Having enjoyed Mono's last couple of records and their subsequent live dates, I was eager to check out this DVD that documents their tour and time in the studio. Unfortunately, the documentary reveals little new information and struggles with distilling the essence of the band.
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Czech psych group Seven That Spells add Acid Mother Makoto Kawabata into their fold for an album that sounds almost exactly like an Acid Mothers record. Be that as it may, it is still a high-quality recording that holds its own against some of that band's better material.
Excepter's fourth album seems like an obnoxious mess at first, but repeated listens reveal patterns in the chaos. Using deceptively simplistic beats, electronics, swimming voices, and even a bass clarinet for good measure, they add rich textures to uneasy rhythms for music that is ridiculously addictive.
The four untitled tracks that make up No Canal are stylistically both familiar and new. While two of the songs feature the mechanical churning of previous Mouthus efforts, the other two stray from the group's comfort zone with mixed results.
The new work from Mike Gallagher of Isis finds him using a subtle touch with sparse guitars and hazy drones to create instrumental atmospherics with a dramatic edge. While it works great as background music, there are also plenty of nuances to reward attentive listening.
Starving Weirdos Brian Pyle and Merrick McKinlay and guests don their wizard robes to invoke unknown realms of existence. Some of the methods may change from song to song, but each has an allure and mystery all its own.
The Trunk label rescues from extinction Vernon Elliot's composition for two 1960s children's TV shows: the charming Ivor The Engine and the decidedly surreal Pogles Wood.
E.E and The Owl Archimedes love dancing to death... literally. Adoringly these two sculptors have put one of the world's most-revered tunes to the chopping block and, by virtue of its eradication, developed a new spectrum of radiant sounds and mutant un-rhythms to enjoy. This is a requiem for the dancing queen, who in death sounds as marvelous as she did in life.
This rare second album from the band gets new life, five extra bonus tracks, and a bit wider recognition on its reissue on Tzadik (on the "Fullforce Composer Series," seriously John, is there a series to go along with every album you release?). All kidding aside, that is a pretty good description of the style presented here. Shards of metal, hardcore punk, jazz, and the avant garde all come together here, somehow as a congealed package.
By all accounts this is a metal album. From the dark, lo-fi black-and-white artwork, gore-ified fonts and titles, I expected some form of death or black metal, and I was pretty much right on target. Now, knowing the label that put this out, I assumed it couldn't be just any generic metal album, because Alien8 is known for leaning towards the experimental.
