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It is nice to know that there are still people out there with very strange ideas, sufficiently demonstrated by this album, the second collaborative effort from Tony Wakeford and Andrew Liles. However, in a world in which Nurse With Wound is working on a HipHop album, and David Tibet is both a professed Christian and a cabinet member of the OTO, perhaps the word "strange" needs to be redefined.For their second outing as The Wardrobe, Liles and Wakeford redefine the parameters of strangeness with an album that marries lovely, emotive, nostalgic instrumentals to the shudders and creaks of old Victoriana. More often than not, the songs meander and drift through the cobwebby attics of old English country houses, the eerie and insistent presence of memory creating an uncanny atmosphere that fairly sparks with ghostly electricity. Eerie electrical portals to other worlds are found amidst the creaking floorboards and old, out-of-tune pianos, dusty guitars and rusty accordions. Without warning, atmospheric melodies are overtaken by the free play of the unconscious, eccentric intrusions from out of the ether, snatches of warped dialogue, wobbly old 78s or incongruous sound effects suites pop in and out with a refreshing absence of logic.
Whereas the title of Cups in Cupboard, the duo's first album, signified a measured appropriateness—cups in the cupboard, everything in its right place—the title of this sophomore album suggests incompleteness, lunacy and lame-brained-ness: "She's a few sandwiches short of a picnic, that one." Apropos of this contrast in title, the new album is not as pleasing and tuneful as that first album, preferring instead to push out the boundaries of discomfort, finding ever newer ways to subtly dislocate the listener in time and space. While the opening piano dirge "Wednesday" seems to start off in the same general ballpark as Cups, it soon descends into an eerie, droning netherworld, with a tinkling counter-melody that constantly threatens to derail the funereal proceedings. Everything finally digresses into buzzing electric insectoid oblivion, a miasma of withering 19th century parlor music, like watching a Merchant Ivory film on acid.
Things only get wackier from this point with the whimsically ramshackle "Horse With One Leg" and the heavily intoxicated, messily percussive strains of "Another Drink?". "Lucifer Before Sunrise" will be the most pleasurable track for old-school Nurse With Wound fans, a reworking of a track that originally appeared on Stapleton and Wakeford's sole collaboration The Revenge of the Selfish Shellfish. This time, the deeply weird crypto-Satanic text is read aloud by Colin Potter's daughters (internal rhyme unintentional), as skeletal guitar figures are licked by crackling flames. The Potter girls' spooky voices are twisted and mutated, scattered around the stereo channels, before being joined by Wakeford's morbid, gravelly vocals, so familiar from well-worn Sol Invictus records from the past two decades. Everything you loved about the English underground esoteric music scene, all in the span of five minutes.
Since Current 93 and Nurse With Wound have apparently decided to take permanent vacations from these kinds of fucked gothic sound experiments, it's nice to hear the flag still being carried by Liles and Wakeford. A Sandwich Short is the perfect mix of disarming melodies and outre electronic textures, with lots of delightfully menacing moments of plain, old-fashioned sinister whimsy.
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This lathe captures Neil Campbell (Astral Social Club and ex-Vibracathedral Orchestra) and Sticky Foster, both, A-Band alumni, somewhere in the world making sound together. Allegedly containing material that could be about ten years old, this release squeezes (what I think is possibly) four tracks onto a clear seven inch vinyl.
This duo, introduced on stage by Wolf Eyes’ John Olson, wastes no time building a swelling hurricane of roasted feedback and battered percussion. “Live at RRRecords” is a wrecking yard turned inside out, all shivering steel towers and strobing blasts of metal. The gnarled hand percussion and the speaker being force fed a guitar head liquefy into a mercury drenched tributary. About six minutes in, and without warning, it switches into a less live assault team sounding piece. An underwater toaster-in-bath murk clicks into play, a drowned mic battering on a sunken wreck’s railings.
