REVIEW: Wyld Wyzrdz - Acceptance (Inner Islands)

Braden McKenna's solo neo-nu-age psych-folk project Wyld Wyzrdz new album is the first of the year on his own Inner Islands label (even though I reviewed the Ashan album first) and the final one for him in this guise. It picks up where he left off with last September's From A Stone, reflecting on the theme of acceptance, as the title suggests, built on a collection of soft drones, melodic hooks, vocal chants and moving percussion. Another heady tapestry of handbuilt sounds from McKenna's excellently expanding label.

Order for just $5 from their Bandcamp






 

Alongside this album comes a video titled ALL FIRE // ALL LIGHT directed by Lawrence Martinez, with its own website The Range of Light.  It's an evocative twelve minute collage of 16mm and Super 8 shot landscapes, interspersed with illustrations and fx with a soundtrack from Inner Islands artists Gkfoes Vjgoaf, Stag Hare and Wyld Wyzrdz.

REVIEW: Ourobonic Plague - Post Human Possibilities

New six-track release from the darkest corner of Australia, Ourobonic Plague follows up last year's GAAP ep with a longer stretch of industrial umbral imaginings.  The irony in titling this Post Human Possibilities is that the effect of this album is to suck away all the kinds of positive potentials the word Possibility might bring to mind. It's a grey aurad environment that is cast here, a shadowy landscape of futility, chaos, dread and paranoia. None of the songs titles suggest an album that would allow a slice of light in.

The opening Her Reptile Dysfunction begins with unsettling reverberating tones and a keening sound that sneaks in under them only to grow into a wavering foreground sound that plays call and response with wordless feral utterings that crawl out from between them. Slowly the dull thump of a beat drags itself through the swampy textures to dominate the speakers, it's funereal procession harried by a rippling kick. 
By contrast, the following Lake Slasher is a far more sprightly piece, with melodic lines flickering between the branching synths like bats in the night forest, cycling round in rabidly fluttering patterns.  Return To The Lake plays on the effectiveness of adjusting the levels of disorientation around a minimal theme before the drag-crawling pitch-downed take on Nine Inch Nails that is Connection Failed preludes the huge end-piece of Washed Up On The Shore.  The album closes on this sixteen minute vista of bleakness that takes half its length to gradually evolve from a primordial state into an achingly paced tempo of dread pounding and haunted mechanics. The cover art being drawn into perspective fully with that blood red sun silhouetting a scene of deserted industry, abandoned, derelict and lifeless. The track rolls forward in waves of toxic drone, breaking on to a bed of gritty vibration like the yellowed waters of a poisoned lake, fizzing at acid charred rocks of its lifeless bank.

You can imagine a solitary figure staring hopelessly outwards, watching as a weak sun sinks below the horizon leaving them alone in an unforgiving darkness.

Order from the Twice Removed Bandcamp

REVIEW: Monsters Build Mean Robots - We Should Have Destroyed Our Generals And Not Their Enemies

Self released on their own Nice Weather for Airstrikes label, Monsters Build Mean Robots have finally put out their long-anticipated follow up to their 2008 self-titled debut - number 5 in my albums of the year when it emerged not long after they did, a collection of subliminally arresting electronic post-rock tracks with a dark edge of political confrontation that focussed on global Government's warcraft.  On this second album their titular and lyrical leanings are still well into the left but this time they include materialism and a more personal existentialism across the five tracks.  As well as embellishing their vocal potency they have also changed their musical outlook considerably.  In their new incarnation there are no longer moments of sparse ambient flicker and glitch to build and direct the tensions and emotions, instead where it was once sounds sourced from the databanks of Leaf, Warp, and Kompakt, ambient signifiers that glowed throughout the tracks, here all that psychic energy is channelled through the sheer rapturous power of the guitar with reference to bands like Sigur Ros, Explosions In The Sky, and Arcade Fire.

The album features all the prominent post-rock landmarks you could need (exhaustive title included) and embellishes them with instinctive structures in miniaturised forms. No 10 minute + slow growing epics, just mini ones, bottled into pop songs.  Glockenspiel fills ripple up the soaring crescendos of Song for the Generals; the progress of Lament 77 is interspersed with detailed vocal nuances, spaces in the walls of guitars where inflections and backing can slip through. The composition of the songs is assured and confident which gives the band an air of authority important if your key lyrical stock is chastising those in power and standing up  as spokesperson for the disenfranchised.  Spearheading the band is the voice and guitar of Pete Lambrou - whichever update of Post.Rock.V.XX we're up to now, he's at the forefront of it, putting on bands around the South and fronting both MBMR and the more rock-centric Last Days of Lorca.  When he suggests that you burn down your home, in Psalm 57, you're inclined to take his lead and go through with it.  He's got a real lived-in sounding set of chords, got a bit of fire to his falsetto that sets him apart from the Jonsi's and Bellamy's of the world although he is capable of layering on the dreaminess and hollering up a bit of bombast when it suits, and more importantly, where it fits. Again: composition is the keystone to this album's success.




