Ukiyo -- UKIYO [Hypnobeat Records]

I take back all the mean, snotty things i said about Die Form while i was at 33 Degrees a while ago, listening to one of their earlier albums; this is great shit. Of course, having Aube on board certainly doesn't hurt. How MUCH he's on board, though, remains a subject for debate: The liner notes proclaim that he performed, mixed, and recorded three of the eight tracks here ("Raijin," "Ukiyo-Mu," and "Fuujin," for those keeping score), but many of the others include Aube-like sounds, which leads me to wonder if perhaps Die Form didn't sample his work and include it in those tracks. Whatever... regardless of where Aube is, this is pretty swank stuff. The album opens with "Molecular Heart Agitation," a thick melange of harsh, swirling sounds that, while credited to Die Form, owes a lot more to Aube in terms of sheer sound intensity. "Akuma" picks up the pace, with more harsh noises, this time linking to a heavy beat and sneering synth bleats, with more weird noises kicking in gradually as the heaviness grows. "Kagami" continues in this vein, adding eerie female vox as well. "Raijin" is where things start getting seriously weird, as Aube enters the picture, layering sounds into a dense and highly textured wall o' scariness. The other tracks continue in much the same manner, with just enough variation to keep it from getting monotonous, and Aube's second contribution, "Ukiyo- Mu," combines a new set of weird vox with the swirling noise trap. Female vox and an insistent drum machine are the calling card of "Mu," while "Fuujin" is the third installment in Aube's shuddering trio of pained cyclotron noisescapes. The last track, "Ukiyo," employs so much Aube-like sound material that it's not even funny, although he's not credited for it; then again, it does feature truly cheesy snyth doodling too, although not so much that it ruins the song (well, not for me at least). All in all, most mondo stuff, and something you should want to seek out....

TMU: I just want to go on record, straight up doom childe, that BEYOND THE FUCKLESS is maybe the greatest title ever in the history of western civilization, and that Ultra Fuckers is almost -- almost -- as cool a name as UNHOLYDEATHMACHINE.

TTBMD (wincing as cd plays): Pretty rough sound quality...

TMU: They're called the god damn motherfucking ULTRA FUCKERS, they don't need fucking sound quality. Hey, when he shouts like that he sounds like he's having a cattle prod rammed up his ass real hard. I like this record already.

TTBMD: I thought it sounded more like he was on fire.

TMU: Can we tell what language he's singing in? This sounds like what the jungle natives would come up with after eating the missionaries and abusing their recording equipment while drunk on blowfish juice and magic mushrooms.

TTBMD: This could have been done better.. the material's there, but it's lacking something....

TMU: Think of this as a document capturing a moment in time, okay? Imagine... you're in the rec room or basement at someone's house... everybody's shirtless and getting mondo fried... the vibe is there... a certain... yes... recklessness in the air....

TTBMD: They recorded this on a fuckin' boombox! How reckless is that shit?

TMU: ... and then... then... two drunk fucking apes crawl up to the untuned guitar and ramshackle drums in one corner of the room and start whacking away at stuff, possessed by their inner demons, and the results are so startling that you reach for something, anything, to record it for posterity. Like... like recording it on the back of your little sister's beat-up Shaun Cassidy cassette that she left sitting in the hot sun at the beach and now it's, like, not so good, but you're gonna use it anyway and record this amazing fucking event and you don't even care how it sounds, right? Right? See, that's what's happening here. It's a document.

TTBMD: Song number five is pretty rockin'....

TMU: "German Rock Radio II."

TTBMD: Sounds like a really lo-fi version of Six Finger Satellite.

TMU: Sounds to me like the funny noises the bus makes in the morning. Look, the blues!

TTBMD: Still, all in all, the best thing about this band is their name. And they have cool artwork. And song titles.

TMU: It's a concept thing. I'm grokkin' their concept. I wish i were cool enough to be an Ultra Fucker. These guys are even sleazier than the Oblivians.

TTBMD: You are an Ultra Fucker. And no way are they as good as the Oblivians. I wish this had been recorded better....

TMU: Well, perhaps they will use this as a revelation, one in which the dark angel of splattergrunt tells them to hie their well-baked buns off to a real recording studio and capture the madness with a tad more fidelity....

C12: All right, moving right along... this band apparently started out as a satanic metal band (they're Norwegian, by the way), something that's hard for me to grasp since this album sounds as far removed from that as possible. (This disc is subtitled "music to an interior film," so this may just be a diversion from their usual sound.) What we have here instead of the usual satanic gabbing and overdone everything is a series of hard (but sporadic) beats mixed with gothic keyboards and atmospheric jazz stylings.

TG: This music is all over the place. It's really well-executed, though. I kind of like this.

