NAUTICAL ALMANAC: Transcriptedivisions LP (HANSON)
Pretty much classic 1999 release by the duo of Twig Harper and Carly Ptak. Puts a cap on their Chicago years. Now they're fully in their Baltimore years, and as you may well know (if you read the Blastitude 11 cover story) there's all kinds of stuff brewing up there, with a few initial skittery CDR releases just the tip of the iceberg. (Ptak's Prepare Your Self is already a noted classic of the genre.) Playing some of the sparsest spazz-noise around, Nautical A. are a duo that sounds like a duo and never really goes for the wall of sound. They're more playful and, I don't know, jazzy than that, but not in a way that drowns out the music's beating punk heart. In other words, this isn't jazz like Ken Vandermark, more like 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Like I just put on side two and it starts with a scorching synth (?) riff, which gives way to sublime insect atmospherics. (That's practically a prerequisite for any post-everything noise improv ensemble: "So how are your insect atmospherics?") It goes on from there with a lot of swagger; this music is a force of nature kind of thing. Side two ends with some surprising auditorium applause -- was the whole thing live? Anyway: force of nature. I declare N.Almanac the new Throbbing Gristle. Speaking of Throbbing Gristle, I was at a 25-hour Throbbing Gristle party last night (the whole box set, being played from noon to one PM) and after about 5 hours of that epochal but turgid smoke, you can really hear how Nautical is developing the form (which is, let's face it, art/punk/underground instant composition).

NAUTICAL ALMANAC/MEERK PUFFY split CDR (VEGLIA) Belgian label releases a split by Nautical Almanac (Baltimore nee Ann Arbor) and Meerk Puffy (Providence), a side look at that psychosonic bridge between the empires of Bulb and Load. The spray-painted cover is VERY nice…someone somewhere said that spray-painted packaging was 'played out,' and it's true, styles do have a way of playing themselves out, but this cover is nice enough that none of that matters.
       As for the two bands supplying the music, in the big weird underground of today Nautical and Meerk Puffy land somewhere in the really good to great to GREAT category. (The Nautical show I saw at the Empty Bottle July 4 2002 was GREAT.) Don’t know too much about Meerk Puffy, except that he was on the Animal Disguise Fog People comp. Listened to the whole comp, liked it all, don't specifically remember the Meerk Puffy track. I do know that Meerk Puffy is a member of Forcefield, because I just read that in Artforum. Well, I haven’t actually listened to this CDR yet, so I'm running out of things to talk about.
       [Review re-attempted three weeks later.] Don’t know what this is yet, just another ‘to be reviewed’ disc finally getting its turn in the changer. What we’ve got is very abstract electro noise, not so much improvised as intentionally made to sound terminally malfunctioning (you know, like U.S. Maple does with guitars and drums). I just bet it's a really long album....let me check the old readout here….yep, still another 8 minutes to go in this first track, and five more tracks to follow. Luckily, this is good, featuring spastically misfiring drum machines and blurred vocal grunts buried under this super-digital ‘loopy’ thing going on. Hmm…still not sure who it is.
       Aha! Just figured it out: Nautical Almanac. (Found the spray-painted cover, empty, near the stereo.) That makes sense. They have the first 4 tracks on this EP, and then Meerk Puffy has the fifth and sixth. Each Nautical track is an entire 10-minute live set. Nautical are perfect at 10 minutes. Right up until the end of the fourth set, this dynamic duo(+?) continues to astound with their rewired lifestyle. As for listening to all four in a row, its like eating candy bars or ice cream or fat chips to me -- delicious, but after 10 minutes I get a little stuffed. Nautical ain't no four-course meal, they're the shot of whiskey and slice of cheescake I have afterwards.
        As for Meerk Puffy, he clocks in with two tracks at 17 minutes. Length? Perfect. A 12-inch single. Believe me, man, rock 'n' roll is a singles format. The "A side" is a great hard cold groove. You could call it techno but it actually swings like Roxy's "Bogus Man." The second is a live set in St. Louis. It takes him awhile to start swinging this time, maybe because he was feeling like he had to start with the industry standard 'three minutes of improv' opening, but start swinging he does. (That's reminds me of the great innovation of Mammal: total groove, without the three minutes of noise improv it usually takes to get to it.) After the good beat section, Meerk drops into the best section of all, a droned-out blown-out coda made up of frequency cycles almost vividly rotating around and around.

