02 August 2009

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Albums and Singles

This lovingly assembled tribute to revered, yet remarkably obscure, folkie Kath Bloom combines one album of covers by a haphazard array of semi-famous fans with a retrospective of some of Bloom’s own material.  While certainly an enjoyable curiosity, the covers album does not come close to capturing the fragile intensity and beauty of the original material.

 

Chapter Music

The vast bulk of Kath Bloom’s work was recorded in New Haven, CT with experimental guitarist Loren Mazzacane Connors between 1978 and 1984.  While both artists have achieved some degree of counter-cultural renown in the ensuing decades, their partnership was decidedly not a lucrative one at the time: Connors was working as a janitor at Yale, Bloom was a gardener at a cemetery, and nearly all of their releases were put out in very limited editions on Connors’ own Daggett and Saint Joan labels.  Two decades later, those largely ignored original releases are highly sought-after and exorbitantly expensive, possibly because Connors is rumored to have thrown out his unsold stock in the mid-'80s (after marriages and relocations forced the duo to go their separate ways).

Both Bloom and Connors stopped recording music for quite some time after their creative dissolution, though Bloom’s creative hiatus lasted considerably longer than Connors’.  However, tapes continued to circulate and a post-mortem fanbase steadily grew through word-of-mouth.  One of those fans was Richard Linklater, who prominently featured  “Come Here” in Before Sunrise, inspiring Bloom to begin releasing new material again in the late ‘90s.  Time, thankfully,  has only enhanced Bloom’s singing and songwriting and she is belatedly edging towards deservedly achieving the reputation of similarly rediscovered folkies like Karen Dalton and Vashti Bunyan. 

Loving Takes This Course originated from a conversation Bloom had several years ago with her filmmaker friend Caveh Zahedi in which she mentioned that she’d like to hear other people record her songs.  Zahedi was very enthusiastic about the idea and contacted Chapter Records head Guy Blackman.  Together, they spent the next two years contacting all of their musician friends and slowly assembling a full album of material.

The artists appearing on the tribute album are a rather eclectic assemblage both geographically and fame-wise, but most fall squarely in the Americana/indie rock realm stylistically.  Several of the better tracks come from artists that I am unfamiliar with, such as Meg Baird’s raw and minimal rendition of “There Was A Boy” or Peggy Frew’s swaying, jazzy take on “Window” (accompanied by The Dirty Three’s Mick Turner).  There are also a number of enjoyable interpretations by artists that I did not expect much from, such as Sweden’s The Concretes, Scout Niblett, and Mia Doi Todd.  The album’s clear highlight, however, is Devendra Banhart’s raucous Motown-meets-The Velvet Underground version of “Forget About Him”.  The only disappointment was Mark Kozelek’s unexceptional re-envisioning of “Finally,” as I am usually rabidly enthusiastic about nearly everything he does.  That said, the tribute album is merely pleasant, not spectacular or essential.  Aside from Banhart and Baird, this is a relatively tame and quietly reverent affair.

The Kath Bloom disc, however, is great.  There are at least three songs here that I will probably still be listening to ten years from now (“Come Here”, “Forget About Him”, and “I Wanna Love”).  Notably, two of those are from Bloom’s post-Sunrise return and all three were written by Bloom herself, which is noteworthy because she was not originally a serious musician: her earliest collaborations with Connors were odd spoken-word performance art pieces.  Speaking of Connors, he is not as heavily represented here as I would’ve expected, as only seven of the fifteen songs originated from their collaborations.  Then again, this is Bloom’s show, so it makes sense that this collection would skew heavily towards her recent, better produced, and more accessible material.  While her experimentally tinged lo-fi work was certainly important and unique, her songwriting noticably progressed with age, so much of her strongest and  most timeless material dates from her creative resurrection.  That said, there is still some excellent early work here, such as “Window” and the tender “The Breeze/My Baby Cries,” but experimentalism is largely absent (aside from Connors’ subtle wordless moaning).

