Angel'in Heavy Syrup -- I (Subterranean)

More bizarre weirdness from the land of the rising sun... imagine the Butthole Surfers colliding with the Cocteau Twins in a punk jazz lounge and you begin to get a glimpse of the strange delights this disc has to offer. The first song, "S.G.E. (Space Giant Eye)" burps up a bomping bassline surrounded by guitars spitting out serrated shards of surprisingly melodious feedback. And then that VOICE comes in over it all... that breathy, ethereal voice. The other four songs are a bit less manic, closer to a tasty yet eccentric mix of free jazz and blues most of the time, embellished by Mineko Itakura's gorgeous voice. (Or is it Mine Nakao? The first plays bass, the second plays, guitar, but both sing, not that I can tell the difference.) The version of "My Dream" here is considerably different than the one available on Charnel's compilation LAND OF THE RISING NOISE; here the guitars are drenched in echo and reverb, twanging away like they marched right out of the Okeefenokee swamp, and the vocals are more prominent this time. Of the two, I think this is the better one, although that may be a matter of personal taste.... The final song is the extended "Crazy Blues," framed at the beginning and end by the sound of running water, a song that mutates wildly over the course of ... minutes and is probably actually closer to improvisational jazz than blues (at least as Americans think of the blues, anyway). Not only is the musicianship impeccable here (as on all of the album), but Mineko's bass playing here is flat-out amazing. Hunt this down, especially if you'd like to hear a foreign take on western jazz/blues.

Band of Susans -- HERE COMES SUCCESS [Restless]

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

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

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

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

Cheer Accident -- ENDURING THE AMERICAN DREAM [Pravda]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With lead in their veins, acres of fuzz in their stomp boxes, and paint thinner swirling down their throats, these fine purveyors of monolithic sludge return to crush you beneath their vast weight. After looking at the lyrics (kindly provided in the booklet) I'm pretty sure they're not going to set the world on fire with any deep messages or anything, but mon, are they heavy or what? There are eight tracks on this disc (one, "Weird Tales," is actually broken down further into three separate parts), but it's really just one long, shoulder-dislocating stoner jam. Lots of reverb and swirly fuzz noises, lots of bone-crushing slo-mo mastadon riffing, and plenty of pure unadulterated heaviness. These guys play like their guitars were made of lead. Slashing downtuned riffing on "Vinum Sabbath" and "Barbarian" is equally offset by pure amorphous sludge on parts of "Weird Tales." My candidate for heaviest tune on the disc goes to "I, The Witchfinder," apparently inspired by some horror film from the sixties or something (i used to know these things but i've long since forgotten and i'm too fucking lazy to go hunt down my copy of THE HORROR ENCYCLOPEDIA to find out for sure, so sue me), in which hate-filled razor riffs bleed into forbidding bass lurches, back and forth again, slower than a snake's bowel movement and just about as stinky. Their Sabbath roots are really obvious on this track (on the whole album, actually), but Sabbath -- heavy as they were -- rarely made speakers shake like this. We're talking bass of seismic proportions, the kind of music that makes knicknacks on your shelf hop up and down in time with the bass moves. What's scarier is that the rest of the album is almost as heavy as this (although i have no idea what's up with the short and quixotic "The Hills Have Eyes," which is more of a brief fragment than anything else). If you weep for the days of old when Ozzy and Tony Iommi both graced the same stage at the same time, then you must delve deeply into the cult of the Wizard. (For the record, their previous discs are every bit as good, too.)

John Fahey -- WOMBLIFE [Table of the Elements]

Let's be frank here: Fahey is a folk musician. But not just ANY folk musician; no, Fahey is the stealth bomber of folk. He's on a mission, you know. He's come to reclaim folk from its current state of wimpiness, much in the same way that Dylan forced the doe-eyed longhairs to wake up and smell the coffee when he strapped on his electric guitar and made everyone piss in their pants at the Newport Festival in 1965. Give ol' Blind Joe Death credit here: he is even more cryptic, elusive, mysterious, and (apparently) misanthropic than the Jokerman himself, no small feat. Plus he looks WAY more intimidating. No fucking fey boots and scarves for Mr. Fahey, who on the cover of WOMBLIFE looks like he just got through loading hundred-pound crates on a loading dock for eight hours in the bad part o' town. I'll bet no one tries to stiff him for his cash at the end of a gig.

The perverse part of this -- him being a folkie, that is -- is not just that he's gained a highly improbable second wind after nearly forty years in "the biz" (betcha didn't know he's released something like 25 albums, did you now?), but that he's done it by crossing over to a completely new audience, apparently by... by accident. A most peculiar turn of events for a man who spent most of the Eighties "curing" various health problems through the power of heavy drinking, being homeless, and supporting himself by reselling thrift-store classical records to naive collectors. So just how did a taciturn, sardonic guy with a beat-up acoustic guitar suddenly come to be worshiped by the avant-garde cognoscenti? Shee, things have taken a mighty strange turn when Jim O'Rourke and minimalist-noise label Table of the Elements are just the first in a mighty long line of people ready to pee in their pants over his every steel-toned guitar move....

The reason, of course, is because Fahey was never really a folkie, at least not in the accepted sense. Unlike the purists who view the voice and the unamplified guitar as the alpha and omega of all that is "folk," Fahey considers these merely two weapons among a limitless arsenal in his war against all that is tame. Hell, he doesn't even bother to SING much of the time -- in fact, he doesn't open his mouth at all on this album. What he DOES manage to do is smother his guitar in overdubbed overtones, ambient noise, tape collages, and all sorts of esoteric stuff that owes a hell of a lot more to the likes of Brian Eno and maybe Stockhausen than to Blind Willie Johnson or Howlin' Wolf.

The unlikely meeting of folk and avant-noise would be a stupefying disaster of epic proportions in most hands, but here it comes across as the product of sheer genius -- mostly because of a powerful dose of subtlety and restraint. (And really, he HAS had about forty years to gear up for this one, you know.) Probably the smartest thing he did regarding this album was to allow Jim O'Rourke to produce it -- a bold move for a guy who's used to producing himself, but one that works out extremely well. It works because O'Rourke is a shaper of sound; as a collaborator or producer, he brings a high degree of organization and formidable composition skills to the mixing desk on any given project. To get an inkling of the just how much difference his involvement makes, compare this to last year's CITY OF REFUGE; while that is hardly a bad album (i thought it was pretty hot shit when i reviewed it and haven't changed my opinion), this makes that effort look like the work of a man who's just woken up from a long sleep (which is metaphorically true, in a sense). This album is so focused, so dead-on, that it's absolutely crystalline, like a flawless diamond that reveals a new facet every time you study it again.

Of course, describing the album itself is not exactly easy. On the first track, "sharks," he opens up with jangling acoustic chords that are gradually supplanted by slide guitar, additional guitar sounds in the background, and tape noises. Ghostly slide and percussive guitar ride over a rumbling bed of what might be train sounds, all building to what sounds like the drumming of a steel can but is probably something else. Odd but engaging. These elements recombine in different forms, levels, velocities, and combinations over the next three songs -- "planaria," "eels," and "coelacanths" -- as if they are all essentially movements within one much larger piece. (This concept is reinforced by the fact that these four all run together on the disc; you can't tell where one ends and the next begins without checking the disc monitor.) This material is all considerably more structured than the pieces on CITY OF REFUGE, but nowhere near as blatantly weird as those on the subsequent EP of "remixes" and stuff, THE MILL POND.

