Plenty of new music to be had this week from Laetitia Sadier and Storefront Church, Six Organs of Admittance, Able Noise, Yui Onodera, SML, Clinic Stars, Austyn Wohlers, Build Buildings, Zelienople, and Lea Thomas, plus some older tunes by Farah, Guy Blakeslee, Jessica Bailiff, and Richard H. Kirk.
Lake in Girdwood, Alaska by Johnny.
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This curious quintet makes sounds that recall the glory days of Nurse With Wound: long, shapeshifting collages of psychedelic murk interrupted by random outbursts of industrial clatter, nightmarish drones, deeply bizarre audio mutations and tangible masses of sticky audio goop of impossibly vague origin. The Sleeping Moustache consists of five ten-minute tracks interspersed with five brief interstitial tracks. Everything blends together well because nothing blends together well; forced juxtapositions and jarring eclecticism are par for the course, just like the finest NWW of yore.
At its inception, Nurse With Wound was a group, not a solo project. However, for the last 25 years or so, even with the large cast of collaborators and producers that have worked on NWW records, it has seemed like the sole autocratic creative domain of Steven Stapleton, lone surrealist wolf. That's why its odd to see Stapleton involved in so much group activity lately, with active memberships in ensembles such as Scribble Seven (with Maja Elliott, Joolie Wood, Freida Abtan, Colin Potter, Andrew Liles and Matt Waldron), the Wounded Nurse Ensemble/Salt Marie Celeste live group (with Diana Rogerson, Potter, Liles and Waldron), and now The Sleeping Moustache.
The Sleeping Moustache is an adventurous fivesome consisting of Steven Stapleton, Jim Haynes of Coelecanth, Matt Waldron and R.K. Faulhaber of irr.app.(ext.), and Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson of Icelandic experimental group Stilluppsteypa. There is no clue given as to who does what on which track, and in fact the album's packaging consists only of five primitive, apparently hand-stamped brown paper slips, each listing the five members of the group in a different order. In the background are fragments of Dada-esque typeset dialogue: "Please sirs, could you help me onto the railings so I might leap to my death into the waters?" or "This malign energy issued forth unchecked, saturating the intimate and the mundane alike to twist the innocent contents of our lives into shapes of vivid, indescribable horror." Each slip is backed with a small print by the artist listed on top. Because of the lack of practical information given about the project, the sounds on this CD emerge as even more esoteric and inscrutable than they would have anyway, and it would be impossible to untangle each artist's contribution. The only entity that can be held responsible for this album, then, is The Sleeping Moustache.
The mind-blowing quality of production is a consistent thread running through this cracked, chaotic journey across unspeakably weird audio realms, remaining vivid and thoroughly fucked for the duration of the album. The album plays like an abstract radio drama in which the narrative could never be turned back into sensible language. Chilling drones and stereo-phased plinks and plonks stretch and dilate while tiny flesh-eating robots force a freight train backwards through a rift in spacetime. Squeaking door hinges and creaking wood stairs slowly sink into a burbling peat bog at midnight, while a gas-fueled generator floods the scene with obscene fluorescent lights. Outmoded machinery and monstrous disembodied spirits battle for supremacy against a backdrop of cosmically generated keyboard drones, which shudder and pulsate as they fester into glowing red sores that blasphemously belch and vent thick steam into the pipes of a church organ. Heavily delayed voices utter foreign gobbledygook which bounces between the stereo channels, farting beings of pure static who cannibalistically consume each other inside telephone wires. Damp, evacuated warehouses serve as the setting for strange and awful ceremonies involving tesla coils, rusty steel beams and quivering electrified gelatin fingers slowly caressing articulated marionettes enacting their own doom.
Suffice to say, fans of classic Nurse WIth Wound will rejoice at The Sleeping Moustache. It's a thoroughly enjoyable resurrection of the sort of classic 1980s audio surrealism that groups like NWW and HNAS perfected, worthy of repeated deep listening sessions on headphones.
Splitting this vinyl, and the handmade silk-screened covers, between a pair of duos from Canada and Brooklyn shows noise, guitars and drums acts don’t have to follow the routes of their bigger peers. Although Mouthus’ heavily textured freakout is worlds apart from Cousins of Reggae’s broken behemoth, there is a common battleground.