When Bloom is at her best, her vulnerable, quivering voice imbues her heartbreaking songs with an irresistible power and humanity.  That, of course, is largely the reason that a tribute album is somewhat inherently doomed: Bloom has written some absolutely sublime songs, but no one will ever be able to perform them as strikingly as Bloom herself.  Nevertheless, this collection is fine introduction to a singular artist and any widely available Bloom release is cause for excitement.  The retrospective disc has not left my CD player since it arrived.

samples

• Kath Bloom - Come Here
  
• Kath Bloom - I Wanna Love
  
• Devendra Banhart - Forget About Him  

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02 August 2009

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Albums and Singles

I have had a long time love affair with the first generation of electronic music composers. Perhaps it is akin to the way I used to romanticize the early explorers of America when I was a young boy, only now I geek out over those who pioneered circuit boards. Gordon Mumma was such a pioneer, exploring the cybersonic world with his own home built audio devices. His music partook in the spirit of joyful discovery that was evident throughout those early years, while also being physically visceral.

 

New World Records

“Megaton for Wm. Burroughs” opens with a searing blast, a long overdriven tone that gradually builds in intensity, the hot white heat of a nuclear decimation, than fades like smoke from a mushroom cloud. The sounds of laser ray guns emerge from the ruins, a chirping crossfire of blips and squeaks. Strangled strings and other oddments are played ONCE group, whose members included Robert Ashley, as accompaniment to Mumma’s tape composition. As the piece progresses the bleeps are elongated into psychoactive slurs, trailing electric glissandos, the white fuzz of a burned out television set. For awhile no clear reception is present, but then voices come in: different military men giving orders and reports in each speaker, along with the rat-a-tat-tat of machine guns. The song ends with the steady hi-hat taps of simple jazz percussion. I can see why this song was written for William Burroughs: it is very evocative of the apocalyptic interzone he inhabited.

Three out of the four songs collected here were used originally as accompaniment for actors in various stage productions. While all were able to stand on their own, apart from attendant theatrics, sometimes it seemed that I would have been able to get more out of them if I had been present to see what was going on. “Conspiracy 8,” co-written with Stephen Smoliar, is a case in point. It consists mainly of atonal feedback in varying degrees of amplitude, strange rustlings, and the occasional ding of a clerk bell. Laughter from the audience is heard at various points throughout, though I don’t hear in the music what it is that might be funny. It is still enjoyable, but since I can’t see what is going on, I won’t be joining with the laughter. “Cirqualz” by contrast, is far funnier. Starting with the opening bars from Beethoven’s Third Symphony, and a voice that says “those two whiplashes of sound that shattered the elegant formality o the eighteenth century”, before moving into a series of brief, but disarranged, sections of circus, marching, and romantic music. Sounds of fireworks filter in, exploding above the symphonic fanfare that is now slightly drowned out by synthesizer gurgles. It all ends rather abruptly with a screech of brakes and a cinematic car crash.

“Cybersonic Cantilevers” is a gem, and for me the highlight of the album. For this piece Mumma invited public participants to join him in supplying sounds of their own choice into microphones and cassette decks, which he then processed in real time with his cybersonic equipment during a day long sound installation. The 19 minutes here are a condensation of the last hour of the performance, assembled from what he was able to capture with a portable recorder. It begins with a hyper rock and roll snippets juxtaposed with the gravelly voices of detective radio dramas. The stops, starts, and fast switches between these sound sources, all accompanied by weird effects, creates a brilliant off-kilter rhythm, before dissolving into a beautifully mesmerizing drone for the second half of the song.

The works presented here span the years from 1964 to 1980. This is an important document from an important American composer, and the perfect addition to the library of anyone collecting early electronic music.

samples:

• Megaton For Wm Burroughs
• Cirqualz
• Cybersonic Cantilevers

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02 August 2009

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Albums and Singles

Despite its utterly mystifying and goofy lenticular packaging, My Cat Is An Alien’s contribution to Staalplaat’s long-running studio session series is a very focused, formidable, and often incendiary affair.  The Opalio brothers have a refreshingly unique and calculated aesthetic that more closely resembles an inspired evolution of free jazz than anything being done by their peers in the noise underground.

 

Staalplaat

My Cat Is An Alien’s story has an improbably fairy-tale-esque origin: in 1997, Maurizio and Roberto Opalio released their debut CD-R (limited to 30 copies) and sent one to Thurston Moore.  Within two months, they were making their live debut as the opening act for Sonic Youth’s Italian tour.  Since then, the duo have released an ungodly number of limited edition records and CD-Rs on their own Opax label, and made split albums with underground luminaries ranging from Loren Mazzacane Connors to Mats Gustafson to Jim O’Rourke.  Notably, the Opax releases are generally housed in very arty handmade packaging, often featuring paintings by Roberto.  With that historical precedent, it is difficult to process why this release looks like a gimmicky ‘80s baseball card and features a cartoon cat turning into an alien.

