Dangerous contortions in the name of all that is free from a room full of talented eccentrics. This collaboration with the name destinied to short-circuit spellcheck programs across the globe first came to life when composer Eric Glick Rieman (prepared / extended electric piano) collared his pal Fred Frith (guitar, maniacal laughter) and talked him into a collaboration. They then brought in trumpet player Lesli Dalaba and violinist Carla Kihlstedt and recorded this album as a quartet. Given their pedigrees (a partial listing of people they've worked with at one time or another includes John Zorn, Carbon, Eugene Chadbourne, LaMonte Young, Tom Cora, Zeena Parkins, and Ikue Mori), it's hardly surprising that the results are loose and flowing, yet still organic in their complexity and unpredictability.

This may be free, but ultimately probably has more to do with film soundtracks than with free jazz. At times their sound resembles that of Tangerine Dream more than anything else, which is kind of interesting. The musical moods occasionally become loud in their drama, but this is not wild and flailing improv on the order of Last Exit or Painkiller -- this is more restrained, less about pushing the boundaries of sound and more about finding a harmonious balance of many elements. The seven tracks on here all sound largely improvised, but not self-indulgent, and while they are all instrumental tracks, they nevertheless paint vivid pictures with their powerful tones and lilting, beachcomber rhythms (especially on "shallow weather," portions of which are nearly ambient). Given that large portions of the album play out like extended soundtrack music to an exotic foreign film, it's easy enough to just sit back and let it all just happen without worrying about the sounds and their origins. Their sound is somehow both crystal clear and suspended in thick fog at the same time. Contradictions exist and are resolved when it pleases them. More brilliant compositions with a bigger palette than mainstream music pundits would have you believe exists.

Three tracks of uptempo punk / metal. One member used to be in a band called Monster Voodoo Machine, an extremely underrated Canadian band that prefigured the whole rap / electronic-rock thing by about six years. The songs on the EP have one foot in Hellacopters-style rawk and the other in BLIND-era Corrosion of Conformity crunchiness. I have a feeling that this is the sort of sound Metallica and Corrosionof Conformity have been going for on their past couple of releases; stripped-down, heavy, and rocking. The disc also contains one of those multimedia deals with a video and some desktop backgrounds. [n/a]

Damon and Naomi -- PLAYBACK SINGERS [Sub Pop]

The wonder-duo of lo-fi gloom pop return! And this time it's even more low-key than before; most of the songs here are acoustic, all of it recorded in their home over a period of a year. Prolific they ain't -- this is only the third album they've released together (well, maybe fourth if you include the Magic Hour thingy) since the dissolution of Galaxie 500, the legendary band of which they comprised two-thirds of the personnel (the third chunk, guitarist Dean Wareham, can now be found doing his thing in the band Luna). But obviously they are big believers in quality over quantity, for this is a gorgeous, melodically minimalist sleeper (in more ways than one) of an album. Especially notable is the fuzzy, overmodulated quality of the recordings themselves, undoubtedly the results of working at home, which give the album a homegrown warmth lacking in most of the conventional releases recorded in professional studios. This feeling is borne out by the album's stated slogan, "Compromising quality of reproduction for the sake of nostalgia."

I haven't heard the previous D + N discs so I have no idea how they sound, but I'm struck by how reminiscent this is of Galaxie 500's sound. As before, the driving melodic forces of the album are in Naomi's basslines and the harmony of their voices (and as before, Naomi remains the primary singer -- a good deal for moi, since I really like hearing her sing). Of course, her wispy, droning vox make it almost impossible to tell what she's actually singing, but they print the lyrics, so how bad do you really need to know anyway? As for the songs, they're all fairly ethereal and filled with vaguely middle-Eastern musical references. The most wispy of them are the openers "Turn of the Century" and "Eye of the Storm," while the quietest (and prettiest) would be "In the Sun." In all of them, Naomi manages to impart both a sense of sadness and hope at the same time, no small trick (and probably the key to Galaxie 500's enduring appeal). "I'm Yours" especially sounds like it could have come from the first Galaxie 500 album, in fact. They also turn out to have a couple of interesting surprises up their sleeves: first, a cover of Ghost's "Awake in a Muddle" (!), complete with with droning middle-Eastern keyboards, and a cover of the hopelessly obscure Tom Rapp song "Translucent Carriages" (as in, so obscure that I have no idea who the hell he is). As always, the key to their success is simplicity, and to say they succeed again with this album would be an understatement.

The title is honest: these are indeed old-time sounds from a modern bluegrass band. They're from Austin, but you could be forgiven for thinking they're a bunch of hillbillies from the Smoky Mountain range. (One of them -- the singer, i think -- is actually a waiter at Opal Divine's House of Free Love, a most favored DEAD ANGEL watering hole, even if they can't keep nonalcoholic beer in stock.) "The Girl I Love Don't Pay Me No Mind" is the true face of back-country bluegrass, and "Red Wagon" is the laid-back hoedown playing at the country dance out in the sticks. I really like the full-on gospel sound of "By the Mark" -- this is an absolute throwback to the Carter Family singalongs, or maybe even as far back as the unearthly sounds found on the Smithsonian FOLKWAYS ANTHOLOGY. This is no less true of the other two tracks, "True Life Blues" and "Jesus Is On the Main Line." Fine, fine sounds of the hill country unspoiled by modern sensibilities. I sense the potential for greatness here somewhere down the line. Definitely a band to watch.

The return of Darkthrone offers up more primitive blackened metal. I think this album is the best of their latest efforts. The songs are long and full of chainsaw riffs. The thing I liked most about this record is that they maintain their sound that so many people try and copy, no trends. The drumming on this is toned down a bit, but fits in perfectly with the misanthropic feel. Buy this record and pay tributes to the gods. [TTBMD]

Dataclast are a couple of dudes from New Jersey weaned on death metal who could apparently only find electronica instruments in the pawn shops, so they decided to wing it electronica style; Earwigs are mysterious dudes in black from Seattle who have been grinding out hideous sheets of noise since 1990 or so. The first half of the disc (actually 29 short and grinding blasts of obnoxious behavior) is taken up by Dataclast acting very much like Blood Duster armed with a pile of damaged analog synths, sequencers, and a drum machine instead of the usual metal instruments. The second half (six songs of greater, less attention-deprived length) belongs to the Earwigs, who are very different in their method of attack but just as obnoxious.

The Dataclast recipe for destructive behavior goes something like this: Start with a pile of electronic gadgets, some of which are broken and don't exactly sound good. Turn everything up real, real loud. Throw in some obscure samples about violence, torture, people being hacked into tiny roach cutlets, satanic laughter, whatever. Play everything by pounding on it until it breaks; if it breaks in the middle of a song, keep playing it anyway. Pure molten metal riffs like the one on "Research Methodology" sound good even on tortured keyboards; add as necessary for texture. Give the vocalist a mike and let him rant, knowing full well nobody's ever going to figure out what the hell he's croaking. Garnish freely with song titles like "Frampton Takes A Bribe" and "Snow White Power Violence." Stir briskly, leaving the metal spoon in the bowl to get tangled in the beaters when the Head Noise Cook throws it in the blender and hits PUREE. Best served in bite-sized chunks.

After all the crazed thrashing about from Dataclast, the Earwigs are a pleasant return to old-school noise antics. Earwigs came of age next to the likes of Taint, Macronympha, Black Leather Jesus, Smell and Quim, that sort of thing, and their methodology is primitive but effective -- turn everything up loud, pound on shit, shout a lot, drench everything in reverb, live by the mantras "more noise is good" and "efx pedals are my friend." In the hands of the uninitiated, such vague operating methods can lead to tragic results; fortunately, the Earwigs know what they're doing. (Well, most of the time, anyhow.) Pieces like "Megatron Locust Invasion"  and the droning filth-o-tron "Unconquerable Golden Dragon!" are so totally old-school in their lo-fi, blown-up noise moves that will bring a tear to your eye if you were around when PITTSBURGH, PA came out. Unlike most of their noise contemporaries, however, Earwigs are down with space-rock, which results in droning interstellar noise mantras like "Total Destruction," in which UFO noises compete with each other in the Wind Tunnel of Doom as howling aborigines get sucked down to their deaths. Like, swank. Plus they yell a lot on "X," which is always a good thing.

Yes, much prime rib here... just be aware that Dataclast are from the glitch school (among other things) and are not even remotely "traditional" in their outlook about anything. The Earwigs tracks, though, should be heard. If you claim to love noise and aren't cleaning your underwear after hearing the apocalyptic noise deevolution on "X," then there's something wrong with you....

Daviess County Panthers -- JE N'AIME PAS BEAUCOUP MA GAMELLE [Sonic B.]

This seething tub o' fear was produced/engineered by Steve Albini and Tom Zaluckyj (one of the former aluminum-axe beaters for Tar), but with the exception of "cat jack" -- a high-velocity flying wedge of spinning overtone guitar and wailing feedback -- you'd never guess it. Except maybe you would after all, seeing as how Albini has been charting a downright schizophrenic course in the last few years, alternating turns with quasi- accessible "alternative" icons (Nirvana, Veruca Salt, and... ick... Bush) and artier/weirder types (Zeni Geva, Jim O'Rourke, Cheer-Accident). Think of the Daviess County Panthers as the missing link between the two camps and Albini's appearance behind the board of many dials becomes a bit more obvious, then....

So anyway, this is an unquestionably swank album. The band sort of resembles Wire crossed with the Birthday Party, or maybe a jazzier and more antagonistic Helium with ominious nods to the first Dream Syndicate album. At any rate, the disc has taken up semi-permanent residence in my CD player, a rarity these days when i'm drowning in releases and never have enough time to listen to anything over and over (ah, for the good old days, right). Unlike the current vogue of smearing three or four fuzzy chords all over the place and shouting a lot, the DCP actually play real songs with structures just barely conventional enough to remain accessible, yet still warped enough to make them genuinely memorable. Matters are helped immensely by guitarist Michael Hibarger's unerring control of feedback and dynamics (check out the lurching jolts of crunch-riffing and the sound of a guitar spitting razor blades on "sinner," or the slo-mo action drone and feedback orgy of "meteor"). The best moments are when the guitar plays a spiky hide-and-seek behind the bass only to eventually jump out and dig trenches in your skull on "resigned" and "leave the lights on." And speaking of "resigned," bassist John Paananen gets the best bass sound there i've heard in years. (He churns out swell bass tones all through the album, actually. He also supposedly plays Farfisa, although it must be buried in the background somewhere 'cause i'm not hearing it....)

The other two members of the band pull their own weight: drummer Chris Keene switches back and forth between lumbering-behemoth mode and weird stuttering demi-jazz beats, employing so many twists and turns that God only knows how the rest of them manage to follow him. (Betcha they practice a lot.) The secret weapon, though, is singer Suzette Fontaine, who sounds like a sleepy, marginally psychotic cross between Lydia Lunch and Bliss Blood (and maybe Lou Reed; she has this tendency to alternate talking with singing). Her best moment is on the creeped-out, blackly paranoid and surreal hallucination-fest "leave the lights on," where she wails about the voices in the pipes and in her closet and under her bed until the endless ditch-digger riff comes along without warning and caves your skull in.

Listening to this is kind of like wandering through the corridors of a spooky underground bomb shelter, peeking around every corner to make sure mad dogs aren't waiting to chew off your face, only to find that the crazed fanatics ready to impale you with steak knives and push you screaming toward your doom are actually BEHIND you. Wups, shouldn't have flinched.... I could go on like this, but you get the idea. You should own this. Period. Seek it out and be impressed....

This is a fair bit more restrained than many of PE's outings. Three duets between guitarist Bryan Day and pianist Brian Noring, where treated guitar collides with extremely "free" piano motifs. On "Part 1," the piano is clean and bright, upfront in the mix, with Day's guitar muted in the background -- sometimes plinking along, sometimes providing a noisy counterpart, sometimes impossible to distinguish from the piano. The mix is reversed to a great extent on "Part 2," with the guitar upfront and making peculiar noises, while Noring plays an organ in the background, deliberately invoking perverse chords and swelling drones from time to time. The sounds on this one are more abrupt and noisy, the dynamics more intense, and the effect marginally more chaotic. "Part 3" returns to the overall sound of the first movement, but there's a bit more happening, and a shift toward actually recognizable rhythms from time to time. Exotic and experimental in the vein of AMM or Bill Horist, perhaps....

One of the things i like best about Public Eyesore as a label is that you have absolutely no idea what you're going to hear when you put one of their discs in the player. Even with artists you've heard before, every release is a brand new bag. This is no exception -- here guitarist Bryan Day joins forces with Keith Nicolay (abuser of various instruments) to create a series of highly improvisational vignettes of cocktail freejazz. Improv guitar runs collide with near-random bursts of activity from a number of sources (samples, taped conversation, piano, other instruments), resulting in a sound much like a lounge band after hours getting squiffed on Ripple and just making stuff up as they go. An idea that could be sheer disaster in the hands of those less schooled in improv, but this is good (although wildly chaotic) stuff. The interplay between the various instruments is a pleasure to hear, and what initially came across as random effluvia often, after careful consideration, turns into something far more tangible (if still way out there). The sounds of anarchy in action!

Now this is the way music should be presented. Begin with a nifty sleeve that also matches the covers for all the other artists on the label, pressed using stiff cardstock, like real albums. Discover the two cryptic inserts enclosed (one for the label, one for the album). Marvel at the simplicity, the mystery, the complete lack of credits or recording information. Pull out the album itself. Note how heavy it is, how clear and bright the colors are on the labels, how clean and shiny it is. Look, doom childe, and you will see: the format that would not die! Pressed on... yes... fat-ass 180-gram vinyl or something like that. Now put the record on the turntable and drop the needle. Dig those chopped-up grooves on Carson Day's "Into the Night" -- listen to the stuttering screech beats as they build to a frenzied crescendo of stripped gears and clattering percussion. Listen to the zombie rattling off random words as it all comes crashing to a halt. Is your soul clean now? Good. You are ready for the droning luvfest of "Different Agendas," where Ilet Apt lay down the oceanic doom drone and proceed to nail it to the cross with a big beat and skittering scratch riffs. Atomic drone techno. If they'd played more of this at Burning Flipside, I would have grokked their techno leanings with a lot more grace....

Oh no! The side ended. You'll have to turn it over, you know. There you go... good... Observe, doom childe, as Ilet Apt lay down the law with "Tripout" -- good sounds converted to good noise riffs that don't interfere with the mighty Beat are the way to go. Robot funk for the rave generation; somewhere far above the clouds the Starchild smiles. The Bop Gun will not have to be used. On "Come Here Often," Carson Day demonstrates that he can be a smooth operator when the occasion calls for it. We're in the land of the good groove, doom childe. Can you feel it? Can you feeeeeeel iiiiiiiiiit? I know Iggy could, but he's not smooth enough to be mackin' here, dig? Let me sum it up for you, squinting li'l doom chile -- this is electronica, techno, whatever they call it this month, minus all the stupid parts. And really, really well-recorded, too. These people are not fucking around. Of course I'm sure you already have this fine, fine listenable and already know of which I speak, right? Right? You don't? Well, what are you waiting for? Hoo hah....

Dead Body Love -- REPUGNANCE C60 [Bludlust!]

Italy's most loathsome noisician is just beginning to get his due on the noise front. Now that local noise reps MSNP and Self Abuse have have formalized the acquaintance, and with his second release on Bludlust!, G. Guiliani should start popping up everywhere. Everywhere that matters, anyway.

Opportunistic as ever, Guiliani takes advantage of this Bludlust! follow-up by dipping a little deeper into the power electronic side of the noisepool. Oscillating pulses form a backdrop to the slow layering rush of DBL's trademark crunch. It's an a absolutely fantastic sound and REPUGNANCE only serves to demonstrate that it works as well with temporal markers as without. Temporal markers aside, this is a very well-developed, well- intentioned -- need one mention heavy-handed -- bit of grit. Not an oversnuffingly heavy onslaught, by DBL standards, but very forceful: we can see the hand at work, and it's hardly a limp-wristed affair. The sense of purpose overindulges, the darkness descends. More melodramatic words, and a well-timed flash of lighting help accentuate such an eerie statement. Feel the fist ease around your neck, grab you by the throat and with inexorable patience and cruelty, wring the living shit out from between your ears, and shove some dead shit back in.

In we go: "Give Way to Grief" is first for the chop. Guiliani whips out his orbital sander and starts buffing up a petrified elephant corpse. He has a lot of raw material to work with here, but manages to rip and tear most of it right off anyway. Sounds of dry shredding and mechanical protestation accompany slow, grinding burn and non-stop sobbing 'n sniffling. I can identify. It always breaks me up to see brand new electronic toys reduced to useless lumps of warped metal and melted plastic. They sure don't make 'em like they used to. Elephant corpses, neither. After the failed attempt at corpse preservation, Guiliani tries his hand at the internal organs: "Flooded Lungs." No sense letting a perfectly good set of lungs going to waste. This time he puts the circular handsaw to work. It takes time. He goes through several hundred blades and a few fingers in the process. But eventually, out of impenetrable grumbling dull-drudgery, a crack of daylight: screeching saws work at the tattered edges with a frenzied passion, repeatedly cutting into sharpened corners and jutting scales. Periodically, he switches back to the mangled buffer just to smooth out the dangerous edges. Then he hits paydirt, splattering leftover embalming fluid everywhere. The crazed pervert is in a state of fevered dementia by now, scooping up the shop-vac, trying to suck-up the hard-to-get areas. I've no idea if he ever succeeds in his task because at that moment, the track ends. I doubt he would have noticed anyway.

