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

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 – 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. 

silber records

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.

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.

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.

plankton wat / dnt records

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?

jesu / caldo verde / myspace

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

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.

the flaming lips / allen ginsberg

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

• last days of radio