The exceedingly cryptic packaging gives no information about the music contained within, but Mort Aux Vaches consists of three lengthy works.  The opening piece fades in with crackling vinyl, twinkling bells, and a slowly intensifying drone of gently shimmering guitars.  Soon, some subtly burbling and spacey synthesizers begin to float pleasantly above the mix.  However, that idyll is violently shattered by the harsh, almost animal wail of a treated guitar and the previously restrained spacey electronics increase in intensity before being ultimately engulfed in a rising surge of roaring static.

The second song is nearly half an hour long and effectively dominates the album.  It begins with an incredibly dense maelstrom of chittering and oscillating sci-fi electronics augmented by cymbal flourishes and buried guitar moans.  Slowly, the quivering chaos intensifies, the cymbals become more spirited, and deep tribal drums creep into the mix.  Gradually the drums steal the focus, as a very insistent crash cymbal joins the pounding toms.  Around the eight-minute mark, however, the propulsive tribalism disappears and the swirling electronic chaos asserts its supremacy once more.  However, it is soon enhanced by some incredibly cathartic swooping guitar noises that sound like a family of dying elephants.  Eventually, it all ebbs and a haunting ambient interlude of bells and a swelling, phase-shifting synthesizer wash emerges from the twittering, rippling electronic wreckage.  That spooky foundation is maintained for an extremely long-time, but never becomes any less compelling, as an ever-shifting cloud of frothing improvised noise weirdness colors it.  Shortly before the song ends, however, a mournful menagerie of strangled guitars appears and breaks the hypnotic spell.

Not unlike the first piece, the third song opens with pleasantly glistening guitar ambiance and a loop of spacey laser noises (the Opalio brothers are quite fond of incorporating toys into their work).  The ambiance subtly throbs and wavers and increases in intensity until it is joined by a deep, rumbling percussion loop and feedback-heavy squalls of agonized guitar and gurgling, lurching electronics.  It all coheres into a roaring, howling crescendo, then slowly fades away, leaving only a lonely ride cymbal in its wake.

There is nothing accidental or sloppy about these songs: Roberto and Mauricio make it abundantly clear that they know exactly what they are doing at all times and have recorded a decidedly complex, visceral, and textured set.  I have not delved too deeply into MCIAA’s back catalog (being an MCIAA completist would result in my instant financial ruin), but it seems like this would be an excellent first album to get for anyone unfamiliar with their work.  This is devastating and deliberate work- it is exceedingly rare for improvised music to work at such a gut-level.

Samples:

• One
• Two
• Three

 

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01 August 2009

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Albums and Singles

Primarily the duo of Heather Young and Noah Anthony—though others have been dragged in along the way—Social Junk uses pounding beats and minimal synth to concoct some of the most pummeling pop this side of the sun. With drenched vocals and spare but wisely utilized parts the duo draw on tactics as far reaching as industrial, post-punk and Krautrock in their rugged and broken songcraft. This, their most recent sonic tastament, reaches even further into their warped world.

 

Digitalis

Interestingly, the group is known for producing vastly different results, swerving between proto-industrial clunk to spacey synth pop over the course of albums and even songs. "Champos '08," for example, features electronic crud mixed in with rotator blades and squeal that reads more like some basement Michigan noise project, while the percussive organicism of "Dirty Cloud" largely explores a much more overtly pretty side of psychedelia. Concussion Summer, their most recent full length on the Not Not Fun label, grinds out mostly instrumental clatter that is in constant flux. This one seems to meld the brazenly fried feel of the latter while persuasively melding it with a kind of numb song form whose fuel is in its monotanous, dead-to-the-world attitude.

This is more or less clear right from the opener, "It Just Isn't the Same," whose constant thud is at once primitive and futuristic, the battle cry for an interstellar war fought with spears and rocks. While the parts are all simple—the three note synth melody unendingly stuttering forward, the bleating scrapes—they are mixed so masterfully, brought forth, drawn back, reworked, that the sound is in constant motion, providing a spaced drift for the half-dead vocals to drift across.