We Should Have Destroyed Our Generals And Not Their Enemies is being officially launched with a free-entry party is TONIGHT! at the Druids Arms, Brighton.

REVIEW: Liquid Skulls - In Lungs (Self-Released)

In Lungs in the third self-released album from Memphis based soporific ambient folk band Liquid Skulls. Woven from skeins of deeply haunting material, this record manages to be even more intricate and delicate than March's gossamer Dead In Yr Eyes.  Extending my interpretations of the sounds I described in my post on that previous release, their quicksilver sound is hard to define, occupying a blurred landscape constructed in some twilight netherworld beween the ambiance of Grouper's deer dragging and Appalachian wyrd folk song structures - less campfire, more swampfire - a boggy and murky veil obscuring a comforting soul-warming centre.

All free downloads are now sold out but you can still pick this up for just $5 from their Bandcamp.

REVIEW: Honeydrum - Pleasures of the Sun (AmDiscs)

Honeydrum
Pleasures of the Sun
(AmDiscs)

That cover art should clue you in to the sounds of Honeydrum: a romantic clinch, mid waltz, blurred out of focus, shaking with both emotional tension, erotic release and the furtive hand of the voyeristic cameraman.  This six track album develops the band from their seven previous eps into a proposition less fierce than the likes of Ghost Animal, less murky than the handful of Beach Fossil bands yet muddier that the clear-eyed Wild Nothings, Honeydrum have a sound that is definitely of the now, with a distinct feel and tone that sets them out from their peers - in their own words; "Atmospheric mall jams". The way they shuffle their feet and hunch their shoulders gives them the air of a slouchier, grouchier Blank Dogs - by now you're getting into the references - a mix of John Hughes and John Waters films. Heavy 80's hangover.

You can download it for free, so you should probably just do that right now:  Digital version out now on the band's BANDCAMP.  Cassettes available from 15th August to order HERE

Review: Hateful Abandon - Move (Todestrieb)

Released on Ipswich based black/dark metal/industrial label Todestrieb Move is the follow-up to 2008's Lungs which saw the duo of Swine and V/M drop the harsh black metal noise of their debut Neverending Black Torrent of Death (released under the name Abandon) in favour of cleaner guitar tones channelled from a new-wave, dark-pop and post-punk perspective. Heavily shaded by the shapes thrown by the likes of Dead Can Dance, The Cure, and Joy Division it almost annihilated their existing audience of knuckle dragging metalhead noiseniks and cast them somewhat adrift of definable categorisation.  The definition of Hateful Abandon as a musical entity, and their position in regards to any kind of historical lineage or current scene is something mainman Mart Brindley (aka Vintyr) explained in assertive no uncertain terms when I sent him some questions for their inclusion in the UK Black Metal Week feature on the blog in December. Read that interview here.

Simply put, this band stand alone.

There's little trace of black metal left on this new album, and other than the vocals which can peak out into hoarse roars there's very little Metal here at all; there's more similarity to current band like The Horrors or Cold cave here than any of the recent strains of black metal bands.  Yet despite that it is one of of the most violent, angry, aggressive and imposing albums to have crushed the air from my speakers in a long while. It's not about defining or submitting to genre tropes to aid the listener in understanding the themes of the record, instead it is all in the vocal delivery, the atmosphere that overrides all the instruments contributing to it. A heavy Swans atmosphere hangs over the record a well

The rise and fall of intertwined guitar/piano crescendos in Human Clockwork is like something from latter day Mogwai (and someone else can tell me the precursor to them).  Overlapping doomy chug of bass in Copper Foundation overlaid by scrabbling guitar lines and alternate rasped and glowering vocal.
Huge throbbing momentum of Poundland that sucks up distorted debris and sonic carnage from the earth scorched by its approach. Has Godflesh written all over, shakes off the comparison, stamps a boot into its face then elevates out of the claustrophobia by adding an echoing choral chant into the final moments. The final track Lost is another of the album highlights, digging in to another emotive key lead finale that loops over into cathartic oblivion, retaining the hostility of the rest of the album, easing it out through a fading coda until there is nothing left.

The musicianship and song structuring in the album is phenomenal, the relentless procession of ideas is as intense as the music itself.  A total experience.

