Apparently this ep was banged-out failry quickly at Steve Austin's studio, Austin Enterprises. Considering where it was recorded, the sound is fairly straight-ahead. On their 1998 record GUTTER QUEEN, Cable threw down some pretty muscular noise rock. Apparently they've decied ot move away from that a bit. I haven't heard their most recent full-length (2001's NORTHERN FAILURES), but I'm told that it has a heavy Sabbath vibe. If that's the case, then this ep would continue in that vein -- except that there's a bit of 70s hard rock feel to some of these songs. 'Course, it would be 70s hard rock as interpreted by a group of wasted sludge-rockers. Songs like "Whiskey Drinkin' Woman" and "Ride the Jackass Backwards" sound like the more driving Zeppelin songs like "Whole Lotta Love" and "When the Levee Breaks" truncated and filtered through the Buzzov'en/Sour Vein aesthetic. "Buy Me a Drink" is the "road ballad" (a la Bon Jovi's "Dead or Alive") dragged through the gutter. [n/a]

Cake-Like -- DELICIOUS [Avant]

OK, so there's this band called Cake-Like and they're signed to John Zorn's Japanese label Avant and they're from NYC and they're three really attractive women, one of whom is the only funny person on MTV's THE STATE (that would be singer/guitarist Kerri Kenney), and John Zorn "executive-produced" (whatever the hell that means), and i know that the entire nation -- nay, NATIONS -- have been lying awake at night until four in the morning, millions of people tearing out their hair in great nasty handfuls, moaning to the ceiling, "Cake-Like... i hear so much about them... but what... what are they LIKE?" Well, i'll TELL you what they're like! They're like the 3Ds arm-wrestling with Helium while Zeni Geva kicks the table and God Is My Copilot run around the table like little hooligans screaming weird nursery rhymes at the top of their tiny li'l lungs! They're like tiny voodoo Barbie dolls raised on equal shots of Billie Holiday and crunchy punk! They're like a catchy pop band with chime-chime guitars possessed by the flickering spirits of the Great White Noise God! They're like a chocolate-covered candy bar laced with bitter almonds on the inside! And they play REALLY LOUD!

If you deduce from the above that i like them a lot, then... uh... you deduce CORRECTLY.

Mostly what they do is present short (VERY short -- 11 songs in under 30 minutes) songs that apparently started out as simple pop ditties only to end up buried in irregular, jagged blasts of punked-out white noise and semi- jazzy bits. It makes perfect sense for them to be signed to Zorn's label, although they're far more direct and "accessible" than anything Zorn's ever been involved with. On top of the pop/noise axis, they spike everything with sing-song lyrics, quite often nursery-rhyme style, that sound cute at first glance until you pay a bit more attention and realize what they're actually SAYING, at which point your milk may curdle a wee bit. For instance, the loopy-sounding "fruitcake" sounds about as childish as you can get, until you realize that the lyrics about pirates drinking wine and tucking children in for the night is actually about having drunks for parents. On "bum leg," the little girl shunned by the neighborhood for being crippled turns right around and does the exact same thing to a girl even lower on the totem pole than herself ("every day she would say / want to come out to play? / i'd love to Sheila, but i can't / because your dad works for my dad"). Then there's "sweet 15," about dirty old men trying to pick up 15-year olds... the list goes on and on. Like the real-life tribulations of childhood, what sounds cute and sunny on the surface here turns out to be anchored to a chain buried at the bottom of a deep, cold river where the fish bite.

Cake-Like -- "mr. fireman/come & play/paco's last return" [Genius Records]

Ah, another swank offering from New York's most fabulous trio, the totally boss Cake-Like. The basic format remains much the same -- chiming guitars battle with noise-landen, overamped fuzz guitars while Kerri and co. yelp and wail in sing-song fashion -- but this time the sound is a bit thicker, most likely due to a switch in producers (to Ric "mr. preying mantis" Ocasek, of all people). "mr. fireman" is the standout (gee, that must be why it's the A-side, huh?), all ching-ching guitars with occasional bursts of squalling noise as Kerri exclaims about being all hot and bothered for a fireman (at least i THINK that's what it's about). On the flip side, "come & play" starts out slow and heavy but picks up the pace (and the noise quotient) about halfway through, reminding me oddly of Shiva Speedway; by contrast, "paco's last return" is just damn weird, opening with an eerie acapella chant before a horribly sped-up flamenco guitar accompanies a heavily-accented, spoken-word story about Paco and his search for the round Rosa, who turns out to be married to a man "even bigger than Paco." Uh... okay.... whatever you say, Kerri... mmm hmmm....

Cake-Like -- BRUISER QUEEN [Vapor Records]

Thick sheets of snow screamed across the frigid wasteland. Glaciers, like pale gleaming monuments to a forgotten age, rose to a sun whose warmth failed to penetrate the howling snowstorm. Lost in the tundra, miles from the nearest Antarctic outpost, Captain 4-Track and TASCAM-Girl -- freezing in their skimpy spandex crimefighting outfits -- argued about whose fault it REALLY was that the Hypercube Flandez Time Module crashed and left them stranded in this godforsaken whiteness.

"I say it's YOUR fault," she screamed, her voice barely audible above the howling wind. "It was YOUR turn to put gas in the fucker."

"MY turn? MY turn? I've stopped at the Shell station the last four times!"

"Yeah, whatever. So what the hell are we going to do now?"

"We march." He pointed into the distance; she saw nothing but a wall of blinding white. "The internal radar spectrogasmotonometer tells me that a top-secret government outpost, currently unknown to all but a few select secret agents and funded out of a CIA slush fund, is only 2.4 miles away. We'll head there and get the fuel necessary to get our ship back on the ground so we can continue in our mission to kick somebody's ass."

"Oh, okay. So whose ass are we kicking this time, anyway?"

"I forget. It's written down in the logbook...."

"Well, seeing as how we're moving about three feet per minute, i figure we'll have plenty of time to check this out." She pulled out a portable CD player and inserted a disc.

"Whose fine new album shall we be listening to, then?"

"The new one by Cake-Like. I'm not so sure I'm all that impressed with it, but I left the Swans reissue back on the ship, so we're stuck with it for the moment."

"You mean to say that it's a flaccid followup to their stunning Avant debut, DELICIOUS?"

"Well... here's the deal: Their first album was such a fluke sleeper hit that the major labels apparently glommed onto them, and so they signed with a sneaky subsidiary of Warner/Reprise. Check out this slick artwork, man. Doesn't this just scream "arty major label concept of what some A&R guys thinks is alternative" or what?"

"Mein gott, the artwork is on a YELLOW background... how... hideous."

"I like the flies fucking, though. That was a nice touch."

"So how is the MUSIC?"

"About the same as the first disc, only with all the periodic noise eruptions and brutal energy all sanded away for a more user-friendly approach. In other words, not quite so much fun. Plus the version of "mr. fireman" here is nowhere near as crazed and energetic as the version from the single. Boo hoo. It's still pretty cool, though. In fact, this whole disc is fine on its own merits; it's just that the first disc makes it look kind of weak by comparison...."

"Surely you must admit that Kerri Kenney gets a magnificent bass tone all over the place."

"Oh yeah, and the stern-mother stuff on "mr. fireman" is absolutely hysterical, along with the line where she's screaming "bring your goddamn truck and some water!" But the nasty fuzzed-out guitar has been pushed waaaaay back, and that's the formula for everything on this disc: the whole business of minimizing the dirty, chaotic stuff that made them so interesting in the first place is what bugs me."

"Hmmm... there does seem to be an overabundance of pretty and girly- girl stuff happening... wait, this song "lorraine's car" is reasonably out of control. They're doing lots of shouting and making strange noises on this one...."

"Yah, if the rest of the album were as consistently energized as this and "mr. fireman," they'd have a winner. As it is, we have to assume that something got lost in the translation due to major label diddling. And what the FUCK is she saying on "the american woman" anyhow? Dammit, i FAILED French, and i'm sure as hell not going out and buying a dictionary.... On the other hand, "truck stop hussy" manages to be pretty, heavy, nasty, and smutty all at the same time, plus she's really yelping there, so maybe things aren't so bad after all... plus it's really kind of funny...."

The disc played as they walked. Eventually she said, "So how far are we from the damn place now? I've got to pee."

"Uh... let's see... by my calculations, we'll reach the outpost in just under two hours."

"Wonderful."

"So how did we end up reviewing this disc, anyway?"

"The ubermaggot was too busy gloating over the Pere Ubu box set to do it himself, I guess."

This is a three-song demo that is punishing! The first thing that needs to be said is that these guys are highly original. They mix some old-school hardcore brutality with killer doom-filled breakdowns. Fuck the trends. The artwork and lyrics are far more creative than ANY band I have seen or heard in the last handful of years. People get scared when they play live... you might get fucked up. You will be hearing more from this band, as I am sure they will get picked up by a label and destroy everyone in their path. [TTBMD]

Cards in Spokes -- REACT [Allied]

In a nutshell: Fast, tense, catchy harmonic punkpop. Think Green Day, Offspring, Ramones, Rancid, the Clash with a better singer (no offense Joe, "character" is okay with me), that sort of thing. The songs are reasonably short and high on energy, and they erect a pretty serious wall of sound for a three-piece unit. Betcha they smoke live. The only catch is that, for the most part, the songs don't really stand out from one another; it's all one big blur of motion that periodically stops for a few seconds before starting up again. Some people might find that, ah, irritating. Given the genre, i'm not sure this is actually that much of a drawback -- after all, the Ramones basically knew two songs (the fast one and the faster one) and they managed to extend that into a twenty-plus year career.

"Faces on File," the first blast of energy, pretty much lays out the blueprint -- stingray guitar, bom-bom bass, relentless drums, high velocity everything. These elements -- which sound just fine, incidentally -- don't vary much over the course of eleven songs (although there are a couple of exceptions). Regardless, i'm inclined to cut them a bit of slack since their lyrics are not only snotty, but considerably more intelligent than the average punkpop fare, and the lyrics to "Towel in a Turban" (which manage to work in a humorous cleavage reference) are pretty funny. And they DO have a serious level of energetic catchiness happening. Ah, if they'd just work on making the songs stand out from each other a bit more....

Some exceptions: "When You Find Yourself" benefits from pulling back on the speed and employing a bit of twisted funk, and "Scratch the Dance Itch" works on a similar level for the same reason. "React" takes on a different drum sound and puts a bit more space in the mix, and as a result the song stands out even though, musically, it's not remarkably different from the rest of the album. Which may be the real hidden weakness here -- if they'd changed things up in the mix a bit more often they might have achieved a bit more variety in the songs. Ah well, it's still hard to beat that energy....

Cas de Marez - CATHEDRALE DE CHANT (Barooni)

Cas de Marez is a Dutch vocal artist who explores the range of vocal expressions in order to form a "language of sound". This disc is a one-hour slice from a fifteen-hour performance for voice and multitrack recorder in 1990. Because the relationship between sound and space are crucial to her work, she uses a technique that makes allowances for overtones. For the first hour of the performance, a basic track of tones and inflections was recorded. This was then played back and added to with a new series of tones that were introduced as variations of increasing timbre. In the end, this process was repeated until there were fifteen separate voices. Absolutely stunning and beautiful. At a certain point, the voices start to meld and unexplicable aural changes take place as one's mind is transported to another state of being. [yol]

Neko normally records for Mint (where she has a nifty new album out right now, in fact), but here she's doing a bit of homegrown recording on her own with a spot o' help from Lance Rock Records. The results aren't too different from her usual albums -- we are firmly in alt-country territory here from the word go -- but they're a bit more spare and direct here, less "produced" (which i vastly prefer), and the songs are easily the equal or better of anything else she's done. For an album that was done at home (by Neko with help form Jon Rauhouse) it sure sounds good -- better, to my ears, than a lot of mainstream overproduced "big sound" albums floating around. (Of course, it's easier to make good-sounding albums with musicians who actually know what they're doing, which helps immensely here in overcoming any recording limitations.) The eight songs here are all excellent, a mix of new songs ("Make Your Bed," "Favorite"), songs from other pals ("Andy," "In California," "Knock Loud"), swank covers (Neil Young's "Dreaming Man," Hank Williams' "Alone and Forsaken"), and a public domain tune ("Poor Ellen Smith") reinterpreted Neko-style. I find it utterly hilarious that it takes a Canadian to do the sound of rural Americana right. Grab this if you see it, because it's hard to find -- intended mainly for Neko to sell on tours in Canada, as i understand it, and available only on vinyl to my knowledge. If you're down with Neko at all then you need this album.

This is a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant box set, in every way imaginable. Four cds of previously unreleased music and one disc constituting a "best-of" for the four American Recordings releases, all housed in an exceptional package. It's not cheap, true, but you get what you pay for, hmmm? And what you get here is pretty swank. One square cloth-bound hardback book labeled TEXT is 100+ pages of interviews, articles, pictures, and explanations of the recordings (as a process and for each of the collected songs); another matching book labeled MUSIC holds five discs in cardboard sleeves, prefaced by the printed technical notes and track listings for the cds. Both books are housed in a sturdy cloth-covered slipcase. All of it looks beautiful... and black.

This box set is unusual in that, unlike most sets, almost none of the music here has been previously released. When Rick Rubin and Johnny Cash began recording together ten years ago, they established a pattern early on of trying (and often recording) an enormous number of songs; they recorded over a hundred during sessions for the first album alone, followed by several hundred others during the sessions for the subsquent three releases. Sometimes Cash played alone, and sometimes with backing musicians as diverse as the Heartbreakers, Glen Campbell, Joe Strummer, and Nick Cave; sometimes he sang his own material and sometimes he covered artists like Soundgarden, Danzig, Vera Lynn (!), Neil Young, Sting (!!), and Nine Inch Nails (!!!). Regardless of the circumstances, he appears to have been highly engaged in the process and sufficiently motivated to keep working steadily even after the complete ruin of his health and the death of his wife. The result is a staggering wealth of recordings, the best of which Cash and Rubin hand-picked for this collection. (Signing off on the final track listing and details was one of the last things Cash did before he died, and probably the only reason he held out that long after June's death.)

The first three discs -- "Who's Gonna Cry," "Trouble In Mind," and "Redemption Songs" -- feature an eclectic assembly of tracks roughly grouped thematically under these evocative headings. Some of the more interesting ones scattered throughout include dark readings of his own work ("Long Black Veil," "Understand Your Man," and an early take of "The Man Comes Around"), peculiar covers (Neil Young's "Pocahontas" and "Heart of Gold," "You Are My Sunshine," and "You'll Never Walk Alone"), some inspired covers ("Big Iron," "Wichita Lineman," "Cindy" -- with Nick Cave, "Devil's Right Hand," "Casey's Last Ride," and a duet with Carl Perkins on "Brown Eyed Handsome Man"), and a lot of stuff that ranges from failed experiments that are interesting but don't quite work to brilliant moments in unexpected places. There's a wild variety to these songs that you don't see coming from one singer much anymore, and by the time Cash is through with them, most of these songs sound like they could have been his from the beginning.

The fourth disc, "My Mother's Hymn Book," is possibly the most interesting thing about the box set -- an unreleased album in its own right, recorded by Cash himself (with assistance at the desk from old pal David Ferguson, who mixed it afterwards). The title is taken from the source of the songs, a battered and ancient hymn book (HEAVENLY HIGHWAY HYMNS) handed down to him from his mother. One Sunday he strolled down to a cabin on his land very reminiscent of the home in which he grew up, sat down in front of a microphone with a guitar and nothing else, and recorded approximately 25-30 songs one after another. Only 14 of those songs are here, but they're powerful ones -- songs like "I Shall Not Be Moved," "Do Lord," "When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder," "I'll Fly Away," "Let The Lower Lights Be Burning," and "I'm Bound For The Promised Land," all delivered in stark and simple fashion. This may actually be the best disc in the entire set, although I have my doubts as to how eagerly it'll be embraced by Cash's new (and younger) audience.

The fifth disc rounds up 15 of the best songs on the first four American releases, including "Delia's Gone," "The One Rose," "Thirteen," "Rusty Cage," "Hurt," and "The Man Comes Around." If you're like me and you came to the box set without having actually heard the albums in question, these tracks confirm that they're probably of high quality. Certainly all the tracks here are excellent, even unpredictable, and definitely not the sound of an artist in decline. With 14-18 songs per disc, there are approximately 80 good to brilliant songs here that most people have never even heard. And who knows what else still lurks in the vault? I suspect we'll be finding out for years to come....

Odd music from odd people... structurally they kind of share some points with Yinkolli, reviewed elsewhere in this issue (although that may be my perception because i listened to them back to back), but these guys are closer to achieving actual "songs" and they have vox and everything. They're definitely in the experimental camp, though, with a fondness for weird noises, mechanical percussion, and heavily repetitive motifs. (These are good things, naturally.) As the cassette progresses (do they have this available on CD? probably not, but it doesn't matter), the songs become more "coherent" and more oriented in the direction of repetition and drone, with occasional bursts of guitar skronk and noise, plus crazed yelping vox. Now they've moved out of the noise category and into the realm of crazed art bands. We're talking about an extremely devolved approach to "rock" here -- mainstream types (the kind of people, you know, who buy albums by the Toadies and N'Sync and Orgy or whatever) would find this extremely irritating, which is a big point in their favor. They also make extremely swell noises with efx pedals that they are inclined to loop and repeat indefinitely, which meets with DEAD ANGEL's approval. I'd go into the songs themselves but they all kind of run together. Is there a hefty Borbetomagus influence going on here? I think so. Maybe shards of leftover Last Exit too, although these gentlemen don't blast the way Laswell's former band did. The best thing i can say about this is that it's extremely mutant stuff, unpredictable and quirky, the work of a band that's less interested in traditional music than in creating emotional states through the unexpected juxtaposition of wildly disparate images (whatever the hell that means, i'm rambling now). In other words, they're weird and proud of it and while there are some moments that don't completely work for me (mostly on the second side), when they're on they're bizarrely captivating in a real different kind of way. If you're bored with the current state of music and want something a bit more challenging, this is definitely the way to go....

The title is not misleading, folks: there's some heavy repetitive mantra action going down on these four long tracks. Not that this is a bad thing. O my no. I don't know what instruments Castro is using on this release -- whatever it is, it's fed through banks of reverb and delay until it emerges as different-sounding drones, basically. This is hardcore drone music that wouldn't be out of place on the Drone label (home of the mighty Troum). A lot of this actually reminds me of Troum's more recent material, come to think of it. So the man must be doing something right.... The only real difference between the four tracks (no titles, so sorry) is in the textures of the drones and the delay speeds, but even accounting for such minimal adjustments he gets a pretty surprising amount of variety from his oscillating drone-o-tron. The high-pitched shimmering drones of the third track are particularly interesting, sounding like the singing of high-tension wires -- Alan Lamb fans take note -- and more of these sounds appear on the fourth track, where the drones 'n whines interact to form eddies and whirls. This is pretty swank stuff for drone fanatics, but the rest of the world should probably approach with caution. His brand-new CD-R arrived in my mailbox just yesterday, but i haven't even had a chance to look at it (much less hear it), so that will have to wait until the next issue....

