- Taylor McLaren
- Albums and Singles
![](http://www.brainwashed.com/brain/images/hoahio-peek.jpg)
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- Steve Smith
- Albums and Singles
![](http://www.brainwashed.com/brain/images/guiltycontabata.jpg)
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- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
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- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
Lo-fi guitar feedback, monotone lyrical chatter, and bland instrumental (amateur at best) cycles do not make for a good record. As best as I can tell, Doreen Kirchner and Wayne Garcia really want to be as hip as they can be; instead they end up sounding like a couple of confused kids with nothing to sing about and no melody to drive their music forward. I don't need a melody to be interested in the music, but AM 11 doesn't have anything going for it otherwise.
There's no interesting production, no involved guitar work, and Animal for the Muppet Show would've been a much better drummer for this band; at least he's a wild and crazy guy. The drumming on this record can only be compared to the sound of a beginning drummer in grade school: sloppy, awkward, and somewhat confused about how to use the bass pedal and the snare at the same time. And they both sound so damned emotionless: "The Drop off Process" (their opening tune, no less!) feels as if it could be the soundtrack to some twenty-somethings getting messed up on heroin. There's no emphasis on anything, their voices sound dim and faded out, and everything meshes into one big and milky haze of dirty public restrooms. None of the tunes really sound different from each other, either. After a little bit I became confused as to what track I was listening to, but I was too damned lazy to get up and check what the CD player was telling me. The pale and dismal delivery of everything on this record had seeped into my bones all I wanted to do was lay around and die in a pit of my own waste. There's probably a grand total of thirty seconds on this record where a combination of drums and guitar come together to make something nice happen and then my eyes get all red and puffy and I realize it's damn near the same song as before. Put a needle in the old vein, grab a few bottles of cheap beer, break out the cigarettes and prepare to die slowly with Sudden Ensemble; if the drugs aren't lethal, they're absolutely dull attitude will be.
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- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
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- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
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- Rob Devlin
- Albums and Singles
![](http://www.brainwashed.com/brain/images/nanangtatangmuki.jpg)
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- Taylor McLaren
- Albums and Singles
![](http://www.brainwashed.com/brain/images/muslimgauze-red_madrassa.jpg)
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- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
![](http://www.brainwashed.com/brain/images/galasdefixiones.jpg)
She is wise to realize that there is something painfully cathartic in exorcising these demons, voicing the cries of the dispossessed, palpably invoking their spirits. Diamanda Gal? forges a blood pact between audience and performer, calling up sorrow and anger from her deepest emotional reserves and fearlessly exposing them. For her new solo operatic work Defixiones: Will and Testament, Gal? could not have chosen a subject more obscure or meaningless to Western listeners — the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides carried out by Turkey between 1914 and 1923 — but the varied texts she has chosen, the haunting musical settings and, most importantly, her forceful and emotive delivery vividly evoke this forgotten moment in history. The double album is packaged with a hardcover book which contains the libretto, drawn from various texts by an impressive array of authors including Armenian poet Siamanto, French poet Henri Michaux, Syrian poet Adonis, Romantic poet Gerard de Nerval and Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. This multilingual patchwork of texts, some dealing specifically with the Turkish bloodshed and some only suggesting the same outrage, sadness and psychological terror, forms a compelling narrative flow from the hysterical anguish of the 13-minute opener "The Dance" to the painful resignation of the concluding "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean." Diamanda's stunning four-octave instrument attacks this material with amazing technical and emotional virtuosity, transforming from a quavering falsetto to a throaty growl in a matter of seconds, enforcing the primacy of her moving drama, effortlessly referencing Greek liturgical music, American blues and Middle Eastern vocalizations. Upon listening to the first track, I was completely transfixed and listened to the entire two hours plus of Defixiones in one sitting. Her seductive performance creates a violent historical shadowplay for the mind that feels all too relevant to our times; the sentiments so universal that she could just as well be singing about the horrors of the Civil War, the ethnic cleansing of the Third Reich, the bombing of Hiroshima or the rape of Nanking. Diamanda Gal?' electrifying work is entirely without peer in the contemporary scene. Her avant-garde exorcisms of plagues, madness and despair sound simultaneously ancient and modern, allegorical yet viscerally direct, elusive and immediate, and Defixiones: Will and Testament should be required listening for anyone who has ever felt the pull of human history's dark chambers beckon.
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- Albums and Singles
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Her dissection of the familiar musical tropes of the Blues is absolutely spellbinding, grasping onto a thousand phantom spirits as her voice quivers, pokes and penetrates each precisely enunciated syllable. John Lee Hooker's "Burning Hell" is transformed into cubist Blues — a fragmentation and reassembling of the song that lays bare all of its emotional truth, drains its blood and leaves it for dead. Her "cabaret grotesque" performance on a pair of Screamin' Jay Hawkins songs — "Frenzy" and the perennial "I Put A Spell On You" — is an absolute joy to behold. Her own composition "Baby's Insane" from The Sporting Life (the collaboration with John Paul Jones), is sweet but deadly. The free jazz vocalizations on her cover of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" recall the unhinged improvs of avant-jazz screamer Patty Waters. In Diamanda's hands, the country melancholy of Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" becomes a terrifying, multidimensional shriek of pain, regret and despair. Perhaps the most beguiling and transcendent of all the songs on La Serpenta Canta is the heartrending version of Diana Ross and The Supremes' "My World Is Empty Without You," with its distorted piano rumblings and Diamanda's dynamic vocals alchemizing the true essence of the song's fragility and pain. Like Nico's haunting The Marble Index, Gal?' beautiful collection of post-apocalyptic torch songs shines darkly with ravishing beauty and a haunting sense of loneliness that threatens to surround my heart completely.
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