"Those Final Seconds," which begins with a fax machine running across the rattles of snakes and delayed vocal punctuations, creates a sort of endless loop that feels overwhelmingly trapped, stuck in place until, somehow, it manages to wriggle itself into slightly new positions, slowly freeing itself of its confines while free rock drum clatter mashes it to a pulp from beneath. This is some blown out stuff and truly fried material, a sax bellowing outward signaling the approaching peak of a seven-minute buildup. Having wrestled itself free, "Grief" seems to a signal a kind of anti-climax, a new and placid world where synths drape over one another as they reach toward a mangled synth pop dreamworld as abstract as it is tangible. Jon Rickman and Bobby Caution join the duo on this (Rickman also plays on the title track), giving it a more full sound while still retaining the distorted peace within the work. It serves as a fine example of the different sounds the group can draw upon while still managing to sound like itself.

The following title track, the longest work on the album, moves between so many modes that it's tough to pin down. It glitches about, building and dying under its own weight like a Robert Ashley piece gone awry, or better yet as covered by Dead C. It is a true monster that feeds right into the brief "Behind a Wall" before the smoldering simmer of "Someone Upstairs" drifts through the coals. When all is said and done it is difficult to not be a convert, and even tougher not to believe in the group's increasing potential. Every release seems to push the bar further, and this one is another impressive statement along their path, as twisted as it is sincere.

samples:

• Grief
• Born Into It
• Someone Upstairs

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01 August 2009

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Albums and Singles

Carelessness, especially the calculated variety, has become a default pose for the indie rocker of today. The music of Dustin Wong radiates the same casual sensibility, but that comes from his art rather than his manners. His first solo album, Seasons, is lazy, lighthearted, and scatterbrained, but Wong's musicianship welds its disparate elements into a unified piece of art.

 

Wildfire Wildfire

Wong has already developed a singular style despite not being a veteran guitarist. Whether it’s heard in the primitivistic stadium-rock of his main band, Ponytail or in long-form minimalist compositions through his former membership in Ecstatic Sunshine, his playing is distinctive. Both bands are linked by Wong’s preference for jazzy chords and sudden bursts of rapid-fire strumming. Not limited to the guitar, he plays a multitude of instruments on Seasons while keeping to the same joyous, anarchic style.

Seasons is divided into four long suites; named (appropriately enough) after the seasons. These suites are nothing but collections of song fragments which bear little immediate similarity to each other. A fragment will consist of a simple riff or chord sequence repeated with little variation. Then at some arbitrary point, Wong will stop the piece, as if he’d forgotten an errand, and abruptly start another. Yet what we hear is not sloppiness, but the organic division of one idea and the next. And having so many ideas, Wong needs to quickly move along. He covers a vast amount of musical territory in that fashion.  A swirling mass of looped synthesizers will follow a chiming instrumental on an acoustic guitar. A cloud of delayed autoharp will condense into the stiff ticking of a drum machine. First time listeners cannot guess what they will hear, only that it will be engaging. In Seasons, nothing sounds inevitable but everything sounds natural.

Like his bandmates in Ponytail, Wong cultivates a naïve, childlike style. On his own, he doesn’t practice the kind of grating babble-lyrics that accompany his band, but there is a mildly regressive quality to his solo-project. Some of that can be attributed to the unhinged shredding that he occasionally breaks into. These technical passages thankfully aren't irritating because they are brief and exuberant, not plodding and pretentious. Wong isn’t trying to impress but to entertain.

The other part in Wong’s naïve style comes from the album’s bright, drifting keyboard instrumentals; their lilting arpeggios recall the gentle cloud-world soundtracks of Super Mario Bros 3. Like the composers for Nintendo, Wong transcends the expressive limitations of primitive digital keyboards through melodic complexity. His tinny synthesizer tones sway in counterpoint like images in a cybernetic daydream. In both instances, the cuteness in Wong’s music seems genuinely idiosyncratic. Unlike the slick, well socialized aesthetes of contemporary indie-pop, he does seem like a dork and comes off the better for it.

It may appear piecemeal but Seasons reveals its merit when heard in its entirety. Wong’s distinctiveness as a musician remains intact through the album’s wild variations of mood and style. Unlike most practitioners of modern rock, he doesn’t need a predetermined mode to compensate for a lack of skill or individuality (as opposed to individualism). The unity of Seasons is like the unity of a person: various but still recognizable. Time softens the discord of its assorted parts and eventually a clear picture of the artist’s mind will emerge.

samples:

• Winter Spring
• Spring Summer
• Summer Fall

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01 August 2009

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Albums and Singles

Marc Richeter's Black to Comm project has always been more or less singular in its scope, seeking no less than than the outer reaches of deep drone meditation. Calling on Renate Nikolaus and Ulf Schutte to contribute electronics, bells, percussion, violins, water and more on top of his own monolithic organ play, Richter has crafted a monster with this lone 35-minute piece. Just make sure submersion is an attractive state before descending.