This came out on PE a while back ago -- in fact, he may well have a newer one out -- and it took this long to get around to reviewing it because... um... well, i'm sure there's a good excuse lying around somewhere. While we figure out just what that excuse might be, let us focus on Mister Castro and his fine, reverbed 'n twinkling guitar of ambient doom.... This is one long track of Castro playing elliptical, often flamenco-like guitar figures through what sounds like a truly staggering line of efx pedals, with the result that the guitar goes through movements of tone 'n sound. On a label dominated mainly by releases full of chaos and inexplicable strangeness, this is something of an oasis in the mutant freejazz zone. Soothing and near ambient much of the time, it is driven by droning notes and repetitive guitar figures; approximately ten minutes into the piece, the drones start to dominate and take on a dark, groaning tone that gradually morphs into a brighter, denser conflagration of shimmering acoustic guitar figures. Past the twenty-minute mark things settle into a languid, nearly motionless ambient groove that goes on for quite a while, until the ambient background grows darker and thicker, with the bell-chime guitars starting to recede in favor of chittering, clattering sounds as the background drone begins to die away. Eventually the drone comes back, as do the chiming guitars, and even more eventually it all fades out, with the bell-chime guitars the last to go. At nearly 45 minutes it's a bit on the longish side (ha!), making it more suitable for background listening (unless you really like Castro's way with a guitar), but this is fine... it's certainly more worthy of background ambience that the horrible Muzak they pump into elevators. Actually, i think maybe elevator music should be replaced by PE releases, which would certainly make things more interesting, eh? [pym i

(TG and C12 are hurtling down the long main hallway of Level Two at breakneck speed, dodging bullets, whizzing ninja stars, metal spores, laser rays, and more. The entire hallway is filled with the continuous roar of machine-gun fire as TG leaps from wall to wall spraying hot screaming death at the forbidding robots. C12 is doing his part, occasionally employing his sonic cannon to shake them apart bolt by bolt.)

TG (mowing down an entire column of spiderbots): Damn! Where'd he find the budget for all these gadgets? Is there no end to them? At least the sporebots are almost gone.... (diverts her machine-gun fire to tear the last sporebot to shreds) THERE! Got him!

C12: Wonderful. Perhaps now you can take care of the million or so spiderbots crawling out of every available opening in the building, hmmm?

TG: You are so fucking tiresome. Put on the new CD.

C12 (doing so): Do you even want to know what it is?

TG: It's on Public Eyesore, so I'm sure it looks lovely and is filled with beautifully grotesque sounds. (The Power Soak Electrostun gun in her hands bucks wildly; a phalanx of spiderbots disintegrates in a thundering fireball, along with most of the vending machines.)

C12: Oh, the cleaning bills will be terrible... the accountants will weep....

TG (wisely ignoring him): Ahhh, this is all right. These guys know what they're doing. It's just one big orgy of lovely, crapped-out electronic noises that come and go in waves. Listen to those drones -- looped, flanged, soaked in reverb like a marinated roast, then layered and staggered, until the whole mess sounds like a nest of electronic cidadas hopping around in an orgone accumulator.

C12 (staring): Mein gott, that was almost... poetic.

TG: One good thing about this is that the textures are pretty varied and the entire piece is staggered in movements, so you don't get bored the way you do with a lot of full-on power electronics. I mean really, sure, your average "turn everything up and back away" noise unit just hits you in the face right off the bat and it's real intense and everything, but then it gets old in a hurry. This is a better way to go. They'll stumble onto something and fool with it for a while, porking it with their gizmos until it either turns into something else entirely or they get bored and move on to something else.

C12: I never cease to marvel that you and the Moon Unit can get something out of music like this. It sounds like bacon frying on a griddle in the backyard of the Battersea Power Plant. Is this a new-age version of what Throbbing Gristle originally had in mind?

TG: Hardly. More like if Eno had been sitting in the office of an electromagnetic resonator manufacturing plant instead of an airport when he came up with the whole concept of ambient music.

C12: You call this ambient?

TG: Well, it isn't really, but if you turn it down it can just hum and drone away in the background without too much fuss. At the same time, listening to it closely will reveal some beautiful and unearthly sounds.

C12: If that's the case, then perhaps you should try this on for size. (grins cruelly as he holds up the cryptic-looking Doppleganger CD case)

TG: Sure, let's have it. (arms jerk out forward and backwards to simultaneously vaporize attackers both front and back) Just watch my back while I'm concentrating on this....

C.C.C.C. -- COSMIC COINCIDENCE CONTROL CENTER

OK -- so this isn't a new disc. But I just found a copy after two years of searching so I'm going to gloat because it was only $9. HAHAHAHA!! Since this is the first release by these gods of noise I expected a little less than what is really there. The first two tracks (only three on the disc) are lower key, moodier noisescapes than anything else I've heard them do. (No, I'm *not* the resident CCCC expert, but I have seen them live also, and it was a lot harder than the first two tracks here.) I almost expected this to be a Lustmord album by the moodiness. Track 3 takes us right back into the place we thought they should be -- hard, looping textures that we all expect from Mayuko and Company. Everything is wonderful, noisy, godhead. Harsh feedback manipulation, varied tempos, off-key interruptions, the whole ball of wax (get the reference?!?). I can't help but gloat a little more, because this disc is now so hard to find!! If you find it, buy it, because you won't be disappointed. All noiseheads must own recordings by CCCC! All noiseheads must see CCCC whenever they can!! [bc]

CeLange -- NEW DAY COMIN' [11th Street Records]

LAWS! As i live and breathe! Somebody sent me a... a... a BLUES tape! Oooo! Not blues as in "ah'm a really old black guy with lots of wrinkles and one lung from smokin' too long which is why my voice sounds like ah swallowed a bag o' razors and all those years workin' in the auto factory fixed it so i can't hardly stand up which is why i'm sitting on this stool roaring drunk but goddamn i can play them slo-mo blooz until you cry in your beer" blues, but instead a more marginally "modern" form with a torch singer thrown in to boot. And they're even from NYC! I didn't even know they HAD blues players in NYC... i thought they were all living in one really big ancient brownstone down in New Orleans or something... shows you how much i know. (Although i can UNDERSTAND how someone would be compelled to sing the blues after living in NYC a while... i was only there three days last time i ventured up to The Big (Maggot-Filled) Apple and was cryin' in my hot-and- sour soup from day one.)

CeLange are pretty much a blues-rock band (there seem to be a lot of those in this issue, don't there? must be the winds of change or the big zeitgeist or something mysterious like that) -- a standard rhythm section (Cliff McComas is the guy who hits things, Pete Persechino is the one who makes air move) with the big groove to back up singer Sue Lange and guitarist Gary M. Celima. Lange would be right at home here in Austin with the likes of Lou Ann Barton, Ro-Tel and the Hot Tomatoes, and the like; she is a coffeehouse blues belter of fine vintage. Celima occasionally wanders a bit too into the delusions-of-Hendrix mania that seems to afflict those players who actually have talent (unlike, say me, who would be hopelessly lost even TRYING to emulate Hendrix). The rhythm section is most swell too. So is this offering, which sounds like it was recorded during a live show (even though i am fairly certain that is not true), and a good one at that.

"Doesn't Matter" sounds sort of like Stevie Ray Vaughn backed by Little Feat (only with a female singer, natch). "Spoonful" starts off with a slinky serpentine riff and moves into a sound borrowed straight from "Spirit in the Sky" and manages to sandwich in plenty o' hep grooves in between. There's plenty of spirited funk in "Save Me" as well. Of course, it would not be a blues album without a weepy blues ballad of sorts; "Change My Ways" fills that bill nicely. An interesting thing happens on "Good To You": Celima actually plays a lot less guitar than you'd expect, leaving some tasteful holes in the sound before laying into a swank solo. (It doesn't hurt that le bassist moves a lot of air on this one, either.) The instrumental "Instrumental" (duh) is most happening as well. And there are many other fine tunes on this album, making it well worth your studied investigation....

Eugene Chadbourne -- COUNTRY SONGS OF SE AUSTRALIA [Entropy Stereo]

This... is a strange record. I'll be the first to admit i know almost nothing about Eugene Chadbourne other than the fact that he used to be in Shockabilly and cut a few loopy records with Evan Johns and the H-Bombs, but whatever i was expecting, it certainly wasn't this. Turns out Eugene has a fondness for devolved country tunes about bullies, trains, and booze generously sprinkled with weird noises and all sorts of sonic clutter... and the resulting sound is sort of like an Appalachian hillbilly backed by a drunken Salvation Army band on the back of a flatbed truck running over potholes through quarry-mining country. This may be country, but i don't think my grandmother would appreciate this record!

Some titles may provide "insight" into Chadbourne's warped view of the world: "The Bully Song," "My Gas Tank Runs on Booze," "My Uncle Used to Love Me But She Died," that sort of thing. There are also several medleys, including one of train songs, and another of Willie Nelson songs. They all sound extremely... odd. Imagine the scary backwoods types from DELIVERANCE turned loose in a recording studio and there you go -- instant lurching chaos. Powerful yet disorienting, to say the least.

This was apparently released sometime earlier on vinyl (it's hard to tell, since the liner notes are largely an inspired mock-documentary fabrication), and this release includes a bunch of unreleased material in the form of EXTREMELY devolved covers of "Wipeout," "Purple Haze," "Star Spangled Banner," etc., all rendered in obliteration fashion so as to be damn near unrecognizable. I swear they are playing many creatively-tuned kazoos on "Purple Haze," and i'm not sure what to make of the rambling monologue about J. R. Ewing... these are disturbed people, mon....

Is it possible for an album to be both country and noise at the same time? I never thought i'd have the opportunity to ask that question, but there it is. Definitely not for the weak.

As usual, i'm late to the party -- Charalambides have been around for a while, doing their thing, but this is my first real exposure to them (i did see Tom Carter open by his li'l lonesome for Troum, but i'm not sure that counts). So my knowledge of them is limited, but if this is any indication, i'd say their bag is firmly in the territory of minimalism. With just two members (Tom Carter on guitar and Christina Carter on vox), their sound is not far removed from Low's experimental moments or something akin to Julee Cruse without the keyboards. Carter's guitar strums, chimes, and drones -- sometimes loudly so -- and what little percussion there is comes courtesy of him tapping or pounding on the guitar, and he drifts away in clouds of guitar tone and the occasional cluster of notes as Christina sings along in a high, droning falsetto that has more to do with meaning than actual words. It's a stark and beautiful, often haunting sound, and this is certainly an interesting place to find them -- which only proves that the ears behind the Blast are good ones. This is fucking brilliant and way beyond ultra-limited, and it comes in a nice DVD package with swell artwork, so i'd advise seeking it out while you still can.

I'm somewhat ashamed to say that prior to receiving JOY SHAPES, I'd never heard Charalimbides. I'd seen the name, but had never come across any of the music. It seems I have some catching-up to do.

Obligatory history: Charalambides has been together, in various two- and three-piece incarnations, since the early 90s. Since 1992 they've released a slew of cassettes, CDs, CD-Rs, and various pieces of vinyl for a series of labels including Stiltbreeze, Wholly Other (their own imprint), and most recently Kranky. [TMU: And don't forget the limited-as-fuck BEING AS IS on Crucial Blast.]

On JOY SHAPES, their second release for Kranky, the core duo of Christina (guitar, voice, bells) and Tom Carter (guitar, lap steel guitar, chimes, etc.) is augmented by Heather Leigh Murray on pedal steel guitar, vocals, and psaltery. (Q: What's a psaltery? A: One of these things.) Over the course of five extended improvisations the Carters and Murray conjure some of the most eerie, * haunting music you're likely to hear this side of an Angelo Badalementi score. What's most impressive is that they do it off the top of their heads, with a handful of instruments.

The first track, "Here Not Here," sets the tone for the album. A lone guitar enters playing a skeletal figure. The guitar is treated with a slight delay for maximum spookiness. Christina's voice comes in next, murmuring. A second guitar enters, sounding for all the world like it's crawling. As the song progresses, the second guitar is joined by what I'm guessing is a psaltery, while Christina's voice moves from spectral mumbling to deranged, desperate chanting. The rest of the album sticks pretty close to this blueprint, although the overall mood varies from piece to piece.

If you like your music minimal, your tempos glacial, and you think Low is too upbeat, then boy do I have a record for you. [N/A]

* My thesaurus (ROGET'S 21st CENTURY THESAURUS, in dictionary form, in case anyone is wondering) lists 17 synonyms for the word "eerie": "awesome, bizarre, crawly, creepy, fantastic, fearful, frightening, ghostly, mysterious, scary, spectral, strange, supernatural, superstitious, unearthly, uncanny, and weird." With the exception of "superstitious," they can all be applied to JOY SHAPES. "Ominous" and more than a few of its forty-odd synonyms ("clouded, dark, forbidding, gloomy, girm, haunting, minatory, sinister, suggestive, and threatening") also applies.

Charming Hostess -- EAT [Vaccination Records]

The long-awaited debut from this local Oakland, California all-female group. Imagine east European folk tunes (Hungarian, Bulgarian, Ladino,Yiddish) sung lovingly in an olde world meets acapella styled vocals way with prog rock- like instrumentation, all arranged by the group, and you'd be close. What is so amazing about this album is the diversity of material that holds together in a completely seamless way. This includesthe original compositions and even the inclusion of a rendition of a traditional African-American work song from Alabama. Further, I was struck by the deeper contrast found between the upbeat singing and mood of the music against that of the rather intense lyrics, of which in many cases are quite bleak, calling direct attention to a variety of negative social issues women are still regularly confronted with. For example,the traditional Hungarian song from Transylvania titled 'Give Him A Little Time' is about a marriage marred by miscommunications, alcoholism and rape. The liner notes add "original text includes the line 'nothing could be a greater sorrow and misery than two people who live together without love.' Discovering such lyrics is like a blow to the gut with a brick. And yet, it doesn't ruin the enjoyment of the music. Instead, it challenges one to pause and think. [yol]

Rhys Chatham -- DIE DONNERGOTTER [Homestead Records]

Okay, so this album is about a million years old (it actually came out in 1989, and of the three tracks here, two were recorded in 1986 and the other in 1981) -- i just stumbled across it and since the Band of Susans apparently worship at this guy's throne (and since i worship at the throne of the Band of Susans, natch), i'm gonna blab about it.... A little background for the uninitiated: Chatham started out as a flutist studying Sue Anne Kahn and subsequently came under the influence of composers such as Varese, Boulez, then Tony Conrad and microtonal fetishist LaMonte Young. In 1971, he started arranging shows at the Kitchen in New York, which became a haven for art-rock bizarreness of all kinds; then, in a bizarre move for an avant-garde composer, he turned toward the guitar as a compositional instrument after seeing the Ramones at CBGB's. He eventually formed the Rhys Chatham Ensemble, which at one time or another has included Glenn Branca (where do you think he got the idea to write stuff with millions of guitars at once, anyway?) and future members of Sonic Youth, Band of Susans, and Ut, amoung others.

So -- now that approximately 90% of DEAD ANGEL's readership is totally befuddled and saying "WUH? I never heard of ANY of these guys, this sounds like ART-ROCK, ooooooo nooooo, I WANT MY MOMMY!" -- we come to this album with the marvelously cryptic title (as best as i can tell, it means "the thunder of God," which would be most appropriate). The title track takes up all of Side A and includes not one guitar, or even two or three, but SIX of them. Once you get past the deliberately chattering, vaguely unfocused introduction (in which the guitars just ramble on in low-key fashion, seeming to play six different songs at once), the guitars all line up side by side and start playing melodic lines off each other, resulting in the sound of one IMMENSE guitar... panned in six directions at once. The result is like standing in a circle and hearing guitars, guitars, GUITARS no matter where you turn. Unless you've heard the Band of Susans, who work the same axis with half as many guitars, you've probably never heard anything like this. I wish i'd had the chance to see this live, mon.... (Two Susans play on this, by the way -- Robert Poss and Karen Haglof.)

"Waterloo No. 2" applies the same strategy -- unidirectional sound, minimalist composition, and heavily repeated figures -- to different instruments, in this case snare drum, trumpets, trombones, and keyboard. (Chatham himself plays one of the three trumpets.) Nowhere near as long as "Die Donnergotter" (which lasts FOREVER... which is cool by me, but most likely nightmarish for many others). "Guitar Trio" returns to the guitars (three of them this time, one in Chatham's hands), and locks three guitars and bass to a beat and forms an almighty riff that repeats over and over like a loop, going on... and on... and on... and on... and on.... And then, just for good measure, it goes on some MORE. Well, it's not quite THAT monochromatic, but close.... The variety here comes mainly from the natural harmonic overtones, which is most cool. Plus it's a REALLY GOOD riff, you know? So worship... throw used guitar picks at the feet of Rhys Chatham....

Rhys Chatham/Martin Wheeler -- NEON [NTone]

Oooo, too cool... i may have to change my pants now.... Everybody's favorite proponent of LOUD minimalism returns with Martin Wheeler (???) in tow. Wheeler lays down da funked-up machine beat and a sea of synth bleats, weird samples, and other electroschmooze, over which Chatham wields a mean trumpet run through a lot of processing gadgets. The results are... ah... [consults The Headless Sno-Cone Girl: "Am i allowed to say 'bad-ass' within the context of a review of an established composer of experimental music? No? Oh...."] ... real sharp. Stunning, even. "Charm" features a hypnotic, even danceable beat of serious proportions and some exquisitely deranged trumpet fury that, most of the time, sounds like anything and everything BUT a trumpet. "Ramatek" is a wee bit closer to "traditional" jazz, in tone at least, with the trumpet sounding more like a really zoned-out saxaphone over (in the middle part, at least) eerie synth washes and a convoluted beat. On "Hornithology" though, the heavy beat returns and the horns get even more bizarre, conjuring up scenes of night cats bopping after hours in a bar far, far in the future.... "Neon" is in more of a languid vein, opening with high-toned ambient sounds and seguing into a low, moody trumpet that has been warped out of shape. Clip-clop go the drums, "mmm mmm" go the synths, "wum da woo wah woo" goes the trumpet... hold it, ambient break... the trumpet returns... this is the sound of new jazz in the wee hours just before the sun begins to rise....

There is only one problem with this disc, actually -- it's too short! It's only about 22 minutes long, aaaieee -- and i want more! More! MORE! Perhaps the gods will favor us, and we can hope that more is on the way....

Well, it's about goddamn time, even if this is nothing more than a sampler for the forthcoming three-CD box set. Be forewarned, o my sweating li'l piglets -- given the incredibly long nature of Chatham's songs, this is a bit of a truncated sampler. With the exception of the eternally swank "Die Donnergotter" and "Guitar Cetet" (a bonus track not on the box set), all of the tracks on here are edited versions. This is somewhat annoying, especially since i've waited something like five fucking years to hear "An Angel Moves Too Fast To See," and here there's only a little over seven minutes of it. Nevertheless, it's about time someone paid tribute to the godlike Chatham by collecting up his obscure and out-of-print brilliance and putting it all in one place, remastered and everything (this version of "Die Donnergotter" totally smokes the Homestead version -- you can actually hear the bass! HEEWACK!), plus when the box set arrives it will include a 136-page book with piles o' pix and essays by the likes of Tony Conrad, Lee Ranaldo, and Chatham himself. And the full-length versions of all the tracks here and then some. And the complete, uncut premiere of "An Angel Moves Too Fast To See," performed by an orchestra of one hundred guitars. Truly i cannot begin to explicate how utterly bad-assed this is, okay? Now if they'll just hurry the fuck up and put the box set out... 33 Degrees is probably getting tired of me calling up every couple of weeks to ask if it's here yet.... Anyone who's ever puzzled over my fanaticism re: Chatham can now pick this up and hear what the fuss is about. And you should, particularly since it does cleverly have that one track that you probably can't find anywhere else. Then you too can be waiting for the box set to land and destroy the souls of a dying civilization.

It's about time this came out. Under discussion for years, this box set's release (rumored for years and finally scheduled for 2001, then 2002, then delayed numerous times) was apparently hampered by all sorts of dark financial hoodoo at Table of the Elements. Last year's release of the one-disc sampler A RHYS CHATHAM COMPENDIUM, with tantalizing fragments of songs appearing on the box set, one performed in its entirety, and one unreleased track, got everybody's attention and started the feeding frenzy. Whatever was going on behind the scenes has obviously been resolved, though, and this arrives in a beyond-swank package similar in design to the COMPENDIUM and in scope to the Tony Conrad set that came out in 1996. The ambitious packaging may explain the delay: Three individual cds (with cases and hep art, mainly treated photography by Robert Longo), a titanic and profusely illustrated 140-page booklet crammed full of essays by Tony Conrad, Lee Ranaldo, and Chatham himself, and a ridiculously explicit 96-page catalog that doubles as ToTE history primer, all housed in a sturdy and eye-catching slipcase. I'll admit the design and packaging are all very attractive (although I think printing up a a 96-page booklet-sized catalog on top of this printed excess might be a tad ridiculous for a label already having the financial jimjams), but the real meat is the three cds, containing all of Chatham's minimal pieces and spanning 1971 to 1989. All the material here has been extensively remastered for clarity and are a vast improvement over previous releases, especially in the case of "Die Donnergotter."

