March 6, 2013 at 9:34 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
MMOTHS: Diaries
Last year, a young Irish producer by the name of MMOTHS released an EP of tracks combining atmospheric minimal techno with post-chillwave/[imaginary made-up genre], with a guest appearance by Keep Shelley In Athens and several lush instrumentals. This new EP continues that intriguing sound, although there isn’t really any of the minimal techno-ness that I heard on the first EP (at least on the fantastic opening track “THNX”). One of his signature sounds seems to be ghostly background vocals, and these are incorporated into many tracks as they were on the debut. Additionally, “Losing You” incorporates beatboxing into its production. Opener “One” adds some crashing drums for a somewhat bombastic effect. “For Her” features vocals by Young & Sick, and basically does the type of cloudy hipster R&B thing a million and one people are doing right now. More interesting is “All These Things”, which features sensuous, upfront vocals by Holly Miranda, and is the most fully realized MMOTHS song yet. It opens with a really nice distorted kalimba-type sound, before the knocking beats and vocals come in. Closer “Too Real” can’t help but remind me of the pianos at the end of Massive Attack’s “Teardrop”, as well as Harold Budd. Like the first EP, this one feels like an intriguing early taste of something that could potentially be powerful later on.
March 5, 2013 at 6:29 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Scott & Charlene’s Wedding: Two Weeks EP
This actually isn’t brand new material from S&CW, it’s a standalone release of their split LP with Peak Twins that came out last year on Night People in America and Bedroom Suck Records in Australia. Of course, their album
Para Vista Social Club that came out a few months ago was actually a reissue of an album that originally came out in 2010, so this is still much newer material, and it shows, as it’s tighter and more polished. But it still has a lazy, slacker-y feel to it, and it still brings to mind all manners of New Zealand indie-pop. “Two Weeks” and “Gammy Leg” start this EP off with similarly uptempo and catchy music, but less than cheerful lyrics. “Two Weeks” talks about being awkward and old-fashioned, and drinking during the day and being depressed. And “Gammy Leg” is delightfully gross, centering around a “zombie leg” which keeps spurting blood and won’t seem to heal. “I Wanna Die” follows, taking the tempo down to a bluesy shuffle and adding plenty of soloing. “My World” is another song about depression, but doesn’t have the uptempo catchiness of the first two tracks. “Hazy Morning” ends the EP with a solid 6 minutes of motorik rhythm and waves of awesome guitar effects, and lyrics seeking to resolve matters: “I don’t wanna be self-destructive anymore.” An enjoyable EP that deals with dark subject matter in a creative and sometimes humorous way.
March 5, 2013 at 6:09 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Greg Boring: Heavy Syrup
The back of this promo CD says it all: “We have no recollection of recording this”. That’s funny, because I have no recollection of listening to this! Just kidding. It definitely sounds like something by someone zonked out of their minds on some sort of abused household cleaning substance. Lots of Casios and other cheap keyboards, and a whole lot of uneasy sounds orbiting around slow carousel rhythms and female vocals which sound slightly more alert and coherent than the music, and maybe might’ve been produced to sound prettier in a different band. “Primitive Lotion” is an instrumental, and has it almost quite together, sticking to a steady Casio rhythm with delay effects, and coming off somewhat Clusterly. A few other tracks have this buzzing distortion that sounds like a misbehaving kitchen appliance or dishwasher or something, and that gets a little distracting. Final track “Night Moves” is another (mostly) instrumental cosmic space journey, with some squishy effects on the beats, and more astral synth exploration. I don’t mind the vocals on this album at all, but the tracks with less of them seem to be my favorite anyway.
March 3, 2013 at 3:49 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
The White Meadows: A Time For Drunken Horses
Sample-heavy folk drone collage from Peter Taylor (Mortuus Auris & the Black Hand) and Maria Thompson. 10 very different tracks, utilizing gamelan percussion, throat singing, birdsong, opera, sitars, film dialogue, and numerous other sounds. Lots of acoustic instruments and nature sounds combined with electronic drone. “Birds” and “Frogs” sample records about those very things. “Clouds” samples dialogue about clouds, double tracking it with a second or two of delay so it says everything twice, and combines it first with aggressive, crunchy beats, then later with sublime nature-film synths. It sort of creates a new world music, one that draws from disparate elements, and most importantly from nature itself.
March 2, 2013 at 11:23 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Journey Of Mind: Oil Burner
A rather short tape from an artist who seems to prefer leaving details up to the listener’s imagination. Two seven-minute tracks of slowed, warped ambience with beats that sound like they’re being played off a tape player whose battery is just about to die, but it’s smoothed out enough so that it actually sounds like a coherent musical statement. There’s also a lot of sounds that come in waves, like piano loops that fully fade out, stop, and start up again, but again in a way that makes sense. Very faded and distant and edge-of-consciousness, and it works so well.
March 2, 2013 at 11:08 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Altar Eagle: Nightrunners
is an album that I feel like I shouldn’t have to review; it’s easily one of my favorite albums of last year, by far, and I feel like everyone should’ve heard it by now and praised it as one of the best albums of the year. Plus, you know, I wrote for their website so I’m biased anyway. But I’m guessing most people haven’t heard
Nightrunners yet, in which case you can just head on over to
Bandcamp right now and hear what you’ve been missing. Musically, it’s just really incredible synth/dream-pop, the arrangements and vocals are a definite improvement over their first album, the songs are catchy and touching, and it alternately reminds me of older Morr Music stuff, mid-’90s µ-Ziq (the synth sounds anyway), and Land Of The Loops. I fucking love Land Of The Loops.