 

Digitalis

With the sudden emergence of a new drone dialect in underground music, Richter brings a classical sense to his concoctions, drawing on the likes of Steve Reich's organ works, La Monte Young's extended sense of time, Hermann Nitsch's sound world and Charlemagne Palestine's power far more than psychedelic babble steeped in rounded edges. His is a focused maelstrom, less concerned with dips into the nether regions of his mind than in sharp trajectories directly towards the sun. Starting with a microcosm of a drone, the piece largely develops itself as an extended crescendo, continuously moving steadily forward into ever deeper waters.

This sort of constant upheaval in a piece has a way of falling short, but Richter is wiser than a lot of his cohorts, instead focusing on an internal build rather than one extending out from itself. The bulk of the work is enshrouded in the subtle organ play, which reads as singular in any given moment but whose constant flux is clear over the course of the work. Within that cloud Nikolaus and Schutte are constantly building, laying down increasinly kinetic details that clatter, murmur and spew there way out of the organ flow like larvae out of a heated pool. Nothing ever takes hold though, the chatter instead serving to divert attention away from the bold organ drone which, somehow, ingrains a kind of festering bother in the listener whose creepiness is far more internal and personal than overt drawings upon darkness.

Half way through the work breaks up entirely, the tickling metallics fumbling forward until, at last, the work explodes under its own weight. A thick smoke, sharp atop the smooth drone, ricochets across while warbling electronics distort themselves into dreams haunted by wolves and ghosts and ivy. By the time it all comes to a fore it has buried itself so deep that any semblance of self is surrounded, blown apart by the sheer quantity of sound. This, it seems, is why they recommend it be played loudly.

This sort of slow development does more than its share of demolition, but it also reveals a fully realized vision and a musician whose focus and sonic sense are at once contributing to and one step removed from so much of the drone music coming out now. This is not music to take drugs to so much as it is music as drug, an intoxicating and immersive experience akin to the very MC5 song it is named after. Not in sound perhaps, but certainly in attitude and scope.

samples:

• Charlemagne & Pippin

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26 July 2009

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Albums and Singles

The passing of bassist Evan Farrell was enough to make Jason Molina think about breaking up the band, according to some recent interviews. Instead, Molina turned to his guitar and ended up writing what might be the best Magnolia Electric Co. record since the group's 2003 debut. Josephine finds the band looking forwards and backwards, breaking new ground and mining old territory and creating something strangely seductive in the process.

 

Secretly Canadian

Molina has been surprisingly candid about his latest record. He doesn't quite explain Josephine, but he doesn't hide the fact that it is a reckoning with the death of a friend and fellow musician. Appropriately, the record is one of the darkest the Company has crafted. In places it recalls the subterranean gloom and lonely isolation of the best Songs: Ohia records, but it doesn't linger in the past long enough to be a step backwards. From the opening "O! Grace," which features a surprising sax solo, to the romance of "Rock of Ages" and the punchy organ on "Little Sad Eyes," Molina and his band avoid falling into clichés by refusing to sit still. The variety of musical styles and instrumentation is, in part, a tribute to the ideas Farrell had for this record, but also proof positive that Molina is one of the best songwriters this country has. He moves gracefully from the straight rock of "Josephine" and "The Handing Down" to the woeful sludge of "Knoxville Girl" and the bar-room balladry of "Heartbreak at Ten Paces." Keeping these disparate adventures in tact is Molina's magical lyricism, which deserves a review of its own in many ways. Although the familiar images of horizons, bells, moons, and birds persist on this record, they acquire a personal dimension in light of Molina's forwardness.

It would be easy to say that Josephine is a concept record about the loss of a bandmate, but that'd sell Molina's songwriting ability short. Perhaps the most emotionally overwhelming song on the record, "Whip-Poor-Will," was written at least as early as 2003. It appeared on the bonus CD to the Magnolia Electric Co. debut in acoustic form and it remains largely unchanged lyrically. So, while the song might sound like a letter to the deceased, it is more likely a song about loss and mortality in general. With Molina it's hard to tell, however. He's called the lyrics to "Josephine" a rebus and refused to say too much about who or what Josesphine is. As honest as he is on this record, he's also just as obscure and impressionistic as he's always been.

