Babe the Blue Ox -- PEOPLE [RCA]

There sure is a lot happening on here for a band with only three members; they must all have four hands or something. Color this Babe crazed. Weird, spastic time signatures shift abruptly like bumper cars even while sporting a vaguely popped-out sound (is it artpop or just loud? Or is it live or is it Memorex? And what happened to Memorex, anyway?) on "Can't Stand Up," slinky rubber bass and tink-tink guitars compete with bizarre lyrics on "Rube Goldberg," feedback and heaviosity permeate the charmingly fucked "Fuck This Song," blah blah blah.... This band (two gals and one guy) are considerably heavier than the average sleaze-metal band when they want to be, far poppier than the poppiest o' pop fairies (check out the lovely "Breathe"), and just flat-out weirder than anybody this side of the Butthole Surfers. This is a scary band; nobody should be able to play this many different styles all at once and do it so well -- surely they have made a deal with the devil somewhere along the way....

Some people are making a stink about this album, incidentally, because it's considerably more "polished" than previous efforts (meaning that they actually have songs that appear to be constructed rather than just crazed ramblings stitched together in their previously more avant fashion, plus it sounds real nice too), but anyone ready to shout "sellout" (what the hell does that MEAN, anyway?) should give it up; this is still way too strange and left-of-center to be considered "normal" by a long shot. Good, weird stuff and highly recommended.

Bacillus -- EPIDEMIC [Clotted Meat Portioning]

Bacillus is the moniker of a man with a mission... to spread the virus of noise. Most of Bacillus' work centers around the theme of destruction through viral behavior, parasites, and the breakdown of all things in general (bodies, society, etc.), and this tape is only the latest in a series of documents propelled by this basic manifesto. The key to Bacillus' strength lies in keeping the noises truly strange and grotesque, and keeping the movements (i'm not sure they're really "songs" in the traditional sense) short -- this tape clocks in at ten songs in 20 minutes, so that should TELL you something. And the material is pretty chaotic -- grinding walls, frazzled bits o' feedback, found sound, drastic edits, all manner of crazed noises. While this is not as truly SAVAGE as, say, Merzbow or Macronympha -- it aims for a lower, scummier sound than that -- it's certainly MEATY enough; we're talking texture like brain matter drying on stucco walls. Some titles, to provide a glimmer of the "plan" at work: "The Swelling Continues," "Microbe Strain," "Hemorrhage Caused by Blow to Head," "Protoplasmic Resonance," "Neuron Misfire," "Cell Wall Collapse".... The message becomes clear: This is the sound of entropy in action. The sound on the tape backs up the message. A good batch o' sonic vileness from one of the better noise units around.

Bacillus -- BLACK PLAGUE [Clotted Meat Portioning]

More microscopic bites of festering unhappiness from this cheerful proponent of nihilism. A "concept" album of sorts that keeps things under control by restraining the entire cassette's length to twenty minutes, the noises come in short bursts. "Pathogenesis" alternates quiet hiss with frying electrodeath; "Tear in Protective Layer" emulates a hurricane swirling down the sink; others like "Macrophagic Refuse" and "Body Rejecting Donor Organ" simulate pure pandemonium with harsh, gritty sounds and cyclotron effects. Most impressive. "Cell Ruptures, and Spills Its Contents" is more of a grindfest, while "Viral Reservoir" centers more around cicilia-frying high end damage. Other tracks achieve similar levels of grief while managing a distinct variety. Eleven tracks in all encompass the passage from infection to complete destruction, and do so with unnerving gusto.

The included booklet has a lengthy passage describing the passage from infection with the Black Plague to its eventual destruction of the human host, which makes for some pretty cruel reading. A word on the packaging, incidentally -- although it is obvious that CMP exists on a low budget, the cassettes are nicely produced and enclosed in a cardboard folder with striking graphics, and the design is duplicated in the accompanying booklet. All in all, a nice outing in the slaughterhouse....

Bad Girls, a trio of Mike Khoury (violin), Wade Kergan (clarinet, sax, electronics), and Ben Bracken (guitar, electronics), get to thumpin' and bumpin' on this swell collection of devolved sounds and nifty titles ("Impressions of a Filthy Naked Hippy" is my favorite, on which they bump 'n thump and make extremely unclassifiable noises and a really good simulation of barnyard animals). The jazz-skronk background rears its gruesome head on "Willingness," but it's "Incidental Music (Mix # 2)" that really gets my mojo risin' -- amp drone, squiggly electronic sounds, mondo reverb, incidental clanking and wanking... the ghost of John Cage watches with approval. They get minimalist on "Calcutta Electric Rickshaw Ride," with lots of open space; "Patterns in Nature" returns to the skronk axis, but on the final track, "Wade in the Water," they make a pretty serious stab at getting devolved with hocus-pocus drums, telegraph electronics, earhurt mixing, and other sonic effluvia that'll make your eyes water. Such greatness must not go unheard. When the slave traders of Uranus descend from the skies in their screaming metallic warships, raining fire and death from the heavens, only those who have heard this fine disc will be spared their wrath. You know what to do.

Bad Idea -- TRAX.SYSTEM [demo]

Here we have four songs about "the information age" from Bruce Christenson (vocals, progamming, keyboards), Jacob Martell (guitars), and John Lu (DJ). Musically, the demo's caught somewhere between early Skinny Puppy (before they retreated into fractured screeching), "Revenge"-era Ministry, and OFFICIAL VERSION-era Front 242; the vocals are particularly Ogre-styled, the hissing menace thing. The vocoder lives.... DJ scratching shows up from time to time too, but most of the time, the songs are driven by the cold pulse of synthesizers, with samples added to reasonably effective use. The songs are fairly short, which means they don't wear out their welcome like a lot of the material from this genre.

This is good stuff, but the one thing that might work against the band is that the material still relies too heavily on its influences; while the work is good, the band hasn't yet developed a strong identity of its own. This is a problem common to nearly all new bands, though, and one that is usually resolved with subsequent experience -- and in the meantime, this is certainly listenable, especially for those who pine for the days before Skinny Puppy started getting "too weird" and Ministry embraced the joys of Black Sabbath on speed.

Bakamono - THE CRY OF THE TURKISH FIG PEDDLER (Basura!)

This is an SF three-piece band whose reputation seemed to preceed themselves for quite some time. What you get here is nothing terribly earth-shattering, but it's still pretty good. At the least, better than much of what the indie world has to offer up. I would venture to say, with a chuckle, that they sound like a cross between a pared-down Slug and Melt Banana. If you can imagine that. Basically, they try to kill you kindly with less intesity. Indie guitar rawk will never be the same? [yol]

Strange sounds in the name of guitar science.... All of the sounds on this disc were made with the guitar, although there are spots where you wouldn't necessarily guess that if you hadn't been told beforehand. If nothing else, Baker certainly understands the mechanics of creative signal processing. On "Element #1" (guitar played with drumsticks), the background is a deep, shimmering drone over which Baker makes almost random percussion sounds by tapping the guitar and/or the strings with the sticks. The effect is similar to some of Jim O'Rourke's early stuff, or perhaps a less hyperactive and more ambient answer to Bill Horist. The second track, "Elemental," is driven by guitar harmonics and includes machine-like rhythms (loops, perhaps?) and ambient guitar hum that slowly and gradually recede, at which point the guitar harmonics fade in and grow. I can see this appealing not only to hardcore experimental guitar junkies, but to fans of Final as well. On "Element #3" the guitar is played with scissors (ouchie!); the effect is much the same as before, but with more wailing and pinging sounds. "Element #2" is the sound of guitar being played with a violin bow, and as you might expect, it has a high drone quotient and more of a physical texture. The final track is "Elemental" again, this time played above the headstock, which results in a reverberating xylophone sound. Interesting stuff, and it's nice to hear an experimental guitarist who's also enamored of ambient sound as opposed to creating violent chaos....

Baker's from the Fripp/Eno school of making guitars sound like anything but guitars, and he's particularly inclined toward slow-motion drones that ring and shimmer in trancelike fashion. His sound -- the sound of bass, guitar, and occasionally cymbals all blown through immense amounts of reverb until it sounds like a room full of droning ghosts -- is augmented this time around by vocals, although they, too, are so floaty and dreamlike that no actual words can be discerned. The sound of "the letters of your name are still a scar on my ears" is one of dark ambience played out in endless cascading drones, all moving at the pace of a funeral march. In one of the later movements the bass is actually distinguishable, forming an recognizable progression, but it's buried in a forest of mysterious drones that rise and fall, rise and fall.... think of it as slow trance with better tones. The second (and only other) track, "I flay my skin upon which to write these letters to you" is another set of cryptic movements of sound, this time built around a singular ringing drone and with more noise-oriented sounds in the background. As the piece goes on, the concentration of noises in the mix begins to grow and the drones begin to take on a sinister rumble, like an alien fighter jet firing off test commands while warming up the engine before doing a bombing run. The interesting thing about Baker's sound is that it is so minimal in its construction, yet so ambiguous in the nature of the sounds, that it creates something akin to an audio Rorschach -- you can project your own meaning an interpretation onto these soundscapes without much difficulty. Imagine Troum gone black metal, perhaps (In fact, parts of it call to mind Burzum's "Totenhot"), and you have some indication of the intensity (and hypnotic quality) of this disc.

TMU: Aidan returns with more whole-grain goodness in the land of the eternal drone. Which reminds me that i still need to send him his cd, oops....

TTBMD: Very mellow waves. A sonic journey with beats of sound coming in and out.

TMU: Yah, on "lapse" he has that shimmering drone going where there's so many layers that diddling with one makes the whole tapestry drift in a different direction. Like dust in the wind, my son.

TTBMD: This reminds me of a Scorn a little bit.

TMU: Mid-period, then? Certainly not the early stuff.... (thrashes around wildly imitating "On Ice" from first Scorn album)

TTBMD: Nah, more like GYRAL or LOGGHI BARROGHI -- it's more mellow than that, though. The beats are more in the background.

TMU: I really like that curtain of sound thing. Now here at the end he's imitating my kitchen sink, sort of.... I like the way he starts building at the beginning of "lysis" with guitars that sound almost like flutes.

TTBMD: I can see a bird flying in a cloudless sky over cold, deep waters.

TMU: As dark shapes flit far beneath the surface, yet slowly... slowly... rising... to explode in the sun.

TTBMD: Very trance-like... feels like I haven't slept in days and my insides are slowly turning into maggots feasting upon the blood between my bones.

TMU: Nah, i don't think the vibe is that dark, brutah. It feels more like... like... (strains) dust-laden rays of sunlight cascading in shafts of vibrating light as Naomi Okabe babbles something esoteric. Something i can't hear. This was recorded on a four-track and sounds really good, which only proves that it's all in the hands, not in the boxes. Technology means nothing without the atomic ass-powered brain to command it to RISE!

TTBMD: Yes, I agree.

TMU: He's drifting now... lost in clouds of subdued melody....

TTBMD: I sure would like to make a record with this guy.

TMU: He is stylin', this is true. Hypnotic drone of the cathedral of lights... Baker is... yes... the night watchman.

TTBMD: This is almost as good as the Voltage Regulator disc, and that's the shit. Serious shit. I'm going to have to pick up more Aidan Baker material....

TMU: The beginning of "symbiosis" is so quiet it creeps up on you.

TTBMD: Laid-back rhythms, like island music. Very, very good. Impressive.

TMU: This is the exotica that robots listen to when they need to unwind after a hard day's work blasting through bedrock or something. Look, it even comes with a naked chick on the cover, how much more exotica-like can you get? (shows TTBMD the saucy cover)

TTBMD: He could get way more exotic than that....

TMU: You can see her nipples, dammit!

TTBMD: Wow. I've seen nipples before.

TMU: But these are solarized nipples. Like, you know, from the solar anus or something.

TTBMD: Wow. I've seen solarized nipples before.

TMU: He's building in density here. It goes by so slowly that you almost don't notice it.

TTBMD: Yeah, things are starting to happen. It's getting busy, there's some kind of story going on here. Someone did something wrong.

TMU: The maggot men are on the loose! Slowly they prowl, like dripping lobster men, toward some beautiful girl's unwitting doom. Sinister business is afoot in the House of Drone. Gangsters in the House of Exotica. Could... could it be? The Mothership is HERE TOO....

TTBMD: Man, you see the Mothership everywhere.

TMU: I see it in Jenna Bush's underwear.

TTBMD: Oh yeah. Suuuure.

TMU: No really, I have these X-Ray Spex that I got from sending in all the Post Toasties box tops. (puts them on and smiles like Stevie Wonder)

TTBMD: Don't look at me like that, dammit.

TMU: The drone is getting heavy now. Dark bass hell is descending. The floor's dropping out. Dead men are rising to begin the Dance of the Drone Disco at 1/800th-speed.

TTBMD: A poisonous gas has been dispersed amongst the crowd. It goes in through the mouth, down the esophagus, and into the stomach and enters into the bloodstream.

TMU: The writhing is fatal. Did the Japanese chick babble again at the end or was that my imagination?

TTBMD: The poison's taking hold of the brain.. I don't know anything anymore.

TMU: Do you have any idea what she's saying on this track "phage"?

TTBMD: No, the typing of your keyboard is too loud for me to hear her. (turns up boombox) Is that truly it in terms of volume?

TMU: Tragically, yes. He opens with peculiar electronics, loops perhaps, on "lethe" -- and then the big drone kicks in, waves of shimmering guitar wash over you, and the Sound rules over all.

TTBMD: This is great shit. I love it.

TMU: Yes, we can just sit here and smoke and float away on great big clouds of melodic drone.... yes, now we float away... floating.... iiiiiiiintttoooooooooooo the niiiiiiiiiiiiight....

TTBMD: My captor has set me free, and I am back where I belong.

This is amazingly hot shit. Recorded live from the board last October at the Ambient PIng Series in Toronto, Canada, three swell musicans steeped in minimalism and drone, an amazing sound that's simultaneously right up close (hear those graceful piano notes, woo!) and a million miles away (float on that cosmic drone, heewack!), and three insanely long songs that are like watching the sky explode while glaciers slowly melt. Three musicians, three songs ("pentametrical," "interlaced rhyme scheme," and "tertiary"), three otherworldly excursions into the great beyond, far beyond the wall of sleep, far past the frozen and empty castles of Kadath, far into the void where the music of the elder gods causes worlds to shatter when they're just tuning up. The sound of eternity, of elemental forces and epochs too vast and seemingly endless for the insects populating this planet to grasp. It's only on "tertiary" that they open with something more closely resembling traditional music and tempos, built mostly around an energetic piano... but eventually it, too, is overpowered by the dark rumbling of the Elder Gods and everything goes deep and endless, glacial and vast, with a sound like reverberations and terrifying rattles in the ice house. What the world needs is this combo on the same bill with Corrupted for an evening of truly synapse-frying slow-motion dark-ambient doom. Seek this out and gaze with awe and terror. Build your shrine on your own time.

Band of Susans -- WIRED FOR SOUND (1986-1993) [Blast First]

What a brilliant idea -- a Band of Susans two-disc compilation cleverly divided into "Songs with words" and "Songs without words." Spiffy! Of course, they technically cheat, since "Tilt" (on the wordless disc) actually has two lines in it, but it's still close enough... There are also a couple of rarities for the discriminating: "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" from the very first (and very obscure) EP, two remixes ("Trouble Follows" and "Ice Age"), and one unreleased track ("Out of the Question"). The remixes don't so much improve on the songs in question as they merely suggest different directions and shift the emphasis from one set of guitars to another, which provides for an interesting reinterpretation. As it happens, two other songs on here ("Now is Now" and "The Red and the Black") are actually remixes themselves, although they're uncredited as such here for some reason.

For the benefit of those "not in the know," the Band of Susans are a really loud quasi-artrock band from NYC who've been at it now for not quite ten years. Their basic mode of attack is simple: one drummer, one bassist, three guitars, and much, much volume. They have a fondness for stacking up guitars in different configurations -- on the early stuff they're just all waffling away in one big riff, while in later stuff the different guitars become a bit more distinct. Either way, it's an exercise in overkill, just like it SHOULD be! Regardless of their arty backgrounds (Robert and one of the earlier members played in Rhys Chatham's ensemble, a couple of them -- including Helmet's Page Hamilton, who was involved in an early incarnation of the band -- have played in Branca's ensemble, Susan Stenger has played with Cage and other minimalists, etc., etc.), they're really a rock band at heart... just a louder and more dissonant one than most, that's all. Ergo, most of the material on both discs really rocks like a pee dog, okay? This is a great introduction to the band; unfortunately, finding the set is not likely to be easy... but it's well worth the effort if you've never heard them yet.

Band of Susans -- HERE COMES SUCCESS [Restless]

Well, I'm not sure this is the absolutely perfect, definitive BOS album -- i think THE WORD AND THE FLESH still edges it out there -- but it's awfully damn close. Rumor has it that this may be the band's last album (or at least, the last in their present direction/configuration), and if it is, at least they're going out like an avalanche.... A couple of things set this disc apart from earlier releases. For one thing, their method of attack is different; in the past they tended to lock all the guitars straight down the middle, like a steamroller barrelling down the freeway, but here they've separated the guitars in the mix and placed them WAAAAAAAY apart. Result? Where they used to sound like several guitars becoming massive, droning guitar the sound of Jupiter, now they sound like one massive guitar with a habit of weaving from side to side like a three-headed hydra. Mondo! The other big difference is that they made absolutely no attempt to "trim" stuff down for potential radio airplay this time, and the shortest song (outside of the 52-second instrumental "As Luck Would Have It" and the CD-only "Sermon on Competition, Part 1 (Nothing is Recoupable") clocks in at just under seven minutes.

