MASTER
MUSICIANS OF BUKKAKE: The Visible Sign of The Invisible Order
CD (ABDUCTION) It's
probably just their name, but I had some trepidation that
this might be a "goofy" band that zoinked through
all kinds of globally accurate styles in a game of wink-nudge
musical chairs while wearing period costumes or something,
but I was completely wrong! Instead, this is one long slowly
unfolding cinematic opium dream in which you're camping out
on a hill and in the next valley over, barely visible through
a thick mountain mist, is another encampment where shadowy
figures come and go around a bonfire, pounding on drums, chiming
in on various strings and flutes, chanting and calling to
the heavens below, gathering and dispersing as if the ghost
sailors in John Carpenter's The Fog suddenly came
to life as nomadic warrior musicians. Twenty different people
are listed in the album credits, and a couple of times the
whole thing builds into near-oceanic proportions, sounding
uncannily like Alan Silva's Celestial Communication Orchestra
the first time, and the second time getting so violent that
I momentarily thought that maybe a foreign country was invading
in order to bring Democracy™! But, these passages are
fairly brief, as the majority of the ritual is played with
an ominous restraint, and always from the remove of that neighboring
mist-enshrouded valley . . . . and it all ends an hour later
with a haunted lullaby and goodnight while you curl up in
your sabretooth tiger rug and stare at glowing campfire embers.
MOUTHUS:
Loam LP (ECSTATIC PEACE
RECORDS + TAPES) Brooklyn
band, a new part of the NYC Psych thing that's been quietly
killing for pretty much a full decade now. Loam is
their second full-length, a
hard-ass record of metal machine rhythm and low-end guitar
thrombosis. Acoustic trap set drums played in a rock'n'roll
style add to the contusion. Album-ender is also album-maker,
a sparser but heavier 10-minute moaner called "THROAT"
that is the disc's black-drone pièce of résistance.
Very solid band, I actually like their first album (CD on
Psych-O-Path) better still.
MT.
GIGANTIC: Old Smiler CD (FRIENDS
& RELATIVES RECORDS / HARLAN
RECORDS) For
the record, this is not the band Mt. Eerie, which features
ex-Microphones guy Phil Elvrum. I've never heard any of that
guy's stuff, but I thought this CD was by him for a couple
weeks. It's not, this is an unrelated band from Bloomington,
Indiana called Mt. Gigantic. I keep trying to get into this
CD but I just can't seem to make it happen. It's certainly
creative, filled with these sorta complicated, sorta quirky,
weirdly anthemic rock songs that are sung in yowling strange
elf-voices. I'd like to recommend it to fans of Caroliner,
and to fans of more poppy Caroliner influencees like the Thinking
Fellers, but it's not quite there, though it might be a good
follow-up for people who have just discovered the Animal Collective.
Last track "Making Time For/It Is Time For" is pretty
cool and wistful, but overall, the would-be animalistic vocals
and the big swarming rock-anthem arrangements just kind of
crowd me out of the picture.
MARISSA
NADLER: Ballads of Living and Dying LP (ECLIPSE
RECORDS) Great
cover! Looks like black metal, or something out of Japanese
horror cinema, but this is an LP of low-key haunting psych-tinged
lady-sung ballads. When I first put this record on, I ended
up listening to it three times in a row, and it's been at
least three times a week, every week, since then. I still
can't really sing along with the songs, but I can kind of
hum them, and I know I can FEEL 'em -- this is a damn good
LP. Moody, mid-range, just the right side of witchy -- a sweet
spot, if you will. First track "Fifty Five Falls"
might be the very best of all, haunted voice over fingerpicked
acoustic and e-bowed electric guitars creating an icicle of
a love song that grows on a tree in a cold forest. (But not
without a pop sense.) Last track "Annabel Lee" is
the Poe poem set to music. Everything in between stays on
the same sad-sweet haunted vibe. The album is performed by
Nadler on vocals and acoustic guitar and one Myles Goodwin
on everything else. I've gotten this far without knowing what
town they live in or what "scene" they're from,
and I think it's better that way. It creates an "out
of nowhere" atmosphere for this excellent album.
NAUTICAL
ALMANAC: Rejerks Volume 3 CDR (HERESEE) Hey,
I missed the first two volumes, but Rejerks Volume 3
is hitting the spot. Five ten-minute-ish free-form jams built
with random splashes of sound-blocks that come and go like
watching sped-up films of day-glo clouds thick with acid rain
working their way across the sky, occasionally butting into
each other and making little rainstorms -- better get out
that titanium umbrella! And, the overall Nautical performance
ethos is nicely summed up at the beginning of track 2, where
Carly Ptak can be heard saying "We're just gonna let
the tape roll....." and continues to riff back and forth
on those words as the thick jams start to take over.
NAUTICAL
ALMANAC:handcut record transfers CDR
. . . with cut record edge (HERESEE)
Damn,
now this one I really like -- in fact, this is possibly my
favorite N.A. release ever! Y'see, this band has their own
record-cutting machine, and they don't exactly use it 'correctly';
they've made records out of "Video Disks, edges of CdR's,
Plastic Lids, Lazer Discs, Wax, Paper, etc.," via "Odd
styles: random play cuts, over-cuting ontop of pressed vinyl,
heavy frequency/noise cuts, layered offset overcuts, etc."
(See
here.) This CDR release compiles a few of these odd handcut
experiments; for example, the "Cleanse Bath" release
is archived (Heresee 031, a 10" lathe cut on metal laquer,
don't know how many copies were made . . . . five or six?
Fifteen?). It seems that most of the 7 tracks, however, were
just one-off experimental pressings, and man these things
are heavy, thanks to the very act of "transferring,"
recording/mastering these handcut records to CDR, picking
up all the extra sounds as the needle plows through the gnarly
vinyl. It's nasty! Especially the mega-ruling track five,
titled "one off-overcut-metal laquer" --- when it's
old thrift store records already buried in gunk and getting
wildly cut up that are mastered onto shit plastic, that's
when it really wails. Musically, this is even better than
the old NON record somebody loaned me once that was nothing
but hastily remastered 1950s female-vocal pop music, with
several tracks completely scratched out on the vinyl, and
three different holes in the middle for me to try.
THE
NEW FLESH: Parasite CD (MAELSTROM) These
Baltimore-area thrashers floored me a year or two ago with
a really heavy, fast, and mean self-released cassette that
placed them pretty high in the youth hate/horror sweepstakes.
Now they've put together a nice pro CD and their sound is
changing. Still lots of hate and horror, but they do sound
like they're growing up a bit, with tempos that are starting
to slow and a weird burnished tin-metal kind of sound that
reminds me of professional 1980s treble-hate merchants like
Big Black and Scratch Acid. As for the slower numbers, they
are monster jams that I can hardly believe, particularly the
9-minute mid-album pulverizer called "Friend of Mine."
It gets my head banging and shaking in big circles just like
the Om CD does, except New Flesh play it much looser -- as
the monstrous bass riff carries on and on, the drums start
to lose their way on purpose and the guitar mess melts into
everything else, and unlike Om the singer doesn't sound like
a Buddhist stoner -- he sounds like he hates all Buddhists,
and he doesn't like you much either, and besides that he's
about to explode from all sorts of other related and unrelated
internal tensions. It's a good 'un, that "Friend of Mine,"
and there's some other slower pulverizers on here that are
certainly worth your attention.
