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.

VIDEO: Grimes - Oblivion

Brand new clip for my favourite track - currently, it changes every day - from the multicoloured kaleidoscope that is Grimes'Visions album. The combination of smooth doo-wop backing 'Wah-wah's' and contrasting anti-melody of that synthetic grinding sound are a good showcase for the way in which she throws her genres together with an almost haphazard mission, sometimes the idea never fully blooms, but othertimes the come off sounding unlike anything else, and that magical concoction would be this track.

last.fm one to post in this thread is a rotten egg!!!

This week's weekly listening - pretty much your favourite thing that I do.  I don't know what that says about me or you but I like it a lot all the same.

It's not going to be me, for once!

01. Perfume Genius - 77

02. Run DMT - 42

03. fauxmusica - 34

04. Honeycomb Bones - 30

05. Sacred Star - 23

06. Mogwai - 20

07. LIQUID SKULLS - 19

08. School of Seven Bells - 18

09. Cold Cave - 17

10. Fulang Chang & I - 16

1 – New album is utterly beautiful. Trying to define it into further words would be like pinning a butterfly to a cork board.

3 – Final album from 'Yorba Zergot''s Fauxmusica guise, before moving on to a a project with the Peach Tree called Sacred Star. Witch House as it was always meant to be – challenging, cryptic, subversive, uncompromising, unlistenable.

4 – New self-released ep from these upcoming garage rockers. More streamlined and cleaner than their last one, but still hairy and full-speed.

5 – see 3, but double its potency for the two-headed beast it is.

8 – Really not as good as Sean's review had me believe, which is a shame because I was with him all the way on his Blondes one. It's just too insubstantial. Indie disco shoegaze that's flighty and weightless instead of involving and ethereal.

10 – First new material in years from these guys who I played a lot in the early days of doing NFR. They've been working with One Unique Signal's Byron to get a sound similarly Telescopic to theirs, which is a very good thing.

DOWNLOAD: Ewan Limb - Ewan Limb

When I posted about this Russian bedroom producer's first tracks I got rained on with emails from people wanting to know more - but at the time there was no more to give.  Now Ewan Limb has put up a full album's worth of material; Nine tracks of dreamy bass heavy electronica that take in all kinds of influences but have the overarching feel of consistency and the artistry of someone finding their own way, all those dubstep squiggles and bottom end drops hooked up to shimmery chillwave heat-haze melodies, shivery cold IDM and jump cuts and glitches.  It's a wonderful album that can get filed alongside the Robel Synthesia releases I have been championing, though this has a much wider range of sounds involved.

There are several tracks here that have been getting a huge amount of deserved attention over on on his Soundcloud - the super chilled layers of Eye and the hypnotically deep Doppler Effect, the unfeasibly dense vibrating Origin, Train Station with its disorienting lurch and icy two-step percussion and the luxurious string embellished Mleko. All the tracks in between have their place in creating an overarching atmosphere, tying all the elements together into an evocatively cohesive whole that should be destined to soundtrack some epic comedowns and daybreaks across the world. Lovely stuff.

Download for free from his Bandcamp now.

NEW TRACK: Wet Nuns - Throttle

It's a very rare occurence that will have me posting about an NME hype band, but the Leeds based heavy metal duo Wet Nuns, right from the name onwards, are doing everything with their simple dual set up of guitar and drums so perfectly it's like a little White Stripes revelation all over again.  Sort of.  And yes, this is pretty much true classic pure unadulterated Heavy Metal no matter how you want to spin it - On their previous single Heavens Below (still downloadable for free from their website, or jump to their Soundcloud) they sounded like a fire damaged Wolfmother dallying with the finest Devil's music in the form of Zepellin and Sabbath riffs and twists.  Their new free download single Throttle will be out on 5th March and it another mother crushing detonation of snarling unrestrained rock with an outstanding slo-motion grind-out to finish it off. The lead riff on this throbs white hot as much as summons the darkness. It's a wonderful sound that I cannot deny, especially as I seem to be in a big garage rock phase at the moment, so all gnarly guitars sound good to me.

They're playing the Green Door Store on the 24th Feb, and by all accounts their live show is some kind of carnage.

Stream Throttle on repeat from their Soundcloud until you can rest it in your digital lap in two weeks.




Here's the video. It's gory.

a last.fm thread

It's the weekly numbers round:

one of these bands spells their name in CAPS. Can you spot which one?

01. Hear Hums - 130

02. Lilacs & Champagne - 99

03. Ewan Limb – 52

04. Cough Cool - 27

05. The Obligatory Cripples - 24

06. Run DMT - 22

07. Message To Bears - 20

07. SAUNA YOUTH - 20

09. John Talabot - 19

10. The Caretaker - 18

10. Saltillo - 18

10. Mirroring - 18

1 – Awesome 'Sung Tongs' style tribal beat & drone pop album of hypnotic acoustics and wordless vocals. Download for name your price. Going to do a full review soon, but don't wait for that.

2 – Album came out on Mexican Summer last month. Totally incredible side project from two members of Grails, I'm surprised I have managed to listen to anything more than this this week. Instrumental 70's exotica soul soundtrack tape splicing set to hip-hop beat with sultry guitar lines shimmering all over it.