Very little on this album is actually "new," with the possible exceptions of the song construction on "Elizabeth Stride (1843-1888)" and the Bo Diddley tribal beat on "Stone Like A Heart" (suitable for slow-mo moshing!); instead, it sounds more like the band decided that if they were going to do one last album, they might as well revisit all the songs they liked in the past but didn't quite nail and redo them the right way. Which is not a bad thing, since for the most part, this is the best collection of songs they've ever laid down in one place, and at least four of them (the ones recommended above, actually) are among the best they've ever done, period. "Elizabeth Stride (1843-1888)" begins with a couple of fat chords and an ambient drone, and gradually builds one layer at a time into a whirling cyclone of cold fusion rage; "Dirge" slows everything down and is one of the creepiest-sounding things you'll ever hear; "Stone Like A Heart" jumps up and down and SWINGS like Bo Diddley's band suddenly possessed by the spirit of art rock (i defy you not to play air guitar or dance to this); and "In the Eye of the Beholder (for Rhys)" just flat out rocks likes a baby-skull-crushing motherfucker. The best part of all? Most of the songs have "introductions" that are longer than most songs... half the time they don't bother to even start singing for two or three minutes into the song ("oh, wait, i FORGOT, we're supposed to start singing sometime, aren't we? WHOOPS!"). Some other magazine said you could make an EP out of the introductions alone and they were right....

And are they still morbid? Oh my yes. They're from NYC, you think they're gonna be SUNNY? Nooooooo. So we get songs about life turning to death at the hands of Jack the Ripper ("Elizabeth Stride (1843-1888)"), lying in bed all day contemplating suicide ("Dirge"), coming apart at the seams ("Hell Bent"), coming apart while ranting at the TV and holding a large caliber weapon ("Pardon My French"), unbridled cynicism ("Two Jacks"), and unbridled cynicism about climbing the ladder of success ("Sermons on Competition, Part 1 (Nothing is Recoupable"). Makers of Prozac and antipsychotic medication will want to take careful note of this album and plan their stock sales accordingly with the album's sales...

Band of Susans -- "Mood Swing/Last Temptation of Susan" [Sing Fat]

How... how weird to hear this after years of being familiar with the version on the album. I guess this must be the "radio mix," because it sounds a LOT different than the album track -- the stingy guitar has been pushed WAY up in the mix and everything else has been pulled back, particularly the bass. It sounds okay, but I still like the album version better. "The Last Temptation of Susan" remains unchanged -- just one big fat-ass drum and a couple of loud guitars spewing out incredibly cool chimey riffs -- BUT it's TRUNCATED! Aaaiee! Oh well... fortunately BOS were never a singles band so it doesn't really, uh, "matter," I guess. If you've heard this and even halfway liked it, I strongly suggest you snag a copy of VEIL (from which they both came) and hear the REAL versions. And while you're at, pick up everything else by the Susans as well. You won't regret it....

Bark Psychosis -- INDEPENDENCY (Third Stone Limited)

This band is difficult to describe because they encompass so many styles and do it so seamlessly; at one moment they're piddling in folk territory, then jazz, then quasi-ambient, then hard rock, then all of the above at once and then some. When the term "alternative" still meant something (before marketing bozos in NY and LA misappropriated the term and started using it to mean "studiously unwashed college dropouts desperately going for the grunge or whatever else is popular at the moment in a bid for commercial sucess"), this is pretty much what it meant.

This CD is actually a compilation of 12" singles and EPs released prior to their full-length HEX album. None of it's terribly dissimilar to what they're doing on HEX, and most of it is fairly quiet and lush-sounding; occasionally they rev up their motor a bit (on the insistent "Manman" and toward the end of "All Different Things," for instance), but for the most part the sound is dominated by strings and keyboards rather than guitars. Dynamics are the main reason to appreciate this group; think of a jazzier and more versatile version of Slint, perhaps (especially on "Tooled Up," where the latter half sounds very reminiscent of Slint's new untitled EP). They also have a preference for stretching things out; of the eight tracks here, only one is under four minutes, while most of the others are at seven or eight, and the closing track "Scum" is over 21 minutes long.

"Scum" is one of the more interesting songs here, although it's essentially an exercise in patience -- the first four minutes are nothing but low bass droning, and the song doesn't really take on a beat or traditional structure until about eight minutes into it. Assuming you can last that long, this is actually one of the jazziest things on the album, with weirdly reverbed jazz chords and a lazy, lazy beat.

The band is almost totally unknown, which is a shame, because they're considerably more sophisticated (not to mention technically proficient) than 99% of the "alternative" bands out on the playing field. Their one full-length album, HEX, is every bit as interesting and exotic as this one. Hopefully with a couple more albums their sphere of awareness will grow. If you see one of their 12" singles, pick it up and see if it works for you...

These people sound most angry. I approve. Plus they tend to play real slow, which automatically makes everything ten times heavier, and while the rest of the band sounds largely weaned on early seventies metal (the good kind), the singer sounds more like he was weaned on death metal. They're also big believers in the concept that you can never have too much distortion or fuzz, so already they're pretty close to being the perfect metal band.... I don't know how "original" all of this is, but it certainly sounds a hell of a lot better than most of what passes for heavy music these days. I also like that even when they lighten up (as they do on the long intro of "antietum") they sound appropriately sinister and certainly not wimpy by any means. (The beefed-up and Southern-friend outro is absolutely brilliant as well.) Their overall sound is right on the borderline between grindcore and extreme metal, all the more reason to like them. And like them i do, especially since they manage to weave a distinctly southern guitar sound into their grindmetal. The six songs on this are a collection of relentlessly efficient pummelings that range from the pretty good to they synapse-shattering. I can't decide if they look as grim as they sound or sound as grim as they look, but there's not question they're grim and musically they mean business. Highly recommended....

I think New York City's Begotten may have created a new Doom/Stoner Rock subgenre -- Shoegazer Doom. Dig it. I would posit that all of the current wave of doom bands can be judged in relation to Electric Wizard (the Wiz being the pinnacle o' Doomness). The E. Wiz doom-tree would go something like this: Sloth = the talented younger brother trying to get out from under his brother's shadow; Warhorse = the angry Yankee cousin on downers trying to control his Tourette's; Goatsnake = the leather pants-wearing, coke-snorting, sunglasses at night-sporting rock star cousin who came THIS CLOSE to joining Grand Funk in the 70s; and Acid King = the trash ex-stripper/ex-girlfriend. In this family Begotten would be the quiet younger brother and sister who spend a lot of time locked in their rooms reading SANDMAN comics and whom everyone thinks spends entirely too much time together.

And that has absolutely nothing to do with why Begotten could be called Shoegazer Doom. You know those days when everything is just too much? The kind of day when you get up and say to yourself, "Fawwwk...." The kind of day when all you want to do is stay in bed. The kind of day when your entire body feels like lead, and just looking at people is a pain in the ass... but somehow you have to get to school/work/whatever. So you put your head down and force one foot to go in front of the other.... A day when you want music that is slow and heavy, yet strangely soothing.... Begotten provide the soundtrack for a day like that. (NOTE: This CD was one of the last releases on Man's Ruin before it went belly-up. Your best bet is to contact the band directly through their web site.) [n/a]

This is a classic release by a totally sick band. This shit is so raw and heavy it is no wonder so many black metal bands rip them off. Ten songs of fast, brutal, satanic fury. The riffs on this album are relentless and at times stand still among all the chaos. The vocals are distant and only add to the misanthropy. This record and DRAWING DOWN THE MOON are highly recommend. [ttbmd]

Kind of a wandering beat/folk poet weaned on equal amounts of Leonard Cohen, Kerouac, free jazz, and punk, the best things about Cindy Lee Berryhill's style are probably the same things that have resulted in her putting out three albums on two different labels-- her loopy and idiosyncrastic personality, a quasi-yodeling vocal style guaranteed to charm some and drive others to contemplate murder, and a simultaneous fascination with the utterly mundane and the exceptionally weird. Remember that girl you knew in high school who had the odd haircut, strange clothes, the coolest record collection, and hung out in coffeehouse parking lots talking to the homeless instead of playing Pac-Man at the mall? Well, that was Cindy Lee... she comes across like the proverbial girl next door, assuming your next-door neighbor ever had a fondness for Ginsberg and skipping school to drive across the county on a lark.

This is probably her most solid effort yet. The band behind her is in fine form as always, providing instrmentation from the standard (electric guitar, electric and standup bass, cello) to the unusual (typmani, autoharp, mandolin), to the downright bizarre (cricket??? palm frond??? trash can and board with loose screw???). It's a tribute to the band's finesse and skill that it all comes together seamlessly; you never really notice the weird stuff until you read the liner notes and start hunting for it. Unlike previous efforts, the songs here don't wander off track very often, staying sharp and focused, making every song a winner.

"Gary Handeman" starts out with her shoes being stolen and gets weirder from there, without ever bothering to explain just who Gary Handeman is, but it's catchy and funny nonethless. It comes across like the dizzy collision between an intensely personal folk tune, a bizarre in-joke, and a full- fledged Busby musical showpiece, with beautiful results. You'll never figure out what it means, but it sounds right nonetheless....

The weirdness continues with "UFO Suite," which rambles on about ufo sightings and abductions; before the song's over, it manages to drag in strings, flutes, a brief monologue from a potential abductee with his dog barking in the background, the chorus of "Buffalo Gals," and (don't ask me why) Janet Reno. (Maybe if you play this backwards, Janet gets abducted herself; I'd certainly get behind that.)

With a violin line borrowed from "Eleanor Rigby" and a plunk, plunk, plunk bass bouncing away in the background, "I Want Stuff" opens with the words "I want colors / I want at least a thousand dollars/ I want to listen to the church music play/ I want everything to be okay" and in less than four minutes manages to say everything you ever need to hear about wanting what really matters in life. Bonus points for the "ay-yay-yay" in the closing chorus!

For some inexplicable reason, this album makes me want to dance in the middle of the desert under the spotlight of UFOs passing overhead... check it out and you'll see why yourself.

Cindy Lee Berryhill -- STRAIGHT OUTTA MARYSVILLE [Cargo]

I still haven't decided what i think about this one. I don't think it's as brilliant as her first one, WHO'S GONNA SAVE THE WORLD?, or her last one, GARAGE ORCHESTRA, but i'll be damned if i can figure out what's "wrong" with it. Still, there's plenty of good stuff here -- the loopy story of joining the high school track team on "High Jump," punk-scene war stories in "Diane," and other equally flaky stuff in "Unknown Master Painter." It seems like every album Cindy Lee is utterly compelled to do at least one song in which she just starts rambling halfway through -- it was "Steve on H" for the first album, "Yippee" for the second, "UFO Suite" on the third; this time it's on the cover of Donovan's "Season of the Witch," which i actually like better than the original. (Of course, i hate Donovan, so this is not difficult.)

I think my biggest problem with this is that it's a bit TOO folky -- but that's my problem, not hers. Her earlier albums that i liked the most leaned more toward rock, which i liked; this one sticks a lot closer to the acoustic folk context, and... i dunno, i liked the earlier stuff better. So sue me, dammit. The big-ass kettle drums of "Caravan" are pretty cool, tho, and "Elvis of Maryville" is pretty damn brilliant in its own right. Hell, maybe i just need to listen to the CD some more until it sinks in....

What is it with Cindy Lee that results in her albums coming out in cycles of quality? It seems like she puts out one brilliant one followed by one lukewarm, half-baked one. It's bizarre. As it happens, this time around it's time for another brilliant one, and this one fits the bill. The story behind the album is an interesting one -- even unusual (although the unusual it Cindy Lee's forte). The album grew out of a tour sponsored (sort of) by fans on the internet, who at one point arranged for Cindy Lee to perform in someone's living room for a handful of fans, each of whom had paid ten dollars each to defray expenses and all that. As the first one was a success, another appearance inevitably followed, until it turned a full-fledged living room tour (hence the album title; this was the sixteenth stop on the tour).

By now it may be obvious that this is a live album (it was recorded January 17, 1998 in San Francisco). This would normally be the kiss o' death for me, but this is an interesting live album, partly because of the choice of material (she picks a pretty strong cross-section from earlier albums and includes several unreleased songs), but also because of the presentation -- while she normally performs on albums with a full band (most recently the Garage Orchestra), here it's just her and Renata Bratt on fretless bass (a fabulous player, by the way). Most of the songs benefit greatly from the reinvention necessary to play in such minimal fashion, particularly on "Diane" (the only track from STRAIGHT OUTTA MARYSVILLE), a song i didn't particularly like in its studio version, which sounds oodles better here. Another thing that adds a lot of charm to the recording is the inclusion of Cindy Lee's rambling asides between songs. Anybody who's followed her career for any length of time knows that she's capable of observations that sound wacky on the surface but generally hide some interesting points (this is a polite way of saying she's eccentric, okay?), and she indulges this trait to the hilt, mostly in funny and entertaining fashion. (Her after-the-song explanation of how the song was inspired by her experience of being constantly mistaken for the receptionist while running a recording studio is absolutely hilarious.) In fact, the entire album's main charm lies in its loose, down-home-in-the-living-room feel. If more live albums were like this, i might pay more attention to live albums in general.

I find it interesting that Cindy Lee's appraisal of her "best" material largely matches my own (we are as of one mind! and here i am about to be single again! perhaps i'll start firing off mash letters to her! i'm sure Cindy Lee would be so excited!) -- the vast bulk of previously-recorded material comes from her first album, WHO'S GONNA SAVE THE WORLD?, and her third album, GARAGE ORCHESTRA, her two best ones (in my opinion anyway). By contrast, only one song from ...MARYSVILLE makes the cut (the aforementioned "Diane") and absolutely nothing shows up from NAKED MOVIE STAR. The rest of the album -- about half of it, actually -- consists of entirely new songs, several of which are actually brilliant ("Family Tree" and "This Way Up" in particular), lending hope to the notion that her next album will break the strong/weak cycle of releases by being utterly phenomenal. (Of course, since Cargo, her last label, disintegrated in spectacular fashion late last year, leaving her "between labels" one more time, when that nebulous album-to-be might materialize is anyone's guess.) Since she has the good sense to include such immensely swank material as "She Had Everything" and "Damn, I Wish I Was a Man" (from the first album) and the beyond-weird "UFO Suite" and "Gary Handeman" (from GARAGE ORCHESTRA), i can hardly fault her on song choices (i do sort of wish she had included my personal fave, "Looking Through Portholes"). Couple the swell performances with the stellar sound quality and you have one of the few live albums worth actually owning. The fact that she sings about transsexual bass players, aliens from outer space, and shoe-stealing bums is just... you know... the icing on the cake.

The only catch to all this fabulousness is that the CD is, uh, only available from Cindy Lee's web site (she's between labels, remember?), and limited to 500 copies. I vaguely get the impression that if it sells out in a reasonable time she'll use that knowledge as leverage to negotiate a deal with a "real" label, although i frankly would be perfectly happy to see her continue to release CDs in this manner (which, given how poorly her labels have understood her in the past, might actually be a better idea -- hey, people laughed at Jimmy Buffett for putting stuff out on his own label, but now that he actually outsells a lot of well-known major-label artists, there aren't too many people laughing now). Nevertheless, the CD is reasonably priced ($15 postage paid, i think) and if you have any taste you should want to acquire it from her site.

Bethany Curve -- GOLD [Unit Circle]

These spaced-out jokers have a peculiar sense of humor: The name of the disc is GOLD, so what color do they use for the unadorned cover and tray sleeve? Uh, silver.... The name and the disc art are opaque enough that you can't tell what they do -- which, as it turns out, is guitar-heavy semi- space rock with an orchestral bent. Most of the time their sound falls somewhere between DISINTEGRATON-era Cure and LOVELESS-era My Bloody Valentine, only with a bigger fondness for weird sounds than the former and a more consistent sense of structure than the latter. Given their penchant for burying vocals in the background and the presence of three guitarists, i wouldn't be surprised to find them influenced by the Band of Susans. (In fact, after hearing the sawtooth guitar squee in the background of "Over and Out," i'm even more convinced they are hep to the godlike vibrations o' Robert Poss and his uberfuzzed guitars.)

The album is pretty evenly divided between tracks that are actual songs ("Drag," "Temporary," "Fold in the Floor," "Fourteen"), pure exercises in atmosphere and strange effects ("Carnyval Sweet," Pool and the Shine," "Strength," "Marasmus"), and others that fall somewhere in between. "Drag," the opener, pretty conclusively demonstrates why they can't be dismissed as a mere shoegazer band -- even though it's spilling over with thick, distorted dream-o-tron guitars and guazy vox, periodically the drums thunder in with such force that they almost drown out the guitars (but not quite). They have a nice sense of dynamics, obviously, evidenced in "Fold in the Floor," where a chiming guitar line is gradually joined by other, dreamier (and fuzzier) guitars, then ethereal vox, and finally the drums, all in their own due time. One particularly outstanding track is "Fourteen," whose thunderous start-and-stop drums and eternally spiraling guitars make it sound like the Cure covering the Cocteau Twins as produced by My Bloody Valentine.