The first disc is taken up entirely by "Two Gongs," a long, droning piece originally composed in 1971 that lasts just over an hour -- the vast and rumbling sound of dark and shimmering waves of harmonic overtones, loud and plentiful, rising and falling and vibrating with unnerving potency. The otherworldly sound often resembles a darker and more formal Troum, using the sound (recorded live in 1989 by Phill Niblock at NYC's Experimental Intermedia) of two large Chinese gongs. Given massive amplification and the rich harmonic overtones available from such gongs, Chatham manages to erect a massive wall of sound. The harmonics, blown up to jet-engine volume, ripple and shriek with thick, buzzing overtones that vary in intensity and predictability given the force and manner in which the gong-whackers do their thing. Smooth. I'll bet this made people vibrate like tuning forks until they heaved when he did this... wish I'd been there.

The second disc is a pretty thorough collection of pieces from Chatham's NYC "rock" period (1977-1986), including "Guitar Trio" (1977), "Waterloo No. 2" (1986), "Drastic Classicism" (1982), "Massacre on MacDougal Street" (1982), and what is probably his most well-known work, "Die Donnergotter" (1986). This is pretty impressive stuff, both for its sound and its pedigree (comb the credits carefully and you'll find present and future members of Swans, Helmet, Band of Susans, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth alongside luminaries like Anton Fier (Golden Palominos), all a critical points of their own place in music history) -- long, ornate, droning exercises in minimalist one- or two-chord drone (provided at times by guitar, tuba, brass or wind instruments, etc., in varying combinations) that bulldoze you with towers of sound in hypnotizing fashion. The five tracks assembled make an excellent introductory primer to Chatham, especially given the impressive remastering job, which greatly enhances the clarity of everything on the box set.

More interesting, though, is the third disc, the previously-unreleased live recording of the 1989 composition for 100 guitars, "An Angel Moves Too Fast To See." The sound is not too far removed from the thundering drone-rock of "Die Donnergotter" and "Guitar Trio," but with 100 guitars moving in concert over a minimalist drum and bass rhythm section, it has a massive and drifting quality that expands on the sound originally offered up in the earlier works. The lengthy piece is broken up into five pieces (the first four ranging from approximately five to seven minutes each, the last part clocking in at 14:48), each exploring different facets of the possibilities of so many interlocking guitars, all of them sounding quite loud. As with the other two discs, the overall sound quality of the piece (which was recorded and mixed in several places in 1997) is excellent. I'll bet this was entertaining to see live.

You can't get much better than this in a box set. Even if you've never heard of Rhys Chatham, if you're hep to Branca, Swans, Sonic Youth, Band of Susans, NYC noise-rock, and the whole punk / new wave scene of the 70s and 80s in general, you definitely should own this. The merely curious may want to investigate the shorter (and less expensive) compendium first. Either way, everyone should hear Chatham's brilliant (and brilliantly loud) adventures in minimalism and body-shaking beat rock. This is probably the simplest place to start. Get it while you can, ToTE box sets have a way of going out of print faster than you can blink....

Cheer Accident -- THE WHY ALBUM [Complacency]

This is an enigmatic one. Hard to tell who's playing on it since the liner notes list everybody by first name only, although the "Thymme" is indeed Thymme Jones, the thump god behind recent releases by Illusion of Safety, Brise Glace, and Yona-Kit, among others. And this is pop album. Sort of. The title's play on THE WHITE ALBUM is not even remotely accidental; this all sounds very Beatlesque, assuming of course that the Beatles had been into Brise Glace and similar avant-styled bands.

Of course, this is only "pop" in the sense that the songs are reasonably short, well-crafted, the playing impeccable, etc. -- even then, they're still too weird to really get played on the radio. Cheer-Accident has an eccentric sense of humor that combines a pleasant pop style with occasional bursts of dissonance and/or bizarre changes in tempo or texture; just about the point where you become convinced that any given song could make it on commercial radio, they "blow it" with some left-field turn straight off a cliff.

They're basically having lots of fun fucking with your head; like the best inside jokes, they play it with such a straight face that you never quite manage to figure out if they're serious about this pop thing or sending it up. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle... But they're still fucking with your head. Take "Transposition," for instance... which is followed by "Transposition (same mix)"... which is in turn followed by "Transposition (same mix)." They are all the same. Yet they are all different. And no, i'm not going to explain that, either. It cannot be explained; it merely is. It is zen. Zen it is.

Or consider "You Never Bothered To Know Me," whose notes helpfully explain that "this song contains no metaphors." Uhhhh... Cage would have approved. And the anti-lyrics on "Pockets" ("What a pal! He's reinvented friendship! When the thumb's pressed down firmly, everything will be OK") lead me to suspect this is some elaborately clever lurch in the direction of dada... or surrealism... or maybe situationism... aaaah, but it still SOUNDS good, so all these things are meaningless. I'll bet you can really have a lot of fun messing with people's minds with this CD, though. And even if you don't get into the "concept," the music itself is stellar, so you could just... uh... listen to the disc....

Cheer-Accident -- NOT A FOOD [Pravda Records]

Cheer-Accident return, this time to ROCK. More or less, anyway. We'll readily grant their their ideas about "rocking" are a wee bit left of center to say, White Zombie's, but nevertheless, this is a spiffy disc. For those not in the know, Cheer-Accident is Thymme Jones (Brise-Glace, Yona-Kit, etc.) and various other arty hooligans. This is only like their fourth album in ten or twelve years -- prolific they ain't -- but it's pretty swank nonetheless. Their "return" to straight-ahead rock (well, sort of) is probably helped immensely by the fact they Steve "yes, i know i look like a stickman, now fuck off" Albini sat behind the mixing desk for this one.

"Even Has A Half-Life" makes a perfect opener -- fuzzy guitars, mid-tempo drums in a sort-of jazzy vein, majestic "introductory" kind of stuff... it just FEELS like a prelude, you know? Nothing staggering in its own right, but a good indicator of what's to come. And things get thick in a hurry... "Grow" winds and turns with snakelike guitars, horns (?), and vocals buried so deep down in the mix that you might not even notice they're even there. Things start getting flat-out brilliant, though, with the third track. First off, they get billions of bonus points for the title: "Modestly Clothed, Did She Trouble You?" I'm kicking myself for not having thought of it first. Then the song itself... Rumbling bass, a steady beat, rhythmic bursts of feedback following my thunderous riffing, then chime-guitar riffing, like a savage mole burrowing deeper into its hole, loud and weird is the way i like it and this will DO. You could dig tunnels to China with this. "Nutrition" is a more standard rockfest, but "30 Seconds of Weightlessness" brings back the mid- tempo beat and chime guitars for more swinging coolness. "King Cheezamin" is just plain weird -- strange, dislocated beat, abrupt start and stop rhythms, a mildly deranged vocal running through the whole thing, horns, other odd behavior... and then the whole thing ends with everybody shouting "WAAAAH!" as the rhythm section goes berserk, only after each new shout the guitars fade away while the vox stays the same. Eccentric, to say the least.

Hot on the heels of that one, "Grow II" fades up, only this time it's totally out of control, rockin' like a pee dog with pure blinding guitar madness... and just as it's starting to really COOK, it does something totally unexpected (what, i'll let you find out for yourself). The last thing on here is a version of "Even..." remixed by MC Shapoopy (hmmm...) that's just completely fucked up, you have to hear it to understand what I mean. It sounds like they shot it full of holes with a machine gun. These cats are CRAZY, mon... and it's a damn good thing, too....

Cheer Accident -- ENDURING THE AMERICAN DREAM [Pravda]

Even for Cheer-Accident, this is a mighty thick slab o' strangeness. A while back ago i was debating (arguing?) with the esteemed Soddy that the next obvious step in the noise sweepstakes was to begin sculpting actual songs out of noise. I forget what the upshot of our discussion was (most likely it degenerated into discussing whether or not Merzbow is still worth paying attention to these days), but apparently that day is HERE. For that concept is pretty much what's happening on this disc. The mighty Thymme Jones (Brise-Glace, Tony Conrad, Illusion of Safety, Yona-Kit, blah blah blah) and Dylan Posa (Brise-Glace, Tony Conrad, The Flying Luttenbachers, and so on) have joined forces with a small army of like-minded hooligans to sculpt a towering collage of repetitive drone, weird noises, ambient drumming, the occasional actual songlet, and more weirdness is divided into 14 parts but is essentially one long piece.

The ambition starts with the looping cyclodrone of "Vacuum," an eerie cycling hum imbedded with other, barely audible instrumentation that goes on for nearly eight minutes before yielding to "The Law of Attraction," where the dronefest recedes into the background enough to allow a solo piano piece to be heard. Weird noises and odd percussion start out in the backgorund of "A Shallow Stream" as a distorted trumpet plays, then the noises overwhelm the trumpet, then both go away together as really loud drums pound away, then all of a sudden there it is: "Dismantling the Berlin Waltz," an actually honest-to-God piano waltz with oblique lyrics about the Berlin Wall, economics, and the scary byproducts of economic progress ("the biggest mall in the world is / being built across the street from / what was the biggest mall in the world"). Meanwhile, weird piano runs abound, then there's a really peculiar percussion breakdown before the waltz resumes -- and it all ends with a lot of honking guitar squee. Whew! But it's NOT FINISHED... there's a couple of measures of what appear to be a totally different song, then the sound of a CD hanging up... for about the next minute or so. That fades out into "Failure," a piano ballad (with odd sonic effluvia hovering way in the background) that wouldn't have been out of place on THE WHY ALBUM. It goes on like this, shifting gears like mad, yet somehow holding together as a whole. Neat trick.

Actually, the noise-sculpture nightmare i expounded upon is a bit of a misnomer; it's probably more accurate to say that the album starts off noisy, then gradually gives way to "standard" (assuming you can claim that of anything Cheer-Accident does and still keep a straight face) pop tunes before the noise creeps back in again. "God's Clinic," in fact, is about the closest they come to a "conventional" song... but it segues into "A Hate Which Grows," possibly the scariest thing on here, which begins with a shrill drilling noise obscuring a piano figure in the background. As the piano dies away, the noise grows louder, until it's the sound of robot hummingbirds being shredded in a jumbo jet turbine -- play this loud enough and i promise it will permanently damage your hearing, plus give you a serious case of vertigo besides. Other stuff happens (including lyrics; see below), but it's hard to tell what it IS with all that terrifying racket going on. Eventually the noise recedes, but by that time there's an ocean of bass waves churning in slow motion -- how the fuck they managed to mix this stuff is beyond me, mon -- and then it's just the screeching noise again, as an actual song (you know, with drums and guitars and words and stuff) begins to emerge. Guitarist Dylan Posa is a god. It all gives way to Thymme and his piano as he recites the lyrics, then everything fades back in and Posa is riffing in most sinister fashion as it all fades out (for real this time). It would be amazing (well, it IS amazing), if it weren't for the fact that the complex, layered tower of construction is standard operating procedure for these guys....

Now, the fact that it took me over 200 words just to describe that one song should make it obvious that it's all too complex to go into great detail for much longer. There is no real formula to how they move from song to song for the rest of the album, or even between parts of an individual song; this is one of the most genuinely unpredictable bands EVER, okay? The most cool stuff of what ends the album is mostly on "Frozen" (nifty guitars and guitar/piano/trumpet harmonizing), "Metaphysical" (swell lyrics, more piano, forbidding noises in the background), "Exit" (they actually rock! well, sort of), and "1/30/94," with razor-wire guitar riffing and boss drumming that just gets abruptly slashed into nothingness to end it all.

Judging from the lyrics, i'd guess Cheer-Accident aren't real impressed with where the country seems to be heading (hence the title); as it happens, neither am i, so they've won me over with this cheerless move, heh. My favorite lyrics are the entirety of "A Hate Which Grows": "I scandalize history / I rape the statue of liberty / beat her about the head and face." I'm not sure whose voice they're emulating here, but it sounds pretty damn ominous, doesn't it? The rest of the lyrics are all pretty grim too -- lots of stuff about failure and murder and death and destruction and how the whole country will soon lie in ruins. My, they're a worried bunch. However, their lyrics are a lot more incisive, caustic, and intelligent than the like-minded spoo generated by countless death-metal bands. Admit it, how can you fail to impressed by lines like "the public and private sectors collide / as the corporations buy up the night / we lie under the sign and embrace / as they sell us the old dream of a new god"? You know, Killing Joke used to write stuff like this, before they decided they'd rather be heavy-metal stooges for the Alternative Nation.

I sure hope Pravda keeps sending me new discs by these guys; i have no idea where they're headed next (of course, they probably don't either), but i'd sure as hell hate to miss it....

Chicago's finest art-rock band turned out one of the most stunning albums ever a few years back with their last official full-length disc, ENDURING THE AMERICAN DREAM, an album so visionary and innovative that it will probably be regarded ten years down the road with the same reverence as the Velvet Underground's first album commands now. (I personally think it's the best and most successfully ambitious albums of the late twentieth century, myself. It's certainly in DEAD ANGEL's top five of all time.) So... what can they do for an encore?

Their dilemma is compounded by that fact that guitarist/engineer/primary cog Phil Bonnet, a swell guy in his own right, unfortunately died in February of 1999, shortly after the band finished work on TRADING BALLOONS (which was subsequently released in a private, limited edition on CD-R). In light of Phil's death and the sheer impossibility of "following" something as monumental as ENDURING THE AMERICAN DREAM, the band has made the most sensible move possible: they have sidestepped the matter completely with an album of bits and pieces recorded prior to Phil's death featuring his guitar work. Make no mistake, this is the most guitar-oriented album they've done in some time (at times it bears a remarkable resemblance in sound and construction to NOT A FOOD, their "rock" album), although it's full of unexpected and arcane structural turns -- songs begin abruptly, revolve around a central riff for a while, then either peter out into something totally unrelated or switch gears with equal abruptness. The entire album (there are only five tracks, and one is a version/reductionist snippet and/or version of the leadoff track "Graphic Depression" that lasts less than a minute) moves like a panorama of disparate pieces that, taken together, form an aggregate whole more indicative of a single shifting track rather than five actual songs. What's interesting is that the songs themselves (which, while having individual titles, actually come closer to forming movements in a much larger, album-sized single piece) come from a wide variety of sources. "Graphic Depression" was recorded at Electrical Audio in May of 1997 and mixed there two years later by Steve Albini; "Insomnia" was recorded and mixed in Thymme Jones' Chicago apartment in April of 1999; "Graphic Depression" (the short one) is a microcasette recording by Jim Drummond; "Post-Premature" is a live performance from St. Louis (10/8/98) recorded by Phil on a Wollensak that actually segues into ANOTHER live performance (Chicago, 5/31/98) recorded at the Beat Kitchen by Aadam Jacobs, and "Salad Days" is a studio piece recorded at Solid Sound on 1/31/99 by Phil (one of his last recordings) with overdubs that were recorded/mixed at Electrical Audio in April of that year with Albini's assistance.

With such a dizzying collection of sound sources, you'd expect this to sound far more chaotic than it actually does, but in fact, were you unaware of these details, you'd never know the difference. Part of this is due to Cheer-Accident's cut-up sound approach to begin with -- this wild variation in sound/structure/movement is their hallmark, one that this time in only aided by the variety in sound sources. But since the fidelity is swank through even the most "curious" of moments (the part captured on microcassette sounds much better than you'd have any right to expect given the source, for instance), the recording notes are meaningless. What's important is that they have taken all of these elements, these movements, and assembled them in such a fashion as to form a long-playing symphony of sorts. I'd like to point out that this is the most instrumental and lyricless work they've done in quite a while (although the sentiment is shared on the "unofficial" TRADING BALLOONS, which i now think may well have been a test-run for this disc, or perhaps outtakes that make it a companion release). Next to the guitars, the most prominent instruments are Jones' piano and trumpet, which are put to good use on "Insomnia" (my favorite track) and "Salad Days" (another excellent track).

The more i listen to this, the more convinced i become that maybe it's more than just a homage to Phil -- that maybe, after critical examination, this is the most logical springboard from ...DREAM. While they've tabled the concept moves for the moment and the noise has receded somewhat, otherwise many of the musical themes established on that album reappear here, only in a more "accessible" form. In that sense, they may have achieved the inexplicable -- an album that not only holds up next to a previous, brilliant one, but expands on where it left off while simulataneouly being more accessible. Amazing. What tricks will they pull out from under their collective hat next? I await the next illuminating salvo....

Everybody's favorite collection of Windy City eccentrics returns with... um... well... (much head-scratching) well, i guess you'd call it a lot... hmmmm... bizarre shit comes to mind.... Let's consult the liner notes, shall we? It sez there that this is the first installment of a proposed series of recordings made at home and in their practice space between 1995 and 1999. So what you have, then, is essentially a lot of episodes of the Cheer-Ax fucking around. Of course, since they're pretty cryptic even when they're playing it "straight," as you can imagine, when they're goofing about they are really out there. This is one of the weirdest things you'll ever hear -- tiny snippets of one lone guy noodling with a keyboard or trumpet or whatever suddenly segues into near-symphonic keyboard drone and mysterious wailing, trumpets appear, voices appear, piano comes and goes, sometimes the songs (eleven of them, technically speaking) even resemble actual songs... it's all over the map, o my trembling sweaty children. Unpredictability is the main item on the menu here. Some of them are just plain whacked-out -- "86 Career Man," essentially their delirious interpretation of doo-wop in which they chant the title over and over ad infinitum over a nifty beat and barrelhouse piano, certainly qualifies -- while others like "Aung Sang" actually could have made it onto one of the official albums (and might yet in the future, who knows). There's a lot of swell vocal harmonizing all over the place, too, which is always a good thing, plus Thymme drags out the trumpet for a fine blast or two on five songs, always a pleasure to hear. Given the time-frame involved, you also get to hear the still-missed Phil Bonnet doing his thing from time to time (whatever that thing happens to be at the moment). Fair warning, though -- there is no "theme" at work here (other than the theme of guys with strange ideas about music exercising said impulses to great abandon), and those not yet familiar with the ways of the Ax may find this extremely unnerving in its otherness. But that's okay; enduring willfully unorthodox music builds character... try it, you'll like it....

The idea here is, as the liner notes put it, to bridge the gap between their ridiculous accumulation of recorded output and the relative paucity of commercially-available listening. You can view this as a "behind-the-scenes" look at the band and their creative process if you're so inclined, or you can chalk it up to a need to keep the name alive in between "official" recordings. Either way, it's a pretty essential addition to the Cheer-Ax canon. (Then again, is there a Cheer-Ax recording that is not essential? It's a zen question, isn't it? A trick question, yes, like asking if it's possible to not like Joe Perry....) Bonus points for including lots of Jeff Libersher's incredibly fucked-up id-loathing artwork, too. Own it or be hopelessly out of touch.