Which leaves the final song, "juana," the closest thing to traditional playing on this album. In some ways "juana" is a continuation of some of the sound and ideas from much earlier works like OLD FASHIONED LOVE; in terms of compositional structure and added guitars toward the end, though, it falls neatly in line with his more recent work. The piece starts out with an almost-familiar melange of arpeggiated melody and strummed chords, moving in a series of patterns that sound almost haphazard. In actuality, he is introducing all the bits and pieces that will be used in a more orderly fashion in the rest of the song, as we see when the first section ends, for as the last note dies away, almost immediately he begins playing a hypnotic riff that was only hinted at before as another guitar strums behind it. The tone shifts at regular intervals thanks to the second guitar, which moves from chords to high-note harmonic picking. This continues, with variations in form, until by the end the second guitar is picking harmonics so high that it sounds like the air is shimmering behind the hypnotic riff. Having already heard this probably a hundred times by now, i remain riveted every time i hear it again (and find something new each time). Brilliant.

Of course, this makes one wonder what he's going to do for an encore... but somehow i think he'll figure something out. Good for us.

You've seen THE WICKER MAN, right? Okay, imagine those kids -- you know, the ones running around naked and talking with disarming frankness and just basically being poster children for Pagan Life -- and imagine their counterparts twenty years later, after the Batcave and Neubaten pounding on shopping carts and the Birthday Party foaming their way around stages and after Miranda Sex Garden made it okay to be kinky madrigal enthusiasts (and to wear funny clothes). This is the kind of music those kids are making now. In this particular case, Flaming Fire -- a five-piece centered visually around gorgeous singers Kate and Lauren, although musicially they're all carrying an equal share of the weight -- combine Devo's deadpan irony and outrage with pounding tribal drums, electronica, pop, noise, pastoral folk guitars, and a wild variety of singing styles that encompass everything from medieval chanting to straight pop stylings to crazed shouting (and a lot of other stuff in between).

They don't waste time on this one: "The Way You Kill Me (Blood Does Shine)" opens with a thumping tribal beat designed to get you hoppin' around the room, and as soon as Kate (or is it Lauren?) comes in with "I love the way you kill me, it's so hot hot hot / I love it when I'm dying, it's so hot hot hot," the sonic landscape starts filling up with all sorts of bizarre yet catchy elements. At the bare bones, it -- like much of the rest of the album -- is a pure pop song, catchy and to the point, but then they start laying all sorts of bizarre instrumentation and pagan chants over it, then halfway through they revert to a slower and less cluttered sound before revving back up again. "Kill the Right People" opens up with a strange pagan variant of doo-wop, and then turns into something the Wall of Voodoo would have been happy to claim as their own, only wilder. And with a catchy chorus that goes "Yeah, and I know what's right / You got to kill the right people / No, you can't mess that up," how can they fail? But then "Your Love Belongs to Me"  (a mildly unhinged expression of fanatical devotion) is pure electronica with madrigal-style chanting and vocals. (Have I mentioned that all of this is horribly catchy?)

One of the best songs is "Goddess of War," a plain unvarnished folk song with minimal percussion that's executed perfectly, and whose spooky lyrics are brought to the forefront by keeping the background simple. "Foreign Car" is one of the more interesting songs, more bright pure pop with a big, fuzzy bass shake and lyrics like "That bastard's working for God / He's sitting, spinning his holy axle rods / That bastard's working for Christ / And God's grease monkeys don't play nice" -- all while Patrick rambles this paranoid chant about the Subaru coming for him while the girls chant call-and-response lines behind him. Other songs like "Cut the Reaper" and "There Is a Sky" are just as off-kilter and still plenty listenable, but it's the stuff like "Onward Forever" -- with its minimal military snare, traditional folk sound, and pagan warrior vibe that suddenly explodes into heavy grinding rock and crazed shouting, like a tribe of war gods in the middle of a frenzied religious ritual, jumping up and down around the fire. Limp Bizkit they ain't, and that's a damn good thing. The next thing you should hear is the wind in your wake as you rush to find yourself a copy of this. Trust me. "It's burnin', burnin', burnin'...."

Any way you slice it, this has inadvertently become a transitional album in the ways of all things 'fleshlike. Not only is it the first full album with a live drummer (Mantia only appeared on half of SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE, remember), and simultaneously the studio debut of Ted Parsons (former human metronome for Swans, Of Cabbages and Kings, and Prong), who's been playing with them since the SOLAH tour, but now it turns out to be Benny's last album with them as well. (He's leaving to go back to school, apparently, and is being replaced by Raven -- logically, the next step will be for Justin to be replaced by Tommy Victor and become Prong Mach II. Stranger things have happened....) Frankly, I can't even imagine what Godflesh would sound like without Benny, so it will be interesting to see where they go from here. At least Benny gets to bow out with the strongest album they've done in years -- this sounds like the album they could have made somewhere between the debut ep and STREETCLEANER, but with occasional nods to many other projects they've all been involved in over the years since then. Having Mr. Parsons step up to the drum stool turns out to have been an extremely shrewd move -- he's capable of playing with metronome-like precision, but his style is very different from the band's previous drummers, man or machine, and that in turn has driven the band in a new direction -- not only does Ted provide beats that are totally unexpected yet totally Godflesh, but his entire approach forms the backbone for a more stripped-down, structurally looser sound than ever before. Freed from the tyranny of counting measures to stay in sync with the machine, in many places on the new album they sound like something akin to a more trance-oriented Zeni Geva, assuming that Null initially worshipped at the altar of Black Sabbath and Swans rather than Pink Floyd and Swans. (It also seems that Justin's a lot more tritone-happy on this album, although that may be my imagination.)

Elements from all of their previous albums (and a few side bands) are here -- the bone-crushing heaviness of the opening track "Defeated" could have come from the MERCILESS sessions, several songs expand on the crushing Sabbath-worship of "Bittersweet" from US & THEM, "Antihuman" sounds like a rogue Ice track, and "Animal" could be an outtake from STREETCLEANER, while other songs echo elements of the mantra moves on SELFLESS, cascading feedback and grinding bass of the early releases, even the techno stylings of from SLAVESTATE in a couple of places. ("Vampires" does sound an awful lot like a song from the last Prong album, which is kind of interesting.) The difference is that everything is subservient to the mammoth, often heavily torqued guitar and bass, and brute force rules over every other consideration for the most part. This may be the most consistently heavy and unrelenting thing they've ever done. At the same time, there's no filler on this release -- and some of the songs (in particular "Anthem," "White flag," "For life," and "Jesu") are among the best they've ever done. This is a focused mess o' tracks, all right....

I think it's interesting that they're now on Music For Nations, because this new refinement of their sound may earn them an entirely new audience as this album makes its way into the hands of the stoners. People hep to the likes of Electric Wizard and Goatsnake who previously would have been put off by the frequent experimental forays into loops and sonic ugliness (or the drum machine) should find this collection of riff-heavy uberfuzz death dirges more to their liking. For that matter, this is the closest they've ever come to making a "traditional" death metal album -- it may have that stoner hypnogroove, but it's executed with machine-like precision.