C12: The album really does sound like soundtrack music, although its beats -- when they do happen -- are far heavier and sometimes more ornate (the metal influence finally rears its head) than you'd expect with "traditional" film scores. This is especially true of the opening track "Lost in moments." By contrast, "Porn piece or the scars of old kisses" sounds more like a complex, semi-ambient variant on trip-hop with vaguely metallic elements. The effect of what the band is doing here is almost like they decided to experiment in various genres by subtracting out nearly all of their metal leanings, then dropping in those influences at odd moments. At the very least it's wildly unpredictable and often intentionally jarring. I can see where this would be wildy aggravating to death metal purists, but to me it just demonstrates that they have far more imagination (not to mention the technical proficiency necessary to dabble is such different genres) than many of their peers....

TG: It isn't often you see an album this ambitious that reaches in so many directions that actually works. I wonder if they play this live. I can't imagine how they'd ever remember the parts.

C12: In addition to the beats that occasionally explode in "Hallways of always," they have a serious trance motif happening with an endlessly repeated minimalist keyboard figure. Other bits (many complex and brief) come and go, but the backbone is constantly there.

TG: Do you suppose that's some reference to HOUSE OF LEAVES?

C12: I doubt it, although supposedly the Moon Unit is working on music inspired by that book. But the Moon Unit does a great many things. On "We are the dead," they open with electronic noise and keyboard washes as a gutteral voice intones something ominious (what i couldn't tell you, since my copy didn't come with a lyric sheet); samples float in and out of the mix as they gradually build toward the next song, "Dead city centres," in which sounds of the city mingle with muted keyboard washes until it abruptly the sound almost completely ceases, dwindling down to foreign noises, then gradually building back up again into something approximating an actual song with a heavily reverbed and minimal piano figure. Their ideas about song construction are certainly unusual, to say the least.... 

TG: This song "Catalept" is even stranger. I didn't even know it was possible to mix classical and hip-hop.

C12: But it sounds excellent, doesn't it? ,The hip-hop beat finally turns into something closer to a steady rock beat as the classical elements build in intensity, only for it to suddenly end.

TG: That ending is awfully abrupt.

C12: The last track ("Nowhere/catastrophe") is just plain strange... well-done and interesting, but... strange. Definitely not a band for the timid, that's for sure.

TG (throwing hands in air): All right, that's it! The last review! We can do the video review and put this fucker to bed and go plan on world domination... and figure out ways to torture the Moon Unit....

C12: Wouldn't it be a wise idea to find if our attempt at assassinating the Headless Sno-Cone GIrl succeeded before we make any rash moves? Oh wait, I forgot who I was talking to. Never mind.

TG: I'd beat your ass for that if I weren't so hopped-up on the joy of shortly ruling the planet from this godforsaken ball of ice. Come on, let's get moving on the game plan, okay?

This is kind of an interesting way to document Ulver's metamorphosis (to the horror of some) from a classic black metal band to pioneers on the new frontier of electronica: the band has invited a number of their pals and contemporaries to remix favorite tracks in a more contemporary style that often favors noise / glitch electronica. That their pals are people like Third Eye Foundation, Upland, Jazzkammer, and Merzbow, among others, only makes the proceedings that much more interesting. For those not familiar with Ulver, they started out as a traditional black metal band and rapidly evolved into something else entirely, doing concepts albums about Blake's THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL with decidedly non-metal motifs, then moving into full-blown trip-hop and electronica with PERDITION CITY.

Some of the remixers on here are fairly obscure by U.S. standards -- Alexander Rishaug (Norway, PANORAMA on Smalltown Supersound, experimental IDM), Bogdan Raczynski (originally from Poland, now in the UK, SAMURAI MATH BEATS on Rephlex), Martin Horntveth (FAST MOTION on Smalltown Supersound, described as Autechre-like), Neotropic (aka Small Fish With Spine aka Riz Maslen, working in the studio and churning out tons o' releases on Ninja Tune), and others even lesser-known outside of electronica circles all contribute interesting remixes here. I'm not terribly familiar with Ulver's early sound and it's hard to tell at times what the source of these sounds were, but that's all right -- the remixers here are sufficiently interesting as to carve out good results with any original source material, and I have a feeling the original stuff was plenty swell to begin with. Certainly the results are often stunning, as on the savage thunder whipped up by Alexander Rishaug's remix of "A little wiser than the monkey, much wiser than the seven men," which sounds like a brilliant fusion of black metal guitar and tones with the hypnotic thunder of harsh techno. (Likewise, Upland's remix of "Lost in moments" in a pretty powerful exercise in distorted percussion, all machine-like chittering and barking, over looped segments of the original composition.) Neotropic's remix of "He said -- she said" has more to do with dark ambient sound that what one normally associates with techno, at least in the beginning, and even when the obvious techno elements come in, they aren't overwhelming and don't stay long. The result is the sound of machines moving slowly through the fog, drifting... drifting... until everything comes to a halt and a thundering synthetic bass line takes over, with percussion (hard and glitch variety) barely audible in the background, until it ebbs away into more dark ambient territory -- only to return again. Neotropic's remix is an excellent example of what's appealing about so many of these tracks: they aren't static, and they move through different (sometimes wildly different) vistas of sound and beats. How much of that is dictated by the original song structures can only be guessed, but certainly Ulver's very unpredictability has given the remixers much room in which to manuever. It's also exhilirating when V/vm bury "The descent of men" in a harsh mix of distorted percussion / noise, so it sounds like Ulver playing through a whirling tunnel of knives....

