09 January 2011

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Albums and Singles

For their seventh full length, the Wizard have opted for a more hard rock focussed style. Scummy biker riffs are pushed to the front; the pummelling smoked doom is still present but has become less overt. Overall, I am not sure if the shift has truly paid off but I cannot deny that this is still a decent album once I allowed myself to become totally immersed in it.

Rise Above

With Witchcult Today and their side of the split with Reverend Bizarre, I was beginning to think that Electric Wizard were in danger of becoming the most unholy, heavy and brilliant metal band on the planet. Their earlier albums are unimpeachable but Witchcult Today represented a perfect musical alchemy; their mix of sleaze, occult references, drugs, metal, and '70s heavy rock coming together in a fantastic orgy of obliterating sound. Therefore, my first time listening to Black Masses was with high expectations and at first I must admit I was underwhelmed. What always had impressed me about Electric Wizard was how full the band sounded and something about this album felt flat to me. The drums and the bass, particularly on the opener "Black Mass," did not have the same oomph as before and Jus Oborn’s guitar tone has undergone a change. However, after a few play-throughs of the album, it began to cast its evil spell over me.

Evil is definitely the most apt word to describe Black Masses, Oborn’s lyrics drip with the kind of imagery that should be hokey and cringe worthy in any other setting but comes alive with horror with Oborn’s singing and the backing of the rest of the band. "Venus in Furs" (not a Velvets cover but a reference to the film of the same name) comes closest to the classic Electric Wizard formula but has a killer sing-along chorus that lifts the music to a new level. The buzzing, psychedelic guitar solo that rips out of the song is the final element I needed to hear to decide that yes this is a great album and my only real problem with it is that I expected something else from the group.

The album does tread water a little but it changes with each listen as to which songs I feel are sub-par, suggesting that it might be just my moods that are off. However, there is not a huge amount of variety here aside from the monster, space-time continuum crushing closer "Crypt of Drugula" which completely departs from the rest of Black Masses. A lot of the other songs are interchangeable; songs like "Patterns of Evil" do not do a whole lot more than fill out the disc. Elsewhere, songs like "Satyr IX" and "Turn Off Your Mind" do a much better job of conjuring up the kind of vibes I feel the band are reaching for throughout the album. "Turn Off Your Mind" will easily be regarded as classic Wizard with its perfect blend of rotten psychedelia and phenomenal riffing.

Black Masses may not be Electric Wizard’s best effort but it certainly does not do them an injustice. It may well represent a transitional period for the group and I am interested to hear how the songs sound live and what might come next. In the meantime, I plan to give Black Masses more of my time as Electric Wizard always improve with more exposure.

samples:

• Venus in Furs
• Turn Off Your Mind
• Crypt of Drugula

 

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09 January 2011

Administrator

Albums and Singles

I haven't been paying too much attention to Acid Mothers Temple for quite some time, as their formula of tripped-out, burbling maximalism started to yield rapidly diminishing returns for me after a few albums.  Still, I often find Kawabata's periodic departures from his core sound to be pretty enjoyable and this is one such case: a pair of hypnotically repetitive and largely acoustic solo pieces.  It is always enticing to hear what Makoto can do when he is not rocking out beneath an electronic maelstrom of bloops and whooshes.

Blackest Rainbow

The first half of this album is devoted to its 20-minute title piece, which is based upon an unexpectedly languid and melodic finger-picked acoustic guitar loop.  As it lazily unfolds, something that sounds like a distant and forlorn-sounding French horn emerges to weave a sad and simple melody while a number of other distant moans and whines begin to drift in and out to provide color and passing harmonies.  Shortly after the 7-minute mark, Kawabata steps in to accompany the lonely moans with his own wordless vocals, but soon launches unexpectedly into a half-sung/half-chanted actual verse (aided by a heavy dose of reverb).  At some point during his vocals, the underlying guitar part is surreptitiously (and seamlessly) reversed and a sitar-like buzz becomes more prominent, which is a pretty neat trick.  Soon after, Kawabata's vocals cohere into a lazily repeating refrain of sorts, which he artfully doubles with some sarangi to make it sound like he is being accompanied by a delayed and higher-pitched second vocalist.  The sarangi doppelganger gradually subsumes Makota’s own voice and lulls the song to a fading close.  It's ultimately a likable piece, but it hard to put my finger on exactly why it works, as it is rather amorphous and Kawabata's brief singing interlude seems both anomalous and puzzling.  Even so, it manages to be sleepily mesmerizing and the interplay between the various elements is inventive and well-arranged.  It certainly feels somewhat sketch-like, but the sketch is a promising one.