Cousins of Reggae is a massive misnomer. On this spilt they seem to prefer distorted violence to the delusions of herb, but should they ever turn their sights on Babylon, it’ll end messily for The Man. Spewing splint-legged detuned guitar mess into five chunks of ‘no future’ slaughter, this duo make primitive sludgy pummelling seem driven by aggression.
Like light starved subterranean straight edgers they jostle and batter five versions of "History and Prehistory of Hudson’s Bay." With caveman flint whittling torpedoes of feedback spurting from their doomy ham-fisted string punching, this is held down and drowned rock music. This sound of this primitive down-the-well mix of guitars, drums and noise sounds like its coming from behind the screen around the bed at the end of the ward. There’s no massive variety between these most of these songs, maybe a little bit more muscled feedback manipulation here or some distant vocals there. "Part Three" adds some elusive chimes to the staggering surges, and this portions length makes it the most satisfying of the Cousins side.
The first Mouthus cut, "Better than Facemask," layers beat upon beat with sub rhythms continuously deposing the chance of melody with a shot to the back of the head. This propulsive layering of drum is normally the preserve of Brazilian funk or the crusty dreads on a festival percussion jihad, yet Mouthus make it the sound of mechanical insects mating endlessly. Part of their appeal is the fact that the sounds thunder out from different layers of murk, pulling an addictive shadowy curtain over the turmoil like a layer of dirt. The mix seems to bring out certain pieces into the shuddering daylight only to be superseded by another beaten barrel looping rumble. Perversely with "New Drugz" the duo ditch the beats, replacing them with rushing static. Everything else that makes up Mouthus is brought a little closer to the front: the dusty stylus metal buzz, low bass tuning and Muslim / pagan chants. The band unquestionably has their rhythm thing down to a T, and "New Drugz" suffers a little from the lack of steady movement that this could bring. Its lack of flight might be paving the way for the band’s entry into blacker psychedelia, but I prefer my Mouthus to be eight limbed and on the move.
Eugene Mirman is a very funny guy, the most promising of the current crop of so-called "alternative" comedians, a group that also includes Zach Galifianakis, Patton Oswalt, Michael Showalter and Brian Posehn. His debut album, The Absurd Nightclub Comedy of Eugene Mirman, was a hilarious, brilliant collection of stand-up material that introduced Mirman's unique brand of self-reflexive, postmodern comedy. In comparison, this follow-up CD/DVD on Sub Pop can't help but seem like something of a letdown, but it's not entirely a lost cause.
Absurd Nightclub Comedy was, to me, an instant comedy album classic, containing so many memorable bits: humorous and bizarre anecdotes told in an incredulous tone, strange meta-jokes curiously devoid of punchlines, hilariously tangential asides and adlibs, and several well-rehearsed routines worthy of a Bob Newhart or a George Carlin thrown in at random intervals. I learned why people with no education were likely to utter phrases such as: "I am bike cheese!" I learned that gay rights aren't rights for gay people, gay rights are just rights that are gay: "Like the right to an attorney. That's a pretty gay right." I learned that my home state of Florida is "kind of like a warm, open-air prison," as well as the differences between crazy homeless people in New York and those in Seattle. Mirman read aloud his cosmically funny answers for an application to appear as an eligible bachelor on TV's "Cupid" dating show. In probably the funniest bit, Mirman created corporate advertising slogans for geometric shapes. "Circle: Now That's a Shape! Square: The OTHER Rectangle! Triangle: HOT, THREE-WAY ACTION!"
En Garde, Society! is not as immediately likeable, and doesn't contain half as many instantly memorable bits. Mirman's delivery remains solid and quite entertaining: his incredulous, self-mocking tone adding a level of self-reflexive irony into the mix on almost every joke. Eugene Mirman is one of the many modern comedians following from influential comedy forbears such as Andy Kaufman or even early Norm McDonald, underlining the absurdity and inherent phoniness of the stand-up comedy art form itself, mocking the form from within the form. Eugene Mirman frequently takes a bizarre left-turn with a joke that may seem incredibly lame, random or sloppy and unrehearsed, but he always saves it merely with his tone and mannerisms, with his linguistic prevarications, and his knowing laugh, delighted in realizing his own potential to confuse and subvert an audience's expectations.