Other highlights include Ulver's own contribution, "Crack Bug," which builds in layers of classical orchestration, glitch electronics, and vaguely metallic tones, then suddenly shifts into hard beats and swirling layers of sound both acoustic and electronic; the glitch-electronic and keyboard landscapes of Third Eye Foundation's "Lyckantropen remix"; and the peculiar, even broken, rhythms and textures of the Fennesz remix of "Only the poor have to travel." And not surprisingly, Merzbow's remix of "Vow me Ibruzu" is... uh... noisy. It's interesting to hear noise used in such a rhythmic fashion by Merzbow, though, and there are a few other surprises in his exercise in hell-distortion to merit it being singled out for distinction. The entire album is filled with startling tracks that are less remixes in the traditional sense than they are new explorations in sound based on old maps. The beautiful part is that you don't even have to be an Ulver fan, or even previously aware of their work, to appreciate this release. Far more thought-provoking than a mere remix album, regardless of what it's called. Jester's high standard of excellence continues unabated.

More like Unearthly Drone, at very high volume. Stephen O'Malley helped produce and mix this intensely fatalistic slab of despair, with good results -- their thunderous sound retains plenty of clarity and crunch even at volumes sufficient to turn the average amplifier into a hot, steaming puddle of metal. The songs (there are six of them, if you care about these things) are pretty much what you expect: long, slow, tortured, and prone to dissonant evil. The sound and the songs are a continuation of exactly what they've done before, only more so and better, plus a lot easier to grok this time around thanks to the improved production. If you're down with doom and like your riffs so slow they're nearly unrecognizable as actual riffs, then you undoubtedly own this already, along with everything else they've ever done (and if you don't, you should). If you're one of the uninitiated, this is the place to start. Bonus points for a long, cryptic title that's absolutely impossible to remember correctly. How much more cult can you get than that, mon?

UnFolkUs -- s/t [Unit Circle]

Remember that quirky, experimental Bill Horist disc i reviewed a while back? (It was SOYLENT RADIO, for those of ye who've already forgotten, and it's still well worth investigating. Incidentally, Horist is on tour now and it probably wouldn't hurt for you to go see him, either.) Well, it turns out Horist is also a member of this avant ensemble, which also includes Eveline Muller-Graf (credited with "sharp metal objects and batterie," whatever the hell that is), stick-player Rob Bageant, and Paul Hoskin (sax, clarinet). Horist remains a purveyor of six-stringed weirdness and everybody else here is just as musically eccentric as he is, which makes for some mighty unclassifiable music. What they collectively play comes awfully close to being a noisier, more textured answer to what Sun Ra used to do with his Arkestra, only with even less of a rhythmic handle to hang onto.

I'm not even going to attempt to describe the songs (there's ten of them, by the way, with names like "Cows in the Belly," "Clap for Jesus," "Toothless in Nickelsdorf," and "The Swinging Toes") track by track -- that would practically require a dissertation in demi-jazz and deconstructionist noise, not to mention an endless glossary indexing all the various mutant sounds -- but i'll say this: they aren't fooling around. Regardless of their disdain for steady beats (when they bother with beats at all), tempos, and readily discernable structures, there is a cohesion and unity in even the most chaotic of these pieces that clearly indicates the band's collective mastery of improvisation. And improvisation is indeed at the heart of this band; their approach to textures, structures, and dynamics is very much comparable to the work of AMM and similar ensembles.

Personally, i think i preferred Horist's solo disc -- there's often a bit too much going on at once for my taste, and i think his guitar trickery was harnessed in bit more direct fashion on SOYLENT RADIO -- but this does serve as an interesting counterpoint to that disc. For those who've already heard and appreciated that disc, or who remain interested in the stylings of AMM and like-minded bands, this definitely bears listening.