The flipside opener has a simple drum machine beat that teeters precariously on the edge of possible funk, the looped notes perforating a swirl of dirty air. The audible hiss of an old school recording makes this feel like the oldest piece here, but it’s a blessing it’s been saved. A protuberance of organic sounds stuffed with snatches of radio and birdcall seems to grow heavier as the track progresses, becoming easier for the listener to sink under the spread. The second half of this track is the most sedentary of the four tracks, tiny electric loops and in-limbo chimes languishing in a bundle of cells. It’s obvious that Campbell’s work as part of Astral Social Club has moved on into other areas and features a good deal of focused energy, but this lathe is still an excellent example of his more sprawling side.
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THE ONE ENSEMBLE
The One Ensemble is a quartet from Glasgow, Scotland. Originally a solo recording project of Daniel Padden, two albums were released as ‘The One Ensemble Of Daniel Padden’ - a self-titled CD on Catsup Plate, and 'The Owl Of Fives' on Textile. After that the Ensemble became a live band and released 'Live At VPRO Radio' on Brainwashed. The band is now simply The One Ensemble. Daniel Padden is a member of Volcano The Bear. Aby Vulliamy and Chris Hladowski are members of Nalle.
[AB-OC-32] THE ONE ENSEMBLE - Wayward The Fourth
CD or LP
$12 USA; $16 World
1. Joker Burlesque
2. Neither One Thing
3. Shapes Disguised As Sizes
4. The Venerable Eleventh Melody
5. Smok [MP3]
6. Resonant Kings
7. Horsehead Waltz
8. Fog And Tumble
9. The Following Thunder
10. Berlinda [MP3]
11. Another Cup To Drown
The heir apparant to Moondog and Zoltán Kodály, The One Ensemble blend European folk, narrative, popular and chamber forms to create modern compositions that provide attention-grabbing hooks and thought-provoking challenges. At times formal and at others improvisational, it is difficult to pin down the One Ensemble sound. Influences range from the classic pop-psychedelia of Robert Wyatt to the deep experimental drone of Third Ear Band. Blissful free jazz, delicate acoustic out-folk, tape collages, Eastern raga and mystical modern minimalism all peacefully coexist in the One Ensemble’s uniquely beautiful universe.
REVIEWS
“A gorgeous and hypnotic work that joyously trips and tumbles through a dark, mediaeval wonderland that exists only on an astral plane; a collection of whimsical funeral dirges for a merry band of wandering monks intoxicated on bad liquor and thujone. It is a collection of hymns to wood sprites and elves; it is the soundtrack to suddenly noticing the glorious spectacle of an ant crawling up a tree trunk carrying a leaf. It is a magical conjuring act by a group of trickster alchemists wandering in a foreign land. It is often all of these things and sometimes none of them, but it is always unmistakably beautiful music.” - Jonathan Dean, Brainwashed
“Predominantly acoustic, with strings, piano and organ to the fore, Padden weaves strains of early English traditional music, contemporary classical, even jazz and world music into an absorbing, sometimes quite otherwolrdly, whole.” - MOJO
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Nova Express
Sleeping with Ghosts is an entertaining album, it is back-to-basics rock played with plenty of conviction. The songs are nothing particularly special but they’re just enough above average to keep me listening to the album. There is a solid scene of French bands that all do this sort of garage rock and Cowboys from Outerspace would be far from the worst. They have moments where I really want to grab my guitar and play along but there’s never a point where they go from just another rock band to something more exciting, they could tickle my rock out bone a lot more.
One thing about this band (and a lot of other French bands) is that their singer sings in English. I don’t understand why so many French bands do this. Some can pull it off but many sound like extras from Allo, Allo. Their vocalist slips a few times into this trap and it’s a bit off-putting. I can’t help but feel that these songs would be a lot better in their mother tongue. Aside from that, Sleeping with Ghosts doesn’t have any major faults, it ticks all the boxes when it comes to rocking out but the band don’t do enough to stand out from the crowd.