The second side consists solely of the similarly epic "The Looking Glass Love," which begins with a tense and endlessly repeating acoustic guitar loop and essentially sticks with that as the backbone of the song for its entire duration.  It's a gambit that works quite well, as the endless looping guitar quickly sucks me into the song's pulse and provides a solid foundation for whatever Kawabata feels like throwing at me for the next 20 minutes, which in this case sounds a lot like an darker, unplugged version of AMT's signature spaced-out mindfuckery.  Well, not entirely unplugged, as there is some unrecognizably processed electric guitar involved, but Makoto also employs an eclectic array of other instruments ranging from hurdy-gurdy to tambura.  He seems especially fond of creating buzzing discordant harmonies between multiple droning notes, which nicely enhances the already ample tension and evokes a palpable sense of dread as well. Gradually, the drones threaten to steal the foreground from the guitars and drag the piece towards something that resembles a submerged and warped bagpipe ensemble, but they never quite succeed.  The endless tug-of-war between the song's central guitar motif and the queasy droning and late-song electronic burbling keeps things pretty compelling and makes for a somewhat nerve-jangling but satisfying composition.  Of the two pieces, it is by far my favorite, largely due to its unsettling edge and more engaging pace and structure.

White Summer of Love Dreamer is a pretty likable and unusual release for Makoto, but it is also a somewhat minor one.  However, the album art is quite stunning (a photograph of a particularly desolate and rocky stretch of beach) and fits the music perfectly, so I am happy to keep this around despite its mixed success.  I would love to hear some more work in this vein, but it ishopeless to try to anticipate what Kawabata will do next: this could be a stage in an evolution towards a fruitful organic and drone-informed future or merely a temporary digression.  I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

• White Summer of Love Dreamer
• The Looking Glass Love

 

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09 January 2011

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Albums and Singles

This unique husband-and-wife duo only existed for a few short years, but during that tragically brief window, they managed to record and release such a staggering avalanche of material that even Masami Akita might raise an eyebrow at their tireless pace.  As such, navigating their sprawling discography of mostly limited edition releases is a daunting and complicated task, particularly since the difference between great minimal drone and not-so-great minimal drone is very blurry and difficult to articulate.  Thankfully, this (one of their rare few vinyl releases) provides an excellent starting point.

Blackest Rainbow

The works here were culled from recordings made by Will Long and Dani Baquet-Long over an 18-month period ending in July 2008, about a year before Dani unexpectedly died from heart failure.Althoughpresumably absent from the mixing and assembling of the finished album, Baquet-Long's presence remains quite prominent, as she posthumously provides many of the album's most vibrant elements through her field recordings from Nepal and her perversely festive cover art. Also, of course, she is responsible for a lot of the music, though it is nearly impossible to tell which instruments are being played at any given time (or by whom), as the Celer sound is heavily blurred and processed.  Their closest stylistic kin is probably Disintegration Loops-era William Basinski, as both artists have a propensity for repetition, haziness, and slow-motion drifting, but there are some considerable differences as well.

In characteristic Celer fashion, each side of this release is essentially comprised of just one lengthy piece, but given multiple titled sections that are quite difficult to isolate. The music itself is essentially drone in the most "drone" sense possible, as the pair employ their arsenal of pipe organs, strings, and tapes to create a vaporously shifting bed for a host of swelling and shimmering other indistinct sounds to emerge from and disappear back into.  Such an aesthetic has the potential to be a bit on the dull side, but Celer wisely intersperse their narcotic reveries with untreated field recordings of boisterous crowds from Dani's stay in Kathmandu (as well as a particularly poignant old movie snippet).  The overall effect is like being in an alternately warm and eerily desolate dream, but sometimes drifting back into semi-consciousness to find a somewhat unfamiliar world.  It can be a bit disquieting and sad, but it can also be quite absorbing.

While some of this material was recorded as much as four years ago and has mysteriously avoided being released by a duo that that has historically had no problem in hitting double-digits for releases within a single year, Long has succeeded in shaping the orphaned pieces into a very coherent and satisfying whole.  I am by no means a Celer completist, but Vestiges of an Inherent Melancholy does not fall far short of my current favorite Celer release (2009's Capri) and offers the added perk of not being out of print (also, the glossy cover art is rather striking too, for people who like pretty things).