Incidentally, if you ever wondered what a Low or Codeine song would sound like in these hands, check out the untitled ending track (approx. a minute or two after "Jesu") -- the first heavy section, in fact, sounds very much like a Codeine riff. My favorite track on the album hands down, one of my favorite Godflesh tracks ever, in fact.

[As their search continues, the Moon Unit and his unlikely entourage find themselves wandering through the rehearsal space on Sublevel 13. Amazingly enough, this part of the Hellfortress remains untouched, much to the Moon Unit's relief. Guitars of every shape and model line the cavernous walls on one side; the other side of the room is an endless stack of amplifiers and ten-foot speaker cabinets. Obscure and peculiar efx pedals are scattered all across the room; the cables littering the floor are so numerous as to resemble a bed of black snakes. His companions follow in awe as the Moon Unit hops across the room, skipping over pedals and strobe tuners, heading for the stereo with the latest Gravitar CD in hand.]

TMU: As long as we're down here, we might as well hear the new Gravitar disc. Rumor has it this is their best effort yet. This time they actually went into a professional studio as opposed to destroying tape in their rehearsal space, so the sonic waves o' death should be crystal clear this time around....

Pym: Look at all these cables and gadgets. Do you even know what all this stuff does?

M--w (pointing): Ah! A vintage Octavia! And look, an utterly ancient ring modulator... oh, how the very sight of such fine recording equipment warms the inner mounting flame of my very soul....

M--a: Yes, a fine store of processing devices indeed. Fearsome as she may be, the devilish Madame Onna would never dare to enter this room.

M--w: And this wall of speaker death! Oh, I am so excited I must now compose a new death haiku....

M--a: Please, let us hear it.

M--w: But of course:

TMU: Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever you say. (fiddles with many knobs, then stands back) All right, better prepare yourself... I'm sure this will be intense....

[As the CD begins to play, suddenly TASCAM-Girl drops from the ceiling without warning. Her spine-chilling scream of "BANZAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIII MOTHERFUCKERS!" can barely be heard over the clattering din slowly erupting from the speakers. She lands squarely on top of the Moon Unit, slamming him to the floor and knocking him senseless. As the band gathers steam, working their mojo in loud and disjointed fashion, she stands up and starts kicking the Moon Unit as the others watch in horror.]

M--w: Perhaps we should put a stop to this, do you think?

TG (snatching CD from his hand): Just try it, punk. What the hell is this wall of sonic filth... oh, don't tell me Gravitar has another CD out for the Moon Maggot to fawn over. I just don't get it. They sound like the members of Black Sabbath tumbling around in a dryer while playing three different songs at the same time. What ever happened to people who made real music, like Foghat and April Wine and shit?

C12 (emerging from hiding): Some would say that you merely have hideous taste, my latex-clad child.

TG: Oh, don't you start... hey, this ending part where they drown a repeating thingy in reverb and get louder and louder is kind of cool.

[Abruptly, actual recognizable chords and a melodic guitar line emerge in the reverb hell's wake. All stand transfixed as vocalist Geoff Walker begins to sing.]

C12: My... my God. They... they can actually play songs. Not just crazed improv jams, but... songs.

TG: He can sing. He's not howling like a pit bull being castrated -- what the hell is going on here?

C12 (quivering in the corner): I... I am very afraid now....

Pym: Hey, this is "Diana" by Skip Spence. A pretty interesting cover for a freedeathjazz improv combo, don't you think?

TMU (mumbling from the floor, still only half-conscious): Yes... such a suave move... right up on par with Judas Priest having the brilliance to cover "Diamonds and Rust" by Joan Baez and then Fleetwood Mac's "The Green Manalishi"... of course the Melvins did that one too... maybe Gravitar should cover Fleetwood Mac... yes....

M--w: I greatly approve of this. See how it gradually grows louder? Denser? Thicker? Like, perhaps, a rancid sausage ripening in the sun until it must burst?

M--a: Yes, an appropriate analogy, my friend. For notice halfway through the song that they slowly but surely pile on much distortion and drift from the meter, burying the song under many layers of sonic rubble. It brings tears to my eyes, it is so beautiful. Already I worship this band, and this is only the second song.

TMU (rolling over, eyes glazed): This next one isn't bad either....

C12 (looking at him suspiciously): How do you know that? This just came out.

TMU: Oh, I've had a bootleg copy of it for about a year now... I have my sources on the black market, you know. So much Gravitar... you should hear the BALLADS AND STANDARDS material, what supposedly will come out on Vinyl Communications someday... I think... I could be confused....

Pym: I kind of like this one. That lonesome reverb guitar that opens it is almost like a weepy blues thing.

M--a: And then, true to their savage nature, they prove that they must bludgeon this song to death with drumming from another dimension and exotic guitar sounds traveling through miles of distortion and efx pedals.

M--w: Surely we must learn more about these deviant gods of thunder.

Pym: Hey, this fourth track is like a devolved rock song or something. It even has a steady beat, sort of. And mutant chicken picking.

C12: They're certainly making some odd noises with their guitars in this.

Pym: This is actually sort of like psychedelic country blues or something....

TMU (stirring again): But here comes "Deep and Wide," which is more like the sound of eighty-foot triffids marching over the hills and into the cities with destruction on their minds.

M--a: Yes, it does sound quite violent. They sound as if they sawing through the guitar strings. I would liken it to a cyclone skipping across the plains and uprooting trees, myself.

M--w (as the next song plays): I believe I prefer this one. The grandiose power of the hyperactive drums is matched by the sound of guitars exploding. First they sizzle, then they explode. And still the drums run rampant.

M--a: Glorious indeed.

[As the CD reaches the last track, "Rocket to Dearborn," TMU sits up, eyes wild and crazed.]

TMU: Okay, this is it. The moment I've been waiting for. This is the greatest song they've ever done and the greatest verison of it, plus it's really long, so pay attention.

[They all listen intently as a hypnotic, flanged-out guitar figure moving at a pokey pace is gradually joined by a steady beat and exotic histronics from the second guitar. As the song progresses, it slowly builds in intensity and density of sound, as most of the weight is carried by the second guitar. As that guitar grows progressively more crazed, eventually the first guitar's sound grows beefier and more grotesque in its own right, until they resmemble UFOs hovering wildly and blindly through one of the howling sandstorms of Jupiter's giant red eye. After some time the cyclone passes, and the first guitar returns to its original flanged-out tone. The song's structure reverses itself toward the end, growing quieter and less crazed, before finally fading out.]

Pym: You're right, that was long.

M--w: An amazing display of power and grace.

M--a: A masterpiece.

TMU (finally coming back his senses): Uh, anytime you guys want to stop fawning over their greatness and hit these clueless fortress-wreckers with the Ultrasonik, that would be okay with me....

[But it is too late. As the noise duo reach for their weapons of ultrasonic destruction, TG and C12 bolt madly from the room. M--w and M--a burst out the door after them, but they are gone....]