NEON HUNK/MY NAME IS RAR RAR 7-inch (LIQUID DEATH/HELLO PUSSY)
"Neon Hunk = Mossmaster (Drums, Techtronix, Vocalizards) + Jennifangs (Synthermasizer, Vocalizards)". Man, half the time with this stuff I think I'm reading George Clinton liner notes, but this is Neon Hunk, whom I don't think anybody doesn't love. No, seriously (it's because they're so damn CUTE, to both the girls and the guys), so I'll just say that this is a great l'il document of what they do, five songs on just one l'il 7-inch side. This fits very nicely with their set on the Fog People comp and with the spot I already have cleared out on the CD rack for their forthcoming (and maybe reviewed in this issue if it made deadline!) full-length on Load!
       Speaking of bands that are really cute (to both the girls and the guys), there's Chicago supergroup My Name Is Rar Rar. Lineup: Chuck Falzone (Flying Luttenbachers, etc.), guitar, Jonathan Hischke (Flying Luttenbachers, etc.), synth bass, Chrissy Rossettie (The Hex, etc.), drums, and Greg Peters (Xerobot) on vocals. I haven't seen these guys in I swear almost a year, which is odd because before that I saw 'em like 9 times in 2 months or something (most shows featuring their original vocalist, the equally superstarrific Camilla Ha of Magic Is Kuntmaster and surely etcetera). Anyway, point is, this 7-inch comes along just when I really need to see 'em play again and reminds me why. It was "recorded by Rob Dunham at Superior Street Studios, March 2002," and you can really hear everything Falzone's guitar and Hischke's bass do as they bounce off of each other and run loopy half-circles around Rossettie's drums. Live, with the costumes and volume, the musical content can just be a big weird blur, but on here you can hear that Falzone and Hischke are almost constantly playing different melodies, propping each other up, replacing each other in comical ways, almost (maybe?) never repeating anything twice, as Rossettie repeats the beats that make it all go and go. (Rar Rar are actually one of the more eminently danceable of the Chicago No Wave bands.)
       The conundrum for me personally is, as with all punk/underground music, how do you fit vocals in? In no wave and hardcore rock, vocalists always try to keep up with the freaked-out music, and usually end up screaming and shouting, if not singing through pedals that turn their voice into noise outright. I've always thought Rar Rar needed a real laid-back CROONER to offset all the madness/magic going on in the music, but I guess that's what U.S. Maple did and they're already legendary. (I personally think they adopted the croon a little too completely, and now are somewhat stuck in it, but I already wrote about that in a past ish and I haven't seen them play for like three years so I can't pass too much judgement.)

NOIZE CREATOR: Deferred Media (AMBUSH)
I personally think the whole techno/rave fallout is a not exactly healthy but none the less astounding thing, like an actual volcanic geyser of colorfully packaged bubble gum. (See Mochipet.) Naturally, any geyser is going to have its occasional design flaws, and from this CD's layout, I'm not sure if I'm listing the artist/title/label info correctly. All I’ve got to go on are a few random phrases printed in the helvetica font on a plain white background, such as “Noize Creator,” “Deferred Media,” a really big numeral “4,” “Ambush Release Service,” “Hazardous Sounds,” “produced by Stefan Senf,” and then on the spine just “ambushCD4.” Nice color, though, and the music itself is officially not bad. Hard beat stuff. Generic, but the genre is solid. The intro to the CD is pretty attention-getting, loud and clipped. Track five, “Have A Piss,” actually starts like a less murky Wolf Eyes track with its slow and low but spastic beat-motion. Despite the packaging, which led me to expect something a little more MOR, this CD contains a lot of good harsh hard-beat grooves which could rock and even freak out a party. I think that's the reason techno and noise music frustrate a lot of listeners; not only does everybody do it, but those who do do it usually do it well. (Or, instead of "well," I could borrow a phrase from my older British friends and say "properly.")

OH NO THE MODULATOR: Semi-Formalizer CD (KLFR/LIQUID DEATH)
Here’s one that I can’t think what it is, just came up in the changer. My first quick take is that this record is to Mammal as Squarepusher was to AFX. The same hard beat music but a loopier, more fusiony version. It also has 30 tracks, none of them really even over a minute and a half long. This is like the Double Nickels On The Dime of weird lo-fi broken-beat jams, with a sharp aesthetic sense that never really lets up over its multitude of tracks. Recom-mended. Let’s see who it is: Ah, that one weird CD sent by the Liquid Death/Hello Pussy empire, by a group called Oh No The Modulator.

