Browse Downloads   Page 9

Black Math Horseman

s/t

Profound Lore

The return of atmospheric American doom rock band Black Math Horseman will see the reformed group release their self-titled new 12-inch on Profound Lore Records. This will be the group’s first release since 2009’s Wyllt (Tee Pee Records). Helmed by vocalist / guitarist Sera Beth Timms (Black Mare, Ides Of Gemini), the return of Black Math Horseman sees its original lineup rounded up by Ian Barry, Bryan Tulao, and Sash Popovic deliver their most engaging material yet with this self-titled 12-inch. Comprised of four chapters that seam into one, Black Math Horseman sees Timms and company heightening the tension and atmosphere of their sound, creating something more experimental and ultimately heavier with their comeback release. This EP is just the beginning of what to expect with Black Math Horseman’s resurgence, as their follow-up full-length album is currently in the works and will see its imminent release in the impending future.

Flaccid Mojo

Flaccid Mojo

Castle Face

“Twin giant towers of amps grinding out minimal beat bloop, the transient sound molecules smell of burning gear and the floor of the pit—this is organic, electronic music at its finest. Dance? Why not. Freak out? For sure. Brothers from a different mother (Bjorn Copeland and Aaron Warren) à la two-thirds of Black Dice have come together with this fantastic debut [Flaccid Mojo] for us. These are mean beat vipers, spitting and tumescent on the abattoir floor.“I would call it drug music, but I’m not sure what drugs these humans consume. Stem cell and adrenal gland cocktails I’m guessing. Futuristic and primal it is, beats from the Thunder-Dome, fight music for fuckers. I’ve seen them on two separate occasions blow the power for an entire building. Baller move, boys. Produced perfectly by Chris Coady (look him up to be impressed). This record is a burning car in a field and I love it.“For fans of Black Dice, Container, Whitehouse, Negativland, Ralph Records, minimal beats à la Profan, vintage Japanese noise, Severed Heads, windburn and chapped lips.” —John Dwyer 

Claus, Michael

Lavender Palace

100% Silk

Lavender Palace is a portrait of a process more than a place – the result of a creative headspace San Francisco producer (and Silva Electronics boss) Michael Claus describes as “dropping out of the world and entering a flow state.” That heightened sense of spatial focus, dilated and dialed in, colors the collection in subtle shades of dream house, dub techno, and liquid downtempo. Recorded before and during the strangest days of peak lockdown, Claus found himself drawn to sci-fi notions of fantastical cities and mythic landscapes, hazy realms in the horizon of the mind’s eye. Further inspired by a new and improved studio arrangement in the city, the sessions unspooled in long, low-slung voyages of texture and pulse, restlessness and reverie, “yearning for a better tomorrow.” It’s music of empty streets and guarded hope, percolating at the precipice of futures too real to recognize.

Malasso

Good, You're Here, It's Time

100% Silk

Rogue romantic Maltese producer Salvatore Munzone describes his debut in terms both scenic and star-crossed: “Love songs and heartaches conceived under the year-round Mediterranean sun, to be heard in a beach parking lot, sitting in the car watching the movement of the sea while the music pumps from JBL speakers.” Good, You’re Here, It’s Time collects 10 tracks of mood system house, proto-techno, and refracted poetics recorded and mixed in fits and starts across the past three years, accruing complexities and contradictions along the way. Lean rhythms trace sunset coasts of club bass, seagull synths, and twilit pads, laced with vocal samples of rapture, doubt, and the need to dance. Munzone cites UK revisionists from Actress to Swayzak to Burial as oblique touchstones but his own sound inhabits a woozy world all its own, attuned to asymmetries, subcurrents, and the sand in the hourglass slipping softly past: “All good things come to an end.”

Staghorns

Eating Feelings

100% Silk

The latest by Tel Aviv producer Shlomi Zvi aka Staghorns is an eight-track emotional response of moodswing techno and sidewinder house, equal parts anxiety trip and rhythm therapy: Eating Feelings. Recorded across last winter in his city studio, the songs began as bass lines then flowered outward into nuanced dimensions of tension and release, outsider acid and active listening – facing down demons on dance floors and beyond. Prior collections for Teel and Infinity.Trax (a collaboration with L.A.’s Choopsie) hinted at his gift for low-slung, liberated kinetics but here he cruises through a deeper house of mirrors, from jittery jack and dusty disco to piano stab dubs and endorphin electronica. It’s club music as coping mechanism, alternately spiraling and centered, escapist and psychodynamic. Sound as sonar, leading us back to our truest selves.

