Fall to thy knees, heathen, and worship the snarling riff-monster that is Yellow Machinegun! Rowr! Grrr! Three cute li'l pixie girls from Japan (why is practically every female band in Japan a trio? not that this matters, just an observation) come together to pulverize their instruments at high speed and low frequencies. They appear to be taking all their cues from hardcore punk and early Metallica, that sort of thing -- lots o' detuned guitar action, triphammer drumming, and spastic solos that burst past like a pack o' angry wasps on their way to a drive-by stinging. Plus lots of barely decipherable death-croak shouting and fractured English, which -- in this context -- actually works in their favor by chopping everything down to barked snippets of angst. Have i mentioned that they play their collective asses off? True, they're not fancy by any means, but they are loud, fast, and heavy. Plus they have swank songs, in particular "Why?," "Something Enormous," "Shut Your Mouth," "Ever-More," "Iron Woman," and the exquisitely bizarre and supremely heavy "Eat Hat Fat" (Japanese women sure are obsessed with food). The band has three albums out, two of which are only available as tremendously expensive imports from their native land, but this one (their second), has conveniently been released in America courtesy o' Howling Bull, which specializes in heavy/hardcore Japanese bands. It would be wise to investigate their rhino-on-steroids sound. Now if someone -- Howling Bull, anybody, i don't care -- would just release the other two albums over here before i have to fork over lots o' $$$ for them at import prices, wup wah....

Yen Pox - BLOOD MUSIC [Malignant Music]

Listening to music is like a box of ice cream... No, wait a second... Yen Pox are a duo who live in different parts of the United States, but apparently collaborate to work on this particular project. With a demonstrative album title such as "Blood Music", brings about visions of a deep, dark landscape. Of hot, bubbling, gurgling sounds, pounding defiantly and emotionally into the inner core of the listener's ear. We're talking banging up against the brain, and giving rise to the need for drinking lots of cold liquids. Instead, it is a mostly flat, endless, and ordinary terrain of uninspired subterranean sounds. [yol]

This actually came to me in cassette form, so i don't know if a CD even exists, and it's definitely a bizarre exercise in noise and cut-up sound. The short tracks combine "traditional" instrumentation (sort of) with great slabs of weird noise and chaotic sound slitherings, sort of like hardcore noise slowed down a bit and given some structure, however minimal. Some tracks (like "Medene") remind me of early, wildly experimental Pain Teens, kind of. Mostly though, the entire cassette is a series of peculiar blasts o' noise and sonic ranting... actually, now that i think of it, what this really reminds me of is the incredibly obscure semi-noise band Pleasure Center, featured occasionally on Manifestation compilations (they also released one CD, ERGO, that i think exactly two people actually bought... me and the guy who runs Realization Records). Trying to actually describe the songs themselves is basically an exercise in increasingly ridiculous adjectives, so i'll merely say that if you favor such things as Crawling With Tarts, Infant Mortality Rate, way-early Pain Teens (we're talking the cassette stuff, the wonky stuff), and maybe even Hafler Trio or Nurse With Wound, then you'd probably find this most interesting indeed. Check out the EPHEMERA section for how to get in touch with the band and obtain your own ear-damaging copy.... Perhaps you can ask them what's up with the mysterious titles (such as "Scraby Langa," "Grabon," "Leben Grahia," "Maba Grahia," etc., etc.), which are either a language i don't recognize or totally made up, i'm not sure which. Either way they're pretty damn bizarre.

Anu help us, i think this is a concept album. A concept album without words, maybe even without direction, but... a concept album. It's all about the Forest of Labandi, wherever that is, and the sounds are those of noise, found-sound, collage, ambient... strangeness abounds. Some of this (especially on "Loobas Victims") sounds dangerously close to freejazz being crushed by ambient rubble. Most of the time it's near-ambient background noise, with lots of scraping and thumping about as distorted noises drenched in reverb drift along. There are some nice clanking sounds (a distorted xylophone, perhaps?) in "Escape From Knayele" and a variety of misappropriated instrument sounds all throughout the disc. It's pretty strange-sounding, but in a good way -- although probably more suitable for background listening than up close, unless you happen to be in the mood to grok obscure sounds up close 'n personal.

I like the homemade art, which is filled with drawings of odd creatures reminiscent of those from Dr. Seuss's forest in THE LORAX -- i would assume these are the animals that populate the Forest of Labandi. The entire package has a homemade charm and a surprisingly relaxing (for something so willfully chaotic) sound overall. For some reason this is also being released on microcassette (!!!) in Russia, a concept so bizarre that the mind fairly reels. Definitely one of the more intriguing releases from the current DIY school....