The title is an in-joke -- he's a former Euroboy and came to Ulver's attention while working as a session man on the seocnd Kare and the Cavemen album -- but there's nothing funny about this album, which is either the album the Beatles should have made after the white album or the one Black Sabbath should have made instead of TECHNICAL ECSTACY, i'm not sure which. The kind of company he's keeping on this album should tell you something about the quality level here -- Anders Bortne of Norwegian Grammy nominees Whopper sings on most tracks, two former Euroboys appear on bass and organ, and members of Turbonegro, Gluecifer, and Ulver show up on various tracks. As for the sound, well, Kare's main focus is drumming and he's equally invfluenced by Can and Black Sabbath, so he's certainly not lacking in the range department. As with all Jester releases, it sounds like it was recorded with exacting precision, which make the nuances easily discernible. Kare calls it "psychedelic blues" -- i call it a droning superlink between pop and metal at the psychedelic intersection.

The album starts in a promising psych vein as "Captain Trips" fades in with warbling organ, throbbing tape noises, and a serious drone -- like a darker-toned version of Tangerine Dream -- and gradually morphs into a blaring pop-metal song that could have come from a Beatles album (post-REVOLVER). The drums are pure PARANOID-era Sabbath, though. "Channel Five" begins with a basic riff and a beat repeated endlessly and builds, instrument by instrument, chime by chime and drone by drone, into a ringing wall of sound. By the time they start to seriously rock the house, they have at least two or three guitarists (inlcuding Kasper Pedersen on slide), a jazz piano, horns, and backup singers all waffling away. Kare establishes a fondness for mantra-like repetition and cascading waves of sound 'n drone early on, and "Channel Five" is probably my favorite track here. If you can imagine the build of the Beatle's "Hey Jude" transformed into heavy metal minimalism with a gospel choir, you can get an inkling of why this track alone beats the pee out of anything nu-metal or top-40 bullshit is ever going to come up with.

By the time we get to "Sunshine Blues," i start to wonder if they and Cheer-Accident share some of the same influences -- this track would have fit in well (in structure if not necessarily in tone) on THE WHY ALBUM (itself a perverse tribute to their Beatles influence). This is what he means by the psychedelic blues: soulful guitar and straight-ahead rock drumming that has more in common with progressive rock than anything else. By contrast, "Frank Furius" is an agitated mechanical punk dirge somewhere between early PiL and The Fall, with startling and sinister lyrics: "My teacher sent a letter home / They wouldn't leave my mom alone / They blocked the street and screamed...." Relentless, monochromatic thunder punctuated by bursts of titanic and unpredictable noise/efx guitar provide the backdrop for the crazed singer to work his way up to roaring over and over "I'm blowing minds, blowing minds out with a hose!" until the song abruptly ends. This is the sound of growing hysteria with the line way too tight and starting to fray.... "Mission To Cure My Condition" is a pretty swank semi-funk vamp with ringing star-drone guitars, all air and light and twinkling radiance over a persistent beat. The extended breakdown is filled with all sorts of peculiar noises -- birdcalls, guitar chatter, who knows what else -- and the beat never lets up. Surreal and yummy and good for your tummy.

"Love Report" begins with reverberating ice-drone keyboards, then suddenly shifts gears -- an actual song -- a pop song! -- is superimposed over those ice-drone ivories, and when the vox appear, so does a twangy minimalist guitar borrowed from Morricone's stable of boss tones. Like everything here, it manages to be surreal and yet insanely catchy at the same time; even though the backbone is intensely minimal, with beats and other elements that repeat for long stretches, the other melodies and counterpoints from other instruments fill out the sound with enough variety to keep it from lapsing into tedium. The final track, "Dark of Heartness," evolves from a dark chant into a clattering engine of ritual possession, as a persistent beat and a growing battery of sounds and effects construct a machine of sound and energy overrun with alien strains of melody. Like Hawkwind with better sound, the sound of the interstellar overdrive harnessed in the service of dark pop music.

This is one of the best albums of the issue -- one of the best albums i've heard in a long time, period. This man (a complete unknown to me up to this moment) is a fucking genius. Just more evidence that Jester may well be one of the most underrated sources of incredibly new and different sounds -- it says a lot about them, i think, that everything i've heard from them so far is consistent with the quality of this release. I'll be listening to this one for a good while to come, seeking out its secrets....

Kadura -- FROM THE DEPTHS OF THE OUTER SPACE [Charnel Music]

This is the third disc in Charnel's ongoing series of "Japan's Rising Sounds," and it's a swank one. Kadura are a psychadelic band (aren't they all these days?) equally influenced by eastern drone (particularly where the vox and guitar tones are concerned) and space-rock. Which means, of course, that they tend to play pretty slow, like they just smoked a good- sized bowl or two, and they believe in kettle drums and the healing power of reverb. Lots o' reverb. They get much more reverb going on here and they'll float away into the ether, mon....

If i had to compare them to anybody (just for purposes of figuring out where they're coming from), i'd have to say they must live down the street from Ghost. The main difference is that Ghost is a bit more schizophrenic and hyperactive at times; Kadura definitely prefer the slow scenic route through their dreamy soundscapes. If you're really insistent on variety in tempo, i suppose that could pose a wee problem, although it suits me just fine, personally. They also like to wail for long stretches -- several of the tracks here pass the ten-minute mark -- which is godlike to moi (i hate short songs unless they're by Cub) but may make others twitch.

All of this disc is excellent. These are exceptional ensemble players and Atsushi Kobayashi does a more than credible pass at the eastern drone style of singing. Guitarist Go Kuwahara is pretty much a psych-god in wait, rolling out trippy leads and reverberating circular riffs (again, drenched in reverb so they just rattle and shimmer endlessly) all over the place with impeccable style. The rhythm section is a bit interesting: they have two drummers and two bassists (one of whom also doubles on A-Synth), which gives them a really huge and textured sound. Amazingly enough, their sense of restraint is such that you can't really tell this (unless you're like me and cheat by looking at the liner notes); there are no instrument hogs here calling undue attention to themselves. Impressive.

Highlights include "Travel to Faraway," a long, slow epic of dreamlike cloudburst guitar and kettle drums that takes over ten minutes to slowly unfold (you know, i don't remember it being that long on the ...RISING NOISE VOL. 2 compilation, which makes me wonder if this a reworked version or if that was a truncated one) and "Alyster," almost as long and full of shimmering curtains of repetitive, hypnotic guitar lines so thoroughly soaked in reverb that they appear to bounce back and forth off the walls. "Oceanic Element" is another beautiful-sounding slice of psych heaven, with bright arrpegiated guitar lines and wailing vox that approximates the sound of cathedral music. The Zurna (a double-reed horn that i think is native to Japan) shows up prominently in the introduction of "Move," whose heavy drums (when they kick it in) make it the closest thing to an uptempo number on the disc. More twangy reverb guitar shows up on "Inner Trance" and "Sky Heart," while the rhythm section takes up a bit more prominence on the closing track "A Distant Land." Really, the entire album is impressively droney and hypnotic, with a sound like the music of the spheres. Just as their contribution was one of the highlights of the latest ...RISING NOISE compilation, so this disc is probably the highlight so far of the Japan Rising series.

