the mantles: s/t (siltbreeze)

variations on a theme? not om. not hadyn. just that i’ve got a pile of this-kind-of-thing mooching desk space right now; from the ever reliable in the red, is john dwyers newest as thee oh sees; slightly surprisingly from de stijl, the (overly?) perky pens record; and the vivian girlsish rocket-spunk conciseness of brilliant colors on slumberland. all good in their own way. but in light of the time:music ratio i’ve plumped to wordage this canny bugger (and attached some empeethree’s for the others). and by this-kind-of-thing i mean whatever’s vaguely garage related. obviously.

so the mantles. inhabiting the underground (both velvet and paisley). chucking out, in a brevitous half hour, ten songs with a zonked swagger. releasing the bugger on siltbreeze. can’t really go wrong can you? the answer’s no incase you were wondering.

it’s one of those strange records that seems to belong to no particular era, tendrils snaking under the skin of fifties rock and roll, sixites surf, seventies psyche, eighties garage revival and cassette pop. all these things smudge together into one hazy smear, a hypno-droning, foot-tapping, spiky chuggery of woofwoofwoof.

it’s all amphetamined jitter and jangle and jigger like some bermuda triangle where late-period vu, lyres and the byrds intersect. not entirely sure if i just described clinic there… but musically exemplified by disappearing act. anyway what it all boils down to is this:

kind of a narcotic garage rawk covered in dreamy gauze and smoggy fuzz of reverb and lo-fi pop stomp. as in what we do matters. kind of a trebly paranoid downer ballads, acid-burned and laconic, sassed-up melodiousness. as in look away, which has some awesome organ wooze on there.

and that’s just the opening triumvirate…

oh and i really dig the cover. an oddtastic photo, washed out gorgeous, from the olden days of virginia weatherby’s father gawky awkward and besuited, clutching a jimi hendrix pic, framed by mountainous skyline.

s’all good.

myspace / siltbreeze

evangelista: prince of truth (constellation)

or where carla bozulich indulges her inner swan (not cygnus but the blackened no-wave skree of gira and jarboe).

always interested by the crazy lines you can draw from the noise and avant-whatever to folk / blues / country twanging. and ms. bozulich offers up a rather fine example wandering as she does between the worlds of nels cline, willie nelson, constellation records, the geraldine fibbers, low, xiu xiu and a hundred other random junctions.

this is the least straightforward of the evangelista records. adopting a rather burroughsian approach to making the record after a musically debilitating illness, by stitching together her bands disparate recordings post-recovery. it’s all nouvelle vague jump cuts and pro-tools editing collage improv.

markers? lots of esses. swordfishtrombones, steve reich, set fire to flames, scott walker, sunn o))). and blixa bargeld. yep. really. it’s that fucking odd. a hideous beautiful-ugly mélange that’s as much noise as it is jazz as it is industrial as it is blues. i’m sure i recall her refering to the earlier evangelista records as gospel noise. which is actually pretty accurate. not that it’s all bared teeth. there’s a dead calm that frequently worms its way in. tension then release then tension then release. y’get the picture.

there’s a rumble of noise and klang of guitar which jitters and glitches into discordant squall that opens the album. it’s called the slayer. it could almost be a deconstruction (if you squint aurally) of something tom araya would write.

it’s not that there’s no proper song / structure on here (there is) it’s just more like an exercise in rock band musique concrète.

so you get the viscous gun wielding phil spector evil atonal glare of you are jaguar, which channels pj harvey’s snake, katiejane garside and lydia lunch. there’s something vague and sexual and threatening about it. rest your head / black hair / red bed. beautiful and abrasive. sickly and hungry and cathartic all at the same time.

but you also get the fucked country noir and mangled strings of tremble dragonfly, i lay there in front of me covered in ice and iris didn’t spell which screech and drone and lapsteel in a scraping layered lullaby nightmare that sounds like the cowboy junkies gone horrible horribly wrong.

and the jazz creak and rattle of decrepit dust-soaked waits on crack teeth. which is all rust covered lounge and cheap synth creepy dorothy valens chanteuse.

it ends with on the captain’s side and a ten minute wash of muffled noise and harmonised voice. layered and laden with textured doom. it could be a tale of the sea. it could be some apocalyptic sea shanty. it could be one of those ancient folk songs about dead lovers who never come back. it’s a strange quietly booming lament. something that could be said about the whole damn thing.

it’s taken me a month to decipher this bugger. and i’m still working on it. but it’s worth working at. harsh and exquisite like a good malt i think.

evangelista / constellation

aarktica: in sea / vlor: six winged (silber)

aarktica: in sea – the most suprising thing about this record is not the cover of danzig’s (video below) am i demon? it’s not the fact that the fella who made the bugger lost the hearing in his right ear. nope. the shock-o-rama here is that with that name, the song titles and the now standard for fans of: (gy!be, labradford, eluvium) it’s not only an incredibly pretty fifty minutes, but it’s a rather warm inviting melodic one too. it’s all very kranky-esque in it’s mixture of the deconstructed and reconstructed organic sounds of strings and keys. if i had to draw parallels, and i’m lazy so i must, it’d be the drawn out lynchisms of stars of the lid or the beautiful fractured slo-pop of windy & carl (who frankly never get the plaudits they deserve). yeah like i said this’d be the time i’d usually drag out all my snowy, blizzardy, glacial chilly wintry metaphors. but no. not today fuckers. this is more like sinking into the warm mediterranean sea, letting the water carry you, feeling the sun on yr face, oozing through closed eyelids, licking lapping gently on yr brain. no doubt everybody including derosa himself would tell me to shut my cakehole, that this shit is all epic blinding white and outerspace cold. well to that i’ll say whatevah. hint’s of joy divisions closer, terry riley, jangle pop on downers (i.e. low). it’s physical (my woofer is vibrating things across the desk as i listen). it’s emotional (not hysterical as some of this kindofthing tends to be). it goes mmmmm. as in the onomatopoeic noise to denote a pleasurable taste experience; as in the om like transcendental vibration that runs through the entire album. exceptional. 