• One
• Two
• Three

 

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09 January 2011

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Albums and Singles

Former Slowdive drummer Simon Scott has been building up to releasing his debut solo album for quite some time and his meticulousness and deliberation were decidedly not in vain.  Despite Scott's percussionist roots, Navigare is a glacial and often beatless dose of soft-focus sonic heroin that seamlessly integrates his shoegazer past with recent inspiration from ambient experimentalists like Fennesz and Tim Hecker.

 

Miasmah

Since leaving Slowdive in the early ‘90s, Simon Scott has been a fairly busy fellow: he has founded a record label (Kesh Recordings), collaborated with folks like Machinefabriek and Jasper TX, and been a member of two other bands (Seavault and Televise).  Nevertheless, he basically fell off my cultural radar and I almost slept on Navigare as a result, as I basically only remembered him as a guy who played drums very slowly (but well) in a band I liked more than a decade ago.   Upon hearing this, however, it seems that either his talents were grossly underutilized in Slowdive or Simon has undergone a stunning creative evolution over the last decade and a half.  Most likely, the truth lies somewhere between the two.

While it is certainly difficult to completely pin down Miasmah’s aesthetic, Navigare is nevertheless a bit of an aberration from the spectral neo-classicicism with which the label is generally associated.  Scott is certainly akin to many of his label mates in cultivating a haunted and shadowy atmosphere, but is unique in both the considerable density of his work and the incorporation of heavier, more “rock” influences.  The most successful and obvious example of the latter is “The ACC,” which artfully melds hazy shoegazer guitars with a bass-heavy dub influence and murky repeating loop that reminds me strongly of some of Scorn’s better work.  “Flood Inn” also mines quite similar territory, but shifts the emphasis from the rhythm section to the crackling, amorphous haze that surrounds it.

Simon employs a wide arsenal of instrumentation on this album that includes sitars, flutes, and strings, but it is all so warped and heavily processed (in a good way) that it is quite difficult to identify them.  Of course, when a recognizable sound does surface from the billowing fog of warmth and hiss, it can be quite striking (such as the melancholy cello loop that eventually emerges in “Under Crumbling Skies”).  Much more obvious is his fascination with warped field recordings, ruined and degraded loops, and tape hiss (though Scott himself sees Navigare as a “guitar album” in the Kevin Shields/Christian Fennesz sense).  The shimmering, roiling ambiance of “Spring Stars” makes an excellent case for his treated guitar prowess, but his wider masteries of mood, sound-shaping, and layering are what truly make the album memorable.

The overall tone of the album is decidedly one of enveloping, drugged warmth mingled with a ubiquitous lurking disquiet.  One of the conscious objectives for Navigare was to seem simultaneously fluid and scorched, a daunting feat that was largely accomplished (though some individual tracks occasionally plunge too strongly into dissonance or bleakness to maintain the delicate balance).  Despite those very narrow aesthetic confines, Scott has achieved an impressive degree of variety and emotional depth, making Navigare a very strong and self-assured first album.

Samples:

• Under Crumbling Skies
• The ACC
• The Night and the Artificial Light  

 

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06 January 2011

Matthew Amundsen

Albums and Singles

Liam Singer’s second album overflows with beautiful piano playing and the album’s tone is frequently gorgeous, but he doesn’t do much new with his classical style and his efforts have little overall effect. The album works best as dinner music, albeit the type that’s forgotten as soon as the meal is digested.

Tell-All

Most of the instrumentals would work as the soundtrack to some melancholy film, but they aren’t differentiated enough on their own to be particularly engaging or memorable. "The Hero, the Cube, and the Flower" as well as "Left Ventricle/Tone Clusters" are nice, but take so much from the Philip Glass playbook that all they need is some chanting in Hopi to make them complete. While earnest, Singer’s voice is a little too precious and naïve for my taste and becomes annoying after a while. He has guest operatic vocals on three travelogues spread throughout the disc, the latter of which is my favorite, but there’s not enough of an implied narrative to make these as worthwhile as they could be.

Although abounding in talent, this album lacks the drama implied by the title and the secret, whatever it may be, lies forever in its watery grave.

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06 January 2011

Matthew Amundsen

Albums and Singles

This improvisatory freakout featuring Nels Cline and Zach Hill was recorded in one day in Chicago. The four long tracks comprising this album consist of drums, electronics, and guitar in fairly equal doses. As cathartic as it may have been to perform, some of its intent gets lost in the recording.