Worm

Bluenothing

20 Buck Spin

COLOR LP ON LIMITED CYAN / BONE GALAXY VINYL!!! After the massive breakthrough of Foreverglade in 2021, the Floridian swamp winds stir again as Worm conjures the nocturnal evocation of Bluenothing. A four track, twenty-six minute mini album, Bluenothing is an ominous nightside lament demonstrating where the always-evolving fog dwellers have been and the distant domains where they may yet venture. The A-side of Bluenothing features two tracks from the mythic Foreverglade sessions that remained encased in the phantom crypts but are no less masterly than the latter’s ultimate six tracks. Indeed, the title track “Bluenothing” was at one time to be the album closer on Foreverglade and all the crushing weight and mysterious allure that made that opus a new classic remains on these two tracks. Yet these tracks also have the added dimension of pure necromantic shred via new guitarist Wroth Septentrion (Atramentus, VoidCeremony, Chthe-ilist, Hulder live). The B-side reveals a different yet complimentary stylistic command, one alluded to in past incarnations and now fully actualized—that of the clandestine dimensions of black metal’s unfathomable darkness and shrouded mysteries. “Invoking The Dragonmoon” is a ritual gate opening into this obscure galaxy, while “Shadowside Kingdom” denotes the arrival to the remote twilight stronghold at the edge of blackness where Phantom Slaughter’s tyrannical celestial necromancy can flourish undisturbed by mortal disquiet and axe-wielder Nihilistic Manifesto crafts a thousand spires of darkly cascading melodies—simply one of the best symphonic black metal tracks since the styles late ’90s apex. And so with Bluenothing...

Guided By Voices

Scalping The Guru

GBV Inc

Scalping The Guru is an archival Guided By Voices release, envisioned and sequenced by Robert Pollard as a cohesive album, featuring select tracks from four GBV EPs released in 1993-1994 by Domino, City Slang, Siltbreeze and Engine Records. These hard to find records are essential for fans of Vampire On Titus and Bee Thousand, with classics including “My Impression Now,” “Matter Eater Lad,” and “Big School.” They feature the line-up that includes Robert Pollard with Tobin Sprout, Mitch Mitchell, Kevin Fennell, Jim Pollard, Dan Toohey, Greg Demos, and Larry Keller. Recorded on four-track cassette by Tobin Sprout, with some songs lovingly fucked with by Mike Hummel.

Kraus

Fire! Water! Air! Kraus!

Soft Abuse

Longtime Aotearoa / New Zealand producer Kraus has been a fixture in various underground North and South Island circles for twenty years, and his solo music has covered a lot of ground in that time. In recent years he’s shifted focus from guitar-based recordings to synthesis-oriented electronic work, an approach that blooms in full color on Fire! Water! Air! Kraus!, his 19th full-length album and first all-electronic affair. Kraus obsessives will once more revel in the inventive use of melody and texture here, as well as the primitive futurist fusion of eastern / western psychedelia and tonal explorations of electronic pioneers like Suzanne Ciani and Laurie Spiegel, with a dash of exotica for good measure. Fire! Water! Air! Kraus! is a joyful, immersive listen, and Soft Abuse is thrilled to share it with the known universe.

Earth Room

Earth Room

Related States

***Earth Room is the self-titled debut of a new band making music in the spirit of electric-era Miles Davis, classic German space rock, and the “fourth world” studio experiments of Jon Hassell. The band is composed of three veterans of adventurous music in NYC: Robbie Lee on woodwinds and electronics, John Thayer on percussion and synthesizers, and Ezra Feinberg on acoustic and electric guitars. In early 2019 Ezra was asked to play a two hour set for a night called “Planetarium” at the Bushwick club Nowadays, where, instead of dancing, one Thursday each month people came to lie on beanbags. Lacking two hours worth of solo material, he asked John and Robbie to join him. The show featured wide-ranging improvisation, deep-color drones, and instrumental freak-outs, and left the bean-bagers beatific. A band was born. The three musicians got together throughout 2019 and pre-pandemic 2020, recording during off hours at Thump Studios where John is the in-house engineer. After the pandemic hit they got to work combing through these sessions, finding the juicy bits, seeing what worked, cutting the fat, peeling the onion, and tying the room together until there were no more overdubs or edits needed. The process occasionally included yoking one jam from one particular day on top of another from a different day, as on the elegiac opener “Bridges of Waves,” in which primitive synthesizers are fused with Robbie and John’s ecstatic drums and flute. The second track, “Within the Field,” is a study in percussive textures, and,...

Why Bother?