Josephine focuses a lot on ghosts, hope, and believing in something, but that only solidifies the album's central figure enough to make her something less than an abstract name on paper. She's mentioned throughout the record with references to hope, freedom, and foolishness surrounding her. On "Hope Dies Last," the band half cries out for her, like she's a lost lover far beyond their reach. Musing over the album's many themes is probably best left to each listener, who can mull over lyrics, images, and the album's evolution in the same personal way that Jason created them. But, I think it might be possible to decode Josephine by listening to the deep, resounding bass that dominates nearly every song. Its sensuous, pulsing sound is the album's lifeblood. It is at the center of the best songs and, like a gift, encourages Molina to explore the dark territory that has always marked his best work.

samples:

• Rock of Ages
• Map of the Falling Sky
• Knoxville Girl

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26 July 2009

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Albums and Singles

This marks an enormous progression from the Cremations compilation released earlier this year: there are no sound experiments or atmospheric interludes here, just killer noise-ravaged synthpop. Cold Cave's proper full-length debut (on Wes Eisold's own Heartworm Press) was well worth the wait.  Also, it is amusing to note that some of the most memorable and danceable indie pop songs of the year involve Dominick Fernow of Prurient.

 

Heartworm Press

This brief album clocks in at around 30 minutes and contains only nine songs but at least a third of them achieve EBM near-perfection.  Eisold vocalizes his caustic lyrics with a world-weary conviction that favorably reminds me of all of the best British post-punk bands, but the darkness and catharsis is transformed into something accessible and non-oppressive through memorable melodies, catchy synth hooks, and charmingly naïve drum machine beats.  The title cut is a great example of the artful union of bleak intensity and shameless embrace of '80s dance music that makes Cold Cave such a likeable band: Eisold’s lovelorn melancholia is beautifully enhanced by former Hatebreed guitarist Sean Martin’s C86-style jangling, a relentless pounding beat, burbling keyboards, and warm and deceptively simple synthesizer chords.  

"The Trees Grew Emotions and Died" is similarly propulsive and unrelentingly catchy.  Xiu Xiu’s Caralee McElroy and Eisold share vocal duties over a foundation of rumbling bass and impossibly thick and anthemic synth hooks.  It also prominently features a somewhat harsh guitar solo, which is an unsubtle example of another aspect of Cold Cave’s excellence: despite strongly adhering to pop song conventions and featuring big dance beats, there is an omnipresent menacing hiss, ugliness, and distortion lurking beneath it all.  While rarely being in the foreground, this noise element is enormously important to Eisold’s aesthetic.  Consequently, Cold Cave songs have a damaged, dark, and heavy feel that bears almost no resemblance to slickly-produced precursors like OMD, Yaz, or the Human League, despite being superficially built upon similar foundations.  

My favorite song on the album is probably "Youth and Lust," which marries gorgeously lush minor key synth chords, alternating male/female vocals, a insistent thumping beat, and an irresistible keyboard riff.  The rest of the album is pretty solid, but hopelessly eclipsed by the aforementioned three songs.  Had they been included on Cremations, "Cebe and Me," "I.C.D.K.," and "Heaven Was Full" would have all been standouts, but the high points of Love Comes Close are on a completely different level.

Love Comes Close captures the sound of an excellent band accelerating rapidly towards their prime and features some of the best songs that will be released this year.  It is rare for me to be this enthusiastic about a new band, but I had unreasonably high expectations for this album and they were largely met anyway.  It's worth noting that some of Eisold’s pre-Cold Cave bedroom electro-pop recordings have just been released this month as well (Ye Olde Maids’ God Blesses Us, Mother Dresses Us).

Samples:

• Love Comes Close
• The Trees Grew Emotions and Died
• Youth and Lust

 

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26 July 2009

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Albums and Singles

While no one would ever call them a "singles" band, Loop certainly did put a great deal of great tracks on 7" and 12" singles and such that never made it to their albums, except as bonus tracks on hasty CD reissues.  This was originally a single disc compilation from the late 1980s of mostly Heaven’s End era singles and b-sides, but this new reissue adds in everything from the more obscure Eternal album (Fade Out era tracks), as well as a smattering of latter period singles and other unreleased tracks into a three disc compilation that serves as good of an introduction to the band as any.