Whatever the outcome, a new obsession blossoms on side B: "Human Destruction". Now there's something we can all get behind. At least it's a little more mainstream. Once again, electronic pulses oscillate at the perimeter, though these tend to disguise themselves with glaringly abrasive overkill. Razorsharp assemblyline flesh-processors splice at a furious pace, blades whirling and swirling through both ends, often grinding up against less-yielding carcasses and other tissue-draped blades caught in the frenzy. Which carries quite naturally into "Destruction Pt. 2": the final processing stages, I imagine. Here it's all blades with little raw material of any kind. Electronic pulses be damned. Instead huge, slavering jet-engines suck up everything offered up front and indiscriminately reduce the writhing whole into minute crystallized particles of frozen dust. [JK]

Dead Kennedys -- GIVE ME CONVENIENCE OR GIVE ME DEATH [Alt. Tentacles]

While i think Jello Biafra is a real swell guy and everything, and of course East Bay Ray is the master o' the Echoplex, i've always had a wee problem with the DKs in that their overall effect was always kind of... scattershot. On any given album, they'd have four brilliant songs, a handful of okay ones, and several less-than-okay ones. As a result, i was never a huge fan while they were still together, even though some of their stuff is utterly brilliant.

Which is what makes this collection such a swingin' good deal, then. As they were disintegrating in the wake of the expensive FRANKENCHRIST/dirty Giger poster trial, they assembled this disc (originally a double-LP) of primo DK tracks... the best of the best. And what a swank collection it is, containing such essential tracks as "Police Truck," "Too Drunk to Fuck," "California Uber Alles," "The Man With the Dogs," "Holiday in Cambodia," "Pull My Strings," "I Fought the Law," and more -- many more. There isn't a bad track on the album, and it's certainly a hell of a lot more consistent than any of the actual albums. Granted, there are some significant omissions (including "Let's Lynch the Landlord" and "Nazi Punks Fuck Off"), and i would have preferred to see a few different tracks in places (it would have been really nice to have PLASTIC SURGERY DISASTERS' best track, "I Am the Owl," on here too), but i suppose you can only fit so many rockin' tunes on one tiny disc, eh?

One important caveat -- the LP comes with a stupendous and lengthy booklet of cutup art hijinks; the CD doesn't. You can get it by clipping out part of the CD insert, but who wants to fuck up the CD insert? (And no, a photocopy won't do -- sez so on the insert. Guess punks aren't too trustworthy or something like that.) On the other hand, the CD does contain the lyrics, a good thing given Jello's tendency toward incomprehensibility at times....

Dead Letter Office -- demo

This four-song demo is kind of interesting, to say the least -- sludgy, primal industrial goth stuff that's hard to pigeonhole, anchored by a drum machine and two vocalists (male and female, for that yin-yang thing, you know). Unfortunately, it isn't recorded very well, which kind of obscures their sound at time; Jennifer also doesn't appear to have a large vocal range, although that could be the result of the recording process, and ultimately doesn't matter anyway, since it actually just adds to the overall creepiness factor (particularly on the ominous, rumbling opener "Nicotine"). "The Miracle Baby," apparently (judging from the printed lyrics) inspired by the film TETSUO: THE IRON MAN, opens with a mournful keyboard pattern, then the drums come crashing in and everything gets much heavier -- and, due to the production, much muddier. There are moments here where things get a little too busy for the song's own good, though. A little more clarity would be useful....

"Angel's Ice" is considerably less cluttered and works much better, and (outside of the keyboards) is essentially an "old-school" industrial composition, occasionally reaching for symphonic heights and generally succeeding. The last track, "Staying Alive in Hell," is a bizarre one, integrating samples from the original "Staying Alive," strange noises fading in and out of the mix, and samples about "burning in hell." It's also short, probably good idea, since the novelty of such songs wears off pretty quickly; this one doesn't overstay its welcome, so to speak. Overall a good first effort, one that hints at real possibilities once they clear up the recording problems.

I definitely like the cover, though -- a picture of a sculpture created by a religiously eccentric janitor, James Hampton, over a period of 14 years, incorporated wooden furniture, aluminum and goil foil, and other odd materials he found during his day job. The finished piece, entitled "The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millenium General Assembly," was intended to be a shrine for the second coming of Christ, and wasn't actually discovered until the man's death. An amazing piece of art, and an interesting choice for the cover.

I wonder if Joe Lally (Fugazi bassist and the man behind Tolotta Records) sneaks joints in the back of the Fugazimobile. He sure does seem to dig "stoner" rock. In the past year or so he's released records by The Obsessed and Spirit Caravan, two bands featuring the "godfather" of Stoner Rock, Scott "Wino" Weinrich. And now these guys, Dead Meadow, a band who don't feature Wino, but who are a Stoner band in the truest sense of the word. By Stoner, I don't mean that they necessarily ingest copious amounts of green matter. I mean that they're way into big riffs, lyrics that don't mean a whole lot, super fuzzy guitars, wah workouts, and pretty, spacy breakdowns.

The disc starts off with a song called "Sleepy Silver Door" which features a riff so blasted, and a guitar sound so fuzzy, that it would make Matt Pike shit his pants. Hell, it might even make Tony Iommi shit his pants at this point. The rest of the disc ins't quite as crushing, but it does swing. It sounds like bassist Steve Kille and drummer Mark Laughlin have put in a lot of time with their Sabbath, Blue Cheer, and Zeppelin records. Over the course of the record you notice that the band has a tendency to wander off into unnecessarily long jams, but more often than not they find their way back. One thing I have to say is that singer/guitarist Jason Simon's voice takes some getting used to. He spends most of his time in Geddy Lee territory, and if you did not come of age in the 70s when apparently rock singers were supposed to sound like castrati, it can be a bit disconcerting.

I should also mention the lyrics. Simon spends a lot of time going on about "distant lands," never-ending stairways (to heaven? arrrgh! I know... but I couldn't resist...), ladies of the morning light with flowing hair, and dancing stars... I mean, ok, I realize that a lot of the time the lyrics take a back seat to the jams, but really, is all this C.S. Lewis/Tolkeinesque stuff necessary?

To be fair, these are minor complaints. As a whole the record rocks... well, not rocks exactly, it doesn't really rock a lot. I'll say this: When it rocks it rocks, when it jams it jams, and when it trips out it trips waaaaayyyy out. [n/a]

This is so insanely loud -- i mean really goddamn fucking loud, man -- that the average person won't be able to approach it without earplugs, but fortunately for you, my ears are toast already so i can suffer for you. (But first i'm turning my fucking stereo down, thank you.) Once the volume's down at something slightly less than the detonations at nuclear test sites, the music is revealed to be more of Smolken's demented take on folk music (that is, warbled with quasi-operatic blackmetal vox and bathed in titanic clouds of blinding white noise). On "Sawney Bean," the white noise sounds remarkably like a celestial choir of angels beaming in their moans from a distant (well, maybe not that distant) star as Smolken emotes heavily over doomlike piano. The noise motif continues throughout, sometimes (as on "Czarne Oczy") in extremely painful fashion. Stripped of all the noise and overblown sound, i suspect this mainly sounds like Smolken's more sedate folk-oriented outings; with the noise going, it's hard to tell exactly what he's doing back there (it sounds pretty forbidding, whatever the hell it is). This is what Merzbow and Masonna geeks should be fixating on -- why spend all that cash on imports when you can listen to noise even more interesting (or obnoxious, i guess, depending on your view) from over here, available at domestic prices? Two final notes: 1) "Siadla Muszka" is what Emperor would sound like if they weren't so infatuated with geek-like keyboards, and 2) the liner notes credits drums to "an anonymous source," but i can't for the life of me figure out where the hell they are in the first place. Now that's serious blackened noise, my friend. The whole deal comes on a wee three-inch cd-r in an elaborate full-color, hand-assembled package, too, if you're deeply moved by that sort of thing. It looks real pretty. Just make sure your stereo's turned down before you play it, okay?

More folk-gothic / noise suites from the ever-prolific Smolken. For the uninitiated, DRC's drawing mainly from two wildly disparate influences: traditional (if dark) country-folk idioms on one hand, and pure atonal noise on the other. The effect (particularly on this release) is in the ballpark of the sound of the Slap Happy Humphrey album (where gentle, lilting folk is often supplanted with or obliterated by sheets of white guitar noise), although rarely as pronounced -- often the noise content is so far in the background as to be nearly invisible, but it's there. The album itself appears to be a concept album of sorts, apparently the musings of various dead poets set to music (mainly acoustic guitar, piano, and the aforementioned background noise bleat) by the Dead Raven Choir and various guests. It's a lengthy one, too, with nineteen songs, and all appropriately gothic in tone. This would actually be a good place to start for those not yet hep to the Smolken discography (apparently vast). Note that Smolken's guitar-whackin' skills and overall sound remind me often of Greg Weeks, and the entire feel of this album reminds me of Tinsel (itself a homegrown Leonard Cohen for the avant-garde).

I just realized who the Dead Raven Choir sound like: they sound like a roomful of Jandeks, assuming Jandek was really big on the pagan folk tip. This is a mysterious-sounding album, just like most everything i've heard so far from head raven Smolken. The sound is one of two Shakespearean bards with li'l mandolins and piano and the like sitting around a living room playing as a storm brews in the background -- very homespun (this is definitely not a hi-fi production, although it's clear enough to tell what's going on, and the rest is just window dressing, right?), but in these hands, very dramatic and effective. There are ten movements, and while i have no idea what the hell they're saying, it sounds like something that would qualify for a more recent version of the FOLKWAYS records. I really like the way the storm outside, which comes and goes throughout the disc as the band plays, actually enhances the whole sound and feel. If the recently-departed Alan Lomax were still around and taking his tape recorder to the hills to record the obscure and otherworldly sounds of the real country and folk musicians, this is the kind of sound he'd be capturing. Griel Marcus would shit his pants over this. Outsider country -- o yeah. It's time is coming, yes it is....

Talk about enigmatic -- Dead Raven Choir is a one-man pagan-goth-something band based in College Station, Tejas, not exactly a hotbed of such activity to my knowledge... and he was booted out of Poland for political reasons and somehow wound up in Tejas. Apparently he was originally into death metal, not that you'd guess it here -- this is more like the pagan folk-worship of Current 93 and likeminded World Serpent bands, a folksy but sinister sound indeed. Smolken (he that is DRC) refers to what he does as "an intense and barbaric form of psych-folk," and who am i to disagree? It's certainly compelling enough in its otherworldliness, like music calling back to the medieval age. The pace is generally funereal, the mood one of melancholy, and it sounds nothing like anything "modern." These are pagan hymns for a lost time. Titles like "Hound-Voice," "The Black Tower," "The Withering of the Boughs," and "The Prophet Lost in the Hills At Evening" give an indication of where his head is -- off in the distance, in solitary contemplation of nature. I could imagine this being made by some fiendish black-metal warrior in a more contemplative mood as a side-project. This would probably hold great appeal for the followers of World Serpent bands and paganism in general....

In a crazed sort of way, Dead Raven Choir may be the missing link between the mystical "old, weird America" encapsulated on the Folkways box set and the new wave of doom (or whatever it is they call this, this thing of ours, capice?) Is Smolken really just the Dock Boggs of the blackmetal generation? Or am Ismoking too much lengleaf again? Either way, Smolken's vision stands at the crossroads of something -- folk and black metal, most likely -- and this mini-cd, the latest in an ongoing quest to map out the territory of wolves, is a bit of a new direction. In addition to the acoustic orchestration and a general inclination to pick up the pace a bit, there are now elements of dark, reverb-laden percussion and snatches of decidedly metallic guitar in the background here and there (like at the end of "War Has a Beauty of Its Own" and the last third or so of "A Ballade of Theatricals"). More and more, especially while listening to the sinister minimalism and dark, hushed whisphering of "Sonja," it occurs to me that what the world really needs is a synapse-shattering collaboration between Abruptum and Dead Raven Choir.... The ep ends with the old-school medieval folk stylings of "Moon Over Castle Ruins," dominated by string bass and mandolin. More proof that even country folk out in the sticks can be possessed by satan. The disc's aforementioned return (sort of) to tempos a bit faster than death marches and a subtle shift in dynamics makes this a good starting point, actually, for anyone who has not yet dared to peek across the dark, black plain of scorched earth and dying crops where Smolken does his thing.

In some ways DRC is the Khanate of country death folk; Smolken and Glenn Donaldson may only be armed with acoustic instruments, but they sure like their folk so slow it's almost stationary. Prone to a noisy sort of deliberate primitivism, their albums tend to sound like someone placed a mike in the living room of two intensely morose country boys, possibly after a couple of swigs o' moonshine, trying to out-spook each other with instruments they found in the attic. Or perhaps they're just soundtracks to an endlessly bleak and desolate movie about wolves coming to eat the sheep. They stick to acoustic instruments and not-so-fi recording for that authentic sound, that sound you first heard on old, old albums with titles like "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" and "Hellhound on My Trail" -- their sensibility is more epic and operatic, however, although they thankfully avoid the screeching diva thing. The kind of thing you should be listening to when you want to transport yourself to another world, one rooted in the rural sounds of the past, and the sound of outsides far beyond the imagination of modern society.

Smolken sure has a thing about wolves, doesn't he? As usual, I can't tell what the lyrics are actually about, but this doesn't stray from the sound he's favored on recent releases -- mainly country-death folk with drones that come and go, and silences. Lots of silences. (I like that the liner notes include "all silences dedicated to kris lapke.") This is one of the better-quality recordings from Dead Raven Choir, and restrained enough to not totally freak out someone who's never heard it (well, at least until they get about halfway through "the pavilion," maybe). As usual, the artwork is lovely, the paintings this time by Jan Stanislawski. For those discriminating country folk with a wee taste for the gothic, o my yes.

More grim foreboding from the DRC, this time via three glacial tracks on a 3-inch cd-r (which I gather is suddenly the hip new format or something) in a plastic sleeve with cryptic but lovely artwork of the woods and a wee insert with notes printed in microscopic type. This outing isn't quite as noisy as some of the earlier stuff, but on slow (and long) tracks like "night scene," "the horn's sound in the wood," and "the shepherd's hour," their approach can be a tad disorienting, with figures built on lengthy pauses that often make you think the song stopped until something happens again. Stuff like this makes me start to wonder if they aren't just the Melvins of the avant neo-folk world or something. Cool stuff, although I suspect most can't hang with the truly epoch-spanning sense of time happening here. King Buzzo would approve.

Decay of the Angel [demo]

Goth. In a way. Only instead of relying so much on cheesy synth stuff, there's a real piano at work here, not to mention a genuine emotional current lacking in much of the latter-day goth offerings. "Valentine's Day" sounds kind of like early Sisters of Mercy, only slower, with piano where the guitar would have been, and minus the vocal histronics. "Choking" is similar, elegant and mournful; "Ever to be in Heaven, Never to be in Hell" adds bongos (!) to the mix, which works well even though it shouldn't, and dire samples about heaven and hell. The samples continue in "Funeral," along with a slowed-down echo and pipe organ, all of which work to eerie effect. "Analog Hell" is quieter, and not quite as gripping, but "Red" -- sounding like it could have been an outtake from Joy Division's CLOSER with the addition of a piano -- more than makes up for it. If there's any problem with this demo -- which sounds utterly immaculate, incidentally -- it's that it's too short; there's only six songs, and it's over too soon. Certainly well worth investigating....

[TG and C12 clatter down an endless hallway, the lights above them bright and humming the drone peculiar to fluorescent bulbs, with TMU and his noise-making guests in hot pursuit. In an attempt to distract them, TMU blares this disc from his portable CD-player....]

C12: What is this stinky thing the Moon Unit is assaulting our ears with?

TG (firing randomly as she runs): The scary product of teenagers who've mastered their instruments without learning to write actual songs first, I think. They were apparently signed about six months after forming and they sound like it, believe me.

C12: You find this bad, then?

TG: More like uninspired. They've got the chunk-chunk thing and the jumping up and down bit down, all right, but all the songs sound alike and they don't go anywhere. This isn't so much bad as it is pointless, really.

C12: Wasn't there a band with the same name active in the 1980s?

TG: Yes, and I'm pretty sure this band has no connection to them, outside of being unimaginative enough to steal their name.

TMU (in the distance): If I ever catch your sorry asses I'll make you listen to this all day every day for a month!

C12: Eek, now there's a frightening thought... is this a nu-metal band? They are, aren't they?

TG (launching grenades at their pursuers): I'm afraid so. They'll probably get compared to Kittie since their singer Gen is a hottie, even if she does have ugly metal shit hanging from her face.

C12: Are they at least as good as Static-X, the only listenable nu-metal band currently in existence?

TG: No. (plugs fingers in ears just before the grenade explodes behind them) Occasionally they get something interesting going, like the slo-mo fuzzriff intro of "Under Locks," but then they start piling on the shapeless nu-metal business and it all turns kind of generic again.

C12 (looking back nervously): I don't think that deterred them... they're still coming.... You know, I believe I'd find this more tolerable if they varied the tempos and song structures more often.