All of that is still there, yes, but the material here just isn't as funny. Where the debut seemed to contain a whole act, from beginning to end, this album seems to be highly edited and assembled from many different shows, snatching a new joke or a new bit from here and there and slapping it all together. Some of the bits are just as hilarious as those on his first disc, such as the Christian beauty magazine routine, where Mirman merely reads the aforementioned publication out loud to the audience, pausing now and then for a sardonic or cutting commentary on the sheer awfulness and stupidity of this shining example of religious propaganda for the young. However, other bits, such as the "Papa John's pizza or not remembering my abortion," seem tacky and not well rehearsed. There are more hilarious bits that resemble humorous personal anecdotes more than they do jokes, which is always good, and rarely found in contemporary standup comedy, except for the great David Cross. More stories about Mirman's background as a Russian emigre' figure in, this time narrating his family's daring escape to America while having their phones tapped by the KGB (all true, apparently).
This sophomore album is a bit shorter than the first, and contains a long and annoyingly pointless filler track towards the end. The track consists of a "skit" with Mirman talking to himself after driving home from the show, which segues into an overlong and very stupid song which will not seem funny to anyone except for those who masochistically enjoy laborious and unfunny "comedy" routines. There was also a silly and superfluous "megamix" track at the end of the first album, but at least it elicited a chuckle or two, more than I can say for the new one. All of these weaknesses, however, are more than made up for by the number of times Mirman still made me laugh on this album, such as the insane screaming of a waiter to a customer about to eat seafood fished from red tide waters: "Your face will shit mice!" When Mirman painstakingly deconstructs some asshole's random comment that he would like to put his "tubesteak" in a passing girl's "hot oven," I nearly rolled on the floor with unselfconscious laughter, and I was listening completely alone, unaided by cannabis. While the "Letters to Nouns" and "Coupons for the Audience" bits don't work nearly as well as they should, other bits are far funnier than they might seem on paper, such as the Jack in the Box chicken strips that are mysteriously advertised as "REAL" on a billboard.
The included DVD is not a video of this standup routine, which would have been nice, but rather a collection of short films that were originally posted on Eugene Mirman's website, or on his Village Voice blog. As such, they have been available to anyone with a high-speed connection for a while now, and thus the DVD seems fairly superfluous, even with Mirman's commentary track, which is generally unhelpful and only occasionally funny. The short films range in length and quality, from painfully unfunny skits such as "Scotch and Soda" to supremely amusing clips like "A Video Eugene Sent Himself From the Future." It all amounts to not longer than 10-15 minutes of video. All told, this is a bit of a chintzy package from Sub Pop, but still, what's there is more often than not embarassingly hilarious, and well worth a listen. In my mind, Eugene Mirman hasn't lost his place as the most talented young comedian of the contemporary milieu.
Up until very recently, black metal was close to death. The great bands that helped cement the genre had lost their way and most new bands were one dimensional at best. Over the last few years, exciting bands began to rear their heads and life crawled back into the genre. Christendom Perished is one such album that has reaffirmed my faith in all things spikey and Norwegian.
Mord are vicious sounding. The guitars could curdle milk and the blast beats jar my ears like machine gun fire. Christendom Perished is a good black metal album full of menace and fraught with atmosphere, all that is traditionally needed in a black metal album. At first listen, I thought this was a good album but lacking in terms of innovation. Repeated listens reveal how dense the songs are, little elements like what sounds like a processed angle grinder on “Opus II” adds another plane to the music. Shards of noise like this appear at various points throughout the album and push Mord from being just another Mayhem obsessed band to a band that within an album or two could help redefine the limits of black metal.