Temporary Residence

These songs get pretty abstract, as can be expected with improvised music, but they’re really more effective when the group heads in the same direction. Carla Bozulich had a hand in editing these tracks in post-production, but for the most part the edits seem arbitrary because each song’s elements are so similar, particularly on the first two, "Enduring Freedom" and "Fork-Fed." The most engaging and enjoyable song is also the album’s longest, "Deathwatch on the American Empire," which builds to a fairly straight but heavy finale. The electronics, while always present, take the foreground on "Space Needle," which is nice change.

While each of the tracks has some decent moments, sometimes the album seems to prefer chaos for its own sake. That’s not necessarily a bad achievement in itself, but it doesn’t always make for a compelling recording.

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06 January 2011

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Albums and Singles

Completed shortly before his untimely passing earlier this year, Nikki Sudden's last album is also one of his strongest. While his songwriting and lyrics are as tight as ever, the backing musicians play as if the songs are their own and lend them a distinctive urgency. Sudden will be sorely missed and this album, with its bittersweet mix of melancholy and exuberance, proves why.

 

Secretly Canadian

Sudden remains faithful to his glam and blues rock influences, styles he's perfected over the years. The blistering opener "Seven Miles" sets the tone for this album with its searing dual guitars and buoyant rhythm section. "Don't Break My Soul" continues the momentum before things get a little slower and a little darker on "The Ballad of Johnny and Marianne" and "Talking to the Wrong Guy." He's never complacent, either, injecting an unexpected moment of bliss on the otherwise rocking "Empire Blues." "Green Shield Stamps" finds him reminiscing about his youth, mentioning friends he hadn't seen since those days, his profound discovery of T-Rex, and the bands formed by him and his brother Epic Soundtracks. While Sudden may have strayed a bit with maturity from the anarchic impulses of his time in the Swell Maps, "Black Tar" isn't too far from that sound with its loud, heavy distortion. Yet the closer, "All This Buttoning and Unbuttoning," is a contemplative instrumental with Sudden on piano, highlighting the range of his songwriting abilities.

Sudden also handled the production duties on this album, augmenting tracks with keyboards and complementary backing vocals in all the right places to round out the compositions and give them proper depth and warmth. The songs themselves, with their faded angels, unfulfilled promises, and haunted loves, showcase Sudden's strengths and versatility to the very end.

samples:

• Seven Miles
• Jet Star Groove
• Black Tar

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06 January 2011

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This set of superficially disassembled songs has its roots solidly planted in structured rock genres, but the production lifts it into a gorgeous leftfield. The fake brown paper bag artwork and the abandoned camper van on the cover give the album a discarded look, which is partially true. This lost 2005 debut from San Francisco's Sic Alps (in their trio incarnation) has been thankfully pulled from limbo and abandoned in plain view for the world’s listening pleasure.

Animal Disguise

Swimming through thick and thin psychedelic atmospheres, these songs come to the fore of the record like rediscovered field hollers and wan white-boy blues. The majority of these twelve tracks come in too short, eagerly grabbing attention and then leaving too soon. These cooling furnace blasts of fuzzed distant verse and chorus music are buried way back in spluttering drums and wrenched warped guitar. Rooted in simple song configurations, the production keeps the bare bones afloat in wobbling hissy waves and scalped psychedelic guitar drones.

The opening "Battle of Breton Woods" is a cavernous Jandekian sounding minute long intro, bashed and trashed guitar leaking all over the place. Some of the music here skims the looser edges of NY noise rock, the best example of which is "Surgeon and the Slave" with its paint-flaying notes and mumbled vocals. The wind tunnel vocals of "Reconnection Land"s lethargic stomp open up the higher frequency channels for some Mary Chain buzz-pop white-out. There’s evidence of a lighter touch too in songs like "I Know Where Madness Goes", the fumblingly distant acoustic guitar and abandoned vocals summoning up broken hearts and strings. The simplicity of the vocal and piano (and hiss) cut "I am Grass" opens up a path for Sic Alps to sign up for some weird folk action in the future.

Not being aware of where they are now, this is a good place for a beginner like me to jump aboard the Sic Alps train. Time to hunt down the rest.

samples:

• Battle of Breton Woods
• I am Grass
• Morning Waltz

 

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05 January 2011

Administrator

Albums and Singles

A gaggle of faceless musicians toting horns, keys, and a secondhanddrum kit shuffle into a practice space and start tuning up. Over thenoise, a disembodied voice intones, "This... is supreme understanding."A sitar player accompanied by an army of other Hindustani classicalinstrumentalists show up. Without a word, the collected players beginto play, with the mysterious spiritual presence guiding the session.Gurus in the background occasionally drop nuggets of knowledge andteases of enlightenment in between sets.