Cheer-Accident/Star*Star -- split 7" [Super 800]

How strange -- the C-A side is essentially a hyperspeed nuclear-blast assault with titan-blur drumming that is occasionally (abruptly!) intercut with a tinkly piano ballad or else lumbering sheets of droning noise. It quite often sounds like three or four different songs are colliding at the same time. About midway through it sort of turns into an actual song (i think) with the chanted chorus "IN-DI-VID-U-AL-ITY," but then that too gets whisked away in favor of something else. Even for these guys, this is definitely... ah... way out in left field. The flip side sounds sort of like one of the artier Black Sabbath tunes left out in the sun to warp, at least in the beginning; eventually it revs up to pogo-speed with weird reedy circular riffing that fades out into odd noises. Eventually another fast segment fades back in, only to cut off abruptly, leading me to strongly suspect that Star*Star is really a secret alter-ego of Cheer- Accident. At any rate, it's damned strange. Dunno, maybe it's an art statement about the short attention-span of the MTV generation....

Mein gott in her himmel! Where has this band been all my life? [THS-CG: Drinking coffee in nightclubs in Toronto, you hopeless twit.] They (Julie Park and Daniel Barida, doin' it all themselves) sound like a cross between Blondie and Shonen Knife with all the extraneous parts left out -- actually, they sound like a lot of things, but that'll do for a start. In fact, they sound like nothing less than pure, perfect pop. Songs like "Kyopo" and "Get Outside" are almost a throwback to the classic era of 80s synth-pop, back when music was sometimes actually FUN instead of an endless landslide of bands wallowing in subterranean misery. (Hey, I like subterranean misery as much as the next maladjusted maggot, but a steady diet of it makes yer intestines shrivel up, boys and girls.) They sound most like Blondie on "Limelight," with the kind of reggae-gone-disco beat Blondie used to do so well and a layer of frosted guitars and string-happy synths on top. The dreamy "Nocturne" is the kind of new-wave pop ballad that used to make the radio so much fun to listen to before it became overrun with screaming yoyos bent on displaying the bottomless depths of their boring angst. "Frown" makes me realize what makes this band sound so much different than others out there right now -- everything sounds it was recorded on helium. This is godlike. I can hardly wait for the full-length album. (As a sidenote, it doesn't hurt that Julie is gorgeous and looks most stylish in thigh-high boots.)

Just to prove that artists are forever inexplicable, it appears through recent interviews that Chicklet were actually sort of disturbed by all the happy reviews they got for their previous EP. Apparently they were concerned that people would mistake them for a fluffy shiny pop band of little or no consequence. Well, there's no denying that this album is a fair shade moodier than LEMON CHANDELIERS was; the inclusion of lyrics this time around make their leanings a bit clearer (they apparently favor melancholy a lot more than you would have previously guessed). While this kind of worrying is irrelevant to me -- i though the EP was fine -- it's obvious that taking the time to make their intentions a bit clearer has resulted in more attention to detail this time around. While their basic sound isn't all that different this time out, they've taken pains to fill out the arrangement with wee but critical flourishes and have largely stayed away from the larger-than-life mixing strategies of the EP. The results, particularly on opening tracks "Superficial" and "Firecracker," are more subtle and muted songs that offer more hidden pleasures to discover on repeated listenings, rather than putting everything out at face value the first time around. Without abandoning their fine-tuned sense of melody (their main strength), they have moved in a bit more of an introspective direction without descending fully into their navels, and the results are excellent.

One of the other things that's apparently been bothering them are repeated comparisons to 4AD bands, particularly Lush; ironically , this never even occurred to me while listening to LEMON CHANDELIERS, but now that they've brought it up, the comparison does come to mind on some of the songs, particularly "Elastic" -- but i'd say it was the Lush of SPLIT rather than SPOOKY, which is a better deal as far as i'm concerned. And i don't think they need to worry about being mistaken for Lush imitators; the influence may be there, but they certainly sound far more like Chicklet than Lush. In fact, i think Daniel Barida's wall-o'-guitar moves at times are more reflective of a slowed-down Curve, especially on "White Flag." Nevertheless, the comparisons must have gnawed at them, because it takes fully six songs (when they reach "Quake") for them to relent and approximate the EP's sound, to fine effect, natch. I find it interesting that they're willing to be daring enough to mix Julie Park's voice down (in defiance of prevailing pop standards, and most of their other tunes) on "Let Me Go (My Own Way)." They also artfully demonstrate the ability to rock when they so desire on "Sleepwalking," which is not only driven by uberfuzz guitar, but boasts tremendous sizzling leads between the verses that make me want to get up from my chair and set you on fire, sir or madam. They should more more songs like this one. (They do come close with "Shark's Smile," which has the fuzzy guitars but not so much of the drive.) Which is not to say they should stop doing songs like the lovely "Afterstorm," though -- chiming glockenspiel (???), wavelike basslines, and muted guitar make for serious audio perfection. I approve. Let us hope they continue their so-far prolific pace and thus grace us with many more such discs as soon as possible.

This is the first full-length CD by Chikmountain, a band from Washington, DC who specialize in what they call "hardcore ambient sound collage." Which is to say it's tons of found sound and noises and grunting and sonic filth slathered across the tracks in collage fashion. Some tracks are more noisy than others -- "Electric Toadjuice Experiment" is a wild, chaotic brew of noises, samples, and chatter coming from all directions -- while others like "Where Am I" approach being actual songs with a distinct rhythm and movements (in this case, a shuffling "beat" and different cycles of sounds and vaguely pornographic grunting over it). "The Room" is an ominous collection of chunga-chunga rhythms at the bottom and grunting, shouting, snippets of conversation, and a sonic landslide at the top; a similar effect is at work on "Turn Up The Music (The Air Conditioner's Mocking Me)" but in a higher register and with a different bank of sounds. "Wronghole," however, actually sounds like a song -- rather than pure collage -- even though it's working in the same fashion with loops of rhythmic sound and bits 'n pieces all collaged together. It reminds me of something Distorted Pony might have done in their early stages....

They embrace ambience (sort of) on "Revelation 101," with slow, droning loops and static that form the backdrop for sampled voices -- now this sounds like something that would have been at home on one of the early Pain Teens cassettes. Ditto for "Drums," which sounds pretty much like what the title indicates -- distorted drums and overmodulated guitar scratching, pounding and crashing away like natives in the Amazon Basin wrecked on Quualudes and Ripple. By the time the final track "Use Once and Discard" makes its play like a demented marching band assembled from bass rumble, drum loops, crowd noises, and God knows what else, another point of reference occurs to me: the Evolution Control Committee. Chikmountain aren't quite as consciously (and self-referentially) "clever" as ECC, but they're definitely operating in the same territory. Case in point -- halfway through the aforementioned song, all the crashing and thrashing stops abruptly for a sample of a man saying "I was trying to listen to a record." And then the crashing and thrashing resumes. A baroque sense of humor, yes....

TG grows bored enough to begin masturbating with her extremely phallic (and extremely large) pistol. Neddal is so unnerved by this that he finds he must look away. Fortunately for him, it's time for another short review:

N/A: Waves of distortion, big dissonant chords, mellow vocals, a sense of melancholy.... This is the kind of record you put on when you want to impress nerdy-girls.

TG: Nerdy-girls? What the fuck are you talking about?

N/A: Go here and you'll see.... [n/a]

Christine 23 Onna -- SPACE AGE BATCHELOR PAD PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC [Insignif.]

Bombs explode like peaches raining from the cobalt sky as Suprajets collide into mountains while strafing all of the countryside and cutting tiny li'l rabbits into furry confetti. "Yip yip!" one screams as he dies. "Mean Mr. Air Force Maggot!" Meanwhile, back at the ranch, it was a dark and stormy night when a shot rang out! But back at the hospital, the girl with the distended earlobes wondered just when MANNIX went off the air --

No... wait... hold on. Wrong ambience. [searches for script] "ALL RIGHT, WHO RAN OFF WITH THE GODDAMN SCRIPT?" Uh oh... gonna have to wing it... uhhh... uhhhh... think topical, think topical....

TAKE TWO:

Suddenly the leader of the free world, Bill "Free My Willy" Clinton, bursts into the room holding a thick Polish salami! With Liz Glawoski holding on to the other end!

[Headless Sno-Cone Girl: "What the HELL are you BABBLING about?"]

Uhhhh... um... no. Let's try again....

TAKE THREE:

More black-suited Overmen than you can shake a stick at, all carrying lifetime subscriptions to THE WATCHTOWER, poured through the door like [insert ridiculous metaphor here, preferably involving gratuitous and unnecessary references to leather or vinyl or rubber skirts]. The lead Overman, looking suspiciously like James Wood on a bad hair day, waggled a finger at Captain 4-Track in menacing fashion. "AH-HA!" he sneered. "Ve are ze Overmen, merchants of ze napalm death love ma-zheen! Ve will dismember you and fuck your wench in the tight tranzpahrent zoot ahnd make you listen to MARIAH CAREY RECORDS! You cah-not EZCAPE! Hahahahahahahahahahaha!"

"AAIIIGH!" TASCAM-Girl shouted, gesticulating wildly to the Captain. "QUICK! Hand me the Freem Gun!"

He tossed her an item from the bag; she aimed it with no results, blinked, then bounced it off his head. "DAMMIT! This isn't the Freem Gun, you idiot -- this is my VIBRATOR! What do think I'm gonna do with that, FUCK 'em to death?"

"No, I thought perhaps you'd kill them with your snotty mouth."

[Headless Sno-Cone Girl: "My GOD, it defies LOGIC... I can't believe you are wasting everybody's time with this CRAP. Are you going to review the goddamn record OR WHAT?"]

Uhhhhh.... ummmm... [looks at watch, realizes deadline is overdue] Uh, i think we're going to save this one for the next issue....

Christine 23 Onna -- SPACE AGE BATCHELOR PAD PSYCHEDELIC MUSIC [Insignificant]

[Off in the wings, the HS-CG is berating the moonunit for his shoddy performance on this review in the previous issue. "Or should we call it NON-review?" she screams. "You winged it with a presidential dick joke! I've never been so embarassed! Well, you better not fuck it up THIS time!"

The stage manager appears. "Awright, yer on buddy."]

[Moon Unit is illuminated by a lone beam of pure white light.]

Uh... okay, um... [checks his notes] Well, i guess the joke about the Princess running from the paparazzi would be in bad taste now... um... so i guess you'll be wanting to know about Christine 23 Onna, then. [coughs violently as THS-CG prods him in the ribs with a meat fork] Yes, i'm going dammit, leave me the fuck ALONE! Anyway... uh... where was i? Oh yah, the Onna. This is actually an ongoing collaboration between Fusao Toda of the divinely godlike Angel'in Heavy Syrup and Masonna, that guy with the long hair who shrieks and makes ear-melting funny noises and hurls himself around the stage so violently that one hopes he has a good health insurance plan or something. They first surfaced on the compilation THE DARK SIDE OF THE BRAIN with "Theme of Christine" and "Space Hippie"; both of those tracks appear here as well (the first is remixed), along with five other tracks. All of the tracks are largely centered around Fusao running her guitar through a million efx boxes while Maso does puzzling and semi-noisy things with a synthesizer and sampler.

"A New Dawn in Mexico" sounds like the demented soundtrack for a low- budget Hitchock ripoff that's been tragically brutalized in the mastering process; heavily reverbed and delayed hypno-riffs are obscured by a thin layer of pink noise and other weirdness. That flows into the remixed version of "Theme of Christine," where Fusao's almost-but-not-quite acoustic fingerpicked guitar is augmented by ominous synth wails and other unidentifiable stuff. It makes me kind of sleepy (although that could be related to the late hour at which i tend to scribble off these vaguely incoherent rants). Some brutally mutant drenched-in-reverb slide guitar shows up on "New Caledonia," along with some forbidding catastrophic noises and incoherent ranting. The most interesting track on here is probably "Cherry 2000" (possibly in homage to the infamous Cherry Poptart, beloved by dirty-minded perverts on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific?), which sounds sort of like Aube gone psychadelic, if you can even imagine such a thing. Or maybe Aube colliding with Coltrane during a jam session between Amon Duul and Can. Who the hell knows? It's pretty damn intriguing, tho, in its monolithic repetitiveness....

So now comes the burning question (i know you've been lying awake for months waiting for me to answer it): is it, you know, WORTHY? Well... it's okay. While the album's not bad by any means, it's not necessarily all that brilliant either; the results of this inspired meeting of noise and psych are not quite as insistently tremendous as one might hope. It's primarily a curiosity of sorts, and probably mostly of interest to obsessive collectors of Masonna and/or Angel'in Heavy Syrup (three guesses as to which axis caused moi to pick it up, and the first two don't count). There's not enough pure noise content on here to really fulfill the appetites of your average noisehead, and the psych portion is a little undercooked. Approach carefully... if you haven't heard them before, you probably want to listen before you buy.

Incidentally, the vinyl itself is translucent pink (how cute) and marblized, and... and... * choke, splutter * has no fucking label, so you can't easily tell which side is which. Aw come on PLEEZ, will you people START PUTTING GODDAMN LABELS ON YOUR ALBUMS SO I CAN TELL WHICH SIDE IS WHICH? Gah... whoever started this trend needs to be beaten down with a pickaxe. That's almost as bad as failing to note on singles whether they should be played at 33-1/3 or 45 rpm. Dammit my life is COMPLICATED ENOUGH without having to try to figure out what the hell is playing or if it's even the right SPEED....

Chug -- KISSER (ep) (Flying Nun)

Cool cool cool fuzzypop from New Zealand, six songs and they all rock. "Oozing" is a straight-ahead chug rocker, good enough, but "Flowers" sports a really warped tremelo-riff that's both really weird and insanely catchy. Plus, who can resist lyrics like "We climbed for hours/ Looking for the fucking flowers/ And I, I, I love nature too"? Norma O'Malley sings most of the time (and plays organ and guitar), although bassist/guitarist Alf Danielson pops in to sing from time to time. "Horses" is slower, moodier, helping vary the pace a bit; "Gunnera" picks up the chug (there's that word again!) factor. The closing track, "Silver," goes on about the moon and is mondo cool itself. The whole thing is great. You can tell I like them....

I have finally put my finger on why the Japanese musicians (even transplants like these NYC women, and when you get right down to it, NYC is kind of a planet into itself, isn't it, so see, it's all the same) sound so much cooler at whatever genre they're currently plundering than their stiffy-pursuing American counterparts. It's not because they steal so liberally (hey, stupid Anglo boyz do that too), or even because they do it with so much flair (all these jagged-sounding rap-funk-metal-salsa-etc. bands have more "flair" than one can even begin to contemplate, and they're all still mostly unlistenable), or even because they steal from so many different places at once (the Mixmaster school of musical theory just doesn't seem to work as often in American hands -- the VU may be hip and all, but "European Son" is still one of the most gloriously unlistenable things ever smudged onto magnetic tape). No, it's because they're much less self-conscious about it. No American whitebread musician would try to squeeze doowop, thunderous metal drums welded to hip-hop beats, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, guitars from Mars, Funkadelic bass, yelping from a birdcage and operatic wailing, Morricone riffs, and more into a single song unless he were deliberately trying to be "arty" and "ironic"... but the Japanese in particular seem to be vested in a peculiar kind of musical innocence that a) allows them to even CONCEIVE of such monstrous creations and b) completely disregard irony or history or tradition and all that spoo in favor of the timeless credo of "if it makes you feel good baby, then let's DO IT." (Mix and match wildly disparate musical chunkets, that is.)

So this is how we arrive at Cibo Matto, then -- two young NYC ladies (well, younger than me, anyway) twisted enough to not only imagine hip-hop should be grafted onto Morricone samples and other weird junk, but tuff enough to make it actually WORK. Plus they have a tremendous obsession with food, almost as bad as my own obsession with angels and death, a deep psychotic pathological thing that borders on the obnoxious, which is of course absolutely fine by me. Since they unleashed the titanic VIVA LE WOMAN on us last year, they've found the time to record with other likeminded hipsters as Butter 08, remix a bunch o' goodies for Yoko Ono, tour, eat a lot, and tour some more. Somewhere in all of that they managed to lay down the nine tracks here, with the help of some equally deranged musicians. And no, i have no idea what the EP title means.

And oh yeah, some guy by the name o' Sean Lennon (you know, the string- diddling offspring of Mr. Lennon and Ms. Ono, the one who looks more like his mama and doesn't make goofy vapid cheezpop) pops up on all but four of the tracks here. He's pretty good, by the way. So good, in fact, that i think he should give up the funk or whatever else the fuck it is he's doing (unless it involves making ugly skronking noises in his mama's band, 'cause she just be so total nuclear wastespew GO, honeychile) and join the food- lusting babes on a permanent basis. Think of it! Imagine it! SAVOR THAT NOTION... Sean Ono Lennon in a white zoot suit out to HERE with those tiny li'l round shades and a big stylin' pimp hat slouched back lookin' badass surrounded by the Dynamic Duo of Rising Sun Doom, All Hail The Emperor RIGHT FUCKING NOW Daddy-o, both of 'em dolled up in haystack hairdos and low-cut dresses and microskirts slit up to THERE and carrying tiny pearl- handled .32s like that scary chick in all those killer blaxplotation flicks while Morricone riffs morphing into "The Theme From SHAFT or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Scaring Conserative White Protestants and Embrace Lurid Fashion Styles and Be a Bad Ass Motherfucker with a Gun" play in the background and as they strut through the musical ghetto in pumped-up air Jordan stiletto heels, the restless natives chant "yo mama satan, yo mama satan, you be so fine, i digs yo Cadillac baby...."

After all, this IS a bunch of people who once wrote and performed a song called "Butterfucker." (It's on the Butter 08 album, for those of you who care. And no, i haven't heard it, but the title ALONE assures it godhead status. The song, that is. The song title. Not the album title. The song title. Are we clear on this now? Good.)

But we weren't discussing my unseemly Shaft fixation, were we? That'll have to wait for another issue, alas (finally, something new to fear). No, we were discussing SUPER RELAX, and i'm sure you thought i was never going to actually mention what's ON the damn thing after all that senseless blather, did you? HA! Fooled again! What we have here is one song from VIVA LE WOMAN ("Sugar Water"), three remixes of the same, and five new songs, some of which are deeply weird and one of which is a perversely chirpy deconstruction of The Rolling Stones' "Sing This All Together." I'm kind of dubious as to the actual need for four versions of "Sugar Water," which isn't even the strongest track on the album for Pooky's sake, but the version remixed by Mike D., Russell Simins, and some guy i never heard of is so thunderous (big, big drums that will improve your car's gas mileage by reducing the amount of time it actually spends in contact with the road) and crazed with its percussion that i'm inclined to forgive them for this. (Even though i really wanted to hear a remix of "White Pepper Ice Cream.") "Spoon" has a really swell overechoed electric piano riff and a funky beat over which they croon, wail, chant, and generally make one want to get up and wiggle one's seat warmer. "BBQ" (apparently recorded live) is the obligatory crazed-rap thing and is all right but no great shakes, and "Aguas de Marco" sounds crazily like Melanie fronting a French garage band covering the Carpenters with indecipherable lyrics, which is cool in a very surreal kind of way. The Stones cover is an acoustic bit that builds to a warped take on "We Are The World" (not as terrifying as it sounds) and the acoustic version of "Sugar Water" sounds like a spaghetti western with a slo-mo drum track. "Crumble" (not the Pain Teens song) is a lo-fi mess of farting around ("recorded at Yuka's house") that was probably unnecessary, but the "coldcut remix" of "Sugar Water" is a spare, stripped-down mix with a soaked-in-reverb wah riff replacing the by-now-sure-to-be-annoying "la la la" chorus), a smart move on their part. Overall, an exercise in extreme coolness and pimp finery. Consume with hot sauce.

Cibo Matto -- VIVA LE WOMAN [Warner Bros.]

This one took me by surprise. To begin with, i had already heard one of the singles, so i was expecting something considerably punkier; what i got instead was cut-up and restructured industrial free jazz. Eek! Yuka Honda is the sampler goddess and and Miho Hatori the singer who alternates between breathy creepiness and demented ranting, but between those two "defined" positions they basically fart around with any instrment and toy they can get their hands on, occasionally with "a little help from their friends" (and yah, that IS a veiled reference to the rumor that Sean Ono Lennon supposedly plays uncredited on the album).