REVIEW: Stag Hare - Spirit Canoes (Inner Islands / Hands In The Dark)

New release from Utah, US based solo-voyaging bio-trance project Stag Hare, available on mixed colour 12" (including d/l) from Inner Islands and limited edition 50 digipack & poster CD run from Hands In The Dark

Arriving at the same time as the Gkfoes Vjgoaf album Spirit Canoes on the same label, this is another release that continues to exemplify Inner Islands as a force to reckoned with - the power of Mother Nature herself.  Stag Hare's music is as equally infused with the sounds and resonances of the natural world as Gkfoes, and on Spirit Canoes he is trying to channel as much as she can through her music along the same transcendent plane.  Composed of four long pieces of deeply hypnotic tranquility floated out over beats drawn from deep earthy tones, Stag Hare loses himself in directing the listener on a tour of the natural forces of the Earth, the vibe getting super heavy out there in the wilderness, bringing hypnotic tides of rhythm and drone crashing right over your head, threatening to wash you away with its flow.

Can't get enough of this biosphere meditative trance at the moment, and the summer is the best time for it - lying out under the evening sky, watching as the music slowly pull the stars out of hiding.

REVIEW: Gkfoes Vjgoaf - Nature Eternal Striving (Inner Islands)

Gkfoes Vjgoaf
Nature Eternal Striving
(Inner Islands)


Sean Conrad is an exploratory sort of person.  He is physically well travelled, having moved round the US and now residing in New Zealand, though his camp there is an equally nomadic one. His previous release as Gkfoes Vjgoaf, Glacial Ways found him take tentative steps towards the water's edge of a new sound - the element itself; Water.  With titles that involve the words River, Mist, Clouds and Snow the main influence for Nature Eternal Striving is explicitly liquid and the album immediately starts with the gentle sway and rocking that echoes the waves and tides and continues to expound on the theme throughout. This new record comes with one of Sean's more insightful introductions which explains his disinterest in water and the fact he hasn't even been swimming for five years, then explains his realisation of it's importance to him and a new found connection to it.  The music of Gkfoes has always been elementally obsessed, starting off with forest forays and campfire rounds ripened in the pine scented backwoods of his home state of California, albums strewn with birdsong and wind rustling leaves, tracks embellished with the sounds of the ambient nature around him.  Now living in one of the wettest regions on Earth he has begun producing music that is in thrall to the rhythms and textures that make up seventy percent of the world's surface and the insides of our bodies.

On Nature Eternal Striving Sean has filled his sound out just that little bit much more and created his most cohesive and wholly consuming record to date. What he achieves is one of those masterly atmospheres that is not so easy to describe, yet so easy to sink into and be transported along with. Its apparent simplicity belies it's complex psychological effect and musical construction; a harmonising of alertness and deep slow breathing trance that will almost flat line your heart-rate with tracks like the 17 minute River Friends and closing Temple Of Snow.  This is drone music with a lot of movement. There's a shimmering post-rock ambience to the way his use of repetition is pushed to subliminally affecting, physically arresting purposes, teasing out endlessly looping refrains of majestic beauty.  This is new age trance music in the vein of White Rainbow's Prism Of Eternal Now without the ironic knowingness of what it's attempting, nor any of the crudity of someone like Dolphins Into The Future (though Ka Ala Ke Kua does convincingly refutes that).

In a harsh critical sense this could be viewed as practical, utility, flotation tank music, but that view would overlook the depth and sheer talent of the musicianship that enhance the album through the intangible elements of quiet euphoria that have always been there in his work. On ...Striving Sean has made these elements more pronounced whilst simultaneously immersing them into the body of the tracks with a more finessed subtlety that makes them much more consciously apparent, creating a coherent, transcendent, yet still elusive album that is always ahead of the listener, leading the mind into over-abundant landscapes of sonic fauna and flora.

Nature Eternal Striving is released on 12th August by Inner Islands and is available to order now. Comes on multicoloured 12" vinyl in a double gatefold sleeve, with digital download.

Here's the final track from the album; The Temple In Snow:

DOWNLOAD: Adolescent - Run Away From Bad People

Adolescent
Run Away From Bad People
DOWNLOAD

Another excellent Brighton based electronics artist producing blurred head and heart music. Alex Parish is Adolescent, and although it's not the greatest of names to get started with don't let that deter you at all because the music inside it is of as high a calibre as that fuck-off massive rifle on the cover art.  It's rare to find artists transposing a tangible mental and physical state into their own music, and sharing such personal problems in as subtle a fashion as Alex does - he suffers from Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and takes the distortions of "mood, memory, time perception" which affect him through his condition and replays his experiences through synth and computers to produce a sound  that shimmers with a deeper resonance that merely artfully placed sound can convey alone.