vlor: six-winged – right. this features a buncha people from the silber roster including michael wood & brain mckenzie from the fabulously titled something about vampires and sluts, yr man from aarktica, jessica bailiff (who i love in an almost creepy sexual way), annelies monsere and the fella in charge of silber. among others. and this is why you get a wildly eccentric mix of breathy pop and plinky noise and shoegazerry, ambient bloops and sweaty garage rawk stomp. and this is why you get two tracks to chow down on here.  if i was to say schizophrenic you’d be heading in the right direction. and yet somehow manages to sound like a proper bloody album and not just a pissaround compilation where a buncha folks bash out a buncha stuff they like playing but couldn’t squeeze into their own records. it manages to be aggressive, odd, soothing, brittle, massive, barely there, stupid, clever, loud, quiet and every goddam thing inbetween. not meant in the pejorative when i say this is all over the place. yet cohesive. cross-pollination and collaborative mind-melds. aargh. what the fuck am i dichotomously babbling about? christ even i don’t know. it’s not often you get to write about a record that at various points says earth, sons & daughters, swans, guided by voices, la monte young and cocteau twins. what you do need to know is that this is a wild and exhilarating listen. it’ll drag you up down left right and stroke yr inner thigh gently while occasionally biting yr extremities and whispering exotic erotica into yr inner ear.  oof. 

buon giorno luamada: s/t / minus the bear: into the mirror / marc broude: rites of zen (more odd things found)

buon giorno luamada: buon giorno luamada - more blissful blossoming lotuses of lovely dream noise from perdizes dream, brazils answer to not not fun. if yr familiar with babe, terror’s warm analogue burblings then yr on safe ground here. does that sleepy dusk/dawn sensation home-taping thing that the likesof ducktails and their various bastard children do. y’know hazy backround fizz in a hot bath-full of guitar fuzz and clean strummery. it’s hard to imagine all this stuff not coming from some sunny dreamland of cold beer and tropical weather and girls with darkdark hair tucked behind their ears swaying in the perfect breeze of postsummer somnambulism. think if it was made here this record would sound like pissing rain, malfunctioning machinery and the garrulous nonsense of shouting drunks. occasionally it bums you out for a few minutes with the found sound atonal hush lastbest heard on mogwai’s come on die young. and sometimes wanders into creaky david (rather then julian) lynch soundscape territory. and randomly batters a cheap distorto guitar. but it’s all good. exceptionally so.

minus the bear: into the mirror – only a fool don’t like minus the bear. if only all indie pop rock prog post-something quirky tuneful funk noise buggers sounded this fucking good. anyway in advance of next years new record, there’s a single available from the usual places (and at shows). this is the b-side. it’s better than the a-side. whatever. fact is knudson’s a goddam geetar genius. this reminds me in all the right ways of the dismemberment plan. you could even dance to the beast should you wish to. i did. hell i’m jigging like a complete arse in front of my type-thing just now. fact is if tv on the radio can hang with bowie and get their mugs in broadsheets and on the cover of rolling stone* then so can, nay should, this lot. beats.  tunes.  energy.  you can’t exactly go wrong. *they may already have i dunno…

marc broude: rites of zen – finally into this rum mix i’m gonna chuck in this seventy two minute ghostly death rattle. is anybody in portland oregan not making little bombs of musical orgasm? beginning to think the whole population’s in a goddam band. no doubt this fella when not jiggering about with oscillators and low frequency military weapons, he’s shooting pool with smegma at liz harris’ house. anyway this shit does the same thing lustmord does at his unsettling quietest; manages to be somehow almost not there, yet at the same time make noise like gravity pressing down on every atom in yr misshapen flesh sack. it’s the sound of deep space loneliness or the blackest ocean floor. it’s the sound of ghost towns and a breeze blowing through abandoned factories. y’dig my lazy metaphors? hmmm. influenced by david lynch.  and i suppose there is someting of the background tension drone and the industrial hum of eraserhead here. anyway it’s likely to divide. me?  i love it.  but then zoetrope is one of my favourite things.  listen yrself.  download here.

hair police: family battle snake: moon unit: stereo: glasgow

moon unit: not zappa’s daughter. but the three piece featuring nackt insecten’s scrabbletastic ruaraidh sanachan on guitar (and not sitting on a rug full of overdriven twinkly things). they had the inevitable guy with table of wires and joyboxes. but really the show belonged to the fella on drums knocking buggery fuck out of his kit, percussing in a way somewhere between chris corsano and dave lombardo. hell’s bells he can pound. epic and loud and freeform huge monstrous waves of cosmic doom and sonorous drone, sturm und drang and sometimes, sometimes veering almost nearly not quite but skirting round flirting with, teasing, tickling, tormenting something approaching riff. this? this was fucking ace.  winning sperm party has some bootlegs here.