Lacerated Nights

Feel It

Talk about a band...WHY BOTHER? are not only doing it themselves, but doing it for themselves. With zero interest in performing live or promoting their music online - the Mason City, Iowa four piece have been back in the basement writing and recording highly original punk music faster than it can be pressed to vinyl in this day and age. Their earliest material was collected on 'A Year of Mutations' and issued on LP by Feel It in 2021 - since then, the band has been building towards their first full length, and hot damn does it deliver! Speck's guitar sound is cut straight from the ultra-trebly Killed By Death sound as Terry's vocals and '73 Univox 100 synth cut over top of the wildly dexterous rhythm section of Pamela and Paul. It's a sound both classic and futuristic from a group of Midwestern weirdos living outside the tech bubble, spinning their own web of sound straight from 8-track tape. So if you need a dose of true original punk rock in 2022 and beyond, WHY BOTHER? can give you that fix.

Imprecation

In Nomine Diaboli

Dark Descent

The name Imprecation echoes forth from Hell once again in the form of In Nomine Diaobli. As a direct follow up to their acclaimed Damnatio Ad Bestias, this will prove to be the band’s darkest and most regal album yet. Tendrils of pure evil will engulf the listener with Satanic hymns that recall the greatest days of Deicide and Morbid Angel. Imprecation’s own version of this venerable death metal tradition brings forth moments ranging from blistering and relentless to crushingly heavy, and all shall yield in their wake. Do not mistake this for “old school death metal”—this is death metal the way it was always intended: powerful, malevolent, and uncompromising. Give oneself over in the name of the Devil to experience Imprecation at the height of their powers.

Private Lives

s/t

Feel It

***Five tracks of incredibly vital and hard hitting punk from Montréal! Private Lives morphed from the pandemic bedroom project of husband and wife Chance (guitar) and Jackie (vocals) into a full-fledged band with the addition of Frank (drums) and Josh (bass). Previous projects include Priors, Pale Lips and Lonely Parade. Private Lives stretch their sound from tuneful, straightforward punk to atmospheric post-punk with surfy guitar leads and vibrant vocals right up front in the mix. A highly impressive thirteen minute debut!

Why Bother?

There Are Such Things

Feel It

***Undeniably one of the most prolific punk bands of the moment, Iowa's WHY BOTHER? are back mere weeks after their debut LP with an eleven song cassette! Just in time for Halloween, WB? give us five new cuts on Side A backed with an assortment of remastered hits from previous small run tapes and lathe cuts, including an epic cover of "Whiskey Man" by The Who to close things out!

Daeva

Through Sheer Will And Black Magic…

20 Buck Spin

COLOR LP ON LIMITED BLOOD RED INSIDE ULTRA CLEAR VINYL!!! Five years on from the wantonly indecent 20 Buck Spin-released debut EP Pulsing Dark Absorptions, Philadelphia’s Daeva rise like blistering flames from the hellish depths with the long-smoldering first album Through Sheer Will And Black Magic… A fiery maelstrom of early demonic black metal and jagged edge thrash convulsions forms the inherent basis of the album, where Daeva have perfected their art like gleaming, forged steel. Within this blueprint for madness guitarist Steve Jansson imposes a deliberate brandishing of death metal’s maggot-strewn corpse and a vigorously lethal dose of pure ’80s metal spirit and zeal. The journey through these scorched wastelands persistently guided by the venomously inventive acid-tongue of vocalist Edward Gonet. Song after song, riff after riff, the Arthur Rizk-produced Through Sheer Will And Black Magic is an insatiable and unstoppable whirlwind of unearthly pleasures and infernal butchery. Storming the gates of heaven with voracious exhilaration, Daeva inflict the ultimate triumph of hell upon the feeble sheep of the light.

Meat Wave

Malign Hex

Swami

Swami Records is excited to glom onto Chicago punks Meat Wave for the release of their fourth album Malign Hex. Ryan Wizniak (drums), Joe Gac (bass) and Chris Sutter (vocals, guitar) strip back the “Windy City Sound” and expose a more jagged and turbulent frame. The ten-track album, which features singles “What Would You Like Me To Do” as well as “Ridiculous Car” and “Honest Living,” was recorded by Gac in 2019 and serves as the band’s most cohesive, dynamic and ambitious work to date. “Our sound in the beginning was consistently very driving,” says Gac. “Now, that characteristic is merely a tool we can reach for. I don’t think it completely defines what we’re doing.” Meat Wave spent the last half of 2019 chipping away at Malign Hex. “We recorded it the same way we always have—live in a room together,” says drummer Ryan Wizniak. “But we allowed ourselves to embellish more and take more chances with extra instrumentation.” While Malign Hex does incorporate synths, organs and walls of guitar, it provides only nuance and atmosphere and does not displace Meat Wave from their meat locker. The album’s lyrics center around themes of lineage and explores a litany of subjects and circumstances: addiction, greed, unreliable memory, obedience. All through a surrealist, collage-like lens. “Everyone wears a backpack full of hexes,” Chris Sutter explains. “It’s heavy and familial. And it’s yours.”