Another thing that sets Mord apart from the vast quantities of mediocre black metal bands is the thickness of their sound. Many bands have a preoccupation with sounding thin and bleak but Mord have a fattened sound that is more like an inferno than the usual frozen wastes visited by long haired men in corpse paint. “Opus IV” features a bass that sounds like Nordra is playing it with a jackhammer. It sounds great but tends to be masked behind Necrolucas’s double bass drumming. Necrolucas’s style is conventional in terms of the genre but executed with all the power of a napalm attack. The full, fiery music is accompanied by fitting visuals of bombed out rubble in the sleeve. Christendom Perished is a battle album. It is violent, dark and incredibly heavy.
The album is just the right length. Mord keep it terse and tight and the album works all the better for it. Keeping up with the frenzied assault is tiring work; an album of 80 minutes would be overkill. By the time “Opus IX” (there is no “Opus VIII”) finished I felt shell shocked and glad to be alive. Not many albums leave me feeling like I’ve done a tour of duty but Christendom Perished manages to do just that.
If it isn't swathed in black and grim enough to cause rigor mortis, then it can't rock. That seems to be the prevailing attitude the nay-sayers take towards Boris and their newest record. Without a shred of reason, I've seen Pink hated upon in vitriolic doses, the result of a trendy paradigm shift towards doom metal and its various incarnations. Boris is going to appeal to a different crowd, though, a crowd that thinks My Bloody Valentine could rock just as hard as any metal and that dirty is just as good as heavy.
The opening "Farewell" doesn't strike me as belonging to the Southern Lord family. Sunn0))), Khanate, Lair of the Minotaur, and Earth—these are the bands that define what the label is all about. "Farewell," on the other hand, sounds like it belongs to mid-90s along with a lot of other shoegazing bands. There's an electric sheen sizzling on the guitars, a melodic emphasis that is absent from so many doom and sludge-laden bands, and a clear vocal part that, though buried in the mix, sounds more important than most growling and shrieking ever does. Boris' Pink (a name that probably pissed off a few fans to begin with) is a monster record, a rabid Tasmanian devil of music that splits homes in two, tears cows into shreds of beef and leather, and launches tractors through people's windows. After the slow pounding of "Farewell" ends, this trio takes a sword to their instruments and slashes out a million mile per hour rock fest; it's a puncturing, balls to the wall album that only slows down long enough to give the band a breather or two. All the recognizable (and sloppy) rhythms that tumble through Pink are what makes it so beautifully brutal and intense. Khanate might crush people under their increasingly heavy heel, but Boris explode with all the power of a semi-truck traveling at a light speed and slamming into a two ton block of steel and human flesh, the impact initiating a flight littered with entrails, shrapnel, and massive explosions. The swift, cutting action of the record is more powerful, more fun than anything Sunn0))) has ever choked out of their E string.
The tones on this album are deep and fuzzy, the guitars humming and overloading like a guitar on fire with too many amplifiers turned up to 11. Initially that might sound like a bad thing, but Boris keep their sound under tight control. The guitars and bass are dirty when they need it to be, and free but concise when appropriate. The point is that the music is fucking gritty, mean, and tough all without sounding like a total mess. This is controlled chaos handled by professionals. I can't imagine this being played anywhere without spontaneous eruptions of violence happening everywhere, putting Axl Rose and his pansy voice and shitty faux rock to total shame. Go ahead and listen to this and then tell me that your favorite metal bands can rock anywhere near as hard. Massive amounts of drugs must be induced when listening to this album. I've never been one to love narcotics, but I feel like I should at least be getting drunk and beating people over the head with chairs when I hear this.
The other side of this album's beauty comes in just how exploratory it is. If the hipster, elite crowd is pissed at Boris for both their pink cover and their enthusiastic embrace of traditional rock elements, they have to admit that this is also Boris entertaining new ground with complete abandon. You can hear how joyful the band is when "Pink" opens up and the drums begin to pound away a groove so thick it's suffocating. When guitar solos erupt from the noise, they sound like volcanic prayers, sprays of heat and lust on a crash course with God. It's beautiful and intense, a rapture beneath a sky of noise and rock. They don't eschew their background, their past, or any of their fans by necessity. Their pounding riffs and long, droning strands of sludge still exist here and there and most notably on "Just Abandoned My-self." The song begins as though it's going to be another fast, orgasmic slice of feedback-laden melody and then transforms into a cannibalistic blob of cacophony. For the majority of the song's 18 minutes, nothing but black, greasy death spills out of the band's instruments. This attitude is all over the record, but within the confines of high energy, thundering and rhythmic pulses. Boris are being as experimental as ever, they're just doing it in a format more people are going to recognize and enjoy.