family battle snake: like if campbell kneale made minimalist techno inside a jet engine. his table of things had length and girth, with bigger, buttonnier boxes and longer twistier wires. if there is such a thing as table envy in this noise-o-rama world, the fella from moon unit must have been crying in a corner somewhere. anyway he made one long fzzschmmm of occasional beats and elektrikal hiss and fuzzing zoned zonked moves. quite transcendentally pleasing it was. with monstrous volume. enough chloropromazine and you could dance to this. or at least sway gently in the brutally gentle waves of skree lapping round yr lugholes.

hair police: or the reason for dragging my sorry ass out on pissing wet thursday night. they were on stage. then they were off stage. and for the brief time in between played like a black metal band doing free jazz. or vice vicious versa. demented gut-shrieks, mindlessly indiscriminate  six string thrash, headbang eyeroll freak the fuck out spazzmagoric joy. an atonal haunted house of cthulhian driller killer mayhem.  if i’d sneezed i might have missed them but quality not quantity eh. a miasmic bloody marvel.  and like the hirsute polis, i have no more words for ya.  thank you and goodnight.

plankton wat: dawn of the golden eternity (dnt)

some of this sounds like it was made for the basement. some of this sounds like it was made for the porch. which is to say, dawn of the golden eternity glues together some burnt-out bedroom psyche malarkey with fahey primitive string flicking. which is to say, while not particularly new i just got a copy and those are two of my favourite things and well, this isn’t the nme so i can’t write about what i want when i want. m’kay.

plankton wat is dewey mahood. dewey mahood is also a member of eternal tapestry. eternal tapestry make a big joyful geetar racket. it’s semi-improvised. plankton watt also dabbles in the made-up. but instead of mega-psyche rawk, here be a more restrained beast. sober, thoughtful, pensive, one that occasionally glances ahead before leaping, one that’s been asked by the missus to turn the volume down just a tad coz it’s two in the morning and there’s only so much tape squelch she can take. m’kay.

that said, the first track on each side – the magic citadel & sphere within the lotus – flange and rattle and wah and weedleyweedle their dayglo hearts to warm analogue contentment. dance fingers dance! and the titular track follows, starts bringing shit down, not in a diazepam kinda way. more in a hazy sleepyheaded just-before-bed kinda way. it loops and drifts and stumbles along rather nicely.

and from there on in it’s fingerpickerry and free drums and weirdy rags and ragas and drone om’s with bits of flute and banjo and some kind of kalimba chucked into the fruity jumble. reminded at times of when ben chasny weirds the fuck out. ‘specially in that drift from solo blues plucking and bending into ritual blobs of transcendental mellow as heard on the shrouded path of enchantment, which is all humming unfurling arpeggios.

i think this has as much in common with hawkwind as it does takoma. it’s as equally in love with the swoosh and vroom as it is with the twang and creak. so if you’ve ever wondered what would happen if loren connors and gary war made a record together, well yr prayers have been answered.

jesu: opiate sun (caldo verde)

is it just me or does jesu seem more at home here than on hydra head? doth broadrick on these records not have more in common with the fuzzy slo-mo murmurings of mark kozelek and alan sparhawks rockist tendencies?

i think so. in fact i’d be so bloody bold (though not really) to say that this shit is just red house painters turned way the fuck up. actually that’s a pretty stupid thing to come out with. retraction, your honour.

anyhoo. this is the new ep. and all my favourite jesu shit comes out on ep. seems more suited to the two or four tracks, thirty minutes format than the hour long long player. don’t ask me why. it’s not like i don’t have the required saintly patience for this kindof thing. coz i do. it’s just that pop music (which relatively speaking this is) should be short and sweet. it should be a fizzing burst of adrenaline.

now obviously this ain’t no shot of epinephrine. even tranqued sloths would be fiddling with the 33/45 function on the turntable on first listen. no what you get is some bastard form of chugging alt-rock (gaah, horrible term) , an almost bliss pop-like structure, melody (which admittedly is sometimes avalanche buried) and post-rock (stop, enough, please…) portentousness.

why does all this stuff (nadja, isis, pelican to a lesser extent) make me wanna dig out my snow metaphors?

or to put it another way it’s a tar-pit you can hum along to. it’s like a radio edit of that nadja covers album, with it’s deadly combo of fuzz, tunes and not quite glacial pace. all sabbath drone and phil spector miasma. it’s like a narcotics-era dylan carson smooching kevin shields. which i realize is a hideous fucking image…

where was i? yeah, jesu. opiate sun. caldo verde. four tracks. twenty five minutes.

losing streak reduced is just rawk played at the wrong speed. there’s even a lumbering solo in there. and while not quite napalm death, it’s not quite stars of the lid neither. like if swervedriver got absolutely anabolically tanked up. the most silver-esque track on here. and everything flirts felicitously with the warmer side of doom. particularly on morning light. it’s all subtle unfurls and evolutions. it’s all arpeggiated laments and vocalized malaise. it’s all about gravity weighing down on yr soul. hell, dig deep enough and there’s something approaching an ultra-tectonic stoner groove. possibly.

as an intro to broadrick’s cuddlier side this (and even more so, the silver ep) is ideal for the uninitiated. but it also obligingly serves as a portal to metal folks interested in exploring drone textures and post-something. and for drone bores and shoegazers wanting to branch out into something heavier.

ideal then.  now howsabout a collaboration with kath bloom?