Gabys, The

s/t

Fruits & Flowers

The Gabys are an almost totally anonymous UK duo. They came to Fruits & Flower's attention via the ALL GONE tape label out of Detroit, who are always fishing around for sub-Xpressway lo-fi music. Lovely summery vocals are almost totally obscured by thick guitar chords and a distant throb that might be a floor tom, but it’s not clear. Immediately thoughts arose of The Garbage & the Flowers with their early VU-demo stylings and SF’s own April Magazine in hiss-drenched strum mode. If that sounds up one's alley, this EP brings four tracks of delightedly wasted pop for a listless afternoon.

Pumice

Phylis

Soft Abuse

Pumice returns with an exquisite experimental bathroom sink pop record in hand, dubbed Phylis. This time out the long-running Aotearoa band, currently a duo consisting of Stefan Neville and Jade Farley, fracture sore-thumbed folk songs into crumpled bricks with riffs written on the toilet. Wonky South Pacific skiffle careens into heady organ dirges followed by galloping blurts of afterlife feedback. As ever, texture and accidents rub up against melodies, rhythms are not strict and words are grubby. But with Phylis, the restless band tenders its most exuberant, straightforward and enjoyable pop record yet. Recorded at Neville’s Tāmaki Makaurau / Auckland studio in 2021, Neville and Farley have returned to the simple and joyful instincts of the earliest Pumice recordings. Nylon strings, drums with the feet, the empty and the absurd. Impossible to think of something analogous to the cosmic comforts on offer here, Phylis once more presents songs that could only come from the world of Pumice.

Petbrick

Liminal

Neurot Recordings

In a world hurtling towards new frontiers of horror on a daily basis, there’s preciouslittle time for pause. For the self-respecting artist, the only reasonable solution is psychic warfare. Moreover, the only way to wage this is without compromise, with the least possible respect for thresholds or co-ordinates of any kind. Such is the terrain of Petbrick on the titanic and transformative Liminal. Here on their second album the duo of Wayne Adams (Big Lad / Johnny Broke) and Iggor Cavalera (Sepultura / Cavalera Conspiracy / Soulwax) lays waste to all or any constrictions in its path, dispensing an assault of vibrant catharsis that is as rich in atmospheric dread as sulphuric intent. Blending a vast sonic landscape with a relentless compunction to break the pain barrier, Liminal is a dizzying exercise in overdrive which can take in industrial abrasions, pulverising rhythmic drive, acid-damaged freakery, cinematic tension and balladic gravitas in disarmingly coherent fashion. The methodology that led to the cathartic brew of Liminal arrived via new approaches to their meld of raw percussive aggression and equally caustic sonic textures. Other heads and personalities also came on board to add richness and intrigue to the onslaught—“I believe we got an amazing team of collaborators—from old school friends like Neurosis’ Steve Von Till and Converge’s Jacob Bannon to new school artists like Paula Rebbeledo from Rakta and New York doom rappers Lord Goat and Truck Jewelz” notes Cavalera. Indeed, the last-named’s bar-spitting fury hits just as viciously as Bannon’s paint-stripping vitriol....

Gevurah

Gehinnom

Profound Lore

Four years after their latest offering, the Sulphur Soul EP, Montreal, Quebec’s Gevurah strikes back with its most intense and scalding release yet entitled Gehinnom. Somber and vicious black metal, yet authentic and efficient in its delivery, Gehinnom is a journey through the physical and metaphysical desert, the realm of death and transformation. From the pits of Gehinnom, Gevurah tread deeper into the abyss towards the final resurrection, with eyes opened and spirit liberated. Each track represents a step in this process of negating the flesh, linking microcosm with macrocosm and deepening the fall of Man.

Pleasant Mob

Irene / Trees & Flowers

Feel It

Pleasant Mob are a new Chicago project from the mind of Raidy Hodges (Spread Joy) backed by members of Tobacco City, Glyders, and Fran on this session. The lead cut, 'Irene', is a swirling psychedelic original that rides a familiar path to where Barrett, Ayers, and co. were stretching their minds at the beginning of the 70's. On the flip, Pleasant Mob treat us to a beautiful take on the Strawberry Switchblade classic, 'Trees & Flowers'.