OLD BOMBS CDR (VEGLIA)
More good shit from Veglia. I automatically like Old Bombs just as much as Nautical Almanac and Meerk Puffy because their name is just as good. They're all in the same genre, man, you know the genre, what should we call it? Bulb/Hanson/Skin Graft/Load Music? Bulb & Hanson & Skin Graft started it all, right? (That is post-indie post-everything 1990s free-form loud regresso-punk super-weird atonal noise-rock.)
      Ah, but Bulb & Hanson & Skin Graft were all Great Lakes phenomena, and Old Bombs are a southern Florida/Georgia sort of band. The lineup is Fukktron (Dino and Vanessa) joined by Carlos from Monotract. The music is in the tradition, and as with Fukktron and Monotract and Nautical Almanac and Harry Pussy and Cock ESP w/Adris Hoyos (live in Chicago, 1997) and Cock ESP (current lineup), the presence of a lady does bring more sexuality into the sound. (Naturally, right? Check the earlier Fukktron track “Pudding Pampers" for an example.)

OLD BOMBS/WOLF EYES SPLIT CDR (PUBLIC EYESORE)
In the last two years Wolf Eyes has released 'high profile' albums Dread, Slicer, and now Dead Hills. Got all those, and during the same time have seen them live at least 5 times. I try to hear it, but none of those albums sound like they do live. Live their entire project seems to be, simply, to THRASH, their signature song being a holy terror wall-of-noise version of "Half Animal, Half Insane" from Dread known as the "2% intro, 98% thrash" version of the song. While Olson pumps his fist, often literally rocking from "the floor up to the ceiling," Dilloway does the hairwhip, and Young does the serious pain-crouch. It's like they've completely lost control of their gear and sound and Nate is screaming and that's when they know it's really good.
       The albums achieve a colder texture; just as harsh, but much more sparse and spaced-out. It's not thrash, more of a buffalo stance. Ah, but not this release, which features a 25-minute live jam at a radio station that contains a 98% thrash version version of "Half Animal, Half Insane," catching them in the middle of a their 2001 national tour on which they were playing this cyclone every night, freaking the OOPS! crowd, besides the valiant few thrashing up front, into a sort of silence. Last show I saw, just last month, opening for Black Dice, was more in the "Dead Hills 2"/"Rotten Tropics" vein, which is still loud as fuck but more of a stone groove than a stone thrash.
      As for Old Bombs, I just reviewed them before this. They're still good. They're actually always good. Neither "hit" nor "miss" enters into it. I only took a couple notes while listening to their half of this release. All that survives is this: "like when some scary soft noise loop starts to sound like a voice saying 'Ride the trelly/Ride the trelly/Ride the trelly' over and over again."

OLNEYVILLE SOUND SYSTEM: Efforts In Freedumb CD (HOSPITAL PRODUCTIONS/LAST VISIBLE DOG)
Two long-running 'micro indies' team up to make a full-press CD by this hip, hot, happening, and altogether up and coming underground neo no wave gruppe. You might have already heard of the Olneyville Sound System from a heavy record they put out on Load. They're basically like the the Deep Purple of fin de siecle Providence, RI design school dropout rock. Deep Purple if, that is, lead guitarist Ritchie Wankmore was out of the equation, because Olneyville, as a trio of heavy keyboard (Jon Lord), fuzz bass (Roger Glover), and heavy drumming (Ian Paice), do not use the six-string. Okay, forget Deep Purple, the music on this album has no vocals, so with both Blackmore and 'Trillin'' Gillan out of the equation, what Efforts really sounds like is a big lumbering hybrid of mid-to-late Heldon, electric Miles, and the original Public Image Ltd. Or maybe just improvised-from-memory versions of Magma songs played at 16 RPM.

OPEN CITY LP (THINWRIST)
Another Thinwrist release, this time by the label's flagship band. It came out in 1999, when they were getting some recognition as a new freenoise duo from Los Angeles, that huge city that, despite its size, was said to have hardly any 'scene.' I think the group name is some sort of comment on this. (There was W.I.N. Records, and the Polar Goldie Cats, and the Smell, and Latona House, and surely tons more that I'll never know about.) As always with Thinwrist, very nice LP packaging. As for the music, all pieces "improvised." Audibly fumbles a bit at the beginning while they're still warming up, but quickly develops an excoriating train of steam as the two guitars sync up for punishing sine pummel. Still here, as with so many bands, the limitations of two-guitar freenoise are plain, and sometimes I really feel that there's already nothing new that can be done with the form. A flash in the pan, right? Open City does challenge that assumption by hitting some pretty extreme frequencies -- the last few minutes of side one are especially surprising. If you have yet to discover what 2-guitar freenoise duos are all about, by all means, jump in here. Otherwise, you know, no need to hurry, right?