OM:
Variations on a Theme CD (HOLY
MOUNTAIN) The
bassist and drummer of stoned doom legends Sleep are continuing
on as a duo called Om. I was a little suspicious when I heard
it was just a bass and drums duo, but not to worry, it's PLENTY
heavy. Bass sound is so huge, tight, and overdriven, it actually
sounds like a trio, the world's tightest stoner guitarist
and stoner bassist playing with a kick-ass stoner drummer,
slowly plowing on a steady mission through still waters running
very deep. Oh wait, I just looked at the cover, and it's a
picture of an eagle soaring, so maybe that's the metaphor
instead of a ship plowing. Although the lyrics, which are
generously printed, seem to be about going to space. Or are
they? Let's see: "Alterates grid on the outer of a newborn
theme. / Choric to the windship -- walk toward horizon. /
Alterates grid on the outer of a newborn theme. / And pass
into the orbitarm -- out from source to freedom." I'm
pretty sure that's about going into space, but regardless,
this is an endlessly heavy hypno-album that gets better and
heavier every second you listen to it, no matter how many
times you play it, seriously.
ORTHRELM:
Ov CD (IPECAC) It
makes sense that Orthrelm would sign up with the Ipecac label,
and this potential for wider exposure has coincided with a
challenging new aesthetic move on their part towards extreme
length and minimalism. The album consists of one 45-minute
track in which short frantic patterns are repeated for unheard-of
lengths (minutes at a time?), sometimes evolving slowly as
they repeat, sometimes remaining quite static. Eventually
there is some pretty wild payoff and some serious changes
of riff, etc., but for those who aren't already Mick Barr
enthusiasts it's gonna take some pretty hardy souls to get
there. A metalhead co-worker was impressed by the skills but
gave up after 10 minutes or so -- "I just don't think
it's going to go anywhere." It does go somewhere, many
places in fact, even when it's apparently standing still,
but even I didn't learn how to truly 'hear' such things until
after spending 7 years living alone and rigorously meditating
on a mountaintop retreat. Anyway, Barr's guitar skills have
already been well-noted in these pages and others, but it's
the drummer Josh Blair who really impresses me on here, maintaining
a precise rolling and tumbling energy that never lags in the
slightest underneath the guitar's double-picking frenzy.
PÃIVÃNSÃDE:
Puhalluspelto LP (ECLIPSE
RECORDS) I'm
still amazed by the Finnish language. The words are so long
and polysyllabic. I have no idea what they mean, but I recognize
so many things in each word anyway, like Sade (the singer),
sad (the emotion), vans (the automobile), Vans (the shoe brand),
pelt (the fur), Pelt (the band), and sometimes almost a phallus!
And speaking of amazing, Eclipse is really putting out a nice
run of albums. This is like their eighth well-done release
in a row, all of them excellent, musically and visually. This
one, titled Puhalluspelto, by a group from Finland
called Pãivãnsãde, might be the best-looking
of the lot. The music isn't as blown-out pretty as the cover
art, but it is pretty blown-out, and that does not necessarily
mean loud. In fact, it barely means loud at all -- this is
obtuse jam improv folk, and as you know, one thing about folk
music is that it's rarely loud, and as you also know, another
thing about folk music is that it doesn't have to be loud
to be blown-out. Anyway. I'm just assuming Pãivãnsãde
is another band from the K. Ystavat and Lal Lal Lal camp(s),
but I honestly can't tell from looking at the minimal credits
or anything. I do recognize one surname, that of Tolvi, which
has also appeared on records by Laukheat Lampaat and Rauhan
Orkestri, so it is highly likely that it is coming from somewhere
within Finland's Golden Triangle of Music (as marked by the
cities Tampere, Turku, and Helsinki).
The Golden
Triangle of Finnish improv psych. (Diagram by Larry Dolman.)
PENGO:
Moving Gelatin In A Translucent World CD+BOOK (AUDIOBOT) Jeethush!
(Translation: "Jesus!", slurred because I'm a little
drunk right now.) This CD is packaged inside an amazing art
book! The artist is Dennis
Tyfus. He's from Belgium (I think), and for this book
he's done a bunch of heavily full-color silk-screen paintings
of birds that may never be featured in Juxtapoz, those hipster
chumps, but would sing clear and true in that forum and any
other. The art book is why I'm saying "Jesus" so
loudly -- holding this thing I feel like it should cost $80
or something -- but damn, the music is pretty Jeethush!-worthy
too. If you're looking for more of the same Pengo you found
on their A Nervous Splendor LP, this might not be
the one for you, because that LP had a lot of ominous delicacy
and quietude, and this CD has three long tracks of pretty
much full-on bludgeon. It sounds like it was recorded live,
and the band is pretty much in giant-wall assault mode and
the result just might blow your chair over. That upcoming
Pengo/Hair Police collaboration LP is starting to make a whole
lot of sense. Track three is especially a stormer, sounding
like a cross between a Glenn Branca symphony, a Japanoise
shitstorm, and Terry Kath's "Free-Form Guitar" all
at once. (Um, yeah, I was right with all that storm imagery,
the track is called "Sandpaper Storm" -- and yes,
two of the three tracks were recorded live -- I guess I should
read the liner notes earlier in the review next time.) And
hey, props to the Belgian label that put this out, Audiobot,
who is also Freaks End Future -- they're doing a lot of quality
work, so catch up with 'em if you haven't.
PENGO:
Their album has nothing to do with birds, but if
Dennis Tyfus is drawin' em, hey, bring it on!
PRINCESS
SWEEPSTAKES: I Love You In Case I Die This Christmas, Man
LP (SCENERY AUDIO ARCHIVE) Reviewed
a packaged-in-garbage CDR by these guys a year or more ago,
and praised it for it's low-fi garage Beefheart worship that
planked out fearlessly into it's own aggressive thrash-space.
Now they've thrown together the scratch to put out a nice
LP and I'm pleased to say it picks up right where the CDR
left off. (The grotty and lovely color-silkscreen cover even
continues the garbage theme, due to the strangely . . . .
moist way it feels to the touch.) I don't know what it is
I dig so much about these guys, but it's something about how
they take weird riffs and, instead of hammering them in perfect
tight sync, elongate and elasticate them until the song melts
before your eyes without ever actually losing its shape. It's
like Michael Morley and Bruce Russell joined the Hampton Grease
Band, and then convinced the new four-guitar lineup to start
working on Caroliner covers. (Totally.)
PSI:
Artifically Retarded Soul Care Operators CD (EVOLVING
EAR) Surprisingly
sick noisy improv album. I say "surprisingly" because
I thought Psi were gonna be, you know, another 'dry improvised
music' trio. Put it this way, I just assumed that the letters
P, S, and I were gonna be the first initial of each member's
last name! (Hotcha! Improv joke! That one gets a Gregg Bendian
rim shot!) I say "sick" partly because the awesome
wraparound gatefold cover by Stephen O'Malley really sets
a tone -- I mean, there's Satan, right there on the cover,
and the artist is in sick bands like Khanate and SunnO))).