Kid Congo & The Near Death Experience

Live In St. Kilda

In The Red

Live In St. Kilda is a twelve song live album from a one-time-only show in which Kid Congo Powers was backed by The Near Death Experience. Kid Congo says, “How did I hook up with The Near Death Experience you may ask? One fine day Kim Salmon, my long time Scientists Surrealist Beast of a friend, wrote from Australia to ask me to play at his book launch for his biography Nine Parts Water, One Part Sand: Kim Salmon And The Formula For Grunge on November 9th, 2019. The launch was to take place at the Memo Music Hall in St. Kilda, a seaside suburb of Melbourne. A royal command performance for the king of Kim? How could I say no to such an honor? What to do about a band? It did not take more than a minute for each of us to suggest Harry Howard and The Near Death Experience as the logical choice. I was a massive fan of the band already and we shared crossed paths as expats claiming out our musical in 1980s London. Harry with Crime And The City Solution and These Immortal Souls, Dave and Clare with The Moodists, Kim with the Scientists and me with Gun Club and Fur Bible. Needless to say it was fantastical to get together and make a playlist for Kim featuring covers by Suicide and Shangri-La, with mine and NDE’s songs as well. The night was magic—I still am floating on a surrealistic pillow remembering the night....

Ekin Fil

Dora Agora

Helen Scarsdale Agency

***Ekin Fil returns to the guitar on Dora Agora. Her earliest recordings, notably her debut on Root Strata, prominently featured guitar in this urgent expressions of a dreamy dreariness that immediately offered enthusiastic comparisons to Grouper. In her development as composer of ephemeral ghostliness for numerous albums as well as her scores to film soundtracks, that instrument has given way to keyboards, organs, synths, and various mood engineering devices, in her beautifully melancholy pursuits of an emotional emptiness through sound. Yet, the pandemic era gave Ekin pause to reflect on her creative process and she picked that instrument back up to create one of her greatest albums to date. As direct and urgent as these songs can be, Ekin swaddles her acoustic guitar chords in soft-focus reverb and polyphonous shadow, colored with a judicious amount of shoegazing drone and somber atmosphere that speaks to her continued development as a composer. "Ghost Boy" in particular is a bittersweet, wistful tune whose arrangement harkens to Johnny Marr at his peak of effortless downer simplicity. "Farba" and "Yo Feelings" turn the emotional screws with soul-crush crescendos of vocal melodies that build upon Ekin's lonely guitar chords. Again, Grouper emerges as one of Ekin's closest neighbors, alongside Carla Dal Forno, Slowdive's Pygmallion, and Movietone. "I really feel like I've gone back to a time when I was recording songs with a guitar and keyboard when I was very young. It's kind of li ke embracing Ekin from that period with my current ideas &...

Upchuck

Sense Yourself

Famous Class

Upchuck is a five piece band from Atlanta, formed from connections made in skateboarding, construction, and teenage delinquency. The band is lead guitarist Mikey, Rhythm guitarist Hoff, bassist Armando, drummer Chris, and vocalist KT – who combined are inventively raucous and revolutionary. Upchuck shakes the minds and bodies of those seeking a release. With lyricism to prove her intentions, songwriter KT screams of haunting tales of discrimination, ignorance, and life in a doomed generation. Only the wise and relentless will thrive in a revolutionized and radical world, and upchuck is sternly feeding the fuel for a new gen. Sense Yourself is teeming with the sounds of swaggering danger. Songs bearing titles such as “Boss Up,” “In Your Mind,” and “Our Skin” come out of the gate strong, complete with searing energy courtesy of guitarists Mikey and Hoff. Bass player Armando and drummer Chris’ rhythms are driven by a bounding sense of urgency and contempt. The group attacks creative post-punk and indie rock with a compelling blend of high-energy blasts and ’90s alt rock inflections, channeled through a haze of distortion. "Perdido," sung in Spanish by drummer Chris, builds energy around the phrase: “Hago lo que quiero” — I do what I want. With "In Your Mind," the group explores the realities of reaping what you sow. But the album’s undisputed jam, "Facecard," finds KT taking on the superficiality of modern America: “The trifling yuppie fuck, comes out beyond the cut to try and low ball, low ball,” KT sings. Operating...

