Podcast Episodes 717-720 are live!
After two weekends away, the backlog has become immense, so we present a whopping FOUR new episodes for the spooky season!
Episode 717 features Medicine, Fennesz, Papa M, Earthen Sea, Nero, memotone, Karate, ØKSE, Otis Gayle, more eaze, Jon Mueller, and Lauren Auder + Wendy & Lisa.
Episode 718 has The Legendary Pink Dots, Throbbing Gristle, Von Spar / Eiko Ishibashi / Joe Talia / Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, Ladytron, Cate Brooks, Bill Callahan, Jill Fraser, Angelo Harmsworth, Laibach, and Mike Cooper.
Episode 719 music by Angel Bat Dawid, Philip Jeck, A.M. Blue, KMRU, Songs: Ohia, Craven Faults, tashi dorji, Black Rain, The Ghostwriters, Windy & Carl.
Episode 720 brings you tunes from Lewis Spybey, Jules Reidy, Mogwai, Surya Botofasina, Patrick Cowley, Anthony Moore, Innocence Mission, Matt Elliott, Rodan, and Sorrow.
Photo of a Halloween scene in Ogunquit by DJ Jon.
Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
Limited to 1000 copies and coupled with a video forthe song "Rails," Rumblings jumps back and forth between tapemanipulation, screwy free-verse adventures, recognizable musicalarrangements, and playful sound collages constructed from metallicscrapes, diseased brass instruments, and typical commercials. Theresult is a little bit like flipping through various televisionstations, but with the ability to find a red thread through the chaosof comedies, cartoons, and documentaries. The first few tracks promiseall of this before some of the collages start to become dull and themiddle portion of the album begins to drag through some directionlessbits of space noise. "Rails (uncoupled)" and "Moonleggs" pick up where"Johnny No!" left of and luckily things only get better from thatpoint. Smegma are best when they attach their own particular brand ofsurrealism and nonsense to the traditional rock stylings of the 50s and60s. "Moonleggs" crosses tropical guitar chords with a spool of brokenspeech samples and distorted horn moans before giving into theprimitive and galactic energy of "Smoke," which mingles absurd lyricswith a propulsive bass line and drum performance. The end of the albumfeels far more cohesive than the beginning and almost feels as if itwere meant to stand alone from everything else on the disc. "Rumblings"and "Supersimple" continue the guitar and noise ethos with bothconsideration and aimless abandon. The continuous metamorphoses thateach track exhibits is intoxicating and by the end of the album I feellike I've had some strange psychedelic experience. Despite something ofa slow start, Rumblings is a lot of fun and it does nothing butget better with each listen. "Rails" is the kind of song that I wishcould be extended into a 20 minute freak out of curving noise and vocaldestruction, even if that meant less tape splicing were to appear.Those tracks just seem distracting after hearing the thump and growl oftheir jam sessions. 
Named after the 10" mini-LP which The Field Mice released on SarahRecords in 1989, this includes the first two Sarah 7" singles, a 7" onThe Caff Corporation, and a compilation track. What struck me first wasthat the cover art on this CD (and the others) was largely out of touchwith what I knew of the band's original artwork for their records.Field Mice albums tended to have very colorful and geometric coversdesigns which caught the eye immediately. On the LTM reissues there aresome wispy, Photoshopped landscapes which look like the covers on musiconce found at The Nature Store. The font for the band name and thetitle have a horribly tasteless drop shadow which looks like somethinga fifth-grader created on MacPaint in 1987 for a Mother's Day card. Ialmost expected to hear the sound of rustling leaves for 70 minuteswith a bonus track of lapping ocean waves. Reassuringly, the music hereis unsullied and as I remember the band. The two Sarah seven-inchessupply the best moments on this disc. Songs like "Emma's House" and"When Morning Comes to Town" are such delicate indie pop moments thattheir fragility becomes not so much a liability as it is a strength.The latter song opens with such a softly-strummed guitar that as aresult your ears are piqued by the challenge to hear the music. Adoting bass line soon picks up the louder decibels and colors thesoftness elsewhere. Other instruments fall in eventually and even theguitar tempo picks up and the song becomes inexplicably dancy, albeitin the most soft-spoken way possible. "Emma's House" is anthemic in away that indie pop rarely can be. A drum machine provides a roboticbeat wherein shimmery guitars climb up and down, settling down only formere seconds at a time. The song is the eponymous cut from The FieldMice's first single when the band was but two people: Bobby Wratten andMichael Hiscock. In fact, most of the songs on Snowball were produced at a time when the band was still a two-piece. I never much cared for the Snowball10" and still don't, but "This Love is Not Wrong" is nothing if notpure twee beauty. "Letting Go" interestingly conjures sounds of TheCure with its minor-chord ramblings, veiled whispers, and glisteningkeyboards. It sounds eerily similar to "All Eternal Things," a songfrom the most recent Trembling Blue Stars album. Some things don'tchange, I suppose. "That's All This Is," is from the Airspace!compilation and by its own virtues is the best validation for LTM'sreissue. Resonating like a percussed lullaby, it's the type of song forwhich a Field Mice lover desperately pines. 