neil mcsweeney: shoreline

neil mcsweeney plies his trade in territory that’s been radio blighted by every guitar wielding blubbering hormonal sac with a plastic soul to bare, with blanditudes proffered to soft-faced men in shiny cars and bleary-eyed women drinking wine alone in over-decorated apartments. territory that once encompassed a buncha folks from sam cooke to hank williams to bob dylan to tom waits – fella’s (and fellettes) that strap on a six string or piano and bash out an honest to god song – now reduced to the sad bit in hollyoaks or the credits montage at the end of some sporting failure.

poor bugger you’d imagine, having that history behind him yet being unnecessarily lumped in with every ignorant (james and rhyming) blunt that passes off mawkish sentimentality and poor mans neil diamondisms as fingerpicked poetry, resulting in some bastard chimera of modern elton john sickly with saccharine pop bloat and a shaky synthetic woodie guthrie palsied on powerchord strum.

yes indeedy. singer songwriterry stuff. a genre that’s been spat on and shat on and raped and abused (to quote macgowan) in recent years.

now i’m no fool (and neither’s mcsweeney i’d imagine) so i’m not for a second comparing him to cooke, dylan or waits. no, what i am intimating in my usual haphazard way is how, in this oversaturated world we live in, a once mighty tradition has been reduced to tear-fests and creepy songs obsessing about girls you meet once on trains.

anyway mcsweeney’s new album’s out and succesfully does it’s bit to right this terrible terrible wrong while sounding pretty damn pleasing to the ears. there’s been a slight swing from the leonard cohen meets lou barlow hi-lo-fidelity on remember to smile to a more expansive band sound. in the same vein as (but with a much more d.i.y. aesthetic than) the elvis perkins record which was the last of this kindof thing i really liked.

so for yr pocketful of coinage what do you get? essentially another half hour of melody, guitar twang, roughed up folkness and occasional fuzzed galumphing rock. it’s about as americana as you get in sheffield(ana).

kicks off with the plain and pretty fucking-off-away-from-it-all of glencoe – ‘to live in the mountain tops, piss my name in the snow’ – sidles into one of the elliott smith style melancholic dying relationships numbers (see the ever so grim rope to hang) and from there on in staggers wonderfully between the lonely strum and plugged in stomp.

i’ll highlight a few (well three) tracks for yr aural fellating:

firstly the tiny widescreen layering of side to the sun which rather deftly (and delightfully one might add) opens up some windswept bedroom morricone / badalamenti whilst smooching nina nastasia with it’s weirdy background curtain of ghostly creak and klang.

secondly the crazy horse does deus chug and bluster of time, which frankly i’d love to hear a full record of. make up a suitable pseudonym fella and crank more of this out. yup. it’s all amplified and fuzzed and turned way the fuck up. more of the spectral western twang haunting this one too. and manages to work delirium tremens into one of the lines. maybe the screaming abdabs wouldn’t have flowed so well….

and finally, thirdly, in conclusion more neil young guitarorama (but less volumed this time) on the break. which cheekily sounds like a mash-up of young’s cinnamon girl and lou reed’s sweet jane (see magic video box below).

it’s a grand effort from one tall gentleman. does much the same as his first record, just steroids it up and strips it down on occasion. and if bon iver can sell a buncha records and get a buncha press why can’t mcsweeney?  i’m rather smitten by this…

neil mcsweeney / myspace

the flaming lips: o2 academy: glasgow

this kindof says it all…

i walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
sat down under the huge shade of a southern
pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
box house hills and cry.
jack kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed,
surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
machinery.
the oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
sank on top of final frisco peaks, no fish in that
stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves
rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
on the riverbank, tired and wily.
look at the sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust–
–i rushed up enchanted–it was my first sunflower,
memories of blake–my visions–harlem
and hells of the eastern rivers, bridges clanking joes
greasy sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
past–
and the gray sunflower poised against the sunset,
crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye–
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays
obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower o
my soul, i loved you then!
the grime was no man’s grime but death and human
locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance
of artificial worse-than-dirt–industrial–
modern–all that civilization spotting your
crazy golden crown–
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
more could i name, the smoked ashes of some
cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
& sphincters of dynamos–all these
entangled in your mummied roots–and you there
standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
in your form!
a perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
monthly breeze!
how many flies buzzed round you innocent of your
grime, while you cursed the heavens of the
railroad and your flower soul?
poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive?
the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
shade of a once powerful mad american locomotive?
you were never no locomotive, sunflower, you were a
sunflower!
and you locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
not!
so i grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and jack’s soul
too, and anyone who’ll listen,
–we’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread
bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all
beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re blessed
by our own seed & golden hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black
formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
riverbank sunset frisco hilly tincan evening
sitdown vision.

last days of radio (folk is a dirty word)

and it’s not about the beards.  although i’m pretty sure there’s beards involved. it’s not brown or beige or tank-fucking-tops or feedeldydeedledydeee. it’s not getting into a debate on traditional or contemporary or post- and neo- and psych- whatever. no more hyphens. it is what it is. if dylan electric is judas then john moloney is satan. these songs sometimes are the sounds of tramps fighting in a music store, or acidfrazzled hippies mad streamofconscious chants or drunk scotsmen sobbing into beer or sadsadsad odes to serial killers. that said i could draw you the line from woodie guthrie to david tibet. i could but it’s so twisted and fucked it’d blow yr tiny little bearded minds.  