Mamaleek

Diner Coffee

Flenser

Of all things, it’s laughter that pervades Mamaleek’s Diner Coffee, the San Francisco metal deconstructionists’ sonically crushing ode to the humor found within catastrophe, American diners, and “the little things.” Featuring a mix of live performances, samples, and field recordings, Diner Coffee laughs through its harsh songs in an attempt to reflect the camaraderie found at the heart of global calamities and changing personal situations. It’s an homage to the quotidian set to the backdrop of the mythologized, sanctuary-like properties of a diner, reveling in irony-less nostalgia. Mamaleek embodies this ethos on and off the record. Originally two anonymous brothers, the past few years have seen Mamaleek adding members and venturing into live performance. Diner Coffee, following in the footsteps of 2020’s Come & See, features new, unfamiliar, unknown voices—including expanded experiments with horns, woodwinds, and strings and a Bay Area-local blues harmonica player who improvised recorded selections during practices. The resulting tracks touch on signifiers from black metal, blues, ambient, and more. Diner Coffee simultaneously represents the band’s artistic progression and the state of the world. Taking a surprisingly optimistic perspective, Mamaleek once again puts forward a project of left-field, wholly unique compositions, eluding easy categorization and furthering their abstraction of genre. “The group cloaks its music in the kind of warm, hypnotic distortion that defines shoegaze, and underneath that haze is a style that’s conceptually abrasive yet altogether beautiful.” —Forbes

Acephalix

Theothanatology

20 Buck Spin

***ON LIMITED ULTRA CLEAR WITH OXBLOOD TINT VINYL!!! Acephalix wakes from five years in morbid repose with a new offering upon the glistening altar of flesh, a devastatingly tormented study on Theothanatology, the idea or belief that God is dead. Within this cerebrum shattering inquiry lies, as always, a primal spewing forth of vicious death metal malignity and bomb-raid hardcore dispersions. Across a decade and a half lifespan, the evolution of Acephalix into the bludgeoning instrument of discord and dead faith displayed on Theothanatology has never felt so urgent. The crumbling siege-like mentality of modern life leaves no doubt God has left the building and Acephalix adeptly soundtrack the contradictions, atrocity and inner turmoil of such massive loss and decay. From the opening title track to closer “Atheonomist,” Acephalix is razor-focused on its greatest strengths, commanding the unambiguous sonic pulverizing of a bulldozer over the decimated skull pile of a once thriving civilization. Simultaneously more musically complex and savagely barbaric, Theothanatology heralds a collapse already in motion.

Davidson, Ethan Daniel

Stranger

Blue Arrow

The black, streamlined Commodore Vanderbilt Hudson locomotive emerges from the long tunnel of memory and circles endlessly on the three-rail track of nostalgia. The rails glisten in the rain, the throbbing engine brushes gobbets of water from overhanging branches and hunkers down with a low-pitched whining groan. Sparks sputter from under the wheels in a blue-and-white arc of recall. The long, majestic iron horse rushes down the straightaway against the wall of the house we lived in when we were 10, whistling and chugging bravely. “I’ve ridden on a lot of trains,” says Ethan Daniel Davidson, a native Michigander. “To jump on one, you try to be sure you can see each bolt. Once they all start to blend together, the train is going too fast to jump on. I’m too old to jump on trains now, but I can still write about them.” On “Stranger”, his most poignant ballad is the quivering, shuddering “My Train Got Lost”. The title comes from an anthem by a Minnesota troubadour who has written dozens of songs about the coming and going of coachmen, station masters, tramps walking along the rails, conductors, steam whistles, railroad men, railroad gin and railroad tracks. Other tracks of recorded sound on “Stranger” owe debts to Public Image Ltd. (the post-punk “Even Bad Seeds”), The Band (the prophetic “There was a Famine in the House of Bread”) and Echo & The Bunnymen (the existential “My Jail”). Of the folk music staple “Dink’s Song”, Davidson says, “It’s pretty self-explanatory:...

Tension Span

The Future Died Yesterday

Neurot Recordings

Using the musical language of their past, the dark punk of their early bands (Christ On Parade, Neurosis, Dystopia, and Asunder) Tension Span brings a new band and a new album to Neurot Recordings that sounds both urgent and personal, speaking truth to the bleak realities of today’s socio-political collapse and the angst and identity crisis it brings. Somehow within the fabric of these themes of stress and fear and rage, there is a feeling of underlying hope, that there is something beautiful in the struggle. Recorded during the isolation of Covid, Noah Landis, Matt Parrillo, and Geoff Evans crafted The Future Died Yesterday, an album that sounds both varied and cohesive, combining musical and emotional heaviness with melody, samples, and synth. Sonically unique and riveting. “In terms of direction, the veteran Oakland-based musicians explore a noir-kissed post-punk path that fans of Killing Joke, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, and New Model Army should take note of.” –No Echo