This two-CD set is an overview of the band's middle years. At thispoint, I am starting to get a little suspicious of LTM's graphicdesigners and what their aesthetic vision was for these CD covers. Gonenow is the nature imagery and in its place there is the distressedstature of a skyscraper looking spookily like one half of NYC's TwinTowers. The image is irrepressibly hideous, not for what it evokes butsimply for its banal appearance. The music on disc 1 is my leastfavorite Field Mice material, partly because they endeavor to sound alittle too much like the Human League (hardly an imprudent move in andof itself, but executed not very well here) and partly because the bandloses some of its virtuous fragility through the over-used electronicsin the songs. The songs are taken from the Skywriting 12" and the So Said Kay10". Most people will tell you that "So Said Kay" is a song whichtypifies everything good about The Field Mice, but I submit that thesong "Holland Street" is a much better mark of the band's glory. Thehand-drummed beginning sounds nearly tribal but any primitivism is soondissipated when the guitar lusciously falls in and from there the songsimply percolates for three minutes in the best sort of instrumentalanxiety. "Holland Street" sounds like a perfected introductory song foran album. Too bad LTM didn't feel poetically licensed enough to playwith the sequencing on these reissues because it would have made onedecisive opening track. One of the more curious songs here is"Humblebee." It is a sound collage which is more perplexing thanartfully incisive. The Field Mice seem out of their element here, lostin the continental forests and far from any meadows in Surrey. Disc 2offers some salvation from the electronic experimentation of disc 1."If You Need Someone" is playful and soaring with its keyboard andguitar exchanges. Wratten's vocals are so earnest it can hurt, but theynever make you feel embarrassed the way that some earnestness does.With only its title, "Anyone Else Isn't You" explicitly announces TheField Mice's thematic vision of singularity and of purpose. Many oftheir songs focus on a significant other, whether adored or estrangedor both, firmly believing that this is the one person who can make lifemeaningful. If the band does not zealously believe in destiny, theycertainly are blinded by it occasionally. Though this theme issomething you can probably discern from just perusing the song titles,actually listening to the lyrics confirms it. The songs from disc 2come from the Autumn Store seven-inches (of which there are two) as well as some outtakes and compilation tracks. Skywriting + Singlesends on something of a sour note with the tedious ten-minute ruminationentitled "Other Galaxies" which jams and drones for about seven minutestoo long. Of the three reissues, this installment is the leastbrilliant and yet the most voluminous. 
At this point, I am convinced that LTM hired a consultant from theThomas Kinkade galleries (no, they don't look like Kinkade's work butthey exhibit the same lack of taste) to design the covers. This thirdcover has a fuzzed-out ocean scene (or are they clouds?) with the sameblue/purplish hue saturating the other covers. On a good note, the dropshadows have disappeared from the fonts. Whether this was donepurposely or as an oversight is unclear, but my money is on the latter.Fortunately, the music starts out more satisfactorily with "FiveMoments" from the For Keeps LP, which was The Field Mice's only official full-length album. For Keepsstill has those moments of Human League emulation but the band was ableto dilute that with some more standard indie pop creations. "FiveMoments" starts off with some suspect effects-processed and tribalvocals (not tribal like the drums from "Holland Street," which werealmost Native American influenced. This is more of an eastern Indiansound, from the heart of Bombay or New Delhi) but soon enough glidesinto a gentle and pleasant wah-pedal melody. Annemari Davies's vocalsare featured on this song, not Wratten's. Davies also gives voice tothe most heartbreaking Field Mice song to be found anywhere: "Willow."It is a simply but infectious guitar dirge drenched in pathos andsadness. The song is elegant and easy to listen to but in between thelyrics there is writhing and pain beyond what you might expect from theband. Perhaps less soul-crushing but equally dramatic is "A Wrong Turnand Raindrops." A swollen harmonica mixes with a lethargic guitar andthe song never gets going until the chorus where the guitar gainspurpose and clarity, the vocals gain intensity and melody, and the songcomes together, only to fall apart again during the next verse, comeback once again at the next chorus. The pattern repeats for four and ahalf minutes. It is offsetting yet compelling and heavy on the emotion.To balance things out, there are moments of levity such as "An EarlierAutumn" which has a country twang and a light step. The song (alongwith "September's Not So Far Away" and "Between Hello and Goodbye") isfrom the last Sarah Records Field Mice 7" and returns the group fullcircle to something that is much closer to their initial sound:spritely, playful, and dripping with lovelorn honesty. 