• william elliot whitmore: take it on the chin
• sunburned hand of the man: wild animal track seven
• sufjan stevens: john wayne gacy jr
• six organs of admittance: attar
• bonnie prince billy: a minor place
• molasses: saint christopher blues
• current 93: this autistic imperium…
• cordelia’s dad: may blooming field
• arab strap: loch leven
• alasdair roberts: i went hunting

broken, not fixed

 

i grew so tired of movement so one day i stopped.

how it happened;

picture me as occam’s razor. with tits.

picture me as emmeline pankhurst. with catheter.

how it happened;

the opposite of awakening.

the sun rises one morning and you don’t. there are no more choices only slogans. you lay comfortable with the realisation that there is no freedom only consumption. medicine is an illusion. love is panic. it all fades. clouds lift. doors forced open in the most obviously phallocentric way. when i get famous they’ll talk like this. they’ll dress it up, but what they’ll describe, reduced, is cock and cunt.

so here i am.

the comedian frozen on stage.

i gather moss.

lost in biology.

so here i am.

the opposite of shark.

what i am not is collectivism or compromise or default.

what i am is as certain as a plane hitting a building.

this is not an exit.

what happens is my eyes dry up quicker than you’d think. light hits like a rock to the head. each photon burst an apocalypse of self-abandonment.

i dream of refusing, not flinching, not struggling.

what i fear most is subconscious.

what i fear most is involuntary.

what i am is body politic.

samaritan

anonymous with creaks and fear spidery in her throat, a voice insinuates itself down wires too distant for comfort. i keep secrets, swollen and slug-like, echoing with other peoples panic, breathy and wet; sweat strangled confessions with masturbatory aloneness. the four a.m. fear a damp shower curtain of catholic guilt and self-help abandonment. no-one is in love. everyone has more tumours than fingers. clinging to kittens and bottles and god.

gowns: broken bones (latitudes / southern)

 

want to know what kinda place this freaky skeletal shit is coming from? read erika anderson’s liner notes:

listening to this recording evokes a time when we were barely holding on by our fingernails. ezra had broken bones in his foot, which the cold and rain didn’t help. there were points during that tour where i just kind of lost my mind, and during the recording of heaven there was a moment where i completely forgot where i was, who i was, and what i was doing. can you hear it?

by christ you can. bad drugs. bad vibes. bad things. a veritable swamp of dread. but a surprisingly beautiful one at times.

so gowns. one of them used to be in the mae shi. one of them is in amps for christ. they come together like spook-rock power rangers. churning out some majorly bummed disjointed jams, reworkings, composed of noise and pop and folk and electronics and whatever else you want to chuck avant- in front of. hey, at least it’s a change from post- somethingorother.

it’s like a forty minute fucked up charalambides album for want of a better comparator product. just replace the sweeping warm texan-psyche tones with some haunted mutterings and scratchy string abstractions. the fractured violin scrapes and barely controlled whispers of feedback actually put me in mind of those drawn-out velvet underground stumbling garage drones.

in amongst this folkish personal apocalypse are burbling electronics (yr man ezra was the mae shi’s synthy module music box fella) in the nervy horror movie soundscape mould, oddball deconstructed balladeering and cracked kindof spoken word soliloquies. it’s the spectral confessional on dog that sticks unsettlingly in my skull. disjointed murmurings of rednecks with dogs and child abuse, full of claustrophobic ambiguity and all delivered in this confessional narcotic drawl. an all too real haunted house tale.

incapacitants: lon guy (harbinger sound)

quelle surprise mouth breathers, yet more racket. and boy is this clever stupid. wonderfully so. like kevin drumm’s noise work there’s a sense of humour behind the squall (impotent hummer anyone…) which frankly in this ever so po-faced scene is a minor miracle. and this mad rubbery bugger is chock full of chuck jones style exclamation marks and tex avery aural ultraviolence. like a tramp waving his diseased cock in the street, it disturbs as much as amuses and no matter how hideous it gets you can’t quite not look at the grotesque swollen monstrosity and it’s filthy sour discharge.

it comes lunging at you like some engorged dayglo beast, track one urging us to take it! take it!  take it! exclamation mark. take it! and take it we do. say! oh oh oh we do.  over and over again. five times. in every orifice. all holes filled. punished. brutalized. double, triple, quadruple penetrated. leaving us depleted, spent, ragged, soiled, gasping for release, for let-up. ‘no more’ you beg, as the convulsions take hold, as the adrenaline wears off, ‘no more…’

the unreserved dastardly fuck of volume here is horrendous. if you’ve heard hijokaidan (you’d remember if you did) you know what to expect. excruciating pummels of corruscating machine noise, the hissing fizz and klang of exploding electricity pylons, the wrongbrained shrieks of middle-aged man-mentals. hysterical. in every sense of the word. it’s disorientating in the most excoriatingly psychedelic way. wave upon wave of amorphous evil energy, ultrarawk electroverload, all lovingly presented in the most hideous fidelity, unnecessary twisted crystal clarity, so you don’t miss one vicious heaving (un)note.

not something i’d choose to listen to regularly but when in the mood to be musically disembowled, aurally enucleated, acoustically asphyxiated this is the disc to spin.

my skull’s busted… should come with a goddam health warning…

kevin drumm: imperial horizon (hospital productions)

so as i lurch from one depressing personal tragedy to another i figured i need something ugly and harsh to soundtrack these rather grim days. and i figured what better fella to get involved in this than kevin drumm. the man who spawned, vomited, shat out, sheer hellish miasma. which at times provided the most gutjuddering ferocious noisemongerry (see the inferno for details) i’ve heard in long while. like burzum being fed legs first into an industrial shredder, recorded onto damaged tape and played down a long distance phone line on loudspeaker through amps the size of andre the giant.