TG: Yeah, and it would help if they understood that they actually sound better when they play slow, like on "Intro," which is the middle of the album for some goddamn reason. I blame this on the producer -- the band is new and young, probably in the studio for the first time, and the whole point of having a producer is to tell them stuff like this, but this fool Russ Russell was probably too busy making coffee to actually do anything as mundane as helping the band improve their songs.

C12: So you'd recommend avoiding this one and hoping perhaps their next one, after touring and maturing a tad, might be better?

TG: I'd say forget about this and fast-forward to the new Zeni Geva disc....

This Seattle orchestra, formerly known as The Young Composer's Collective, is sort of like a Kronos Quartet for the Coffee Generation (only with way more players -- ten on this release, to be exact). Which is not to say that they're amped up or anything, but that they have a more "modern" approach to classical musical and traditional sounds. Under their earlier name released a soundtrack to Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS [un-labeled records]; on this one they worked with Scott Colburn, who has also worked with The Climax Golden Twins and The Black Cat Orchestra. So obviously they have a good pedigree.... Their sound is that of an orchestra (albeit a most unconventional one), and they coax some unusual rhythms and sounds from their instruments on this release, the music based on a butoh dance and concept by Haruko Nishimura. I'm not familiar enough with butoh to know how this fares by comparison to other butoh-styled music, but it's certainly engaging enough in its own right. Occasionally unsettling, too -- just as you've been lulled into submission by the low-key "The Woman Awakes," the giant percussion of "The Hunt" will make you literally jump out of your seat. The opening piece "Hibernation" is a perfect example of their sense of dynamics, with the instruments slowly swelling in volume then receding, over time growing louder and more "awake."

The danger and uneasiness of traditional butoh comes through in "The Target," which is almost all wildly unpredictable percussion (percussionist Robert Walker is particularly spectacular all across the disc, actually). I find "Interlude" especially interesting, given its echoes of Tony Conrad in the dissonant intervals and drones that build to a frenzied full band climax before fading away and coming back in a more chromatic fashion. The thundering rhythms in in "Confrontation" are closer to tribal psychosis than anything i normally associate with the orchestra -- maybe i've been listening to the wrong stuff all the time, eh? The crickets (or mimicry of such) at the end are a nice touch....

Their initial assault of sonic violence at the beginning of the final track, "Chase," is worthy of early Neubaten, only in the context of an orchestra as opposed to maniacs playing shopping carts and bandsaws. In fact, the whole tone of the the piece is pretty strident, and much heavier than you'd expect, plus laced with plenty of dissonance for my taste. Drop in unexpected bursts of percussion heaviess and riffs that gradually fade out and slow down in perfect time and you have moments of pure heaviness in a most unexpected context. Recommended, and not just for the classical or butoh enthusiasts, either.

Christopher DeLaurenti -- THREE CAMELS FOR ORCHESTRA [American Archive]

The CD cover calls this "adventurous new music made with traditional and homemade instruments that sounds like nothing you've ever heard before." It's definitely different, although elements of it can be traced back to other sources (even if they aren't where DeLaurenti was coming from, they share similarities). For instance, "The Old Frontier," combining quick snippets of noise, sound collage, odd instrumentation, and occasional peculiar vocal choruses, calls to mind Stockhausen [tmu: oops, sorry hellfarmer] dissecting Stravinsky after listening to lots of Merzbow (for the tape-edit frenzy). DeLaurenti has a fondness for jamming as many different sounds as possible into a composition, something obvious from the very beginning; there's more unusual sounds happening on this one cut than most full-length "experimental" albums. Then comes "Canon Sludge," which really sort of DOES sound like Kerzbow, although i doubt that was the intention. Unexpected behavior from a composer... this is a good sign....

Two long pieces (each over twelve minutes) form the core of this disc: "Three Camels for Orchestra" and "Hiram's Blood." The first comes in several movements, combining orchestra, occasional snatches of jazz, repetitive passes of devolved swing, crazed flanged-out skipping-CD noises, and basically everything but the kitchen sink -- this is not a man who likes to stand still -- into a seamless orgy of sound exploration. "Hiram's Blood" is, i think, a composer's take on radically misappropriated free jazz that's been bent out of shape and twisted into the ominous shape of Miles Davis possessed by the soul of Merzbow (or maybe that should be the other way around, seeing as how Miles has croaked already). "Iszkarrchse," a "sonic pile-up originally scored for orchestra," is a brooding, heavily layered stack of keyboard drones augmented by eerie wailing, crumbling noises, and other stuff even more unidentifiable. It reminds me of Voice of Eye in a way, but at the moment everything reminds me of Voice of Eye for some reason, so we'll let that one pass....

There are several more pieces here, all equally surprising and even unpredictable. And he delivers on his promise of providing no "new age noodling, droning drum machines, ambient fog or other demeaning crap." (Of course, i LIKE drum machines, but that's beside the point here.) Just more proof that odd things are afoot in Seattle, once you get past the glazed- eyed heroin-snarfing goatee slackers in flannel all currently gasping like beached fish now that "grunge" has begun its slow descent into oblivion.

Delerium -- SEMANTIC SPACES (Nettwerk)

Ummmm... a funkier, more beat-heavy Enigma? I'm not sure the world really NEEDS two versions of that band, but if I have to pick one, I side with this one -- if only because Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber (Front Line Assembly) make more interesting noises. Plus singer Kristy Thirsk (Rose Chronicles), who appears on some tracks, is a better singer than the breathy one from Enigma. The name of the game here is ambient tribal techno (is that even a category?); lots o' thump-thump beats, weird percussion, spacy background noises, wispy singing, etc., etc. In addition to Thirsk's ethereal vocals, there's plenty of background chanting, particularly on "Resurruction" and "Incantation." This is their first effort for Nettwerk after several on Dossier overseas, and it's sonically immaculate; the big drawbacks here are that (like most dance music) it all kind of runs together after a while, and the songs are LONG (out of nine, the shortest one is 6:21), meaning it's the kind of album that works better when heard in small bites rather than all the way through --perfect for club action, actually.... Bonus points for the stellar art direction from Technografix, which rivals the work Steven Gilmore did for the early Skinny Puppy releases.

This band really sort of defies description, but i'm going to give it a stab anyway. Imagine Melt-Banana and Boredoms as fronted by a warbling woman obsessed with Mardi Gras drag-queen fashion and backed by a band of equally suspicious-looking characters, only plying their trade through... samba. Isn't that just an evil notion? I'll bet you never in your wildest nightmares imagined there might be a band equally influenced by Japanese noise, avant culture, and samba rhythms. If the Boredoms crashed a Miami Sound Machine concert and kicked Gloria Estafan off stage to jam with the band, it might sound something like this. Which is to say, obviously, that this is a damned strange record....

The star attraction, obviously, is crazed singer Emi Eleonola (she also controls the keyboard and other incidental instruments), who comes on like a drag queen having a Tourettes seizure, spitting out shards of warbly Japanese, English, and Martian all at the same time. She sounds like she sucks helium in prodigous quantities and matches them with li'l pink pills. The rest of the band is distinctly stuck in the second-banana role, but they're a sharp bunch o' players and Miss EE would be lost without 'em (or at least, would just sound like another ranting bag lady). While most of the album is based more or less in the world o' samba (even though their take on the subject is pretty, uh, demented) and filled with ranting spiels, they do occasionally just flat-out rock (as on "Love Maniac"), and like most Japanese bands, no matter how far out in left-field they wander, you never get the idea that they're lost -- you may be mystified, but they know exactly what they're doing., even when they're piling on the sound waves in the warped psychedelic acid-soaked samba mode (which is exactly what "Recreation" sounds like; "The Second Magic" is pretty spacy in its own right).

DSQ have been around for a while -- i used to see singles and cassettes by them hawked in Japan Overseas years ago -- but this is apparently their first serious attempt at cracking the US market, perhaps encouraged by the moderate success of other Japanese bands like Boredoms, Super Junky Monkey, Angel'in Heavy Syrup, and more recently, Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her. How successful they'll be remains to be seen -- while this is a pretty swank album, it's definitely a bit beyond the pale for the average listener, and the fact that Miss EE wanders schizophrenically between singing in English, Japanese, and tuning in broadcasts from the outer planets doesn't exactly help their commercial potential. Best check it out now while it's affordable, before it goes out of print and the band sinks into obscurity on this side of the ocean again....

I am embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of Amy Denio prior to finding this CD in my mailbox. Which is my loss, evidently, since she has a unique free-spirit sensibility that often reminds me of Anna Homler, a good thing in my book. Like many musical free spirits, her musical travelogue has been a long and varied one; of the 19 tracks here, culled from the past 12 years of her career, nearly all of the albums they are culled from were recorded for a different label each time. Several of the albums she appears on are out of print, and the rest are damned obscure, so this disc is a useful document and introductory primer for dumbasses like moi who managed to somehow miss her along the way. She's certainly been busy; judging from the tracks here, she's appeared not only solo but with seven different groups, among them the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxaphone Quartet, Pale Nudes, and Tone Dogs. She also plays a wild variety of instruments -- in addition to singing, she plays guitar, bass, sax, accordion, drums, and hubcaps -- and approaches them all differently not only from instrument to instrument, but from one song to the next. Needless to say, finding a strong strand of continuity in her career is a difficult task, which may explain why she's not exactly a household name. Too bad, because if this disc is any indication, she churns out excellent, otherworldly material like nobody's business.

The disc is arranged not in chronological order, but in clusters of group/solo appearances: first come the Tone Dogs songs, then the one with Curlew, then a string of solo tracks, one with [EC] Nudes, more solo tracks, one with the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxaphone Quartet, several with Pale Nudes and FoMoFlo, and finally one with Die Knodel. Nearly all of it is impossible to easily describe, although some tracks do at least suggest lines of musical relation to other groups -- the Tone Dogs track "(When George Bush Was Head of the) C.I.A." reminds me a bit of Anna Homler (if not so much in actual sound, then definitely in spirit), while "Czechered Pajamas" brings to mind something that could have been birthed during sessions for an early Golden Palominos album. Her Curlew track "What Is Free to a Good Home," by contrast, is clearly muted free jazz (i think). The [EC] Nudes track "Salvatore" actually approaches being straightforward rock with some seriously frantic guitar playing (courtesy of Wadi Gysi), except for the fact that it's sung in Italian. (Shades of the guitarist from Henry Cow doing a live, note-perfect version of Z. Z. Top's "La Grange" with lyrics in Russian.) The Billy Tipton Memorial Saxaphone Quartet song, "Air Drone," is an example of truth in advertising: against a minimal beat, Denio (on alto sax) and the others drone like an homage to LaMonte Young. The songs with Pale Nudes are interesting because of her choice of instrument -- accordion, amazingly enough -- but are otherwise more or less straightforward songs (as opposed to avant-garde tone explorations), especially on the lovely "Axis" The Die Knodel song "Ambaraba Ci Ci Co Co" is one of the most unusual selections here, apparently a movement from an opera (and again sung in Italian, logically) in which Denio provides the voice of Angel # 2. She really gets to unleash a startling vocal range on this one. My personal favorite of the disc, however, is an unreleased solo tune, "Exiles," a beautiful and spooky track that would sound just as wonderful being covered by Edith Frost. (In fact, that kind of makes me wonder what a Frost/Denio album would sound like.)

Trying to squeeze the wide range of her talent and sounds into a brief review is not only impossible, but actually sort of ludicrous. Suffice to say that after hearing this disc, i'm scratching my head wondering how someone so original and compelling can remain so undeservedly obscure. Obviously this is a fucked-up world when Amy Denio labors in anonomity while the miserable bastards in Korn get to drive Maseratis. I'll never own a Korn album (thank God), but i'll definitely be on the lookout from now on for Amy Denio's albums....

John Denver -- THE COUNTRY ROADS COLLECTION (box set) [RCA]

Looky looky looky -- they FINALLY came out with the box set to end all box sets, the one ah been whinin' about for years, and they managed to do it, what, just a month before his final plane ride into the ocean? I mean really, talk about TIMING....

As exits go, Denver could have done much worse. RCA presents a pretty thorough overview of his career on the label (from 1969-1986), seventeen years worth of highlights compressed down to four CDs (but the discs are crammed full -- there are 79 songs total here). They get immense, massive brownie points from moi by including about half of the still-out-of-print AERIE album. In fact, they appear to have included something from every album released on RCA, and the scary part is that i get the feeling they only scratched the surface -- i know of at least a dozen songs not here from three albums that COULD have been, and i'm sure there are even more from the albums i haven't heard. They also re-engineered and remastered most of the early material (some to the point of reinstating parts absent from the actual album releases); Denver has never, ever sounded this good, at least in terms of pure recording quality. Sort of makes me wish they'd go back and relentlessly remaster every single one of his albums and re-issue them.

Some interesting surprises crop up. For instance, i never knew that Denver had such a fascination for the circus, which shows up in at least two early songs ("Circus" and "Molly"), or that the ubiquitous "Sunshine on My Shoulders" was actually released three years before it was reissued as a single in conjunction with the first GREATEST HITS album and basically imbedded itself forever in the public consciousness. It's also surprising to see just how many of the good songs (and they're all good, really) -- about ninety percent of them, in fact -- were written by Denver himself. RCA also gets my thanks for including absolutely none of the horrible, career- damaging Muppet-related trash on this set.

In fact, they get just about everything right in this set. They have all the obvious ones -- "Poems, Prayers and Promises," "Leaving on a Jet Plane," "Sunshine on my Shoulders," "Rocky Mountain High," "City of New Orleans," "Annie's Song," etc., etc. -- plus plenty of favorite lesser-known (but just as good) ones like "Casey's Last Ride," "All of my Memories," "We Don't Live Here No More," "Ripplin' Waters," "It Amazes Me," "Thirsty Boots," "Some Days Are Diamonds," "Dreamland Express," "Fly Away," "Flying for Me"... the list just goes on and on.... There are also no obvious clunkers on the set (although the insanely, irritatingly cheerful "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" and "Grandma's Feather Bed" come awwwwwwwfully close). True, there are moments toward the end of his RCA years where everything starts to get a bit too bombastic (my God, whose idea WAS it to pair Denver with Placido Domingo on "Perhaps Love"?!? Never mind how it sounds -- pretty good, actually -- just the mere IDEA is so deranged that it fairly makes the mind reel), but you can blame that mostly on the label, who took note of Denver's declining sales and suavely booted out his longtime producer Milt Okun in favor of new and "hip" yoyos who nevertheless weren't, uh, quite as good. Fortunately Denver's talent was still too large to completely squash, but some of the material on the last disc is still a little over-the-top....

Aside from that, though, this is a reasonably swank collection. It is true that i could quibble over some of the selections -- i would have traded a few of the lesser songs for more selections from AERIE, for instance -- but that largely comes down to personal taste. I do have one mildly bigger complaint in the fact that they left out completely his protest songs (about Nixon, Vietnam, and the like), which -- had they included them -- might have gone a long ways toward combatting his goofy Mr. Sunshine image. Outside of that, however, it's almost impossible to fault this box set. I really didn't expect RCA to do a decent job of it and now i'm pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong. Color me impressed....

Maximum heaviness from the word go is the order of business here, my sweating li'l piglets. From the forbidding cover (black! more black! blackest of the black! what the hell is it? no one can tell, for it is BLACK!) to the punishing deathfuzz stompfests on the disc to the attitude problem evident in the lyrics, this is a band that has no time for wimpiness. Their apparent goal is to squash you and in that they succeed admirably. Heaviest tracks: "27 Years," "Driven to Perversion," "Godfed" (with caustic anti-Christian lyrics and a violent, blinding delivery more in line with grindcore than stoner rock), "Cast From Thee" (which opens with eerie ambient stuttering and turns into an evil chunk-chunk deathgroove), and most of all, "None But Myself," which is just a full-tilt barrage of pure grinding hate and fury that's most impressive in its unremitting violence and blackened thrash. The rest of the album is pretty close in heaviness quotient to these find crush-anthems, though, so if it's complete, surly destruction you seek, you have come to the right place. Pound, pound, pound those instruments like hammers driving nails in coffins....

A number of people have already written a lot of really ridiculous poo about this album. Depending on who you listen to, it's either the apex of modern music -- nay, art in general -- or a steaming pile of pretentious... well... you know. As with most things, the answer lies somewhere in between. First things first: If you prefer your music served up in discrete, easily-discernible songs, then you probably won't like this at all. There are ten tracks, but between ambiguous beginnings and endings and eccentric material bridging the songs, it's hard to tell where one thing ends and another begins. The album was clearly meant to be listened to as an album, and if you can't hang with that, well... you probably thought Yes songs were too long, didn't you? Speaking of Yes, if you loathed the Golden Age of Prog Rock (Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Gong, King Crimson, etc.) and can't grok the repetitive minimalism of bands like Slint, Unwound, Zeni Geva, and the like, you should probably avoid this album like it was a dead cockroach you found in your sock drawer.

The album was engineered by Greg Norman and Steve Albini, working with the band over a period of three years in seven different studios (including Electrical Audio), and the result is a densely-packed of beat-heavy music, noise, trip-hop, and many layers of strange samples, instruments, and snippets of conversation. The level of detail in the coordination of music, noise, beats, and sound layers is formidable, and in places it's an overloaded wall of sound. I gather that the band (composed of the cryptic trio of Acquaman, the Real, and Levitos; Ecco Terres of The Forms appears as a guest vocalist) essentially evolved out of By Symmetry (whose THE MATH OF BIRDS ep remains legendary in some circles), and the inexplicable nature of their names extends to their music. Highly evocative and difficult to pigeonhole, I can see why people are worked up about it.