Released as an LP on the K.A.K. labelin 1995, Zero Beats Per Minute was conceived as the ultimateanti-rave statement, growing out of a series of after-club performancesalong the London-Swansea mainline in industrialized Newport. Anal wouldperform next to the train tracks, hoping to catch wandering acid andecstasy-fueled ravers as they wandered from closed clubs to after-hoursillegal warehouse parties. As anti-rave, I imagine Anal's brand ofnoise worked quite well, a series of rhythmless explosions ofaggravated analogue noise specially formulated to piss off all but themost anarchic ravers. Anal was far more interested in the bleak,industrial frigidity of Throbbing Gristle and Whitehouse than themid-90s weekend rave scene typified by Praga Khan and the Lords ofAcid, and it shows. As a punk-as-fuck, industrial-strength belch in theface of vapid dance and drug culture, the album works. As another wayfor synthesizer fetishists to get a cheap thrill, it also works; anyonewho likes Mount Vernon Arts Lab or Queen Elizabeth would likely alsoappreciate Anal. The question of whether or not it contains good musicis a bit more difficult, however. The album's first six tracks are allrelatively brief little sketches of Anal's delicious blasts of analoguedrones, blankets of static, steam-venting copper tubing and gale-forceplumes of thought-canceling noise, but nothing stays long enough tofully develop. The album's main attraction is the sidelong behemoth of"Journey Through a Burning Anal," which uses all of the techniques onSide A to build a long, slowly transforming odyssey through thegraveyard shift of a steel mill, with clever little nods to morepopular forms of techno here and there just to remind you of how faryou have traveled. Though this track is nice enough, when it was over,I couldn't help feeling a little shortchanged by the album. At 31:42,it's incredibly brief, the LP apparently having been shortened for thisreissue. I can only speculate as to why it would have been edited downin its transition to the digital format, but it seems an odd choice.Fans of Coil and Co. who have been waiting years for Eskaton to makegood on its promise to release "I Am Newport" b/w "Kiss Me Ringland"will doubtless be disappointed that this material has not been includedas bonus. Also, Cope's Fuck Off & Di label apparently engineeredthis release without the consultation of Jody Evans or Thighpaulsanda,making this entire release of somewhat questionable pedigree. Let thebuyer beware.
I think this is supposed to sound grinding, heavy, and intimidating,but the latest from Chondritic Sound's founder sounds more like a blastof dense, hot air than anything else. This single, 42 minute trackfluctuates between a frustrating stasis and short, intense barrages ofmachine noise and static. The bass-like rumble that stays through theentire album undergoes a series of modulations that becomes thicker andthicker while waves of bees, never-ending crunches, and low-endfrequencies boil over one another in an almost indistinguishable haze.Eventually Death Tonebegins to sound as though it is going nowhere and by the end of thealbum I feel as if I've been run in tiny and completely uninterestingcircles for far too long. There's no doubt that the album is incrediblyloud, but it isn't punishing or particularly noteworthy in itsseverity. With a title like Death Tone that's a bitdisappointing, especially considering the label Hive Mind released thison and the lack of any discernable arrangement other than the shifts intexture that so gradually occur. The constant cycle of homogenouselements doesn't allow for any shocking moments or unpredictable blastsof sound and it especially doesn't allow for any interestingdevelopments. Roughly ten minutes of listening to this would have beenenough to let me know what was going to happen throughout the rest ofthe record; an entire 30 minutes or so is wasted repeating andrehashing what was accomplished very early on. To make matters worse,the jumble of fuzzy waves that make up this album eventually begin toblend into the background and disappear altogether. Instead of soundinglike a confrontation with something deadly or even scary, the musicslowly becomes benign and altogether easy to listen to. I expectedsomething confrontational and demented, but received a poorlyconstructed and disengaging soundscape. Louder, far more deadly havocexists out in the realm of noise; the name and vaguely anti-musicalsentiments of Death Tone aren't enough to make a bland and redundant recording exciting or horror-inducing. 
Here, MachineBoy unfortunately adds nothing to the previous cast of characters whohave worked with these tools in the past. While the central point ofinterest is supposed to be Lorian Elbert's spoken word, that's exactlywhat derails this disc and leaves Machine Boy's production to try, (andfail) to take up the slack. Elbert's poetry might mean something ifread with conviction, but her delivery is soaked with the dissociated,uninterested droll of someone's who's heard of poetry as a verbal artform, but hasn't quite mastered it. Every line pulled from her verse isdelivered with virtually the same intonation so that I'm never sure ifall the words are from one long poem about tedium, or just sound thatway because she lacks the spirit or presence to bring the words fullyto life. The words are further maligned by Machine Boy's sampling,looping, and poor recording of them. Spoken word is a hard thing topull off without garnering laughs from all but the most turtle-neckedEnglish majors, but artists like Nicole Blackman, Maggie Estep, andElizabeth Alexander bring to mind the kind of collaboration thatMachine Boy no doubt wants this to be. Thankfully, none of the tracksare long enough to inspire contempt, but they aren't interesting enoughto merit the short time they do occupy either. Tied down todeconstructed poetry and musical backing that doesn't seem to noticethat the words are there, the Depression EP never has a chance to take off. 