But Psi really do play genuinely sick sounds that do plenty
of justice to the cover art: severe dog-whistle electronics
and blatantly ill low-end stumbling and fumbling. This may
indeed be dry improv, but it's dry in the way a hellish day
in the desert is, or a virus creeping out of a clinic. (This
just in, important correction from the band: "Just wanted
to give you the ol' correction that the sick cover art from
Artificially Retarded Soul Care Operators was actually
all drawn by peeesseye's own Fritz Welch with color and layout
by SOMA.")
QUEM
QUAERITIS: TV TV Happy CDR (NIGHTPASS
HANDMADE RECORDS) As
I suspected, ANYTHING can happen in the post-Smell L.A. "punk"
scene. Quem Quaeritis are final proof. First of all, they
named their band Quem Quaeritis. Say what? Second, they put
their CDR in a jewel case and spray-painted it like that.
(It's beautiful and it feels nice too.) Third, they perform
such an absurdist melange of funky styles on their album,
such as dark ambient, gabber techno, art-damaged free jazz,
improvised musique concrete, spoken word, Venusian hillbilly
Godz stomp, 'funny rap' (with the good sense to do it for
only a minute), and whatever kind of music track 2 "Samurai
Scientologist" is. (Futuristic jazz-fusion flute-funk
a la The Cosmic Jokers under the direction of Tom Ze?) It's
grooves like this track 2 business that are the deal-breaker
for me -- if they're willing and able to do something this
sexy, they win automatically. The second half of the album
does kind of bog down into some toyish free jazz endlessness,
but by the time it does, I've already been shook up pretty
good and the devolution is kind of charming. One to watch!
(Oh damn, I just learned that they aren't a band anymore,
and that their whole concept was to make music without using
guitars "because geetars are geetarded." I didn't
even notice there weren't any guitars!)
BRIAN
RURYK: Piece of Shit Guitar CDR (CAST
EXOTIC) Everybody
knows Brian Ruryk, that crazy guitar improviser from Canada,
but I haven't heard too much from him lately
. . . . . now that Muckraker magazine is no longer publishing!
(Drum roll, please!) But what should show up in the mail but
this new CDR release by Mr. Ruryk, and hearing him again after
all these years brings me right back to when I not only mail-ordered
his Nest of Guitar cassette back in 1997, but also
back to when, in 1994, I borrowed the Guitar
Solos 3 LP from some older Lincoln, NE dude and I
could not BELIEVE the Fred Frith track "Alienated Industrial
Seagulls." I played it for people, and we all went "What
the hell?! Is that just one guitar??!" Well, this album
gives me that same feeling times about 300. Except that it's
clearly not just one guitar -- the credited "cassettes,
records, computers, garbage" seem to make a lot more
impact than the "guitars" -- but the guitar is certainly
an omnipresent sound here, crunching and smashing and flapping
around like renegade heavy machinery in an echo chamber being
invaded by one thousand frantic doves. Also comes with a great
little mini-book with color xeroxes and even some hand-painted
pages, interspersed with lots of short little written bits
about the piece of shit guitar by various, ahem, noise guitar
celebrities. Good 'uns from Charlie Draheim, Keith Rowe, Carly
Ptak, Joel St. Germain, Tu m', Tetuzi Akiyama, Aaron Dilloway,
and a GREAT one by someone named CCC (about GTR, the 1980s
supergroup formed by former Yes guitarist Steve Howe, as in
"HOWE in the hell did something he recorded after 1974
make it's way onto your turntable?," and former Genesis
guitarist Steve Hackett, as in "I don't think you'll
be able to HACKETT anymore, you might as well just put on
an Allan Holdsworth record instead"). Oh, and I like
the one by John "Justin" Donovan too.
THE
SB: Pink A CS (WHITE TAPES)
Um, so I think this
cassette inside a g'damn handkerchief is my favorite SB release
so far . . . . . . . . okay, 20 minutes later, it's definitely
my fave. I've actually heard about six (!) releases by the
SB and so far they've all been pretty much the exact same
thing, in a real good way: one long single spaced-out dark-cloud
numb-teeth tone-drone, and I assumed this one would simply,
in the words of both Mike Love and Sidney Poitier, "do
it again." I knew I was still gonna like it, and give
it a thumbs-up review, but, other than the (g'damn) handkerchief,
I didn't think there'd be anything new to report. Ah, but
now that I've listened, I'm happy to say there IS something
new to report -- I'm not even gonna need to mention that g'damned
handkerchief again. This tape is GOOD. Yes, it's a side-long
piece that really is still the same sad greyblack drift, but
here's what's new, or done in a new way: synth-based pulses
and waves cutting into the cloud, pumping weird life into
it, making it glow and flicker while it sits there all spooky-like.
Pulses, waves, sine-tones, sine-tickles. Mmmmm. Sine-tickles.
(Wow, that was my first ever Homer Simpson reference in Blastitude.
I know, I know, a little late to the game....)
THE
SB LP (WHITE TAPES) I'm
a little slow on the draw, and this album's edition of 200
is already sold out at source, but damn, it's good. The SB
are a long-running improvised sound/noise group from New York
City. They have been doing basically the same thing for a
long time, a particularly bleak void of electronic improvisation
that is very easy to fall asleep to, not because it is boring,
but because it is enveloping, like a blanket. And friends,
I do not use hyperbole in the slightest when I say that The
SB, for this, their very first 12" vinyl release, have
used some of their very best performances I have ever heard.
This is great cold-electronic free-stuff that chills to the
bone at the same time that it heavily relaxes. Black and white
marble vinyl record comes as a "white label" in
a nice anonymous chip-board disco sleeve (unfortunately not
pictured here), except yours might also come with the sleeve
of a 'dummy album' (mine unfortunately IS pictured here).
THE
SB: "...the great cold-electronic free-stuff..."
SCREAMIN'
MEE-MEES: Garbage Collage CD (GULCHER) The
title of this 23-track CD made me think it was gonna be the
Mee-Mees' version of Faust Tapes, with all the tracks
segued together and mega-mixed. But now that I've listened
to it, I realize that "garbage" just means that
all these tracks are random outtakes and demos from 1975 through
1980 that never got released, and "collage" just
means that they're all gathered here in one place. Can you
imagine: Screamin Mee-Mees outtakes and demos?? Their absolute
most polished songs are already outtakes and demos! But yet,
the tracks on this disc indeed sound more like demos than
usual. Like they weren't officially recording some unknown
7-inch for some never-heard-of label, they were just rehearsing
for it. To wit, the album seems mostly 'unplugged', played
on acoustic guitars with the beats played on a table or a
coffee can. This all doesn't mean I'm not enjoying this, because
I am -- it has a low-key and extremely casual acoustic haze
that is surprisingly relaxing, and it's still rock'n'roll,
and it's still permeated with patented Cole/Ashline third
mind ridiculousness. For example, track three "C'mon
Jimmy" is a very matter-of-fact number from 1976 about
the pop politics of the day: "Why on earth didn't we
have a winner back in '72?/Started with George McGovern and
Eagleton so/they got defeated back in '72/by Richard Nixon
and Spiro Agnew so/God help us now, we're in 1976/Oh God help
us please!!/Jimmy Carter help us now!!" Or how about
the self-reflexive "Mouth Song," which goes "I'm
gonna put my mouth up here and sing / I'm gonna put my mouth
up here and sing . . . You haven't heard us sing for a year
/ We've been out drinking beer." There are also ruminations
like "You Wish That You Was You" and "Why Can't
A Watermelon Pray?" (which asks the question, "Why
can't you objects do the things you ain't supposed to do?"),
a couple sequel songs ("I Drink Sody" and "Too
Young To Shave Part Two"), a supra-reverb cover of "Pipeline,"
a cover of "You Really Got Me" that lasts about
4 seconds . . . and lots of other garbage too!