The complete and total essence of blind, sociopathic evil, bar none. The second album from Stephen O'Malley's oppressively slow doom band raises the bar for bleakness in just about every way imaginable. The riffs and beats this time around are so slow (and yet so precise) as to be almost stationary, while vocalist Alan Dubin's pained serial-killer shrieking has been honed to a fine and grotesque edge, with distinctly unsettling results. "No good times in here," he rages on "Commuted," and he's not kidding. With four songs playing out over approximately an hour, all about psychotic rage leading to ritual murder or worse, all slower than cell death and just as hopeless, it's not for the easily bummed. What you get kind of depends on how you like to listen to your depressed raving: the cd contains "Commuted," "Fields," "Dead," and "Too Close Enough To Touch," while the double-lp substitutes "Commuted (coda)" for "Dead" (which you can find on a separate 12" backed with a remix of "No Joy" from the first album, if you're so inclined).

All of the material here is stellar, excruciatingly slow drone-riffs played at maximum volume with minimum movement, but my favorite is probably "Fields" (in which Dubin raves, apparently to a girl he's just killed, about all sorts of psychotic stuff over frozen-tundra riffs, repeatedly howling "I did this all for you" over and over as he buries her in the field). Lots of intense psychodrama thanks to their spectacularly pained singer, who sounds even more convincingly unhinged this time around than ever. The riffs themselves appear more well-thought out as well, spread out more strategically and better prepared to keep things moving over twenty-minute suites of minimalist doom, and the lyrics are brilliant, delivered in a state of simulated psychosis that perfectly complements the bleak drone. If you can't get enough of his shrieking scream, be sure to scoop up the gatefold double-lp version on Load, where -- in addition to packaging equally as swank as the cd but now large enough to properly appreciate and heavyweight vinyl pressing -- you get a "coda" version of "Commuted" that features an enormous amount of horrific shrieking at times. O'Malley designed the packaging again, and this may be his best effort yet (and yes, he retains the spidery art-deco look of the band's logo, a smart move). The true current masters of slow motion doom. By the voice o' Ra, albums like this make me proud to be an American....

Alan Lamb -- PRIMAL IMAGE [Dorobo]

The recommendations above are sort of misleading... those are actually the only two pieces on the entire disc. They're also both quite brilliant. What we have here are two compositions of wire music, the result of the hobby of an Australian neurosurgeon who apparently spends his spare time not playing golf, but instead uses contact mikes to record the sound of telephone wires. (His colleagues probably think he's quite odd... but then, they're the ones who wear funny clothes visible to the naked eye from Saturn and spend all day swatting tiny round things, so what do they know?) Lamb has recorded these sounds then mixed them down into two compositions purely through crossfading, and the results are eerie... and amazingly organic, given their origin. It's all about the principle of "integer harmonics of the fundamental" (do i hear LaMonte Young pausing to listen as he combs the knots from his beard?) and resonance. Lamb provides in the liner notes an "explanation" of his art that practically requires a degree in acoustic physics to understand, but what it boils down to is that very long wires that are also quite thick vibrate at a frequency below 1 Hz, causing only the harmonic overtones to fall within hearing range. And those harmonics resonate. They resonate in a BIG way. Is this the sound insects hear when they shuffle through our much larger world? If it is, no wonder they fear us.... Terrifying in an inexplicable, primal way, yet haunting and even beautiful, this is the actual sound of physics at work. This is beyond amazing. One can only hope that he has lots more material like this and intends to release it all. If you buy only one "experimental" album this year, make sure this one is it.

Loblolly -- HYMNS TO DYMPHNA [self-released CD]

Milwaukee's favorite export that isn't drinkable are BACK. It's taken them a while, but they have returned at last with a full-length CD full of new songs... new instrumentation on old songs... new personnel... hell, new everything, mon. The core of V'ronco (psychotronic guitar, vox, howling, administrative details) and Dan Mullen (bass, more vox) remains the same; Andy Pagel turns up as the latest in a long line o' people to hit things in search of the perfect beat. (He's gone now, of course. They have a new guy to beat on helpless objects now.) Some other things have not changed -- V'ronco still sounds like Grace Slick being possessed by the devil under the influence of Johnny Walker Red and way too many gallons of coffee, the band still crams every influence they can think of into each song all at once, and their whole outlook (musically and lyrically) is still somewhere between freaky and flaky. (In fact, all of the songs from the original demo YOU'VE TAKEN TOO MUCH ACID -- now tragically out o' print, so if you weren't smart enough to snag it when i told you to eons ago, you're out of luck now, buddy -- are on here, along with five new tunes.)

Some things HAVE changed, though. All of the holdovers from the demo have undergone extensive studio surgery, mostly in the form of expanded instrumentation (although "Deal," probably the best track from the demo, has shuffled the arrangement a bit and grown about a minute and a half longer), which is hardly surprising given that this is, after all, the "real" album and that was the demo, right? What's wild, however, is that apparently having the Prime Galactic Overlord Stringfuser from F/i for a hubby has rubbed off on V'ronco; the album is just totally drenched in psychotronic space-rock guitar. This... is a good thing. One can never have enough spaced-out guitar doodling.

The best of the new songs is by far and away "Tell Me About Your Perfect Smelling Dreams," which gets piles of bonus points for the bad-ass title alone. It starts out sounding like Devo crossed with the Beach Boys on brown acid, drops in honky-tonk piano and quasi-doowop vox about a third of the way through, then descends into a long interlude of devolved cyclotron space riffing, demented semi-jazz drum waffling, and UFO noises before returning to the actual song again. "White Flight Suburban Nightmare" is almost as demented: It starts out as spastic, turbocharged thunder -- then stops abruptly and turns into a halftime swirl of loping bass, droning ghost vox, and shaved paintpeeler guitars reminiscent of the Butthole Surfers in their prime for a while before abruptly revving back up again. Talk about cognitive dissonance.... The other new standout is "Andy's Stolen Lighters," a song so bizarre that words fail me. The music sounds like exquisitely deranged country funk with over-amped drums, the lyrics are sung/shouted/wailed, quite frequently by both singers at the same time (singing totally different things, mind you), and there's, uh, SOMETHING at the end that sounds like chicken picking on the bass guitar, which i didn't even think was possible.

"Burning Feet," the ominous "Is It So," and the serial-killer rant of "Prowl" remain pretty close to the originals from the demo, only beefier in sound this time around; "You're Really Getting Weird On Me," though, now opens with shimmering ping-ping guitar that eventually turns into full- blown squealy stuff, and the bassline takes some funny dips as well. The main riff of "Tell You A Story" has changed considerably and the song as a whole is heavier now, with the addition of thundering guitars and fat-ass drums. "She Just Wants to Sleep" has been fattened up with background guitars, keyboards, and God knows what else, and "Deal," as mentioned earlier, has been tinkered with to a pretty serious degree. It's still moored by the lurching feedback guitar, but it's a bit looser (i think) and definitely longer, and it's gained a lot of twisted string-scratching in between the verses. It's still deranged-sounding shit, mon. This song -- in fact, most of the album -- is what the Butthole Surfers would be doing now if the Butthole Surfers were still any good.

