Some album titles are more apt than others but this is one album whose name rings true. With the heart stopping slabs of guitar paired with some serious musical exploration, Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley have looked beyond their usual extreme music surroundings and recruit some truly surprising collaborators for their most ambitious album to date.
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One of Robin Storey’s many strengths has been to the ability to translate the genius loci of his north England homeland into musical artifacts. Listening to Dark Rivers put me in a headspace of animistic communion with the internal and external landscapes he evokes. As the title suggests, they were mostly of an aquatic nature. These songs are fluid, amorphous, ever shifting, snaking like water from creek to river to ocean, and layered in time (spanning from monolithic rock glyphs to the military-industrial complex of the Cold War) as well as in space.
Based upon their childlike and almost self-parodyingly reductionist name and rather Dungeons and Dragons-inspired cover art, I expected Dark Castle to either be unintentionally hilarious or the most abrasive, evil, soul-withering doom metal band I have ever heard. Much to my surprise, they were neither. This male/female doom-psych duo has crafted an impressive, assured, and surprisingly melodic debut.
It's dark outside, the windows are open, and the light in the room is slowly bleeding into the shapelessness outside. A trickle of sound pours out of the speakers and evokes a half-frightened reflex; it isn't clear whether something just moved outside the house or if Haptic just added a new element to their droning melancholy. In slow, measured steps, and with liquid ease, The Medium plays out like a subdued, but troubling soundtrack to an unreleased David Lynch film. It's filled with both tense uncertainty and cool atmospheres drowned in low-end heaviness.
Omar Souleyman's work inhabits the blurry region that separates "embarrassingly misguided and inept pop" from "brilliant outsider art." Despite that, this cadaverously aloof Syrian is the reigning king of his country's cassette kiosks and an extremely popular wedding singer (and rightly so). This is bizarre even by Sublime Frequencies standards.
As part of a campaign to reissue the neglected discography of Manchester post-punk label Object Music, LTM's Boutique Label presents this collection of the entire recorded output of Grow Up, the project of Spherical Objects guitarist and Manchester Musicians Collective member John Bisset-Smith. A six-piece featuring brass and woodwinds, Grow Up combines stripped-down, youthful pop-punk with sophisticated chamber pop and hints of Beefheartian skronk.
Despite having numerous releases on nearly every format imaginable, this is the first 7" from this Ohio threesome. I was afraid that two sides of a 7" would not give them enough time to generate the intoxicating music that I expect from Emeralds but they have conjured up two beautiful miniatures that encapsulate their long-form compositions without sacrificing any quality.
Another chapter in LTM's Boutique Label reissue campaign of obscure Manchester post-punk label Object Music, this collection presents more than 100 minutes of experiments, improvisations, skewed pop, drone-laden blues, minimal electronic synthpop and weird, dislocated Nurse With Wound-style audio surrealism. A reissue of a double-album originally issued in 1980—a collaborative release by labelmates Steve Solamar (Spherical Objects) and Steve Miro—Sheep From Goats was certainly the most adventurous release by Object Music during its brief existence.
This vinyl-only release from one of Japan's finest psych bands has truly snuck out without fanfare. Currently only available as a very small run LP (although the label appear to be planning to repress it), this is the best releases in Up-Tight's already impressive catalogue. This LP sees them thrust their sound into the abyss and they jump fearlessly in after it.
Words like armageddon and visionary get tossed about around David Tibet (for good reason) but with this latest album, these words seem too small and meek. As hinted on Black Ships Ate the Sky and the split EP with Om, David Tibet has embraced a blistering rock aesthetic for his apocalyptic visions. Sounding as psychedelic as Of Ruine Or Some Blazing Starre or The Inmost Light trilogy, there is also a heaviness here not heard since the noisy tape loops of Current 93's embryonic period. Tibet sings of Aleph (an Adam-like character), murder, and destruction as a huge cast of musicians and vocalists create a backdrop worthy of his vision.