RAMON
SENDER: Worldfood CD (LOCUST
MUSIC) The
Locust Music label has grown to be one of the most impressively
prolific labels in Chicago, a city that is home to many, many
impressively prolific labels. I first noticed Locust when
they did those two Sun City Girls triple-LPs in 2001 -- wow!
-- but when I first really checked back with 'em, just a few
months ago, I was shocked at how busy they'd been, having
released something like 50 or 60 more discs since then (no,
I'm serious), from new stuff to old stuff, folk, jazz, electronic,
academic, 60s freak, rare groove, and plenty of etcetera.
They've even got about four or five sub-labels. Busy, busy,
busy .
. . . . and here's just one of their releases, by someone
named Ramon Sender. I'd never heard of him before, but it
turns out he was part of the San Francisco Tape Music Center
in the early 1960s. From there he went on to the one and only
San Francisco Diggers collective (hmm, I'll have to look back
over Ringolevio and see if he's in there), and after
that "co-founded the legendary Morningstar Ranch Commune
in Sonoma County." There's tons of stuff about this to
dig through on his website, raysender.com,
but it's all new to me, and right now we're talking about
the two tracks of music on this CD -- long ones, 29:32 and
43:15 respectively. Recorded in 1965, they are two in a series
of twelve "Worldfood tape drones" that Sender created
by experimenting with cutting-edge tape equipment that a hip
employee of the Ampex corporation kept dropping by the Tape
Music Center with. The first track, "Worldfood VII,"
is a real beaut, Sender taking a fragile woman's voice singing
the line "To see him with my eyes," from some sort
of Jesus-themed student performance he had composed and directed
in his "early year at the conservatory," and mixing
it into a heavenly tape-swirl of sun-spin cloud music. It's
gorgeous and even a little bit scary. Track two, "Worldfood
XII," is longer and more of a watery bloop-bleep classic
electronic pattern/process piece. Very nice, but man, that
first track . . . . . . Apparently more of these archival
Sender releases are on the way, and with Locust's avidity,
I wouldn't be surprised if we see quite a few of 'em......
SHY
RIGHTS MOVEMENT: Trauma Peepshow CS (KAW TAPES) Whoah,
this is from the guy in England who does the Sniper Glue zine
and, I dunno, I guess I figured this would be noisier. Why?
Because the zine is B&W cut-and-paste and has features
on Naturaliste and, uh, Sonic Youth? I guess that's why. But
Shy Rights Movement are rather mellow non-noise singer/songwriter
pop. Once I accepted this mild style shock, I noticed some
pretty good twee-gaze dust-ballads on here, like the "Looking
out the dirty windows" song. Good psychedelic feel on
that one, makes the earnest AM Radio pop melodies really mean
something. The more upbeat rock songs sound a little more
generic -- the ballads are Shy Right Movement's strong suit.
SIGHTINGS:
Arrived in Gold CD (LOAD)
I'll be damned -- Sightings went into a studio! On previous
releases the band has recorded themselves in what sounds like
an underground concrete bunker, where the sheer street-rock
volume of the band has immolated itself in recording-level
red -- extremely impressive in a totally blasting way, especially
for new listeners (all releases have been killer, my favorite
is Michigan Haters with Absolutes second),
but when it's the third or fourth album recorded that way,
you start to get a little frustrated, because you know there
are songs and excellent rhythms going on under there, and
you kinda wish you could hear them as intensely as you can
the blasting. And now, with Arrived in Gold, you
can! The studio is Brooklyn, NY's Rare Book Room, the outside
engineer is Samara Lubelski, and together they have brought
the Sightings sound away from the blast and toward the void
with all the brilliant sharp shards intact and rendered in
detail -- arrived in gold indeed! You can hear better than
ever that Sightings are much more than a mere 'noise-rock'
band; in fact, they turn noise into a full-fledged free-form
psychedelic compositional approach, well-spiced with weird
insect dance rhythms, ghost-memories of fucked-up hip-hop,
and liberally bad vibes.
SIGHTINGS/TOM
SMITH: Gardens of War CD (THE
SMACK SHIRE) After
six CD releases, the Smack Shire label is batting a thousand.
Tarot or Aorta, Gravy's Band on the Run,
the Rev. Lester Knox compendium, To Live and Shave in L.A.'s
God and Country Rally!, the Xex reissue -- all highly
recommended by Blastitude. Though for some reason, this Sightings/Tom
Smith disc first hit me like a spell with the flu. It sounded
wrong or something, and I was duking it out, not getting it,
listening further, getting annoyed, the vocals seemingly drowned
by music which was just lumpy motor-sounds or something, and
finally I shelved it. About two months later it made it's
way back into the changer on "second chance" status,
and up popped track #3 "Keep Me From Speech" and
jeezus, it floored me. Totally dirty truly driving power electro
rock. Lumpy? Not at all -- the primary rhythm and song-force
is this high-pitched guitar skree thing that dive-bombs at
the end of each measure leaving shards of mind-melt detritus.
In the meantime Smith's laptop spits out something rhythmic
and sinister, and his singing is placed just right in the
mix. Hell, I do call it crooning, but not as much "noise
crooning" as just plain jazz crooning. You know,
torch singing? Fire music? But a melancholy flame, a somehow
resigned mood -- truly emotional (sniff) and heartfelt (sob),
while the music powers onward and downward, crushing everything.
Tracks 3 through 5 in fact form a devastating mid-album onslaught,
with "Keep Me From Speech" followed by the 7-minute
extended dance and falsetto glory that is "Capitalism
& Schizophrenia," followed by "Beyond the Brain,"
also kind of a dance hit, albeit in a more low-key and street-ghost
way, my favorite part the long a capella vocal intro
by TS, with its sweet sparse amp noise punctuation. The whole
album is damn good 2005 dub de roque de gutter concrete,
more than even the considerable sum of its parts.
SILENTIST:
Nightingales CD EP (CELESTIAL
GANG) "Who
is Mark Evan Burden?," you may ask. Then again you might
be like "Mark Evan Burden? He's the dude from Get Hustle,
except he's not in that band anymore...." I knew that
myself, but I had temporarily forgotten that I knew it, until
this CD came in the mail and I was like "Who is Mark
Evan Burden? Oh yeah, he was the guy on the Hammond B3 organ
when I saw Get Hustle in Chicago back in '03 or something.