TMU is outside Pym's apartment, having a smoke in the hallway and standing before the picture window, contemplating the vast pipelines of the great machinery outside, half-buried in the endless snow. It's a lovely picture, a peaceful scene that is abruptly shattered by a horrible sawing, grinding noise erupting from the other side of Pym's door. Then the entire hallway begins to shake and throb to a gruesome techno beat. Annoyed, he pounds on Pym's door until she appears.

TMU: Hey! HEY! What the fuck is going on here, the whole hallway's shaking... damn it, I'm holding you responsible for any structural damage that comes out of this....

(Pym ducks back in and turns the volume down)

TMU: So what is this, anyway? It's kind of... um... words fail me.

Pym: It's one guy -- a Canadian, i think -- making godawful noises with gadgets that sound like harsh drilling equipment, all over an insanely repetitive house or jungle beat. Something technoish, anyway.

TMU: Is this what John Lydon had in mind when he wrote "Death Disco"?

Pym: You got me, but I like to dance to this. It's loud enough to give you a nice body massage if you turn it up loud enough.

TMU (getting into the groove): This sounds really repulsively hideous in a way that's actually sort of morbidly interesting. And i do appreciate that groove... that obsessively repeated disco beat from hell... (looks at cd) mein gott in der himmel, this is gonna go on for like nine minutes? And the other songs are just as long? This man must do a lot of heavy dope.

Pym: Check this one out, "Recombinant."

TMU: Whew, that's some heavy reverb and delay drone hell. Droning power station music for the zombies of the undead or something. This is what i imagine them playing in the milk bar in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE after the droogs leave. These songs are still way too long, though.

Pym: This from someone who routinely records twenty-minute tunes....

TMU: It's a variety thing, bitch, you wouldn't understand.

Pym: Calm down and listen to "Descender." Isn't this diseased-sounding? Isn't that a beat that makes you want to take your clothes off and fuck steel-plated robots?

TMU (looking at her funny): Well... maybe not robots... you know, i'd like this a lot better if he'd get the drums and twee noises to be a lot heavier. The rest of what he's doing here is actually kind of interesting, even when it goes on too long. I do like the heavy crunching noise intro at the beginning of "Supercollider" -- oooo, such fine tones... loan this to me when you're finished destroying furniture, this might grow on me yet.

Pym: Sure thing. (dances back into apartment; wall-shaking volume resumes)

Universal Indians -- "Freak By Nature / Bought and Sold" [Uprising Records]

Aaaah... lo-fi weirdness from a bunch of mysteriosos making a largely unclassifiable (but enticing) racket. Last time we heard from these art- damaged lunatics, they were helping Gravitar immolate a split record; this may be earlier, and it's marginally more coherent (musically speaking), but it's every bit as cool. "Freak By Nature" sounds almost like... like what i imagine Amon Duul to sound like without having actually heard them, only with really fuzzed-out guitars and tinky drums, all threatening to overload the cheapo four-track they employed for this fine recording. Coolness. There's singing periodically, but it's anybody guess as to what he's saying, so.... "Bought and Sold" is more of the same, only a bit more sparse and not quite so determinedly lo-fi (in other words, the drums have a bit more heft and the tape unit's not sending out distress signals from being brutalized by ridiculously overamped guitars). It has a loose, almost lurching feel that is most swank, and it deteriorates into ridiculous squalls of fuzzy guitar noise, which is always a good thing. Plus i'm most impressed with the unknown guitarist's swell tone. A worthy slab of vinyl.

This is a reissue with THE UTTER DARK demo added. This band defines death metal. When this came out I couldn't believe how heavy they were, to this day it still sounds fresh and authentic. The songs are brutal and relentless reminding you of a winter night in their native Sweden.Compareable to the godlike GRAVE, you can listen over and over. The Utter Dark demo shows that they always had a killer sound even before going into a real studio. [ttbmd]

The Unquiet Void is actually one man, Jason Wallach, who creates exotic instrumental soundscapes with a battery of synthesizers... mood music for the universe, if you will. (He also contributes a couple of tracks to the BUTOH compilation reviewed later, but those are more rhythmic than anything here... this is mostly floaty stuff.) It's interesting that he's plying his trade on a darkwave label, because a lot of this makes me think more of Isao Tomita or Tangerine Dream -- classical art-prog, in other words. There is some actual rhythm percussion in "the dreaming begins," "sinking into the blue black oblivion," "morning twilight," and (briefly) in "the waking hour," and occasionally percolating basslines (as in "angels"), but mostly the disc is dominated by an abundance of keyboards. They not only set the mood, they generally provide the rhythm and direction (however nebulous that may be) of each piece. It's moody, ambitious music that sprawls in all directions, but Wallach usually has enough restraint to keep it focused and prevent the dreamlike sounds from floating off into the ether. I have no doubt this appeals heavily to the darkwave crowd (and sensibly so), but i'd also recommend it to devotees of Tomita or Tangerine Dream as well....