As the EP progresses, whether by design or happy accident, the tracks seem to get denser in their cloudbursting sense of euphoric harmonic detail - the double ambient sucker punch drift implosion of KNEKT and The Source is an equal to the hallucinatory bliss produced by artists such as Vondelpark, Moths, and Holy Other.

Follow him on Soundcloud, then watch this:  The haunting docu-music-video to the opening track TLE (Temporal Lobe Epliepsy), which records Alex's visit to a hospital for a brain scan for the condition which he suffers from. His backstory is copied below.




BACKSTORY:

Since I was very young I've had Temporal Lobe Epilepsy. In my case, seizures are quite infrequent, usually occurring in batches over a few days, every 4-6 weeks.

The seizures are not so physical, instead they affect my mood, memory, time perception, and create massive confusion.

For the past 5 years I have been attending frequent brain scans such as EEGs and had an MRI, the reason for this being that my seizures are so infrequent it is almost impossible to catch one on record to analyse it.

This 72 hour brain scan was the last ever scheduled for me, and I was told that if I didn't have a seizure whilst staying there, then there wasn't much else they could do.

I decided that I would document the first day of the brain scan to accompany a piece of music I had been working on, that was supposed to mimic my seizures in both the sounds used and the mood created.
This was the second time I had produced and edited a video, so I hope you like it!

In the end I DID have a seizure whilst there which was a miracle and am waiting on the results of the test.

REVIEW: Hotel Wrecking City Traders & Gary Arce - LP

Hotel Wrecking City Traders & Gary Arce
Bro Fidelity

Melbourne based instrumental brother-duo Hotel Wrecking City Traders team up with Gary Arce of Yawning Man on this huge monolithic two-track slab of improv noise rock. Yawning Man were one of the bands first making forays deep into the Desert Rock scene along with Kyuss, Brant Bjork, Karma To Burn and then some; a wealth of gnarly experience from which Arce draws on, setting his guitars down over the top of the tapes sent to him with a cool and studied sense of purpose as the two HWCT brothers (Ben Matthews on drums, Toby on guitar) work off each other building up the tracks. Toby also laid down bass parts to further define the flow of the tracks, but the initial darker guitar and drum are taped live together. The pair have a subtle and powerful way of playing off each other, locking into dense grooves and allowing each other space - a great canvas for Arce to add his extra detail on to.

The first track slowly builds up from feathery psychedelic skeins of loose interplay that solidifies into into howling motorik juggernaut. There's a big dose of Pelican and Isis buried into this, a patient focus on developing textural elements within the improvised frameworks slowly ratcheting up the tension and pressure letting it steam out again fiercely but not quite through the kinds of huge riffs HWCT have played with before. The two tracks don't quite cut as loose and free or offer up as devastatingly hedonistic grooves of molten rock as tracks off the Black Yolk ep from 2008 did - Go check out Lakeshore Strangler and Pagoda immediately after this and buy that album up too - but it's an almost incomparable form of rock music they are playing here.  Mastered by James Plotkin, the master of conjuring a sharper resolution of depth and space out of dark music, this is a record of intricate feeling, teasing out themes as the tracks progress, a Mogwai  influenced sense of using repetition to create scale.  The lighter guitar of Acre is contrasted by the dirty crunch and aggressive sawing of Toby but the restraint with which Toby plays is what makes the combination a success.

The record is limited to 300 copies on a lush deep blue wax 12" including a t-shirt with tidy teardrop logo.  Order your copy HERE

DOWNLOAD: Asian Women on the Telephone - ICanT

Asian Women on the Telephone
ICanTRAIG Records
DOWNLOAD

Russian Dadaist industrial drone rock outfit Asian Women on the Telephone have released a new full length that utterly surpasses their previous work and many other records released this year. Similar street level clang and clatter to the likes of Religious Knives, Skull Defects, Mi Ami, Black Dice and original non-conformist dissenting confrontationalists like Einstürzende Neubauten, Faust, Throbbing Gristle and Suicide, ICanT has reconceived and energised their vision into producing the band’s most idiosyncratic and physically exciteable album to date.

As those preceeding references would suggest, theirs is a contorted melding of kraut, psych, industrial, and avant-garde elements all interlocked and playing off each other at any one time, certain aspects arcing out of each of the eight track with varying degrees of intensity.  Highlights are inevitably the parts where propulsive beats comes to the fore and suck the rest of the noise along in its slipstream, the grandest most sweat-inducing wide-eyed piece of them all literally having their thrall to the hypnotic embedded in its title: Vip-Maria-Viva-Trance.