PINK FLOYD: Meddle LP (CAPITOL)
Man, of course Waters and Gilmour were always straight-up MOR, but I said last issue how much I like Dark Side. It's still true, but Meddle, on the other hand, is an almost completely wack album. I'd never listened to it before now, except for of course the opener "One Of These Days" because it was all over FM radio in my childhood. A heavy enough jam the first couple times, but commercial radio long since dulled whatever 'pretty good if not as good as Hawkwind' charm it might've had. (The vocals even plagiarize Sabbath's "Iron Man.") The next song, "Pillow Of Winds," is just a tragically bad ballad. I hate the way they use Syd's word "eiderdown" in the very first line, with none of the charm. More plagiarism, already! Next song "Fearless" is the best song on the album, as far as mid-tempo art-rock goes, but it's not like it's better than anything by Genesis (not even as good as some Collins-era shit, like "Abacab").
        Side two is one 23-minute track, which is at least sort of promising. It's the title track. It opens with a single electronic tone repeated a couple times. This tone in the middle of a Pink Floyd album reminds me why I ditched a lot of rock for noise & experimental music a few years ago. As does the rock song that immediately follows, because as you know, a 'weird' electronic opening to a Pink Floyd song only means that a lukewarm classic rock ballad is going to be played in 45 seconds or less. At 23 minutes, its the world's longest Crosby, Stills & Nash song, and all the echoplexed guitar scraping in the world isn't going to help that. There is one exciting moment when the ballad drops out into a white man funk groove with a pretty cool production. Unfortunately it just plods on and on while Gilmour plays boring slide guitar. I now remember this track as the one they were playing when I finally left the room during the Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii movie. (Oh, now the drums and bass have dropped out and he's making seal sounds with his guitar! I mean, wow.)

QUEEN: A Night At The Opera LP (CHRYSALIS)
I had my ear glued to the stereo for infinite plays of this album when I was a kid. It was around 1978, when I was 7 or 8 years old. Whenever the favorite band topic came up, I announced Queen. It had formerly been Kiss, but Queen were a bit of a maturation for me. I did not yet know about ‘gay’ and ‘straight'; with Freddie (as with Halford) it was just meant 'fabulous heavy metal.' This was News of the World and Jazz era, that brief time after Mercury had cut off his rock-god hair but before he had grown his coming-out moustache. One morning over breakfast my dad and I were talking about the band, and he explained to me that "queen" was a British euphemism for a man that liked other men instead of women. Even after that, I still didn't really know (or care) -- Brian May and Roger Taylor did such a fine job bearding for Freddie. (Although in hindsight, those guys could get plenty queeny. John Deacon? He was the quiet one. The quiet gay one. And that's okay!)
        I had already bought News Of The World because “We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions” was pretty huge on my elementary school playground. Loved News, and then I bought this one, an older album from 1975, because it had the even more epic and astounding AOR hit “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Sure, I should’ve been listening to Roxy Music, but Queen was more than Roxy enough on the farm where I lived. (Rural Route 5, Randolph, Iowa). In fact, listening to it now, I think Queen almost has to be precisely where I got my taste for the over-the-top sounds this magazine is all about.
        The very first song, “Death On Two Legs,” is OTT in extremis, a freaky heavy metal bitch-queen put-down song with snarling guitars and lyrical imagery that's not just Bowie-worthy, it's pretty much cyberpunk. Other big standouts are the 9-minute “Prophet’s Song,” a quasi-biblical doom rocker with an extended a capella section that rivals that of the more famous “Rhapsody.” There’s “’39,” which is really a beautiful country song, and then “Sweet Lady," which continues Bolan’s original goal as good as any of the other heavies stomping the boards in 1975 (though it’s not quite the triumph that Queen’s own “Now I’m Here” is, from 1974's even better Sheer Heart Attack). I’ve never forgotten the way Freddie sings, “You call me sweet like I’m some kind of cheese!” Actually, those three songs were all Brian May compositions, while Freddie was preening like mad with shit like “Death,” “Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon,” the wonderful “Love Of My Life,” and “Seaside Rendezvous.” Then there's one of the album's biggest hits, the rare John Deacon composition "You're My Best Friend," and stuff like Roger Taylor’s “I’m In Love With My Car," which sounds a little lugubrious now, but I thought it was heavy as hell when I was 8 or 9. Shit man, Queen was my favorite band of all time. All I can say is....."No synthesizers!"
       (BONUS MATERIAL: From everything.com, "One of the band's peculiarities is their academic success prior to entering the music industry. All four gained tertiary qualifications - Degrees for May, Taylor and Deacon in Astrophysics, Dentistry and Electrical Engineering respectively, and a Diploma in Commercial Art for Mercury - any one of them could have had lucrative careers in their original fields, had they not chosen music.")