The effects permeating the album are interesting in their own right, from the slo-mo rotating wind-tunnel feel of "Carnyval Sweet" to the crunchy noises of "Strength" that are eventually nearly drowned out by droning hoverbot guitars. Then there's "Cygnus X-1," whose spaced-out interstellar whirls and bleeps live up to the starbound title. "Movement," especially in the introduction, makes inventive use of decaying delay lines before the song's full weight kicks in. The album ends with the twisting drone and squeal of "Marasmus," one of the most abstract pieces on the album -- at least until the drums and avalanche of guitars roar in, at which point it is transformed into a big, gloriously messy blur of sound. Yowsa. In the Land of the Burning Steer Skulls, we call this swank.

Most of the reviews i've seen for this compare them to the Cure, which i find baffling -- if anything, they're a more guitar-heavy update on the ambient/shoegazer sound favored by Cocteau Twins, the early 4AD bands like This Mortal Coil, and GLIDER-era My Bloody Valentine. They favor creating spiraling cathedrals of melodic sound, as clearly demonstrated by the opening track "Long Beach," a sweeping stack of guitar drones that pulses with a steady beat as guitars swirl and drone around the rhythmic center. As with earlier albums, their overall sound is dense and majestic, a swirling veil of sound designed to envelop the listener in near-ambient sound while still retaining a recognizable sense of structure and melody. This new release took three years (and a new lineup) to assemble, and the time they spent on it has paid off -- this is easily the best in a series of excellent releases. The entire disc is uniformly excellent (and in some ways reminds me a great deal of the last Lockgroove album), so much so that i'm not sure i even have a favorite... all of it is strong stuff. (I do especially like the uberfuzz guitars on "The Guarantee" and the propulsive -- sorta -- drive of "The Lodge" and odd bits here and there, but overall the entire disc is of such consistency that it's hard to single out any one song.) I like that the vocals are subservient to the guitars, often unintelligible and drifting through the wall of sound -- that much, at least, could be compared to DISINTEGRATION-era Cure (although i'd liken it more to PURE-era Godflesh, but that's just the kind of guy i am). As usual, another fine release from Unit Circle, and one worthy of your time and attention....

Beautiful, beautiful sheets of drone that unfold in lush ambient fashion over minimal beats, billowing on clouds of reverb. On their fifth album, the band employs drums, bass, two guitars, and vocals to fashion immense and vast panoramas of rich ambient sound and tasteful drums. Some songs are dreamier than others (like the opening track, "The Automatic" -- which picks up the pace later with the addition of technoish beats halfway through), while songs like "Jettison" form swirling, droning layers of sound over which vocals float like sunlight streaming through the clouds. Even with commanding beats, "Sleep" layers on such thick sheets of drone that you'll find yourself starting to nod off even before the enormous vocals and keyboards begin to smother you into submission. One of the catchier songs is "The Means," anchored by a throbbing bassline, but all of the songs are exceptionally listenable. Their blurry wall-of-reverb sound is reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine, but the songs themselves are far less static (inventive shifts in dynamics and unexpected arrangements are a hallmark of their sound) and their intentions far less abrasive. Brooding, beautiful drone mantras waiting for your ears.

Bettie Seevert -- LAMPREY [Matador/Atlantic]

OK, let's see what we have here... three guys/one gal from Holland with an album that sports a truly hideous cover (designed by the band themselves, only proving that talent in one artistic endeavor does not necessarily translate to others) and sounds like they have every record ever made by Neil Young, most by Lou Reed, the first three by R.E.M., and probably half the Flying Nun back catalog. Talk about your serious jag-pop fixation.... Singer Carol van Dijk has a voice that falls somewhere between Juliana Hatfield and Rebecca Gates after eating a really big heap o' Quualudes (with occasional excursions into Cindy Lee Berryhill territory), and while I gather that's supposed to be the main attraction here, what gets my attention more often are the guitars. I don't know who's playing what (Carol and Peter Visser both play the magic box o' strings), but they have the early Neil Young squeak and squall thing down pretty cold, particularly on songs like "Keepsake" and "Re-feel-it." Others like "D. Feathers" are more laid back and wouldn't be out of place on one of the first few R.E.M. albums, assuming you were in another universe where the young Peter Buck believed in fuzz pedals.

Other stuff of note include "21 Days," with a sleepy, droning bass and a chiming guitar part flat-out stolen from the first Pearl Jam album; the lazy, look-how-much-echo-we-have! drizzle of "Tell Me, Sad"; and the quiet, we're-not-quite-stealing-from-"Can't Find My Way Home"-but-we're-awfully- damn-close-aren't-we? elegance of "Silent Spring." My one real complaint with the album, though, is that it's got a severely tinny high-end; I don't know if that's intentional or not, but it annoys the hell out of me. (And the crowd replies, "Say WHAT? You listen to SKULLFLOWER, what are you talking about?" as the cryptic slave to the sno-cone girl flees from the stage....)

Seems Mayor B. is giving the Japanese (labels, anyway) a break for the time being, and setting his sights on Germany. This 7" contains four tracks of Emil's usual four-armed turntable reworking of records released on the Tochnit Aleph label. The real surprise for me is the surprisingly restrained take on Con-Dom's "Sermon" 7", in which he pulls a funny ha-ha on us by only working with the very very early drone part of the records... no howling eulogies to personal freedom or thunderous climaxes to be found, just edgy foreshadowing. The track utliizing Dachise's "Sugar Path" 7" makes use of all of their faces -- drone, atmosphere, razor-sharp high-end blasts -- all at the same time, giving us a very compressed greatests hits package in just under two minutes. The final track on side one is from Column One's "thx-1138" 12", and finally contains some voice loops and more typical Beaulieu-lian concerns, including some sweet repeating grooves (no actual lock grooves on this side, though, just in the recording). On side two, Astro's "MSG of Electronics Wave" LP gets a facefull of raw hell, with the full overload blare that side one lacked taking up the entire program. And a real lock groove ending this side too boot! In typically beautiful and cocky parlance, the man with the Minutoli once agian says a non-tearfull farewell to noise music and the label he's just taken for a ride. Even if you haven't heard the originals, this is an excellent example of the Emil Beaulieu sound if you're looking for a choice introduction, and for those without the taste for Emil's often lengthy periods where he lets a locked groove just ride and ride, this is just the right size too. [cms]

Four guys from Chicago who wouldn't be out of place on a bill with Reverend Horton Heat or the Flametrick Subs doing old-school raunch rock and doing it well. The band has been floating around since 1999 in various lineups and this is their fourth recording, so they've had plenty of time to get their shit together and it shows. They rock out on songs like "Shit to Pimp" (where they get a bit carried away with the soloing, perhaps) and "Ball Deep, Mountain High," but the one I like best is "Kicking Birth," where they crib and speed up a boss AC/DC riff and use that to launch into the high-octane Turbonegro-style opening to the song proper. "Sexual Dry Gulch" is pretty hep and AC/DC-like in its own right -- their drummer has the beat down cold all over the album, but nowhere more so than right here. Lots of Thin Lizzy, Iron Maiden worship lurking in the likes of "Fuckin' A" and "Iron University" -- along with Melvins-like riffing and lots of solo bleating over a hard, bouncy beat on "Thou." Best title: "Born in Jail," which also employs a ridiculous amount of reverb on the guitars to great effect. This is actually a reissue of the band's self-released cd on Raw Deth, and besides rocking like a pee dog, it sounds excellent (in fact, it's really fucking loud). Worthy of your worship.

Big City Orchestra -- WE LIKE NOIZE TOO

This cassette release documents a live preformance where 50 different discs were spraypainted, etched with a Spirograph, and then "played" by each of the four members present. During the performance each disc was subjected to some kind of "torture" -- candle wax, razor blades, flames, anything that would continue the destruction began with the painting and etching. The process, as well as the output, are reminiscent of AMK performances/ recordings. Before the discs were further mutilated they would play some recognizable bits, but as the torture continued, the discs lost their wills, lost their voices, and just scratched and screamed in agony. Torture - a good way to make noise. And We Like Noize Too. [bc]

Big Hat: SELENA AT MY WINDOW (March Records)

The most amusing moment in Big Hat's bio is the reprinting of a review likening the band to "a simple nightmare where Elizabeth Fraser sleeps with all the members of Kraftwerk and gives birth in the waiting room at Ralph Records." This was apparently meant as an insult, but silly us at DEAD ANGEL, we think it's a pretty nifty idea... and about as good as any other description for a pretty much unclassifiable band. With a gorgeous (in every sense of the word) singer, Yvonne Bruner -- who comes from the Kate Bush/Tori Amos school of delivery, sort of -- and a small army of musicians employing eclectic percussion, violin, tin whistle, trumpet, etc., the music is derived from so many wildly different styles that they defy attempts at pigeonholing. Essentially, though, the band makes warm, entrancing mood music that would probably be welcome on the stereo of anyone with a 4AD album in their collection.

As for the songs themselves, to try describing them individually would practically require a dissertation -- there's a LOT going on in every track in terms of arrangment and instrumentation. Never fear, though -- the band is firmly in control every step of the way, and while the instruments are many and often exotic, they all work together surprisingly well. The result is a collection of amazingly diverse songs, each of which has something unique to recomend it. While Yvonne's captivating voice is the immediate feature all the way through, all the playing is equally sharp and charming as well. Everybody brings something compelling to the mix, without ever getting in the other's way, an astounding accomplishment for songs this ornate and intricately arranged.

And yes, they DO favor big hats. And big hair, big clothes, big sound, big EVERYTHING... and you have to love a good band that thinks big, eh?

This disc is kind of an anomaly among the other discs reviewed here in that it's actually a fairly straightforward rock and roll album -- you know, the kind of thing they don't make too often anymore, unfortunately. It's not terribly "out there" and even my sister (notorious for finding my general taste in music totally inexplicable) might like this. If the big-deal music industry weren't currently so obsessed with emaciated waif singers and downtuned angst-rock, it might even be the kind of thing you'd hear on the radio, backed by the big guns o' major label promotional mojo. As it is, the poor guy behind this (David Wimble -- vocalist, songwriter, guitarist, all-around joe in charge) has to put it out himself and hope it gets heard. I yi yi....

Which is a shame, because this is a pretty happening album. From the propulsive drive of "Wild River" to the neo-folk/Creedence-tinged "Poor Boy," the songs on here cover a surprising range of ground. Better yet, they are largely to the point and well-written, well-played, and generally a throwback to when people made plain old albums without lots of political/social angst and obtrusive posturing. Some of this (especially "Poor Boy," whose entire second half is dominated by a whistling solo, of all things) reminds me of the early material by Poi Dog Pondering. "To Whom I Must Confess" is a near-country lament with impeccable slide guitar, while "Tap On My Shoulder" betrays a serious Cohen influence, only with a considerably higher melodic content..And dig that Dylanesque harmonica on "You Can't Love Yet" -- i do believe that Mr. Wimble has (rightly) concluded that most of the mainstream music made beyond about 1970 is pure crap and has simply jettisoned all traces of the present in favor of a sound that unfortunately fell out of favor decades ago. The thought is only reinforced by more tunes like "Alive in Every Hour," which sounds very much like something Don MacLean and Elton John might have whipped up, had they ever bothered to collaborate. (The piano movements are beyond swank.)

Wimble's cause is aided considerably by inventive arrangements in songs like "Wall of Ice," where a funkified beat holds the pace while everything else doesn't so much build as sneaks in, one instrument at a time; at other points it helps that he shuffles the instruments and sounds at his disposal so there's a wide variety of tonal palettes happening all through the disc. It doesn't hurt that all of the songs hang fire (although there are some mild clunkers among the lyrics, Wimble's lone weak spot), either. This is not only far beyond the quality (both in terms of songwriting, playing, and recorded sound) one usually finds in self-released albums, it's actually of a quality one would expect to see on independent labels like Flying Fish or Rounder. Perhaps the esteemed Mr. Wimble should send copies of the disc to labels of that nature and broaden his reach; it's not impossible for me to imagine that he might actually get somewhere by doing so....

Big Void -- THE FLOOR OR THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ROOM [J-Bird Records]

O mon, i... i'm having a FLASHBACK... to the days... of Pink Floyd and giant wooden bongs.... No kidding, there's a serious Floyd influence running through this disc. Except, of course, Big Void's drummer can actually play more than two tempos, which puts him waaaaaay ahead o' Nick "don't you wish you had as many cars as I do?" Mason. And the singers can actually sing, which has not always been the case in Floyd (Roger Waters is a pretty reasonably lyricist, but as a singer, he ain't gonna put Mel Torme out of business anytime soon).

The influence becomes apparent right out of the box on "It's Me," which sounds like an outtake from MEDDLE, maybe. But they start branching out almost immediately, as "George Reeves Jumped Out the Window (World Without Sound)" keeps up the slo-mo spaciness and the sampled sound nuggets (from old SUPERMAN episodes, appropriately enough), but also incorporates a sly Cars reference as well. Plus horns! By the time they reach "Mr. Magoo," they've moved into the realms of genuine psychedelia and the Floyd thang is apparent only in the vox... and "Dr. Strange" sports a severely swingin' guitar riff over hyperkinetic keyboards, about as un-Floydian as you can get (they were swell guys, but swing they did not).

It gets more convoluted. Is that a salsa beat i hear on "(You Got Me) Lying on the Floor"? Dunno, but it sure is funky, while "The Other Side of the Room" sounds like a wild party in progress after many, many shots of tequila on top of the mushrooms. "While You Were Dead" gets bonus points for the title alone; the percolating synth 'n snare attack amid all the odd spoken bits and sonic wooziness don't hurt either. And i never thought i'd live to hear a psychedelic version of Little Feat, but that's what turns up on "Living in a World Like This." Perhaps if Little Feat had sounded like this i might have liked them....

The key here is that while they are undoubtedly toiling in the shadow of Floyd and other early psych wizards, they are considerably better players (and songwriters) than most of those one might cite as influences. Plus they have a really huge inventory of odd hypnosounds, always a plus. Looks like they reissued this just in time for the psychedelic revival....

Which leaves me with only two questions: a) is the Page Hamilton listed as "guitar, occasional vocal" THE Page Hamilton of Band of Susans/Helmet fame, and b) how can i possibly contrive to spend some "quality time" with the naked girl inside the insert?

Now this is kind of intriguing... hardcore with elements of drone and funk, like a bizarrely spastic post-noise Public Image Limited or something. Or maybe Arab on Radar with a less cryptic and more hypnotic drummer. The guitarist (well, I think it's him, anyway) sure makes some supremely irritating squeals on "Up the Nest." Their rhythmic drive and complicated riffs owe as much to punk as anything else, but the singer's stream-of-consciousness spiel and warbling sound straight back to eccentric vocalists in the vein of Johnny Rotten and almost any No-Wave shouter you can think of. This is noisy, eccentric, even cryptic stuff, a steady series of vignettes of near-indecipherable monologues broken up by churning rhythms, abrasive guitars, and chanting / shouting. Parts of "Bastard Scaffolder" remind me of late Jawbox; parts of "Sling yr hook" make me think of Last Exit. It's all pretty chaotic and unpredictable, yet played with ridiculous dexterity and exacting precision, sort of like watching expert jugglers playing toss using sticks of dynamite.

Midway through the album (there are 17 songs; they stretch out, but they don't get carried away), it becomes evident that their modus operandi largely centers around getting a massive groove happening, then chipping away at the groove with the guitars and vocals. Abrasive, disorienting, and -- when they devolve into brazen displays of technical dexterity and all that -- frequently dazzling, they keep a high level of energy going even when they start flying off into avant-noise territory. If this band were in the U.S., it would probably be on Load. There's certainly a similar aesthetic at work, although these guys aren't quite as frantically spastic as some of the art-damaged freaks on Load. Strong stuff, but an acquired taste for many and possibly dangerous to the ears of the unbelievers. Approach with caution if you're not down with confrontational vocals, abrupt mood swings, loud everything, and proggy ideas about song structure. This should serve as a prime example of what can happen when you allow impressionable punk youngsters to own albums by Yes and Slint at the same time.

You know, every time i see a band or label name with initials, i always wonder what they mean -- like with N.G.W.T.T., for instance. What does it mean? Nice Girls With Tantalizing Titties? Not Gonna Whip That Transvestite? Nyquil Godz Worship Tiny Tim? Who knows? These things can be very distracting.... (Which brings up the question of just how you end up with a name like Bio-Bitch -- what the hell does it mean?!?! -- but my idea of a "good" name would be something like Dimebox Pussy Blast, so what do i know....)

Anyway, the band's stark packaging (lots o' black 'n red, children with hammers, etc.) does not mislead -- the contents are heavy and brutal to the point of sounding like starving cavemen with guitars and a drummer beating on skulls. I can't decide if they're a hardcore band like Unsane gone black metal or a black metal band with a fetish for Unsane-style damage, or if they're loud 'n ugly for the sheer hell of it. Wait, let me drag out the magnifying glass and check the insert (my eyes aren't what they used to be and the band didn't print the titles on the CD case)... "Dead Wrong (Study in atomic/noise-metal/thrash # 1" and other long-winded titles (all right!) lead me to suspect they might have a ghoulish sense of humor similar to Type O Negative's, even though they sound absolutely nothing like Peter Steele's current band (previous one, maybe). Some other titles as evidence: "What Was Funny Becomes Bloody As the Crowd Turns Violent," "Raga of Unparalled Terror" (which is not only the funniest song title i've seen in eons but makes me wonder if they're hep to the Mike Gunn), and "Another Good Song About Truckers, Car Crashes, Disease, Etc." They even helpfully print lyrics and random notes and stuff for you to read (but not me, 'cause the types waaaay too small for my eyes).