Unsane -- SCATTERED, SMOTHERED AND COVERED [Amphetamine Reptile]

The last couple of years haven't been particularly GOOD to Unsane, have they? Forced to tour with the Entombed, their drummer dies from a nasty drug overdose, their bassist quits, Matador drops them... it's enough to drive a man to DRINK, which i'm sure they do, and quite heavily at that. The good news is they have a new label and new bassist, and all of this angst has made them even MORE pissed off (and i didn't think that was possible!), so now they sound so disturbed that they probably qualify for intravenous injections of Thorazine.

Some changes have been made, obviously. For one thing, Vince's drumming is much better than Charlie's ever was, so on this the beat is rock- steady, just like it was on TOTAL DESTRUCTION (although on that one he stepped in halfway through the songwriting process; this time was in from the word go). Second, new bassist Dave Curran is a lot more versatile than Pete was (not that Pete was bad or anything, but Dave goes further out on a limb more often). Plus -- and i don't know how they managed this on what i'm assuming was a reduced budget, seeing as how they're now on a tinier label -- this time the SOUND is much better, much more distinct; you can actually tell what's going on most of the time. Of course, they're still as psychotic as ever, although this time around Chris almost sounds human (notice that i said ALMOST).

As for the songs themselves -- well, they're all really obnoxious. These guys sound like they'd genuinely like to break your legs with a lead pipe and shove you face-first in the toilet and then drive an icepick through your ear. And that's when they're being POLITE. They must have all had severely traumatic childhoods.... This band ought to be doing film scores for slasher flicks (it would be a big improvement over the cheesy music most of those flicks use, that's for sure). They get lots of bonus points for the truly subterranean bass on "Get Off My Back." I thought the speakers were going to levitate, then explode... Helmet probably wishes they were this good.

And yes, the cover's tasteless... what, you're surprised?

You know, i've always wondered what this album is doing on Man's Ruin. Unsane were an Amphetamine Reptile band at the time, it was recorded live at the 1996 Amphetamine Reptile Christmas party at the Turf Club in St. Paul, Minnesota, and... and... so what's it doing on Man's Ruin, dammit? Ah well, i guess some mysteries are never to be known....

Nevertheless, this is one mighty swank slab o' hate. It features twelve songs and a "special guest appearance" track, with most of the material from their then-current album SCATTERED, SMOTHERED, AND COVERED and TOTAL DESTRUCTION, plus a smattering of earlier stuff. It all rages. Vinnie Signorelli in particular swings like a hammer behind the drum kit, and Dave Curran gets a surprisingly good bass sound considering it is a live recording and everything. With Chris Spencer yowling and whacking away at his poor guitar, they just thrash around like a wounded dinosaur with great abandon, just like the Unsane we have all come to know and love. True, they end up having to execute a fade between "Body Bomb" and "Test of Faith" thanks to an "ill-timed reel change," but otherwise it's a pretty stellar job of capturing them in full-tilt charging rhino mode. They even do something called "4 Sticks," which might be a cover of the Led Zeppelin tune (it's, uh, kinda hard to tell). I'd tell you who the "special guest" turns out to be, but they mumble all through the introduction and i never have figured that out... the track sure crushes, though (once it actually gets started, anyway). Given that Unsane are fundamentally a live band at heart (even if their albums are completely soul-crushing), this ought to be a must-have for any Unsane collection.

Unsane -- OCCUPATIONAL HAZARD [Relapse Records]

Guess what! Unsane are back... and they STILL want to kill you. Slowly. Preferably by shoving large knitting needles through your ears. But since doing that one by one all across America would take too long (although it would offer them the opportunity to drink lots of free bear from countless fridges), they've settled for the next best thing: releasing this album. Talk about your massive cases of earhurt, this would be a good one....

The drill should be familiar by now. Three guys from the diseased bowels of NYC (you know, the BAD part of town, the part they leave out of the tourist brochures, the vile cesspool of body parts floating in sewer grates in crack dens... THAT part of town) playing a volatile mix of nitro-fueled hate with indecipherable lyrics that nevertheless sound real scary because Chris Spencer screams them at you like the dying words of a blood-spattered psychotic killer. Bassist Dave Curran still has the most bowel-loosening bass sound on earth -- really, it constantly sounds like his instrument is about to give up the ghost and just fall completely apart -- and the band's overall sound can still be roughly likened to having a letter bomb explode in your face.