 

The physical release is limited to 100 CD-Rs bound in hand-made silkscreen pentagon folders available through RAIG Records and Shiny Beast.

REVIEW: Everyone To The Anderson - The Man Born From Inside of a Horse (Unlabel)

The Man Born From Inside of a Horse is the debut full length album from Brighton's Everyone To The Anderson. It will be released through Unlabel on Monday in a limited edition run of hand-made die-cut screen printed sleeve CDs.  It will be a work of art-rock record worth cherishing. For years I have been saying this is the best band in Brighton and for years I have no real idea if anyone has been listening to me or not, yet for years I have repeated it as one of the truths that I know. Their Doodlebug EP is a flawless rush of brawny adrenalised frayed-nerved noise rock, as numbingly acerbic as it is cerebrallly exciting and vice versa. If you can verse that vica.  The tracks on that were long and drawn out weighing in their peaks with a measureed build. At under half an hour the 11 tracks that form '...a Horse don't so much as blast past, they burn right through you leaving their figures imprinted deep into your synapses, so after even brief exposure the glottal breaks in the opening riff will stalk your walk. This is the kind of music you play on headphones at other pedestrian's peril as you involuntarily contort in thrall to the direction of the music, the momentum of each track will keep your feet moving as your mind and shoulders meet in unified spasm.  There's a dryness to the vocal deliveries that recalls Steve Albini - there's a lot of Fugazi to the guitars.  Even inside the heart-burstingly lush melody of So You're Saying There's A Chance there lies a kernel of grit that keeps it mean to the core, but the chorus keeps unfolding out in even more attractive layers like the petals of a rose attached to the idly savage thorns of its' stem, and it's an analogy that you can pull through plenty of the tracks on the album; one of the keys to its' potency a passive aggression - distortion and harshness, angularity, edge all co-existing and harmonising with unexpected softnesses, a gnarliness overlaid with prettiness; veils of shimmering delay, the pregnant hum of warm feedback, patiently held guitar tones, Ben Gregory's voice. Then the beasts attack all barking, snarling and frothing at the mouth.  The build of Pocklemouse could end you up anywhere but it chooses to whip itself into an almost uncontrolled frenzy.

And therein lies the second key to the effectiveness of this album: Restraint. Another Albini reference, and another lesson transcended by this band.  Illustrated in the track title Let's Take This To Smithereens; you know what that censored word should be and it makes you rage at the replacement of it. Hold on to that thought, because it will be released through the course of the track, all in distinguished, unhurried time.  There's an elegant poise to the execution of every aspect of this album, a sharpness the eludes description (how very convenient for me) and can only be felt while listening. There's a sense of dark humour and a sad sense of nostalgia to some of the lyrics like "We're carving our names into the spine of a tree, hello we were here in August 1990",  a sense of self-deprecation "we need a space six feet high and just enough wide, we'll only be passing through", and some kind of sensuality "It's skin on skin", breathed heavily, the exact nature of the breath's intent ambiguous. Which leads to the final keystone holding the album together, the most addictive quality it has to offer is something it doesn't actually offer directly but keeps elided from the listener.  You will not be able to turn up this loud enough to ever overwhelm you as much as you want it to, there's something so tantalisingly distant about the way it will never submit to you but strides on and off indifferent, in its' own little world.

In 2011, rock music doesn't get much better than this.

DOWNLOAD: Vagina Vangi - Locked Forever

Vagina Vangi
Locked Forever
DOWNLOAD

New four track EP from this Russian witch house oriented outfit following their Benighted United ep from December that develops their genrefied themes and expands their sound onto a wider plane. The track titles elude to an end times of occult darkness, Biblical prophecies, of damnation fire and brimstone, the wastelands and castigations of Milton's Lost Paradise, Satanic themes wrought in cold electronics.

The four tracks of Vagina Vangi's new release almost run straight into each other, barely missing a beat before seguing your attention through smoky fade onto the next budding tendrils of euphoria. That is certainly what the music in the EP hopes to achieve, through a mix of chest bursting throat choking euphoric trance and a dissonant yet equally complementary and enhancing use of noise, distortion and disintegrative effects. The sounds draw comparisons to, if not direct influence from, the feral trance of Salem and White Ring and the more studied bleakness of Vortex Rikers and Porn Antler. There is a fullness to the construction of these tracks which enhances their designs to lift the listener up on to a higher plane.

The first track Black Coils sets this landscape out in as epic proportions as an opening gambit will allow; charred beats imposing themselves across a smoothly twisting rhythm, a disembodied vocal slowly coalescing into a liltingly delicate refrain suddenly solidifies into full throated flight along with a soaring megaton blast of fiery synths. Europop and dirty noise drone balled up into an explosive comet of momentum.