Still, while the album's highly-orchestrated music is generally interesting and always well-executed, this is not exactly as original as some would lead you to believe: I hear hints of Beme Seed, Massive Attack, Cheer-Accident, Slint, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, My Bloody Valentine, and Funkadelic in here, along with an epic prog sensibility that largely went out of style when Yes stopped being interesting (right around the DRAMA album, in other words). On the other hand, they have good sense about what and when to borrow and their own ideas are usually intriguing. There's a big beat and a high drone quotient in places, which is always a good thing. They're also down with minimalism, repetition, rhythm that actually swings, weird droning vox, and all sorts of whole-grain goodness that you should want to check out. The effect of the entire album is much like a psychedelic funhouse ride through an endless collision of styles and genres, overlaid with cryptic hints of a bizarre spiritual philosophy. Plus I really dig their hopelessly ornate and complicated digipak-within-a-digipak packaging. And at least they're trying to do something interesting and different, which is more than I can say for any of the tedious shitheads I saw on the Grammy Awards earlier this year. So what are you waiting for? Go on... you've wasted your $$$ on lesser stuff before....

Here we have Dick Metcalf on keyboards and Jim Konen on guitar, synth, and vox, gettin' together to swing on some supersonic future jazz. Sun Ra would have approved, I'm sure. Over Metcalf's hypnotic trance riffs on "Sine," the two of them go off on wild tangents, playing off the beat with increasingly wilder sounds. They get a good jazz beat going on "The Beat" and work some peculiar-sounding mojo over it, one moment smooth soundtrack music, then wah-wah, then vox and other things. They take it all down for some chill-time on the majestic, droning "Inner Strength," then get back to the business of funking up proud, electronic style on "Oasis." More hep shifts in style abound on "The Fastrack" and "2BLU2GROOVE," but it's the last track -- the swift 'n boppin' "Rongnine" -- that really makes the room jump and shake, and it's filled with exotic sounds over a driving beat that commands you to BOOGIE! Yes, BOOGIE NOW for FUTURE! Won't you get down with the Mad Doktors of Electronic Soul? You know you want to....

Deutsch Nepal -- COMPRENDIO... TIME STOP!... AND WORLD ENDING [Release/CMI]

This particular release is a compilation of tracks recorded between 1992 and 1996. Since the final mastering was completed in 1996, the disc has a more cohesive feel to it than most compilations that similarly span time periods.

It is very easy to say that this disc characterizes the darkly experimental music for which Cold Meat Industry is becoming known. Most of the disc remains very low-key, very moody, very dark. Each composition is based on slower rhythms, samples tha t add to the unsettling feel of the rhythm, and different loops that continue to create the darker mood. The samples serve to disorient, to add a flair for the eerie and unnerving. This isn't as assaultive and hateful as a release by Brighter Death Now, but it does have the same compositional feel to it, the same underlying desire to unsettle, to take listeners out of a passive listening experience and let them think about some of the compositions. The comparisons are rather easy to make; fans of Lustmord, certain, more instrumental Coil, or even Hilt would truly enjoy this release. [bc]

Robert Devereux is a Pittsburgh musician who's leery of being pigeonholed (not that it would be easy to do in the first place); Jeff VanderMeer is a dark fantasy writer and winner of the World Fantasy Award. This cd is an interesting collaboration between the two -- unusual, often mysterious music to accompany VanderMeer's book CITY OF SAINTS AND MADMEN. The cd comes in a beautiful digipak with extensive notes and writing bound into the package, all of it exceptionally well-designed. I like that the notes include specifics about the songs themselves, elaborating on their relevance to the stories they accompany and how they were created. (I'm particularly intrigued by the story of the Moroccan record from 1954 where he found the first "Festival of the Squid," which he subsequently reworked for this album's song of the same name.)

The music is exotic-sounding, partly because of a heavy Middle Eastern sound prevalent throughout, but also because of its gestation methods. The music was written to accompany various selections from VanderMeer's book (an excerpt of his writing is included in the liner notes), and Devereux wanted an electronic sound without using electronics -- so he took the acoustic sounds of acoustic guitar, drums, piano, and Tuvan throat singing, then processed them. The result is an often-hypnotic, melodic, and tonally rich collection of soundscapes that do indeed simulate electronica while retaining the lovely sound of acoustic instruments. Helpful reference points would be Neurosis, Q. R. Ghazala, Tribe of Neurot (especially the collaboration with Walking Timebombs), Maeror Tri (even when the guitars aren't present or particularly upfront, there's a heavy experimental drone vibe floating through most of the album), techno, and Middle Eastern melodies, but Devereux's sonic palette is really too wide and vast to be confined to a handful of catchy motifs. Interesting and highly listenable sonic action. If you're hep to VanderMeer's thang, you should definitely try to lay your hands on this and let it spank your ears. Even if you care not one wee figgy-fig for the V-man, fear not -- the material stands up easily on its own, and it's well worth hearing. The Devil Kitty likes it; who are you to defy him?

Okay, first up: They get about a billion bonus points for the inner painting of Ol' Scratch looking out over a destroyed temple (with a tile floor straight out of TWIN PEAKS) filled with way-underdressed succubi and naked wizards and skeletons and gargoyles. Beyond the temple: Golgotha. They even have pentegrams (two of them, in fact). Second: Their encyclopedia-length thank-you notes include Danny from Southern Gun Culture -- they get props for respect. Their li'l press thingy calls them "doomy stoner rock" and that's accurate enough, but I think they sound more like Eddie-era Motorhead (although they're not as persistently obsessed with speed), assuming Lemmy had thrown away his Chuck Berry and MC5 records upon hearing Black Sabbath. Guitarist Steve Janiak can actually sing without sounding like he's heaving up a bowl o' razors, though, and this recording sounds like it was engineered by people who knew what they were doing and weren't smoking crack (which is more than you can say for half of Motorhead's albums). The stereo panning at the tail end of "Angular Shapes" is a nice, unexpected touch in particular....

Expect lots of riffs, many of them melodic, quite a few of them catchy. The album is full of heavy riffs, slow riffs, fast riffs, simple riffs, not-so-simple riffs, and way better arrangements than your average stoner / doom album. They know how to keep things moving, instead of beating a riff to death (something maybe only Zeni Geva has ever been able to really get away with consistently), which is good. That there are plenty of nifty riffs is better. Their twin-guitar thang goes down obscenely tight and bathed in distortion, just like Thin Lizzy used to serve it up. The rhythm section does the dinosaur shake with clarity, volume, and plenty of crunchy heaviness. There are eleven tracks and they all rock. You should buy this. Better yet, go see them live and buy it there.

Devo -- ADVENTURES OF THE SMART PATROL [Discovery]

Devo goes multimedia? No surprise there... Devo were always well ahead of the curve on these things, whipping up convoluted deevolutionary videos before MTV was even a dribble down some marketing maggot's leg and getting into soundtracks and video game muzak before it was "cool." So now Devo have some apparently deranged game out on CD-ROM that, as best as i can remember, is about saving the world by capturing a genetically devolved monkey-turkey in a spacesuit. Or something. I don't really know, since i can't find the promo junk that came with this CD. It doesn't matter anyway, because this disc is merely the audio goodies from said game. About half of it consists of Devo standards we've all come to know and luv -- "Peek A Boo," "Beautiful World" (possibly the best song Devo ever did; small wonder that they obsessively tack it onto every compilation release now), "Whip It," "Freedom of Choice," and "Jocko Homo." The rest of it is new stuff, much of it written expressly for the CD-ROM game, and it's mostly good, some of the best stuff they've done in a LOOOOOOONG time. Perhaps the time is ripe for the rise of Devo....

"Theme From the Adventures of the Smart Patrol" is an instrumental that comes on like a crazed, satanic hybrid of bad rockabilly, 50s exotica, lounge, surf, and Moog bedevilry all rolled into one meaty, beaty, bouncy track o' goofiness. It has horns! Mutant horns! We approve! "That's What He Said" is even hipper -- loping hip-hop drums, detuned motorcycle guitars, synth bleating, Moogs aplenty... it's unmistakably Devo, but the first thing in years they've done that actually holds up next to the older stuff. "Mechanical Man" is also prime weirdness, although not quite as spiffy as the first two tracks, and "U Got Me Bugged" is... is... well, if i ever meet Mark Mothersbaugh i'll be very tempted to smudge his glasses and smack him silly while screaming "What the HELL were you thinking? AAAAIEEE! IT IS ANNOYING WHEN YOU SQUEAK LIKE THAT, DAMMIT!" But this won't really happen, because they immediately make up for it with the hilariously smutty and immensely godlike "34C," which is about exactly what you think it is. Crazed Moog-fueled surfabilly that rides the motha' wave while Mark chants "34C is not good enough for me, I need to have... at least a D... big ones, round ones, fat ones too... the itty bitty teeny ones just won't do...." Is it tremendously sexist? Well, uh, YES, but hell, it's just so CATCHY....

There's one more new song, the sample-heavy "The Spirit of JFK," but i think JFK should be dug up so we can shoot him again, so i didn't pay that much attention to this one. It's okay. I'd rather hear "34C" again instead. The final verdict -- go Devo, young man... more meat, less filler, and Whip-Its thrown in for good measure....

The promotional thingy that came with this describes it as Australia's answer to Fear Factory, only heavier. I can't argue with that, but since i'm not a huge Fear Factory fan, that makes me twitch a bit.... Given that description, the album is pretty much what you would expect: louds of pounding, crazed 'n heavy guitars, lots of screaming about living in a world cluttered with machines and various oppressive trains of thought. It's certainly heavy enough, but all the songs sound pretty much alike to my ears, and i'm continually puzzled as to why bands this heavy think they need keyboards at all. Keyboards and heaviness have worked for exactly two bands -- Deep Purple and Burzum -- and as loud as the guitars are, it's not like you can even hear the keyboards or samples half the time, so having them in the first place seems kind of pointless. This is music for moshing in arenas, and since i avoid those scenes like the plague, i'm probably the wrong guy to be reviewing this, but oh well...

So if you like Fear Factory and similar bands, this should make you soil your pants. But since i don't care much for Fear Factory and the whole pounding industrial-metal thing started to bore me about the same time Ministry started blowing chunks (basically about five minutes into FILTH PIG, as i recall), i can't say this album does a lot for me. Cool graphics, though (even if they do borrow a bit too heavily from Fear Factory's aesthetic). [pym imitating rkf]

There's no need for an essay here. The Dexateens are the band the Black Crowes always wanted to be. They play scrappy, snarling, southern-fried rock 'n roll, but instead of cribbing from Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Faces, they lift from the masters: Mick Taylor-era Rolling Stones. "But the Stones were from England, you twat!" Yeah, but for my money they had a better feel for southern music than all those "real" southern bands put together. [TMU: That's because they were looser and less-inclined to doodle endlessly, thus making them more closely resemble their idols.] With that in mind, THE DEXATEENS sounds like the album that could have come between STICKY FINGERS and EXILE ON MAIN STREET, had the Stones been aware of the Stooges. Since STICKY FINGERS and EXILE are about as good as rock 'n roll gets, The Dexateens should give themselves a pat on the back. [N / A]

Fans of improvisational guitar and sound, mostly of the kind typified by AMM, Bill Horist, and Fires Were Shot, will want to take note of this. Pianist Diaz-Infante and guitarist Forsyth have worked together before, but where their earlier release LEFT & RIGHT was a series of long-distance duets, this album finds them together in the studio, improvising live at the same time. They have also expanded the instrumentation to include toy piano and other odd-sound instruments (Diaz-Infante also plays acoustic guitar on some songs), and the pieces were discussed beforehand, so their improvisation is less about chaos and the unexpected and more about loosely-controlled strategies of sound architecture. Some of the pieces, such as "NYC Journal excerpt (2000) piano/guitar," employ the use of noise generated by one or both guitars, generally used as a counterpoint of sorts, and on "sound is good all the time" employs piano soundboard and acoustic guitar to emit bizarre sounds as the instruments are abused (through scratching, tweaking, and general prodding). While some of the pieces are more structured than others (such as the melodic "passing one another... acoustic/electric # 17," which begins as reverberating tones from various instruments and evolves into something far more alien), none of it sounds entirely random. One piece, "knock on wood... acoustic/electric # 11," comes perilously close at times to sounding like a lot of toys running loose in the room as guitars play randomly, but there's a kernel of structure that holds it all together (just barely), like an artful simulation of chaos on the edge of becoming uncontrollable -- surfing the improv wave, so to speak. One of my favorites, "trace out motion," opens with tinkling piano playing repetitively and near-random squeaks and scrapes from the guitar, building to a point where the guitar drops out for a while as the piano moves up and down the scale, then comes back in from a different tonal perspective. The guitar's sound gradually evolves and devolves in complexity and tonal color as the piano remains largely static, a tonal generator spitting out unexpected bursts of otherness. This is compelling stuff and executed with a high degree of technical proficiency, but without sounding academic by any means. Well worth seeking out, and both artists have extensive pedigrees and numerous releases together and separately.

I'll say this, they certainly know how to get your attention: the beginning of this cd (the first several minutes, actually) is a miasma of damaged-electronics sound and edits of pure silence so abrupt and random that you'll think your cd player is all screwed up. Or the disc. It's effective enough that you can't really be sure one way or the other right up until the second track begins playing.... This disc is one long, continuous work divided (possibly arbitrarily) into 13 parts, consisting of Diaz-Infante doing horrible things to acoustic guitars, drums, and piano, plus the odd vocal here and there, and Forsyth coaxing deviant sounds from an electric guitar and piano. As with much of their previous work (including WIRES AND WOODEN BOXES, which this collection resembles at times), they appear to be more concerned about the sounds they're making and the pursuit of their own cryptic structures to be real worried about how it sounds to the listening public. There's quite a clatter going on in some parts, near-random collisions of mutant sound from whatever's at hand, strange ideas about vocalization, and moments of unexpected beauty buried in the near-constant barrage of sonic distractions. This scattergun-of-sound approach is perhaps a more refined and academic suggestion of what you might get if you slowed down the Boredoms and Melt-Banana and limited them to instruments that don't require volume or power for the most part. After hearing a few of these collaborations, i'm growing mighty curious as to where they record them, because even though they employ a wide variety of sound sources, the final tracks are clear and distinct. You may well still wonder what it all means, but at least it sounds good....

On this disc, Ernesto unveils his sensitive singer-songwriter side in between long streches of weirdness. A pattern develops early on in the sequencing of the 30 tracks on this disc: he presents two to four short, avant samples of anti-structure and power-electronic sounds (whose titles are simply the track lengths), then follows with an actual song (minimalist as it may be; these compositions are the ones important enough to actually rate titles), with the result that eight actual songs are scattered across the disc, islands in a sea of wordless exercises in sound and experimental stylings. Some of those exercises are quite interesting indeed: track 12 (3:13) sounds like it's all field-recording drone, hypnotizing even with next to nothing going on, darkwave without the waves. The "songs" are a bit closer to recognizable tunes (well, sorta), with vaguely-discernable structures mostly swaddled in drone and accompanied by strange rhythms and sounds as Ernesto sings (sounding bizarrely like a cross between Tom Waits 'n Todd Trainer -- takes a bit of getting used to). What he's singing about i have no idea, but with song titles like "from Henry who just wrote," "cranking up its pathos," and "a ride to Cuba with Martin Sheen," i suspect it's fairly elliptical and opaque. With this solo disc Ernesto proves once again to be a tone scientist of the highest order, branching out in unexpected directions, working with unusual sounds, integrating electronics and acoustic instruments into his soundscapes and songs. He also has swell taste in hats. I'm not convinced this would be a good place to start if you haven't already grokked Ernesto's mighty (and mighty eccentric) anti-guitar mojo, but if you're already down with his deep-dish experimental groove, then you'll want to scope this out.

Sure, they're avant / drone cats of the highest order from the word go, but they're plenty accessible even for non-avant listeners. Large chunks of this album sound much like a lost Godspeed You Black Emperor! album minus the tedious political poo and with the addition of more adventurous sonic textures. Unlike GYBE!, however (and most "soundtrack music" in general), their sounds are completely guitar-driven. Acoustic guitarist Pablo St. Chaos and electric guitarist Bohol lay down droning black holes of psychedelic strum as Ernesto Diaz-Infante perverts the plan with prepared guitar and processed vox. The results are really interesting, because the three of them together work really well, maybe even better than any of them individually. I have no idea how the album was recorded (it was recorded in San Francisco, though), but a lot of it sounds live and improvised, with plenty of surprises and interesting sounds. I like the way there are layers of sound (treated, acoustic, electric), and in places, even deeper layers of drone and efx. The sound manages to be minimalist and complex at the same time, and even though there is no drummer (or any designated timekeeper, for that matter), there's definitely a serious rhythm to the drone. The first song, "slow in the unday," is essentially an introduction to "sunlight fixed, folded," which sets the tone with slow, droning acoustic and electric guitar overlaid with strange sounds courtesy of Diaz-Infante and his tortured (um, treated) guitar. By the time "death valley, restless, tired" rolls around, it becomes obvious that the main strategy at work is to let St. Chaos and Bohol construct repetitive drone structures over which Diaz-Infante can freestyle in avant-noise mode. This is an excellent strategy. The disembodied vox on "la cosa pasada en la noche" competes with grinding walls of textured sound (and a lovely sound it is) over unpredictable free-jazz guitar. The gritty textures of the next song, "still endless & drawn out toward you," are reversed -- the noise elements are more dark ambient and the vocals more obscure, with the freejazz elements far more upfront. After a while it spaces out in a dark wash of noise and rumble punctuated by endlessly reverberating sounds. The last two tracks, "sans division" and "amor fati," are less dramatic and more casual than the previous ones, with the former being heavily down with the endless repetition motif and the latter making suave use of found sound (at least that's what i think it is). More fine work from Diaz-Infante plus the introduction of two previously unknown talents... what more do you want?