Some things have changed this time around, though. One-time Swans drummer Vinny Signorelli sounds even more ominous than on previous discs, if such a thing is possible -- here he sounds like a human drill-press. You can just imagine the drums imploding during the sessions. And while Dave Curran's wall-o-filth bass trundling hasn't changed much (in fact, he still sounds enough like Pete Shore, who left after TOTAL DESTRUCTION, that you could be forgiven for not even noticing the personnel change), it's certainly gotten more surgically precise in its search for the perfectly lurid hate groove. The big surprises here, though, are mostly emanating (sort of like radioactive waste) from Chris Spencer's guitar. Dunno if it's all the endless touring or what, but the guy has gotten genuinely unpredictable; it's not just churning power chords anymore. "This Plan" features a swirling guitar line that owes a hell of a lot more to the likes of Null and Coltrane than it does to ordinary noise-rock (it also fades out instead of just ending like a car crash, which is a new move for these guys). More guitar spew of a similar nature on "Over Me," a churning juggernaut in its own right, confirms that this is not just a passing thing, either. "Take In The Stray," which opens with semi-jazzy drums, is almost -- God help us -- sort of catchy, at least until the Spence-man opens his mouth and starts barking. After that you just have to hide under your chair and hope some of the furniture is still standing when the song ends. More psychotronic guitar shows up on "Sick," where Spencer alternates doodly hall-of-whirling-knives stuff with brain-raping power riffing until you have no choice but to submit or be buried beneath the onslaught.

Things get really interesting with the likes of "Hazmat," though, where they pick up a machine-like industrial vibe that puts a whole new spin on their patented crash-and-burn approach. "Humidifier" is not far removed from this new spin, with clanking stop and start bass riffs overrun by a quirky beat and more shredomatic guitar doodling. Both of them sound like the band's performing in an industrial laundromat, turning over and over in the washing machine.

The rest of the album is essentially a series of pummeling shots to the head -- all spine-rupturing bass, cannon-blast drumming, wounded-rhino guitar, and the voice that sounds like Spencer just got shot at close range with a shotgun. It's all pretty blinding (not to mention exhausting -- how these guys manage to play this night after night without imploding onstage is beyond me), but "Understand" -- with its shuddering bass tonnage and beyond-hardcore drum and guitar pounding -- is one of the major standouts. Beyond brilliant. Makes all the rest of their albums look like they were just getting warmed up. If listening to this doesn't make you want to set people on fire then there's something wrong with you....

This is a really swell retrospective, and it's nice to see that Unsane are apparently back. Does this mean a new album might appear in the near future? One can only hope.... This is a two-disc set, with 24 tracks from the band's entire career (covering all the official albums on Matador, Amphetamine Reptile, and Relapse) on the first disc and 23 tracks of video and live footage on accompanying DVD. If that weren't sufficiently mind-boggling, the booklet goes into detail about the band's history and they even throw in a bunch of nifty pix. The cover even sports one of their charmingly gruesome bloodfest pictures -- what more could you ask for?

The song selection is pretty on target, wall to wall heavy shit, with four songs from the first album, five from the SINGLES compilation, three from TOTAL DESTRUCTION, then six each from the last two albums, running on the disc from latest to earliest. If you've never heard Unsane, this is the way to hear them first, bulldozing their way through track after track of howling psychotic rage. Everything here is great, with a cumulative effect similar to having a cement truck fall on you again and again. Very few people have ever been able to match their unhinged bass sound, pounding drums, and guitarist Chris Spencer's intense hostility -- Slayer, maybe, but they're metal and while Unsane are certainly obnoxiously loud, I'm pretty sure they're not metal. They're definitely not for the weak, that's for sure.

Even if you have all of the band's albums (and if you don't, perhaps you should, eh?), this is worth owning just for the DVD, an amazing collection of four videos and a whole shitheap of live footage (19 songs worth, with very little repetition -- in fact, "Scrape" and "Alleged" are the only tracks that show up twice, in two different shows) from four shows in 1992, 1994, 1996, and 2003. The Northsix show at Brooklyn, NYC (2003) is the longest one, with nine songs performed by the current lineup, using several different cameras from different parts of the venue, resulting in a nifty mix of pro closeup footage and grainy audience footage. Chris looks awfully healthy and intense for a guy who most of 1999 (or thereabouts) laid up in the hospital, the sound is good, and they even helpfully list the song titles before playing. The 1996 footage from CBGB's features the same lineup and good visuals, although the sound is a bit iffy. Going back to 1994, the show at Golden West in Albuquerque is strictly audience footage of iffy but serviceable quality and reasonably good sound, with no sacrifice in intensity. Only two songs here ("Trench" and "Maggot"), which is too bad... although they make up for it with four way-early songs from a 1992 appearance at Sudsy Malone's in Cincinnati. The venue looks like a cramped hellhole and the audience footage is not only vaguely hideous but shot from a fair distance, but the sound is surprisingly good and the band is way beyond intense. Go get it now before they stop including the DVD or whatever it is record labels do these days to compel you to spend your $$$. That $$$ will not be wasted here.