I’m guessing the vinyl is no longer available, but Crash Symbols released it on tape with a track-by-track remix album on the second side (this is very nearly sold out as of this blog post). This is also available on Bandcamp (for free, even) so even if the tape’s sold out you can still hear it. The remixes tend to go for a deconstructive approach, looping and chopping up sections of vocals, rarely just taking them as is and merely applying their original song structures to new beats. Interpretations range from Seekers International’s wild dub take on “Digital Gold Futures”, to No UFOs’ dub-techno version of “Parallel Lives”, to a sensuous downtempo mix by Discoverer of “No Spring Till Summer”. “Fledgling” is my favorite song on the original album, and Ghibli’s remix doesn’t even try to capture what makes the original so special; instead, it isolates a heavily distorted vocal snippet, and loops an ecstatic melody over a loud clapping beat, and it’s over in a couple of minutes. Ricardo Donoso does a big dramatic cinematic edit of “New Designs”, focusing on the “we’re all lost but we don’t care” chorus and truly placing it in an appropriate new context.
February 26, 2013 at 8:59 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Toxie: Newgate
Unassuming little 7″ on Goner by a new band from Memphis made up of members of Magic Kids, Coasting, and The Barbaras. “Newgate” starts off as a straightforward rough-guitar indie-pop song with understated female vocals, but then some new wave synths swell up for the chorus (“and in the middle of the night, I call your name”), which attacks you with catchiness, then you get hit with “ooooohhhh”s in the background, spoken vocals (“we’re all waiting to die”), another verse, another chorus, and then it’s over and you’re frantically pressing replay a bunch of times. I think we have a hit. B-side “Ties” has a similar tight sound, with a bit more detail (cool left-right panning guitar, good dynamic control, some slightly surfy sounds), and a bit more of a laid-back grunge feel, but definitely not too loose. Not really garage-y at all. My ears are perked up.
February 26, 2013 at 8:12 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Bionulor: Erik
Bionulor describes his music as “100% sound recycling”, and bases all of his works on a single short sample of a previously recorded work, with no additional instrumentation. This album consists of takes on Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies”, which is such a well-known composition that it begs the question of what could possibly be added to it, why would anyone mess with such a classic? Didn’t people get tired of “old stuff remixed” albums years ago anyway? Well, fortunately, this is a lot more interesting than that. It’s all recognizable as the same source material; the first track sounds like the familiar piano melody played backwards, with static and some delay effects. It gets more twisted from that point, though. He applies some Fennesz-like filtering sounds, some stereo separation, makes abstract rhythms out of skipping static, and at one point almost approximates steel guitar out of the sound of backwards piano. The last track seems to reveal more of the melody, but deliberately chops it up and stitches it back together (seams very audible), and adds a few discordant plunks approximating prepared pianos. “Gymnopédies” is the type of piece that never gets tiring no matter how many times you hear it, so hearing 48 minutes of slight, glitchy variations on it is nothing less than a pleasure.
February 26, 2013 at 7:06 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
C V L T S: Realiser
For whatever reason, I thought I had associated C V L T S with witch house, probably because of the name and the AMDISCS association. This tape (which is actually an expanded edition of an LP that came out earlier last year on Aguirre) is so far beyond that, though. It’s hazy and lo-fi, alright, but without any goth pretensions. Instead of being otherworldly, conjuring up images of witches and spirits and ghosts, it comparatively sounds, well, worldly. It sounds closer to something created by imaginative humans. Some of it is heavy on effects and atmosphere, but some of it sounds like honest-to-god Indie Rock. And it works perfectly fine that way. “Brahma Weapons” has swirling guitars, driving drums and bass, and low-mixed whispered vocals, and “Sandstone Retreat” is a 2-minute slice of bedroom slowcore. Other songs have hypnotic loops and blurry guitars, and seem to stick to a grubby 4-track aesthetic instead of going for more hi-tech trickery. The final track, “Suki”, seems to have a bit more digital-sounding tones, but it develops into a rich pool of fuzz and stays sufficiently warped, and retains its lo-fi-ness. And it ends with applause, which is looped and repeated, causing you to wonder if it’s actually a live performance or if it was just a trick added onto the end of the song. So basically, this tape doesn’t convince me of any sort of supernatural forces or anything, but it does sound like a well-done, enjoyable tape of lo-fi guitar and effects.
February 26, 2013 at 12:33 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Golden Grrrls: self-titled
I’ll always have a soft spot for Slumberland’s brand of twee-pop. The label keeps unearthing new bands offering their variation on C86-style indie-pop, shoegaze and noise-pop, and even if most of them don’t hit it out of the park, or even to outfield, the label usually puts out a few albums per year that I can’t help but enjoy. This is one of them. I was prepared to hate it because of the band name, and the first couple tracks are kind of “this could go either way”. But the group’s three-part harmonies (one male, two female) are unique, and they manage a few catchy songs, especially during the second half of the album. The album sounds a little rough, though; there’s some songs (such as “Paul Simon”) where the guitars sound just a little too high in the mix, and a few other songs seem to start too suddenly, like half of the first note of the song sounds chopped off, and that doesn’t sound correct. Actually, upon further listening, the imperfections are a little distracting, which is a shame because some of the songs are pretty good and the harmonies are quite interesting. This album could be better, but I do give this band credit because I like their sound.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 