Unlike Unsane and the like, though, they have a twisted fascination for ragas and non-western music in general, even though they are basically a death metal band (i think), which results in some moments of pure blinding weirdness amid the grunting 'n grinding. It also helps that they have truly grotesque ideas about tone and a sense of humor (black as it may be). Be forewarned, though -- while they are truly heavy as elephant dung (especially on the aptly-titled "Heavy-Impact Steam-Hammer"), their singer is down with the death-croak that annoys some people (like our own esteemed n/a, for instance). He sounds fine to me though, so there. Ha!

They get lifetime bonus points for ending the album with "Dead Silence," which is exactly that... for about seven minutes, anyway, after which it turns into... um... something beyond my earthly powers of description, except i'm pretty sure it would go over well in a mental ward. The last chunk of the disc is worth the price of admission alone just because it's so deranged.

If Godspeed You Black Emperor were a spaghetti western honky-tonk band this is what they would sound like. They are mondo spooky and this is good. Aside from the ambience of found sound and room noises in the background, their sound largely revolves around the use of waterphone, wurlitzer piano and organ, and wailing slide (sometimes accomplished with guitar, sometimes not). Their sound, a weird mix of orchestral manuevers executed from the perspective of a backwoods country bar band, has much in common with Godspeed, and if you like one, i suspect you'll like the other. The songs all flow together within this framework, linked by odd noises, deep country ambience, and background conversation. I'm not sure there are any "best" songs -- you either like it all or you don't really, and the songs are consistent in their quasi-cinematic quality -- but my favorites (on this listening anyway) are "blue tears," "a light so dim," "your church is red," and "it's a crime i never told you about the diamonds in your eyes." In addition to the aforementioned Godspeed reference, i hear links to the Dream Syndicate (the California band, not Tony Conrad's thing), Howlin' Wolf, Marty Robbins, and a dozen other wildly disparate influences. It's beautiful how they add it all up, though. This is a fine album from a band deserving of serious attention.

Three new songs and every bit as creepy as the second album, which makes me really want to track down the first one on Headhunter. I'm not sure what the point is of releasing just an EP at this point, but what the hell, i'm not going to turn down new tracks from these melancholy dudes.... The first song, "a truth quietly told," is buoyed by a spiky piano featured prominently in the mix and a sinister Moog trembling in the background while Jenkins tries to sing around it. The sound is bright, much clearer than anything from the second album, although i suspect that's less a matter of recording quality than intent; certainly the second track, "destroying the city of hearts," sounds very much like an outtake from the second album. It opens up with traffic sounds and other off-kilter effluvia and turns into an actual song with a slow and inevitable beat (their speciality, i'm beginning to gather). Piano, trumpets, scary Moog swells, pretty much no vox, it goes on for quite a while and sounds fine doing it. The last song, "song about a....," is actually sort of upbeat, like an old-time honky-tonk roadhouse revival tune. I have no idea what the hell it's about, but it sounds most hep. So far the boys from San Diego with cowboy hats and Moogs are batting a thousand.

Location: Somewhere deep in the bowels of a nameless government building that houses the headquarters of Deep Zone, an "unofficial" organization whose name appears in no official government document, whose entire existence is underwritten by the peculiar "handling" of unspecified slush funds. Laser-activated alarms sweep through every hall; guards with the authority to kill all intruders and dispose of their bodies in the incinerator wander freely through the more accessible levels; fire-breathing robot drones, impervious to bullets or gas, trundle sullenly through the lower levels. An impenetrable fortress, its secrets remain safe, for no man has ever been able to navigate its security and descend to the 13th level far beneath the earth.

No one, of course, save for TASCAM-Girl.

T-G (running through a hallway on the 14th level with guards and robots right behind her): Goddamn! Good thing i picked today to wear flat boots instead of the spike heels... shit, they sound pissed. I guess they didn't like it when i turned their boss and all his lackeys into agent flambe....

She turns abruptly down a hallway, her long hair trailing wildly like a jet stream, and hoists her .252 Evapotron Decimator (muzzle flash optional) Special to waist length. She pulls the trigger and holds it down; true to its name, everything in the hallway evaporates in a blinding hail of plutonium bullets. Before the gunfire even fades she switches on the Wallgrip soles of her boots and climbs up the wall, hanging from the ceiling, gun ready.

A horde of blood-spattered agents in black suits with .45 Automatics spill into the hallway, flanked by heavily armed robots. Their leader is a tall, rawboned man with soulless eyes named Maurice, not that any of his flunkies have the balls to call him that; they call him Mr. Doom instead.

MD: Shit! Where is that bitch? I can't believe she's wasted 137 agents already and you maggots can't even find her! What is she made of, smoke?

ROBOT: Negatory. Sensors indicate she is 90% water, 5% bone and blood mass, 3% fetish wear, and 2% stolen military ordnance. And 120% attitude. This cannot be... the numbers fail to add up correctly....

MD: Shut the fuck up and tell me where she IS, dammit!

ROBOT: Sensors indicate she is in this room, Your Vileness.

MD (sweeping an arm wildly toward the pile of bleeding ruptured flesh along the hall): WHERE? Do you see her anywhere? Unless she's hiding under the bodies... yes! That's it! Activate phasers! Burn EVERYTHING!

The robots scour the walls and floor with their lasers, turning everything to toast.

MD: Hahahahahahahaha! THAT will teach the bitch! She'll never... uh.... um. do you ever get the feeling you're being... uh... watched?

T-G: Peekaboo!

Everyone looks up. TASCAM-Girl drops a Fast-Activating Napalm Grenade and hits her force field switch. The agent and robots don't even have time to react before the hallway is filled with what resembles a small sun.

T-G: Kick ass. (drops to the floor and begins to move) Now if I'm right, I should find that old windbag down on the next floor....

Moments later, in a subterranean laboratory, the door explodes in off the hinges and TASCAM-Girl bursts in screaming wildly, her eyes like amphetamine-driven pinwheels. The machine gun in her hand bucks like a malfunctioning vibrator and turns red-hot and smoking as she empties a 1,500-round clip into every single surface of the room, save for the table where CyberLieutenant 12-Tracks sits listening to a portable CD player. Laboratory assistants howl in pain and terror as their insides are blown out against the walls just as the walls are shattered by the impact of an endless storm of bullets.

As the racket dies away, while TASCAM-Girl is reloading her gun, she speaks to the CyberLieutenant.

T-G: Hey, what the hell are you doing, anyway?

CL: Why, listening to the latest offering from The Black Heart Procession, of course. By the way, can I ask you something? How can you consistently manage to blow up everything in the room with reckless abandon without ever hitting me? Not that it would matter since i'm encased in armor these days, but still....

T-G: Talent. (picks up the CD eco-wallet) These are the yahoos from California who sound like spooky ambient roadhouse music, right? Ambient country death songs by "alternative" dudes in cowboy hats?

CL: Exactly. This three-song EP is a teaser, i suppose, to hold people over until the imminent release of their third full-length album.

T-G: Yah, these guys are all right. So how's the EP?

CL (shrugs): It's reasonable enough. A bit scattershot, more like existential alt-ambient-country jams with peculiar sound efx than actual songs, but that's the core of their essence, and to be expected, i guess. Still, i believe i preferred the second album, where the spooky sounds actually resembled real songs as opposed to atmospheric "moments."

T-G: So you're saying they don't rock?

CL: Rocking is not really the point, dearheart. Take the opening song, "a boy with no tongue" -- the idea is to be immersed in these country-style sounds, the horns and the waltzing organ, to experience the vibe, so to speak, without necessarily having to deal with a traditional song structure. Their purpose is to occupy a peculiar zone of existence, somewhere between traditional country and experimental ambient sounds, to define a new paridigm of their own, a unique style --

T-G: I knew those classes at the community college were going to ruin you. Start making sense, dammit!

CL: Perhaps i should express my deep appreciation for the drones and desolate slide in "fish the holes," then? That song at least approaches being an actual song, and includes the subterranean percussion and spooky piano that made the second album such an exotic treat. It doesn't really go anywhere -- it just goes on and on, actually, getting denser in its sound and intensity -- and I'm not sure it means anything, but it's interesting nonetheless.

T-G: Okay, that's a little better....

CL: Of course, that song segues into "when i spoke backwards she finally understood," a moody and wildly distorted avalanche of sounds broken and twisted beyond endurance, like a hillbilly tune as misappropriated by Merzbow, perhaps. Most grotesque and somewhat painful, but thankfully short. I deeply appreciate the bird sounds buried in the rubble, however. They resonate with my inner naturist. The coda, incidentally, is a faraway assembling of horns and vocals buried behind amplifier hum and the crackling sounds of a record stuck at the end of its groove.

T-G: So in other words, they have damned strange ideas about what constitutes country music.

CL: Exactly.

T-G: All right, count me among the clued in. Now put that shit down and get with the program -- we've got people out there to kill, don't you know that?

CL: Oh, absolutely... just let me get my magic bag and we'll be off....

The sad cowboys with a pump organ (like a pump shotgun, only a tad more musical) return with what may be their strongest album yet. I have the feeling that if they ever get their shit 100% together that they may yet turn out one of the greatest albums ever made. I don't think this one is it, but they're definitely getting closer. It helps that this time around they have a higher ratio of songs to merely atmospheric noodlings. The BHP's biggest problem is that they've had a tendency to be kind of hit or miss -- they either turn out absolutely riveting, unclassifiable juggernauts of desolate creepiness like "release me" or "a light so dim" (from their first and second albums, respectively), or they turn out wispy and ethereal swamp dirges of questionable memorability. (Their EPs in particular are more like haunting but somewhat inconsequential soundtracks than actual albums, which can be annoying.) This time, though, they're doing a better job of integrating the swirly mood moments into actual songs without wandering too far off the beaten path.

This album doesn't have anything as staggeringly brilliant as "a light so dim" on it (although "we always knew" comes awfully fucking close), but the songs as a whole are a lot more consistent in quality and and listenability than the batches on previous releases. And who knows, i may eventually begin to see some of this material as more brilliant than it first appears -- already after a few spins it's becoming increasingly more compelling. It may be that the songs here are so much more subtle than the immediately galvanizing "best" tracks of previous albums that they take a few listens to appreciate properly. One thing is certain: this album is far more "mellow" than their other two long-players -- only three songs really "rock" in any sense at all, and the rest the album ranges from mid-tempo to dirge, moody but layered set pieces that may make you nod out if you're not careful. The two exceptions, interestingly enough, are the first and last songs, effectively bracketing the rest of the album. The opening track "we always knew" is flatly amazing -- beginning witha reverbed something (bass? beat? who knows), all the instruments come in one after another, adding a layer at a time, until the singer's ghostly pale voice croons, "you want to know / where the truth is found / we try to breathe but life was never found / in you...." It doesn't even sound like a song played by musicians; it sounds like the music is assembling itself into a song from thin air. The song is hypnotic, forbidding, mysterious, and beautiful all at the same time. It may join "a light so dim" as the two quintessential BHP songs. At the other extreme, "the war is over" (the pentultimate song) rocks roadhouse-style, complete with horns and barrel-roll piano, sounding like a throwback to the first album, maybe. The final track, "on ships of gold," doesn't so much rock as it completes the musical circuit begun with the first song -- it's a creepy, hypnotic death dirge underpinned by swirling noise-bass and slo-mo piano chords as a martial beat keeps time like the beating of drums by galley slaves. The vocal effects on this song are extremely strange, especially toward the end, and it's just an absolutely otherworldly sound.

The rest of the songs are not quite as brilliant but plenty sturdy enough, and swaddled in the kind of bent gothic moodiness that has become the band's hallmark. They're a hard band to describe -- i think of them as sad cowboys playing dirges while drinking themselves to death at the edge of the universe, which is probably about as accurate a description as you're ever going to get from anybody. But while they incorporate elements of country music (real country music, not this pop black-hat crap, but sounds made by hillbilly bands out in the shacks of Appalachia) and new wave pop, they don't really sound like either one. What they do consistently sound like is incredibly haunting and melancholy. If you've never heard them before and were going to investigate, i'd recommend starting with this one, working back to - 2 - , then picking up at least the first album as well....

When I saw the name Black Helicopter, I figured these guys for a metalcore band. You know the deal -- chugga-chugga guitars, a couple of "experimental" noise pieces, and some geek screaming about conspiracy theories. I was wrong. Musically, Black Helicopter play dark, brooding rock 'n roll, not unlike Shellac. I use Shellac as a point of comparison because while they don't sound like Shellac, they share Shellac's approach to dynamics. Where most bands, if they have any sense of dynamics at all, go for a real quiet / REAL FUCKING LOUD sort ofthing, Black Helicopter, like Shellac, are more subtle. Like a spring uncoiling slowly, they let the tension build, and build, and build, until the song is over and you're still waiting for the snap!

The lyrical content of THAT SPECIFIC FUNCTION revolves around the interaction between several of the musicians and a man known only as "Kerm." The simplified version: In the early 90's, a couple of guys from the band worked at a convenience store. Every once in a while an unemployed Teamster who went by the name of Kerm would get stinking drunk, come into the store, and lapse into fits of autobiography. The band recorded some of Kerm's stories and those stories form the basis of the lyrics.

In the wrong hands this sort of material would be an exploitative mess. Black Helicopter turn it into a compelling narrative. I don't want to give too much away, but they paint a picture of a fucked-up, miserable, borderline sociopath who is painfully aware of his shortcomings. That they're able to make the listener empathize, if not sympathize, with Kerm is no mean feat.

I should also make a quick note of the packaging. The Traktor7 packaging department did a damn fine job with this release. The case folds out into a pop-up illustration, done by The Unknown Artist (aka The Artist Formerly Known As King Velveeda), of the convenience store, complete with a finger-waving Kerm laying into the band. Swank. [N / A]

Well, well... what have we here? Lo-fi agitprop? Power electronics or bedroom pop? Two guys with beer and time on their hands? Only the Devil Kitty can say for sure. The five songs on this cd-ep are closer to homebrew electronic pop than anything -- Sebadoh with a Casio, if you like, or perhaps a moderately more sinister answer to Tris McCall, hell, maybe even a blue-collar and distinctly American answer to Belle & Sebastian -- but the five short bursts before and after the actual songs are more akin to cryptic (and short) experiments in sound or brooding power electronics in the vein of Final or the really great part at the beginning of "Love, Hate (Slugbaiting)" on Godflesh's PURE (well, sorta, if you squint real hard). The eternally droning keyboards on the actual songs frequently sounds like Muzak (deliberately, I suspect), while loping polyrhythms and pulsing bass keep the good groove going. They get a really swank guitar sound, especially on the folkish "heard" (whose lilting and pleasant vocal delivery hide some genuinely misanthropic lyrics). Two of the songs, "uncle scam" and burning effigies," are full-on political rants couched in surprisingly catchy music; one ("plum and froth") is about, um, a Catholic girl named Annette and her "succulent vulvic plum" (then comes the froth, luv child!); and then there's "ravi wankuh," a hilariously snide putdown of some fool who just won't shut up. (It also boasts the swellest tangle of boss riffs, spartan but tuneful minimalism, and pure-damn swank melodic genius since Nirvana's "Dumb.") The presentation is pretty basic, but minimalism is almost always better than overkill, and the neutral presentation leaves you completely unprepared for the gorgeous melodies lurking between the examples of oddness. In essence: Swank-o-la.

I have 'em pegged now: Like members of Cheer-Accident moonlighting with the guys from Ween in a warehouse full of cheap gear. It's more complicated than that, of course, but what isn't? And it's close enough for rock 'n roll (which I don't think this is, by the way, although it rocks from time to time -- no, this is pop, my friends, but pop in the hands of men who may well be diabolically insane, which is always more interesting), so let's roll with it. No time to get jiggy here, mon.... The misanthropic bent that served them well on their previous ep hasn't gone away, although it might be toned down a bit, and their perverse fondness for creating catchy beats and tunes, only to drive away the emo children with healthy servings of scratchy noise on top, remains intact. The sound of this album is much different than that of the ep, but it's hard to say exactly how -- most likely modifications in equipment and recording environments. Plenty of droning, tweeting keyboards and blatting trumpets from time to time to liven up the proceedings, too, which is fun. A lot of this really reminds me of the strategies and sound on Cheer-Accident's THE WHY ALBUM, although I have no idea if that has any bearing on the festivities at hand. There are more songs this time around (13 of them, to be exact -- my favorites are "Eisenhower's 1953 Inagural Quote," with is gorgeous guitar and squeaky tin-can vocals, the catchy and beat-heavy "Buddy Holly The Crickets," "Soul Hustler - Intermission," "Tell," the swell honky-tonk piano on "Impasse," and the trumpet-heavy "Humans, Ugh!"), and if you're not down with the sound of destroyed and deformed pop tunes, you may not make it through the whole disc... but that would be too bad, because it's pretty solid all the way through, although its bizarre mixing strategies and penchant for waaaaay-upfront vocals takes some getting used to. Swank, intriguing stuff, and the big pile of skulls on the album cover does not suck either.

TG points the gun; Neddal -- already bored now -- executes the minimalist review:

N/A: Extremely well-done mid-tempo stoner-type rock 'n roll. Fans of Orange Goblin, Hangnail, etc., will be all over this.

TG: You're getting good at this.