Unsane -- "Sick / No Soul" [Man's Ruin Records]

Eeeeew, they're SPEWING hate all over my turntable... guess i'm gonna have to hunt down the Comet after all.... "Sick" is classic Unsane -- churning detuned guitars, plodding drum hell, and "vocals" that sound like a dying man being force-fed Drano. Yee-haw! Your mother will not approve! It's also extremely short, even for them -- maybe two minutes max, if that. The b- side "No Soul" is just as heavy, much faster, and incredibly crazed; it also features guest appearances from 7 Year Bitch's Selene Vigil and Mike Morasky of Steel Pole Bathtub, who helpfully provides some disturbed guitar immolation just in case the A-side didn't clean out your sinuses already. Toss in art by Kozik, death-fixated graphics, and ugly translucent purple vinyl and you have the makings of a jolly li'l collector's item....

Wow! I never cared much for this band until I heard this. The production is fucking killer. The band recorded this themselves and it is scientific. One song after another just coming and going in all directions. A very original album with attention to every last detail. Think Shellac, Beatles (THE WHITE ALBUM), Drive Like Jehu, My Bloody Valentine. A must have!!! [ttbmd]

At this point, my expectations for a Jester disc are probably unreasonably high, but that's the price you pay for maintaining a certain standard of excellence... and besides, they haven't disappointed yet. Which brings us to their latest offering, the debut disc by Upland (actually Knut Ruud of Oslo, Norway) whose aesthetic lies in "projecting dense structures of sound from places visited in dreams, worlds mulded by the forces of guided chaos and skewed logic." This disc falls squarely into the category of Techno Albums I Actually Like, mainly because it's a techno album that systematically violates all the rules of techno. It's also incredibly detail-oriented (and, like everything else on Jester, exceptionally well-recorded) and multi-layered -- when they say "dense structures" they aren't kidding -- which essentially transforms it into a math/prog-rock album cleverly pretending to be a techno album. (Sort of like Ulver's PEREDITION CITY, where they spent a great deal of time being a black-metal band playing trip-hop.) It's also a noise album in many places, which always merits great approval.

At the same time, there's a creeping minimalism at work here (and on Upland's website, which accurately reflects the album's strengths), always a nice thing. The songs here aren't so much actual songs in the traditional sense as they are painstaking constructions of beats, noise, and vaguely musical content assembled into shifting structures of sound. Sometimes the complex sound constructions are introduced or bridged by giant washes of ambient sound (as at the beginning of "root"), and sometimes the sounds are impossible to identify, but the chaotic sounds often add up into something genuinely brilliant (such as the clipped ticking and perfectly-timed noises of "flex"). Ruud is also fond of extreme panning, with beats hopping back and forth across the speakers, an effect that's most noticeable (and somewhat disorienting, probably intentionally so) on "flex." In "block," the beats themselves are often buried in siren-like wails and noises dropping in from different directions, with the effect of sounding like a standard techno album being dissected by a hungry mechanical engine. This is definitely true of the closing track "marshgate," where a standard-issue tubby-techno sound is relentlessly overwhelmed by a growing lattice of overlaid beats, mechanical noises, and melodic sounds of unknown origin.

One of the best things about this disc is that it doesn't wear out its welcome -- at a little over 32 minutes, it manages to cover a lot of sonic ground in a short time, and the individual songs have enough room to work up a good head of steam and get fairly convoluted, but they don't go on endlessly to the point of boredom (a sore point with a lot of techno albums). Interesting stuff, housed in a beautiful and intensely minimalist package (so minimalist, in fact, that there is absolutely no information outside of the title and track listings; for all that stuff you have to visit the Upland site). More proof that from Jester come only good things.... [pym imitating rkf]

Urchins -- YUMMY [Alley Cat Music]

I... I think they call this alternative now because they don't know what else to call it. (They used to call it rock and roll, by the way. That was before people started paying hundreds of $$$ for old, used Doc Martens. I don't think anybody in this band wears Doc Martens.) It's basically straightforward rock with a vague tilt toward "folkiness" (well, sometimes) and pointed like an arrow toward the heart o' pop. What they are mostly is FUN... you know, the Word That The Alternative Camp Dare Not Speak Lest Trent's Platinum Records Will Be Taken Away. They'd rather be sardonic than drip with angst, which is fine with me; the angst trip is getting old already.... They're also a much better band than most of the angst-rockers, and Karen Bradbury is one of the best singers around right now, period. So already they have many bonus points in their favor.