R.O.T.: r.o.t.2. CDR (VEGLIA)
This is kind of confusing, with the clear plastic case, and the minimal information. All the info in this entire package can be found in the heading of this review. Oh, except for this: “I-6:untitled / rec. 200I.” Anyway, I do know that R.O.T. are the flagship band of the Belgium-based label. And they deserve flagship status; a good band. Pretty squarely in the Dust/Nav camp,
       It immediately creates a Dust/Nav vibe, stuff like lonely chord organ/accordion/hurdy gurdy grinds away on one or at most two chords and a lonely electric guitar picks out notes in the resulting haze. Some of it is quite melancholy and indigo in mood. That's a good thing. I may hate emo punk but I'll always bend an ear for honest emotional content. (Ya see, most emo punk is NOT honest, but why am I talking about emo punk anyway?) Anyway, R.O.T. don't try to do anything groundbreaking, but there are nice touches, like the way the first track suddenly ends after 4 minutes with a quick fade, or the singing on the second track.

THE RAPTURE: House of Jealous Lovers 12-inch (DFA)
Side A sounded slammin’ when I played it on WHPK, and then Vice Magazine had an article about the label with a picture of a guy with cool messed-up rocker/clubber hair. The guy who runs the label actually doesn't look like a 'rocker,' more like an all-American guy who watches sports and eats pizza. But, the rocker/clubber guy with cool messed-up hair is gonna look better in a Vice Magazine article, and he was in a band on the label, so there ya go. Maybe he was in the Rapture. I actually don't care, AT ALL, so I can't keep filibustering about it. I will say that side A, "House of Jealous Lovers," is a fantastic song. There may indeed be retrograde authenticity issues, what with the whole punk-funk disco throb, but it's finally a song good enough that issues like that don't have to matter. Side two is like putting on a whole different record, it’s like a psychedelic love song ballad. WTF? I think it’s possible – very unlikely – but possible that the pressing plant screwed up the record. Wasn’t expecting that. Was the song good? Maybe, can't really remember.

REYNOLS: Original Soundtrack Of Pythagoras' Theorem CDR (SEMI-ROAR)
Reynols seem to have about 30 new releases going right now on labels from all over. At first I'm surprised how much this one sounds like so many other Reynols record, with the band just playing along while Tomasin drums and mumbles. But, as Courtis once told me, "Tomasin is very good drummer!!" The beat is always there, this disc included, and now that I'm listening closer I'm starting to get into Tomasin's melodies, and also a weird stop-and-start short-track thing happening. What is this, the Reynols vs. Sebadoh 7-inch? Or the Harry Pussy Vigilance! cassette? Waitaminnit, now I'm on track 13 of god knows how many and I'm starting to think it's just the same minute-long song repeated over and over again. That's a Jandek trick too. (See the one-two punch of Ready For The House and Six By Six.) Anyway, you've gotta get the Reynols/No Reynols double CD on Freedom From before they're completely gone. Beyond that, sure you don't need every Reynols release but any one you should happen upon is guaranteed to give you a full dose of genuine 'mystery music.' I don't mean to get cheesy about it, but that's a term by jazz bassist William Parker, and almost everything you read about in Blastitude is in here because it qualifies to me as 'mystery music.' Including the Rolling Stones.