Must've read his name somewhere. Damn, he must've lugged that
B3 around for the whole tour. That's work, that's dedication,
that's why Get Hustle are being written about in a major international
fanzine like this one (ha ha). Damn." Anyway, it was
a great Get Hustle show, and Evan Burden is on the Get Hustle's
Dream Eagle 1 release that I really like. But --
he's not in The Get Hustle anymore, now he's in this band
Silentist, who are actually a metal band. A black metal goth-prog
cabaret band, to be exact, and this is their debut CD EP,
four tracks clocking out at 20 minutes or so. First track
is a pretty well-done possibly-Darkthrone-influenced swarmer,
but with intense piano barreling along as well, so that's
kind of a head-turner. The other three tracks incorporate
a little doom/stoner into the black/blur fabric, always with
that symphonic cabaret piano riding atop, for a juxtaposition
that is always pretty wild -- just check the way the title
track thrashes for its length and then suddenly gives way
to an extended high-speed Glass/Wakeman solo piano coda. I'm
sure someone somewhere will call this "false metal"
even if on a technicality alone (the piano) but that doesn't
mean it isn't "real something else".
SILVER
DAGGERS: Pasado De Verga CS (NOT
NOT FUN) Spray-painted
tape that comes with an actual silver dagger attached to it
(one of those toy ones that retract so you can play like you're
actually stabbing someone or something, with a cassette, in
this case, pun intended despite being terrible), but don't
let the striking Not Not Fun aesthetic distract you, the music
is quite good too. Silver Daggers stand out by NOT being a
spazz dance punk w/masks act -- their rock action is more
laid back and spaced-out, krauty and dubby. Occasional wacked
female vocals really take it to another tweaked level. Great
sounds, great vibe, though not exactly a great album -- hey,
some cassettes are, but this one sounds more like a practice
tape of song ideas, rough sketches, fine parts and grooves
to remember and do something fully-formed with later, etc.
I'd really like to see what they do next, but this is still
a fine listen while we're waiting, and it does come painted
with a dagger attached to it!
THE
SKATERS: Rippling Whispers CDR
(23 PRODUCTIONS) I
thought this acclaimed new duo was part of the new young American
crop of new young noise-throat singers ("moan wave"
as some new young genre-wags are already calling it), but
it sounds to me like what's being whaled on here is 99% good
ole distorted electric guitar, and when I say whaled on, I
mean these guys are fuckin' WAILIN'. Amplified crunchy strings
pushed to the limits, blasting not to bury but to REVEAL .
. . There are vocals, but not zone-moan so much as weird little
babble around the edges -- singing shearing guitar feedback
tones that sound like human voices, and singing squealing
human voices that sound like liquid guitar feedback. I'll
be damned, the critics are right on this one, this is indeed
ecstatic music! They can moan all they want next time, I'm
sure they rule at that too!
THE
SKATERS: Crowned Purple Gowns CS (LAL
LAL LAL) Man,
these guys really do never cease to amaze. I've heard about
three of their releases now and Crowned Purple Gowns
has gotta be the queasiest dive through the omniverse, our
favorite San Diegans-who-do-not-skate cooking up something
that sounds like a huge wobbly funhouse mirror refracting
satellite drones and space tones from a backwards space-station
carousel floating upside- down somewhere to the left of South
Venus, and it's all being picked up and broadcast directly
through our collective brains by that tiny weird metal cavity
filling in our collective upper left molar. The second piece
on side one is the more unbelievable of the two, powered by
ultra-high space-seer vocals as alien as any prime Sun City
Girls zone-out. Side two continues in the vein of the first
piece, except this time a small tribe of highly intelligent
sub-verbal cat-people are thrown into the mix and doused with
cold water. And I'm not even trying to write one of those
"surrealistic noise reviews," that's just what it
sounds like. Also while listening to this tape, I was thinking
about the rather invigorating statements one of these Skaters
made about slavery (as quoted in Matthew Bower's column on
the Volcanic Tongue website, click
here and scroll down to get to it), which made me think
of Sun Ra (duh) and how he used ecstatic and violent free
jazz and space-travel noise to combat and escape the slavery
of Planet Earth, and how The Skaters are doing the same thing
again now, just as effectively, and in fact in a more updated
style, because Ra tried to get it to the people by couching
it in big band jazz, and even that concession to popular taste
didn't get it to most of the enslaved masses who needed to
hear it, so the Skaters are past the point of couching it
in anything, not even "rock": this is the
uncut slavery-escape mind-travel music of today.
It's
probably just their name, but I had some trepidation that
this might be a "goofy" band that zoinked through
all kinds of globally accurate styles in a game of wink-nudge
musical chairs while wearing period costumes or something,
but I was completely wrong! Instead, this is one long slowly
unfolding cinematic opium dream in which you're camping out
on a hill and in the next valley over, barely visible through
a thick mountain mist, is another encampment where shadowy
figures come and go around a bonfire, pounding on drums, chiming
in on various strings and flutes, chanting and calling to
the heavens below, gathering and dispersing as if the ghost
sailors in John Carpenter's The Fog suddenly came
to life as nomadic warrior musicians. Twenty different people
are listed in the album credits, and a couple of times the
whole thing builds into near-oceanic proportions, sounding
uncannily like Alan Silva's Celestial Communication Orchestra
the first time, and the second time getting so violent that
I momentarily thought that maybe a foreign country was invading
in order to bring Democracy™! But, these passages are
fairly brief, as the majority of the ritual is played with
an ominous restraint, and always from the remove of that neighboring
mist-enshrouded valley . . . . and it all ends an hour later
with a haunted lullaby and goodnight while you curl up in
your sabretooth tiger rug and stare at glowing campfire embers.
Brooklyn
band, a new part of the NYC Psych thing that's been quietly
killing for pretty much a full decade now. Loam is
their second full-length, a
hard-ass record of metal machine rhythm and low-end guitar
thrombosis. Acoustic trap set drums played in a rock'n'roll
style add to the contusion. Album-ender is also album-maker,
a sparser but heavier 10-minute moaner called "THROAT"
that is the disc's black-drone pièce of résistance.
Very solid band, I actually like their first album (CD on
Psych-O-Path) better still. 
For
the record, this is not the band Mt. Eerie, which features
ex-Microphones guy Phil Elvrum. I've never heard any of that
guy's stuff, but I thought this CD was by him for a couple
weeks. It's not, this is an unrelated band from Bloomington,
Indiana called Mt. Gigantic. I keep trying to get into this
CD but I just can't seem to make it happen. It's certainly
creative, filled with these sorta complicated, sorta quirky,
weirdly anthemic rock songs that are sung in yowling strange
elf-voices. I'd like to recommend it to fans of Caroliner,
and to fans of more poppy Caroliner influencees like the Thinking
Fellers, but it's not quite there, though it might be a good
follow-up for people who have just discovered the Animal Collective.
Last track "Making Time For/It Is Time For" is pretty
cool and wistful, but overall, the would-be animalistic vocals
and the big swarming rock-anthem arrangements just kind of
crowd me out of the picture.
Great
cover! Looks like black metal, or something out of Japanese
horror cinema, but this is an LP of low-key haunting psych-tinged
lady-sung ballads. When I first put this record on, I ended
up listening to it three times in a row, and it's been at
least three times a week, every week, since then. I still
can't really sing along with the songs, but I can kind of
hum them, and I know I can FEEL 'em -- this is a damn good
LP. Moody, mid-range, just the right side of witchy -- a sweet
spot, if you will. First track "Fifty Five Falls"
might be the very best of all, haunted voice over fingerpicked
acoustic and e-bowed electric guitars creating an icicle of
a love song that grows on a tree in a cold forest. (But not
without a pop sense.) Last track "Annabel Lee" is
the Poe poem set to music. Everything in between stays on
the same sad-sweet haunted vibe. The album is performed by
Nadler on vocals and acoustic guitar and one Myles Goodwin
on everything else. I've gotten this far without knowing what
town they live in or what "scene" they're from,
and I think it's better that way. It creates an "out
of nowhere" atmosphere for this excellent album. 