Yes, i know, we are apparently whores for Ernesto's boss pickin' tones -- pretty soon we won't even bother with other artists, we'll just become All Ernesto, All The Time. He sure puts out a lot o' stuff, i'm having a hard time keeping up with it all.... At any rate, here he's doing his thing with the "prepared guitar" in tandem with Bob Marsh, whose violin and cello make a nice complement to Ernesto's devolved guitar stylings. There's nine tracks on here and the lengths are pretty manageable (well, the last one, "Dance of the Bear Clan," tops out at 11:50), and judging from title similarities, i'd say there's some kind of primitivism theme running through the release. (Or maybe it's just a vast in-joke; experimental musicians are an easily-amused lot.) With titles like "Gathering of the Fish People," "First Ceremony (Dawn)," "Second Ceremony (Noon)," and the like, it certainly looks like there's a concept at work here. As for the music, it's pretty amorphous and chaotic -- lots of squeaking and squawking, thumping and bumping, guitars and other stringed instruments being tortured into making sounds their designers never intended for them to make. Some mighty strange doings afoot here.... This is definitely "out-there" music, somewhere in the neighborhood of Bill Horist with Sun Ra peeking over the fence, so the timid and unadventurous need not apply, okay? As for the rest of us, we can only wish we sounded this exotic. On the "Ceremony" songs (there's four of them, and they essentially form the center of the album) they rein in the chaos just enough to (usually) sort of approximate actual songs as opposed to collections of weird noises, while "Dance of the Bear Clan" is an exercise in extended minimalism that maybe goes on a tad too long (it does build from nothingness to somethingness rather nicely, though). More fine sounds from the devolved sound heartland.

You could probably make a compelling argument that Ernesto plays on too many albums for his own good -- I've already lost count of how many DEAD ANGEL has reviewed, but it's a lot -- but he delivers the goods pretty consistently, and works with a lot of interesting people... besides, what's he gonna do? He's a guitarist, the whole point is to play live and put out albums, right? The thing is, even with so many releases floating around, nearly all of them have been significantly different, and he's had some interesting collaborations along the way. This is one of the more compelling ones, an "electro-acoustic work" constructed over time on two primitive four-tracks, with the two of them sending work back and forth in the mail. Materials used / recorded by the duo in the process include turntables, a broken cd player, snippets miked from the TV, MUNI / BART field recordings, violin, voice, keyboards, percussion, hand cymbals, handbells, Ghanaian windmill bells, newspaper, bentwood tambourine, rattles, shakers, and other esoteric stuff; the result is two long tracks of destroyed samples, electrohum, glitch electronics, and other damaged sounds. "Part I (tracks 1-7)" are largely more about electronics / noise, while "Part II (tracks 8-11)" more prominently feature the use of traditional instruments, but both long tracks spend plenty of time exploring the dimensions of sound inherent in their choice of noisemakers. The tracks are long enough (46:39 and 30:44) to allow plenty of room for development, and while some listeners may find that a bit on the long side, there's plenty of nice elements to latch onto. Recommended mainly for the patient.

Eleven more collaborations from these experts in modified guitar nuances. Ernesto plays acoustic guitar and Chris plays electric guitar, not that you'd recognize them half the time, thanks to unknown modifications of said instruments, unorthodox methods of "playing," and a southern-sized helping of efx processing. The beginning track, "the sun is shining," frequently sounds more like insects buzzing around a grunting rhino; the final track, "six years," sounds like bells chiming over the hum of telephone wires. In between they manage to evoke the sounds of a heavily-reverbed piano ("how little observed... half a mile distant") reverberating in slo-mo and the percussive sound of tuned drums and droning wires ("i once carried... from time to time"). Their methods of attack vary, although they have a tendency to interact, then drift apart, especially on "one afternoon last year." You can hear the ghost of John Fahey reverberating around in the hollow spaces of Ernesto's restrained and near-tentative stabs at melody in "on a morning five years ago (touched my trembling ears)," even as Chris destroys them with odd sounds and textures. Similar in style and (probably) execution as their first collaboration, but gentler and more contemplative, perhaps. Excellent, as always.

More proof that two guys with a minimal amount of instruments can make a pretty impressive racket, assuming you pick the right two guys and give them the right toys. In this case the two noisemakers would be Ernesto Diaz-Infante, prepared-guitarist par excellence who appears on way too many albums to keep track of, and Rotcod Zzaj, a legendary figure in the cassette mythos (and now releasing swell underground recordings like this one on cd-r), here wrestling exotic sounds from a Kurzweill 88. On "Speeches for the Schizoid," Ernesto pounds his guitar like a piano and drum simultaneously, creating both a percussive rhythm and shards of melody as Rotcod provides exotic noises and a shrieking, buzzing sound that nearly fills the musical space. The sound they achieve on "Slightly Demented Diatribe" is that of a zoo in which the animals have all crawled out of the cages to play with the instruments as a radio babbles in the background (and the great apes in particular are really fond of the reverb box). On "Voicemail From Venus" and "Tourbus Trade," they ply their tools in unorthodox fashion over tapes of conversation (in the case of the latter song, a tour bus guide commenting on the scenery passing by). Some of the most engaging tracks are the one where Rotcod provides a beat or pulse from the keyboard, as on "Hiddenspeak," over which Ernesto can make unusual sounds with the treated guitar. "Mysterious Notions" is another such track, with a beat and hypnotic feel that are reminiscent of classic exotica, yet adorned with clusters of unidentifiable sound and prepared guitar sounds that approximate, at different times, a classical string quartet and the soundtrack for a spaghetti western. Insect-like drones and a slow, tidal motion are the inspiration for the title of "Orkin Man on Ludes," which is filled with plenty of offside sonic chatter in addition to the deliberately-lethargic bass pulse. The four-note keyboard bass riff that runs through "Conveyance" is simple but hypnotically catchy, and it provides the foundation for a landslide of sound, in which prepared guitar, samples, muffled conversation, and efx abuse create a hallucinatory psych dirge. The fourteen tracks on this release reveal the wide range of sounds that can be coaxed from just a couple of instruments, and given the substantial roots these fine fellows have in the realm of free music, that it's all pretty compelling is hardly surprising. A fine primer on the exploration of sound.

What we have here is a disc full of strange experiments in sound collage and spoken word, like an exotica album gone horribly wrong (maybe that's why the cover sports a retro design). Your reaction to this collection of tunes is largely dependent on your fondness for sound collage and found sound; imagine Evolution Control Committee with a fondness for retro sounds and self-help tapes and you have the general idea. The personnel remains mysterious (the insert contains only lyrics, which are certainly amusing, especially since they're generally delivered in a hipster-beatnik manner that contrasts nicely with the authoritarian voices from the tapes), but they're up to all sorts of hijinks: cut-up snippets of sound, layers of tapes, jazz bites, processed vox, and other forms of sonic weirdness. With lyrics like "It's midnite at the farm / I am a scarab twice reborn / 2 stroke the mink and don the fuzz / of the Blessed One," it's hard to tell if this is all a big joke or if they're hinting at Deep Thoughts -- their choice of background sounds and tapes/sound sources foster a joking novelty feel much of the time, although there are interesting (if brief) musical interludes buried in the sonic effluvia, so i'm guessing there's a level of seriousness somewhere down in there that's not immediately reflected on the surface. This is a most mysterious album, especially since it's difficult to tell where the found sounds end and the actual music begins (assuming there *is* any music on here that isn't purloined -- i have the feeling these jokers are totally down with the likes of Negativland, ECC, and the whole Plunderphonics school of composition-by-borrowing). If this style of assembled sound collage and music is your bag, it's worth checking out for the interesting near-jazz music and juxtaposition of sounds; if you're not down with the whole collage bag, it will annoy the living hell out of you. Feeling brave, doom childe? Then wade through the unpredictable river o' stacked-up sound and see where it leads you....

imitating

Die Cheerleader -- SON OF FILTH [Human Pitbull/London Records]

THIS is a punk band. Not cheesy stuff like Green Day and the Offspring. They're three women and a guy on drums, from England (i think), and they believe in big guitars. Many of them. The album was produced, as it happens, by Henry Rollins; he also co-mixed it (along with David Blanco, whoever he is), so of course it sounds like they're playing in a vat of sludge half the time, but even then they're unstoppable. Their main two weapons are guitarist Rita Blazyca, who would apparently like to kill you, and singer Sam Ireland, who sounds a lot like Nina Hagen on steroids. The drummer (Andy Semple) and bassist (Debbie Quargnolo) are pretty nifty too, but it's Rita and Sam who most often sound totally out of control. I'll bet this band crushes like a bad-tempered elephant on crank live. Best moments include Sam's impressive air-raid siren singing on "Saturation," the stop 'n start intro of "Starsucker" (followed by an avalanche of guitars), the careening overdrive riffing of "Disease or Accident," and the total overkill of "Washington D.C.," a "cover" (deconstruction is more like it) of Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love," which sounds like it was recorded in the middle of a riot. Great stuff and if MTV's going to go punk happy, i'd rather look at Sam and Rita than Billie Joe and that guy with weird hair from the Offspring ANY day....

What we gots here, my weeping li'l sheep, are two cds -- count 'em, two -- of alien soundtrack drones of doom. Die Elektrischen (armed with his diabolical electric train) joins forces with various other pals and players from the label (Karen Stackpole -- forty-inch symphonic gong; Bill Noertker -- double bass; Garth Klippert -- accordion; Tony Cross -- violin; and Ben Hayes -- digeridoos) to create vast, epic sheets of ringing, moaning, reverberating, almighty fucking Ra-approved drone. The beautiful part is that they're using, for the most part, instruments that not only drone exceptionally well by design, but do so with a rich and varied tonality. At the same time, everything is bathed in reverb and recorded in such a way as to imply vast, even cosmic spaces, creating a forbidding and otherworldly sound. On some songs, like the first disc opener "amon hen," the playing is so sparse and reverb-drenched that it's hard to even tell what instrument is generating which drone -- the sound is glacial and alien, and utterly swell. It's a tad easier to grok what they're doing on "trainline" (which brings more of the noise content out of the background), but it's no less mind-altering in its dark alien soundtrack vibe. There's a bit more of the high-end thing happening on "ghosts in the shitter" than I'd normally care for, but they get bonus points for the title and the rhythmic motion, like the drone-o-tron spinning slowly... slowly... s l o w l y... until coming to a halt. There's a nice incorporation of sound efx happening on "plotinian plateau," sound that is probably running water but might be noise, and it forms the backbone over which the other players work their mojo in unpredictable and cryptic snippets of drone. "Fatal Blow" turns out to be the secret weapon, armed with a serious dynamo hum that comes close to drowning out the other drones sawing away in the background (although the violin does get a nice and prominent workout in places). The last track, "sote's camouflage," is full of drones both high and low that build to a crescendo then crash away, with melodic (and harmonic) effluvia twinkling in the background... only to be crushed by hard-beat electronics and stuttering sonic filth.

This is what Godspeed You Black Emperor! wishes they sounded like (and actually might, at least occasionally, if they'd give up on politics and the increasingly-stale soundbite move), or maybe at least did on the first full-length (still the only good argument for them being taken seriously on any level at this point). More than anything else, this is an instructive primer on how to do drone right, served up icy 'n endless by master technicians in the hallowed art of Power Droning. Any serious student of dronology needs to be diggin' these discs, like, now....

Bring on da funk, baybee! Dielectric returns again to free your goddamn mind, dammit -- whether or not your ass follows is up to you. But they have strange ideas about funk at Dielectric, dig? They swing the mystic hammer of funk real slow-like, see, and with piles of drone. In fact, some might claim this is not even technically funk at all, but they would be wrong. The unbelievers just haven't learn to funk slow enough, that's their problem. They claim to be minimalists, which is actually even true, but their minimalism has more in common with Eddie Hazel, Masonna, and Stefan Knappe than with Philip Glass, Steve Reich, or Terry Riley. While all the other cool kids were smoking cigarettes out on the yard in between classes at the Theater of Eternal Music, the Dielectric posse were rollin' their blunts and practicing their sex moves in the back row of the Eternal Theatre of Drone. It's not your pappy's minimalism, h00t!

The setup is simple: Three musicians from totally different genres (sound artist Loren Chasse, free-jazz drummer Jason Levis, and evil turntable artist Die Elektrischen) convened in the studio to improvise freely, after which the results were arranged and mixed by Die Elektrischen (on the first disc) and a variety of outside producers / artists (all on disc two). As with all Dielectric releases, the sound is stellar -- more than most indie labels, Dielectric really understands the possibilities inherent to doing things right in the studio, and that you get what you pay for. That really comes in handy here, since the ubersensitive mikes in use here catch every nuance and detail, no matter how small or minimal, leading to a goldmine of sonic potential at mixdown.

The first disc is simply brilliant, generally for the same reasons Alan Lamb and Alvin Lucier's wire music is brilliant -- for long periods there's nothing going on (reminiscent of some brilliant reviewer's two-word summation of Main -- "nothing happens" -- both rude and totally correct)... but that's the whole point of the MASTERPLAN, see? The sea of nothingness is what prepares you for the moments when something does happen. The gambit on most of the first disc (seven long pieces with titles like "Cocaine Lovin' Orange County Kids," "Bellicose Asshole in Charge," and "Cruising Deep Space With Hendrix' Ghost and a Handful of Green Globe Blotter," titles that have little or nothing to do with the actual music itself) is to throw out some deep drones and a small number of obsessively repetitive and hypnotic sounds, then leaven them from time to time with small, cryptic bursts of something else to keep you from nodding out entirely. The first two pieces are endlessly lovely exercises in drone and buzzing hum, like watching protons decay. The minimalist background of "Dual Rails Under Montana Snow" is brightened by devolved and unpredictable free-jazz drumming (mix upfront, too). Then there's the gradually growing swarm of droning, pusling keyboards in "When in Naples, Eat!" -- initially innocuous sounds overlaid to form tones simultaneously soothing and menacing, as you wait forever for something that's coming... but does it ever come? Only the Devil Kitty can say. "The Light is Green... Go! Go! Go!" may be my favorite -- the ringing of an alarm clock chopped and dunked in reverb so immense that everything is transformed into a series of roaring sheets of sound and the rumbling, dying reverberations of a doomed world. The final track is an epic of swirling space sound and interstellar death drone -- just what the doctor recommended, nu?

The second disc, where various people like Carson Day, CP, Sonic Death Monkies, and Gerritt take the raw tracks and radically deconstruct them, is interesting in its own right, although very different in approach. The celestial drones are still here, but in the hands of guys like CP, they're chopped up and broken by periods of silence, and in the case of Carson Day, overlaid with actual beats (mostly of the glitch-electronica and slo-mo techno variety, but pared down to the simplest elements). Arastoo's take on the whole thing ("Scent of Broken Stones") is kind of interesting, with its hollow and faraway percussion and pensive drones and ominous whispering. Gerritt's tracks, especially "Another Time," drag minimalism into the noise territory by reducing tracks to nothing but a minimal amount of drone followed by hideous crunching via the use of the session's more abrasive sounds. The sounds on this disc are taken from the same session -- in some cases they're probably even the same exact sounds -- but in the hands of these wildly divergent artists, the effect is considerably different. If the first disc put you to sleep with its languid droning, this one will wake you back up with its obesiance to noise and chaos. Either way there's something for everybody. More suave sonic moves for you to grok. Check it out.

Dielectric Records creeps in from the west wavin' a mighty cryptic mojo stick, with visions of being the American Jester, then goes one better by releasing everything on heavier-than-Ra vinyl, thick black virgin vinyl, in nifty-looking (and designed in a similar, distinctive fashion), sleeves and in limited editions of 500. Swank-looking stuff from a new label specializing in "quality recordings of unusual music." In this case, the quality music is a combination of sometimes-harsh glitch electronica and dark ambient. "Overload" was created from "digital overs and the mighty ocean," and while the digital clipping sounds employed as loops are nominally recognizable (if a bit unsettling), the ocean sounds have been processed enough that it's hard to tell where they are... although when the avalanche of grinding clip-loops pile on toward the end you'll discover that the ocean awaits to carry your shattered nervous system away. Perversely enough, "Faust" -- a lengthy slice of dark-ambient drone and swirl that does sound like ocean sounds were used -- turns out to be mostly a couple of pals tormenting a synthesizer. The tones are dark and evil, though, as is the sinister whispering that crops up from time to time. On the flip side -- make sure you have a crane handy to turn over that heavy-ass 180-gram virgin vinyl -- the evil handyman gets his noise beat mojo on in "Beat Takeshi," where devolved sounds and fragmented beats compete with bursts of arcane sound over a shifting grid of elliptical (sometimes even skeletal) rhythms. "Hofmeyer" channels the same sound sources into a winding, shrieking wail that bursts into an insanely distorted disco beat, then tears the beat apart with snippets of sound and bursts of noise. Is it a sample? Is it the sound of amps being turned to eleven and mikes being blown up? I dunno, mon, but it sure got a beat... oh it do....