This record refuses to leave my player. It has been with me everywhere I go. It is a superb rock record littered with enough influences and playfulness to make it both interesting and addicting. I laugh at people who are giving this a cold shoulder; if the underground crowds are too hip to like something that rules this hard, then they're letting go of a band and a record that could make every other heavy rock group around look like a bunch of girls in, ironically, pink skirts. My only complaint is the artwork. While the acid tabs were a good idea, the lyrics and information are impossible to read because of the color and layout. I've noticed this happening with a lot of bands. Why would anyone put white text on a sheet that already contains a ton of white or otherwise light colors? The packaging is beautiful, but unintelligible for the most part. Musically, from beginning to end, this album kicks a whole lot of ass, enough to stick in my mind as one of the better things I've heard this year. The move from droned out, space rock to thrashing, truly dirty rock and back to space again is hypnotic and absolutely a must hear. Don't let the bullshit you've heard or read about this band fool you. That's just the sound of a bunch of trendy assholes getting pissed off over the fact that Boris did something great and did it without being willfully obscure and difficult in the provess. At one point I called this the bastard child of Blue Cheer and My Bloody Valentine and though I now think that Blue Cheer isn't quite heavy enough to make that comparison work, it's a perfectly good explanation of just how dirty this record is and just how beautifully melodic it ends up being. I couldn't recommend an album more enthusiastically or to more people. It's everything a great record should be: a good time, a great listen, and an entirely unique perspective from some very unique musicians.
Harris Newman is one of the most diverse guitarists to emerge in the last 10 years and Bruce Cawdron is most notably known as the drummer for Godspeed You Black Emperor. Together they've both played as Esmerine with Beckie Foon of Silver Mt. Zion, and without her, the duo has released their first album as Triple Burner.
Their debut album sounds more like one continuous performance: like a concert in various movements. It starts quiet—very, very quiet—and from the first real full song, "The Wherewithal," it seems as if this duo is going to head down a more languid Esmerine-like path: with Cawdron bowing the marimba to the serene notes of Newman's guitar. Things are still calm by the start of "Roundabout" but they build in volume, intensity, and pace, with Cawdron fully engaged in the hand and malleted percussion. By the song's end the duo are blazing at a lightning pace, and the energy is maintained more or less throughout the rest of the disc.
I don't know if Bruce is playing the plastic spoons at the beginning of "Bride of Bad Attitude" but this song is a distinct turning point in styles for Harris. Whereas before the guitar playing was more in line with the sort of new folk sounds coming out of people's guitars like James Blackshaw or Ben Chasny, "Bride" looks south of the Mason-Dixon line, with a Kentucky Bluegrass tinge, and by the next song, "Wall Socket Protector," the train-like snare drumming from Cawdron matches the piercing slide guitar in a very Mississippi Blues manner.
Although the serenity returns for the most of the nearly 14 minute "The Pulse of Parc Ex," it sounds as if Bruce has built his drum set up, piece by piece, with either cymbals or cymbal-sound producers (you can never tell with this guy). The song naturally progresses between the quiet and more moderately paced playing, never quite getting out of hand, leading naturally into the closer "Regresso," which echoes "Wall Socket Protector" with a much more complete drumset in the hands of Bruce.
Newman and Cawdron are excellent players but they clearly work well for each other: Newman's playing is fantastic but a guitarist needs something more to make the sound a little more full without becoming a complete distraction. With the flood of new folksters it's becoming hard to keep up but thankfully Newman doesn't look like he's planning on getting lost in the shuffle. It's a perfect time now to catch up with Esmerine and Newman's solo releases (see Strange Attractors) and those lucky enough to live in the Northeast US and Canada can catch them on the road in the next few weeks.
