarre, maybe kind of creepy, and more than a bit fascinating.
March 7, 2013 at 12:00 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Toning: Ideas Of Visions
Epic double tape on Constellation Tatsu, following 2011 tapes on Skell, Stunned and Eggy.
Ideas Of Visions is the shorter of the two (4 tracks, 20 minutes), and seems to focus more on eerie, unsettling drones, often with acoustic instruments or sound sources. Plenty of harmonium (or some such instrument), some nature sounds (or bells and shakers that suggest forest life), some violin, as well as a few plugged-in instruments. The tracks build and sometimes change drastically, as with the paranoid synths at the end of “Shake It Up And Never Return”. “Rising March” does what it says, building up creaking string sounds along with something that buzzes like an alarm, ending up with something that could soundtrack a scene in a Hitchcock film.
Toning: Stuck In Slime
(which is 9 tracks and 40 minutes long) experiments more with synths and beats, sometimes zoning out into jazzy keyboard solos (“Normal Portal”), or OPN-like prism patterns (“Coming To Know”). Still droney, but definitely more melodic and rhythmic. “Stuck In Slime” seems to tap something out in morse code with its chattering, vibrating synths, and “Reflecting Void” buries some meditative tones under crunchy, buzzy beats. “Snake Maze” keeps things sneaky, with a skittering drum pattern and a very low-to-the-ground atmosphere. “Circling The Drain” plays a pattern game with some noodly horn, softly pulsating beats, icelike ticking, and some sort of drilling synth sound, ending up sounding like a couple minutes of an alien assembly line. “Soothes” ends the tape on an appropriately calm note, with reverberating congas and warm, sunlike guitar which gently pans like rays of golden light. Like some other tracks here, it also seems to not particularly start or end, it just goes along with its mood for a few minutes and ends suddenly. A pretty diverse collection of sounds, and it seems to make sense that the tracks are divided onto two tapes the way they are, instead of just cramming them all onto a C-60.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 