Zabrecky

Seance! With Zabrecky

In The Red

“The title of the green glow-in-the-dark vinyl record is not merely a title: it is the first step on a journey to exploring the spirit realm with Zabrecky as your tour guide—just in time for Halloween. On the off chance that you are unfamiliar with the work of Mr. Zabrecky, it will behoove you to know that that he’s had one of the most illustrious, interesting and eclectic careers imaginable. He first came into the public eye in the 1990’s while fronting the popular angst-ridden pop punk combo Possum Dixon. Unlike other artists, his quick, quirky intelligence and onstage intensity didn’t result in a solo rock’n’roll career, but directed him to explore far more esoteric avenues. His later incarnations—all fueled by the same fascinating power—lead him to become an actor, a world famous award-winning magician, mentalist, author and professional auctioneer. Equal parts persuasive snake oil salesman and unctuous supernatural aficionado, he is possessed—[ ] pun intended—of an odd, slightly eerie sense of humor...or perhaps it is that Zabecky is dead serious—and his convictions are merely perceived as humor? “For well over a decade, within the mysterious, chain and shackle- bedecked walls of The Houdini Room at The Magic Castle, Zabrecky has conducted literally hundreds of seances. One day in the not-so-distant past, Zabrecky had a revelation...or was it advice whispered from The Beyond? ‘It occurred to me that people could conduct their own séances in the comfort of their living spaces or in nearly any space,’ Zabrecky said. Harking...

Algebra

Chiroptera

Unspeakable Axe

Swiss thrashers Algebra have become one of the most reliable machines in metaldom over the course of their fourteen years of existence. Like the famous Swiss watches, their music is clockwork-precise. Several overlapping schools of classic thrash coexist in their songs, with the heaviness and directness of the classic Bay Area bands somehow not crowding out the weirder, progressive flourishes of countrymates Coroner or even modern, post-1992 extreme metal influences, à la latter-day Megadeth, perhaps. It all comes together into a pummelling, yet controlled, behemoth of a band without visible seams on its stainless steel outer shell. Their release schedule has been almost as reliable as their riffwork, with prior full-length albums Polymorph in 2012, Feed The Ego in 2014, and Pulse? in 2019. The latter two were their first outings for Unspeakable Axe Records, who is now proud to unleash their fourth album. Titled Chiroptera—with a suitably spooky bat painted on its cover, courtesy of the talented Adam Burke—this may be Algebra’s most advanced offering yet, without departing too greatly from the style they have been refining up ’til now.

Intelligence

Lil' Peril

Mt. St. Mtn.

***LARS FINBERG, confirmed genius guy and poet laureate of sunken 21st century Rock, acts as manager in perpetuity of THE INTELLIGENCE, primary vehicle for his prolific creative swirl and a project that has taken on new shapes across myriad trials and shifts. The project began in his Seattle bedroom—a lad and his Tascam cassette 8 track—with the classic Boredom & Terror and has now landed in his Los Angeles studio apartment—an urchin and his Tascam digital 12 track—with Lil’ Peril, a new album that finds Finberg 1000% back at the controls. Over the course of 11 albums (!), The Intelligence has established a backbone that boogies through revolutions, allowing each jam-crammed dispatch to feel and sound admirably unique. The angular sharp shocks heard in earlier years have steadily evolved into the ballooning grooves heard on more recent releases (including Finberg’s recent solo work). Lil’ Peril is a dreamy gamble that captures this current bubbling penchant in The Intelligence’s inaugural homemade mode. With inspirational templates as far-flung as Les Paul, The Specials, Lee Perry and Mary Ford, Lil’ Peril pulls off the absurd shift “from ‘No-Wave Santana’ to ‘Screamers recorded by Jon Brion”. Playing shoulder parrot to studio engineers has no doubt informed Finberg’s approach to home recording, specifically in how much further he can go without wincing budget-minded eyes staring him down. This is immediately sensed on the opener “Maudlin Agency,” which begins with canned minimal bleep and closes with a full recreation of the “Brass Monkey” hook. These surprise-attack...

Guided By Voices

Alex Bell B/w Focus On The Flock

GBV Inc

Epic new GBV! Pollard gets ambitious and wild. "Alex Bell” is a 5 minute tour-de-force. Limited edition of 1000 copies.