Nothing against Techno Animal or Curse of theGolden Vampire, but I am guessing that most of Broadrick's hardcorefans were just biding their time until he unleashed this long-rumoreddebut full-length from his new band Jesu. The album is released at avery serendipitous time, as the resurgence in interest and popularityof post-metal and noise rock has reached a fever pitch, just the righttime for Broadrick and crew to show everyone how things are reallydone. And show them he does, unleashing a longform rock album thatrecalls the best slow-burn doom metal and shoegazer psych-rock, withoutreally sounding like anything else other than itself. People willdoubtless attempt to refer to this as "metal," but it's no more "metal"than Godflesh ever was. Instead, it's a unique combination of elements:rumbling, speaker cone-obliterating bass to rival the mostbowel-voiding moments of Sunn O))) together with thick, textural layersof grinding, melodic guitar, powerfully sparse drums and a blindingwall of wintry keyboards. Broadrick's vocals are desolate and emotive,plaintive wails that are artificially time-stretched, vocodered andharmonized to stunning effect. With the heady sense of chillingambience provided by the synthesizers, I was reminded of Burzum's Filosofem,though the vocals share more in common with Alice in Chains or someother reference point bound to scare the beard-strokers away. The albumis composed of eight somber rock dirges of generous length, each onecompounding layers of distortion and echo throughout their length,filling the room with forceful surges of sound that funnel down noisywhirlpools or crest to awe-inspiring heights. Jesu is more than the sumof its parts. From a collection of essentially down-key, depressingmusical elements, the music at times achieves a sort of heavenlyspiritual transcendence. Case in point is track two, "Friends AreEvil," in which melody is provided by Broadrick's funereal, downcastvocal mantra along with ferociously belted guitar and punishing basscrunches. By the seven-minute mark, however, the song has becometriumphant and majestic, aspiring to the ecstatic "Jesu, Joy of Man'sDesiring" heights suggested by the band's name. The band's effect islargely visceral and thus difficult to translate into words, I amcertain this will please longtime fans of Broadrick as well as fans ofHydra Head, Southern Lord, Robotic Empire, and related businesses.
It seems her father was a leader of the Tamil rebellion attemptingto win independence from the Sinhalese majority, which made her earlylife one of violence, poverty and constant flight from governmentforces. Apparently, this background accounts for the political andrevolutionary overtones of many of the tracks on Arular,though I'm not sure I ever would have detected these themes had I notalready been aware of Maya's story. The Sri Lankan beauty has some goodbuzz behind her because of a pair of ace singles released last year—Galang and Sunshowers—thatintroduced M.I.A.'s signature combination of Timbaland-style beatcraft,Peaches-style electro, dancehall reggae and UK grime/garage-scentedhip-hop. Also there was the popular illegal mashup mix Piracy Funds Terrorism Vol. 1with Diplo, which pitted L.L. Cool J against The Clipse, Missy andCutty Ranks. Her debut is released on XL Recordings, home of DizzeeRascal and Basement Jaxx, both of who seemed to have informed elementsof M.I.A.'s sound. Most tracks are built from a Roland MC-505 beatboxspitting out pounding, distinctly dancehall-style beats, decorated witha myriad little squiggles and acid squelches. The emphasis on clean,laser-sharp, eyeball-vibrating synths bears more than a passingresemblance to Timbaland's production style, which is no accident, asit seems M.I.A. is trying to position herself as thepolitically-conscious, across-the-pond answer to Missy Elliott.Although she perhaps comes by it more honestly, M.I.A. also includes alot of the banghra and worldbeat elements that have become de rigeurfor all modern hip-hop post-"Ger Ur Freak On." Except for a fewpointless tracks of filler, the majority of Arular is raucousand entertaining while maintaining a certain kind of relentlessforcefulness that seems at once scary and sexy. It's the very model ofan entirely derivative sound palette, and M.I.A.'s vocal stylings andlyrics are in no danger of being admired by anyone, but the albumaspires the rarefied heights of alluringly disposable club culture. I'dsuggest that anyone interested in the album immediately go look forlabel advances in cutout bins or on your favorite RIAA-baitingfile-sharing service, because the official release of the album, whichwas scheduled for this Tuesday, has been indefinitely postponed becauseof an unauthorized sample issue. Enjoy. 