 

Reactor

Each disc roughly corresponds with the band’s studio albums.  Disc One features the early garage stomp of "16 Dreams" as well as an earlier take of "Head On" that would be more polished and sped up for Heaven’s End.   The oddly out of place "Brittle Head Girl" is here as well, which with its synth flourishes and levels of tremolo make it sound like some odd hybrid of early Cure and Spacemen 3.  It’s an very different track that resembles a different path the band could have taken, though I would say the more forceful heavy space rock they ended up going with was a much wiser choice.

The heavy hitters on this disc are the two titans of "Burning World" and "Spinning."  The former is a slow, morose track of shaky tremolo and funeral drumming that trudges along in a barbiturate haze into worlds where psychedelic drugs aren’t even necessary.  The latter is an unabashed blast of tremolo laden '60s guitar rock with just enough of a post-punk edge to make it a creature all its own.  Of course it appears here in the "full" version, which appends a longer instrumental outro after an initial fadeout.  Both tracks appear in different variations as well:  "Spinning (Spun Out)" is an alternate recording that’s just a bit faster and more up-tempo, but feels too immediate, rather than the expansive swirl of the original.  The previously unreleased demo of “Burning World” is a rougher take on the track, emphasizing repeated guitar solos and even more buried vocals.  It’s a notably different, though not superior, version.

Disc Two is mostly the Eternal/Fade Out era material, and could almost be considered the "covers" album, because more than half of the disc are various covers from tribute albums and singles.  Leading out with the strong, reverb covered "Collision" (which appeared in a Peel Session form as well); it is a more polished version of that rock monster that would have been a perfect fit on Fade Out.  "Crawling Heart" is a perfect bridge between the two studio albums, as its psych rock rhythm is matched with a distortion laden bassline and cutting guitars.  The haunting "Circle Grave" is the strangest piece here, with its hollow guitar ambience and shrill feedback, making it by far one of the most dissonant tracks the band ever recorded, and another demonstration of Robert Hampson’s early infatuations with musique concrete.

The covers here are an eclectic mix:  The Pop Group’s "Thief of Fire" gets two runthroughs: the first being all jagged guitar and echo chamber hell vocals while the longer "Motherfucker" alternate mix is more stripped down, allowing the flanged guitars to go off in their own trajectories. Here, Hampson’s more impassioned vocals being the only thing keeping it together.  Their cover of Can’s "Mother Sky" unfortunately ditches the original’s in medias res opening, but is still over 10 minutes of sharp mechanical drumming, and alternating restrained and manic guitar riffs.  While it lacks the virtuosity of Jaki Liebezeit, it is otherwise a faithful, if somewhat unadventurous take on the classic.  It is also the track that made me check out Can as a teenager, so it’s definitely got its charm.  Nick Drake’s "Pink Moon" receives a reverent treatment, leaving just acoustic guitar with little effects or processing.  Neil Young’s "Cinnamon Girl" also gets a throwback to the more hazy Heaven’s End Technicolor sound with more than a smattering of old school psychedelics. 

Disc Three is a bit less diverse, with the front end featuring no less than three mixes of "Arc-Lite."  The "Sonar" version is the original one, with its echoing vocals and repetitive guitar riffs being pushed along by a rhythm that doesn’t really lock into where it should be for about half the track.  The Daniel Miller mixed "Radar" and "Radiated" versions take different directions, with the former sounding more like an alternate mix, just with different effects and layering on the guitars, while the latter is cut and pasted over a Suicide-like monotone drum line, bringing the buried bass melody to the surface and resembling some of the later period Wire/Wir work.  Between all of these is "Sunburst" which is just as beautiful as the more widely released Peel Session version, though I must say I prefer that ones urgency to the studio polished version that appears here.

There are also three tracks from the live Prisma Uber Europa EP, with "Afterglow" and "Got to Get It Over" both appearing as harder edged, muscular takes on the album tracks.  The third one, "Burning World" (labeled "Burning Prisma" on the initial issue of this album) draws the already long track out even longer, with a faster pace and a more aggressive guitar line that is just the right level of hypnotic repetition and improvised squall.  The closer is the legendary cover of Godflesh’s "Like Rats" from the Clawfist Loopflesh/Fleshloop 7".  The sound quality is far and away better than the lo-fi mp3 I had of this track for a few years, but the death metal growl vocals from the original aren’t Hampson’s forte, and thus aren’t quite as effective as Godflesh’s cover of "Straight To Your Heart" (which isn’t included here).  It is nice to hear a more psyched out take on this track though, and the pained guitar solo here is a lot different than the metallic squeal of the original.  