but no. the fucker’s let me down. kindof. instead of an hour of self-flagellating aural brain scour i’m presented with an hour of thick-bliss melancholy, a slo-mo blizzard and the (un)welcoming sleep of a snow blanket.

y’see i haven’t heard anything of his since the miasma rerelease. haven’t heard imperial distortion, so i foolishly assumed he’d continued the loud sound (of a seven year old record, i realise…). not that miasma is entirely ugly, but it’s pretty far removed from this.

one track. just lay down and forget it. all the connotations that come with that title apply musically. how to describe something so inherently minimal, so utterly unwordy? why with my usual verbose prose, irritating hyperbole, iconoclastic phrasing and repugnant non-sequiturism of course.

be prepared to focus (on the hour of music, not this crumbling bilge), concentrate that mushy mulch of a brain of yours. there’s no point dipping in and out like some flitting, flittering, flighty a.d.d. haribo addict. you could play it in the background but frankly you’d zone out and think somebody next door’s hoovering. no i recommend a sit down, eyes closed, big headphones on. or go one better. on saturday i submerged myself in one of those isolation booths, you know where you float on salty water in a pitch black tank for an hour and feel yr consciousness bugger off to another place altogether. t’was an odd heaven. use this shit the same way.

it is quite frankly akin to substance abuse listening to just lay down…. it’ll alter yr mindwaves in a subtle hypno- way. reductionally it is nothing more than some ultra low frequency drone, a mildly fluctuating hum of submerged electrickerry, an all encompassing immersive wash of monotonic tone. but given time, zonked silence and a fortress of solitude, it offers a veritable pandoras box of minimalist delight.

drumm’s ouvre (man i dig that word…) inhabits some odd venn diagram overlap between merzbow (if his laptops voice broke) and popul vuh (at their most static). and like masami akita he’ll either test yr patience or deliciously warp yr fragile morrison-like wooly cotton infant brain.

it’s textured, smooth and cold and soft like someone playing wine glasses in a gentle snowstorm or delicate whiteout. notes, tones, sustained for seconds minutes hours, hang sometimes threateningly in the air. it undulates almost imperceptibly, unfurls indiscernibly, vacillates and mutates and fluctuates om-like. it gazes at you with the blank soothing terror of nietzsche’s void.

i dare you to stare back.

endless endless endless / e.p. hall / sentient machine (another rum bunch of random offerings)

endless endless endless: black talisman – this frankly is rather beautiful. in every way. handsomely packaged as some kind of laser etched shamanic artefact. and aurally the kindof shit that wouldn’t sound out of place on not not fun or next to james ferraro’s holy mountain output. self described as a post-noise duo that plays guitar and gameboys. i came expecting dj scotch egg instead i got a fountain of bliss. a balming wash of drawn out orgasmic whale noise, korgesque squelch and nes eight bit percussion.

they inhabit a soothing elseworld of guitar plink and fuzz and twinkling klang. it’s noise, but one enveloped in a snowy blanket of collaged and unwrapping, unfurling, evolving swoosh. oddly organic despite being made by machine, black talisman is a soothing, warm, pre-comedown elated treacle of melting harmony. it’s all blurred polaroids and repeated electrick agitation and loop upon loop of gentle tongue inside ye earholes. it’s occasionally unsettling, with a creepy boards of canada on downers feel, an almost psyched-out folk vibe. imagine the skaters brighter, murk-free sound filtered through the synthy japanesey machine clank and street chatter of blade runner’s ambience. a crude trope that in all likelihood makes little sense outside my head but fuck it, that’s where this music belongs.

if i had more time this would’ve been in a post of it’s own. but i don’t. so go to the bandsite. there’s a tonne of albums for free. and for the love of christ buy this.

e.p. hall: mommy crow - more beautifully packaged noise. noise as noun, not genre y’understand. this has proved a rather fitting introduction to morning-time following last nights jack rose fingerpicking slideguitar beer excesses.

remember regina spektor before major label antiseptic turned her into a saccharine produced sugary shadow of her former self? well this is what i’d rather she was doing. chucking out occasionally noisy rattling folk murmurings. all things bookish, creepy, and thinky. quoth the raven. in other words (and there are a lot of those) there’s something of the heart and brain and guts about this. something stripped and bloody and bare-boned about the whole affair. but one rich in emotion and language and imagery.

most of the time it’s just lady singing with guitar (a voice that reminds me of a less naif-ish joanna newsom (and i dig joanna newsom)) and then it branches out into xiu xiu style electronickery or cello drone or birdsong or burbling noise or avant percussion, as on churchyard. hell, the emperor’s note even chugs into fizzing arcade fire moves. it’s a decidedly robust, satisfying listen, and one that despite it’s apparent monochromatic minimalism rewards repeated listening.

anyway this is out on the twenty fourth november followed by a euro tour with drekka (whose bluesanct recently put out a fabulous screenprinted boduf songs vinyl). go get. go see.