In these musically incestuous days it seems like underground improv super groups are meeting up in every inner-city basement. Most of these team-ups come and go in a pleasant enough pot and beer fuelled assault on the senses, but rarely give do they give glimpses like this into group dynamics. Despite this band’s apparent bleak worldview (evident in the song titles and collective name) this is a generously equal musical and unstereotypically focused offering. This is a band working towards one musical goal under the focus of four very different spotlights.
The team up of Chris Corsano, Carlos Giffoni, Brian Sullivan (Mouthus) and Trevor Tremaine (Hair Police) looks on paper like the meeting of remarkable minds. Yet unlike many other random get-togethers of underground this looks like its naturally gelled right of the bat. There’s an overlap in the different territories of these players and this is why Death Unit works as well as it does. Two drummers, a guitarist and an abuser of electronics may not seem like the most easily workable group set-up, but these biomechanical moves come together like the biggest, baddest Decepticon ever built.
For all the unshackled elements and the often-careering pace, both "Scum" and "AIDS Death 666" are perfectly formed for all their rough edges; this is the only way to experience a downhill dash in a freewheeling flaming tank outside of Baghdad. Only Death is Certain comes wrapped in Frank Miller style bloody splatter text and this gives a boost to the mindset of a slickly aggressive world of noir improv. These heavyweight up and comers find an equilibrium that allows all four to flex their muscles and sharpen their teeth, but instead of straining against each other they’re all pushing one way. Giffoni’s pinpoint skill for precision breakdowns balances Trevor Tremaine’s sickened noise outbursts and Sullivan and Corsano lead and back each other into disassociative grooves.
The controlled demolition of "AIDS Death 666" throbs with backed up sine curving energy, tracks spinning for a grip on something, anything. The cymbal storms may precede an electronic meltdown, but the drums are never to far from a formal pattern, even it is formation ram raiding. Both songs run a loose live take on the Carter/Christopherson interface that melted the lines between rhythm and greasy noise, and here the drums take wide loops getting louder as they go.
On the opening "Smut" the sinewy feedback intro is coaxed into an off kilter peal until the digital sounds overtake it. This electronic rip is stretched so far into the foreground that it’s possible to hear the binary clicks. As the wiring is being wrenched, spilling electric vomit, there are coughing splutters and splurges of percussion; this cooperative work as one mind in channelled brute force. There are melodies in the rise and lunge of the feedback, in the back and forth buckling verging on the lip of freefall. This isn’t your typical jam session.
The term "exoteric" can relate popularity, being the exact opposite of "esoteric" and, for the most part, this description is suited to Metalux. Their strange noise has always been a little easier to swallow with its comprehensible beats, recognizable guitars, and punches of melody. Put them with John Wiese, however, and the title of this album begins to appear ill chosen.
John Wiese's approach to noise is multifaceted; he either destroys sound beyond recognition and then constructs strange microscopic fits of random size and shape or he pummels everything he comes across into pure chaos. He almost rides a middle ground between these two approaches on Exoteric, trying to fit in with Metalux's surreal and often perplexing sound. While I like these two on their own, I'm afraid that their work together pales in comparison. Metalux's music has always been disorganized, but I'm always under the impression that they must have some love for organization in some shape. Some of their music is arranged into what some might consider actual songs and even when they venture off into unknown territory, Metalux have a knack for bringing their random sounds together in coherent ways. The whole mess might be incoherent by nature, but Metalux work a miracle or two in their own way. That's why I'm surprised by all the noise on this release. I don't hear a single piano, crystalline drone, or guitar anywhere. In fact, the entire album seems to be composed of sounds taken from Wiese's hard drive. The palette this record uses tastes just like Wiese's noise always has. His passion for granular sound is evident all over Exoteric and unfortunately it takes up the most stage presence.