Again, this compilation is as indispensable of a release as any of the band’s studio albums, but does function well as an overview of the band’s career.  While there is not an abundance of unheard material here, the tracks are so strong that hearing them cleaned up and remastered is worth the price of admission alone.  

samples:

• Spinning
• Mother Sky
• Burning World (Live)

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26 July 2009

Administrator

Albums and Singles

As their third and final studio album, Loop had mostly excised the 1960s Technicolor psychedelia that had defined their debut, Heaven’s End, leaving only a molten orange lava of layered space rock that was entirely all their own.  Like the first two albums, here it is presented remastered and with a bonus disc of outtakes and demos from the era.  Even nearly 20 years after its initial issue, the mix of tight structures and improvisation, all pegged out at 11, can give any modern “loud” band a run for their money.

 

Reactor

One thing Loop perfected is leading off an album strong:  Heaven’s End had the swirling wah-wah of "Soundhead;" Fade Out had the dark, manic "Black Sun;" and here it is the dense space of "Vapour," marrying a bass and guitar melody perfectly with Robert Hampson’s vocals fading even more into the background then they were before.  Just as the track seems to be coming to its conclusion, it comes back with a  force and vigor unmatched by most tracks in their discography (or most of their contemporaries) before slowly dropping in tempo to a lugubrious end.

For utter balls out rock, few things can touch this album’s first half.  "Afterglow" is a panned nightmare of crunchy guitar stabs and erratic drums, and the following "The Nail Will Burn" runs on an overdriven bass guitar melody with crunchy, brittle guitar shards cast atop.  It’s not until "Blood" that the pace begins to slow down. It does so with atmospheric piece of cascading guitar feedback, drum rolls, and more abstract elements and heavily processed vocals that resembles a darker, less isolating sound that guitarists Hampson and Scott Dawson would pioneer later in Main.

Both "Breath Into Me" and "From Centre to Wave" bring back the overdriven blast rock that characterized the opening of the album, the latter especially benefitting from producer Paul Kendall’s touch, with the closing resembling speakers being slowly disconnected from the player, the sound becoming more and more distant and tinny with every second before roaring back with a blast of feedback.  The nearly 10 minute closer "Be Here Now" is also a slower and more sparse track, allowing multitracked guitar notes to trail off into space over a simple, but steady rhythm, closing the final album with one of the band’s more delicate moments.

The bonus disc here contains both pre-released tracks as well as a few rough demo versions of the album tracks that, while not amazing on their own, still make for a good listen.  The opening pair of "The Nail Will Burn (Burn Out)" and "Shot With a Diamond" both were bonus tracks on the original CD issue of A Gilded Eternity, the former being a slightly more straightforward, trebly mix of the track, while the latter is a mostly instrumental (with the exception of Apocalypse Now dialog samples) repetitive drone of basic guitar clatter and metronomic percussion, also a good foreshadowing of what the band would go on to do in their post-Loop careers. 

The demos are also nothing too drastically different:  the instrumental early draft of "Arc-Lite" unfortunately suffers from its lack of vocals, focusing too much on the repetitive elements of the band without the more dynamic counterbalance, and the also vocalless take on "Vapour" is not drastically different from the final version, just slightly rawer, but structurally the same.  "The Nail Will Burn" demo version is quite similar to the other two versions, but the shorter take of “Be Here Now” is much more interesting:  it’s a harder edged version of what would finally be released.  It’s still sparse and vast, yet there is a bit more clang and grind to it, reframing the track completely differently than the previously released one.

The best part of this disc though is the band’s third and final Peel Session, which, like the others in this reissue campaign, was also available on the Wolf Flow collection.  "Afterglow" is functionally the same as the album version, but "From Centre to Wave" is given even more room to breathe, and the rawer pseudo-live edge of the BBC studios causes it to a be a different beast entirely.  Finally, the closing "Sunburst" is my personal favorite moment here.  A B-side on the "Arc-Lite" single, here it is stripped down to repetitive drum rolls and a mix of guitar chord drone and crunchy squalls, all proceeding along with a slowness and sadness unmatched by most.

Each Loop album was such a different beast, though all still connected through vast space and overdriven guitar bonds that makes it impossible to pick a favorite.  Here perhaps it is their most fully realized work that unfortunately signaled their demise.  Like the first two albums though, it is essential listening for anyone who claims to enjoy shoegaze/drone/space rock/whatever it’s called these days.

samples:

• Vapour
• Be Here Now
• Sunburst (Peel Session)

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