N/A: Yeah, and I'm so looking forward to being beaten by the hired thugs from these labels.... [n/a]

Okay, i know there's already three million Black Sabbath compilations and reissues out there, all different permutations of the same basic material (mainly from the first four albums), but this is the one you actually need. For one thing, this compilation was actually produced by the band itself for Warner Bros. and Rhino, and it was extensively remastered (with much improvement in sound over previous cd versions), plus it comes with a nifty, fat-ass book stuffed full o' swell pix, text, liner notes, and all that useful hoohah, all wrapped up in a pretty li'l double-digipack package in a slipcase. I think everything from WE SOLD OUR SOULS..., the previous official compilation, is on here, along with a booty-shakin' trunk full of other ace tunes -- basically all the really good stuff from the first four albums and a healthy sampling of the later four releases before Ozzy flew the coop. (The tracks here -- all 29 of them -- are strictly from the Ozzy days, for which i am most thankful.) This compilation right here is probably all the Black Sabbath that anyone really needs (further consumption is encouraged, of course), and ultimately it's the stuff that really matters. All the important ones are here -- "Black Sabbath," "War Pigs," "Paranoid," "Iron Man," "Into the Void," "Laguna Sunrise," "Symptom of the Universe," "Children of the Grave," "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath," "Supernaut" -- along with a good chunk of the second-tier material from the first four albums in particular and two to three tracks each from the last four Ozzy albums. The sound has never been better (the drums really benefit from the remastering), the two discs are sequenced chronologically for your ease o' use, the booklet is a work of art (and includes some priceless pix of the band at their most basic and their most fashion-impaired). They even have "Evil Woman," the track from the UK version of BLACK SABBATH that's not on the domestic version. What more do you want? You need this, you know you do....

I've just listened to this disc four times in a row; that should tell you all you need to know. If not, then: Blacktail are a four-piece out of Boston. The music is mean, like the aural equivalent of that scene in DIRTY HARRY where Clint Eastwood shoots the guy in the leg and stomps a confession out of him. There are flailing riffs, droning dirges, a bit of yelling, and even a ballad of sorts. If I haven't sold you yet, then here's the critic's way out: If you took 5ive's CRP (the disc was recorded at Ben Carr's Odd Halo Studios), Milligram, and Keelhaul and made them engage in a battle of the musical forces, you'd get something like this. Fuck yeah. [N/ A]

A Swedish stoner band? I thought they were strictly hep to black/death metal and the like.... Of course, this is heavy enough (and often fast enough) to be up in that territory. Maybe this is what passes for death metal in Sweden. I don't know. I do know that it's really, really loud and heavy, espcially on the opening (and aptly named) "Thundergroove." Come to think of it, "10,000 Reasons" is just as fast and heavy... it's not until you get to "Blend" that the stoner moves start becoming more apparent (meaning they drag out the wah pedal), and that eventually gives way to... yes... intense heaviness. Funky guitar turns up on "When I'm Finally Gone" and the opening acoustic guitar on "Feels Like My Mind" is almost folkish (!), and "Damned If I Should Care" is an actual stoner-psych ballad. The grinding bass and chiming guitars on the eleventh track (named with an obscure symbol rather than words) is a nice departure from the heavy moves, but they bring back the monster sound on the bonus track "Lose" (apparently an earlier recording that Meteor City talked them into putting on the CD), which impressive results. Weird but good. Consume without fear.

Bliss Blood/Like Wow -- "Drinking My Blues Away/Drunk" [Psycho Teddy]

So THIS is where Bliss shows up after calling it quits with Pain Teens... in NYC, singing old-time banjoule music?!? Eek! But it is most cool, mon. She sounds like an authentic flapper girl from a scratchy 20's 78, only with way better recording. She's credited with voice, ukelele, violin, singing saw, vibraphone, plus stomp and whistle; her partner in oddness, Thomas Truax, not only plays the bass and jug but recorded the thing. She sounds fine, too... must be all those nights of listening to Patsy Cline (which should be her next move, cutting a whole album of Cline standards on one side and old-time music on the other -- either that or death metal). Plus the cover is a swell cartoon of her looking like a Betty Boop goil while hanging in a paper moon with her ukelele, as drawn by Robbie Busch, whose style is sorta reminiscent of Larry Welz of CHERRY POPTART fame (minus all the porn). Cooler than a polar bear sitting in a tub o' ice cubes and something you should earnestly desire to own unless you're a weenie or something.

There's also a song by Like Wow called "Drunk" on the other side, but i have yet to actually listen to it so i have no idea how it sounds. Given that it appears to be another old-time standard and was also recorded by Truax, i'd guess it's about the same....

Pym, M-a, M-w, and the Antichrist are all sitting around with their feet on the coffee table in the Room With the Really Big Picture Window. A snowstorm outside has risen to the pitch of a flickering whiteout, rendering the room unnaturally bright even at three in the morning. Blood Duster's CUNT is playing way too loud when TASCAM-Girl strides into the room. Her boots are more buckle than actual boot and the Phantom-Powered TXR-18203 Class C Gas-Cooled Repeating Automatic Hyperanalytic Freem Gun dangling from her hand is quite huge. She points to the stereo with the gun; M-w hastily scoots over to turn the volume down.

Antichrist (setting aside his copy of BAREFOOT TEENAGE RUNAWAYS): And what can we do for you this fine evening in the heart of eternal darkness?

TG: Do you guys know that your fucking Blood Duster shit can be heard all the way on the other side of the Hellfortress? Like, you know, at three in the god damn motherfucking morning when SOME PEOPLE are trying to, you know, FUCKING SLEEP? What the fuck is WRONG with you people? ARE YOU DEAF?

M-w: Oooo, poor baby not understand about earplugs?

TG kicks the coffee table over so violently that he and M-a are thrown from their couch, spilling coffee on the Antichrist. As he screams about his ruined jacket imported from the Seventh Circle of Hell and custom made on top of that, TG jams the vent-cooled barrel of her incredibly huge atom-powered vaporizer against M-w's face.

TG (her bloodshot eyes totally crazed): I. Didn't. Quite. Fucking. Hear. You. (smiles, bearing an unnerving resemblance to a shark) Would you care to repeat that, please?

M-w: Excuse me, I said it is most terrible that we have disturbed your sleep. We can obviously never be forgiven. Can you be moving the gun, please? The subatomic vibration makes my fillings shake....

TG (retreating back a step): I have a brilliant idea. Since you complete shit-gobbling morons obviously have nothing better to do with your time, you can review this obnoxious thing. Then TURN IT THE FUCK OFF SO I CAN SLEEP! Okay? Do we think we can fucking handle that little bitty motherfucking concept?

M-a (looking around nervously): Ah, well, if... ah... (looks at the big gun) Why of it course it is our pleasure!

Antichrist: You know, you might want to cut back on those diet pills.

TG (sweeping the gun around the room): Did you see that? Out the window? Did you see it?

Pym: What, Voltron?

TG: No no no no no no no no, that motherfucking 900-foot Osama bin Laden! LOOK, THERE HE IS AGAIN! (Everybody looks out the window; the whiteout is nothing but a blank slate.)

M-a: Miss Girl, ah, do not be taking this the wrong way, but you have completely flipped.

Pym: I swear, you are the craziest bitch --

TG (getting in her face): FUCK YOU!

Pym: No, FUCK YOU, BITCH!

TG (firing rounds into the ceiling): YOU -- (pop!) FUCK YOU! (pop pop!) I'LL FUCKIN' (pop!) KILL YOU AND (pop! pop! pop!) YOUR WHORE MOTHER --

Pym slaps the gun aside and hits her upside the head. A catfight ensues, with them rolling around on the floor slapping and kicking and breaking things while shouting profanity-laden hate at each other.

Antichrist (already bored): While they're sorting out their differences, we might as well turn to this charming taste of grindcore. Personally, I fail to understand how their record label managed to get so squeamish about the art and lyrics when it was called CUNT to begin with, but that is of no consequence: this is a fine, fine record by a bunch of young Aussie lads who are undoubtedly going to hell.

Pym (peeking at the notes): "93 riffs and 2068 words." I like that. A band that knows these things is anal enough for my tastes.

M-w: We know all about your anal tastes --

Pym (throwing booklet at him): FUCK YOU! (starts kicking him, then beating on his back when he cringes)

Antichrist (rolling eyes): Father, Lord of the Flies, why must I suffer so? (shakes head) Where was I? Oh yes, the potty-mouthed young Aussie lads. They play a fine, beer-soaked strain of grindcore with less politics and more humor. Mind you, the level of humor we're operating with here on should be obvious with song titles like "bigfatarse" and "ijustfinishedsuckingoffmetalheadsinthemensurinals," so those anticipating any pretense at sophistication may be rudely shaken to pieces. Their modus operandi is deceptively simple: start with a gross homily or rude sample (they favor movies like BOOGIE NIGHTS), then jump into lots of healthy grinding away and shouting and jumping up and down and rude instrument abuse and so on. Like a new Beatles, only with ruder words!

Pym (dubious): These guys have about as much in common with the Beatles as I do with Marilyn Manson.

M-a: You mean you're not dating him?

Pym: No, that's apparently Dita's job these days.

Antichrist: Their zestful, manly joy for life shines through in every track, through such nostalgic paens to childhood as "pissingcontest" and "letsallfuck" --

M-w: What about "atracksuitisnotappropriatemetalapparel"? Would you classify that as a sensitve protest song in the tradition of Phil Ochs and Woodie Guthrie?

Antichrist (getting really fucking annoyed): No, I would call it a lot of jumping up and down and shouting. May I continue?

M-w: By all means.

Antichrist: The appearance of this fine, fine album represents a step backwards toward a forgotten musical tradition. It is almost a throwback to the great formative moments in jazz -- you can easily imagine these daring young men taking their places along the likes of a young Gilmore or Coltrane, making great steps into new and uncharted realms of tone science --

Pym (laughing so hard she passes fragrant wind): You are so full of shit. I don't know which one of you is more full of it, you or the Moon Unit.

Antichrist (stiffly): I'll have you know that I not only graduated ahead of my colleague at the College of Eternal Obesiance to Lamashtu, She Who Erases, but I was the valedictorian of my class, which is more than I can say for our mutual friend.

TG: Why don't you just come out and admit that this album mainly sounds like the product of smartasses with loud amps who basically drink way too much coffee?

M-a (looking puzzled): I am confused now. Are we liking this album or not?

TG: I don't know about you, but the Moon Unit likes it so much that Antu had to make him stop listening to it because he was running up quite a bill from breaking things while jumping around the room playing bad air guitar. Myself, I think it's pretty amusing.

M-w: The grossed-out efx that plays over and over at the end is a nice touch.

M-a: This part about the dad lecturing his kid on when he's going to stop listening to classical records and buy real music like Black Sabbath and Deep Purple is kind of funny.

M-a (listening to album playing in the background): Did you hear him say "Superfly?"

The Antichrist gives up on them and returns to his magazine; TG turns and walks out of the room, mumbling incoherently. She hears more shouting and threats and laughs as she creeps back to bed.)

You want heavy? Goddamn it, i'll give you heavy -- here, let me shove this obnoxious platter of hate down your throat (arrrrgh!) like a hand grenade with the pin already pulled. Does it burn? Does it make your eyes water? Does it make your body jerk up and down a monkey on a stick trying to snap its neck off the stalk in a vain effort to keep time with the beat? Good... then it's working....

This is so heavy, mon, it shits osmium. This is sort of what Unsane might sound like if they were more metal and less punk -- not quite as much low end (does anybody have a bass sound more subterranean than Unsane's?), but every bit as pummeling and psychotic. Vince (the singer) in particular is most convincing as a raging heathen let out of the cage and shackles just long enough to bark with incoherent rage while the rest of the band thrashes away madly like they've all ingested a bucket full of go-pills. It all sounds like the rest of the band is doing all it can to keep up with him, and given the crazed fervor with which he rants, this means that they tend to play at three different speeds: fast, faster, and "look, the train's just jumped the track".... This is not music you "listen to"; this is music that slaps you around the room until you pull your pants down and hide your eyes and accept the inevitable.

The disc opens with "Hardcase," which comes straight out of the box like an irritated rhino -- at high velocity, too; they're flying through most of the song, until they break for a moderately slower moment o' mosh before barrelling down the road again like a train out of control. "Badass Motherfucker" (whose martial chop-chop rhythm is reminiscent of the Misfits, only much heavier) is every bit as fast and furious, maybe faster even, and while Vince remains every bit as crazed and indecipherable as he did on the first song, he sounds like he means business (besides, why do you need to know what he's saying anyway? that's what the lyric sheet is for, eh?). My favorite is probably "Fuckin' Bitch Whatever Anyway" -- a song that not only features mamoth drumming and disembowelment by chainsaw guitar, but manages to touch on death, hell, knives, murder, hate, misogyny, sex, blood, anarchy, and Dali (Dali?!?!?) in just 21 lines. "I R A Maniac" opens with galloping bass and the loopy chant "the devil is my friend, the devil is my friend" before turning into an orgy of intensely manic riffing (hey! look! Metallica used to crush like this before they took up wearing ostrich skin boots and whining about Napster!), double-bass drumming, and pure overkill.

"Erase the Past" and "Why?" are similar speed-driven barnburners, but the song sandwiched between them -- "Vampire Bitch" -- is a bit of a departure, opening with melodic, almost neo-psychedelic bass and guitar interplay before kicking into overdrive, then switching back to more of the midtempo psych stuff; it switches back and forth throughout the song, sounding alternately spooky and crazed. The disc ends with "No Son of Man," an apocalyptic mess of hammered-iron riffing and wild drumming (complete with shouting from Vince) that eventually turns into a bizarre coda driven by kettle drums (???) and guitar noises that doesn't so much end as it just... dies out. Most odd. (Bonus points, btw, for the obscene "hidden track" at the end....)

Verdict: Loud, crazed, oppressive, obnoxious, all the good things punk/metal should be. You need this.

Heavy, bad-assed metal with blastbeats and the occasional psych influence (!) -- this is powerful shit, mon. The band deliberately combines traditional extreme-metal with seventies rock, Appalachian music, and influences from the new wave of metal in the eighties. The result is heavy as a dump truck, full of wildly unpredictable shifts in tempo, tone, and texture, a schizophrenic sound of blunt musical trauma. This disc is actually, as far as i can tell, two things in one -- the first six songs (including a deranged cover of "Mississippi Queen") are studio tracks, followed by seven live and demo tracks. Of the studio ones, my favorites are "The One That Wasted Me" (a counterpart/continuation of the opening track "The One I Wasted"), which is filled with abrupt, churning guitars and intensely overdriven blastbeat drumming, and the aforementioned cover of the Mountain tune, downtuned and speeded up into a big atomic blur. The live tracks are noisier and obviously live, and are even more raw and brutal than the studio tracks; the demo tracks are similar to the studio ones, with more basic production values (but still clear and every bit as intense). -- of those tracks, my favorite is probably "workshed assassination," a thrashing mix of honking guitar, churning beats, and pure attitude problem. As with all the other Crucial Blast releases, this comes packaged with impressive artwork. Brutal, ferocious, intense, AND swank semi-pornographic art -- what more could you ask for?

The Body Lovers -- NUMBER ONE OF THREE [Young God]

You know, i could have SWORN somebody told me the Swans were dead. Wait, look, it even says so on this here CD i reviewed last time -- SWANS ARE DEAD in real big letters that even i can read -- so it must be TRUE.

So how come this is a Swans record?

Now, they've cleverly obscured that fact by calling it the Body Lovers, but that doesn't change the fact that Gira is behind the wheel and using (among other things) retooled and processed chunks of old Swans material. If it walks like a Swan, talks like a Swan, why then....

Except there's no talking at all on this album. (Well, Jarboe wails every once in a blue moon, and Gira unleashes a short monologue at the end of track 9, but that's about it, really.) This is billed as a "psycho- ambient" album, the first of three, and more than anything else, it sounds like outtakes from the ambient parts of SOUNDTRACKS FOR THE BLIND with more diverse instrumentation. And wild instruments abound: in addition to the usual bass and guitars, sounds come courtesy of melodica, accordion, ebo, flugelhorn (what the hell is a flugelhorn?), piano, blah blah blah. Think of it as a kinder, gentler Swans, especially since there's not really a beat happening through much of this (or at least, not a noticeable one). For the uninitiated, Gira has taken samples, loops, and source material from earlier Swans tracks, among other things, and mixed them down into a droning ambient stew leavened with exotic droning instrumentation and the occasional wail or scream. The results are deeply hypnotic without the same level of forbidding angst so prevalent in Swans (although it's not exactly soothing all the time, either). In fact, a lot of this sounds like extended ambient versions of material from WHITE LIGHT FROM THE MOUTH OF INFINITY crossed with the quieter parts of SOUNDTRACKS, a fine idea as far as i'm concerned. I'm already looking forward to the next installment....

But -- but -- someone tell me, mon: what the HELL is the deal with the pig? I... i... don't understand... i'm confused. I... i want my mommy....

This is seriously demented stuff -- fucking with the vocals, making weird noises, incorporating weird dialogue, hysterical voices, chants of "kill," and pure random noise... it sounds like the Butthole Surfers (early model) creatively "remixing" various noise and industrial snippets and porn grunts to make really perverted anti-songs. You will either marvel at the kind of creatively addled "thinking" that leads to such seriously demented work, or you'll loathe this with every cell of your being. I've never heard Mister Bungle, but this is like a low-rent and even more demented version of how that band is generally described to me. I'm impressed with the editing and amused by the repulsive sense of humor, but this is not the kind of thing i'd play repeatedly myself -- the weirdness falls just a tad of ever resolving into actual songs for my taste, even though there are some really interesting moments happening all over the place. A lot of this, frankly, sounds like dialogue and music loops arranged to sound like stoned rambling, saying the same thing over and over again... whether that kind of thing is to your taste is up to you, natch. Imagine if the Buttholes had been nothing but the weird noise experiments and amplify that by a severe weirdness factor and that's sort of what oozes out of the speakers here. It's pretty deranged-sounding, to be sure. Not for the faint of heart.