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With this very brief album the Japanese duo drum up 16 songs in just less than 16 minutes. It may be extremely short but this CD contains bucketfuls of energy.Their noisy, angular interpretation of punk is a little different to the norm and most importantly fun.
Ache
Musically Teenage Mondo Trash is thoroughly enjoyable. It sounds like a lot more than two people belting out these songs. While never showing off, both Tetsunori Tawaraya’s guitar playing and Keiichi Nakano’s drumming show competence and enough adventurousness to add a fair bit of excitement to the songs. They explore more avenues in thirty seconds than many bands do in their entire careers. Although I must point out that the music never reaches the madness of Fantomas, it is far more accessible with a heavy emphasis on punk and metal. The last few songs are the best examples of their impressive playing. For example, on “Torepan” Tetsunori flies all over the fretboard and extracts all sorts of great tones from his guitar without ever straying into the world of wank. Keiichi’s drumming sounds like he’s programmed to drum in time to Tetsunori’s odd notes, the two of them are tight but very natural sounding.
Tetsunori’s vocals don’t always work. He has a frantic yelping style that sometimes sounds great like on “Sirloin” but sometimes it borders on annoying (although that could be due to pounding headache I currently am enduring). He’s at his best when he counterpoints his guitar playing with his vocals, for example on “Hammer” he lets off bursts of pure guitar mayhem while letting off completely different explosions of sound from his mouth. The fact that he sings in his native language makes his unorthodox vocals sound better, I think if I could understand him I’d be less impressed.
It’s hard to get bored with Teenage Mondo Trash as it is all over so quickly. It finishes at just the right time as I think 2UP’s music works best in small doses. If I had to listen to 40 minutes of this I think I would give up but as it stands I can deal with it fine. Aesthetically I feel they shouldn’t be released on CD as they’re a band that would be ideal for a 7” only catalogue; they could fit an entire album on one record. That aside, Teenage Mondo Trash is an exciting and vibrant release that once again proves that there is an awful lot of music from Japan that needs western releases.
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This compilation is meant to be an audio and visual experience. As well as 16 audio tracks there are four videos for the computer. They could have saved themselves the bother of including the videos as they are awful examples of video art. That being said, none of the music inspires much confidence either.
3 Pin Recordings
Focusing on the audio first, there is little here to make me want to listen to this CD again. The first three tracks range from the poor industrial music-lite of DisinVectant to the absolute bollocks of CJ Pizarro’s “Dark Black Semen.” It took me a few goes to get past the second track, the urge to just press stop proved too strong at first. Even the normally excellent Daniel Padden can’t save the day; his “Cornelius” is lacklustre in comparison to his other work. Only very briefly does the disc ever verge on interesting; John Cake’s “Dawson Has Left Part 2” features a nice selection of sounds like bubbling, kitchen machinery and distorted poetry. This less than two minute piece is the best of what’s on offer here.
The problem with Electricity is your Friend is that so much of the music is derivative twaddle. I may be harsh about this, no doubt most of the artists here have put in a lot of work to sound so mediocre but I really don’t want to have to listen to this. Sampling is used to death on most of the pieces; at times it’s impossible to move without being smothered by uninspiring samples. There also seems to be a competition to see who can be the most eccentric, with all entrants sounding forced and artificial.
In addition to the one piece of audio (a dull deconstruction of The Beatles “Strawberry Fields”) provided by Jliat are two videos. The videos are completely superfluous, one is a ten second shot of what I assume is Jliat on a train and the other is a shaky, blurry video of a merry-go-round. Neither of them is interesting at all. This is a problem that runs through all the video content of the compilation. Frank Cougar’s “Peaceful Bus” is a poem set to video in response to the London bombings of 2005. In it he says: “For as weird as all that it is, it would make one heck of a good movie.” The events that unfolded in an act of terrorism might make a good movie but Cougar’s dismal poetry does not.