For the most part it sounds like Metalux took a back seat in this project. Some of their more warped and incidental sounds do appear here in there, in the form of mutant trumpets and warped vocals; what has always made them stand out, however, is conspicuous by its absence. The total lack of melody and the slow pace of the record belie the fact that Metalux sometimes make me want to dance. This is more like an effort to give me a headache in various, pulsing formats. I don't hate the album entirely, but I think these two noise makers could've done a lot more between each other. There's just too much cold and dark space on this record to draw me in and, if anything, this album is an esoteric piece of strange un-noise. It is rhythmic without maintaining a solid rhythm and it is scathing without being overly harsh. In other words, it is simply mediocre sound with few big drawing points. I love the vocals Metalux contributed, but I don't like how they were used with the exception of the very last track.
I suggest looking into Metalux's and Wiese's separate catalogues before I'd get this. Even though I liked both bands prior to hearing this, Exoteric didn't do it for me. It doesn't sound like what I had imagined a cross between these two would sound like.
Japan’s LSD March are best known for their thunderously loud and trippy music. Empty Rubious Red shows a softer and more melodic side as the group is stripped back to Shinsuke Michishita alone. The white hot power is still there but only rarely bubbles to the surface. Instead the focus is on building the same power and tension through quieter and less overdriven playing.
Empty Rubious Red was originally self-released by Michishita last year in a tiny edition of about 200 copies. This reissue gives the album a much nicer sleeve and a bonus alternative take of the title track. “Empty Rubious Red (Take 3)” is tacked on to the start of the album where it sits comfortably. It is loose in structure, mainly random guitar and percussion with echo. It sounds nice but doesn’t go anywhere. “As Many as Stars in the Sky” follows it and is quite a departure in style. Michishita sings softly over a clean electric guitar; it’s bare and beautiful. The album continues in this vein.
However despite the soft side, there are still some extreme sounds on it. On “I Have Been Saving My Love for You” there is a bass playing in the right speaker that packs a mighty punch, listening on headphones was like getting my ear syringed. Empty Rubious Red sounds like it was recorded quite rough and ready but the music is clear and the dynamics are incredible. The different instruments and Michishita’s voice feel like they are all around me in the room giving an intimate and warm feeling.
The original version of “Empty Rubious Red” is far superior to the bonus version. There is a strong bass drone underlying the song. The guitar sounds more confident and Takahashi (one of two appearances) on drums provide more punch, especially during the last two minutes when the song turns into the aural representation of a cosmic orgasm. This fades out into “I only Have Hands for Hold You,” a plodding song that finishes off the album and leaves a relaxed feeling hanging in the air. Empty Rubious Red is as much of a gem as the title suggests. I hope that Archive will consider reissuing more of LSD March’s mainly out of print back catalogue as this and the recent live album have whetted my appetite for more.
Orac Records' co-founder Randy Jones and Paul Dickow (Strategy) both take stabs at remixing the electro-popping, hard-edged dance number "The Love That I Crave" with solid results. The original is twisted and manipulated into stretches of dub-laced pop and sweet, delicate minimalism that is about dance as much as it is about lush beauty.
I had almost forgotten about the remix. A few people know how to work them well, others don't, and for the most part I'm happy enough with the source material. I have no need for a restyled song that will probably sound a lot like the original. Of course, Aphex Twin, Kid 606, Autechre, Plaid, and plenty of others revolutionized the remix for some people. Rarely did a remix from any of the above sound even remotely like the original and, in some cases, it was questionable whether or not the song was a remix instead of a completely new composition. In their cases, however, the music being rearranged and destroyed was instrumental or abstract enough that it practically begged for fresh hands to mess with it. The Blow's "The Love That I Crave" is a pop tune by all standards. It is only two and a half minutes long, it has a lovely, silky chorus held up by some very sexy vocals and a throbbing beat that'd make most any dance-floor denizen happy. The Blow throw their percussion front and center in the mix and play with it just as Jack Dangers does, but their draw is how happily the singer melds with the sound of the rubbery bass and ecstasy-fuelled synthesizers. The beat is loose enough to have sex to, but it throbs more sensually than most club tunes can. Dickow and Randy Jones' approaches to this song are both different, but both hold on to that sensuality for dear life.