I think... that these guys have been working too hard. "These guys" are K.K. Null, Darin Gray, Thymme Jones, and Jim O'Rourke -- essentially the core line-up of Brise-Glace -- with assistance from Melt-Banana's Yasuko Onuki on "Frankenbitch." First mistake on your part would be to glom onto this solely on Brise-Glace's (well-deserved) reputation; this sound NOTHING like that band. It actually sounds more like... uuuuuuh... a jazzier and more fractured Zeni Geva. I'm still undecided as to whether that's good or not.... (This whole big sonic lovefest was engineered Steve "Please Let Me Explain To You Now In Calm, Reasoned Rhetoric Just Why Urge Overkill Should Be Forced To Drink Their Own Waste" Albini, for those of you who keep track of these things.)

The reason I say they've been working too hard (and they HAVE, dammit, are these men in a secret battle with Skullflower and Merzbow to see who can bury the earth in recordings first?) is that while the first two songs jump with the best of them, and the closing track may be one of the greatest things ever recorded, everything else in between is kind of, well, spotty. (You have no idea how greatly it pains me to suggest that anything produced by this particular group of sonic deconstructionists might be less than perfect, but...) The tracks in between are not BAD, but they waffle between really cool stuff and stuff that's just... there. It's one thing to put out a schizophrenic record, but to put out a schizophrenic record full of schizoprenic SONGS -- well, one has to draw the line SOMEWHERE.

Having said that, I must say that it's really amusing to hear Null going "na na na na na, na na na na na" like a demented karoake singer trying to croak out "Land of 1,000 Dances" after too many barrels of Spaten Munich (as he does on "Hi Ka Ri"), and many splendid squeaky noises abound throughout the disc. As you might expect, the playing is stellar throughout (these men may have lost their minds, but they haven't forgotten how to PLAY), even when they're all apparently playing four different songs at once (which is interesting but doesn't always work). And Onuki's chirping vocals on "Franken-Bitch" are hysterical.

Regardless, the REAL reason -- the sole true reason to own this disc -- is the album's closing track, "Slice of Life." Two guitars and a beat locked into one almighty riff... for twenty fucking minutes. They turn the usual "song" format by changing not the musical pattern -- which remains essentially the same through the entire song -- but instead by changing the DYNAMICS; one "movement" of the Endless Monochrome Riff trundles along, then another "movement" comes along and the EQ and panning radically shift, so that when the high end drops out and the drums totally tub out in a sea of reverb, the song remains the same but sounds totally different. They call this genius. Hard to believe it comes to us courtesy of people who don't do drugs or eat meat....

Weird, cryptic snippets of sound that gradually turn into something occasionally musical before mutating into weirdness again. That seems to be the modus operandi for these sonic jokers. Armed with vocals (or so it claims on the cover -- i'm pretty sure they're in there somewhere), Stratocaster, and various odd toys and gadgets, they make mad sounds that defy categorization. One song, "cameroon," is filled with madly scratching guitar and tinnitus-inducing drones apparently designed to give you vertigo; "tremolo indicator" is indeed filled with warbling guitars, not to mention other peculiar sounds (including moments of disjointed percussion and much crabbing in Japanese). For a recording that lists percussion as one of the instruments, beats sure seem to be in short supply -- when they do appear they're abrupt, scattered, and seem to have almost nothing to do with anything that's playing. In fact, the entire thing has an aura of near-randomness that makes it impossible to even guess what might be coming next. There are some nice warped slide guitar sounds happening on "cosmic elegy," and "how dare u?" is punctuated by what sounds like a kazoo being tortured with a barbeque fork as percussion sort of "happens" and other noises hop up and down... you know, what this entire album sounds like most of all is a party of musicians playing musical chairs with various instruments. I detect the ghost of Sun Ra lurking about, ordering the participants to dance this mess around. Even for a PE release this is most decidedly out there....

The Young Dubliners -- BREATHE [Scotti Bros.]

Perhaps, with bands that are entrenched in that Celtic pop sound, comparisons to the Hothouse Flowers or the Waterboys are inevitable, and on this CD there are waves that roll close to the melodies and emotion of both the Waterboys and the Hothouse boys. With the Young Dubliners though, there's also an edge that cuts through, that slices towards the American side. Vocals that would fit nicely on a record by Live. Smoother than the Pogues, and still leaving a taste of Guiness in my mouth, the songs on Breathe have a definite style that manages to twist from slight Irish desert rock to more traditional ballads while retaining a subtle darkness that pushes the lyrics and punctuates the rhythms. [mf]

The pairing of this "dynamic" duo was inevitable, I suppose. The Ruins have long stated their affection for Ron Anderson and the Molecules, despite the amount of head scratching that always accompanies such brash comments. Let's face it, the Molecules only wish they could sound as focused and tight as the Ruins always do. Sure, i'm biased. You gotta problem wid dat, huh?! This recording is the result of an inpromptu studio jam one night between Yoshida and Anderson at his Night Toast Studios. Some overdubs were later inserted by Anderson, but overall, it is a true document of wild abandon. Interestingly, rather than insert some of his own brand of bass-thumping, Anderson goes for attempting to mimic the general style of the Ruins... on guitar, no less. What results is something just short of genius, but not really disappointing. Yoshida can hold his water, no matter what obstacles he is faced with. [yol]