In all fairness, videos included on audio albums is a concept that I have little time for, there is little joy in watching a low resolution video the size of a postcard with a scratchy audio track.Even when it’s something I’m interested in I’m unlikely to load up the multimedia part of a CD more than once. When it’s something as bad as this I’m sorry I even went through the bother of opening it once.
samples:
- Dragon or Emperor, "Never Know What to Say"
- Jliat, "Strawberry Fields"
- CJ Pizarro, "Cousin of Bambi"
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Ultralord try their hardest to be heavier than thou, sometimes it works but other times it comes across as juvenile metal posturing. It’s hard to draw the line between serious metal and the tongue in cheek and with Ultralord the line is blurred.
I enjoyed We Hate You and Hope You Die but I can’t take it seriously. That doesn’t really matter as I don’t think Ultralord set out to make an avant proto giga meta chin stroking metal masterpiece. This is good honest to Satan rocking, as the rotten middle finger in the middle of a pentagram on the cover suggests it would be.
One thing that did annoy me about a lot of the songs is that Ultralord seem incapable of finishing them off properly. Instead they employ the laziest of all recording techniques: the fade out. “Pussy Witch” in particular is a horrid example as the song is weak to start with and the excruciatingly long fade out (well over a minute of fading out!) does it no justice. It smacks of being an unfinished demo. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to come up with an ending for a song and had the band gone the extra few yards these songs would work a lot better. Another source of annoyance is the vocals which go from being mediocre to being pretty awful. On “Blood Sinner” the lyrics are terrible and they’re not helped by the poor delivery. Luckily the music carries the songs and it’s possible to filter out the vocals by concentrating on the playing.
The riffing is all pretty standard, a mix of thrash and sludge. It is fun but not a lot to get my teeth into, a few bands have done it better but equally a lot of bands have done it far worse. From time to time it ventures too far into cheesy nu-metal territory which I could do without. Thankfully the solos are tasteful if unadventurous, although as unadventurous as they are I think they could do with some more thrown in. The world needs more solos in this age of the riff. By far the best part of the music is the drumming. Like everything else on We Hate You and Hope You Die the drumming doesn’t bring anything radical to the art but it is far above competent. Corey Bing pounds the skins like he means it, towards the end of “Don’t Fear the Reefer” he captures some of the raw energy that I’d associate with early Swans, his drumming going exceptionally well with the simple riffing and distorted guitar harmonics. Unfortunately this is another song with a crappy fade out.
We Hate You and Hope You Die adds little to metal as a genre but doesn’t stray too far into cliche. It is almost gratuitously metal but that’s the effect Ultralord are going for. It’s like giving out about Merzbow for being too noisy. It’s a good album for when you can’t decide exactly what you want to listen to as there’s a bit of everything (metal) on it. It could have been a better album if they had a better vocalist but as it stands it’s a listenable if forgettable experience.
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Sprawled over two discs, this album from New Zealand’s Mrtyu! is a lumbering behemoth of rumbling bass, feedback, and layers of distortion. It’s a gloriously unholy mess, suggesting subterranean rites held far from the light of day.
The first disc features three tracks, beginning with the ominous "Rites of Death in Body Temple." Heavy bass erupts below the surface while drones and feedback battle for dominance, setting the scene for the unfolding of some arcane ritual in "The Burning Ground." Industrial groans, insect-like whines, and clanging metal rattles make this the most turbulent track on the first disc, and the most engaging of the three. Purging the turmoil is "Ash on Ash," which serves as a boiling transition between events.
In contrast to the somewhat more leisurely pace of the first disc, the second disc is more immediate. While "For the Glory of the Fallen" with its dense waves of descending drones is somewhat similar to the tracks on the other disc, "Pyre" gives the bass a more obviously prominent role, its slow notes accompanied by tortured voices, swirling static, and explosive bursts. Likewise, "Digitalis" unleashes a claustrophobic attack that becomes an incendiary throb crackling on the edges of sanity. The album’s most rhythmic track is "The Wordly Skein," a heavy pulse accentuated by shredded noise. It’s not until "Durgas Blood (We Heed the Call)" that whatever fiendish entity the music’s been summoning finally erupts from its lair, attempting communication with a tongue too swollen with bile for speech.