Mush

That is S.E.V.A., a joint project between Gone Beyond and one-timeteenage hip hop prodigy Mumbles. After making his mark with productioncredits on A Book of Human Language (with Aceyalone on the mic),Mumbles spent several years exploring mysticism and religioustraditions, studying spirituality with gurus in the US and abroad. Whathe found—enlightenment, total consciousness or maybe just some reallygreat hash—S.E.V.A. itself is a New Age double entendre: a Sanskritword meaning "selfless service," and an acronym for the credo "spiritevolves via awareness." And luckily, that's the only bit of what somemight label "New Age bullshit" to pop up on the entire record.

Whateverthe music's intent or holier-than-thou bent, Mumbles and Gone Beyonduse their production skills to more or less faithfully emulate theaforementioned uncommon jam session, with numerous other sounds andmoods included in the scope. Jazz and R&B drum breaks anchorcascading strings and otherworldly flutes. Sparsely arranged meditativeand moody moments suddenly give way to sonorous rises, and there arelight-hearted moments of whimsy, accompanying the spoken mumbo-jumboand keeping it palatable. However, these moments are like lush fertilehills in between long desolate valleys. Far too much of SEVA is emptylike this, as if the lead player forgets his bit while his backingband faithfully plays along waiting for him to remember—or if someoneforgot to include the vocal track in the final mix of a hip hop joint.Such tantalizing but ultimately empty (maybe it's a spiritual message)vestiges are all the suffering patient ears left thirsty from A Book ofHuman Language Days get. It almost seems as if Mumbles is torturingthem, stringing them along with drum sequences and killer loops thatany fool could lay a rhyme over, and then pulling back to themeditiative grooves, leaving the hip hop set blueballed while offendingjazz cats with the empty spaces' wasted potential.

Maybe there'ssomething I'm missing—I might not be on S.E.V.A.'s spiritualconsciousness trip. For my part, I'll remember Carl Spackler'swords—"Gunga-gulunga"—while I wait for Mumbles to return to the fold ofMCs. They miss him, and if Mumbles' search for consciousness can't findthat out, he's meditating under the wrong tree.

samples:

• Spirit Evolution
• Suspended Animation
• Soul Surgery

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05 January 2011

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Most of Edward Ka-Spel's mid-'80s China Doll albums have beenunavailable for many years.  The songs themselves have appeared onvarious compilations, but sometimes in a modified form, rarely with theoriginal track listings, and never with the original artwork. Anal-retentive fans have been drumming their fingers patiently,waiting, waiting...
Beta-Lactam Ring

With Laugh China Doll, Beta-lactam Ring Records has begun thewelcome process of re-releasing these works in their originalform.  As an added bonus—or annoyance, depending on your pointof view—the coupons included with the albums can be redeemed for adisk of previously unreleased music (be careful when you pull the CDout of the cool "mini vinyl" gatefold sleeve; the coupon is small andeasily lost).

Due to the liquification of the original master tapes, Laugh China Doll (and the included Dance China Dollmaxi-single) could not be properly remastered.  But thanks tometiculous clean-vinyl restoration the sound quality is incredible andthe album has never sounded as dynamic (though there are occasionalpops, cracks and moments of slight distortion).  As for the songsthemselves, the majority of them are classics.  Some do sufferfrom dated, repetitive, and frankly annoying drum programming ("Lisa'sFuneral," "Eye Contact") or fail to come together in a coherent way("Find the Lady"), but the bulk of the album covers Ka-Spel's strongpoints: the haunting melodies of "Requiem" and "Lady Sunshine," theepic war story "Atomic Roses," and "Lilith's Daughter," a voodoo taleof easy sex told through a traumatized child's eyes.  Thehighpoint for me is "Even Now," a duet with the mysterious Lily AK, andit remains a perfect example of Ka-Spel at his most effective: just asimple keyboard line and some heartbreaking lyrics.  Two livetracks from 1988 are also included, just so you'll know what it soundslike when a guy with a hammer bashes the heck out of a concrete block.

Laugh China Doll is a unique slice of early-'80s budgetelectronics.  The keyboards may be creaky and the effects a littlecheesy, but it starts off the China Doll series with a bang, and itmeets my single criteria for aural goodness: "I like how it sounds."

samples:

• Lilith's Daughter
• Requiem
• Even Now

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