Then we take up the issue of songs. They write good ones. I could live without the use of the wah pedal in "Voodoo Boy" (which boasts funny lyrics about refusing to be suckered by a conniving would-be suitor's bullshit), but it's hardly their fault that i have an irrational fear of wah devices, so we'll let that slide. They manage to string a whole bunch of killer ones in a row --"007" (an ode to the Bond-man... and probably the Sean Connery version at that, the only REAL one, according to the Headless Sno-Cone Girl), "The Man with the Golden Tongue" (bizarre antics out and about on the town, party to party, melee to melee), the savagely funny "I'd Like To See You" (a jilted-luv janglefest with lyrics like "I'd like to see you, I'd love to see you / As a human sacrifice / Then next time maybe you'd think twice / About screwing someone over"), a bouncy, bouncy remake of the Partridge Family's "I Woke Up In Love," and the big-beat slow-burner "Tru Luv," my personal favorite on the CD.

The rest of the CD is pretty close to that high-water mark, too. "Dress Up" is an upbeat onslaught of chime-rock guitars and apparently about the perils of being a transvestite, while "Take Me Away," "Grudge," and "Vulture Dance" all feature great playing and appear ready-made for fun stage antics. And "The Enabler" is just flat-out godlike. As an added bonus, the last track is a second, uncensored version of "I'd Like To See You" (it has the naughty, naughty F-word in it... you know... that word... fuck... that one...), rendered this time as an acoustic piece as opposed to the full-band version mentioned earlier. Cool band, cool CD... most highly recommended.

I have two words for this: bizarre shit. One drummer, one very loud electric guitarist, and an enormous debt to devolved skronk-rock along the lines of Arab on Radar as well as Corrupted. Art rock that can't quite restrain its metal core, vascillating at will between elliptical skronk-moves, prog-rock, and flat out heaviness, the duo here (both from Black Elf Speaks) rock the house in most unpredictable ways. They share Cheer-Accident's fondness for both strange rhythms and strange, quasi-pop (but not quite) vox, and the complex math-rock feel of bands like Don Caballero or Shellac, but their sonic thuggery is more frantic and agressively abrasive. This is the kind of sound that should be heard live at a volume sufficient to assault your body and mind. The thundering riffs and crazed freestyle sonic deviance of "uUH uuUh Uuhh" are the missing link between Black Sabbath, Joy Division, and Keiji Haino; "Screaming Bloody Murder" isn't far behind it in the bizarre heaviness sweepstakes. Many coolness points for the shifting tempos, tripped-out delayed guitar riffs, and pure grinding rock fury of the last track, "Jaml Abdul Abdul kebab" (followed by an nifty but unlisted track of twinkly acoustic folk guitar intermittently crushed by a brief riff that turns into slow wasting doom and heaviness incarnate before going out in cascading waves of hyped-up psych-metal, among other things, before turning into something else entirely). Capable of Ruins-like manic overkill, yet distinctly more American, with jaw-dropping chops, and attention-span-deprived switches of tempo and temperament -- now you're cooking with gas, uh-huh....

Used -- [demo]

If, as a friend tells me, Unsane is "Helmet on crack," then this must be Unsane on angel dust laced with strychinine. Only artier. And like Unsane, this is a threesome, although they're from New Paris, IN, a long ways away from the Matador filth kings.... "Buzz" is a semi-funky percussion thing with tribal chanting in the background, hypnotic and built on a solid groove; "Marijuana" is a bit closer to the Unsane comparison, with lots of low-end filth swirling around a lot of powerhouse drumming; this probably sounds really punishing live. "Senseless" crashes around with a lot of shrieking guitar noise, and about this time (the end of Side One) it dawns on me that if they're actually SAYING anything, I sure don't know what the hell it is; most of the time the vocals sound like they were routed through a bullhorn soaked in huge vats of reverb, which sounds really cool, but kind of eliminates any chance of actually deciphering lyrics... but that was probably beside the point anyway. Then "Bleeding," the first song on Side Two, actually begins at the very end of the first side, which is kind of interesting... definitely a bit more imaginative than most... and it's a slowed-down death croak looped into infinity, but offset by playing that's actually melodic, with interesting results. "Hate" returns to the noise axis, and "Dive" is even louder and nastier. The mean chug-riffing of "Twist" leads into the kitchen-sink noises of the final song "Gnash," which sounds at times like a severely art-damaged western score, assuming that the West had been transported to the bottom of an NY sewer. Entertaining ear punishment....