3 – Russian bedroom producer releases a full album of his bass heavy chillwave melody influenced dubstep electronica. Get it free from him HERE

4 – Hazy, slo motion lo-fi guitar jamz. Been playing some free d/l albums from their Bandcamp

5 – Polish garage rock band playing pretty hard, fast, loud and noisy. Pretty unsubtle, but pretty nice for it.

6 – Hallucinogenic h-pop (no it's not a dirty word, it's the bomb) from the sunny side of psych.

7 – Great sleeping music, played the Departures album a couple of times this week.

7b – Brighton based rock combo kicking some punk heavy jams.

9 – Still think this is a fresh, deep and affecting techno/house album. Might not have the most sophisticated or rich sound palette, but it's really well arranged and the sounds all suit their purpose. So yeah, great.

10a – bonus/out take Patience tracks for free from....where else: Bandcamp.  Get it before he takes them down, if you haven't already.

10b – Dark atmospheric dubby, heavy on the drum part of D&B influenced electronica with strings, Monocyte is a concept soundtrack to the comic book of the same name.

10c – Collaboration between grouper and Tiny Vipers – as dewy and mossy sounding as you'd anticipate. Reverent organic psychedelic ambience.

TOTW:

Anything off Lilacs & Champagne, obvs. But I'll go with the opener:

GIG PREVIEW: The Men, Hookworms & Sealings - Sunday 19th Feb.

...so that would be tomorrow night, Brighton town - Prince Albert.  Three bands of slightly different stripes all great enough to warrant a rare gig preview from me.

The Men, as you probably already know, play their record collection as if they invented it, kicking out MC5 jams, Spacemen 3 doped repetition, gnarly snarly attitude of The Stooges and a whole load of 90's sonic fuzz and fury fom Dinosaur Jr, Mudhoney and their like.  There's not a band quite like The Men around right now:




Hookworms are a  Leeds based trio playing a dark psych style of garage rock - loads of space, reverb, looping threads of riffs needling their way through time and space out to fizzing climaxes. Still a bit Spacemen, there's some Krauty Can influence rattling about inside the trippy frameworks of their tracks, and soem of the looser strung out Sun City Girls. 




Sealings are one of Brighton's loudest and volatile propositions, now pimped out with a live drummer their show are even more hi-octane takes on their hybridised rock/metal/punk noise.  Here's their brand new video for new track Out Cold

DOWNLOAD: The Caretaker - Bonus After Sebald tracks

The Caretaker has put up 9 bonus tracks which co-exist alongside his eerily wonderful Patience (After Sebald) album, for free download for a limited time.  Not sure when his going to close this down, so hurry over to his Bandcamp to get them.

"Extra tracks taken from the soundtrack of the Grant Gee film "Patience (After Sebald). The source material for 'Patience' was sourced from Franz Schubert's 1827 piece 'Winterreise' and subjected to his perplexing processes, smudging and rubbing isolated fragments into a dust-caked haze of plangent keys, strangely resolved loops and de-pitched vocals which recede from view as eerily as they appear."

VIDEO: Turbowolf - Let's Die

Brand new video for the new single from the finest rock band the UK currently owns - watch this and have Turbowolf own you right back. 

This is one of the most ferocious tracks from their album, and one of the finer examples of how they manage to cram so many great moments into such a short space of time - the burbling synth prologue to the slamming intro riff then BLAM into the meat of the piece, squiggly, squealing, imploding  guitar solo (how do they make that sound!?), heavyweight intense breakdown, instant classic lyrics, all blasting along with that unbridled sense of momentum that only the truest Rock can deliver - and it's called Let's Die!  It;s all about careening into oblivion and embracing every moment of it.

The video, directed by Casey & Ewan is a futuristic and thrownback as the music - 70's style stop motion animation, velvet shirts, Chris' absurd facial hair, all booted into the future with copulating Terminator robotics and chipboard bedsheets.  Sexy what?

There's no reason to to love the whole of this with the whole of your being.

The 14 track album is less than a fiver from iTunes, so go get. It wasn't in my Top 50 albums of 2011 for nothing.

NEW TRACK: Light Asylum - Shallow Tears

Finally, a new release!  Shallow Tears is the lead 12" single from Light Asylum's long-awaited, highly anticipated self-titled debut album, due out in May on Mexican Summer.  The two-track single comes on suitably fetishistic limited edition white vinyl.

Dancing over the grave of the not-even-dead-yet Grace Jones, with a vocal comparisons all too apparent to avoid a reference, Shannon Funchess and Bruno Coviello return with another visceral tear-streaked symphony to emotion-haunted back alleys and dry-ice cloaked dancefloors. It starts with a peal of thunder,as dramatic an entrance as they could make, then the drums start pounding. This music is something else out there on its own. Even without Funchess' remarkable intonations there's enough resonant affect being squeezed out of the synths that each time she really opens up her lungs it reaches right into your chest and crushes your heart.  A less coked-up Cold Cave in introspective sensitive mode, Shallow Tears rolls forward in stately fashion, blowing up into alternating surges of drum crescendos and vocal multitracking that freezes time and blows out way before your ready for the affair to be over.

The B-side, Genesis, is far more restrained, with a creeping paranoid melody line picking its way over a jittery drum track that slowly slides into a silvery vocodered vocal climax. A little bit HTRK, but again, an entity all of itself.  It's the perfect foil to the grander A-side, a flawless 12" dropping a twin assault deep into your sensual perception, and the ultimate teaser to the10 track album, due out soon.

Order now from Mexican Summer.

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