Um, let's see, how to describe the undescribable... they, uh... well, it's like... um... well. Uh. I am at loss for words! A rare event! O my! Well, let's see -- the opener "apple" fades up with sampled conversation and a weird pulsing noise that builds into industrial-type drumming, weird bubbling synths, chunked-out riffs, unidentifiable scraps of sound, and Miho's unpredictable vox, but the real key here is how STRUCTURED everything is -- like a collision between the worlds of noise and free jazz cabaret, only welded to an inflexible beat so it doesn't all fly away. "Beef Jerky" (updated and re-recorded from the earlier single) is a bit closer to their original sound, funky and rap-influenced, with Miho shouting perfect lines like "who cares, i don't care, a horse's ass is better than yours!" Then "Sugar Water" does some pretty bizarre things with samples of Paul Weller and Enrico Morricone -- how's THAT for a scary culture spawn? But "White Pepper Ice Cream" is the mind-blower, opening with the muted sound of either running water or background traffic; then an unvarying beat and a hypnotic glockenspiel figure take over while Miho gets deep and mysterious on the subject of ice cream and Bonnie and Clyde (?!?!) for a while, until -- just as you have succumbed to the hypnotic rhythm -- fiery noise wakes you back up (with saxes bleating in the background) until everything reverts back to the beat and glockenspiel. Godhead.

The entire disc is pretty close to these three in quality, although not always quite as otherworldly, particularly on the totally crazed "Birthday Cake" ("i don't give a flying fuck though / SHUT UP AND EAT / TOO BAD NO BON APPETIT") and the grinding heartbreak of "Artichoke" ("your hands are like a rusty knife / are you gonna keep on peeling me?"). Just about the time you've got them figured out, they drop voodoo from a totally unexpected direction. And now that they're touring with Yoko Ono and soaking up even MORE weirdness as they go, there's no telling what they'll sound like on their NEXT release, either. Ah, it is glorious....

I'm in a bit of a quandry here. This is unquestionably a "better" album than their previous full-length disc VIVA LE WOMAN!, but i... uh... like the earlier one better. However, in light of the fact that i live to be Yuka Honda's love slave and would never admit, even were the soles of my feet being tickled with a blowtorch, that she and Miho could ever do any wrong, i guess i'll have to recommend this one too. Are you ready for my dissembling? All right mon, let's crank....

My beef is not with the quality of the album itself -- it's fine, really -- but that they sanded down all the quirky, rough edges that made their earlier stuff so interesting. They aren't jumping around screaming about knowing your goddamn fried chicken on this one -- no, they've gone cool-jazz or something, as filtered through their kaleidoscopic genre-hopping. Certainly they have not lost their catchiness -- "Working For Vacation" is just a mad mix of latin sensibility and pure hip-hop that makes my butt want to MOVE (everybody must run for cover now) even though i am tragically deficient in the booty-shaking department, a good groove that benefits greatly from Miho's increasingly accomplished vocal delivery. (In a related move, the retooled "Spoon," originally on the SUPER RELAX! ep, is just as ass-controlling and considerably better than the original, with all sorts of suave shit grafted onto it.) By the time "Flowers" rolls around, though, it all starts to sound like an updated version of that mainstream seventies sound that eventually started to get on my nerves toward the end of that decade. I'm not terribly certain that reviving this sound, regardless of how well it's done (and they are doing it well), is such a hot idea. (They certainly don't help dispel this idea by including the syrupy "Moonchild," whose very title just screams seventies. It sounds swell, true, but by this point -- the fifth song on the album -- i'm starting to wonder if they're going to pull out something as unspeakably weird and cool as WOMAN's "white pepper ice cream." But i'm a bitter crank so what do i know?)

In fact, the entire album suffers mildly from advanced mellowness -- maybe it's just because i made the mistake of listening to this back to back with the new Godflesh album, but it sounds like it's a bit lacking in the heat department. I have to admit that i was mildly disappointed in "Sci-Fi Wasabi" after all the buildup; i was expecting something spectacular and hell, it's not even the best song on the album (that would be "Working For Vacation," most likely). I do have to admit that the horns in "King of Silence" are beyond swank, and the lurching heavy metal chords of "Blue Train" are a brilliant move (especially when the entire song starts speeding up, measure by measure -- an oblique tribute to Death Angel, perhaps? That would be sneaky and ironic and kind of funny, and i'll bet you don't even know why, do you? Well, never mind, it's too involved to get into here, and i'm digressing again anyway, aren't i?), especially in conjunction with all the cool jazz stuff -- it's sort of like Black Sabbath jamming with De La Soul or something, a move so daft that only Cibo Matto could make it work. Of the two versions/halves of "Sunday Morning," the one i like better is the first one, which has a whomping beat, more weird shit flown in around the edges, and a happening rap from Miho with a hypnotic chorus. The other version is just too... damn... slow (although the titanic bassline just about makes up for that deficiency).

I must say i have no idea what to make of the mostly wordless, wailing final song "Mortming." It's... um... bizarre.

So i dunno. Maybe i just need to listen to it more or something. There's certainly plenty of good stuff on here, but i think... let's put it this way: in a recent interview, Yuka suggested this this album was an attempt to make something even her mother could listen to. I think she succeeded in that respect, but i'm not sure this kind of success is always a good thing....

Circle X -- CELESTIAL (Matador)

If Glenn Branca and Gravitar crashed a party hosted by Sonic Youth and Swans, and if they all got kind of pixilated and started fiddling with the amp tones and noodling on the piano and messing with pianos, it might sound like this. Sort of. Which is to say that Circle X are kind of hard to describe. The key points to keep in mind here, though, are noise (both symphonic and purely atonal), tape loops, and creative instrumentation. If they're going to be slotted anywhere, it would most likely be in the vague field of art-noise, along with the likes of Einsteurzende Neubaten, Skullflower, and the formerly- mentioned skronk gods. Unlike most of them, though (with the possible exception of Sonic Youth), Circle X manage to mix melody and sheer noise terror in a manner that makes much of their work simultaneously accessible and lunar at the same time, no small feat. Best example: the opening track "Kyoko," where melodic guitar-picking and a semi-funky bassline lull in the listener with a catchy structure, only to pulverize all listening conceptions with creepy wailing and periodic blasts of fierce atomic noise guitar, including what may be the most splintering high-velocity guitar immolation (about halfway through the track) since Zeni Geva's "Angel."

Things only get weirder; "Pulley" (on which the singer actually sounds not only human, but genuinely mournful) comes across a lot like Frank Zappa in spots, only less pretentious and more eerie. Things get a bit more frantic again with "Crow's Ghost," and "Gothic Fragment" pits droning guitars and more wailing against jazzlike drums, eventually fading into the swell of a pipe organ. Things get really noisy again on "Tell My Horse," where whispered vocals compete will big, scary, moaning, tinnitus-inducing guitars; on "Hardcases (Big Picture," an emotionless voice relates the story of gangsters, crime, and murder over a deafening wall of sound like the waltz of distortion- eating dinosaurs. "Wax Fruit" roars ahead like a punk tune, only swathed in layers of high-pitched guitar screaming -- have I mentioned that listening to this CD at high volumes will probably permanently damage your hearing? Hell, I'm 80% deaf to begin with and I can't listen to this at full volume, which is pretty damn scary. The last song, "They Come Prancing," is short and easy to miss, it's so much quieter than the rest of its company; nothing but a low, eerie violin playing over an unidentified chittering noise... a coda for the swans, perhaps? Remarkable band; remarkable CD. By far and beyond one of the best "noise" documents to pass through DEAD ANGEL's CD player yet. Highly recommended. And if they happen to be playing live in your area, do go check them out... just don't forget to bring earplugs....

I'm at a bit of a disadvantage here -- this is essentially a remake of the apparently-classic free jazz album INTERSTELLAR SPACE, originally recorded by John Coltrane (saxophone) and Rashied Ali (drums from Neptune) in the sixties, and tragically, i have not heard the album in question, so i don't know how this stacks up against the original. I do know that there are some obvious differences -- here Cline substitutes guitar for sax, although the results are still pretty squiggly (his guitar has a tendency to sound like a bunch of tadpoles shimmying and shrieking). However, i do know about Coltrane (not that i understand him) and i do know that the head beatslayer of Gravitar babbled all sorts o' praise of this disc, so it must be coming from the right space, eh? You know?

Anyway, these two guys get down and make one hell of a racket. How the fuck anybody can play as fast as Cline is utterly beyond me. On "Mars" they are completely out of control -- we're talking music that sounds like it was recorded in a Mixmaster, mon. Cool tones, tho. Things are marginally more on a leash during "Leo," sorta, and "Venus" is downright soothing, gradually building into something resembling an actual song (almost) rather than just abstract doodling. Things start to get out of control again on "Jupiter," with the two seeming to play almost independently -- the sound by this point is starting to remind me of Borbetomagus and Lhasa Cement Plant, which makes me wonder just how much influence Coltrane has had over the avant guitarists (plenty, i'm betting). "Lonnie's Lament" is cool mainly because it has a beat i can actually sort of follow (well, most of the time anyway), which is really important to me for reasons that have never been entirely clear....

So the basic gist is that it's a pretty swell display of the potential of free jazz and a good way to annoy your neighbors. Plus i wish i could play as fast as Cline, but that'll never happen because i'm too lazy to practice like that. A good way to get your free jazz fix, at least until Coltrane rises from the dead to show them all how it's really done.

"My father was Black my mother was Decker/ Believe me my friend it doesn't get any better...." The first two lines of Clutch's first EP sums up their basic philosophy with amazing accuracy. Actually, there's a lot more to them than that, but that's the core at work here -- loud, mean, and crunchlike, with a tone much like... like... why, like a Black and Decker sander being scraped against the side of your face. Repeatedly.

If you haven't heard Clutch, think Helmet, Prong, Sabbath on speed (and minus the hokey evil-trip), etc. These men are METAL and they are not ashamed, so DEAL with it, okay? But this is not ordinary metal... oh my no. This is the real thing, the way metal was meant to be-- no weird posing, no excursions into pretentious artiness, just straight-ahead catchy crunch riffing and lead playing that sounds like it's being beamed into from the other side of the sun on a beta wavelength. What makes them even better than the average metal band is their lyrical slant -- intelligent, literate, and fiercely sardonic. Why should you want to listen to some weenie hairspray band babbling about "every rose has its thorn" or some equally meaningless crap when you can hear a guy who apparently eats Drano for breakfast screaming lines like "we'll thresh the psyche and till the pride/ distill the blood proclaim the gun divine/ damn the foul age praise the promised swarm/ we are the ploughshare and yet we are the sword"? Don't know about you, but I know who gets my vote....

Clutch: TRANSNATIONAL SPEEDWAY LEAGUE (Anthems, Anecdotes, and Undeniable Truths) (Atco)

Clutch are back and heavier than ever, throwing their weight around like those goofy twins on motorbikes from the Guiness Book of World Records. Those guys were so hefty they had to be buried in piano boxes, and Clutch is just the bigass earthmover necessary to dig up all that dirt and get the job done. Big buzzing riffs, piles of distortion and a lead sound capable of stripping skin from the dead, sardonic lyrics about everything from paranoia to advertising jingles-- it all adds up to a juggernaut that has come for your head. Clutch wants to play marbles with your eyes and it would be most unwise to argue with them.

Take "El Jefe Speaks," anthem for control freaks across the world: just when you think the wall of sound can't get any thicker, guitarist Tim Sult steps on yet another fuzz pedal and soaks the whole damn thing in pure distortion hell until your speakers start to sizzle like bacon frying on the ground at Dealy Plaza in the middle of July. And in the charming "Milk of Human Kindness," singer Neil Fallon perverts a line from the Don McLean classic "American Pie" inform you that "helter skelter fallout shelter/ can't escape the boiling swelter/ beat you like the dog that you are" over an almost-funky chunklike staccato riff that wants to kill your firstborn with a hammer.

Driven by an elephantine bass line designed to utterly disembowel anyone foolish enough to get too close, "Binge and Purge" lumbers along to the tune of "Perhaps it's just the way the light falls/ but everything looks like a target to me/ and I don't know where the gun is/ but I'm certain it's pointed at me" before kicking into total manic overdrive three-fourths of the way into the song. The printed lyrics in the CD booklet are incomplete for this song, but then again, if I were a band on a major label and managed to say "motherfucker" 21 times in 90 seconds at the end of a song, I'd think I'd leave out part of the lyrics too.

Things slow down a bit for "Heirloom 13," a slow, eerie drone about one man's doomed attempt to escape his own unwanted heritage, before swinging into the stellar guns-and-trucks bluster of "Walking in the Great Shining Path of Monster Trucks" (a title so hip that you should buy the album just for that alone). Black Sabbath may be one of the band's biggest inspirations (along with Prong, Helmet, and the Band of Susans), but I can't quite see Ozzy croaking lines like "well I rolled Jesse Helms like a cigarette/ smoked him higher than the highest of the minarets/ Jesse James couldn't even handle it/ started looking at me like I was Sanskrit." Can you? I didn't think so. Every single line in this one song is a quotable classic, especially the loopy observation that "Evil Knievel like Virgil/ was both a gentleman and a scholar" and the perfect kiss-off, "don't hate me just because I'm beautiful/ you'll find that it's really not unusual/ when you're raised with the Good the Bad the Ugly/ a holy trinity in Flavor Country."

Yes, this is the way metal should be made -- by big men with big guitars who can read something a wee bit more complex than a driver's license. Play this back to back with the new Prong CD and melt in ear- shredding bliss.

Clutch -- CLUTCH [Eastwest/Atlantic]

I think Tim Sult must have been dropped on his head while watching George Clinton at Lollapalooza last year, because he apparently thinks he's playing guitar now for Sly and the Family Stone circa THERE'S A RIOT GOING ON. This is either a bold stroke of genius or sheer lunacy, and i'm still not quite sure which is closer to the truth. The REST of the band still sounds pretty much as crazed as usual; singer Neil Fallon still sounds like a deranged Southern Baptist preacher choking on barbed wire, and they're still considerably more literate/intelligent than the average metal band (how many metal bands do YOU know of that write songs about making off with the body of John Wilkes Booth?), and when they want to be heavy they certainly do it right. They just don't do it as OFTEN on this album, which is a wee disappointment. Still, the whole space fixation is pretty amusing....

Still, while this bizarre excursion into crush-metal funk doesn't always work as well as they probably intended, this is by no means a bad album. It's just, uh, WEIRD. Lyrically, they're still obsessed with chewing up pop culture and spitting it back in tiny smartass chunks -- they reel off references to Marlon Brando, Weebles, John Wilkes Booth, the planet of the apes, Skull and Bones, Animal Farm, 1973 Dodge Swingers, Zion, Samson, C.B. radios, NASA, and more in just about every line -- and for all of Tim Sult's bizarre delusions of funk, he manages to pull it off and he's awfully damned good. And i like the way many of the songs just run into one another without ever stopping... shades of old Pink Floyd... but there's getting around the fact that the thing just doesn't start to rock like a pee dog until the second side, which, for a metal band, is kind of worrisome. I dunno... file under "half-baked" and call it an experiment with decidedly mixed results....

Coa -- SMELL ME, SMELL MY GRANDFATHER [Japan Overseas]

Now HERE'S something different for ye... two young ladies ("Eddie" and "Bill" -- the Japanese have a most strange sense of humor) who want to strike FEAR into your heart. Or something. Maybe they just want to go shopping. Maybe they just want to tour the US (as they are doing now) with the secret desire to come to Tejas and tip over cows so they can go back home and tell their friends and neighbors that they lived out a BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD episode. Maybe they want to SMELL the cow. Maybe they want to KISS THE GOAT (more likely, given that a goat bathed in psychadelic hues is on the cover of this disc). Maybe i don't know what the fuck i'm talking about, which would hardly be news or anything....

So anyway. They are two women who apparently look like Shonen Knife, only cuter and more helpless... and then they open their mouths and sound like Satan. EEK! Talk about misleading! Haw! Aside from the first track, "Be There (Human)," they essentially sound like... uh... a faster, more crazed version of Unsane with Japanese vox. (Apparently Unsane are real heroes in Japan.) The lineup is even more devolved than Unsane's -- Eddie screams like she swallowed Borax and pummels the living pee out of a poor helpless bass while Bill beats a drum kit to death and shouts along on the choruses. Both add percussion, whatever the fuck that means (what the hell is "percussion" anyway? You see this all the time on albums and i STILL don't know what it means -- does it mean anything they beat on that wasn't technically a drum? Who knows?). And hey, look, they even cover an Unsane song! (It's "My Right," which i would guess is from one of the early albums since i haven't heard it.) They also like to begin and end everything with jagged whiny squeals o' feedback, which is okay with me, although it sure makes it hard to tell which song is which....

Their version of "My Right" sounds pretty evil, mon. Come to think of it, just about EVERYTHING on this disc sounds pretty evil. I'll bet they go over like stormtroopers in NYC. It sure would be interesting to know what they lyrics are to see if they're really trying to out-scum Unsane or what, but alas, half the liner notes are in Japanese, which i still can't read. (Still!) I'll tell ya what, tho... the last time i heard women who could do the death-metal bowel-grunt thing this well was when 13 was still pissing all over the place. This bodes well for Coa. DEAD ANGEL approves.

Chris Cobb -- MECHANICAL ACTS/TWO LOOPS [self-released]

Low-fi acts of mechanical angst for the discriminating... in a minimalist sense, to be sure. Each side of this cassette is a repeated loop of sound, suitable for background listening, or possibly for integration into some other sound piece. The latter option holds the potential for intriguing possibilities; i may have to try it myself and see what can be layered on top of it.... Taken by itself, though, the tape works best as background while doing something else -- not because there is anything wrong with the pieces, but because of the repetitiveness. Definitely a series of sounds for the hardcore minimalist. The first side is almost ambient -- the endlessly looped sound of some object rolling across a table, with each loop maybe ten seconds in duration. On the second side, the sounds of a typewriter and other unidentifiable sounds are grouped together in a slightly longer loop and repeated over and over until they form a hypnotic mechanical trance mantra. Each side is thirty minutes, but the length is arbitrary, really; you could loop this stuff forever. Intriguing stuff for those with a repetition fetish....

Cockpit -- "Hair of the Dog/Gearhead Girl/Phantom Limb" (K Records)

More white-trash stoner-cheerleader yelping from a bunch of women who used to be in Florida's PMS (most of them, anyway). The sax player wandered away at some point apparently, which is too bad, since that was one of the things that kept from sounding like just another garage-punk band, of which there are probably more than enough at the moment. "Hair of the Dog" is a rave-up paean to drinking heavily and regretting it the next day, "Gearhead Girl" is another chunky blast o' ranting about a "gearhead girl/ drag race bitch/ hot rod girl/ horse power queen"; musically the two are pretty interchangeable. Things start swinging a bit more with "Phantom Limb" (or "Ghost Limb," depending on whether you believe the label or the liner credits), where you actually sort of hear Claudia doing, um, something on the keyboards. Hmmm.... not bad, but their earlier (and impossible-to-find) stuff is seriously hot shit and this is kind of weak in comparison. Still worth checking out if you've never heard them yet, just be aware that there's better stuff floating around out there.... Great cover, though. I'll bet they actually drank all those empties, too.

Coedine -- THE WHITE BIRCH (Sub Pop)

These guys play slow. Like, really really REALLY slow. Slow enough that you could probably have a pizza delivered between beats. But if that's your gig, then this should certainly do the trick. On the best songs like "Sea," the dynamics go from quiet acoustic strumming to big, fuzzy chords. On some of the others, the slow, numbing pace might put you to sleep. In all cases, the lyrics are pretty depressing -- this is not recommended for the suicide-prone -- and the singing is appropriately mournful. So should this be "slocore" or "sadcore" or maybe "slosadcore"? Damned if I know, but if you're in the mood for lying in bed moping and need something to listen to, then look no further.