Dirt Cheap -- GET OUT OF MY WAY [self-released CD]

Okay, i'm in a quandry here. Normally i would deduct many, many bonus points for lack o' originality, since they sound like AC/DC. And i mean EXACTLY: when the first song ("Casino") started up, my immediate thought was "My, Malcolm hasn't sounded this good in fifteen years." However -- HOWEVER -- in a rare fit of compassion, i'm gonna give 'em back all the points because they at least had the good sense to Xerox (tm) the OLD version (ie., the pre-BACK IN BLACK boys, whose output pees all over anything from BIB onward).

Besides, they don't sound completely like AC/DC -- their singer is "bluesier" and stuff, sorta like Paul Rodgers (does anybody out there even remember him or am i horribly dating myself here?) just getting out of bed in the morning. Plus their lyrics are immensely dirtier than AC/DC's; where AC/DC sticks with innuendo, Dirt Cheap likes to name names. Let's see, consult the lyric thingy (you knew they were going to have one, didn't you?)... hmmm... "no self-control, her sweet tight hole, is now a danger zone"... "her cunt was gold, but now it's dirt"... "what do you want, some affection? no way! get the fuck outta here, bitch, now!"... ah, it looks like they could have saved themselves some $$$ by leaving the lyrics out and simultaneously staved off the inevitable arrows o' criticism headed their way. Me, i wonder if they just don't laid enough or something....

But who cares about lyrics? I don't care about lyrics (unless they're by John Prine or Bob Dylan or something). The whole point of this disc is that they, uh... well... what do they do, Butthead?

"THEY ROCK!"

Yes. And what else, Beavis?

"THEY KICK ASS! Heh heh huh huh heh huh heh uh huh."

Exactly. Even if they did stoop to the cheesiness of starting "Bitch" with female heavy breathing, which has so far actually only sounded good on disc coming from Sean Yseult of White Zombie on MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY. (Sean Y. can moan and pant in my bedroom anytime... well, she could if i were still single.) And it is true that they sort of reach for pretentiousness in the grim epic lyrics of "Highway to Madness" and "September 12th," both apparently inspired by real instances of tragedy, something hefty AC/DC- soundalikes just probably try to avoid. (If Malcolm and Angus never felt the need to overreach the intellectual boundaries of their truncated educations, why should their offspring, eh?) Nevertheless, they make up for these boo-boos by rocking in classic fashion better than anybody else i've heard lately. And besides, their lyrics STILL aren't anywhere NEAR as goofy as anything Robert Plant ever spouted, and Led Zeppelin are gods... and several of the offerings here ("Casino," "Highway to Madness," "Get Out of My Way") mine the AC/DC strip mine so effectively that it renders the lyrics irrelevant. Plus for a self-released disc, this sounds awfully professional -- i gather they can afford it from the success of their live shows, and if they are anwyhere near as good on stage as they are on disc, they probably sell a lot o' these babies at the local watering hole....

I'm not quite sure how to take this disc; on one hand, the songs are extremely catchy and well-written, with an early Danzig meets AC/DC vibe. That's something I can get into. On the other hand, the band's name is cringe-worthy and the song titles... well, here are a couple of examples: "Hey Superman," Tastes like burning" and "Symptom of the unitard." I guess they are trying to be funny, but come on, a Simpson's quote for a song title? This may be a personal hang-up, but I like my rock humor subtle, they should leave the goofy shit to Spinal Tap and Weird Al Yancovich, because when you get down to it, the silliness detracts from the rocking. [n/a]

I know that this was released back in 1992, back when Relapse was not putting out shitty bands like Alabama Thunderpussy, Skinless, and Cephalic Carnage, but this record is so amazing that it needs to be given proper attention. This band was only around long enough to record this full-length and an EP called DUSK. Deep, dark sounds that make the listener feel like they are amongst the black gods. The songs are long and range from speed metal to doom, using no effects. This will take you into oblivion. I wish there were more bands around like this. All hail Disembowelment!  [ttbmd]

Disposable -- STATUS SYMBOL [Corprolith]

Bizarre stuff happening here. Chunks of songs played backwards, pauses of silence, then, throbbing bass shuddering mixed with overprocessed backwards vox that all cuts off abruptly after just a few moments. On the flip side, a fragment of odd conversation cuts off after a few seconds and the crazy rhythmic backwards song of the first side resumes. Then silence. Then it resumes again, only to lapse back into silence... and then it's back again one more time.. It's almost as if the sound material exists solely to get bracket the moments of silence. A deeply weird anti-statement....

Disposable -- "Vinyl Tresspass" [Corprolith]

OUCH. Talk about painful statements... What we have here is what USED to be an ordinary pop single (by whom i have no idea, although what little can be discerned through the sonic rubble reveals the lyric "please don't forget" in the chorus), until i was scratched, defaced, painted over, and inscribed with the following statements: "Is this what you've been waiting for? Or do we need to do a CD? Buy Corprolith. Make a statement that means something." As for playability: I played one side and it sounded like Satan eating gravel. Eek! Unfortunately, i was a pussy and didn't play it all the way because needles are hard to find these days, you know. Art? Noise? Terrorism? You decide....

More from grumpy (and increasingly snowbound) DEAD ANGEL reviewer / guitarist Neddal Ayad and his pals (Carol from Nice Cat on vox and Ren from sHEAVY on drums) whiling away their time in the frozen tundra by playing very, very loudly. They cover John Lee Hooker ("serves you right") and the Rolling Stones ("stray cat blues"), not that the songs terribly resemble the originals -- instead they sound more like Thrones or Sabbath on Quualudes with the amp set on the evil drone switch. And while the songs may not be recognizable in structure, they're definitely recognizable in attitude. The Hooker cover and the final track, "... and the fog rolls in," are the heaviest things here (and they're heavy as lead, all right), but all of it's pretty jacked-up and in-your-face. Subtle they are generally not. Bonus points for staying loud, loose, and raw. When they're not hijacking the boogie car for a fast ride off the cliff, they're grinding you into paste with their growling slow-death crush groove. There's five boss tracks and it's probably limited and all that, seeing as how it comes in this expensive-looking but obscenely cool brown fabric pouch covered with skulls. Skulls are always good....

The does are what Neddal does with his spare time when he's not being a grumpy reviewer or donning his Spaceman Spiff outfit to save Canada from the unsavory likes of Phil "I Am Incoherent Now!" Anselmo. He does it (the does, that is) with Carol from Nice Cat. You'd like to do it with Carol too, wouldn't you? Down... down.... Their chunk of the split ep (their entirely appropriate title: SLEEP DEPRIVATION BLUES) consists of three tracks recorded in Toronto, May 2002 (has it really been that long? Gah...) with Neddal on guitar and keyboard, Carol singing, and temporary guest Jim from Nice Cat providing the beat. The "keyboard" shows up mainly as a one-note riff being hammered to death at the beginning of "four am," which is almost immediately drowned out by blaring guitar, cardboard-box drums, and unclassifiable shit (samples? beer being poured into the keyboard? who will ever know?). The song in question sounds like something The Stooges circa 1970 would have listened to obsessively backstage while waiting for Iggy to return from scoring dope. "five over three" sounds more like an old, mutant rockabilly record from the late fifties that Ivy Rorschach might have studied to perfect those swank Cramps riffs. The Melvins thang rears its ugly head on "sleep deprivation blues," where Neddal discovers that no matter what else you do in the song (in this case, droning feedback and amp noise one might more properly associate with, say, Corrupted), if you riff out playing mostly straight sixteenths real slow, people will mention "King Buzzo" until you are sick of hearing the man's name. Carol's in here somewhere too, drowning beneath the waves of noise....

Breathe Stone are a country death band led by Timothy the Revelator, armed with banjos of doom, electric and acoustic guitar, squeezebox, and other diabolic tools of hillbilly doom 'n drone. Tim provides the sonic backdrop on three songs for different vocalists, with otherworldly results. Alicia from Funeral is the breathy and morose singer for the droning "rara avis," in which country death blues are rendered stationary and infused with the hypnotic ambience of Maeror Tri or Troum (or maybe just the final couple of Fahey albums); Sarada (is this the Hellfarmer's Sarada? If it is, she should prod him to email me or something) provides the counterpoint to Tim's vox on the considerably more countrified "crow omens." Tim is the sole singer on the folky (with electric feedback) "maria walks amid the thorns," which welds Sun Ra's tone aesthetic turned up to 11 with the cryptic sounds of hillbilly rhythms. Diabolical invocations of a lost Americana, where even kids from the farm can turn up for practice with a cheap guitar and a loud amp. They should team up with Dead Raven Choir for the dark-folk dream tour of a lifetime.

A solo disc of noisy deviance from one of the members of Klak, Houston's vanguard of cicilia disorientation. On this disc his love of gadgets becomes obvious, especially on the multi-part epic "Orever Hexus," which features piercing tones and noises along with lengthy digressions into oscillator loops. Mighty strange stuff, and i can't think of a good comparison right off the bat, although i'll bet Dom's heard of Nurse With Wound and Hafler Trio and their contemporaries. Luv the symphony of skipping CD loops. "Pink Clouds," while still infested with oscillator loops in the background, is much more drone-oriented, more my style... drones and ringing cyclotron loops, definitely the way to go. This actually sounds like it could have come from one of the Zenflesh compilations. With "Ice (Oridu)" they return to the broken-glass feedback approach, sounding remarkably like Skullflower's "Sunset" only with the addition of other extraneous noises to break up the effect. "Seri Sail" is a crunchier affair, with a devolved and ugly loop of distortion leading the way; that leads into "Mai Sermon," a slab of music concrete stitched together from disparate noises, loops, chittering sounds, and unrecognizable dialogue samples. At the end Dom combines screeching guitar feedback with atonal clattering on "Don't Climb the Faggot's Tree," and i promise you it will damage your ears if you listen to it with the volume turned up too high. Hell, it may ruin your hearing even at low volumes. Interesting, cryptic stuff and noise-laden as all get-out, but i still think the first track of the KFJC disc is a much more constructive use of Dom's talents, and something i'd like to hear more of....

Donkey are two dudes (Hans Fjellestad and Damon Holzborn, to be precise) putting synths, samplers, guitar, and electronics through some pretty esoteric paces. In essence, they collect field recordings (in this case, from within and around the woods at Big Sur, hence the title) and embellish them with strange experiments in bizarre electronics. "Crick" is one such endeavor -- an improvised performance combining experimental guitar, field recordings, and unorthodox keyboard stylings, all recorded live in the studio without overdubs. It's a strange unspooling of tape, all right, with sounds of the forest -- animals, birds, running water -- competing with strange glitch electronics and other unusual sounds. The sounds of the forest come and go, sometimes leaving behind a peculiar trail of unidentifiable sounds. Eventually the sound itself becomes a river of noise, and the sounds begin to resemble a field recording of an urban forest of machines rather than animals. "Wood" is more about the electronic processing of sound, and the use of those sounds to imply rhythm and movement -- layers of processed sound interact in overlaid movements, creating a sense of rhythm by implication. The track I like best of the three is "Fog," which is heavy on the drone tip -- a sound of unknown origin is manipulated in such fashion as to drone at different speeds and frequences, providing a shifting backdrop like a series of mechanical sandstorms over which Holzborn plays devolved, skittering guitar figures that sound more like insects with horns than anything you'd expect from an actual guitar. The hovering UFO hum of death that appears at one point is really swell too. The packaging is lovely as well. A nice collection of sounds both natural and unnatural.

The party was in full swing, complete with coke on the coffee table, orgies in the bathroom, and loud seventies rock of the lamest sort erupting from the stereo system when the doorbell rang. One happily inebriated teenager swayed toward the door and opened it. Before he could ask what the caller wanted, he was driven back in a hail of bullets, spraying blood and bone chips everywhere. As he took one shambling half-step backward and collapsed with blood still spraying from his shredded lungs, the crowd of wide-eyed teenyboppers watched in horror as TASCAM-Girl and Captain 8-Track sauntered through the door.

"You... you killed Bobby!" one young snub-nosed chicklet in a microscopic halter top wailed.

"Damn right," TASCAM-Girl snarled, holstering her baby Mac. "I killed him with my big fucking dick for the crime of playing Boston without a license. Don't you people know that it's in bad taste to play seventies music when you didn't even live through the decade?" She approached the stereo, considered it carefully, then whipped out the baby Mac. The gun roared; plastic stereo chunks erupted. At last the stereo gave up the ghost in a cloud of black smoke. Satisfied, she returned the gun to its holster.

"I say," Captain 8-Track noted, "don't you think that was perhaps a bit drastic?"

"Drastic crimes require drastic measures. My only regret is that I can't bring him back to life and kill him again for his shitty taste in music. I'll bet he doesn't even have any Prong records in this collection... let's see... nope, no Prong... lots of N-Sync and Hanson and Backstreet Boys and that jolly pixie slut Britney Spears... my God, is that a New Kids on the Block album? And what's this? Foghat? Don't you people know that it's illegal to own Foghat albums? Fuck, the record collection goes too."

"You know," Captain-8 Track shouted over the roar of the machine pistol, ducking to avoid being speared by hot flying shards of jagged vinyl, "it would do you a world of good to learn about tolerance --"

"Fuck tolerance," she snarled. She reached into one of the pockets of her skintight vinyl PVC dress and produced a portable CD player. Setting the disc player on top of the remains of the stereo, she pressed play and said, "All right, now you miserable little snots are going to learn about real music. If you're going to listen to cheese, dammit, it should at least be good cheese."

"Tell me," the Captain said as the Donnas began to rock, wailing about boys in skintight jeans, "how do you manage to keep anything in that dress when it's so tight I can actually count your pubic hairs? Really, I must know, it's an amazing feat."

She ignored him, addressing the crowd of teens cowering in one corner of the room. "All right you little shits," she shouted, "pay attention. This is your only chance. There will be a test afterwards. Now. This music playing right now -- this godlike snotty rock and roll -- is the Donnas. Four girls from California whose only goal in life is to be the new Ramones. At this they succeed splendidly. It's taken them a couple of albums to get their shit together, true, but now they have their turds together tighter than a mosquito's asshole and if you don't believe me, I will kill you. Do we understand each other so far?" The dazed crowd responded with much vigorous head-nodding.

"What makes this so brilliant," she said, nodding with approval as the crowd began to shake in time with the music, "is that they understand fully what made the Ramones so great: they don't waste a lot of time on bullshit, they don't bother with grand displays of guitar masturbation, and they write rude but funny lyrics about pissing off your parents, smoking dope, lusting after boys in skintight jeans, and all the other jazz that defines life for teenagers. They have absolutely no redeeming social value and don't give a flying fuck about politics and for this you should probably sacrifice your firstborn children to them. They're no morose shoegazing politically obsessed turds like those tiresome grunge guys -- they're just four geeky women who intend to rock your world and not much else. First lesson: keeping your ambition simple can yield impressive results."

As "You Don't Want To Call" came on, the teenagers gave up on the last vestiges of their fear and began to get down. As the party began to resume swinging, TASCAM-Girl continued with her lecture, jumping onto the coffee table to doodle crazed air guitar while shouting. "This song is a perfect example of everything they do right," she raved. "Catchy, four-on-the-floor rock and roll with an ass-quaking bass and snide lines about being dumped by a clueless boyfriend, a sound halfway between the Ramones and the Cars. This same clever strategy of whompin' beats and bass coupled with catchy-ass guitars and snide lyrics shows up again on 'I Didn't Like You Anyway,' about -- yes -- clueless boyfriends, and 'Hotboxin',' about getting caught smoking dope. The rest of the songs are basically Ramones throwaways, but they're good throwaways, and you're not doing anything this swell, are you?"

"That's all fine and good," the Captain yelled as he stepped over a couple plonking away to the beat of "Searching the Streets," "but how do you explain their questionable taste in covering Motley Crue, of all things?"

"Oh, the song 'Too Fast For Love,' you mean? Well, it is true that there are better songs they could have covered -- hell, there are better songs by the Crue -- but that's a matter of taste. And besides, they do all right by it, so why do you care?"

"Just thought I'd bring it up." He pointed to a young man swinging naked from the chandelier. "Look! I do believe that young stud is getting behind this band!"

"As well he should," TASCAM-Girl said. "The Donnas rock like a pee dog and if you don't buy this album they'll come kick your goddamn ass. And that's way it should be."

The Captain surveyed the growing chaos around them and nodded sagely. "Well, it appears our work here is done. Now... what next?"

TASCAM-Girl reloaded her pistol, sniffing. "I hear there's a worthless shit down the street who insists on playing Liberace records real loud," she said. "And I just... happen... to have the latest Godflesh CD on my person. What do you say we go save him from that satanic bad taste?"

"By all means," he said happily, following close behind as she crashed through the plate glass window....

The party was starting to hop, with coke on the coffee table, orgies in the bathroom, and lame (but loud) seventies rock cascading from the overpriced speakers, when the doorbell rang. One already-intoxicated teenager lurched to the door and opened it. He started to ask who it was and was driven back by a hail of bullets, spraying blood and bone shards everywhere. As he took one shambling half-step backward and collapsed with a cloud of blood hissing through his shredded lungs, the crowd of wide-eyed teenyboppers watched in horror as TASCAM-Girl and CyberLieutenant 12-Track sauntered through the door.