The Headless Sno-Cone Girl has proclaimed this her favorite new album of the year and suggests you find a copy and make it yours. You would be wise to follow her advice; after all, hell has no fury like that of a headless chick whose advice has been ignored....

Pain Teens -- PAIN TEENS [Charnel Music]

FINALLY. The reissue. And it's about fuggin' TIME. After years of waffling, dickering, and vacillating (is it coming out on Trance? Charnel? someone else? who knows?), Charnel has brought out the CD version of the band's first album on the tenth anniversary of the album's original release. And a fine reissue it is... although there are a few surprises. O my yes.

First: The track sequence has been mildly altered. "The Pour Doubt Blood" has gone bye-bye (most likely because there's an almost identical version, "The Poured Out Blood," on STIMULATION FESTIVAL already) and in its place are four bonus tracks. One, "Tapes," is from one of the earliest cassette releases (MANMADE DISASTERS); the origin of the other three, though, is pretty damn mysterious. I have nearly everything PT ever put out (cassette or otherwise) and i've never heard the other three tracks. Are they old? New? Live? From the one cassette i don't have? I do not know....

The second big surprise is the SOUND. For the benefit of those who have never heard the original LP release, two words should reveal all: tar pit. The material for this album originally came from four-track cassettes, and between the lo-fi tendencies inherent to four-tracks and the patented PT rumbling-through-the-mud-in-search-of-decaying-Sleestaks low-end throb, the LP was pretty thick-sounding. Brilliant, but... mudlike. No longer so! For the reissue, everything was digitally remastered to more exacting standards and the results are like night and day. On tracks like "Inside Me," "The Shoemaker," and "A Continuing Nightmare," entire guitars and other instruments magically rise from the sonic mung, suddenly audible for the first time. The change is dramatic enough to almost make this a new album in its own right.

The album itself remains, in many ways, the ultimate PT album -- it just bursts with creepy dirges about serial killers, grotesque sexual fetishes, mutilation, and other eerie stuff. Two tracks -- "The Shoemaker" and "A Continuing Nightmare" -- are nothing more than taped monologues from a serial killer (the former) and a tabloid program recounting a woman's ordeal at the hands of a crazed kidnapper (the latter), both backed by a swamp voodoo rhythm section, crazed guitar bleats, and all kinds of mutant noises clattering away in the background. Others like "Brown Jenkin," "Symptoms," and "World of Destruction" are tremendously loop-driven (harbingers of what would later become the core of the Walking Timebombs sound). Everything else on the album falls somewhere between the two extremes; none of it even remotely resembles a standard "rock" album, although several of the tracks actually sound like (tremendously devolved) rock songs. Well, sort of.

As for the bonus tracks -- i personally would have taken "Happy Razors" over "Tapes," but it is very indicative of their obsession with short loops and quirky sounds at the time. "Innsmouth" is another sludgy dronefest enlivened by weird bell-like guitars and wailing, while "The Freezingwind" sounds like the same basic idea sped up several times and run through a series of pitchshifters, resulting in a high-pitched wailing drone like wind through the glaciers. Unspeakably cool. The last listed track, "Somnambuist," is something on the order of ambient middle-eastern slo-mo with lots of tarpit bass grunt happening in the background, and wouldn't have sounded too out of place on the Walking Timebombs/Tribes of Neurot collaboration, actually. And then there's the puzzling unlisted mystery track at the end... i have my ideas about that, but any way you slice it, it's damn weird....

This remains the Pain Teens' most experimental, least commercial album; it's also one of their most solid, particularly now with the addition of the bonus tracks. It should be of extreme interest both to Pain Teens fans who are unaware of their dark experimental origins and to those who can't get enough of the Walking Timebombs, whose recent releases are awfully reminiscent of this album's overall feel. Now if someone would compile the best of the rest of the cassette tracks and release them on CD all would be right with the world (and yes, that's a hint).

It took a while (like, seven years), but former Band of Susans guitar innovator Robert Poss has finally gotten around to releasing a post-BoS solo album (actually the first of two related releases; the companion disc, CROSSING CISCO BAY, will be out shortly). It was worth the wait. Fair warning, though -- while this is totally brilliant shit, most of it sounds absolutely nothing like Band of Susans (or rock music in general, for that matter). There is very little "rock" here (what little there is, in fact, is more by implication than actual execution) -- this has more in common with the experimental work of guys like Alvin Lucier, Phill Niblock, AMM, and other electronic experimentalists. Blues by way of samplers, gates, and oscillators, where the guitar is nothing but a tone generator open to heavy processing power. Sun Ra would approve.

Of the sixteen tracks here, eleven were recorded by Poss on his own at Trace Elements, and the others are from various post-BoS shows at places like Roulette, Experimental Intermedia, and live at the Cooler. The ones that come closest to resembling familiar music are "Improvised Duo (Live at the Cooler with Tom Kelley)," which is essentially a lengthy melodic-noise solo over heavy rhythms, "Where Do Things Stand" (which actually sounds like an instrumental Band of Susans outtake and features some truly savage guitar mutilation), the short 'n bass-heavy "Zener Shunt," and "You Were Relentless," which comes across as a wilder, noisier, and less riff-heavy answer to "The Last Temptation of Susan." The rest of the album is a series of experiments (some live, some not) with oscillators and other efx gadgets, exercises in which hypnotic drones Maeror Tri or Troum would find most pleasing are overlaid in cascading waves (as on "Brakhage") or cryptic tones are repeated and layered amid swirling reverb ("Radio Free Albermuth Revisited"). Oscillator fury abounds, creating pulsing rhythms on "Henix Sambolo" and "Regret" in particular; distortion is everywhere, creating singing blades o' tone on tracks like "Management Confidential" and "Memphis / Little Rock" (the live track from Experimental Intermedia). The rest of the tracks are some mixture of these esoteric combinations, perverse and compelling slices of electronic DNA spliced with slivers of distortion and truly intense tones. One of the best combinations of beat, build, noise, tone, and just plain hep guitar is "Azulene (Instrumental Version)," where layers of guitar and drone wind and unfold over (and under) a remorseless beat.

This is great stuff, and the pictures on the cover (a pile o' exotic efx pedals wired in a daisy-chain over an amp schematic on the cover, and a mixing board festooned with wires, dials, and patch cables on the back) tell you everything you need to know. You know you need this. Trust me.