This disc of creeping dark ambient noise sees the light of day (or more accurately, the pale white light of the moon) courtesy of Crionic Mind, a wee label that is beginning to get my attention because they take power electronics seriously. Limited to 500 copies and swaddled in darkly elegant artwork, this is seriously brooding stuff, recorded on four-track (although it doesn't sound like it), minidisc, half-inch tape, etc. -- hissing bundles of noise and drone calling up images of death and darkness. The mastermind behind these esoteric sounds is one Gary Tedder, who processes sounds both conventional (piano, violin, cymbals, etc.) and unconventional ("voice mutator positioned into washing machine spin cycle," "sounds from a construction site," and so on) and renders them largely unrecognizable, then weaves them together into dense soundscapes filled with forbidding tones 'n drones. Music for an ancient funeral procession, perhaps, or the soundtrack to a film of bodies in an endless field, dead eyes staring sightlessly into the night sky. The titles are interesting and evocative: "the last time my needle kissed the spoon," "along this burning sphere," "the moon makes these mad white horses shine," and so on -- not your typical power-electronics train of thought, to be sure. While Tedder's sound is squarely in the ambient power electronics tradition (this disc would be perfectly at home as a Tesco release), his aesthetic is probably closer to that of Die Form or Current 93 (not that he sounds particularly like either one). If this release and the previously-reviewed Never Presence Forever disc are truly indicative of the level of quality at Crionic Mind, then i'm definitely paying attention now. This is highly recommended and at 500 copies, i doubt it will last long, so seek it out while you can still find it.

Anthony Coleman Trio -- SEPHARDIC TINGE [Tzadik]

This is the latest offerring from John Zorn's Radical Jewish Culture series as released by Tzadik, Zorn's US label which focuses on three select spheres of Zorn's musical interests. This recording features Anthony Coleman on piano, Greg Cohen on bass and Joey Baron on drums. Since the time of the destruction of the first great temple, Jews were forced out of their homeland to wander the globe. Over the centuries, Jewish communities grew and flourished in many disparate parts of the world. In Judaism, a race that is big on heritage, the roots of culture and religion are keenly defined by one's national origin. There are two distinct nationalities of Judaism: Ashkenazim and Sephardim. To that end, Jews of European, Eastern European and often American descent tend to be Ashkenazik. Whereas Jews from the Mediterranean, Mexico and Spain are often Sephardic. For this release, Coleman explains that he wanted to stay away from Klezmer mania, and instead explore a kind of Jewish cultural music that includes all of the influences he grew up with and around in the bustle of New York city. Music that he has whole-heartedly embraced. The result is the Sephardic Tinge. A mixture of off-tempos, distinctly Spanish, with traditional Jewish melodic compositional stylings played in a classic Jazz piano trio format. The result is beautiful, expansive and wonderous music. The first track begins with a very introspective, slow and bittersweet look at Coleman's juxtapositioning of styles. None of the tracks ever reach the frenzied nature of Klezmer. Iinstead, the music is solid and majestic. In addition to new material, Coleman also plays covers of Thelonious Monk and Jelly Roll Morton, as interpreted by his Sephardic Tinge style. Led by Coleman, both Baron and Cohen offer their strong, emotional and playful musicianship to this simply amazing recording. [yol]

Tony Conrad -- EARLY MINIMALISM VOLUME ONE [Table of the Elements]

(TAKE 1)

Goddamnit... i... i was doing SO GOOD at not smoking... was gonna kick that fuckin' demon in the BALLS... yah... i was doin' just SWELL... even though the nicotine demons had imported the Sweat Machine and Subatomic Molecule Sandblaster and i either wanted to sleep for 27 hours at a time while dreaming immensely fucked-up dreams about watching my nephew eat oatmeal in a goldfish bowl or couldn't sleep at all... NO PROBLEM... thinking in mad obsessive fashion every fifteen seconds about that cooooooool breeze, the PAUSE THAT REFRESHES, not getting a goddamn thing done, yah, but STILL... i had a fuckin' HANDLE on it... and then... o GOD... and THEN....

Yah, i was FOOLISH enough to start diggin' in to the fat, juicy booklet for this here fat-ass four-CD box set and... and... AND...

* sob * there... THERE IT WAS....

Yah like a motherfucker.... yah... yah... YAH... GOD DAMN IT... the young Tony Fuckin' Conrad lookin' suaver than shit and... and... and SMOKING A CIGARETTE.....

[ten minute pause while Moon Unit's spine turns to tofu and he gets dressed, goes out to the Texaco, purchases overpriced generic cigs]

Okay, so i'll have to quit AFTER reviewing the Conrad box set. FINE. No PROBLEMO. Never mind that i'm so goddamn broke that i can't even AFFORD to buy generic cigarettes -- shit, you KNOW the apocalypse is upon us when you have to pay two fucking dollars for cheap-ass shitty-smelling foul-tasting GENERIC cigarettes, damn, where's my GUN? [whispers from the HS-CG] Oh yah, i forgot, i don't OWN one, guns are for RICH people, well fuck, i'm gonna have to STEAL one and DO something about these fat maggots in Congress who keep jacking up the price of cigarettes, laying on those taxes, to the point where a pack o' cigs is 80% tax (this is true, dammit).... it's an absolute heartbreak, let me tell ya....

[nicotine kicks in] Woo, i'm dizzy now....

You know, heroin is starting to look downright SENSIBLE....

Tony Conrad -- EARLY MINIMALISM VOLUME ONE [Table of the Elements]

(TAKE 2)

To understand the story behind (and importance of) this box set, the first in a series of "reconstructions" of Conrad's original work from the sixties, you have to understand the Dream Syndicate. Not the paisley underground guys led by Steve Wynn, but the Dream Syndicate that eventually evolved into the Theatre of Eternal Music -- Conrad, Cale, Angus MacLise, LaMonte Young, and Marian Zazeela. Cale and MacLise went on to join the Velvet Underground; Young and Zazeela went on the form the Theatre of Eternal Music, and Conrad remained outside, doing his own thing. But somewhere along the way Young, who had taped all of the Dream Syndicate rehearsals/jams in his loft, grew possessive of the tapes and refused to let any of the others hear them, much less release them, without agreeing to sign over all the rights to himself. Naturally, Cale and Conrad refused (MacLise died, which conveniently put him out of the running). In the mid-eighties, when it became obvious that Young was determined never to relinquish his hammerlock on the tapes, Conrad finally talked the bearded guru into letting him at least listen to the tapes... at which point he took notes, went over his own scores, and proceeded (with the help of such luminaries as Jim O'Rourke and Alexandria Gelencser) to recreate the originals live and tape them, thus executing a neat end-run around the power-mad Young.

Which brings us to the present, and this four-CD box set, the first in a series of volumes. The four slices o' creeping dissonance captured here are FOUR VIOLINS (an early solo bit), EARLY MINIMALISM: APRIL 1965, EARLY MINIMALISM: MAY 1965, and EARLY MINIMALISM: JUNE 1965. (The FOUR VIOLINS disc, incidentally, is enhanced and includes a nifty assortment of sound bites, interviews, and pictures, none of which i've been able to actually look at since my outdated PC doesn't have enough base RAM, boo hoo.) And naturally they are all heavenly clouds of droning tone clusters or else excruciating (and endless) wails of earhurt, depending on where you stand as far as minimalism and screechy violins are concerned. As you have probably guessed by now, i'm in Tony's corner.

FOUR VIOLINS, then, is an "unscored recording" (composerese for "he sat down with a couple of beers in him and just started playing with the tape running") of four overdubbed violins, recorded on Conrad's own four-track in December 1964. This is a key document to understanding Conrad, because it's the first available recording of his early success at codifying his unusual scale theories and actually putting them to use on tape. Conrad's unique sound, beginning with this document, comes from a scale whose sound derives primarily from "pitch relationships derived from the second, third, seventh, eleventh, and seventeenth partials in the harmonic series." It's a radical, dissonant departure from the twelve-tone scale and while it sounds haunting and beautiful (to ME, anyway), i'm sure it must have scared the pee out of people hearing it for the first time in the age of flower power. This doesn't sound psychedelic at ALL; it sounds more like the relentless march of dead mathematicians bursting from the grave to wrestle music back from the cult of hippy dippiness.

EARLY MINIMALISM: APRIL 1965 begins with one lonesome violin sawing away that is eventually joined by another, faster (but equally droning) violin. Eventually, just as the incessant sawing appears ready to launch into the stratosphere, it falls back and the open space is filled by a string quartet. The music evolves -- slowly -- through movements in which the individual elements of the quartet (violin, viola, cello, and contrabass) all take turns moving to the forefront. After several cycles of these movements, everything falls away to two violins again, before the entire quartet joins in again (in more restrained fashion) behind them. The entire performance takes over 53 minutes to complete.

EARLY MINIMALISM: MAY 1965 is even longer (an unbroken stretch of 56:57) and proceeds in a similar format, although here the instrumentation is stripped down to two violins (one manned by Jim O'Rourke) and cello. Of all the pieces in this volume, this is probably the most "listenable" to those who find Conrad's tones mystifying; it is also the most severely droning. It doesn't even start getting all that dissonant until the second violin comes in, and even then the dissonance is nowhere near as violent as in the previous two pieces. Structurally, though, this is perhaps minimalism at its most extreme -- the tempo does not vary and the slow progression is so deliberate and understated that to the casual observer, it might well seem that the music is essentially standing still for almost an hour. This is my favorite of the four discs.

EARLY MINIMALISM: JUNE 1965 is -- brace yourself -- even LONGER (60:23) and more minimalistic, a drawn-out composition using four violins and one cello. (Incidentally, since i have not noted it already, these are electric versions of said instruments at work here; FOUR VIOLINS may be an exception, though.) The feel is similar to the previous disc, although the additional violins insinuate themselves a bit more sneakily this time. In fact, there isn't an obvious difference (other than a gradual thickening of sound) until nearly thirteen minutes into the piece. The next major shift -- one of register this time -- doesn't occur until 24 minutes have passed. Shortly thereafter this is a new movement, a return to the beginning of sorts; it plays like a restatement of the original movement with shifted emphasis on instrumentation, with the background violins now visible in the foreground.

The liner notes, by the way (all 90 pages of 'em), are an excellent introduction into the theory of minimalism, the history of the Dream Syndicate (and the resulting feud), and Conrad's enigmatic mindset. It also includes many swell pix of Conrad as the young artiste and much peculiar wordplay (as an "explanation" of the pieces themselves, bizarre neo-stories that effectively mock the concept of "explaining" music in the first place). It's a stupefying work of art that nicely complements the music on the discs. Table of the Elements, in fact, has gone to ridiculous lengths to present this work in spectacular fashion, and i'm certainly looking forward to the next installment....

Consumer Electronics -- s/t [RRR Records]

Weeeeell... i hereby nominate this as the most OBSCURE item i have ever come across. It's so obscure that, after seeing the "cryptic" liner notes (about which more in a moment), i posted a "he'p me!" notice on rec.music. industrial that NOBODY answered... and then nobody on the new-music list knew anything either... and even a couple o' most knowledgeable Label Gods could offer only sketchy information (such as the fact that it's apparently limited to 300 copies). So, i remain largely clueless about the personnel, and the track listing (hah!) is NO HELP there... in fact, all the track listing says is that all the songs on Disc 1 are conveniently called "0.00" (convenient for THEM, anyway), on Disc 2 the track listing is lost, and Disc 3 is all live (although those song titles are given).

Careful sleuthing has revealed, however, that these three 12" slabs o' vinyl are vaguely Skullflower related. Apparently one or two members of the early Skullflower (Philip Best and, from the sound of it, maybe Gary Ramleh) appear here prior to the 'flower formation, making all sorts of irritable noise. William Bennett of Whitehouse MIGHT be here too, ranting on Disc 3 -- if not, the guy wailing there sure SOUNDS like him. Who knows? It is all just so... so... so willfully OBTUSE....

So what do you get when you open the cryptic package? Lots o' noise. The first disc is essentially eight tracks of crunched-up static noise occasionally augmented with tripped-out guitar and other painful noises. Hyperkinetic drums make the odd appearance here and there, too (perhaps the pregenitor to Ascension?), usually for no clear reason other than to be obnoxious. Sone of the tracks on the flip side add tapes of people talking about sexual psychology and other weird stuff, but otherwise it's all fairly static -- lots of ugly noises being repeated ad infinitum and total blasts of sonic purge fury cutting through every once in a while just to wake your glazed ass back up.

The second disc ("Leathersex") is similar, with more speaking tape loops (about smoking, mental patients), but the first side is kind of mellow by comparison to Disc 1 -- the noise here is more like background hum, squashed down in the mix. Side two resumes with the cut-up approach and things start getting noisy again, with the last track being a collage of high-pitched squeaking and skronking junk. It all tends to get a bit samey after a while, though, which is definitely a drawback....

Disc 3 is live and much more interesting. It sounds very much like a sick collaboration between Skullflower and Whitehouse, which is probably actually TRUE. Imagine Whitehouse's throbbing electronic pink noise chug as the backdrop, then add on several layers of 'flowery guitar abuse, then (on side two, anyway) garnish with a crazed "vocalist" ranting about sticking things up your ass (it DOES sound like Whitehouse already, doesn't it?), and you have a reasonably accurate idea of what's going on here. Plus there's lots of clunking and clanking going on the background in addition to the pink noise/rumble sonics, for those of you who like these things.

Bottom line: at $35, this is kind of for the hardcore only, especially since a) it's really hard to find and b) sounds largely like well-recorded tape hiss with lots of clattering thrown in for good measure. Most likely of interest primarily to severe Skullflower/Whitehouse devotees and people who wish Klaus Shchulze (remember him?) had been noisier.

Content Zero -- [demo]

Moderately groovin' techno -- notable mainly for the totally inspired/deranged techno deconstruction of the Misfits' "Last Caress," a move so exquisitely warped that it alone makes the demo worth hearing. The rest of the demo falls prey to the limitations of the techno genre, meaning that after a while it's hard to tell the songs apart, since they all revolve around that chug-chug techno beat that seems to be prerequisite for all techno. An exception is the slower, moodier "Story of Our Universe," and "Scared," which has more of an ambient piano sound even though it's anchored to a fast-moving techno beat. The cut-up sampling on "Klaebestrimler" is pretty catchy, though. Not bad for a start, at any rate....

Seven slices of rhythmic noise 'n effluvia from one of the proponents of Imperial Floral Assault Unit, and a moody sort of noise they are. The first track, "Malkovich," falls pretty squarely in the tradition of damaged power electronic assault, with chopped-up noise rhythms punctuated by snippets of conversation, bursts of piano, unpredictable noises -- and then it builds briefly and abruptly ends. "Frustration" is more subtle; low rumbling drone, like the sound of a turntable winding down, then a different kind of rumble and droning waves of tension over which odd sounds hover and break. Babbling conversation and disconnected sounds are the backbone of "Combustion," which incorporates a rhythmic element from time to time when the sample is allowed to skip. The unearthly drone of doom returns again in "Early Sunday Morning," with overlapping drones that eventually fade out in a drill-bit whine. "Fuck My Ole Boots"  employs amp hum, static, erratic rhythmic noise, and unintelligible conversation to form the soundtrack to an overheard and cryptic event of ominous yet unknowable import; static of a sort is the source of the rhythm in "Necessary Discomfort" as well, a sound that is eventually joined by rumbling waves of sound and ion-generator noises. On tracks like this one, the sound is somewhere between what you would expect from a Zenflesh release and perhaps a noisier Public Eyesore release -- strange loops of sound akin to ungrounded power cables sputtering under high-powered transformers. "Timeless Waiting" is much in the same vein, only louder and harsher. An interesting entry in the annals of collage electronics -- if IFAU fails to continue for some reason, Mark Wilson (the gatherer of sounds here) could probably continue in similar fashion on his own.

If you come to the party now expecting Gravitar, Part II, you'll be disappointed, buddy. Eric has moved on -- he's a keyboard diddlin' man now, futzing about with circuit-damaged synths, loops, and weird sound in general. Here he's captured live on the air at various radio stations (KFJC, WCBN, and "Canterbury," which might be radio and might be live onstage, who knows?) doing murky, near-ambient loop-fu which making rude noises with his busted synth toys. In most cases with the ten tracks here, ambient noise like wind rattling through dark tunnels is the bedrock of the sound, ambient and heavily reverbed, over which he bumps 'n thumps, activates strange electronic sounds, but on the Canterbury tracks, he gets a serious power-drone going, rotating between the speakers and growing in volume until your head starts spinning; somewhere in there he's got the damaged electronics going, too. Dark, alien-sounding stuff, very different from anything he's done in the past. Have I mentioned there are no beats happening here? Strange times in the land of electronica indeed....

Well, it's about time. Took 'em long enough. All these years while everybody and his dog has been rewarded with a box set, and it's taken Warner forever to get this one out... figures....

A digression. No doubt you wonder why anyone should care about four discs full o' the Coop. Simple: just because. Sure, he's turned into an anachronism, he's been largely defanged (this is what happens when you take to singing songs penned by Desmond Child and playing golf all the time), and no one cares anymore. But without Alice, you can make the argument that we wouldn't have shock-rock as a genre, or full-blown spectacles for rock shows, or cross-dressing rock stars, or Marilyn Manson. Of course, these also might be good reasons to travel back in time and have him killed as far as some are concerned, but it's not his fault that none of his devotees have half his wit or flair (with the possible exception of Rob Zombie). The truth is that almost anything you can think of in rock, particularly in terms of excess or outrage, can be traced back to Alice Cooper. He was there first.

It also doesn't hurt that the Alice Cooper Band, for a while in the seventies, churned out a whole stack of classic tunes -- "The Ballad of Dwight Fry," "I'm Eighteen," "Under My Wheels," "Dead Babies," "Halo of Flies," "Killer," "School's Out," "Elected," "No More Mr. Nice Guy," and "I Love the Dead," among others -- and when Alice shed the band and went solo, he turned out a whole series of interesting concept-psychodrama albums. He was into concept albums long before Pink Floyd (who may well have been influenced by them; they were certainly influenced by the Floyd, as "Levity Ball" demonstrates, and they all hung out together while Cooper's band was still based in California, so it's not such a farfetched idea) and Trent Reznor, hep to creepy-crawly personae back when Marilyn Manson was still a wiggly spurting from his daddy's weewee, and an expert at outrage long before an endless line of metal dumbasses made the concept moribund. And Alice always had a secret weapon that most of his competitors never had; in addition to being well ahead of the pack in terms of concept and presentation, he was always far more intelligent, witty, and sardonic than the rest. Really, how many bands have ever managed to top the classic aside from "School's Out" -- "We got no class/ And we got no principles/ And we got no innocence / We can't even think of a word that rhymes"?

As far as box sets go, this is generally a good one -- all of the obvious hits are here, plus a healthy selection of not-quite-hits-but-still-cool songs, and much to my surprise, his entire career is represented here, including a generous slice of songs from the Nazz and Spiders period (prior to the formation of the Alice Cooper Band). They even provide several songs (probably unwisely, as it happens) from the first two albums, PRETTIES FOR YOU and EASY ACTION, discs generally regarded as highly unlistenable even by hardcore Cooper fanatics. Even better, there are more than a few extras unavailable anywhere else -- the aforementioned Spiders material, previously unreleased demos ("Nobody Likes Me," "Respect for the Sleepers," "He's Back," and the "lost track" from SPECIAL FORCES, "Look at You Over There (Ripping the Sawdust From My Teddy Bear)" -- a track that was pulled at the last minute because it didn't fit with the other tracks, even though it was still listed on the first pressing of the album), and several unreleased or horribly obscure tracks ("No Time for Tears," several eminently listenable tracks from the horrible movie MONSTER DOG, a couple from the FRIDAY THE 13th movies, "Only for Britain," and "Hands of Death (Spookshow 2000 Mix)"). So one certainly can't complain about a paucity of material. The packaging is also stellar -- the fat booklet contains a lengthy history of the band, lots of observations from all the members, a track by track listing with credits, comments from various band members and producers about the gestation of every track on the box set, etc., etc. They even went to the trouble of gussying up the CD cases themselves with art from obscure overseas singles of the Coop's most popular songs. So far, so good....