"Ohmygod!"  one young snub-nosed chicklet with black and blonde hair wailed. "The Donnas must have a new album out!"

"Damn right," TASCAM-Girl snarled, holstering her smoking Glock. "And I just wasted your doorman for the inexcusable crime of playing Foghat without a license and the proper security clearance. My God, don't you people know it's illegal to play Foghat when you didn't even live through the seventies?" She approached the stereo, appraising its value, then drew the Glock. The gun roared; steel jackets punched through the stereo.

"Tell me,"  CyberLieutenant asked, "does the Director of Deep Zone have any idea how many bullets you waste on every mission?"

She ignored him. "Look," she said, "they definitely need help here. Check out this record collection -- no Godflesh or Ramones records, no Swans records, no Joy Division, no Big Black even, but lots of horrible shit by N'Sync and Christina Aguilera and Korn and Limp Bizkit and other stuff so bad it's not even worth peeing on. And what's this? A James Taylor album? Barry Manilow? Burl Ives? Tiny Tim? Somebody around here better be heavily into post-modern irony or the whole collection's getting torched."

"Hey, What's wrong with James Taylor?"

"That does it," TASCAM-Girl sneered, tossing a fast-acting lithidium fragmentation grenade in the stereo's general direction. As the stereo and the record collection went up in flames, Cyberlieutenant 12-Track shook his head and said, "It would do you a world of good to learn about tolerance."

"Fuck tolerance," she snarled. She reached in the back pocket of her skintight vinyl PVC dress and produced a portable CD player. Setting the disc player on the coffee table, she pressed play and said, "All right, now you miserable little shits are going to learn about real music. Music that will want you to get up and dance and fuck and smoke dope and behave like a juvenile delinquent. In other words, good music."

"Tell me," the Cyberlieutenant said as the Donnas began to rock, "how do you manage to keep anything in that dress when it's so tight I can actually read the numbers on the credit card in your back pocket?"

"State secret,"  she said. She turned to the crowd of teens cowering in one corner of the room. "All right maggots, "she shouted, "pay attention. This is your only chance. There will be a test afterwards. Now. This music playing right now -- this godlike snotty rock and roll -- is the Donnas. They just turned 21 and they still sound like juvenile delinquents. Their original goal in life was to be the new Ramones. But having achieved that, now they've taken on the bold step of sounding like the Ramones emulating Cheap Trick with guitars borrowed from Kiss. They're not just the new Ramones, they're the new Sweet. This is an extremely good development and thus their new album is brilliant beyond belief. So if you don't buy it, I will kill you. Do we understand each other so far?" The dazed crowd responded with much vigorous head-nodding.

"What makes this so brilliant," she said, nodding with approval as the crowd began to shake in time with the music, "is that understand fully what made bands like the Ramones, Cheap Trick, and Kiss great, but at the same time their sound is full-on no-frills, no-bullshit rock and roll with rude and funny lyrics about pissing people off, smoking dope, having sex, and getting in trouble with the law. They have absolutely no redeeming social value and don't give a flying fuck about politics and for this you should probably sacrifice your firstborn children to them. No morose and politically-correct grunge anthems here, just full-tilt hard rock that walks the tightrope between pop and metal with a punk attitude. First lesson: Learning at the feet of the proper masters will always yield superior results."

As the first song, "Are You Gonna Move It For Me," began to gather steam, the teenyboppers gave up on the last of their fear and began to get down. As resumed swinging, TASCAM-Girl continued with her lecture, jumping onto the coffee table to doodle crazed air guitar. "This song is a perfect example of everything they do right," she said. "Catchy, four-on-the-floor rock with pop-metal guitar riffs as sharp as scythes, basslines capable of levitating speakers, and snide lines about how unimpressed they are with obnoxious "fans" who like them for all the wrong reasons. Bitchiness never rocked this hard, let me tell ya. The same clever strategy of whompin' beats and bass coupled with guitars spewing catchy rock riffs powers most of the other obvious crowd-pleasers here, but the best thing is that they just flat-out rock their asses off. Those whining turds in Korn and Limp Bizkit can only wish they were half as good as this band."

"You forgot to mention the drummer," the Cyberlieutenant said, swigging from a bottle of vodka.

"That's right, dummer Donna C. has gotten way more sophisticated without turning into Neil Peart or something, and the entire rhythm section has developed a serious swing. They've also gotten into the habit of occasionally dropping in jaw-dropping riffs for just a couple of measures at a time in places like the tail end of 'Are You Going To Move It For Me' or parts of '40 Boys in 40 Nights' and 'Police Blitz,' just to show you they can. But they're tasteful about it -- they don't overdo it. At least half of this album -- particularly 'Are You Gonna Move It For Me,' '40 Boys in 40 Nights,' 'You've Got a Crush on Me,' 'Little Boy,' 'Police Blitz,' 'Hot Pants,' and 'Nothing to Do' are absolute classics. The rest of the songs aren't too shabby either and are better than anything you're going to come up with in this lifetime."

"That's all fine and good," the Captain yelled as he stepped over a couple doing the nasty to the beat of "Police Blitz," "but how do you explain their quesstionable taste in covering Judas Priest, of all things?"

"I'd say that's sharp judgment on their part. Although I personally would have picked 'Sinner.' Their version of 'Living After Midnight' is so spot-on it's scary, and it is a party animal theme, so who else better to cover it?"

"Just thought I'd mention it." He pointed to a girl swinging naked from the chandelier. "Look! I believe this band meets with her approval!"

"As well they should," TASCAM-Girl said. "The Donnas rock like a motherfucker and if you don't buy this album they'll come kick your goddamn ass. And that's the way it should be."

"But of course," the CyberLieutenant said, nodding sagely. "Well, it appears our work here is done. What next, my little explosive death merchant?"

TASCAM-Girl reloaded her pistol. "I hear there's a worthless shit down the street who insists on playing Tony Orlando and Dawn records real loud," she said. "And I just... happen... to have the latest Electric Wizard album on my person. What do you say we save him from perishing in the everlasting lake of fire on account of his horrible taste in music?"

"By all means," he said happily. As she crashed through the plate glass window, sending jagged shards flying in every direction, he sensibly left through the door.

So the Donnas have moved up into the big leagues (kind of surprising, since by their own admission in a recent interview, their best-selling album -- the previous one -- has only sold something like 12,000 copies if memory serves me correctly), onto the very same label responsible for destroying one of the greatest bands of the 20th century (that would be Jawbox, since i'm pretty sure you weren't paying attention to their final, beyond-brilliant self-titled album... you know, the one Atlantic absolutely buried). To say i am worried would be a massive understatement. Having heard the whole thing now a few times, i'm at least reassured that they didn't fuck up the band's overall mission (boys + beer + cheeba + beats + loud guitars = the female Kiss) too badly, but jeez, what the fuck did they do the band's sound? Not only is the album severely lacking in the kind of drop-dead amazing hooks scattered all over their previous albums (now they just sound like a big blur o' fuzz 'n motion -- not a bad thing in itself, but not quite the same thing, eh?), but you can't hear Torry's drums half the time and singer Brett is drowned out by the band on a pretty regular basis. (I'm okay with Maya's bass being the most prominent part of the mix, though.) And what the fuck did they do to Torry's drum sound? Half the time (especially in the intros) she sounds like she's beating on plastic plates instead of drums, and since they got it right on the other songs, the only thing i can assume is that they thought this was, like, you know, a good idea or something. But they're wrong. And what's up with the dumbed-down lyrics, which are nowhere near as snotty 'n brilliant as on previous discs? (I could be wrong here -- blame that funky mix and lyrics printed in such tiny eyestrain-o-vision type that i'll never be able to read them.)

On the plus side, they've never sounded this consistent before -- this is the first one of their albums i can play all the way through without just hitting the highlights and ignoring the clinkers, and the overall sound is certainly a lot more radio-friendly than ever (whether this is a good thing or not is debatable). They're pushing the cuteness factor pretty hard, and while i think that's a pretty cynical ploy, i'm just as entranced by the sight of cute 23-year old girls in skimpy clothes as the next guy, so it would be kind of hypocritical of me to complain about it, eh? Sure will make them hard to get "taken seriously" (assuming they even care about these things) later, though.... Early pressings of the album also come with a DVD that makes them look like goofy idjits (plus the interview is conducted by the eternally-irritating Andy Dick, not a point in anybody's favor) in a pointless interview whose only bright spot is when Maya, Queen of Surly, pushes Dick into a pool. There's also an equally pointless mess o' footage of them fucking around on the studio that culminates in a badly-shot stage appearance and a cheap, animated video for "Do You Want To Hit It" from THE DONNAS TURN 21, which makes absolutely no sense. (Plus you'd think they could Atlantic could afford better work, but that might have been done while they were still on Lookout!, so we'll let them slide on that one....)

Invocations to darkness through the excessive use of efx 'n reverb. What makes the fear mojo work in these grinding sheets of dread is how amorphous it all is, formless and limbless, yet everywhere at once, sounding like a bad hallucination at a bad time to be freaking out. Paranoia, fear, cognitive dissonance... the tumor turns inward, burrowing into the soft meat.... This three-song demo, like its companion in the next review, is the culmination of many experiments in efx-processing and instrument abuse. Diseased sounds appear from the sonic mung and linger for a while, gradually mutating into something else equally grotesque. Elements that appear on a regular basis: self-help tapes, distressed guitar noises, improbable efx chains, sound for the pure gut-busting blown-up fury of it. I DEFY YOU TO TELL ME WHAT ANYTHING ON THIS ALBUM IS! It is all without form... dark, sentient ice clouds descending upon the earth in the Final Days... the hell robots... the machines will continue to run long after the blood dries. Other stuff you should know: there are three songs ("the sinner's heart," "my time in your stomach," and "drakulon"), they're all pretty long, and four out of five doctors do not recommend that you listen to this if you are pregnant or currently taking anti-psychotic medication such as Haldol. This is unnerving shit and will really bug the fuck out of your co-workers if you insist on playin' it real loud at work. Email Todd, he'll be happy to spread the luv. (And no, i don't know what the fuck a "drakulon" is.) This is the one with the bad-ass fucking beetle on the cover, just in case it all gets too confusing for ya.

More material from the same general period as THE SINNER'S HEART, but maybe even more fucked up and with even cooler titles... fuck, i wish i had a song called "floyd street." Anyway, this is another three-song demo (the one with the ritual knife on the cover). This demo is a bit more varied -- "the one with no shadow" is one of the most experimental moments of either demo (and shorter, oddly enough), but the aforementioned "floyd street" is severely evil, heavy like the stones on Easter Island and about as cryptic -- a thundering drone riff plays (real... fucking... slow... too) over and over for what seems like eternities while scary noise shit and voices do horrible things in the distance. The sound? Blind, dumbfuck evil, mon. There are no happy morals in this sound. No lessons to be learned here. Just... the final sound of evil. This is what Black Sabbath must have sounded like to people hearing them for the first time in the summer o' luv. Of course, it wouldn't be a Doppleganger joint without some tapes floatin' around, and sure enough, they turn up on "beyond the void." A self-help putz drones on as slow, creeping death, like a dark fungus of the elder gods, gradually creeps up into the mix. Repetitive grunting, ecclesiastic drones, a dark and unpredictable intent... it's not as soul-collapsing as "floyd street," but toward the end it devolves nicely. You need this, you know you do. Shake Todd down for one.

Fuck yeah. Most people will know Dove by proxy. Singer / guitar player Henry Wilson played drums on Cavity's SUPERCOLLIDER and is currently the rhythm section in Floor. A Dove demo appeared in 2001 and tracks appeared on a split 7" with Floor and on a compilation called SOUTH OF HELL. I worked with Berserker Records around the time the Floor / Dove 7" came out and managed to get my hands on a copy of the demo. I was totally blown away. The songs on the demo meshed the aggression of bands like Cavity and eyehategod with the more atmospheric approach of early Floor. I expected a lot from this disc, and I'm happy to say that I wasn't disappointed.

The disc starts with a pretty acoustic piece called "Thank You For Your Patience," which I'm sure is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that this record was originally done in 2002. From there it jumps right into "Goes Without Saying," which takes the chunkier approach of some of the more METAL stoner bands like High on Fire and filters it through an almost old-school hardcore level of aggression. By mid-record the band settles into a Melvins-like sludgestomp. Towards the end there are a couple of songs, "Never a Straight Line" and "Sight and Seen," that -- with their huge riffs and disembodied vocals -- bring to mind the more recent Floor material. (And Godflesh's SELFLESS.)

Now that I think about it, more than any disc I've heard in a long time, Dove brings to mind that period in the late 80s and early 90s when hardcore bands discovered Black Sabbath and Metallica. The record that comes to mind is Corrosion of Conformity's BLIND. Don't get me wrong, DOVE sounds almost nothing like BLIND, but both records have an "everything's up for grabs" kind of vibe, and both bands did an amazing job of lifting the best bits of punk, hardcore,metal (and in Dove's case, indie, emo, and darker "alternative" rock) and twisting them into something that is (Dove) and was (CoC) totally their own. [N/A]

TG suddenly belches and points her gun at Neddal, who has rapidly grown tired of being a captive reviewer. At gunpoint, she demands that he reduce this fine album down to two sentences. Neddal, who would normally expend many more sentences to elaborate on their worthiness, burrows deep down into his psyche and comes up with this telling summation:

N/A: The sludge-doom equivalent of Karma to Burn. Who needs a stinkin' singer when you have THE RIFF? [n/a]

Interesting... i've never heard of the band or the label before, but clearly there's something happening here. The label apparently specializes in darkwave/gothic metal (of sorts), a category that is as close as you can get to categorizing Dream Into Dust, a band with sufficient scope and vision to resist easy pigeonholing. There really isn't much of a metal connection here -- in fact, i'm inclined to think of them as something akin to a more "danceable" answer to Current 93 -- but the entire EP does have a distinctly gothic feel to it. However, it's possessed of harder beats than i normally associate with darkwave, and the band is fond of incorporating brief snippets of loops, found sound, and other sonic fragmentation to spice up the proceedings, particularly on the opener, "The Lost Crusade." There are hints of heaviness -- "Age of Delirium" is anchored by a brooding, heavy snare and no-frills percussion under all the synth washes and, toward the end, unleashes some pretty spectacular bass drone capable of making your speakers levitate at high volume. The droning cyclone roar that opens "Dissolution," however, eventually segues into droning electronics and a brief spoken text before climbing back up into cyclone mode again. It's not so much an actual song as a mood piece, and is one of the moments that most reminds me of Current 93, although this band is far more "structured" in its songwriting than Tibet's band. The final song, "Seasons in the Mist," begins with more of the wind-tunnel electronics, but eventually turns into an actual song featuring acoustic guitar and violins (i think). I have no idea who plays what (the liner notes don't say), but i wish i played acoustic guitar as well and as cleanly as the guy playing here.... One of the better industrial/darkwave efforts i've heard lately, to be sure.

This is a full-length album by the band mentioned in the previous review, and i'm kind of fuzzy on what label it actually appears on -- it was sent to me as part of a promotional package from Chthonic, but the copy i received was a CD-R (they ran out of extra promo copies, i gather), and the promo thingy claims it's on Elfenblut Records (itself the darkwave division of Misanthropy Records). I'm pretty sure it can be obtained from Chthonic, though, so i'm not sure that really matters....

Anyway, this confirms what the EP suggested: Dream Into Dust are definitely not a metal band, and are closer to darkwave in intent, although their execution makes them harder to peg (which is good). The opening "Maelstrom," for instance, is an instrumental mood piece consisting of swirling synth drones, repetitive electronic noises, and other forbidding effluvia. All of this abruptly stops as "Cross the Abyss" begins, with midtempo percussion and a low-key presentation in general that builds in intensity, the drums growing heavier and the sound thicker and more layer as the song progresses. Midway through, the song is punctuated by a violin solo -- give them bonus points, mon -- and tinkly acoustic guitar. Eventually the song builds to a giant sonic blur of drums, noises, crowd sounds, and more. "Mercury Falling" opens with sonic driftwood, including some sounds processed backwards, before turning into a full-fledged song of almost medieval origins. Much of the album, in fact, sounds like songs from the Middle Ages translated for modern instruments, which i find most intriguing.

My favorite track on the album is "Nothing But Blood," which opens with acoustic guitar and -- even after the percussion and ghost synths appear -- is still heavily dependent upon that guitar motif. The middle of the song makes use of creative instrumentation (of such obscure origin that i can't even describe accurately what it is) to supplant the guitar figure before the drums come back in, like the sound of kettle drums on a slave galley ship. Unusual sounds abound throughout the disc -- helicopter noises and the sound of breaking glass feature heavily in the introduction of "Farewell to Eden," in which trumpets appear as well, which makes for an interesting juxtaposition. The grand piano takes center stage for parts of "Eternal Acquisition," whose drill-press bass and thunderous beat (supplanted by whining electric-drill noises) makes it the likely gambit for club play, i would think. More loops and sound effects appear in the closing track "Not Above But Apart," along with the piano as well; it's surprising to see how well the analog and mechanical elements work together.