Hey,
I missed the first two volumes, but Rejerks Volume 3
is hitting the spot. Five ten-minute-ish free-form jams built
with random splashes of sound-blocks that come and go like
watching sped-up films of day-glo clouds thick with acid rain
working their way across the sky, occasionally butting into
each other and making little rainstorms -- better get out
that titanium umbrella! And, the overall Nautical performance
ethos is nicely summed up at the beginning of track 2, where
Carly Ptak can be heard saying "We're just gonna let
the tape roll....." and continues to riff back and forth
on those words as the thick jams start to take over.
Damn,
now this one I really like -- in fact, this is possibly my
favorite N.A. release ever! Y'see, this band has their own
record-cutting machine, and they don't exactly use it 'correctly';
they've made records out of "Video Disks, edges of CdR's,
Plastic Lids, Lazer Discs, Wax, Paper, etc.," via "Odd
styles: random play cuts, over-cuting ontop of pressed vinyl,
heavy frequency/noise cuts, layered offset overcuts, etc."
(
These
Baltimore-area thrashers floored me a year or two ago with
a really heavy, fast, and mean self-released cassette that
placed them pretty high in the youth hate/horror sweepstakes.
Now they've put together a nice pro CD and their sound is
changing. Still lots of hate and horror, but they do sound
like they're growing up a bit, with tempos that are starting
to slow and a weird burnished tin-metal kind of sound that
reminds me of professional 1980s treble-hate merchants like
Big Black and Scratch Acid. As for the slower numbers, they
are monster jams that I can hardly believe, particularly the
9-minute mid-album pulverizer called "Friend of Mine."
It gets my head banging and shaking in big circles just like
the Om CD does, except New Flesh play it much looser -- as
the monstrous bass riff carries on and on, the drums start
to lose their way on purpose and the guitar mess melts into
everything else, and unlike Om the singer doesn't sound like
a Buddhist stoner -- he sounds like he hates all Buddhists,
and he doesn't like you much either, and besides that he's
about to explode from all sorts of other related and unrelated
internal tensions. It's a good 'un, that "Friend of Mine,"
and there's some other slower pulverizers on here that are
certainly worth your attention. 
The
bassist and drummer of stoned doom legends Sleep are continuing
on as a duo called Om. I was a little suspicious when I heard
it was just a bass and drums duo, but not to worry, it's PLENTY
heavy. Bass sound is so huge, tight, and overdriven, it actually
sounds like a trio, the world's tightest stoner guitarist
and stoner bassist playing with a kick-ass stoner drummer,
slowly plowing on a steady mission through still waters running
very deep. Oh wait, I just looked at the cover, and it's a
picture of an eagle soaring, so maybe that's the metaphor
instead of a ship plowing. Although the lyrics, which are
generously printed, seem to be about going to space. Or are
they? Let's see: "Alterates grid on the outer of a newborn
theme. / Choric to the windship -- walk toward horizon. /
Alterates grid on the outer of a newborn theme. / And pass
into the orbitarm -- out from source to freedom." I'm
pretty sure that's about going into space, but regardless,
this is an endlessly heavy hypno-album that gets better and
heavier every second you listen to it, no matter how many
times you play it, seriously. 
It
makes sense that Orthrelm would sign up with the Ipecac label,
and this potential for wider exposure has coincided with a
challenging new aesthetic move on their part towards extreme
length and minimalism. The album consists of one 45-minute
track in which short frantic patterns are repeated for unheard-of
lengths (minutes at a time?), sometimes evolving slowly as
they repeat, sometimes remaining quite static. Eventually
there is some pretty wild payoff and some serious changes
of riff, etc., but for those who aren't already Mick Barr
enthusiasts it's gonna take some pretty hardy souls to get
there. A metalhead co-worker was impressed by the skills but
gave up after 10 minutes or so -- "I just don't think
it's going to go anywhere." It does go somewhere, many
places in fact, even when it's apparently standing still,
but even I didn't learn how to truly 'hear' such things until
after spending 7 years living alone and rigorously meditating
on a mountaintop retreat. Anyway, Barr's guitar skills have
already been well-noted in these pages and others, but it's
the drummer Josh Blair who really impresses me on here, maintaining
a precise rolling and tumbling energy that never lags in the
slightest underneath the guitar's double-picking frenzy.
I'm
still amazed by the Finnish language. The words are so long
and polysyllabic. I have no idea what they mean, but I recognize
so many things in each word anyway, like Sade (the singer),
sad (the emotion), vans (the automobile), Vans (the shoe brand),
pelt (the fur), Pelt (the band), and sometimes almost a phallus!
And speaking of amazing, Eclipse is really putting out a nice
run of albums. This is like their eighth well-done release
in a row, all of them excellent, musically and visually. This
one, titled Puhalluspelto, by a group from Finland
called Pãivãnsãde, might be the best-looking
of the lot. The music isn't as blown-out pretty as the cover
art, but it is pretty blown-out, and that does not necessarily
mean loud. In fact, it barely means loud at all -- this is
obtuse jam improv folk, and as you know, one thing about folk
music is that it's rarely loud, and as you also know, another
thing about folk music is that it doesn't have to be loud
to be blown-out. Anyway. I'm just assuming Pãivãnsãde
is another band from the K. Ystavat and Lal Lal Lal camp(s),
but I honestly can't tell from looking at the minimal credits
or anything. I do recognize one surname, that of Tolvi, which
has also appeared on records by Laukheat Lampaat and Rauhan
Orkestri, so it is highly likely that it is coming from somewhere
within Finland's Golden Triangle of Music (as marked by the
cities Tampere, Turku, and Helsinki). 
Jeethush!
(Translation: "Jesus!", slurred because I'm a little
drunk right now.) This CD is packaged inside an amazing art
book! The artist is 
Reviewed
a packaged-in-garbage CDR by these guys a year or more ago,
and praised it for it's low-fi garage Beefheart worship that
planked out fearlessly into it's own aggressive thrash-space.
Now they've thrown together the scratch to put out a nice
LP and I'm pleased to say it picks up right where the CDR
left off. (The grotty and lovely color-silkscreen cover even
continues the garbage theme, due to the strangely . . . .
moist way it feels to the touch.) I don't know what it is
I dig so much about these guys, but it's something about how
they take weird riffs and, instead of hammering them in perfect
tight sync, elongate and elasticate them until the song melts
before your eyes without ever actually losing its shape. It's
like Michael Morley and Bruce Russell joined the Hampton Grease
Band, and then convinced the new four-guitar lineup to start
working on Caroliner covers. (Totally.) 
Surprisingly
sick noisy improv album. I say "surprisingly" because
I thought Psi were gonna be, you know, another 'dry improvised
music' trio. Put it this way, I just assumed that the letters
P, S, and I were gonna be the first initial of each member's
last name! (Hotcha! Improv joke! That one gets a Gregg Bendian
rim shot!) I say "sick" partly because the awesome
wraparound gatefold cover by Stephen O'Malley really sets
a tone -- I mean, there's Satan, right there on the cover,
and the artist is in sick bands like Khanate and SunnO))).