Because the songs on both discs evoke such a similar atmospheric dread, at times they lack enough distinction to make them unique. Together, however, they are so singular in their effect that they effortlessly provoke a hypnotic fascination as darkly mesmerizing as any demonic siren’s song.
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- Matthew Amundsen
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Originally self-released in 2003, Graves at Sea’s short album of sludgy stoner doom peaks in all the right places. While their approach may not be shockingly different from their peers, they don't waste any opportunities to pummel the senses.
Titles such as “Black Bile” and “Praise the Witch” are pretty much par for the course, as are the throaty, pained vocals that garble lyrics into incomprehensibility. Yet the band does other things that elevate them above average practitioners of such vile metallurgy. The medium tempo riffs have a familiar proficiency but are never monotonous. Instead, they’re fused with a good sense of dynamics that keeps them lively and entertaining without resorting to filler.
They also have a couple of extra touches that point to some grander ambitions. The end of “Red Monarch” finds them adding weird ray gun sound effects to the mix, while the ending of “Black Bile” devolves into a strange, airy loop suggesting a hazy realm of slyly disembodied voices. “Wormwood” also ends with a looping swirl, like a tunnel into another dimension. As far as the growling vocals go, the band includes a lyric sheet to help decipher the madness.
While themes of addiction, the ashes of civilization, and redemption through death’s release are hardly unexpected, they’re executed with such emphasis and passion as to make them cathartic and convincing. Since it’s only 30 minutes long, the disc is much too short yet it whets the appetite for more material.
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- Scott Mckeating
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Tracking down Graveyards releases is like taking on a part time job. Scattering their music across miniscule private press labels blink-and-miss-it editions, the current threat level of incoming albums is always elevated. Being a trio with a sax player, they’re often tagged as jazz or scumjazz, but their reach goes much further that the remit of those genres.
As a unit John Olson (Wolf Eyes), Hans Buetow and Ben Hall (both members of Mêlèe and Death Knell) easily transcend the limitations of tags. Their albums don’t appear to be compiled or released in any sort of chronological order, their evolution scattered randomly across CD-Rs, cassettes and vinyl. The frequency of their musical discharges may make it look like these things are just being shat out, but the quality shows that this is light years from the truth.
This particular cassette release is a typically good looking package for the band, a Princely purple wraparound card sleeve and a pile of hand drawn skulls, the handmade aesthetic matching their idiosyncratic path. Through their hours of jams (and being members of numerous different projects), Graveyards have mastered the ability to have numerous distinctive sounds they can cross pollinate. Like some swelling and engorging mass, they sound distinctly like themselves, but utterly different from their other releases at the same time. Head and shoulders above the innumerable ancillary and pristine studio units of the improvising trio world, the fidelity here is just above the usual American Tapes murk levels.
This is a generally more structured release, with Ben Hall leading the way with simple percussion patterns that move between brutal loops and the threateningly restrained tethering of tempos. Tapped out cymbal knocks create stiletto patterns over a deep bass note drone, leaving Olson warming the air in-between. The Graveyards music here bristles with safety pinned energy, carried by a wind from a deep, dirty pit. A battered bell and metal percussion led piece, “Three” has Olson and Buetow invoking ghosts, replying and entwining with Hall’s brutality. Each player seems to know exactly when to keep it in or drag it out. The other untitled highlight, “Two”, haemorrhages an unspoiled regurgitation of sawn cymbal sound with a Staccato cello taking the strain. The horn moving from braying howl to mournful passage on this cut perfectly sums up the trio’s refusal to sit comfortably.
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