sentient machine: sentient machine – fuck me this is slick and sexy. like an oil spill on a white alaskan shoreline. sounds like what trent reznor does now but with fire in their ample bellies. is it just me or has rez written some spreadsheet formula for composing nine inch nails songs over the past three records? anyway this has all the spit sheen and polish of million dollar studio album. how the hell they got this to sound so bloody expensive i dunno. maybe i’ve been lo-fi too long and gone all aural mr kurtz…

so hints of faith no more, in the quirky pop-metal of architecture man. hints of killing joke on she blew me away’s tribal stomp (which develops into pure bombastic synth pomp in a stupidly awesome seventies prog, power metal vein). it’s an unrelenting twenty odd minutes, unafraid to inject the punkfunk, toot some big-ass brassy brass, weedelyweedeley solo like zappa (i demand more schmears of zappa over more songs!), chomp down on some disco biscuits, angularly grind out those geetar chops and get all eighties l.a. sleazy on hard enough, a song which has a jazzy breakdown that smacked a big grin across my ugly mug. yr man adam insists there’s an albini influence in there. i don’t hear it. but then i didn’t write the goddam thing. decide for yrselves and get this sparkling pile of audio wonder free from the bandsite.

errata / i was totally destroying it / turzi (a rum bunch of random offerings)

errata: errata – i s’pose you’d have to class this as post-something if you were in the classification business. post-metal, post-hardcore, post-whatever. what they do is that kindof epic soundscape meets thundering uber-chordage and throaty roar-vox that envy (should that be inveja…) and cult of luna (if they were amphetamined out their swedish heads) and will haven (make up yr goddam mind grady…) do. they’re portugese (as if you could tell…) and really rather good. niftily keeping the right balance between deranged bellows, guitar battery and widescreen ambience. a bit like the brutal stick violence dance of jogo do pau. i like this.  a lot. 

i was totally destroying it: horror vacui - been hearing a lot of this kindof thing recently. feels like i’ve somehow regressed back to my teenage years. nirvana at reading on cd. yo la tengo live in glasgow last night. pavement, sebadoh, dinosaur jr. all playing again. this? this indulges some decidedly tuneful power pop. bit like superchunk or veruca salt. roughed up tunes aplenty. incredibly pleasant (not meant in the pejorative) powerchording and choruses. the radio friendly shit that for some reason never gets played on the fucking radio. makes me want to dig out those old cheap trick records. which is never a bad thing. and even if you don’t like their musical shenanigans there’s a fairly intellectual / amusing emo-boy rant by their lady singer:

male emo-pop bands are laughably effeminate at times in their mannerisms and personal hygiene, to the point where i, a lover of all things feminine, am almost offended by it. androgyny should be an exploration into the metaphysics of gender, but in this case, i feel that it’s just a thinly veiled mockery of women. all girls are to these boys are nameless entries in their lyrical diaries. we break their hearts, we cheat on them, we love them, we fuck them, and sometimes we even get back together with them. as jessica hopper puts it, “our existences, our actions are portrayed solely through the detailing of neurotic self-entanglements of the boy singer – our region of personal power, simply, is our breadth of impact on his romantic life.” our faces are their album art and tattoos. we have doe eyes, long flowing hair, we need validation through our relationships with these boys. they either have us, or they don’t. it makes me want to throw up.

oh and i rather like the band name too.

 

turzi – and a track i totally dig but know nothing about for some reason. it’s a bit of a curious hybrid, some utterly mental chimera that somehow reminds me simultaneously of goblin, iron maiden, harmonia, guapo and pounding fucking techno. it’s all very exciting and excitable and i suspect a rather sweaty danceable live show to boot. i need more. if you sent this, send more. moar! as the internet kids say.  it’s driving.  it’s pounding.  it’s relentless.  chuck any vaguely sexual metaphor at it you want.  oof.  and i love the fact the french still totally dig prog… 

califone: all my friends are funeral singers (dead oceans)

califone make so bloody little out of so bloody much. that’s not meant in the pejorative y’understand, just sometimes they’re so damnably subtle you’d hardly know anything was going on.

born of chicago’s red red meat (bunny gets paid being one of the last few finefinefine records released by sub pop) who (and which) paved the way for califone’s folksy murmurings and electronic burblings. and with each album they refine this formula to bare-boned perfection.

all my friends are funeral singers is part companion piece, part soundtrack to califone honcho tim rutili’s movie of the same name. it’s a film i know bugger all about beyond the psychic-living-with-ghosts-in-old-house premise, but this don’t impact on the absorption in / enjoyment of the album. i guess the themes and stories overlap and complement, but one isn’t required to understand the other. i hear the tour will incorporate both into the live show.  which should be pretty ace.

the music is the usual mix of brittle blues and electronic textures. it sounds simple, hushed even, but when you start unpeeling the oniony layers and collage overlaps, picking (hoho…) through the banjo, guitar, piano, fiddle, drum, horns and vintage organs, the complexity of their compositions dawns. reduced you could call it skewed folk but it’s so much more, like if william basinksi recorded dylan’s basement tapes.

it has strange contradictory qualities, whereby it’s junk-rough at times, while also softly tactile, organic yet industrial, tender but unsettling. whether it’s the bass squelch opaque electronics of giving away the bride, a song which radiohead would give up their wonky right eye for, or the more straightforward pop structure of polish girls, which has an understated melody of such weary beauty it brought a little warmth to even my black heart. it is within these disparities califone work so well.

all of this combined with the queered folk threads which run through the whole album, the string-picked stomp of ape-like, the psyche insinuations of buñuel and evidence result in a listening experience so rich, yet so light, you can gorge yourself like a vomit speckled roman emperor for hours. dig deep people, this album is incredibly detailed, a subtle agglomeration of sounds that have a delicious lush cinematic quality.