But Psi really do play genuinely sick sounds that do plenty
of justice to the cover art: severe dog-whistle electronics
and blatantly ill low-end stumbling and fumbling. This may
indeed be dry improv, but it's dry in the way a hellish day
in the desert is, or a virus creeping out of a clinic. (This
just in, important correction from the band: "Just wanted
to give you the ol' correction that the sick cover art from
Artificially Retarded Soul Care Operators was actually
all drawn by peeesseye's own Fritz Welch with color and layout
by SOMA.") 
As
I suspected, ANYTHING can happen in the post-Smell L.A. "punk"
scene. Quem Quaeritis are final proof. First of all, they
named their band Quem Quaeritis. Say what? Second, they put
their CDR in a jewel case and spray-painted it like that.
(It's beautiful and it feels nice too.) Third, they perform
such an absurdist melange of funky styles on their album,
such as dark ambient, gabber techno, art-damaged free jazz,
improvised musique concrete, spoken word, Venusian hillbilly
Godz stomp, 'funny rap' (with the good sense to do it for
only a minute), and whatever kind of music track 2 "Samurai
Scientologist" is. (Futuristic jazz-fusion flute-funk
a la The Cosmic Jokers under the direction of Tom Ze?) It's
grooves like this track 2 business that are the deal-breaker
for me -- if they're willing and able to do something this
sexy, they win automatically. The second half of the album
does kind of bog down into some toyish free jazz endlessness,
but by the time it does, I've already been shook up pretty
good and the devolution is kind of charming. One to watch!
(Oh damn, I just learned that they aren't a band anymore,
and that their whole concept was to make music without using
guitars "because geetars are geetarded." I didn't
even notice there weren't any guitars!) 
Everybody
knows Brian Ruryk, that crazy guitar improviser from Canada,
but I haven't heard too much from him lately 
Um, so I think this
cassette inside a g'damn handkerchief is my favorite SB release
so far . . . . . . . . okay, 20 minutes later, it's definitely
my fave. I've actually heard about six (!) releases by the
SB and so far they've all been pretty much the exact same
thing, in a real good way: one long single spaced-out dark-cloud
numb-teeth tone-drone, and I assumed this one would simply,
in the words of both Mike Love and Sidney Poitier, "do
it again." I knew I was still gonna like it, and give
it a thumbs-up review, but, other than the (g'damn) handkerchief,
I didn't think there'd be anything new to report. Ah, but
now that I've listened, I'm happy to say there IS something
new to report -- I'm not even gonna need to mention that g'damned
handkerchief again. This tape is GOOD. Yes, it's a side-long
piece that really is still the same sad greyblack drift, but
here's what's new, or done in a new way: synth-based pulses
and waves cutting into the cloud, pumping weird life into
it, making it glow and flicker while it sits there all spooky-like.
Pulses, waves, sine-tones, sine-tickles. Mmmmm. Sine-tickles.
(Wow, that was my first ever Homer Simpson reference in Blastitude.
I know, I know, a little late to the game....) 
I'm
a little slow on the draw, and this album's edition of 200
is already sold out at source, but damn, it's good. The SB
are a long-running improvised sound/noise group from New York
City. They have been doing basically the same thing for a
long time, a particularly bleak void of electronic improvisation
that is very easy to fall asleep to, not because it is boring,
but because it is enveloping, like a blanket. And friends,
I do not use hyperbole in the slightest when I say that The
SB, for this, their very first 12" vinyl release, have
used some of their very best performances I have ever heard.
This is great cold-electronic free-stuff that chills to the
bone at the same time that it heavily relaxes. Black and white
marble vinyl record comes as a "white label" in
a nice anonymous chip-board disco sleeve (unfortunately not
pictured here), except yours might also come with the sleeve
of a 'dummy album' (mine unfortunately IS pictured here).
THE
SB: "...the great cold-electronic free-stuff..."
The
title of this 23-track CD made me think it was gonna be the
Mee-Mees' version of Faust Tapes, with all the tracks
segued together and mega-mixed. But now that I've listened
to it, I realize that "garbage" just means that
all these tracks are random outtakes and demos from 1975 through
1980 that never got released, and "collage" just
means that they're all gathered here in one place. Can you
imagine: Screamin Mee-Mees outtakes and demos?? Their absolute
most polished songs are already outtakes and demos! But yet,
the tracks on this disc indeed sound more like demos than
usual. Like they weren't officially recording some unknown
7-inch for some never-heard-of label, they were just rehearsing
for it. To wit, the album seems mostly 'unplugged', played
on acoustic guitars with the beats played on a table or a
coffee can. This all doesn't mean I'm not enjoying this, because
I am -- it has a low-key and extremely casual acoustic haze
that is surprisingly relaxing, and it's still rock'n'roll,
and it's still permeated with patented Cole/Ashline third
mind ridiculousness. For example, track three "C'mon
Jimmy" is a very matter-of-fact number from 1976 about
the pop politics of the day: "Why on earth didn't we
have a winner back in '72?/Started with George McGovern and
Eagleton so/they got defeated back in '72/by Richard Nixon
and Spiro Agnew so/God help us now, we're in 1976/Oh God help
us please!!/Jimmy Carter help us now!!" Or how about
the self-reflexive "Mouth Song," which goes "I'm
gonna put my mouth up here and sing / I'm gonna put my mouth
up here and sing . . . You haven't heard us sing for a year
/ We've been out drinking beer." There are also ruminations
like "You Wish That You Was You" and "Why Can't
A Watermelon Pray?" (which asks the question, "Why
can't you objects do the things you ain't supposed to do?"),
a couple sequel songs ("I Drink Sody" and "Too
Young To Shave Part Two"), a supra-reverb cover of "Pipeline,"
a cover of "You Really Got Me" that lasts about
4 seconds . . . and lots of other garbage too!
The
Locust Music label has grown to be one of the most impressively
prolific labels in Chicago, a city that is home to many, many
impressively prolific labels. I first noticed Locust when
they did those two Sun City Girls triple-LPs in 2001 -- wow!
-- but when I first really checked back with 'em, just a few
months ago, I was shocked at how busy they'd been, having
released something like 50 or 60 more discs since then (no,
I'm serious), from new stuff to old stuff, folk, jazz, electronic,
academic, 60s freak, rare groove, and plenty of etcetera.
They've even got about four or five sub-labels. Busy, busy,
busy .
. . . . and here's just one of their releases, by someone
named Ramon Sender. I'd never heard of him before, but it
turns out he was part of the San Francisco Tape Music Center
in the early 1960s. From there he went on to the one and only
San Francisco Diggers collective (hmm, I'll have to look back
over Ringolevio and see if he's in there), and after
that "co-founded the legendary Morningstar Ranch Commune
in Sonoma County." There's tons of stuff about this to
dig through on his website, 
Whoah,
this is from the guy in England who does the Sniper Glue zine
and, I dunno, I guess I figured this would be noisier. Why?