Bongwater -- PISSED OFF AND... FUZZED OUT! [Dallas Tarr]

No, it's not THAT Bongwater, not the one famous (mostly) for Ann Manguson's impressive cleavage on the back cover of THE BIG SELL-OUT. No, this is throwback metal from Canada, pals of neo-Sabbath demi-psychedelicists Sheavy, six songs of bone-crushing honest-to-God-plain-old metal the way metal was MEANT to be, before metal apparently became confused and started thinking it was also punk and techno and blah blah blah. While these guys hang out with Sheavy, they are -- judging from this tape, anyway -- much heavier, more straight-ahead Sabbath classicists (meaning they don't bother to get all flowery and stuff; they just beat your brains out into a bloody paste on the garage floor).

However, the band's brute force is somewhat nullified by the tape's production -- while the guitars sound great, so fuzzy and blurlike that you can just imagine the amp fuses exploding one by one, the rest of it is pretty much an indistinct roar. Arrrgh! Most frustrating, especially since even through the sludge you can tell that they're pretty bone-crushing. Too bad i'm broke or i'd call 'em up and offer to come over there and record them properly... Canada's always a nice place to visit, the Canadians keep their streets and lawns much nicer than lazy Americans.... At any rate, the tape's pretty entertaining, as long as you can live with blurred production (particularly if you think metal stopped being any good after, say, Black Sabbath's fourth album).

It's good to see that the Canadian stoner/grind merchants Bongwater (666 added courtesy of inexplicable confusion with Kramer's arty American Bongwater) continue to get better, louder, and heavier with each release. Their early demo tapes were essentially interesting riffs buried in an ocean of mung, but their more recent material has become far clearer; they're still hardly going to be mistaken for Barry Manilow, true, but this is not a bad thing. Now, fresh from a swank appearance on the Misfits tribute (see review later on), they present us with two new slabs of sonic hate. I'll say right upfront that i have no idea what either song is actually about; singer Fred French is not exactly a model of linguistic clarity (which is okay, by the way; he shouts well and i can occasionally make out heartwarming sentiments like "i want to kill you," so his heart's in the right place), and anyway Neddal Ayad's wailing holophonic sludge guitar o' doom pretty much obliterates any chance you ever had of understanding him anyway. "L-eyed" opens with piercing feedback and settles into a subterranean grind mode early on; the guitar drops out periodically to let the bowel-loosening bass carry the weight for a while, then the guitar crashes back in, and it's all a fine slice of Sabbath-inspired punishment. "Tanner" is even more interesting -- the wailing, flying-yards-of-shrapnel guitar is heavily reminiscent of early Skullflower in places, but the song is definitely firmly in the stoner camp (check out those swirly efx pedals, mon). The entire song is like a sonic bulldozer swaddled in fuzzy ambient guitar filth. The headless sno-cone girl approves. We await more.

C12: My, that Sienko boy writes well. He's making us look bad, Henriette. Come to think of it, all of this is making us look bad. I already regret this.

TG (dropping old gun for new one): Stop your whining! (fires so rapidly the gun overheats and jams)

(As another wave of sporebots bear down upon them, they are joined by a terrifying new class of defense robots. These look like a towering cross between metallic spiders and triffids, their small and rounded bodies hovering just below the twelve-foot ceiling, suspended in the air by long legs of flexible gooseneck metal. They twist and shimmy, their small robot command centers nearly impossible to hit, their legs writhing like snakes. Crazed bolts of white heat burst forth from their miniature cannons.)

C12: Oh, I do not like this.

TG: Tell me again how you managed to work your way up to Lieutenant with such a weak attitude. (She drops to the ground and sweeps the room with concentrated laser fire mere inches above the floor, cutting down the weaving long-legged spiders like wheat falling beneath a scythe's blade.)

C12: I'm going to die and all I hear are insults!

TG: That and Boris, which may be even more of an insult to your girly nature. (hurls grenades without even looking; the album plays as she leads them down a narrow hallway) Ahhhh... listen to that groaning, shuddering feedback drone of immolation... just a guess, but i'm betting these dudes from Japan are Earth fans. This is not a bad thing. Much like the Sunn disc the Moon Unit reviewed last issue, you'll either love it or hate it.

C12 (shuddering at the nausea-inducing waves of feedback): I can't say that it's doing much for me.

TG: That's because you're a pussy. (Her grease gun runs out as a sporebot looms large, about to fire a spore in her face; she twists it violently, sending it firing in the other direction, and tears its head off the body.) The first song (the title track) is over 65 minutes long, which some might find a wee bit much (this version of the CD adds a bonus track, "Drone Evil"), especially since it mainly consists of long, drawn-out, shuddering chords with lots o' hum -- the subtle sounds of dying amplifiers, essentially. If you have the patience to sit through the entire thing, it slowly (very slowly) evolves through several movements, incorporating different guitar textures (drone, subterranean bass throb, piercing drill-like noises, etc., etc.) in different arrangements and layers. The sound is similar to Earth and Sunn, but nowhere near as dense or dependent on rhythm (there is plenty of repetition, however).

C12: I can't believe you actually like this. And you give the Moon Unit a hard time about his taste in music?

TG (ignoring him): You'd never imagine this much racket could be raised by a trio -- there's only one guitarist and in many places he sounds like far more than that. The bonus track is, for all intents and purposes, a more concise (relatively speaking) summation of the same aesthetic; at only 7:50, it comes across as a bit more focused almost by default. Lots of groaning and buzzing in this one, with Main's dying-guitar feel raised to new and impressive volumes. God only knows what this sordid buzzed-out activity is doing to their amp speakers, but it sure sounds impressive while they're doing it. AMPLIFIER WORSHIP may still be a better album -- it's hard to say -- but if it is, not by much. If you're going to spend a lot of time drowning in Earth worship, you might as well check this out too.

Now this is suave. Borgo is a saxophonist and composer with a range encompassing both old and new forms of jazz (he won first place at the 1994 International John Coltrane Competition and has played while a whole bunch of snazzy people, including Herbie Hancock, but he is also compared to more recent avant-jazzers like Anthony Braxton). Here he stages both solo and ensemble expeditions into the world o' jazz, with a sound that's agreeably mellow and largely old-school offset by a composition style that's more modern. Even when he's moving into "modern" territory -- usually signaled by changes in the background -- he does so in a subtle manner. This is jazz in reflection mode for the most part, and even when it gets energetic, it doesn't descend into the shrieking atonality and noise that typifies a lot of experimental jazz these days. The result is an album that sounds like it could have been recorded twenty years ago (at least in terms of its overall sound, direction, and tone), but yet is still modern enough to appeal to those entranced by more current trends in jazz. I like the full-on sextet pieces the most, because he's surrounded himself with some sharp players and they go off in really interesting directions. As for how good they are, let's put it this way: one of the ten tracks here is a cover of Charles Mingus ("Duke Ellington's Sound of Love") , and not only do they play it well, but it's consistent in quality with the entire rest of the album. (For the record, six of the remaining nine tracks were composed by Borgo, one by guitarist Sam Wilson, one by alto saxist David Pope, and one -- "Conference of the Birds" -- by mystery guy Dave Holland.) This is seriously fine stuff and the artwork is even nifty too. You should listen to this.

Much later on Sublevel 17, we find TASCAM-Girl still forcing Neddal at gunpoint to compose ridiculously short reviews....

N/A (nervously): Don't you think the labels and the bands here, uhhhh, might be kind of annoyed at these real real short reviews?

TG (gobbling another handful of black beauties): DO I LOOK LIKE I GIVE A HOT STINKY FUCK?!? If they have a problem with it they can take it up with ME. (fires a burst of bullets into a glass case, smiling madly as it explodes in a hot hail of steel and glass)

N/A: Uhhhhh...

TG (grinding gun into his ear): REVIEW, MOTHERFUCKER! REEEEEEVVVVIIIEEEEWWWWWWWW!!!!

N/A (obliging): Fuck Andrew W. K. and all that goofy retro-Twisted Sister bullshit. Boulder are the kings of HEAVY METAL!!! KRANK IT UP!!!!!!! [n/a]

This is just incredible. I love this band and once again they deliver the goods. Side A is called "Stigma of the Ripper" and it has that lazy, drugged-out, low-fi feel to it. Side B is a noisy, drone type of jam that seems to seep into your very soul. The vocals on this record are great and remind me of a serial killer's cry for help. This was pressed on fat-ass white vinyl. Thanks to tUMULt for putting out like a good whore should. [TTBMD]

More killer songs from Brainbombs on this slab of wax. The sound quality is questionable [TMU: That's probably why it gots da title it gots, mothership-chile!] but I have come to appreciate it. The songs range from scary jams to some sort of devolved rock anthems. Side B just flat out sucks. It is a "remix" or something by Alec Empire. What a waste of space. All the music he touches turns to shit, and this is no exception. Buy this record for the A side, it is well worth it. [TTBMD]

Brainbox -- PRIMORDIA (Nettwerk)

A one-man show from Tom Third (formerly of Brothers and Systems), who calls this "cocktail music of the future," not that this tells you much without actually hearing the album. What it is, really, is electronic lounge music with elements of jazz, hip-hop, ambient, and a dozen other genres thrown in, all of which work surprisingly well together here. "Autoasis" sounds sort of like Henry Mancini and Enrico Morricone after being possessed by the spirit of Enigma... odd but compelling.... "Salt and Velvet" adds whispered female vocals to the mix, while "Lovemotor" relies on subterranean basslines for its weight as piano and trumpets work around the bottom end. "Wet Pavement" sounds like a crazed descendant of "Theme From Shaft" with female mumbling and a cool groove, and "Marshall Planet" ends the disc with a pretty nifty sonic drone augmented by keyboard swells and a funky ping-pong rhythm. None of the songs really stand out apart from the others, but I suspect that's intentional, as if the album were intended to be one continuous piece conveniently broken up into ten movements; something to put on as quiet background music to slowly infiltrate your subconscious.

Brain Failure are a punk/ska/reggae band (and a loud one, at that) from Beijing, China, and they're a pretty good one. I'm not familiar enough with any of these genres to have a good feel for who they're influenced by and all that, but they play really well and with intense energy -- i'm betting this is a really serious live band. The ten tracks on this (possibly promotional-only) item are apparently all taken from a Chinese punk compilation on which they appear with several other similar bands (WULIAO CONTINGENT, on Scream Records) and their first album, TURN ON THE DISTORTION. Some of the songs, like "2000 Y2K," are flat-out bursts of energy that are more pure-octane punk than anything else; the ska and reggae influence are all over the album. The rumbling bass that opens "Living in the City" is a sharp move, as is the really amazing level of distortion on the guitars. As a unit they're pretty stripped down -- two guitarists (one also the singer), a bassist, and a drummer are all it takes to keep the motorcycles rolling at high speed. There's some great, speedy guitar playing in "A coward" and "Anarchy in ROC" (that's Republic of China to you), and the guitars are really loud, always a plus. The sound effects and puttering about at the intro of "Coming Down to Beijing," but it eventually turns into a really heavy reggae song (sort of), then launches into full-scale blazing punk attack with gusto. On "Three Little Dirty Punks" they open with buzzing amp noise, which i'm pretty sure was not part of the original reggae / ska program, and then they launch into this truly bizarre beerhouse shout-a-thon that eventually turns into an actual punk song (and yee, is it loud toward the end). Truly a different and interesting perspective on punk from the People's Republic. If their hunt for a label outside of China is successful, they have much potential for success just based on their commanding rock fury....

Hey, I like this. Two guys (Chris Strawn and Christian Gordy) on guitar, vox, drums, etc., who are coming from the same basic place as bands like AC/DC and Shellac, all simple (usually) riffs and elements but played with precison and loud abandon. They keep the sound loud and basic, the songs short (usually around a minute and a half), and the rock hard 'n heavy. When they're fast, they sound like AC/DC on caffiene; when they're slow, they sound like Lynyrd Skynyrd with modern amplification. Throughout all thirteen songs they sound like a band that would be equally at home on bills with old-school rockabilly / metal / southern boogie bands, or on any Load triple bill. If Shellac had nastier-sounding guitar and were playing like men too drunk to know they're on fire, I think they'd sound like this. Highly recommended, and seeing as how they're going to be on tour this year, maybe you should see them too. Just don't take the title too literally, okay?

The first track, "A Thread in the Silver Skein," is a long (fourteen-plus minutes) and expanding field of swirling drone that grows to encompass a number of traditional instruments, then voice, without ever losing the elemental drone that makes it so dreamlike. Some tracks like "Candle, Corpse, and Bell" and "Funeral Masque" are closer to traditional folk music, and not so much psychedelic as evocative of an earlier and different-sounding time, but the droning cello (violin?) in "Ophelia" makes it clear where the real backbone of the music is. I really like the ominous drone and minimalist rhythm, too, of the disc's closing track, "Down in Yon Forest." What I really like is how the disc manages to incorporate literally a full century's worth of sounds -- from the doomed country death-folk of the mountains at the turn of the 20th century to certain droning sounds more clearly rooted in the tail end of that same century. It all comes together in a dreamy, dark, and mildly unsettling disc that exists somewhere in the black forest of drone, folk, and minimalism.

Josh Ronsen, the Austin artist behind the long name (and purveyor of the useful Austinnitus mailing list), recently coughed up this interesting, self-released cd-r, which collects up a number of compilation tracks and a couple of otherwise unreleased ones (including one recorded live at the Intersect 3 Festival). I don't believe this is available in stores -- K-Tel he ain't -- but he is most likely open to trades, and this is certainly worth trading for. The first two tracks, "for i.d. ii" and "for michael northam," are droning, ambient tracks in the vein of (early) Jim O'Rourke or Illusion of Safety, and even though they are produced with totally different sound sources (solo bass with no processing on the first, processed bowed cymbal on the second), they have a remarkably similar feel -- in fact, if you're not paying attention, you'll miss the moment when one segues into the other. Things get a bit crunchier on "for carmen resendez," where a processed contact mike produces darker, grainier sounds; it's still ambient, but now the ambience has more of a machine-like throb and the occasional bit of thumping 'n bumping. I like the tones 'n drones on "for gerard klauder," created through the use of processed prepared guitar -- bell-like tones compete with shuddering bass drones and tumbling notes, like the sound of a clock being disassembled.

Surprising sounds abound on "P008," and without the helpful aid of the liner notes i never would have guessed the sound processing originated with pottery shards (!) -- the droning, burbling sound that rises and falls is very reminiscent of Troum, which is kind of intriguing since the sound sources are so wildly different. This trend continues with "NN01" and "GF07" (and no, there's no explanation for the cryptic titles; i would assume they reference the discs being sampled), wherein CD samples are processed into oblivion to create textured drones. The final track, "i3," is live (recorded at the Intersect 3 Festival), and sounds like it was recorded to tape with no particular concern for filtering out background noise (no big surprise there, given his extensive roots in the work of John Cage); it's the most dynamic track here, and also the briefest.

It's obvious that the tracks were chosen with a significant degree of thought as to how they would work together, and they do indeed flow well. This is a strong showcase of excellent work in the field of treated guitar. A special note should be made of the nifty minimalist packaging, including a lovely abstract painting (similar to the designs on the Maeror Tri HYPNOTIKUM albums). Thou shalt investigate and acquire.... [

pym imitating rkf]

Dielectric returns with another hefty platter of whole-grain experimental electrogoodness, this time in the guise of four tracks by Brian Fraser and Chris Palmatier. Working for the past decade in the gray zone between post-rock and electronica, they raid genres with an unflinching eye for unusual beats and tones, taking only what can be reassembled in a new and interesting way. The beats on "Palimpsest" shift through several styles of techno and EBM without ever losing the core beat, even as strange sounds and dub-like bass dance around the beats. "I Can Hear It In My Truck" sounds like future jazz for interstellar dance clubs, all short-circuited beats and winding melodic tones over pulsing synth, bass tones, and piano. Smooth sounds for the bachelor pad of the astro-vision generation. The flip side begins with the booty-shakin' beats and glitch electronics of "Crossing [LP Version]," and continues with "Crossing [Dude, I Did Not Expect the Ewoks Mix]" -- two radically different treatments of the same source material, with the remix being far more unpredictable and hallucinatory. Their sound is a swell fusion of the deliberately cold and hostile sounds of glitch electronics and the melodic sounds of acoustic instruments and keyboards; the result is a series of highly rhythmic and dance-worthy chunks of experimental sound channeled into arrangements and structures accessible enough to render the deeply strange oddly appealing. Dielectric continues its eventual rise to world domination....

I don't even begin to know how to accurately describe the duo of Brian and Chris, but I like this disc a lot. There's an easy listening vibe at work, true -- there are moments when they start to make me think of Spirogyra (a hideous association for intensely personal reasons), but most of the time their e-z smooth-style vibe is backed by extremely peculiar (if frequently catchy) noises, breakbeats, and other weirdness. They incorporate a lot of what is good and interesting about various genres (glitch electronica, drum 'n bass, breakbeat, post-rock, blah blah blah), but manage to keep things accessible so the unadventurous don't flee in terror at the first sign of something weird. Their ideas about rhythm, especially the use of fragmented beats and abrupt shifts in sound density on "crossing," are interesting enough to keep things percolating even through parts that some might find too bland and other parts that some might normally find too weird. Tracks like "action packed vacation" and "matin" sound like the kind of soundtrack music you'd expect to hear in one of the wordless passages of the hip underground nightclub scene in some film so deeply underground that only the last of the hipsters even know it exists. It may be easy on the ears, but there's a complex train of thought happening behind the airy, minimalist structures and shifting melodic figures.