Second track Goatghosts brings a haunted male vocal straight in over a thick cable of electro throb, the melody line sputtering and shorting like the most delirious Justice tracks. A distinctly European sound of French filter house and chart trance. Behind the fizzing live electrical lightshow are layers of rising key major chord synth stabs that get overloaded even more on the title track Locked Forever which almost roars out of the speakers where it not for that drive-time smoothness it's been finished with – it works, it sucks you in then hits you with a slamming beat straight in the solar plexus doubling the density of the track instantly with the kind of shocking elation that a good drop should feed you, and the effect keeps running through the rest of its' five minutes.

Final track, of Chaos and Hell is a slow burner, holding down an overarching atmosphere of doomy intensity, employing oppressive minor chord progressions that move with studied intent, building itself up over the spine of a martial tattoo slowly reappearing from some dirty and distant skirmish accompanied by clouds of ominous synth tone. As this seething mass of darkness draws nearer the cavorting shadows of the the former tracks can be made out, yet in its' final moments this release never quite opens out into a fully unleashed four to the floor onslaught that it might have set you up for leaving you on the edge of a climax that is yours to interpret as satisfying or otherwise. For me, it's all the better for the restraint.

Download from Bandcamp, stream and follow on Soundcloud.

If you like the sound of this keep your eyes on the blog, later today I've got an
interview with band leader Ilya Arhipov for you.

DOWNLOAD: Bernholz - Consequences 1 (Variations on a Theme)

Bernholz
Consequences 1 (Variations on a Theme)Anti-Ghost Moon Ray Records
DOWNLOAD


Berholz is the name of the solo out-wardly experimental explorations of one member of Brighton's Duke Raoul.  Most of the tracks in this release are very brief, only a couple stretch over two minutes creating a flickering tapestry of an album that offers up a lot of very neatly realised ideas in its brief twenty minutes.

Starting off with a minute of loose jazz-based bass & voice freestyle that segues through fifty seconds of prettily delayed white tone, then real beats kick in; for ninety seconds a clicking see-saw of minimalism is seduced by luscious grey hum that all simmers away to starkness.

The fourth track builds on the third, the minimal clean lines to all sounds are there, an organ playing a short chiming refrain that rolls around in small cycles, disappearing under a rumbling bass mid-section, then reappearing on the other side loaded up on effects. The piece is fleshed out of the longest running time of 4:26, giving the listener their first and only chance to really immerse and breathe in the ambience and feel the languid pace of the rhythm.

On the fifth, Beach Boys harmonies back a fatter dirtier bass-drum beat, the skin reverberating with the solid thumps propelling the track along, the vocals floating lazily over the top like they were basking under Californian sun – a fantasy which the atonal grinding tone between them attempts to aggravate as best it can.

The ninth track breaks up the smoothness by chopping into the rhythm with an almost glitch-like disrespect for form, but the trajectory isn't separated by too much to actually vibrate your teeth out with dissonance, the track progressing with a linearity to lock on to. The final piece is three minutes of vocal harmony, voices layered upon on another, firm toned, heavy breath and sighing.

The ten tracks are each titled with a simple number from one to ten 1,2,3 – but not in sequence. Reordering the album into track title sees it play with equal, if not more success, so it's worth giving both orders a listen. Minimalist abstract art jokes. The music is no joke. Excellent stuff.

REVIEW: Wyld Wyzrdz - Free Magic (Inner Islands)

Wyld Wyzardz
Free Magic
Inner Islands
BANDCAMP

This is the third release from Californian naturalist psych label Inner Islands and it is from the solo project of label owner Braden McKenna himself, Wyld Wyzardz - chief propoent of the meditative Earth music his label personifies.

Three tracks of immersive oceanic flotation drone, all sun sparkles and fresh salty sea breeze. The twenty-minute opener Ocean Wind plays on a softly lilting motif that winds gently onwards like an ambulating river down towards the sea; three central themes, a deep undercurrent of thick tones, an almost birdsong like trebly refrain that calls from the tops of each wave of mid-toned synth thrum as it peaks. It sounds really clean and fresh, crystal clear waters swishing at the banks of a channel that drifts toward an increasingly open outlet and the expanse of the pacific. The second much shorter track, Forest Light, is beholden in thrall to the bird-song it samples, almost a pre-requisite for being released on the label, McKenna emphasies the subtly harmonic and rhythmic ways in which the accompaniment of nature can enhance the glowing energies of this nu-age synthesiser drone. There's the sense of a timeline being traced as the album progresses, the long slow dawn, through a hazy midday then a cooling down and darkening. The final track Dragon's Garden ends with the chirruping of crickets and the creak of frog song – dusk drawing in on the close of the album.
Free Magic is out now available as download or 12" & d/l

REVIEW: Sealings - 'Untitled' (Italian Beach Babes)

Sealings
'Untitled'
Italian Beach Babes

Buckle up for the forthcoming ep from this Brighton based band of shapeshifting noise-rock fiends Sealings. It doesn't have a title because they "usually forget about those" but it does have four tracks of incendiary raw power with just a slight enough hint of subtlety to make you prick up your ears. It also has this cover! 