Because the zine is B&W cut-and-paste and has features
on Naturaliste and, uh, Sonic Youth? I guess that's why. But
Shy Rights Movement are rather mellow non-noise singer/songwriter
pop. Once I accepted this mild style shock, I noticed some
pretty good twee-gaze dust-ballads on here, like the "Looking
out the dirty windows" song. Good psychedelic feel on
that one, makes the earnest AM Radio pop melodies really mean
something. The more upbeat rock songs sound a little more
generic -- the ballads are Shy Right Movement's strong suit.
I'll be damned -- Sightings went into a studio! On previous
releases the band has recorded themselves in what sounds like
an underground concrete bunker, where the sheer street-rock
volume of the band has immolated itself in recording-level
red -- extremely impressive in a totally blasting way, especially
for new listeners (all releases have been killer, my favorite
is Michigan Haters with Absolutes second),
but when it's the third or fourth album recorded that way,
you start to get a little frustrated, because you know there
are songs and excellent rhythms going on under there, and
you kinda wish you could hear them as intensely as you can
the blasting. And now, with Arrived in Gold, you
can! The studio is Brooklyn, NY's Rare Book Room, the outside
engineer is Samara Lubelski, and together they have brought
the Sightings sound away from the blast and toward the void
with all the brilliant sharp shards intact and rendered in
detail -- arrived in gold indeed! You can hear better than
ever that Sightings are much more than a mere 'noise-rock'
band; in fact, they turn noise into a full-fledged free-form
psychedelic compositional approach, well-spiced with weird
insect dance rhythms, ghost-memories of fucked-up hip-hop,
and liberally bad vibes.
After
six CD releases, the Smack Shire label is batting a thousand.
Tarot or Aorta, Gravy's Band on the Run,
the Rev. Lester Knox compendium, To Live and Shave in L.A.'s
God and Country Rally!, the Xex reissue -- all highly
recommended by Blastitude. Though for some reason, this Sightings/Tom
Smith disc first hit me like a spell with the flu. It sounded
wrong or something, and I was duking it out, not getting it,
listening further, getting annoyed, the vocals seemingly drowned
by music which was just lumpy motor-sounds or something, and
finally I shelved it. About two months later it made it's
way back into the changer on "second chance" status,
and up popped track #3 "Keep Me From Speech" and
jeezus, it floored me. Totally dirty truly driving power electro
rock. Lumpy? Not at all -- the primary rhythm and song-force
is this high-pitched guitar skree thing that dive-bombs at
the end of each measure leaving shards of mind-melt detritus.
In the meantime Smith's laptop spits out something rhythmic
and sinister, and his singing is placed just right in the
mix. Hell, I do call it crooning, but not as much "noise
crooning" as just plain jazz crooning. You know,
torch singing? Fire music? But a melancholy flame, a somehow
resigned mood -- truly emotional (sniff) and heartfelt (sob),
while the music powers onward and downward, crushing everything.
Tracks 3 through 5 in fact form a devastating mid-album onslaught,
with "Keep Me From Speech" followed by the 7-minute
extended dance and falsetto glory that is "Capitalism
& Schizophrenia," followed by "Beyond the Brain,"
also kind of a dance hit, albeit in a more low-key and street-ghost
way, my favorite part the long a capella vocal intro
by TS, with its sweet sparse amp noise punctuation. The whole
album is damn good 2005 dub de roque de gutter concrete,
more than even the considerable sum of its parts. 
"Who
is Mark Evan Burden?," you may ask. Then again you might
be like "Mark Evan Burden? He's the dude from Get Hustle,
except he's not in that band anymore...." I knew that
myself, but I had temporarily forgotten that I knew it, until
this CD came in the mail and I was like "Who is Mark
Evan Burden? Oh yeah, he was the guy on the Hammond B3 organ
when I saw Get Hustle in Chicago back in '03 or something.
Must've read his name somewhere. Damn, he must've lugged that
B3 around for the whole tour. That's work, that's dedication,
that's why Get Hustle are being written about in a major international
fanzine like this one (ha ha). Damn." Anyway, it was
a great Get Hustle show, and Evan Burden is on the Get Hustle's
Dream Eagle 1 release that I really like. But --
he's not in The Get Hustle anymore, now he's in this band
Silentist, who are actually a metal band. A black metal goth-prog
cabaret band, to be exact, and this is their debut CD EP,
four tracks clocking out at 20 minutes or so. First track
is a pretty well-done possibly-Darkthrone-influenced swarmer,
but with intense piano barreling along as well, so that's
kind of a head-turner. The other three tracks incorporate
a little doom/stoner into the black/blur fabric, always with
that symphonic cabaret piano riding atop, for a juxtaposition
that is always pretty wild -- just check the way the title
track thrashes for its length and then suddenly gives way
to an extended high-speed Glass/Wakeman solo piano coda. I'm
sure someone somewhere will call this "false metal"
even if on a technicality alone (the piano) but that doesn't
mean it isn't "real something else". 
Spray-painted
tape that comes with an actual silver dagger attached to it
(one of those toy ones that retract so you can play like you're
actually stabbing someone or something, with a cassette, in
this case, pun intended despite being terrible), but don't
let the striking Not Not Fun aesthetic distract you, the music
is quite good too. Silver Daggers stand out by NOT being a
spazz dance punk w/masks act -- their rock action is more
laid back and spaced-out, krauty and dubby. Occasional wacked
female vocals really take it to another tweaked level. Great
sounds, great vibe, though not exactly a great album -- hey,
some cassettes are, but this one sounds more like a practice
tape of song ideas, rough sketches, fine parts and grooves
to remember and do something fully-formed with later, etc.
I'd really like to see what they do next, but this is still
a fine listen while we're waiting, and it does come painted
with a dagger attached to it! 
I
thought this acclaimed new duo was part of the new young American
crop of new young noise-throat singers ("moan wave"
as some new young genre-wags are already calling it), but
it sounds to me like what's being whaled on here is 99% good
ole distorted electric guitar, and when I say whaled on, I
mean these guys are fuckin' WAILIN'. Amplified crunchy strings
pushed to the limits, blasting not to bury but to REVEAL .
. . There are vocals, but not zone-moan so much as weird little
babble around the edges -- singing shearing guitar feedback
tones that sound like human voices, and singing squealing
human voices that sound like liquid guitar feedback. I'll
be damned, the critics are right on this one, this is indeed
ecstatic music! They can moan all they want next time, I'm
sure they rule at that too! 
Man,
these guys really do never cease to amaze. I've heard about
three of their releases now and Crowned Purple Gowns
has gotta be the queasiest dive through the omniverse, our
favorite San Diegans-who-do-not-skate cooking up something
that sounds like a huge wobbly funhouse mirror refracting
satellite drones and space tones from a backwards space-station
carousel floating upside- down somewhere to the left of South
Venus, and it's all being picked up and broadcast directly
through our collective brains by that tiny weird metal cavity
filling in our collective upper left molar. The second piece
on side one is the more unbelievable of the two, powered by
ultra-high space-seer vocals as alien as any prime Sun City
Girls zone-out. Side two continues in the vein of the first
piece, except this time a small tribe of highly intelligent
sub-verbal cat-people are thrown into the mix and doused with
cold water. And I'm not even trying to write one of those
"surrealistic noise reviews," that's just what it
sounds like. Also while listening to this tape, I was thinking
about the rather invigorating statements one of these Skaters
made about slavery (as quoted in Matthew Bower's column on
the Volcanic Tongue website, 