O, i greatly approve of this. Forget that it's on Alchemy, Japan's home of whole-grain golden noise, for this actually has a very low noise quotient. No, this is secretly an exotica album, featuring the fab vocal stylings of porn starlet turned chanteuse Miki Sawaguchi, the fetching gal with the hefty hooters indeed on the cover (and in the booklet, where she reveals a lot more than just her psyche). Absolutely nothing can prepare you for the shock of the boss trumpets blaring on the opening instrumental, a big-band swing thing executed (as is everything on the disc, in fact) with swank precision. The bizarrofest gets ramped up in earnest on the next track, where Miki and the backing band (a bunch of swell guys who shall remain unfortunately nameless since i can't read the Japanese liner notes, but there are a bunch of them, including Jojo) turn Joan Jett's "Be Straight" into a funky salsa dance tune -- only to follow up with the lounge-cool funky bossa-nova (with flamenco guitar, no less) "Bad Bad Bossa Nova." Along the way they also churn out surf-rock with scrunched guitars, slow 'n moody neo-folk, and an absolutely gorgeous pop ballad that could seriously be a huge hit if it were only in English. (I prefer it in Japanese, myself.) The album's only flaw is an excruciating stab at a Janis Joplin song that wasn't very good to begin with and sounds really grotesque in Miki's hands, although i think her butchery of the song is deliberate, especially after hearing how well she sings everywhere else on the album. That wacky ironic Japanese sense of humor at work again, i suppose.... There is some noise on the album (probably courtesy of Jojo), but it's mostly buried in the background (especially on the neo-folk track) and in the introductions; the one exception is the sixth track, which is mainly a lot of disconnected noise and meandering while Miki babbles. It's okay, but nowhere near the brilliance of the other tracks. Still, this is already one of my favorite albums of the year and i sure hope this isn't going to be a one-off deal....

Disclosure: Shevel Knievel guitar player T. Darlin and I have a play-by-mail thing going, so it's possible that the following review might be slightly biased. That being said, I've never been one to cut my friends slack when it comes to their music (go ahead, ask TMU) [TMU: It's true!], and luckily I don't have to start now. Shevel Knievel are three young ladies based out of Oakland, CA. Their music is hard to pin down. They play a dirty, hazy, filthy brand of rock that inhabits the space where punk, sludge, indie rock, noise rock, and straight up rock and roll crash out after long nights of cheap booze and messy sex.

"So," you're saying to yourself, "it's all well and good that they don't fit into any particular genre and all this stuff about booze and sex sounds great, but man, what do they sound like???" (shakes head) There's no pleasing you people, is there? There's a bit of mid-to-late period Black Flag (think SLIP IT IN and LOOSE NUT) in there. I can hear some Flipper. I'm sure people are gonna say they hear some Sonic Youth. There may be a touch of L7, but these gals are way more into the fuzz than the chunk. They also write some damn catchy songs and lay down some great riffs. [n/a]

Skullflower -- XAMAN [Shock]

Skullflower's finest moment?!?! Well, i sure as fuck think so (although the skull-caving glory of "White Fang" on INFINITYLAND comes awfully close). This is an early classic, a "lost" document (for most, anyway) in the sense that it's now hopelessly out of print and, since Stefan Jaworyzn contributes guitar doodling here and he's apparently no longer buddies with the rest of the band (he "left" shortly after this album), the chances of it being reissued anytime soon are, uh, real minimal. Which is too bad, because this crushes the piss out of practically everything else on earth. Of the four tracks, my favorite is the long and obnoxious "Slaves," in which the drummer pounds one heavy beat into the ground while the twin guitars of doom wail and fuzz and just basically disintegrate everything they touch in a fiery trail o' VAPOR. The high-tone ear damage of "Sunset" is pretty spiffy too, although nowhere near as earth-shaking as the opener (granted, "Slaves" is a pretty hard act to follow...). The side-long "Waves" is essentially similar in attack to "Slaves," only lengthier and cutting a kamikaze path from different angles, and is equally brilliant. Probably their definitive moment, and something you should grab if you ever see it....

Spinanes: MANOS (Sub Pop)

In a recent article in ALTERNATIVE PRESS on the Japanese noise scene, David Hopkins (whose Public Bath label provides an American outlet for many Japanese underground bands) offered the opinion that part of the reason for current interest in the scene overseas is ennui: "Americans are interested in Japanoise because of their own boredom with current music... [they] know that the musicianship, and especially composition skills, are much better in this underground."

So what does this have to with a pop band from Oregon? Not much, except that if more American bands could consistently deliver such exceptional work as what you'll find on this album, listeners in this country might not feel quite so compelled to look overseas for high-caliber music. While there are plenty of technically proficient players scattered across the record labels in America, songwriting skills in the past few years have often unfortunately taken a backseat to exercises in attitude and retro-guitar skronk, often with disappointing results.

Not so with the Spinanes. This album has no fancy guitar doodling, no weird posturing, no dubious politics, no silly and pretentious, half-baked art concepts -- just one guy and a drum, one girl and a guitar, and more really cool songs than you shake an army of swizzle sticks at. Cool? You couldn't get any cooler if you were standing on a glacier in Antarctica pissing ice cubes.

Basic is a key word in this band's style; with only two instruments and a voice, they have no filler and no room to hide. Only the strongest of songs can survive such naked scrutiny, and fortunately for us, there's plenty of them here. In fact, there are no weak songs on the entire album. Period. Somebody should give them a medal or a kewpie doll for this alone. The songs are all about real people caught up in real life struggles, from the pensive doubt of "Entire" and "Shellburn" to the disintegrating relationship in "Sunday," and the happier moments of "I Love that Party with the Monkey Kitty" and "Epiphany." Scott Plouf's steady drumming provides the beat for Rebecca Gates' guitar lines, and whether she's slashing away at jangly, stinging chords like she just heard R.E.M.'s "Radio Free Europe" for the first time or turning down the volume with gentle strumming, the arrangements are always catchy and memorable, making you want to hear them again and again until you drive your roommate crazy. This is one of those albums where it takes you forever to get around to hearing the last few songs because you're too busy playing the first ones over and over again.

I could say more -- for pages and pages -- but you get the idea. I'm willing to crawl over an acre of broken glass just to be first in line to get the next album when it comes out after hearing this; maybe you should do yourself a favor and find out why, don't you think?

Yow -- for someone creating such fine yet minimalistic sounds, Karen sure carries a lot o' gear around with her, mainly percussion instruments and a wide array of gongs and cymbals, but also such oddities as German egg beaters and -- I quote -- "goat toes." I'm sure I don't want to know.... Karen sounds like she's from the old-school avant-garde, down with guys like Lamonte Young and Steve Reich and maybe even Alvin Lucier. There are five pieces on this amazing slab of VINYL -- yes, children, VINYL, the heavy-duty audiophile grade, not that cheap shit they used to make that horrible-sounding Iron Maiden album you're currently using as a coaster -- two of which are parts of a lengthy improvisation with Ann Dentel, two of which are Karen performing solo, and one (the last track on the album) of which is Karen as source material to be gruesomely abused by Die Elektrischen at the mixing board. The loud, piercing drones she attains on these pieces, mainly through bowing cymbals, will be familiar to anyone who's ever listened to the "Pure II" dronescape that closes out Godflesh's PURE cd. When she's accompanied by Ann Dentel, the homemade percussion items come into play as more traditional percussion items are hammered and struck, even as one of them beats the cymbals and gongs furiously. And then there's the track remixed by Die Elektrischen, in which these sounds have been pitchshifted down and distorted to add a grinding mechanical pulse to the drones, one that rises and falls, rises and falls, like the mothership in interstellar overdrive. Swell, swell stuff. Mondo props to Dan Voss and Drucifer for the immaculate recording, made with some really nice equipment (including a Studer board and Neumann mikes). It shows. I foresee great things ahead for both Stackpole and Dielectric.