Fans of the clench-fisted sludge rock spewed out from the likes of Mayyors, Twin Stumps and Rusted Shut will take succour from this but there's a sleeker, darker sensibility lurking about within the shadows of its rhythm section.

Steaming oiled pistons push this machine along, rippling underneath the fiery buzz of guitars. Opening track King Shot is is howling salvo of leads, barking and squealing across each other. The steel gets stripped back off the second track, Swag Chandelier bringing in the street-wave pulse of a beat, eerie and menacing; Suicide by way of Brighton town. Cruel World rides the same rails even harder, accelerating the tempo and summoning sheets of smoke-damaged distortion to confuse your senses, throwing in some almost clear cut lead lines towards the end which lead nicely into the final Black Hole, which is the closest this EP comes to allowing your ears room to breathe, easing off the intensity and producing a half-light melody, something approaching prettiness against the backdrop of carnage still smouldering behind it.

The release will be limited to 100 light blue cassettes and ships on 30th May. You can order HERE, listen to Cruel World HERE

and stream/dnld King Shot here:





You can download a few of their previous now-out-of-print releases from the band themselves by pointing your clicker over these words, including the split that first caught my ear and burned it right off back in '09:

My Boyfriends Dead ep (Clan Destine)

Tie Dye Tapes

Split w/Lois Magic (Free Loving Anarchists)

REVIEW: Stick In A Pot - A Number More Than Nothing At All (Sad Sentry)

Stick In A Pot
A Number More Than Nothing At All
Sad Sentry

BANDCAMP

Stick In A Pot hit me up with this, his debut full length album months ago and I've been playing steadily ever since, constantly expecting to finish this write up, intended to get it before its release date in March but never quite squeezed it out. It's a grower as much as it is instantly likeable; took me a while to really recognise the subtle nuances of the vocals styles as something more than an amalgamation of Stuart Murdoch and Nick Drake; there's a real tapestry of sound weaving the songs together that might not be instantly noticeable - especially if at first you're presented with it being an album by one Piers Blewett, when in fact it has been recorded with a band of six people and more than twice as many instruments again beyond the expected acoustic guitars and drums, including glockenspiel, synths, drone machines and radio frequencies, mandolin and dulcitone, none of which are used arbitrarily. There's a great intuitive ear going on with the compositions, plenty of space to let notes hang when at other times there will be some neat tone or unhurried counter melody sliding through the opening.

Of the ten tracks on the album Synaesthesia is probably my favourite though I'm a sucker for the subject matter it helps that the song is a beguilingly layered up piece about psychological dissonance. Leaving folk structures and lyrics aside Procrastina features lovely humming loops of droning guitar melody overlapping and weaving round each other in long cycles of plangent elation.


Brighton has quite a wealth of folk oriented artists and a scene that has been in rude health in recent years with the Woodland Recordings and Wilkommen Collective groups alone offering a number of inspired performers and this album compares favourably to those established and seriously talented artists.




Here's the video to Navel Lint, the first single taken from the album in February:

DOWNLOAD: Crooked Mountain, Crooked Sea - What's There To Write About?

Crooked Mountain, Crooked Sea
What's There To Write About?DOWNLOAD

They've been releasing records since 2009, when they first put out A Small Version of a Party but until the last 6 months, have so far kept a relatively low profile. At the end of last year local monthly music (and more) bible Source Magazine featured One Hundred Yards Into The Desert from the band's (also free d/l) It's The Falling That Counts, Not The Landing album in their songs of 2010 writers chart, and they have also been garnering praise from all ove the UK.  They follow in the footsteps of fellow Brightonian based wielders of angular punk dissonance such as Charlottefield, Everyone To The Anderson, Ack Ack Ack, Zettesaur, Illness, Projections.... That felt good listing off all those bands. This city has bred a good heritage of confrontational guitar bands steeped in the heavy melodies and dirty rush of hardcore, imbuing heavily rhythmic feral rock with an Albini-raw presence, diamond sharp turns and steely hooks and on the strength of this release alone Crooked Mountain, Crooked Sea deserve to feature amongst those names.