facetiously i could describe them as wilco’s little brother, or uncle tupelo’s weird nephew — the correlation being jeff tweedy’s willingness to grasp both the dissonant experimental, bucolic blood and dust sides of americana. but i won’t. i’ll leave you, dear readers (listeners), to decipher those mumbled symbols and splashed cymbals yourselves. enjoy!

mission of burma: the sound the speed the light (matador)

the only good thing the smiths ever did was not reform. when that day comes as far as i’m concerned my personal seventh seal is broken. not just because i have a pathological loathing for all things smithsian but also because i have a pathological distrust for band reformations. a peculiarly new phenomenon ( i think…) within the indie world. i’ll lazily lay the blame at all tomorrows parties circle-jerking feet. it continues apace with recent pavement and public image ltd reunion tours announced. all good bands split up. all bad bands eventually reform. that’s a ninety nine percent fact.

the one percent exception to this rule is mission of burma (and to a lesser extent dinosaur jr. coz the new stuff’s pretty ace and it does mean less time available for lou barlow to release dreary fucking indie pop solo albums). in essence what i expect, nay demand, is that you continue as you were, as a working band. write, release, tour etc. not to be some fucking nostalgia act, some slick karaoke kash kow, touring festivals, playing older fatter versions of your classics at gigs attended by thirty-something mid-mid-life-crisis twats trying to reclaim their youths from a mediocre stereophonicked adult life. paying yr forty quid gets you the pixies in some giant soulless corrugated warehouse playing a greatest hits set (ie doolittle and a handful of songs from other albums) and a desperate yawning void inside that says you’ve been so fucking had, here’s yr entirely unironic ‘ha ha we’ve reformed for the cash’ ironic t-shirt. is this different from bananarama or inxs without the dead guy? no. accept the fact your time has come and gone. yr just dying with a little less dignity, a little less of your scrawny black souls in tact, with yr trousers round your ankles like some fat balding indied version of the king…

anyway, bile spewed, rant over. back to the main event folks.

mission of burma’s third album proper since the regrouping. it’s slightly unsettling to think that signals calls and marches and vs. are twenty seven years old. but they are. and the sound the speed the light comes on like it’s nineteen eighty two all over again. with maybe even a nod to this on ssl83?

it’s the spikiest spunkiest record of the three newbies. fairly unrelenting in it’s boisterous pace and with that rather tasty mix of brains and brawn, noise and melody, that made me fall in love with the buggers’ music all those years ago. it is, reduced, a straight forward (punk?)rock record. relatively speaking. you can still see the minutemen-style we jam econo in them. not so much in the music but certainly in the attitude, the aural politics the sheer bloody belligerent verve and nerve of them.

opening with the wordily humorous – one, don’t look at anyone / two, drink only when drunken to – decidedly tuneful and frankly singalongable power pop of 1,2,3 partyy! is a bold move. kindof reminded of the newer buzzcocks albums on this one. the video’s below.

and from there on in it’s the usual mix of miller, conley and prescott’s differential aesthetic poise. and it’s this meshing of the divergent styles that makes mission of burma so fucking great. whether it’s peter prescott’s percussive intensity and more overtly confrontational writing as heard on good cheer with it’s occasional link wray distorto twang and shouty thumping rockerry. or clint conley’s brash melodic bombast (who oddly also provides the record only slowish moment with feed). or roger millers more intricate numbers, dense and tense and wiry textured, building like the feast of angled geetar scratch (plus a fuzzy delight of a solo) and ferocious drum rattle and thud that is possession.

everything on here stands up to the ballad of johnny burma or that’s how i escaped my certain fate. an indication, i think, of how good this shit is. so treasure them while they’re still at it because prescott stated last year that they only had a few more years left in them. as burma anyway.

robedoor: raiders (not not fun)

i went home last night, fell down on my bed, i got to dreaming so, i was talking all out of my head…

robedoor have only gone and bloody done it. fully embracing the lysergic blues hinted at on the transitionary exorcism blues joint. not that they’re playing some twelve-bar boogie, more an annexing of the existential howl and the eerie wail of blind lemon, that hissing otherworldliness of pre-war ghost recordings re-recaptured by alan lomax.

when you’ve made as definitive a statement as rancor keeper, the only aesthetic option is to keep moving, keep changing. you stop, you die. says the shark. and trying to follow that thuggish yowl of pure cthulhuan vinyl evil with more of the same would have been the most redundant move since lydon’s public image reformation (which i know is chronologically illogical but it sticks in my fucking craw…)

whereas old school robedoor was thick like tar and murky like crowley these new jams have a discernible stoned blooze throb, choking in a fug of hell-cellar trance moans. now they’re channeling the deranged almost-garage not-really-punk drone sprawl of suicide. i dig it. this is slightly less restrained than exorcism blues, less underdriven and semiblown amps-set-to-six. there’s an almost bardo pond third eye clarity to this collection. but more of a buggered bardo pond performing next door in a fog of hash plumes and miasmic bad vibes.

frankly it’s a kindof beautiful record, but an ugly beauty, a terrible beauty. like knowing the hot chick in ‘v’ has freaky lizard shit going on beneath the softsoft skin and totalitarian fetishistica. yup. from the first echoed morricone twang and splash incantation of countdown to depression, through the zonked vu / joy division shapes of indo shadow and people of the book to the monstrous chugging squall of the downcast eye, this is a swollen voodoo dream of a record.