ROLLING STONES: Between the Buttons LP (LONDON)
Back in 1967, the Stones felt the need to keep up with Joneses who weren't named Brian and release an infamous ‘summer of love’ statement, Their Satanic Majesties Request. Apparently they weren't aware that they were already plenty psychedelic with their previous release, the supposed 'pop' statement that was Between the Buttons. Hell, the weird ‘zooming’ guitar in the mix on the sublime “Who’s Been Sleeping Here?” alone is psychedelic as one-hundred leaping gnomes, and you don’t even have to wear a wizard’s hat to get it. Right now this is sounding like the best Stones album ever.
       Okay, maybe not ever, but the best pre-decadent Stones album. And sure, they might be imitating the Beatles, but they might also be imitating the Count Five -- or are they simply trying to write a Kinks album? With the tom-and-maraca hook of “Complicated” they’re doing a hell of a good job. Not only that, but Buttons opens with “Let’s Spend The Night Together,” which is just as great of a statement of rock/sex intent as "All Day And All Of The Night." And “Miss Amanda Jones” is amazing rockabilly, something the Kinks could never do. (They were more skiffle!) One guitarist -- I don't know if it's Keith or Brian -- plays a lardacious Chuck Berry rhythm throughout that just RULES. The other guitarist plays lazy clean-tone country blues leads. (I'm guessing the rhythm was by Mister Brian Jones, but I guess that I just don't know.)
       “Something Happened To Me Yesterday” comes on and breaks the mood completely the first couple times, being a blatant imitation of a Ray Davies music-hall social satire. After all, "Sunny Afternoon" was "the biggest hit of the summer of 1966 in the U.K.", and still given homage to almost ten years later. (cf. Queen's "Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon") Listening to it, say, a third time, which I have this weekend, it starts to be pretty enjoyable, like with the way Mick sings "It's really rather trippy..." in that silly cockney accent, and is that Keith singing the chorus?? And it is a nice payoff when after the eight or whatever choruses Mick ends the album with a little thank you rap: “So from all of us to all of you, not forgetting the boys in the band, and our producer, Reg Dwight, we’d like to say ‘god bless’.” And then he actually ends it with some rap about how “if you’re out tonight, don’t forget, if you’re on your bike…wear white. Evening all…” Back in Blastitude 11 I did say that Mick displayed “a surprising proclivity for sketch comedy,” and here it is again in Blastitude 14.
        Ah well, let’s just say in closing that Buttons is a much better Revolver than Satanic Majesties is a Sgt. Pepper. Dig this chronology: Rubber Soul comes out in December 1965. Four months later, Aftermath – the first all-original Stones album – comes out in April 1966). Another four months after that, in August, the Beatles release Revolver, and then the Stones answer back five months later, in January 1967, with Between the Buttons. Five months later, in June of the very summer of love, the Beatles release Sgt. Pepper, and six months later, the Stones release Satanic Majesties, the most infamous of all their responses to the Beatles, after which the Stones went back to being the Stones and inaugurated their aforementioned decadent period by releasing Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street, perhaps the top four greatest rock albums of all time (in any order).
       The decadent period continued rampantly throughout the Seventies as the music inevitably got worse (“sucking in the seventies” indeed, although they still came up with a few classics) and then finally petered out in 1983, after the Undercover album. After a three year break, they gave decadence one last hurrah with the remarkably camp animated video for “Harlem Shuffle,” Jagger sporting a mullet and cavorting with Ralph Bakshi creatures, the band wearing pastel suits like Kool & the Gang. Then, after yet another three year hiatus, the Stones re-emerged as part of a genre that I can only think of as health club rock, exemplified by the eternally buff Sting, the fanatically and Glenn Frey, who actually did ads for some national health club, although I can't remember which. Steel Wheels, Voodoo Lounge, and Bridges of Babylon....all total health club rock.

SAMUS: Desengano CD (CRUCIAL BLAST)
METAL!!!! I don’t know who this is yet, but it’s METALLLLLL!!!!!! Even if the vocals do have a bit of the old post-grunge ‘megaphone or CB radio’ vibe about them, the riffs overpower it with hulking lo-fi METTTAAAALLLLLL!!! And it’s not speed metal either – these guys know their limitations and plod the hell out of ‘em! Go lads! Next track is morbid Disney soundtrack music….which leads into a grungy lounge groove….what is this, Quintron the Spellcaster?? No, it’s not him, or at least the metal track wasn’t him..…is this a comp? If not, it's a pretty eclectic group. Next track is back into less lounge and more dark spaced-ness, so its probably not a comp…oh, I bet I know what this is, its that band called Samus that was sent to me by the Crucial Blast label and caught my eye, looking as it does like some spaced-out art-stoner basement metal, which is almost exactly what it is! Fu Manchu meets Faust. 72 minutes of stuff, which is as usual too much to listen to in one sitting, but it goes all over the place and stays remarkably interesting throughout, especially with some plunderphonic beat-oriented tracks that, if taken as strictly underground hip-hop, I like better than any of that Anticon shit. And like you might think track 7 "10/90" is fairly typical stoner riffing, but what about the way it segues into a Bomb Squad on 16 RPM backing track with a back-masked Incredible String Band raga melody over it? (Crucial Blast=good label name, right?)

BLASTITUDE #14
   
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