Caro provides two remixes and both tend to emphasize the lighter elements of the song. His percussion comes front and center, just as in the originals, but Caro also likes to speed things up a bit. It sounds as though he's spent plenty of times spinning in clubs and, as a result, his first remix, "The Puddles of Love" remix sounds custom-made for DJs. There are all kinds of dub effects sprinkled throughout the first four or so minutes of this version. Voices echo and become soaked in reverb and bass, slowly becoming out of sync with the music and less intelligible. Sci-fi keyboards belch and squirt all over the pounding bass drum that sits on the song from beginning to end, but they never quite carry the groove that the original song contained. If anything, this version sounds a bit flat, as though Caro were trying to formulate an extended jam that never actually gets to the jam part. There are sparks of minimalistic fervor here and there that make it tolerable, but when situated right in the middle of two, more excellent tracks, it's hard to say much more about this. Caro's "The Sea of Love" remix is shorter and more in tune with the original's sexy and sleek presentation. Caro retains a heavy, deep bass sound for this song and adds sweeping string synthetics and choirs in the background. It's a chill-out version of the song. It works well enough because it's both catchy and different enough from the original to maintain my interest. When Caro adds the Japanese sounding guitar into the song, which mimics the vocalist's melodies, the result is pure bliss, a ticket straight to heaven. As that guitar floats through the rest of the song, it's hard not to fall in love with the bouncing rhythms that play out between it, the drums, and the lyrics. This rips his other, more standard remix in half.
Dickow, on the other side, has only one remix, but it's one hell of an effort. He must've heard the echoing, stereo-spanning vocals of the original and decided that he was in love. His remix turns the original into a spaced-out haze: a blur of popping drums and pixilated bass synths. When he adds the piano to the already jumping mix, the song turns into an outright explosion that is equal parts dance and hypnotic arrangement. The robotic vocals that take over in the middle of the song carry both the melody in the song and its surreal soul. It doesn't take Dickow much to turn a song around, to completely alter its face and then drill right into its heart. His minimalistic approach suits this song incredibly well, bringing out the best parts that the original had to offer and adding new elements that turn it into an entirely new piece of pop. At over six minutes, however, it's less pop music than it is some strange hybrid of dub, dance, pop, and psychedelic minimalism. It's a cheap and entertaining slab of 12" vinyl that showcases two talented composers exercising their imagination on great source material.
In this year's Terrastock, Detroit's Paik was once again one of the show stealers. While the instrumental combo's formula isn't the most original sound in the world, their songs are fun, the tunes are well-defined, the live sound is intense, and their stage presence is nothing less than godlike. Monster of the Absolute is easily one of this year's better instrumental rock records, as it's the sexy side of gritty: something you don't mind getting dirty for because it feels that good.
Contrary to what a lot of people say, Paik aren't really a metal band nor do I find a lot of metal in their mix. They're hot and blistering, raw and tireless. It's void of posturing, wanky guitar solos, and has a solid spinal cord made out of beats. Although Monster of the Absolute opens and closes with the thick smoke of beat-less layered guitar, the foundation of each of the album's five main songs is the groove.
The rhythm section is usually the first to make themselves clearly known and on top the riff or mainline lie. On a song like "Phantoms," the lead guitars hold fairly close to a melodic structure, with only the pitch bending slightly. "Snake Face" is met with a wall of dissonance: the pulse is driving the song like a powerful train that's chugging along and the whine is the roar of its engine. The unease of the blistering guitars isn't that far from the more dissonant sounds of Loop or the tamer side of Major Stars. Even when the song's intro is ushered in by guitars on something like "October," it's the beat which leads the way, with shakers and infrequent chime sounds. In a brief 6+ minutes this song shifts gears a couple times yet it gracefully maintains the same melody as was opened with. The 9+ minute title track is this album's magnum opus, as it's thunderous, anthemic, and relentless and gives way to the last song, "Contessa," where a bass line is king and guitars, while loud, remain remarkably peaceful for the duration.
Paik are good at making the best of time on Monster of the Absolute: they don't waste a single moment on this short album and I have no complaints about its length. Brevity is sometimes enough to want to keep going back immediately after because all too often there's the feeling of distorted time and the "did I miss that" syndrome. In a flash it seems that Monster is over and I'm aching for more rather than feeling like I've had enough and that's crucial to getting us back again for the next time.