Now for the bad news -- this set is unnecessarily heavy on the latter-period Coop to the exclusion of the mid-period stuff (otherwise known as the "lost years") and ballads in general. This is a bummer, because i was hoping to hear more from that era, especially in light of the fact that most of the albums in question (FLUSH THE FASHION, SPECIAL FORCES, ZIPPER CATCHES SKIN, and DADA, to be specific) are horribly out of print in this country. Even worse, the track selection makes me deeply suspicious that some outright classics from this period were left off this set -- for instance, the only two songs represented from FLUSH THE FASHION are "Clones (We're All)" and "Pain." So where are "Leather Boots" and "Grim Facts," two absolute classics that should have been on here? For that matter, including only three tracks from ON THE INSIDE is practically criminal -- they left off "Jackknife Johnny," "Inmates (We're All)," and the show-stopping "Nurse Rosetta" in favor of all the insipid ballads? What were they thinking? Gah.... And for that matter, why the hell isn't "Halo of Flies" on here? I swear, they should have let me put this together....

On the other hand, now at least i know i definitely need to track down those lost albums. And after hearing the plethora of early tracks from the pre-LOVE IT TO DEATH era, i'm convinced that my first impression of the early albums (i didn't like 'em) was a correct one....

Corndolly: "Afterschool Special/The Difference" (Dalmatian Records)

The swan song of the late, great, and (in this corner, at least) lamented Corndolly, and as far as swan songs go, it's a respectable one. Not as brilliant as the "Human Cannonball" single, but then again, that's a tough one to beat.... While their earlier singles sounded like a weird cross between L7, New Order, and the Butthole Surfers, this is a bit more straightforward, and considerably more cranked up. Lots of cool drawn-out guitar squealings punctuate the A-side, which has the paranoid refrain "they're laughing at me" running through it, and "The Difference" is the fastest (and shortest!) thing they've ever done, a big, crunchy slab of pounding punch that only proves that even toward the end, they weren't standing still and doing the same thing over and over. I weep for my Corndolly... but I sure am glad this single exists!

Corndolly -- s/t [Mud Records]

If you missed out on Corndolly the first time around (like, when they were still TOGETHER), now you can find out the easy way why they were so godlike with the release of this CD, which collects all seven tracks from their three singles (including the long, long-unavailable "Sex Kitten/Come Out" debut) and adds four previously unreleased tracks (two early, two late). What always made Corndolly so cool was that early on, they achieved a pretty fair approximation of Joy Division's sound -- wobbling, high-toned bass and a totally wonked-out hollowness -- without getting bogged down in the ponderous slow weeping doom that a million goth bands misappropriated later with mediocre results. They also added fuel-injected catchiness, punked-out lurching, and a female singer... and thus ended up so far removed from Joy Division that everybody missed the point and compared them instead to bands like L7 and Babes in Toyland, solely on the basis of all- female personnel. Which is probably why they never got anywhere, alas, but utterly beside the point....

So anyway, they were godlike, ok? (And drummer Angie and Matt, the bassist who replaced Rachael after the second single, are STILL godlike, as will become obvious when their new band Liquorette releases its first CD later this year.) That wonked-out bass is very much in evidence on tracks like "Waterbed," "Sex Kitten," and "No Song" (especially the latter, which sounds like an outtake from UNKNOWN PLEASURES with Amy's vox grafted on afterwards -- this is a good thing, just in case you wondered), while others like "Come Out" and "Angie" lean toward the poppier side of things. "Angie" is one of the best things they ever did, and could have made them "big" if they hadn't unfortunately imploded first; the instrumental "Mudfucker" just crushes, like Neil Young in a thunderous mood on a day when Crazy Horse decided to hang fire. And "Human Cannonball" (NOT the Buttholey song, although probably inspired by them) is still one of the heaviest, densest walls of slow, grinding heaviness ever. You should own this and since it's dirt cheap, there should be no excuse not to....

I have a particular affection for Corndolly because their "Human Cannonball" single was the first single i ever bought. (I was a late bloomer where singles are concerned, and still don't collect them as obsessively as i do CDs.) It came out in 1992 and to me, was always the missing link between late new wave and new-school grunge. If i remember right the single came out just before Nirvana's NEVERMIND fucked everything up by causing the majors to get terminally fixated on bands solely from the Washington area -- which may be why Corndolly, who were frankly fucking brilliant most of the time (and endearingly flaky), never went on to become a Big Fucking Deal. (Their singer's abrupt departure shortly after the release of their third single might have had something to do with it, too.) This single -- the first one i ever bought, remember (i'm not including 12" EPs, which are just short albums as far as i'm concerned) -- had one song on the A-side ("Human Cannonball") and two on the flip side ("Squirting Banana Dildo" and "No Song"), and for a long time every time i played the single i'd start by playing the A-side endlessly, then flip it over, play the first song once, then play the third one endlessly. (If you deduce that perhaps i really fucking liked those two songs, you would be correct. I even wrote a letter to them and Angie actually answered back....)

As it happens, they had released a couple of earlier singles and one afterwards before the band imploded. This cd collects up all the tracks from those singles, plus two tracks intended for another single that was aborted by the band breaking up. This cd was a godsend when it was released, because it included the second single, "Sex Kitten/Come Out" (which basically sold out as soon as it was released, and the two bonus tracks, one of which ("Mudfucker") was one of the best things they ever did. (The "Human Cannonball" single is sold out now too.) Plus it was nice to be able to listen to "Human Cannonball" and "No Song" ad infinitum without having to get up and fuck with the needle.... I'm pretty sure this is still in print -- at the very least, still available from Parasol Records directly -- and if i were going to recommend one CD from the grunge era, this would be it (the one other would be Spinanes' first album MANOS). Seven of the eleven songs here were recorded by Brad Wood (best known for working with Liz Phair on her early albums) and supposedly Amy sounds like Liz Phair on some of the later songs, although i sure don't hear it. They always sounded like a cross between a less-weird Butthole Surfers and Joy Division with popfuzz guitars (and a nod to Neil Young toward the end) to me, just a handful of giggly women (and one guy briefly) making unassuming but brilliant music while letting the Big Boys of grunge bore everybody to death with their bombast. This is a band that wrote songs about more ordinary and approachable stuff than most of their grunge counterparts -- with songs like "Sex Kitten," "Squirting Banana Dildo," and "Afterschool Special," they certainly were a lot more down-to-earth than bands like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Plus "Mudfucker" is a brilliant instrumental that neatly fuses grunge garage-rock with the likes of Neil Young and Crazy Horse. One of DEAD ANGEL's favorite albums. If you should happen to trundle over to Parasol to pick it up, be sure to grab everything still available by Honcho Overload while you're at it.

Space-age jazz, man, and it sounds mighty fine. The group is heavily influenced by free jazz of the sixties in particular (especially where tempo and the use of space are concerned, certainly on songs like "Ms. Hubbard's Shock Installation"), but they are hardly retro, encompassing both traditional jazz stylings and more modern, experimental sounds. They're heavy on the improv tip, but can get down and groove when the moment calls for it. Two of the members here (swank percussion dude Nathan Hubbard and multi-instrumentalist Jason Robinson, here employing sax, flute, and electronics) are part of the Trummerflora Collective out of San Diego and the other half of the quartet, trombonist Michael Dessen and bassist Scott Walton, have played with the likes of Yusef Lateef, Nels Cline, Bobby Bradford, Marcos Fernandes, Skeleton Key Orchestra, and lots of other hepcats, so you know they can get down. Most of the songs are spacious and moderate in tempo; the opener, "Restless Years" (driven by relentless percussion courtesy o' Hubbard), is the only thing there that even passes for fast, so their stylin' moves may be lost on people from the MTV generation who are all used to hearing everything jacked up to eleven at railgun tempos. But hang with them at their speed and you shall be rewarded: the band is inventive, prone to the unexpected, and beyond tight. Robinson's fondness for unusual samples and the instrument-abusing tendencies of pretty much everybody on board make for regular explosions of mysterious sounds, especially on "Artichoke Clock." The droning horn on "Birdrock Dub" and its minimalist electronic accompaniment is pretty intriguing, but tracks like "A Street No One Knows" and "Axis" will be more familiar to old-school jazzsters. Their jazz is so smooth that it can include the strange, subdued power-electronic opering of "Ten Directions," even as that sound is eventually augmented by flute 'n jazz percussion that's completely straight-up old school style. The quartet manages to cover a lot of ground and reach in a lot of different directions without falling apart -- their free jazz is a bit more subtle than the hyperjazz of today. Old school is good. Good tone is even better. Both concepts go great together. Check this out and hear for yourself if you don't believe.

C.O.T.A. -- TA'WIL [Charnel Music]

Apparently they are naturalists, judging from the look of the long liner notes in the disc booklet, although since the words are brown on brown and of a microscopic typeface, i'll never really know for sure. Regardless of their politics, their sound is pretty interesting... slow, loping tribal drum rhythms and spooky, disembodied synth leavened with trancelike guitar passages (sometimes repetitive figures, sometimes just hum, other times mutant sounds buried in the background), and only sporadic vox. They're big on the slow-motion drone and the shortest song is nearly seven minutes... these are good things....

The first track, "Blood and Soil," opens with cycling guitar hum, running water, chirping birds, voices reading from some exotic text, and eventually coalesces into a trancelike dirge guitar supplanted by thudding, distorted drums and an eerie vocal chorus. As the song builds, thick keyboard drones add another layer to the growing wall of sound. Swirling clouds of guitar hum also infiltrate "Ismaeli," along with distorted drums more cryptic chanting vocals and a harsh wall of noise that dies away midway through the song, leaving behind just a tinkering drum track and various odd, watery sounds. Toward the end, the singer intones a passage adapted from the prose of Omar Khayyam; i have no idea who he is, but it sounds awfully exotic....

The best track on the disc is probably the fifth one, also the longest at 12:24 -- "Song for the Fifth World." A forbidding beat, dark droning synths, and counterpoint polyrhythms set the engine in motion, often sounding like a mildly heavier version of Voice of Eye. The hypnotic beat is augmented by regular hissing much like blasts from a furnace, or perhaps an approaching dust storm. The sound gradually builds in intensity, growing louder and more complicated, until it finally dissolves in a spiral of hissing and droning. Hard to follow, but the closing "Spiritual Warfare" manages to pull it off with gradiose orchestral bombast (not to mention the occasional burst of noisy fury).

The overall feel is somewhere between a less-crazed Crash Worship and a more orchestrated answer to Voice of Eye... not a bad combination. The name, incidentally, stands for Children of the Apocalypse, and apocalyptic is as good a label as any for their dense, brooding sound.

THIS IS THE SHIT! Full-on dark cult metal. In your face songs with raw production. Barbarian Wrath always puts out good music. Fans of Demoncy and Beherit will find this band interesting and full of TRUE hate. What a relief! [ttbmd]

TMU: Well, they're off to a promising start with that name, aren't they? The title of this first song is called "Black Light Discipline Room." I like the way they think already....

TTBMD: Yeah, it sounds good. Guitar waffling with background noise....

TMU: Calliope sounds....

TTBMD: This is in the same realm as Skullflower. This sounds like it was recorded live.

TMU: There's just two perverts making all this racket. One of the instruments they list is "shattered skull of the black goat" -- (squints) oh wait, actually "guitars, samples, synths, noise," sorry about that.

TTBMD (munching): These sunflower seeds be salty!

TMU: "... sweeeeeeet, sweeeet, sweeeeeeet, sweeeeet sunflowwwwwwaaaahhhhh...."

TTBMD: Did you do a review already for that Low album?

TMU: Yah, when it came out. Back when it was still possible for me to not play it constantly. Like all the time. I am enslaved by Mimi's forbidding snare.

TTBMD: There's a song here called "Leatherface."

TMU: Everybody digs that crazy cat and his stylin' chainsaw.

TTBMD: I highly approve of this. It's everything I look for in sonic exploration and use of delay and guitar drone. Faaaaaar out!

TMU: This is the music of the Atomic Ass Vacuum Cleaner Salesmen of Neptune. Hear their lovely shrieks as they pummel you into senselessness if you don't buy the deluxe model with all the sexual attachments! Like the Horn-0-Matic 500! The Galaxie Pedal of Delayed and Deferred Doom! Buy from them so many products that your bowels ache with desire, lest their wives -- the dreaded Platinum Devil Dolls of Planet Playtex -- come and whip you into senseless abandon and a state of ecstatic, shamanistic desire by beating upon your forehead with their fanged silver phalluses! (panting) The ritual of ectasy begins... the bodies are joined... sweat runs down the Elder God's back and dribbles into the Ocular Shifting Anus... nugggh... areyeh... that which lies dreaming cannot be dead... yuuuu... ugu... agar... (shrieking) the blind maggot eyes of the Goat of a Thousand Young! Blind black goat festering at the center of the universe! The terrible three-lobed eye! Hell titan! Death pig! I AM THE GOD OF VACUUM CLEANER ATTACHMENTS! I YI FUCKING YIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEE!!!

TTBMD: What the fuck are you talking about, man?

TMU: This song. I think. It's hard to tell, I'm possessed by chickens.

TTBMD: Crackhouse is totally the shit. I'll have to check out more stuff on Mandragora. Where are they from?

TMU: The crab caves of Neptune.

TTBMD: This was recorded back in 1989.

TMU: Oooo, wave transmissions from the great beyond... what song is this?

TTBMD: "Thorazine Brain Melt."

TMU: My brain is an ice-cold Slushee.

TTBMD: This CD just keeps getting better. I wonder if they have anything more recent out.

TMU: This i do not know, o swami. My Great and Terrible Eye of Anu -- HAIL ANU! MAY HIS EYE NEVER CLOSE! -- does not see this information. It does see the panties of the girl next door, but not discography information.

TTBMD: This song....

TMU: Yes?

TTBMD: ... it sounds like going through withdrawal.

TMU: Burroughs kicking junk in a tiny windowless hole in some Tijuana fleabag while heavy construction equipment builds the future around him. Sunlight streams in through pinholes in the walls and motes of light dance across his cancerous flesh. The needle gleams. Noises escape like gases. The Atomic Ass Brain burns, oh how it fucking BURNS! HELL -- yes, o my brother, a real and terrible HELL -- is right here! Right now! In the mind of the tortured souls who would unleash such terrifying sounds upon an unsuspecting world!

TTBMD: Doppleganger and Crackhouse should put out a split CD.

TMU: Stop that, you're fucking scaring me and shit. Such a terrible and forbidding thought to even attempt to contemplate... now you've done it, i'm fucking scared, mommy, come HOLD ME!

TTBMD: Next CD, o my brother.

This is kind of amusing: the cd-r is listed as having an A side (1-7) and a B side (8-12). I would expect no less from these cranky misanthropes. The cd-r itself is more of what they do best: strained sheets of groaning, fuzzed-out dark ambient noise and freakout sounds. What they do is less about "songs" and "parts" (which may be why they didn't bother with titles) and more about finding ugly-sounding gadgets and abusing them even more, creating evolving soundscapes of unpredictable sound anchored only by highly repetitive riffs and rhythms when they're not drifting totally into space (or pure noise). Yes, doom childe, we are in the land of live improv freakout, and it's pretty swell, although it sounds like the recording ran into problems here and there. This is not quite as oppressive and genuinely disturbing as some of their other stuff, but it's plenty hardcore, all right. This is the sexed-up sound o' noise bleat, probably served up before a disbelieving audience. Unless they were an audience hep to the sounds from Load or Mandragora or maybe even Skin Graft, in which case they might have been able to grok the weirdness devolving before their very eyes. Before... their very... eyes! Buried under all the sonic disembowelment, if you listen closely, you might detect a distinct nod to early metal in the riffs (think good Sabbath, Judas Priest, that kind of thing). At times they resemble an even more atonal Gravitar, only their drummer isn't quite as hyped-up as Eric Cook, more into the straight beats no matter what the speed, and their guitar sound is distinctly different. This is the process of devolving... grok it while you can....

Since it's called THE ACID KING and it has a picture of Ricky "Say You Love Satan!" Kasso (or whatever his name is) on the cover, with several titles referencing the Acid King's gruesome crime, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that this is their "concept album." As concepts go, it's pretty loose, and so are the lo-fi sounds that abound on this disc -- Erik Amlee and David Gilden employ guitar, loops, and noise to create screeching, groaning piles of sonic filth that are at times reminiscent of a dirtier, noisier Beme Seed (only without Kathleen to make everything sound even vaguely human). Given that this is all about "the terrifying mind of an LSD user," it's plenty psychedelic (and a dark kind of psych at that). Bad juju and violent mood swings abound, deliberately jarring and unsettling variations in sound density and volume level jump out at you, and the pure blind noise content is sufficient in places to scare off all but the seriously devoted. Are you man (or woman) enough to enter the realm of the Acid King and return unscarred? Who knows, but it wouldn't hurt for you to find out (well, you might go deaf from all this violent crashing about, but what's life without a little risk, right?).

It's been a while, but the Cramps have busy since their last album, BIG BEAT FROM BADSVILLE came out four or five years ago on Epitaph. Since then they've regained a hefty chunk of their back catalog, which they're reissuing through their own label, the newly-reactivated Vengeance Records, and they have this brand-new disc with thirteen new songs of sonic depravity. (They've also swapped out bass players again, but that's hardly surprising.) At first glance it appears they're just going through the motions -- there's absolutely nothing new happening here, believe me -- but repeated spins reveal that they sound really good and while there's nothing absolutely stunning here along the lines of "Super Goo" or "Sado County Auto Show," there's plenty of good stompin' fun to be had. Harry Drumdini continues to be by far the best drummer they've ever had, new bass slapper holds down the big beat just fine, and Lux and Ivy are... well, they're Lux and Ivy. Some things never change. Best stompers here: "Big Black Witchcraft Rock," "Dopefiend Boogie," "She's Got Balls," and "Mojo Man From Mars." The psychobilly revolution continues, garish boots and lurid deliquency themes intact.

Crash Worship: "Pyru" (Charnel Music)

Weird noises soon give way to pounding tribal drums while the natives scream and howl like primitives in heat... then another set of drums kick in while SOMETHING apparently fed through a talk-box squawks away with mad zeal. Then ANOTHER drummer appears. Uh-oh, the natives have SPEARS, they're getting restless, what, ANOTHER DRUMMER? Aieeee, this is GETTING OUT OF CONTROL IN A HURRY! Muttering, chanting, the talk-box is apparently being eviscerated, quirky electronic noises give way to an ominous whisper... oops, gotta flip the little round thing over... ah, throbbing bass, here come the drummers again, the natives are sharpening their knives, one has a swinging guitar set on "mince" and another is shredding his, was that someone's head I just saw flying through the forest? My, I haven't hallucinated like this in YEARS, this should probably be ILLEGAL -- no, no, DON'T WAVE THAT SPEAR AT ME! Ah, saved by the UFO landing in the forest and squashing everybody... but then the aliens disembark and they're even crazier, they're possessed by the spirit of Tom Waits (or at least the bizarre sound of "All Stripped Down"), uh-oh, the drummers DIDN'T DIE, they're BACK, my mind is now a crystal-flavored slurpee, I'm beginning to see why Charnel finds this band godlike, I think my DNA just restructured itself... oh my dear sweet suzi that squealing noise is most painful....

I think I must play that again now. I... I am COMPELLED to do so. [WARNING: Do NOT attempt intercourse while listening; your offspring will have many heads. And drumsticks for hands.]