The tracks on What's There To Write About? rarely last more than three minutes, but each manages to squeeze a dynamic shape into its abrasive structure; The storms of howling feedback in It's The Same ge lashed down onto a driving rhythm; the spacious reverb guitar line that opens Chances Scattered is suddenly obliterated by dry hoarse throated barks, the way the beat hacks into the spiralling descent of the riff in Hours In The Frame. Across the ten tracks of this album the band drop more headspinning moments of excellence than it would be possible to describe in easily readable sentences, so abrupt and profound the changes in direction - Other Places, Other People features four increasingly head-noddingly potent shifts before two minutes, one of which involves cleanly sung harmonising.  It's an attention to songwriting detail that is emphasised further by the unsubtle caustic tones they flick their guitars to when the atmospheres get a little dark and the moods shift from fist in the air to fist in yr face. 

The album is free to download now from their Bandcamp, along with several other releases. There will be a physical release bound in recycled book covers on Box Social at the start of May. 
Get it on mp3 now, and start saving your pennies for that.

REVIEW: Daniel Klag - Weird Fiction

Daniel Klag
Weird Fiction
AMDISCS

Weird Fiction is the latest, and first release on AmDiscs, from New York based anti-gravity ambient musician Daniel Klag, following CDr's on Self Storage and La Station Radar.  The six tracks on this release mix multi-hued waves of lugubriously flowing drone with elemental textures, in thrall to the ethereal works of Fennesz and Tim Hecker and the prettier, unspooky, end of Boards of Canada's canon. As the tracks progress they morph and warp hypnotically, colouring themselves with emotive resonance, outlining hazy narrative arcs in their structures.  Opening track All White with the Peaks of Mountains is at once of the air and the earth, as its title suggests, drawing out a steely granite-dense centre tone that locks down lighter currents that rise off it, the whole piece exerting a shivering light headed atmosphere on the listener. At the opposite end, the closing Stone Cities Ancient and Wind Weathered is composed of similar audio substances yet emphasises the earthier concerns of decay and decomposition. 

He recently made Stadiums and Shrines blog a deep and heady mix of the kinds of artists his music is informed by, directly or obliquely which you can download here:

DOWNLOAD


00:00 Daniel Klag – “All White with the Peaks of Mountains”
04:07 Fennesz + Sakamoto – “Cendre”
06:26 Tim Hecker – “Atlas Two”
14:54 David Behrman – “On the Other Ocean”
19:53 Daniel Klag – “Ramparts”
24:30 Kria Brekkan – “Armor”
25:39 Rhys Chatham – “A Crimson Grail Pt. 2″
29:24 Jonny Greenwood – “Moon Mall”
30:25 Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. – “In D”
34:15 Experimental Audio Research – “Dusk”
37:17 Six Organs of Admittance – “Awaken”
38:44 Inca Ore with Lemon Bear’s Orchestra – “Blue Train”
40:50 Ciccone Youth – “Me and Jill”
42:34 Gas – “Zauberberg 1″
47:13 Keith Fullerton Whitman – “Acgtr Svp”


Here's a video clip from a couple of years ago, or Klag performing live.

REVIEW: ∆AIMON - Amen

∆AIMON
Amen
Tundra Dubs

Tundra Dubs is a Californian based label dealing in the underbelly of modern music; the ugly side of witch house, the confrontationally bleak electronica that conjures the more inhospitable soundscapes in its seances.  Immediately stamping its mark as one of their best, almost signature sounding releases, is the debut from the mysterious (been a surprisingly/relatively long time since I've got to say that) ∆AIMON.

Amen adds some cold-blooded industrial momentum to the labels sound, hip-hop signifiers subducted into convection loops that spits occult themes back out, oily and violated by the darker malevolence that forges these tracks.  The album smashes itself out of the speakers with Pure, eruptions of crumbling distortion, breaking apart under the insistent stamp of hollow-eyed drum-machine, its steady mechanistic plod juxtaposed well with the flighty feminine vocals that flit between the spaces, riding in the wakes of the beats that plough through the waves of fuzzy drone, a fizzing presence that threatens to break over each track and flood them with noise - what holds it back is a tense sense of restraint that keeps this release from overshooting itself, and holding the tracks at a nervy peak throughout their relatively short durations. The title track Amen features an earth shaking bassline that ratchets up the tension further until it all peaks with the following keystone; the cover of Swans' Holy Money. It's a rendition that extends the grim futility of the original, rolling right into ∆AIMON's world and out the other side leaving the following tracks ringing with its vehmence.

This is it, and you should go over to buy it from the labels BANDCAMP for just $3.