I don't know enough about darkwave in general to even guess as to how similar or dissimilar this band may be to others in the genre, but what they are doing is certainly highly imaginative and consistently executed with great skill. I'd be surprised to find more bands in the genre operating at this level of proficiency. The medieval motif definitely works for them.

Dream into Dust, the dark and exotic-sounding post-goth band spearheaded by Derek Rush and in conjunction with players like experimental guitarist Bryin Dall (Loretta's Doll, 4th Sign of the Apocalypse) and Eddy Malave on viola / violin, returns with an album loosely inspired by Ursula K. LeGuin's book and movie of the cd's title, Neil Gaman's SANDMAN series, and who knows what else. Heavily steeped in ethereal goth tradition and immaculate in sound and packaging, their sound is similar to some of the more symphonic acts on Middle Pillar (which might explain why Middle Pillar is their distributor, eh?). Fave moments: the mesmerizing fusion of folk, acoustic, and experimental sounds in "How the Roses Burned," the dark and mechanical "Wrong Side of the Glass," the icelike tribal thunder of "No World Outside," and the slow folk rhythms (and spaced-out efx) of the "Internal Return." Guitarist and lover of efx Dall appeared on the most recent Angels of Light disc, and to imagine this as a more explicitly gothic counterpart to that band's sensibilities (but without Gira's polarizing personality) wouldn't be too far off the mark. The disc (which sounds excellent) was mastered by Doug Henderson, the same guy who mastered the aforementioned Angels album, and its dark-ambient soundtrack vibe is a good one. Strong stuff.

The Dream Syndicate -- THE MEDICINE SHOW [A&M]

As Steve Wynn points out in the liner notes to this CD reissue (already out of print, alas), a lot of people were really disappointed when this album came out. After the damn-near-perfect garage thrill horrorshow of their indie debut longplayer THE DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES, Kendra Smith -- one of their strongest assets -- left and they signed to a major label and came out with this album, a drastic departure from their original blueprint. Needless to say, a lot of people screamed "sellout" and dropped them like a hot potato covered in live maggots. Shortly thereafter crazed uberguitarist Karl Precoda left the band (where the hell did he GO? a classic MIA if ever there was one) and the band began its slow spiral into oblivion.

All of which is really too bad, because this album is much, much better than the above would indicate. True, it's brilliant for reasons largely unrelated to what made the first album on it, but the band never had any reason to be ashamed of this record (which is Wynn's favorite of the four the band did, incidentally). This album makes more use of the Dylan/Neil Young influences than it does of the Velvets connection that so thoroughly dominated the first one, and songs are uniformly excellent (with the possible exception of the title track, which is a bit weak, oddly enough). Precoda and Wynn turn in some of the best playing of their careers on "Bullet With My Name On It" and "Merrittville"; the songs are mostly paranoid and sinister, an area where Wynn has always excelled; and "Armed With An Empty Gun" is a classic desperate-loser rant with a rockin' rhythm section and the beautiful lines "armed with an empty gun / i'm stuck in Santa Fe / a man says what are you holding / i said let me put it to you this way / i said at night i go to sleep / and in the morning i awaken / he said i think i know you / i said i think you're mistaken...." And how can anyone who's ever seen the Kern scumflick THRUST IN ME possibly deny that "John Coltrane Stereo Blues" (which is the entire soundtrack to said flick) is anything less than godlike?

As an added bonus, the CD tacks on THIS IS NOT THE NEW DREAM SYNDICATE ALBUM... LIVE!, a four-song EP originally recorded for Chicago's WRXT-FM's concert series when they opened for R.E.M. on July 7, 1984. Aside from the fact that it sounds amazing (the version of "Medicine Show" here smokes the album version), it's interesting because it's the only recorded document of their lineup with a keyboardist, who really adds a new dimension to their sound. (Too bad they decided not to keep him; the subsequent album GHOST STORIES would have really benefited from his presence.) There's a nearly unrecognizable piano-driven version of "Tell Me When It's Over" that lays waste to the original, an excellent version of "Bullet..." that includes a nifty layer of pipe organ, and a tremendously cranked-up and punked-out take on "Armed With An Empty Gun" that includes a really intense breakdown in the middle that's almost tribal in its stomp power. Combine that with the vastly improved rendition of "Medicine Show" and you have to wonder what the hell they were thinking when they got rid of the keyboard guy. But bands are strange that way....

The intensely dynamic duo are screaming through the clouds high above the earth, strapped down in the ejection seats of their Turbofrop Stealth Bomber (with the optional AutoSnackTrayServer installed), weaving through the mountains and valleys of the Grand Canyon, headed west. TASCAM-Girl is at the wheel, clad in a fire-engine red vinyl catsuit and black wraparound shades, surrounded by enough handheld weaponry of military-grade power to level mountains while snacking on Slim Jims. Bored, she executes a screaming dive to the ground, pulling up at the last moment to roll through a series of loops while buzzing goats just to see them dive for cover. The CyberLieutenant 12-Track is fiddling with his record collection, oblivious to her kamikaze piloting.

T-G: I'm bored. These long trips always get on my nerves. Not enough action.

CL: My dear, you get bored and want shoot things in between trips to the refrigerator. I'm seriously thinking of having you prescribed for Xanax.

T-G: Can't. Extensive military testing has determined that taking mood-altering substances has a tendency to affect my aim and slow down my trigger finger. The CIA and the Deep Zone superiors wouldn't approve, dig?

CL: Dearheart, your aim and trigger are speed are pointless -- you blow up everything in your path. You don't need good aim.

T-G: Yeah, well, still....

CL: I know how to take your mind off the monotony of this trip -- I have just the record for you, it just arrived by post. By the way, would you mind not steering straight at the mountains? It makes me a tad nervous. (presses a button on the dashboard and a gravitationally stable turntable with floating tonearm appears)

T-G: I'm afraid. Knowing your taste in music, I'm very afraid.... So who are we gonna hear now?

CL: A fine duo from Houston, Texas known as DR:OP:FR:AM+E. Just a taste of the techno, jungle-style, with corrosive noise control and extremely obscure samples thrown in for good measure. They'll make your ass move, my child, although that could be dangerous given how much ass you have....

T-G: Flattery will get you nowhere, you fawning snot! What are you even doing paying attention to my ass anyway? You like men, for God's sake....

CL: Ah, but fine art is to be appreciated by all. Now listen.

The record begins to turn, and what sounds alarmingly like a television jingle oozes from the speakers. Sure enough, it's a well-formed and highly tuneful advertisement for Country Club Malt Liquor.

T-G: What the fuck?!?!

CL (laughing): Ah, a jest on the part of these fine lads. An inside joke, if you will... they slave by day as creators of audio-visual content for film and television, then toil by night in their infernal hellstudio. Busy lads, these men! The "concept" here -- whipped up after too many hours at work and quite possibly too much vodka, for all i can imagine -- is that the tracks are separated by jingles for this imaginary beer. The jingles are quite well-done, by the way, with an arcane sense of humor....

T-G: Yah yah, whatever dude, just hush up and let 'em play dammit....

As the jingle dies away, "one six + five" opens with whining noises before erupting into wild jungle beats and throbbing basslines, all dissolving in a stew of unidentifiable ghost noises. Sampled vocals chanting about something figure into the mix after a while, and then it all winds down and fades away.

T-G (as new jingle plays): Hey, that was actually kind of swank. So what's with the arcane titles?

CL: I believe they're references to the BPM, at least where the numbers are concerned. "cfit" stands for "controlled flight into terrain." I have no idea of the meaning behind "spbif," however. Ah, the jingle is ending... time now for "seventy nine nine"....

The song begins, introduced with seemingly random bleeps and bloops and minesweeper sounds. Eventually an actual synth rhythm starts to happen, followed by a looped beat that eventually becomes moderately more complex without ever speeding up -- this is one of the more "ambient" offerings, actually.

T-G: I must admit, they have some stylin' beats and make cool use of ambient sound. I can get behind this.

As the next jingle ends, "spbif" comes up; it is the one that's out of control; fast, intensely rhythmic, with a sound like a CD skipping and chopped-up edits designed to daze and disorient. Another jingle separates it from "cfit," which turns out to be more spot-on beats and swirling snippets of sound.

T-G: All right, they have my approval. So what's happening with them?

CL: Well, I believe they are readying a full-length album to be released on Monotremata Records, one that will build on these themes and offer up quite a few surprises... many guest musicians, as I understand it. It should be worth the wait.

T-G: Cool. Well, play that again... i think we have just enough time to hear the whole thing again before we hit Seattle....

Trance-like drone pop, like Lush or My Bloody Valentine or the Sundays, but obviously linked just as easily to the modern techno palette of electronica, trip-hop (there's plenty of Massive Attack in the band's approach to sonic architecture), and attention to texture and detail. Vocalists Ryan Policky and Sarah Marcogliese are very much from the My Bloody Valentine / Cocteau Twins school of thought regarding vocals (Rule # 37: If you can understand anything, the vocals need more reverb), but while the band's not exactly going out of its way to hide their influences, they aren't leaning on them all that hard, either. The result is an album (twelve songs worth) of music that is almost guaranteed to hold much appeal for anyone who grew up in the shadow of the shoegazer scene's first wave, but has also kept up with the post-shoegazer drone / electronica scene since. I prefer the songs on which Sarah sings (big surprise), but they all have that same swell, majestic, larger-than-life sound, and there's a subtle sense of humor at work in places (witness the explanation of the "old sailing song" that bridges "murnau" and "when memory fails"). They have a penchant for bridging songs with odd snippets of conversation, throwaway bits, or strange noises, many of which refer outward, toward the real world beyond the studio; the result is to give the album a more organic, cosmopolitan feel, as if the songs are part of a guided tour through the hidden coffeehouses and impromptu film clubs where lush, orchestrated soundtrack music like this is frequently born. The album's sound is immaculately recorded and carefully constructed in layers of beats, melodic drone, noises, and lots of swirling reverb -- it's a dreamy, droning sound designed for headphones or stadiums through miles of Marshalls. It's nice to see that shoegazing always remains a stylish choice for the discerning few, and that there are still bands who can do it well.

This isn't quite as thematic (or as willfully crazed) as Kaiser's 17 THEMES..., and it's nowhere near as obscure or free-form rhythmically, but it's no less avant for it. Here we find Kaiser on trumpet, flugelhorn, and vox dueting with percussionist Brad Dutz, who employs a truly amazing number of percussion devices, far too many to list here (but including "Rawcliffe clay bowls" and "string cajon," whatever these fine, obscure things might be). The two work their mojo -- an often hypnotic, tribal mojo, sounding like ritual shaman music at times -- over twelve songs of what might loosely be described as tribal free jazz. Kaiser's trumpet serves as the melodic device and counterpoint to rhythmic structures of unusually wide tonality, the result of such a large array of percussion tools. There are moments when Dutz creeps up into the territory of getting carried away with the constant clattering, but for the most part his rhythm stick is focused more on hypnotic repetition rather than density of sound. One of the album's recommendations is its large panorama of rhythmic sounds, a practice that largely died out in the seventies in the wake of the ridiculous excesses of prog rock and the increasing homogenization of all sounds intended to be "radio-friendly." Kaiser's distinctly melodic trumpet wailing is a nice plus, but i suspect this would have stood up on its own just stripped down to the percussion alone. It comes in similar packaging as Kaiser's aforementioned release, and makes a nice companion piece.

Bob Dylan -- THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 4: BOB DYLAN LIVE 1966

Okay, to understand why this is such a big goddamn deal, you have to know a little history. A wild-haired fellow by the name of Robert Zimmermann subsequently reinvented himself to become Bob Dylan, freewheeling troubadour with a twangy acoustic guitar and some of the most amazing lyrics anyone had ever heard at the time, and released his first album in February 1962. Over the next four years and several brilliant albums, each one better than the last, Then, in an 18-month period between January 1965 and the middle of 1966, he recorded three of the greatest albums of all time back to back (BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME, HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED, and BLONDE ON BLONDE and changed musical history in the process. Remember, prior to Dylan's rise to fame, musicians didn't generally write and record their own songs, and even when they did, they were constrained to writing pleasant little ditties of no more than three and a half minutes in length for radio airplay. Dylan crushed these "rules" and more -- he was a singer who couldn't technically sing and didn't care, he was a studio musician who left in mistakes, he sang lyrics so ridiculously literate and tremendously obscure that 90% of his audience had no idea what he was talking about... and he was an acoustic folk-singer who dared to go electric.

The last one is what got him in trouble. Somewhere during his early years, the counterculture attempted to co-opt him to be their spokesman, their public face, their figurehead -- without ever really understanding that Dylan is not a man who can be co-opted. He might sell out, yes, but only when and if it amuses him. As his own label has discovered more than once, trying to rein in the Jokerman and compel him to do your bidding is kind of like trying to catch a hurricane with a butterfly net. For whatever reason, the counterculture decided that the only vision they had for Dylan was to eternally be a folksinger with nothing but an acoustic guitar... unfortunately for them, Dylan, always easily bored, had other ideas. So it came to pass that when he recorded an electric side on HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED, it created a roar of collective outrage that was only equalled in intensity when he appeared with a band at the Newport Music Festival and was booed off after only three songs (he came back to do two more acoustic numbers, the last being a most sardonic and telling rendition of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue").

The situation only worsened when Dylan took on the Hawks, the ace bar band (and then some) that would eventually become The Band on their own, and started playing dates with them on the subsequent European tour in 1966. Each night he would open with a segment of songs performed alone, accompanied only by acoustic guitar and harp. His selection of songs was generally an interesting one, including several songs unreleased at the time and others from his new visionary period, but at least the acoustic section always went over well. But then... ah, then he would bring on the Hawks and the shit would hit the fan. The sentiment of the outraged listeners was later summed up by a "fan" in EAT THE DOCUMENT, who said in respect to the live shows that Dylan "needed shooting." All of this culminated at the show in Manchester on May 17, 1966 (not the Royal Albert Hall, the last show of the tour that occurred without incident nine days later), where Bob's temper got the better of him, resulting in an absolutely fire-breathing live performance. All of the above culminated in a riveting moment that's hard to imagine happening today -- in the lull between the end of "Ballad of A Thin Man" and the start of "Like A Rolling Stone," some outraged fan screamed, "JUDAS!" Dylan's equally outraged response -- "You're a liar!" led to his admonishment to the Hawks to "play fucking loud" and directly into a version of "Like A Rolling Stone" fiery enough to set off smoke detectors from fifty paces.

So now we have the actual document itself, spread across two CDs (one for the acoustic segment, one for the electric half), and it's really hard to fathom what compelled Columbia to sit on this for 32 years. Were they really afraid that it wouldn't "sound good enough" or something? Granted, they had to do a fair amount of tinkering to overcome some technical limitations, but 32 years worth of tinkering... i'm having a hard time buying it, mon. (The finished set sounds brilliiant, incidentally.) Or were they worried about the impact of hearing some misguided idjit called Dylan "Judas"? Or did they just totally misjudge how badly the public wanted to hear this? I'm betting the last one, especially since the most recent -- and best -- bootleg of this, GUITARS KISSING AND THE CONTEMPORARY FIX, is rumored to have been made from a leaked Sony tape of this very CD-set courtesy of a Sony executive frustrated at the long wait. Supposedly Sony heard the bootleg, saw the sales, and finally woke up to the $$$ they were missing out on, and ergo, here we are....

So how's it sound? Pretty damn good, actually. The acoustic set has some minor imperfections, but they're truly minor, and the feel - especially on songs like "Visions of Johanna," "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," and "Desolation Row" (making its live debut on that European tour) -- is amazing. The set includes, in addition to those three tunes, "She Belongs To Me," "Fourth Time Around," Just Like A Woman," and "Mr. Tambourine Man." But it's the liver-than-live electric disc that's the real treat: Dylan and the Hawks play like they're fighting their way through a war with bombs exploding in every direction (which was certainly true enough, in a metaphorical sense). Opening with a testosterone-laden version of "Tell Me, Mama," the Hawks are absolutely top-notch from the word go. Things start genially enough with that and "I Don't Believe You" (which Dylan sardonically introduces by saying "it used to go like that, now it goes like this"), But things start getting ugly after that, as you can hear booing mixed in with the applause in the moments between songs thereafter, along with lots of disruptive slow-clapping. Dylan's response is pretty suave: he turns up the volume and gets rapidly more pissed off. By the time they reach "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues," he sounds like he'd be happy to drill his songs straight through the naysayers' skulls. A raging rendition of "Leopard-Skin Pill Box Hat" (again disrupted during the introduction by jeers and slow-clapping) and "One Too Many Mornings" brings them to "Ballad of a Thin Man," which Dylan sings with a contempt he doesn't even bother to disguise, especially on the revealing line "You know something's happening but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" Then comes the defining moment: Some maggot screams "JUDAS!" followed by much garbled invective, to which Dylan responds, "I don't believe you. You're a liar!" -- and after telling the band to "play fucking loud," they crash into a thunderous, intense, flat-out amazing reading of "Like A Rolling Stone."

And that's pretty much what you need to know. The set comes in a box with a nifty li'l booklet crammed full of cool pix and an explanation of said events, but really, everything you need to know is on the discs. Now if Columbia would just get up off their fat asses and release more of the piles of cool Dylan shit (outtakes, live goods, and unreleased tracks) still sitting in the vault, then i'd be an even happier guy. But for right now, this is good enough. Brilliant in every sense of the word.