Crash Worship -- TRIPLE MANIA II [Charnel Music]

The tribal madmen return, sounding oddly restrained this time out. While there's plenty of the tribal stomp thing going on here as usual, in a lot of places the emphasis seems to have shifted to the spaced-out guitars (which sound really cool, by the way; MY guitar should sound like this). "Wild Mountain" opens with the sound of rocket liftoff and proceeds to get noisy in slow, layered fashion, with slowcore drums and demented robot animal noises erupting from the guitars. Very, ah, chewy.... The version of "Pyru" here is radically different than the single --same loping drums (or more accurately, sets of drums), but the track here is more stripped-down, with some genuinely exotic-sounding, delay-intensive guitars reverberating all over the place. Hypnotic without being flat-out assaultive.

While this outing is generally a bit easier on the ears than previous ones in terms of volume and density, particularly on slow burners like "Muscolos" and "TCB," others like "Triple Mania I" and "Bring Me The Head of Jeff Mattson" (with mid-tempo pounding drums and avalanche noise guitar) indicate that the band is still capable of being plenty obnoxious when they feel like it. They're also experimenting with a lot of new and different instruments and textures, such as on the weird country-tribal "Git on Home," which sounds like what might happen if Flatt and Scruggs got good and shitfaced on that demon moonshine and decided to run their banjos through a heap o' sound processors, then slowed the tape down a few times just for "fun." And the long, loud "Live NYC" has plenty of fire and fury to it as well -- lots of jackhammer pounding, and from the sound of it, they were smacking sticks on the drums, the mikes, the stage, the speakers, big metal cans, the groupies, and God only knows what else. Yes, even on a disc more readily accesible than some of their earlier ones, they still have that jagged touch o' frenzy....

Crawling With Tarts -- MADELEINE [Sulphur]

Sulphur is actually yet another "division" of Silent records. This gem seems to have been very quietly slipped out the back door. In fact, it has apparently been out for a number of months, but how would one know? It has been conspicuously absent from the racks of nearly all the local stores. I found a copy while in Portland. With that said, Crawling With Tarts is a duo that has my respect, mainly because they don't allow themselves to be rigidly pigeon-holed. Each release is contextually ever so different from the next. If one ever dare think they understand the formula, Crawling With Tarts will just throw out another curve ball, leaving one in the corner and scratching the old noggin. Although all of the tracks appear in a very coherent order, it's interesting to note that they were all recorded somewhere between 1983 and 1994. This release is about the most pop- oriented thing I've ever heard them do, except to say that it's unmistakably quite quirky and angular too. Attentive listening will reveal some of the inner secrets of what makes this band so damn great. [yol]

Crawling With Tarts -- I AM TELEPHONING A STAR [ASP]

An interesting thing happened... just as i was wondering, "You know, i hear much about Crawling With Tarts, i wonder what they are like?" -- wouldn't you know it, somebody sent me this out of the clear blue. Perhaps now i should sit around wondering what the Wanda Jackson box set on Bearsville sounds like.... [hs-cg: Yeah, right.] What it is, then... is... odd. They seem to be fond of odd percussion and minimal song structure. That's the story on the first couple of tracks, anyway, especially "The Trunk Hill in Kweilin." But on "End Loop Haiku," they sound more like a noisier, more eccentric counterpart to Hafler Trio -- loops of found sound compete with loops of speech and looped snippets of noise or melody, all playing in circles. "Radio Compressor Test No. 4" is EXTREMELY annoying: silence periodically broken by a loud "SKOCK!" like a microphone popping. OW!

Some of this -- particularly "Fielding Variation No. 2," which actually sounds like a series of lawnmowers droning in circles -- is reminiscent of the Chris DeLaurenti album reviewed last issue. The centerpiece of all this sonic effluvia is "Scenes From the Ottoman Empire," a seven-minute track opening with whistling sounds and low-field hum; eventually a drum track and a xylophone (?) begin beating out a rudimentary rhythm before dying away and into what sounds like a series of bird calls. (If this sounds distinctly odd, well... it is.)

"Sparkling Red Stars" is the closest thing on the disc to an actual "song," although they've tinkered with it so that the sound keeps fading back and forth in volume and is partially obscured by what sounds like rotor blades whirring. "A bird's-eye view of the new buildings" is pretty much nothing but a drum track (with some incidental noises thrown in here and there), as is "Visiting the Seabed." The last two tracks -- totalling about two and a half minutes -- are snippets of conversation that have been spliced up, run backwards, treated, etc., for a most peculiar effect... again, recalling Hafler Trio. Most peculiar. Definitely a recording for the adventurous in spirit....

Crawl Unit -- AFTERMUSIC [povertech]

Interesting manipulations of sound processed entirely from other sources, if my understanding is correct. The CD (available from Crawl Unit's own label, Povertech), opens with "malfunction," where a sampled classical (?) bit devolves into CD skippage of various types; this is followed by "soul virus," an odd conglomeration of skittering, chattering noises and the occasional rising peal of microphone feedback. "the shadow of the object" -- at nearly eleven minutes, the longest thing here -- mixes almost tabla-like noises with ambient chiming, background squeals, and other odd sounds to hypnotic and mantra-like effect. The overall sound of "to have not" is that of a cyclotron being sanded down somewhere at the edge of the universe; "involution" combines spoken samples with CD skippage, guttural moaning, and an increasing wall of rumbling noise, all apparently designed to flatten your temporal lobe. In "loss," bass sounds are gradually augmented by faraway noise like a sandstorm and other cryptic sounds. The cyclotron effect returns -- in a bit more subdued fashion -- on "seeking," while "saturation test (installation fragment)" depends on changing dynamics for its desired effect. This CD is difficult to describe and even harder to categorize -- it's not flat-out noise, at least not in terms of intensity, but it's certainly not music in the melodic/rhythmic sense either. Hmm... perhaps the title was a most prescient one... at any rate, it's well worth investigating. Crawl Unit has a new one coming out shortly on Manifold that promises to be every bit as interesting....

The beat is hopping from the word go. Crepusculous is two whacked-out looking guys making equally whacked-out but seductive grooves with noise, samples, and other insidious sonic effluvia buried beneath the hypnobeat. That's the opening vibe on "Qweqwe," and when they're not making hideous noises and turning those into gross beats (as on "Chin of Change"), luring you in with catchy rhythmic elements that build upon one another seems to be the order of the day. Not every song on here holds my attention, but certainly more of it does than the average mainstream techno/electronica album. In a weird way they remind me of Ween: when they're not quite there they're okay, but when they get it totally right they're deranged but brilliant. Unlike Ween, their field is pretty firmly the land of electronics 'n jiggy beats, so that does somewhat limit their ability to stretch out, alas.... One thing i definitely like is that when they're loud (as on the title track) they're REALLY LOUD, but when they're quiet they're really quiet. The hiccuping beat of "The Head of the Body (Tuberculosis") is most swell, too, as is the brooding steel drums of "Like Distant Sheeping." When they eschew the wild noises (or at least keep them down in the background), they approaching this droning industrial clank that would be really scary if they turned it up a lot louder. Another cool band working its mojo in the shadow of the underground, thanks to the likes of Mathbat and like-minded small labels.

Cub -- COME OUT, COME OUT [7" version] [Mint Records]

I have a hard time imagining that there's anybody out there doing lo-fi cutesy catchy popstuff better than this. This is just total godhead. I haven't gotten this loopy about an album since the Spinanes' MANOS (whose own peculiar brand of deceptively simple minimalist pop isn't that far removed from this, although that band tends to sound much, much "cleaner"). Lo-fi recording (expect to hear lots of hiss and hum between songs) can't obscure how much fun these women are having, and in a lot of places the lo-fi vibe actually works in their favor -- the tubbed-out drums on "new york city" sound really cool (even though you can hardly hear the REST of the percussion).

Good stuff abounds -- the punked-out energy on tunes like "ticket to spain" and "life of crime," the chiming arpeggiated guitar riff of "everything's geometry", harmony vocals at the end of "new york city," the naughty line (!) in "tomorrow go away," blah blah blah. But it's not all fun and games, which is what makes Cub -- like the Spinanes -- stand out from the "cute pack"; there's an undercurrent of tension, conflict, or just plain pissed-offness running through half of the songs, especially on "my flaming red bobsled" (about a girl who's perceived as too aggressive for her own good and the sore losers around her), "life of crime" (the perils of teenage delinquency), and "tomorrow go away" (about an insensitive luv connection).

When they're in the mood for fun, though, they're positively loopy, as on "voracious" -- apparently about crocodile-wrestling, of all things -- and the simultaneously adorably charming and totally deranged "radio chinchilla." I don't think any other band on earth could get away with a line like "satan sucks / but you're the best" and still make you want to hear the song over and over like a tranced-out idjit....

And just why IS Ian McKaye of Fugazi standing around with them on the pic inside the sleeve? Ah, such mysteries!

Irritating Collector Scum WARNING: This album exists in two formats, CD and a series of three colored vinyl singles (oooo!), and they are DIFFERENT, arrgh! The CD loses "radio chinchilla" and one other while gaining a song that's not on this version. I guess this means I'll have to get the CD too... gak....

Cub/Potatomen -- split CD-5 [Lookout/Mint]

Hey, the [ cub ] are ROCKIN' this time.... and as always, they sound godlike. I've yet to hear a [ cub ] release that didn't make me want to run out and buy everything of theirs and set chairs on fire and stuff because [ cub ] ARE THE PURE DISTILLED ESSENCE OF ROCK AND ROLL, DAMMIT! Plus Lisa is one of my all-time favorite singers (Bliss Blood is the other). There's a lot more buzzsaw in Robynn's guitar this time, particularly on "Exit," one of their best yet, and she and drummer Lisa G. switch places for a squirrely, punked-out cover of "Runaway." Bonus points awarded for that fact that on the incredibly tiny insert, Lisa looks an AWFUL LOT like Laura Palmer from one of the early episodes of TWIN PEAKS.

The Potatomen are a trio of twangy, suave hepcats who are sort of like a punkier, dance-floor version of Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Sort of. This is a good thing, trust me. No matter how weird it sounds. Plus they have the good taste to cover The Four-Eyed Twitchy One's "Words of Love" and they don't drop the ball on it, either. They are worthy of your attention for this alone....

Cub -- BOX OF HAIR [Mint/Lookout]

This really threw me for a loop when i first heard it; it's louder louder and in yer FACE (eek!) than the previous two discs, and their sound has shifted a bit -- the guitar is up in the forefront here, rather than the bass (as was more the case before). They're also rockin' a lot harder this time around, for the most part. Top it off with considerably improved "production values" and you have a very different cuddlekitty indeed....

There are exceptions -- "magic eight ball" sounds like it could have been lifted from the last album (other than the fact that it sports a really nifty accordion accompaniment, woo!), while "loaded" and "main and broadway" sound like holdovers from the first album (but GOOD holdovers, mind you). But most of the album is movin' on, so to speak... generally with good results. Check out the gratuitous reverb on "box of hair," mon! Meanwhile, "way to go" not only has a cool shuffle beat, but is just one catchy sumbitch besides. As a matter of fact, just about everything is awfully catchy without being obvious (particularly "pillow queen" and "freaky"). And did i mention that "s.g." rocks like a rabid pee dog? How does Robynn manage to get such a tremendously swank guitar tone, anyway? I would kill to know this....

The secret weapon o' the CD, though, is the gorgeous "river side," possibly the best thing they've ever done. It even has a violin, dammit! Violins are cool! Cub are never better than when they're getting morose about crushed romances. As for the live "not what you think," i'm not sure what to make of THAT -- especially since it grinds to a halt halfway through to break for approximately fifteen minutes of what sounds like a rocking chair squeaking before resuming waaaaaaaay on the other side. Uh... okay... what kind of drugs do these ladies take on tour, anyway? It doesn't matter... they are godhead... we should probably give them a state or two for their own disposal just for merely existing (i favor giving away Montana, where only the cows are sane anyway).

Other things you should know: The insert features a picture of a cat with a really fat head and Robynn Iwata is STILL one of the hottest women in the music biz (not that this has anything to do with anything, but it still needs to be said, of course). So what are you waiting for? Go pester your local record store until they hand over a copy just for YOU!

Cub -- MAULER [Lookout/Mint Records]

This is not really a new album proper -- instead, it's a collection of odd bits from Cub's first five years in existence. Some of the tracks on here are alternate versions of stuff already released; some are from obscure early singles; others are from the numerous compilations the band has contributed to at one time or another. Given the band's obsession for giving non-album tracks to compilations and recording different tracks for the vinyl and CD versions of the same albums, it was kind of inevitable that something like this would have to happen. Even though its appearance is more than welcome, i do have a couple of quibbles: like, where the hell is "radio chinchilla" from the vinyl version of COME OUT, COME OUT? And why are there previously released tracks from CO,CO and BOX OF HAIR taking up space that could have been used for other obscure tracks? It's a mystery, mon... might as well ask why Dylan hid away "Blind Willie McTell" and "Foot of Pride"....

Nevertheless, the rest of the goodies here make the disc indispensable. Full nine of the 16 songs here are from obscure compilations and split singles, including all three tracks from the split with Potatomen. Some of these songs are so brilliant -- like "Secret Nothing," possibly the best thing they've ever done -- that you wonder what possessed them to give them away to compilations rather than including them on their own albums. Bands are strange, aren't they? It's also nice to hear the previously unreleased track "pregnant," which is a nifty slab o' fuzzy churn. They also include many of the songs from the original 7" EPs PEP and HOT DOG DAY; all of the ones here eventually ended up on BETTI-COLA, but these are the original (different) versions, so that's cool... would have been nice to hear the rest of the EPs on here, tho....

But it's worth picking up just to hear "Green Eyes," the alternate version of "Pillow Queen," "Exit," and the aforementioned "Secret Nothing," which is flatly too fucking cool for mere words. As an added bonus, they include tidbits about the origins of the songs (along with discography annotations) in the booklet, plus lots of photos. And they're standing around in their undies on the back of the CD case, which is fine by me.

Current 93 -- ALL THE PRETTY LITTLE HORSIES (CD, Durtro/WSD)

The second installment of the "Inmost Light" trillogy comes as a full- length album. The third installment is due out in May or June. After years of slagging away, it looks like David Tibet has now finally realized his vision of perfection and beauty through his unique blend of folk and music concrete. The title track is taken from a traditional (bedtime?) song and is used to open up the album, as sung by Tibet, and then to close it, as sung by guest Nick Cave. Yes, you read that right. All of the tracks weave their way in and out of each other, melting together seemlessly like puzzle pieces that when fully assembled reveal the true theme. Tibet's trademark sense of black humor inserts itself at all the right moments. I especially enjoyed the inclusion of Lilith Stapelton's over-the-top crooning. [yol]

Fans of the old-timey fingerpicking guitar, the nostalgia of the Hawaii of your mind (may vary from the one you see on vacation), and the perfect melody would do well to throw down three and a half notes for this little buddy. Apart from a wholly slick package/production (nice color sleeve depicting someone else's family, b & w image of a Hawaiian shoreline on back, and coolest of all, a library checkout card on the inside of the sleeve from "Currituck County Public Library system" which you can fill and feel free to never return), there's four songs, two instrumental, two with vocals, of Kevin Barker's (who you may know as a songwriter and arranger for the TeenBeat! band Aden) really exquisite melodic flair. The opening title track is superb and inventive, starting with a recording of a scratchy old Hawaiian record on a child?s turntable. Kevin duets with the record for a bit, and then goes into his own melody as the old record comes to the end, emitting the scratching and grinding sounds of a '78 at the end of a side. The two parts never actually fuse, but play side by side, a new interpreter of an old song.

There's also a shorty banjo choon that begins side two, but the highlights of the record are "Did I See You" and the simultaneously heart-breaking and heart-mending "Intertwining Arms" are amazing, perfect pieces of folky and melodic songwriting. The latter is solo elegiac, it can render me mute and introspective for a good 10 minutes after the stylus comes back to rest. This is not the sort of thing I EVER usually seek out, but I can't stop listening to this record. Everything about it is perfect; even with only four songs, the sequencing works superbly, the melodies haunt you for hours afterward, and like any 7" worth its salt, your first tendency is to flip it back over: "Why not, it's short, I've got all night." This WILL enrich your life, I guarantee it. [cms]

The name doesn't make things obvious, so i'll spell it out: Alec Empire (Atari Teenage Riot) lays down the slablike beats, then Techno-Animal trails behind vacuuming everything up into its hate-o-mizer and spews out the bloody bits. As for the sound that emerges from this particularly hellish laboratory experiment, well, it's basically the sound of Atari Teenage Riot (minus the vox) slowed down to Techno-Animal's preferred Turgid Tempo of Doom and liberally coated with twisted guitar, violent samples, insane cheeping, and other sounds of an apocalyptic nature. Much of it -- especially on tracks like "Caucasian Death Mask" -- is quite loud. Would you expect less? Empire's approach to the music here is different than what he normally does in ATR; here, he explodes in a flurry of mad beats, then settles into an endless subatomic groove over which the Pathological puppies can wail at will. This, the opener of the way, pretty much sets the tone for all that follows. On "Escape From Earth" they mix destroyed CD sounds into the primal sludge; on "Substance X" they actually import a vocalist (MC Beans, whoever he be), although his words are run through piles of repeat delay; on "Kamikaze Space Programme" they craftily emulate the sound of angry dinosaurs sweeping aside entire cities with their tails; and on "Ultrasonic Meltdown" they basically throw in every kind of sound and sample they could get their hands on, then crush it beneath a bronto-beat. But otherwise, the tunes are pretty much all of one kind -- a big beat, big noises, big hate, big everything, which gets a bit tedious after a while. The sound of it all is pretty damn swank, particularly since it all appears to have been recorded way too loud (on purpose, i'm sure), but i can't imagine sitting down and actually listening to the entire thing in one sitting. It's best digested in chunks. Nevertheless, those who cannot get enough of the mighty atom smasher that is Techno-Animal will probably want to acquire this. It definitely leans more toward Techno-Animal than ATR, so it should be of importance to the T-A fetishists for that reason.... (Hell, why do you think i bought it in the first place?)

Curve -- COME CLEAN [Universal Records]

Yes... it is true... Curve have returned to kick Shirley Manson's goddamned ass. New album, new label, and new sound (sorta) -- they've moved away slightly from the wall-of-guitar-festooned-with-weird-shit sound of earlier albums (in other words, the sound pretty much ripped off wholesale by Garbage). Big guitars abound, yes, but the overall sound is considerably more chopped-up and sample-dependent than before, and the beats have lurched into the vaguely techno territory. Nowhere is this more evident than on "Chinese Burn," which is hectic, frantic, and all over the place, with the guitar fuzzing away mostly in the background while the beat twitches like an epileptic eel. "Dog Bone" not only pushes the techno envelope, but introduces thick sheets o' pure white noise behind the wall-o-guitars "Alligators Getting Up" keeps it up with the ice-hall dance thing, while "Killer Baby" weaves everything around a doodling "whoo-whoop" synth bleat, yet another technoism run amok. Good thing it sounds good, eh? Harsh noises as loops turn up again in "Forgotten Sanity"; by contrast, "Beyond Reach" sounds almost like techno chamber music before eventually breaking into a heavy-duty uberbeat.

"Coming Up Roses" and "Something Familiar" are the more obvious links to the older Curve -- especially the latter song, which sounds like it could have come from one of the early EPs. It's all full of droning guitars, droning vox, and slo-mo ping-pong beats. As it happens, they're the only two such songs on the album, so if you were expecting more of the same, you shalt be horribly disappointed. On the other hand, if you were hoping to see the band expand on their by-now patented "this is how we crush people with the wall of guitars and samples" sound, check in to the listening booth. Admit it, you'd rather hear the real thing than poofy-lipped Shirley going through another round o' watered-down Curvisms, wouldn't you?