The sound starts getting adventurous -- starts hoppin' in a serious way, in fact -- on "hey rube," which is at first reminiscent of early Mogwai, maybe, but suddenly turns into souped-up bass-heavy funk before going back. They get a swell guitar sound on "galatea" that, by the time it's joined by keyboards and bass, sounds somewhere between John Fahey and Galaxie 500. At the same time, a lot of the music hear sounds very much like some of the stuff that used to come out on Wyndham Hill (home of Mannheim Steamroller) in the early days of the cd revolution, which is kind of interesting. The closing track "sakura" is the most technoish of the bunch, with lots of pleasing mellow bleeps 'n bloops over a jazzy beat and big chords. Part of their genius, I suspect, is in finding really good sounds so that the fullness and richness of sound lend melodious overtones to their mojo. More evidence of swell, swell audio documentation taking place over at Dielectric....

brise en glace -- WHEN IN VANITAS... [Skin Graft]

I'll be damned, Jim O'Rourke appears on something you can occasionally wiggle your bun to -- yikes! How... how SCARY.... And STEVE ALBINI had a hand in this? Plus it has ANGELS on the artwork inside? I-yi-yi, things are gettin' MIGHTY WEIRD....

So anyway, what we have here is a bona-fide "noise supergroup" or something like that -- Jim O'Rourke and Henry Kaiser on guitar, Darin Gray (Dazzling Killmen) on bass, Thymme Jones (Cheer Accident) on drums, plus a bunch of other assorted rhythmic/percussive miscreants, all twanging and banging away over five tracks. For the presence of so many people, most of it sounds pretty spare, although when things start to happen, they happen in a big way. Dynamics are the name of the game here -- "neither yield nor reap" begins with piddly noises, then a twangy guitar comes in for a while, then a sick, throbbing bass hum begins to rise and fall as another guitar pokes its head up every once in a while, and it just keeps getting heavier and denser until -- just as you expect it to utterly EXPLODE -- it shifts gears ENTIRELY and starts into a deranged apocalyptic funk vamp (!) [I smell Kaiser behind that one... any man who has been known to play "La Grange" onstage backwards while singing the lyrics in Russian is a man with a DEVILISH sense of humor....]

Most of the noise here is pretty restrained, though -- this is generally closer in volume levels and intensity to solo O'Rourke or Illusion of Safety than, say, solo Null or Techno-Animal. Call it controlled ambient fury, if you will.... The plans on the drawing table here have less to do with brute force than cunning strategy, a desire to sneak up on you from behind, to lull you into thinking you know what's coming next only to shift into something totally unexpected that nevertheless makes even more sense. They call this genius, by the way. Beyond that, trying to describe what's actually happening in the songs themselves is pretty much useless on paper (uh, screen? nevermind) -- you have to actually hear it to get the full picture.

Cool stuff along the way include sterling and focused performances from everybody involved, with different members shining through at various points (such as Gray's blinding high-velocity bass pummel in "host of latecomers"), Thymme Jones' solid, startling drumming all the way through, the rotating Leslie-cabinet feel of the bass in "restrained from do and will not (leave)," and the way the 24-minute "one syntactical unit" unfolds at a leisurely pace, making staggering use of dynamics and tonal shifts all the way. This is incredibly cool shit. I'm hooked... I... I want MORE....

Brick Layer Cake -- CALL IT A DAY/EYE FOR AN EYE.... [Touch & Go]

Why this magnificent desert jewel languishes in the obscurity of cut-out bins with worthless poo like Hanson and Spice Girls get to ride around in big-ass daddyio black Cadillacs is beyond me. This disc compiles two swank EPs by the solo "project" of Todd Trainer, once of Rifle Sport and the godlike Breaking Circus, and currently the beat dynamo of Shellac (you know, the third coming of Big Black... Steve Albini... blah blah blah).

In this setting, Trainer specializes in long (mostly), drawn-out, slo- mo death epics that consist mainly of thunderous beats, shredded guitar feedback, and ominous vox buried somewhere deep in the rubble. Kind of like Breaking Circus with everything turned way up and played at half-speed, or maybe what Black Sabbath would sound like if Tony Iommi had grown up in the shadow of factories of the Midwest rather than Birmingham (England, not Alabama). In bold fashion, the CD leads off with the best track, and then manages to hold pretty close to that stun-o-meter setting for the rest of the tracks that follow. Even if the rest of the disc sucked like Christy Canyon in a four-star oral excitement extravaganza (it doesn't, by the way), it would be worth owning just for "Sitting Pretty," the riveting sheet-metal feedback drone-epic that kicks it all off.

Other primo moments include "Show Stopper," a grim drone chamber of sizzling feedback and chiming major chords that sounds much like Joy Division run through a self-destructing Marshall stack, the moody and somewhat more restrained (even pretty, oooo, scary!) "Kiss of Death." The monumentally slow, relentlessly scary "Killer" (apparently about a childhood friend's murder, assuming you believe the TROUSER PRESS GUIDE) starts out with frayed deathfuzz chords that roar and die away in a most unsettling fashion for the first minute or more of the song before the bass comes in and they begin to duel in extreme slow motion; he never bothers to bring in a beat because the song's plenty heavy enough as it is. The last song of the CALL IT A DAY portion, "Execution," is even more feedback- drenched and plenty gripping in its own right.

The rest of the disc consists of the earlier EP originally issued on Ruthless Records (Albini's label, if memory serves me correctly). The sound on these is a bit more sparse and nowhere near as gargantuan, but that's okay, because you can hear lots more going on, like the nifty arrpegiated guitar figures on "Curtains/Clockwork." The lurching, bass-heavy "Eye For An Eye" is essentially a warmup for the fearsome feedback thuggishness of CALL IT A DAY. More repetitive drone guitars on "Going to Go" make it most hep as well, and while "Waterpark" is not quite up to the pit-bull standards of the rest of the disc, it's certainly no slouch either. It takes TALENT to make waterparks sound scary, dammit!

After hearing this, not only will i have to hunt down the full-length album TRAGEDY-TRAGEDY, but i may have to reassess my formerly lukewarm opinion of Shellac and seek out Rifle Sport goodies as well....

Maybe I received a few too many blows to the head while delivering the headkicks of hate in my years, but noise just seems to be played out. This disc just faded into the backgorund while I was trying to listen to it, and it would have faded out even more had I picked up my JACK THE RIPPER novel I'm reading. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but the talent that seems to be lurking behind the imitation here might be used better.... This disc is a well-crafted noise collage that reeks of Nurse With Wound influences, only a bit less on the random side. [brain]

Justin Broadrick/Andy Hawkins -- SUBSONIC 3 (SKINNER'S BLACK LABORATORIES) [Sub Rosa]

A tag-team match from guitar-mutilation hell, indeed: Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Ice, Techno-Animal, etc., etc.) takes control of half the disc while Andy Hawkins (Blind Idiot God), under the rubric Azonic, spends the other half reducing his guitar to hot steaming sludge. Call it a momentary diversion from their respective full-time projects or merely a one-off aberration, either way it's pretty bizarre and intense....

Broadrick clocks in with four solo guitar tracks, each largely based on heavily repetitive guitar figures. "Guitar One" anchors itself with a low, droning guitar figure that cycles over and over as additional guitar riffs come in and begin to repeat, sort of like a low-tech Techno-Animal; the effect is either intensely hypnotizing or incredibly irritating, depending on where you stand in the minimalism/repetition sweepstakes. (Hint: Turning it up REALLY LOUD helps a lot.) About halfway through, the piercing high- end riffing starts to eat away at your hearing while the low end mulches away, like Godflesh on indefinite hold and scan. Eek! "Guitar Two" takes a different tack, turning down the volume so the sound is almost acoustic, while maintaining the repetitive aspect and adding periodic waves of noise and static. "Guitar Three" combines weird effects, chugging sounds, static, feedback, and all sorts of mayhem in controlled and repetitive bursts, like a mad black box gone haywire and spitting out hot gears, while "Guitar Four/Infinite" pulses and rumbles like chords floating through black water running through a subterranean cave. Yow. Extremely different from his previous work and yet still true to his established sound. Good stuff.

Then it's Andy Hawkins' turn, with production help from Bill Laswell, who unleashes some truly scary guitar skronk on "River Blindness," almost like Total with meaner guitars and better production values. Talk about apocalyptic, this is it. "Nine Tails" manages to go that one even better by being a long, jagged burst of screech wailing colliding with jagged guitar explosions. Ow! I need Tylenol now! Ow! Ow! Owwwwwwww....

Broken -- SKYTORN [Sterlized Decay]

Monumental heaviness from England (i think) that falls somewhere between late-eighties progressive speed metal and less-obsessive death metal. The most obvious influence at work here is Metallica, although there nods to Slayer, Queensryche, and a whole slew of British metal bands. Listening to this album -- released late last year -- you'd never guess that "grunge" or "alternative" ever even happened. You'd also never guess that metal "went away" (wherever it went, someone forgot to tell these guys, Mr. Blackwell, and about a million other metal bands still workin' their mojo on the endless tour circuit).

Skytorn are a bit different, though, in having a bit more imagination than most of the bands in their genre. While the opener, "Blinding Shade of Black," is pure over-the-top eighties metal (the REAL kind, not the horrible poofy stuff made "popular" by the likes of Ratt, Poison, or Bon Jovi), the second track ("To Shine Inside") has a weird reggae influence (sort of) and some genuinely strange guitar lines going before moving to more traditional values (although i notice that the melodic breakdown in the middle has a definite flamenco influence, something i've never heard on a metal album before). Subhuman basslines, a weirdly loping beat, and chiming guitars introduce "Duality," which quickly turns into turbocharged piledriving rhythm madness fraugh with half-time tempo changes and more heaviness. (It sure is strange to hear a singer who sounds variously like Layne Staley, Eddie Vedder, and any number of death metal croakers, often in the same verse.) Others like "Twisted Fate," with its interlocked harmony guitars, are actually kind of catchy (at least until they start obliterating your senses with god-of-thunder drumming and croak-style vox); "Emphasis," by contrast, is just pure plain Sasquatch-rock, all chunk-chunk pounding fury. In fact, pretty much everything, including the last two tracks ("Last Ashes" and "Skytorn") eventually turn into blunt festivals o' heaviness.

While Broken are not exactly breaking lots of new ground here -- if you listened to a lot o' speed/death metal through the eighties and early nineties, then much of this will sound familiar -- they are pretty good at what they do, and that's probably good enough. After all, the whole point of metal is that nothing succeeds like excess, right? One can never have enough, as long as it's clearly the good stuff....

The best of Brujeria. All the songs you love from all the albums you love. Can you say BRUTAL? It even has cool Mexican TV samples in between songs! All the satanic, drug-loving, corpse-molesting you can handle. NARCOS SATANICOS!! You guys sure are swell. [TTBMD]

Brutal Truth -- NEED TO CONTROL [Earache Records]

[THE SCENE: The den of some surburban middle-class family in Anytown, USA, where the family's eldest son, a long-haired death-metal spazz (let's call him "Roy") is sitting in the den with another like-minded pal (whom we'll call "Brian"). They are listening to the latest offering from Brutal Truth, when SUDDENLY -- ]

As the CD begins to play and the hair begins to fly, the noisy afternoon of these young men is RUDELY SHATTERED by the splintering sounds of the door being taken down by a battering ram. Confused, they turn away from the stereo just in time to see a small army of cops in black t-shirts and aviator shades explode into the room like a bomb with legs and arms and VERY BIG GUNS.

Four of them grab the bantamweight Roy and slam him against the wall a few times to get his attention, while 27 of them wrestle Brian to the shag carpet, clubbing him viciously with their metal batons. Just so Roy won't feel too unloved, the four cops holding him beat him about the kidneys until he whines. Meanwhile, as the rest of the Thought Police begin to tear the room apart looking for contraband, two of them saunter over to the CD player and begin to critique the still-playing CD.

"Can you believe it?" Joe Bob picks his teeth with a matchstick as two of his pals stomp the pee out of Roy behind him during the reading of his "rights." "Listen to this, it sounds like it was recorded in a sewer."

"Pro'lly WAS," Bubba chortles. "You just don't get more sewerlike than this, my friend. Listen to that singer, he sounds like he's been eating lye soap for breakfast. Scary, ain't it?"

"It sure is, Bubba." He opens up the CD case and pulls out the insert. "Look at them longhaired scum. Bet they smoke lots of dope. Don't you think they smoke lots of dope? They're probably stoned in that picture."

"Lemme see." Considers the black and white photo, nodding. "You're just absolutely right, Joe Bob. And they pro'lly don't even send their mamas a card on Mother's Day, neither."

"You're so right. Let's see what these lyrics say.... 'burn me / burn me / burn me / burn / and i'll fucking burn you'." He turns and kicks Brian in the head a couple of times. "Hey boy, your mama know you listenin' to albums with the f-word in them?"

Brian moans, his eyes glazed, as the cops read further. "OH, here's a good one -- somethin' about a head up an ass... rest of it's just smut and anti-law politics, no surprise there. And looky there, we got us a skull in a tiny Masonic pyramid, yes sir, we're talkin' PURE EVIL here, huh?"

Joe Bob looks through the lyrics, snorts, and sets the insert on fire. He drops the flaming page on Roy's crotch, laughing as the young man roars and squirms, unable to escape with a fat-ass cop sitting on him.

Joe Bob bends down to speak with the semi-conscious Brian. "Boy, what we got here is a couple of death-metal perverts listening to this deep down satanic music -- what defense you got for yourself?"

The young man gurgles: "It ROCKS, dude. And it's, like, uh, sort of anti-authoritarian and everything. Beats hell out of listening to some old fart like Barry Manilow."

"Barry Manilow? BARRY MANILOW?" Enraged, Bubba begins whaling on him with his flashlight. "I'll have you know, boy, my sainted MAMA, God rest her long dead soul, had EVERY ONE of Mr. Manilow's albums!"

"Help, help...." Brian moans for someone to come save him, but it is no use; the lawful agents of the Thought Police beat him to death with their big flashlights and set his friend on fire, then leave the blood- spattered walls behind them as they set out for the next house in their mission to make the world safe for "respectable" music....

Brutal Truth -- SOUNDS OF THE ANIMAL KINGDOM [Relapse]

Most death/grind bands kind of bore me after the first few listens, because while they have that undeniable energetic death groove, they're usually so busy wailing about Big Daddy Satan and working so hard to prove how evil they are and how scary their music is that i find myself... you know... nodding off. Really, you can only hear that mojo bag so many times before it gets old, you know? Which is why i like Brutal Truth: they totally disavow the horror/Satan trip in favor of detailing how and why the world as we know it is going to slowly crush our spines until death starts looking like an attractive option. I find THAT a hell of a lot scarier than anything Deicide or Cradle of Filth is ever gonna shovel at me. Plus it helps that they aren't as slavishly devoted to the image thing (hell, journalist-turned-torchthroat Kevin Sharp has short hair and looks like a cowboy, he wears a COWBOY HAT for fuck's sake, and he has manly sideburns besides) and they are considerably more intelligent than the average death/grind devotee. Even after smoking bushels of ganga they remain fiercely articulate, no small feat, mon....

Straight from the shoulder, then: this is a brilliant album. Not only is it incredibly focused and varied (the death/grind camp has recently started shagging off the malaise by incorporating elements of darkwave, ambient, and noise into their pain freakouts, but Brutal Truth was way ahead of the curve on all three counts pretty much from the beginning), but they have the tremendous taste and balls to cover... yes... Sun Ra. Now, it wouldn't even MATTER if the song totally blew (it doesn't, by the way); just the sheer INSPIRATION to cover a demented free-jazz pianist when you're a grindcore band is brilliant. (The track is "it's the end of the world," by the way, and it is one of the best ones on the album.) But then again, given that they tend to sound like a controlled-fission version of jazz after the nuclear holocaust, maybe the cover makes more sense than it would at first glance.

The album is a concept album of sorts: It is largely inspired by the Desmond Morris sociopolitical classic THE NAKED APE, and mostly deals with how the pressure of urban sprawl and technological overkill are forcing the human race backwards down the evolutionary scale. Deep down, Brutal Truth would have us believe, we are not far removed from the animal kingdom, and then only because we have the "superior intelligence" necessary to destroy ourselves. (I'm behind them on this tip, big surprise.) The vision thing, the art of the deal, the bowel-loosening swings of Wall Street, and genocide all come under their punishing microscope, and they have no reassurances to offer. They're beyond apocalyptic; they're the air raid siren that's the last thing you hear before the fat airborne nuclear pill hits the ground and everything goes white.