S.W.A.T. -- DEEP INSIDE A COP'S MIND [Amphetamine Reptile]

Totally mind-boggling and truly hysterical stuff from the twisted, sardonic hatemeisters behind APOCALYPSE CULTURE and ANSWER ME! with the help of the guitarist from Austin's own Poison Idea and various other hoodlums. The basic idea is brutally simple and hideously brilliant -- cover a lot of oldies, throw in a couple of new tunes, center everything around cops and robbers, put a mean and cynical spin on it all, and presto! instant satire....

Unlike most "novelty/concept" albums, this joke works largely because they had the good taste to pick cool stuff (although the joke starts wearing a bit thin toward the end of side two) and then had the good sense to enlist the help of real musicians (ie., the guitarist and the drummer) to make sure it holds up on repeated listening. Having the real players on board means the covers sound really good -- the guitarist is surprisingly tasteful for something like this-- and having the zine fanatics along for the ride results in demented pieces like "Cops Are The Only People Left," in which the two writers hold a conversation (completely with poor English and redneck attitude) about how cops are the only ones man enough to wade through the human filth and hence they're the only "real" people left in the world. We also get the treat of the original "Coffee, Coffee, Coffee," with these immortal lines (delivered courtesy of ANSWER ME!'s Jim Goad, who could have a successful singing career if he so desired): "I want a doughnut, I want it now / A doughnut is a policeman's gasoline / Give me coffee, a couple of doughnuts, and a little more coffee / Because you don't want to see a cop like get mean."

Other amusing goodies included a dead-on version of "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly" that includes Joe Friday snarling "don't try to con me with your mind expansion slop," a deranged cover of "Theme From SWAT" with news audio from the LA riots in the background, a truly possessed version of "The Pusher" (i don't remember the original saying "goddamn" so many times, do you?), a ramrodded and surf-crazed "Highway Patrol," a version of "Formula 409" that includes "modified" lyrics involving the threatening use of hunting knives on the highway, and even more bizarre spew of a similar nature. What I want to know, though, is if Mac Davis is AWARE of what they've done to "In the Ghetto"; i somehow just can't see Davis APPROVING of lines about hookers getting gang-raped while a South Compton cop croons "as the city burns" and the priceless saga of the rich kids headed for trouble ("then one night after graduation / the suburban kids come to town / buy some weed and cruise around / until they meet the wrong gang and they get gunned down... as a rich boy dies....").

Not all of it's equally brilliant -- the cop-paranoia version of "We Can See For Miles" never quite hangs fire, "Hold on Baby" seems out of place, and the demented monologue of "Tony and Xerxes at the Shortstop" is kind of, well, pointless. But this is a small price to pay for the previous songs and a big, bouncy, chugging version of "25 Minutes to Go." And the mere IDEA of doing "Thunderball" from the vantage point (and in the voice) of a backwoods redneck cop is... is... is so BRILLIANT that i worship this bunch just for that....

Have i mentioned that both monologue cuts are intoned over a backing track of "Midnight Cowboy?"

Now I know what it means every time there's an earthquake report in California: that Totimoshi must be rehearsing. The catchiness muscles hinted at on earlier tracks like 'Cellophane" return here beefed-up on steroids, while everything is even heavier than ever yet considerably more distinct (courtesy of a boss recording job by drummer Don Newenhouse and Lars Savage at Lucky Cat in San Francisco). The songs here are in a whole new league -- compact and tightly-wound, yet filled with unexpected lurches and dynamic shifts that spiral into crazed, complicated-sounding weirdness. The trio frequently sounds like Black Sabbath playing Zeni Geva's catalog backwards (especially toward the tail end of "The Pigs Are Schemin'"), but now on some songs they've got a full-on pop fetish happening, as on "Light Lay Frowning," "Make Your Day," and "You Know." Even in the catchiest tunes, though, they hardly sound wimpy or twee -- this is pop music for loud people. Bassist Meg Castellanos gets bonus points for providing not only the churning bottom but frequently the melodic heft as well. The best song here is "The Hero Released From Fright," a lengthy instrumental that alternates between melodic picking and thunderous riffing until veering off without warning into a droning, psychedelic groove over which guitarist Antonio Aguilar solos furiously and with growing abandon. The heaviest is probably "Vader," a crushing slab of sinister brute force that kicks off the album, although the surging, hyperactive "The Skies Over Monolith Mountain" is just about its equal in heaviness. "You Know," one of the poppiest songs on the disc, proves that it is possible to be melodic, catchy, and heavy at the same time without turning into something cheesy. The entire album rocks like a pee-dog from start to finish, the artwork on the disc is great, and I've already seen with my own eyes that the new material rocks just as well live as on the album. If you have yet to discover the greatness that is the Toti and the Moshi, now is your chance.

Zeni Geva -- NAI-HA [NG]

You probably have no idea what "nai-ha" actually means, but from the way singer/guitarist K. K. Null screams it over and over in the title track, you'd quickly guess that it's probably unpleasant. (In fact, it loosely means "broken inside." The title track itself is apparently about the gruesome aftermath of an auto accident.)

Unpleasantness is the general theme of the entire album, not terribly surprising for a group with such a forbidding sound. Even though the lyrics (what few exist) are almost entirely in Japanese, the bottom-heavy production (courtesy of Steve Albini, of Big Black/Rapeman/Shellac fame) and obvious references to brutal noisemasters like Godflesh and Swans, convey the attitude of death and misery regardless of the language barrier.

From the ferocious kamikaze-drummer attack of "Autobody" to the closing hightone mayhem of "Terminal Hz," a jagged roar of rumbling noise, windlike guitar, and lumbering drums that sounds remarkably like a slow- motion earthquake, the three-piece band (augmented by Albini on "Angel," where he contributes extra guitar) alternates between bludgeoning the listener into submission and tossing out unexpected surprises (the violins in the second half of "Autobody," the chimelike guitar and whispered vocals of "Angel"). The occasional moments of prettiness, though, don't deter the band for a moment from achieving its real goal -- namely, to obliterate everything in its musical path. This it does with savage vigor, like a musical samurai with guitars instead of swords.

With a huge sound reminiscent of Godflesh in its heavy bottom and impossibly high-end guitar tones, resulting in almost no midrange, it's hard to believe that there are only three people in the band, and no bass at all. Half the time it sounds like the band is playing in a huge, cathedral-like cave; there's a surprising magnitude of space going on here. Null's decidedly unorthodox guitar playing ranges from slow-motion death plod to dizzying bursts of speed, and quite often his guitar sounds like some demented transmission from another world far beyond our solar system. Remember the egg chamber in the original ALIEN movie? This album is what the facehuggers were listening to down there.

What saves the record from sounding like an impenetrable wall of sludge are a combination of Albini's sure-handed engineering and production, along with the band's precise grasp of noise, dynamics, and song construction. The high point of the album is "Angel," an eerie, midtempo tune with chiming guitars and a truly subhuman bass crawl that abruptly shifts into sonic overdrive from time to time, when you least expect it, before returning to its original hypnotic structure. For enthusiasts of maximum heaviosity, the second half of "Nai-Ha" degenerates into a pounding, crunch-laden riff much like a jackhammer trying to bore through your skull. Anybody into sheer, painful heaviness should check this one out.