Of course, given that Sharp's vox is roughly equivalent to a Waring blender set on "puree" then slowed down to half-speed, you'll never know what the hell the lyrics are anyway unless you read the lyric sheet. But that's okay; the music is even more ominous than the lyrics. Many of the songs, like "dementia" and "k.a.p." are terrifying bursts of hyperkinetic sonic thunder (you can't really call it playing when it sounds like the sped-up audio of buildings being demolished) -- Brutal Truth, when it suits them, are still one of the fastest bands around -- and they pay homage to their grind roots with the caustic brevity of microtunes like "callous," which literally lasts about as long as it takes you to sneeze. But when they slow down a bit, as on "fucktoy," they prove capable of unleashing juggernaut riffs that bore through your skull like a jackhammer. Then, after exhausting you with several songs built on velocity, they pull back and throw out something like "blue world," which opens with a swirling, almost ambient stew of noise, looped phrases buried in the background, skittering feedback, and other ominous sonic rubble, all of which finally coalesces into an actual song of considerable heaviness. "sympathy kiss" is built around a loop of a skipping CD that fades in and out of the mix as tribal drums circle around and heart-stopping riffs cascade over one another in slo-mo before turning into something that vaguely resembles hyperspeed death funk. The most brilliant offering, though, is the last track "prey" -- built entirely around a microsnippet from an earlier song (Sharp screaming "prey" with the band in turbo mode behind him), they loop the snippet for the entire duration of the 21-minute track and slowly, so gradually you can hardly track it, torch the EQ. It works like a deranged, hypnotic mantra, and you're not even aware of the steady increase in volume and distortion until you suddenly look up around the fifteen-minute mark, dazed at the endless bludgeoning, and realize that it sounds like the entire world is caving in inside your skull. And then it gets even LOUDER. And uglier. I swear listening to this track all the way through will alter your consciousness (which may well have been the intention). Hands down my favorite track on the album.

The most impressive thing about Brutal Truth is that they have honed their art of controlled chaos down to an intimidating science. For a band that constantly sounds like it's on the absolute brink of utter implosion, it's amazing how precise they are. It's hard to imagine that this kind of music is actually played by human beings; at times it seems as if it would require superhuman stamina to execute the dizzying high-speed twists and turns they throw in like clockwork. I'm not quite certain that they're grind's answer to Ruins, but they're awfully damn close.

Now that i think of it, it makes perfect sense for them to cover Sun Ra... this isn't grindcore, it's deathjazz. Embrace the terror. Sleep with the apocalypse. Burn your cheesy black metal albums and grok this instead.

Meanwhile, in the official listening room -- recognized as the Doom Room thanks to the nifty inscription "Do the Doom" chiseled into the massive stone door -- we find The Moon Unit and his nifty pal Todd the Black Metal Drummer sitting around listening to the majestic and flatulent sounds of Bull Anus. As TMU throws the cd in the player and returns to his seat, grotesque noises and a low end like the black helicopters of the apocalypse fill the room....

TMU: Now i know we are descending into the cancer-ridden bowels of hell. Skullflower on bad, bad, bad heroin.

TTBMD: Somewhat one-dimensional power violence. Harsh, brooding, violent.

TMU: Listen to those evil fucking tones, o my brother. The sound of tape being mulched. Bulldozers lowering their blades into the poisoned earth. The voice of SATAN! GRAU! GRAU!

TTBMD: Haunted amplifiers reanimate dead frequencies.

TMU: They have some cool machine-gun sounds on "Beefry."

TTBMD: Spastic beats and metal grinding metal.

TMU: (zones out while "Iniox" grinds away like a slow-spinning top)

TTBMD: This cd is a series of variations on the sound of machines breaking down. Parts is parts.

TMU (from zombie stupor): Life... is... LIFE!

TTBMD: Some loosely-structured songs are also on this cd. And i mean loosely. And what would make someone call their band Bull Anus? I want to know.

TMU: Maybe they like bull anuses. Maybe they have known bull anuses, in the biblical sense, if you get my drift....

TTBMD: I wonder if they have ever heard of Cattle Decapitation. Harsh grindcore that might be right up their... asses!

TMU: I must admit, i respect a band that thinks with it's anus. Some of these grindy-grindy weeoo sounds are really mantra-like. You can zone out to this band from a distance. I wonder if they rave. Do you rave?

TTBMD: I don't fucking rave. Thinking with their anus... shit for brains? I guess they got shit on their mind? Shit happens? The cd is good shit.

TMU: Holy Bat Shit, Robin! This song... are we allowed to call these things songs? This is "Anthrax Ripple" and it sounds just like the ripple of dying leaves in the wind after the Revelation of Anthrax on the Day of the Locust. Is that prescient or what?

TTBMD: Yes. A Commodore-64 on acid -- pockets of sound. This song, "Anthrax Ripple," is the best song on the cd so far.

TMU: I like the dark-ambient moves on "Yak Bak." This band has a lot more depth and variety than i originally would have guessed from their name. I wonder if they grok the Melvins.

TTBMD: Falling face-first into hot black clouds. I can't get the god-damn tv to work right.... All that static. And the rhythmic textures that bleed endlessly. "Yak Bak."

TMU: This is the fucking locust-filled sky as seen by the maggots crawling in the dead dog's eye socket as the semis go by.

TTBMD: This the sound of centuries. Of bones turning to dust.

TMU: I think we really like this track a lot. There's a Skullflower thing going on in some of these tracks, what with the blown-up deathfuzz guitars and whatnot, but then they have a core of this really non-rock sounds. Some of this could pass for tracks from one of the early Skullflower LPs.

TTBMD: It is a simple formula of willing frequencies to their appropriate graves.

TMU: Bone spurs chip away at the flesh as the human skin lanterns sway in the wind.

TTBMD (as songs play): What's the name of this label?

TMU: Mandragora. They sent us a big ol' pile of goodies, including that swell Superfuckers thing.

TTBMD: The rest of the album flows in a similar vein. Pick this one up if you get the chance. And the Superfuckers.

The Bunny Brains are weird -- but with their given name and what little I know of their bizarre existence so far, that's hardly surprising, eh? I have the vague feeling this is a live album (parts of it certainly are), and "Freshen Up" certainly lives up to the idea: lo-fi, live-sounding, and extremely devolved, it starts out sounding like the band's tuning up (and they may well be) and gradually evolves into howling kitchen-sink psychedelia. Not the psych, mind you, of guys in paisley shirts who take big tabs o' acid and play flowery epics about the summer of luv, but the scary kind -- unpredictable freakouts from guys so strange that it's frequently hard to tell whether they're serious or pulling your leg. Either way, it's pretty out there (but still surprisingly listenable). At times they remind me of Beme Seed minus the shamanistic goddess thing and with a strange sense of humor. Psychedelic punk shenanigans, titles like "Harm is comin' to me every day in every way," "Overdose of cum," and "Robert is a corpse," weird noises and deviant sounds harnessed in the name of punk, psych, and funk... sounds like a good time to me....

The "gimmick" -- two drummers and two bassists, all named Mike and Mark -- sometmes obscures the message in the eyes of the faithful, directing attention (through no fault of their own) from the forbidding death grooves where everyone's attention should properly be focused. To help clarify matters this time around, they got a way better production job than before (you can thank Weasel Walter for that), eliminated all but the handful of words necessary to get the point across in the booklet (exactly 26 of them, including titles and credits), and hammered out six longish slabs of angst and hitting things over and over again. The men of Burmese are real good at angst (and occasionally screaming) and hitting things over and over again. Taking the twin-bass hell of bands like Cop Shoot Cop and welding it to the twin-drum thunder of early Swans, Burmese take the potential for sonic ugliness a couple of steps further with heavy doses of Whitehouse-worship and a "concept album" about the evil men do. Over cheerful ditties with titles like "Rapewar," "Thumbsucker," "Shut Your Mouth... I Paid for the Hour," and "Just Say Cunt," they pound away at slow, dirgelike rhythms, piling on noise from distorted basses and screaming vile, vile stuff through miles of efx processing. On songs like "Thumbsucker," they start to sound like a giant machine with a stripped gear, expiring and going out in a giant collapse of machinery and sparks. Most of the time they vascillate between loud, slow, noisy, or some mix of the bunch, but they rarely ever "rock" in the sense that most would consider things to, you know, rock. They don't rock; they bulldoze. The mulch. They hammer things into the ground. The explode with pent-up rage, they futz around frantically from time to time, but they don't exactly "rock" in that sense -- they are never, ever going to be mistaken for Cheap Trick, okay? -- although they actually develop some forward motion on "Shut Your Mouth....," which sounds bizarrely like New Order on bad, bad speed, chronicling the disintegration-in-progress of some genuinely disturbed soul. Then it just mutates into squalling noise hell. "Just Say Cunt" doesn't last very long, but it packs a lot of Whitehouse-inspired pink noise / junk noise / screaming psycho hell impact into that brief time slot. If you're already hep to Burmese, you should definitely hear this, because it's some of their best work yet; if not, this is certainly not a bad place to start.

Now this is heaviness. The enraged ape on the cover is an accurate indication of the sonic destruction happening on the disc. First up is Burmese, who come raging out of the corner like a wounded gorilla on PCP, savagely swiping at everything in their path and setting it on fire. Bits and pieces here and there can be traced back to Whitehouse, Merzbow, probably half the Cold Meat Industry roster, Burning Witch, and probably one of the purest strains imaginable of the deep, cellular-level sickness that infects some musicians when provided with large, catastrophically-loud instruments and lots of amplifiers, causing them to inflict great distress to all witnesses involved when they start seeing if they can break the equipment by playing noise at full volume. Burmese don't really play "songs" in the traditional sense of what most people think of as songs (although, as with Arab on Radar -- a band they sometimes resemble -- there's probably a lot more structure under that sonic mung than is readily apparent); rather, they have highly public temper tantrums at a volume sufficient to raise the dead. In China. The ten tracks they offer up here are very much what you'd expect: Brief bolts of sonic violence designed to irritate, annoy, and possibly offend you. Are you man enough to take the ride, mister? I'll bet this band regularly endures fun scenes with promoters who really didn't understand what was going to happen when the band took the stage....

The rest of the disc is four long (well, longer than the Burmese tracks, anyway) and grotesque blurts of grim sonic filth from Fistula, who win major bonus points with me right off for the completely insane "Green Lung." Man, I know all about that.... "The Basilisk" is pretty hep too -- big riffs, big drums, big everything, plus it's got a groove Alice Cooper would have approved of back in the day, only a million times heavier. "Caterpillar" is my idea of a good time; big drums and rumbling bass to smother an endless riff and some dude screeching like he's getting ready to beat his dog or something. I'm not so sold on "Powers That Be" -- I think Fistula sound better when they're a lot less speedy -- but it's nice that they threw it in for the benefit of people who can't quite hang with nonstop slow-motion crawl. I like them a lot better when they're creeping into Corrupted territory.

This isn't just heavy, it's like having your skull exploded from the inside. First Burmese surround you and pummel you wildly from all sides until you're dizzy, then Fistula wades in and starts slowly but systematically clubbing you into the concrete. The pain, gringo, it is enormous -- but if you've partaken enough of the Ronrico 151, si, si, the sound your ears make as your skull reverberates from the repeated blows sounds most soothing....

William S. Burroughs -- NAKED LUNCH (Warner Bros.)

This is a really curious item. It is a three-disc set of Burroughs reading selections from the book. It claims to be an "abridged" version of the full recordings due out soon which is amazing, because if that's the case one can imagine how long the real thing will be! This time around, it's just old Bill, speaking with his ever-familiar voice. And best of all, it is without any of that annoying musical accompanyment shite that Hal Wilner, for reasons still unclear to many, always mixed far too loud over Bill's rich voice. There is some music, but it is only in between tracks, however it is tasteful, subtle and very appropriate for the material. The music is composed and performed by Bill Frisel, Wayne Horvitz and Eyvind Kang. Would caution that this material will be best enjoyed by serious Burroughs fanatics. [yol]

Okay, this is the next-to-last thing to be reviewed in an issue that's already several days overdue, and i am damn tired, so we'll do this the short way. Perhaps if i'm up to it next issue i'll expound further, but here's all you need to know for now: Burzum. Christian, Varg, Count Grischnackh, man with a guitar a mission. Black fucking metal. True grimness from a bone-deep sociopath. Lyrics in Norse and German. Bad attitude and creepy pastoral artwork. God pisses off Varg; churches go poof. Varg's pal and mentor, Euronymous (of Mayhem), gets pissy with him; Varg stabs him over twenty times. Police bust his ass; find shitpots of explosives and church lists. Varg gets sent up the river; he manages to finish this album first. (He later releases two guitarless, MIDI-only synth albums recorded in prison, both of which are good, but nowhere near as brilliant as this.) Four tracks, over forty minutes, pure brilliance throughout. "Det som en gang var" may be the world's greatest black metal song; "Tomhet" is almost certainly one of the best dark ambient songs ever; and the two songs in between (one of which, the title track, is an epic of intensity itself) are pretty high up the quality-control ladder too. If you can only have one Burzum disc, it should be this one. End of story. Ball in your court.

The Butterflies of Love -- "rob a bank/love may be possible" [Coffeehouse]

Another slice of twisted pop from the Greene brothers. The first one, "rob a bank," has Jeffrey singing in a plaintive voice over a spiky guitar and "aaah aaah" background vocals. Aside from its weird, faux-waltz feel, where else can you get lyrics like "I'm not a Communist / doesn't mean I don't want to be a king / I'm not an anarchist / doesn't mean I won't blow up a building... you made me feel like / I could rob a bank..."? The flip side is Daniel's contribution, "love may be possible," another low-key sideways glance in the direction of pop. Lots of heavily reverbed, delayed guitar (slide, maybe?), and regretful lyrics about love and drinking make this most cool. Another two-sided platter of unheralded pop smarts and hopefully not the last.

The Butterflies of Love -- AMERICA'S NEWEST HIT MAKERS [Coffeehouse]

An ironic title, to put it mildly. The Butterflies of Love are "pop" in the same sense that Cheer-Accident are -- that is, their vision of pop is skewed and dissonant, to say the least. "Lunatic" is catchy in a weird sort of way, with its onslaught of weirdly-tuned guitars, but then they keep breaking in for bizarre spoken interludes. "Guilt" features a tinny, distorted vocal and... and... uh, SOMETHING going underneath it (don't ask me what) that sort of adheres to a pop structure, but manages to so thoroughly pervert it that 99% of those who listen to it will find it really annoying, even though it's essentially borrowing from the more dissonant edges of the Beatles, of all things. "I Read Her Diary" is a bit closer to the real thing, with its up and down guitar pulse and vocals that a bit closer to "realness," but still... this is well into the territory of the adventurous, mon. The "Intermission" track is essentially lots of drone and fuzziness and feedback, not exactly pop staples, either.

"Walking the Dog," though, manages to minimze the weirdness and turns out a slow-waltz that actually wouldn't have been too out of place on an early Velvet Underground record. "I Don't Want" sounds like a second take of "Lunatic" with the cosmic slop removed, and "Sleep" drags in more of the oddly-tuned guitar and background drones. This is one weird album, even if it is bizarrely accesible in certain ways -- the work of men who drink too much coffee and hear funny or the spearhead of a new direction in pop that, ten years from now, will sound classic and inevitable? I'm not real sure, so in the meantime we'll file it under "for the adventurous at heart," eh?

Butthole Surfers -- ELECTRIC LARRYLAND [Capitol]

I first heard the voice o' Gibby in 1984, when i bought PSYCHIC... POWERLESS... ANOTHER MAN'S SAC solely for the band's name. As i recall, my general reaction when i played the big fat record was "what the HELL is this shit?" The only things on there i could even stand were "Cherub" and "Mexican Caravan," so it went into the reject bin, where i didn't think about it again until i somehow ended up hearing REMBRANDT PUSSYHORSE a year or two later, at which it suddenly dawned on me that i was in the presence of GENIUS. Retarded, dope-soaked genius, but genius nonetheless. So i gave PSYCHIC... another spin and whaddyaknow... it sounded MUCH BETTER... and LOCUST ABORTION TECHNICIAN, the magical third album, sounded just as swank.

Unfortunately, from that point onward the dope consumption began to slowly take its toll, and their quality control meter went into a downward spiral that bottomed out with the truly lame major label debut, INDEPENDENT WORM SALOON. Bum deal, mon.

But now they are BACK and guess what? This is not your father's Butthole Surfers (or your big brother's, for that matter), but this is the best album they've made since LOCUST ABORTION TECHNICIAN. It's also the first where you can actually tell what the hell is going on, which is kind of nice. Dig that groovy fat reverb on the gated drum on "Pepper," mon! Of course, the lyrics aren't anywhere near as crazed and surreal as on earlier albums, and the first part of the album spends an inordinate amount of time trying REALLY HARD to be "normal" -- or at least as normal as you can be when you're called the Butthole Surfers, anyway -- but it eventually gets weird enough to compete with at least mid-period Surfer hell....

Schizophrenia is the order of the day here, with styles running from the crazed faux-metal of "Birds" and "Ulcer Breakout," jingle-jangle pop on "Jingle of a Dog's Collar" and "TV Star," aimless farting around on "My Brother's Wife" and "Let's Talk About Cars," twisted rock tunes like "Ah Ha" and "The Lord is a Monkey"... and of course there's the song everybody has heard by now, even in the jungles of the Amazon most likely, the song with the big beat that's more or less lifted from Beck's "Loser" -- you know the one -- "Pepper." They play musical chairs so often on this album that it's amazing they didn't get dizzy and fall on their asses with spinning skulls....

So is any of it "new" or "revolutionary" or any of that jazz? Well, uh, ummmm, no. For that you want the first three albums, and they happened... ah... a LONG TIME AGO. What you get this time around is just a good album, no more, no less. Be glad Gibby didn't end up dead in a gutter outside of Emo's and just enjoy it for what it is, okay? Look, any album with a song containing lines like "thanksgiving coming on the fourth of july / in the form of a girl with a needle in her eye / well she came from out west / on a nickel's worth of gas / with her mind on her money / and dope up her ass" HAS to be worth your hard-earned pesos....