Dead Void

Volatile Forms

Dark Descent

After some silence since their magnificent demo, Dead Void return from the depths to bestow a crushing debut album—Volatile Forms—upon the world. Drawing in on doomy, yet certainly not meek, atmospherics—the sheer monstrous tone of which will pin one to the wall—it is clear this is something unwieldy. Murmuring bass seeps through buzzing guitars in a manner that sounds profoundly unwelcoming, while the daunting vocals and crashing drums give no alleviation from the bludgeoning force. While the hostile and claustrophobic sounds of this record cannot be ignored, equally impactful are the grooves which hit like a hammer of pure malice when carefully spliced with the caverns of eerily contorting death metal. When the pounding drums break through the guitars, they have a real hard tone, while the seeping filth of the strings is not overshadowed. Clearly the three demos and spacing between them have allowed the band to develop into the best version of themselves, as on this debut album one hears a refined but unpolished and inhospitable cut of truly awesome music taking form. Moving forth, the hooks, the grooves, the expanses of doom and desolation, all conjure something inescapable and dread-tinged while the malignant hammering of pure old school violence is not lost or forgotten, as warped riffs and blast-beats meet gutturally-spewed vocals and occasional lead oddities. Contrasting often nuanced moments with an assault of bestial ferocity, there is no predictability or obvious pattern, rather a chaotic and honest approach to all of the songs. These tracks move...

Beach, Michael

2022 EP

Goner

Following the highly acclaimed album Dream Violence (2021) and the recent LP re-issue of his modern underground classic Gravity/ Repulsion, Michael Beach has announced a new self-titled 12-inch EP, to be released via Goner and Poison City Records. Recorded during the winter of 2021, the new record is made up of both 8-track tape and full studio recordings, interspersed with experimental, moody interludes, and features Beach’s Australian bandmates Bonnie Mercer (guitar), Peter Warden (drums) and Carla Oliver (bass) throughout. The EP’s stunning closer “Only A Memory” is a collaboration with Lloyd Swanton of renowned Australian minimalist trio The Necks, recorded in NSW’s Blue Mountains. “Out In A Burning Alley,” the EP’s lead single, combines Beach’s soulful abstracted lyrics over two minutes and fifty eight seconds of blazing garage-rock, where the sounds of the Melbourne and Oakland / Bay Area underground collide. In support of the upcoming EP and recent Dream Violence album, Beach will be returning to tour the US in September/ October, headlining dates on the East and West coast and performing at the iconic Gonerfest in Memphis, TN. The touring outfit will also feature Beach’s long time collaborator Utrillo Kushner (Comets On Fire / Personal and The Pizzas) on drums.

Barreca, Marc

Recordings Of Failing Light

Palace Of Lights

Marc Barreca’s Recordings Of Failing Light explores the subatomic matter of ordinary instrument sounds. Pianos, glass percussion, guitars, and feedback are atomized through sampling and granular processing in search of the audio equivalent of a negative image. In the end, these granular elements became the beds and pads for elaborate extrapolations of deconstructed melodic, rhythmic, patterned, and forward-looking sound—and with the addition of analog sequencer and arpeggiator based textures, some tracks reach back to Barreca’s days with Young Scientist. Perhaps as an acknowledgment of the aesthetic guiding Jon Hassell’s Seeing Through Sound, Barreca’s work here finds its origin in images. The gradations and modulation of light and dark in radiographs, rayograms, negatives, old black and white and sepia-tone photos all impart and inform a shaping influence to the waveforms and amplitudes of sound found in these twenty pieces. Heavily layered, simultaneously dense and expansive, Recordings Of Failing Light is the result of experiments conducted in a sonic version of the Hadron Collider. Marc Barreca has been creating and performing electronic music since the mid-1970s. Recordings Of Failing Light is his eleventh solo album for PoL. His 1980 album, Twilight, reissued on vinyl in 2018, was one of the earliest releases on PoL. The Empty Bridge is his tenth solo album for the label. Recent releases include From The Gray And The Green (2019), Shadow Aesthetics (2018), and four collaborations with K. Leimer and two with Three Point Circle. Reissues include work on the acclaimed VOD box set American Cassette Culture,...

Frisk

Stalker

Iron Lung

You ever wondered what it sounds like inside the heads of people when they're fist-fighting? The sharp thuds and painful cracks, the internalized grunts and high pitched squeal of a ringing ear that just won't go away. You ever been hit in the jaw with your mouth open? It's about as unpleasant as a feeling can be. FRISK's "Stalker" strikes us the same way. Hard and gnarly, an unrelenting misanthropic pummel of the highest order culling influence from equal parts Integrity, Brainbombs and Negative Approach. Leeds is the most dangerous city in West Yorkshire.

Intensive Care

Antibodies

Iron Lung

In today's music landscape its so easy to intellectualize "noise" since there isn't much for the average listener to grab on to. You are made to feel stupid if you don't get all the nonsensical bleeps and scrapes that every mediocre can swilling table stander can belch out. And then there are the reasons that noise music, yes I'll call it music because that's what the fuck it is, took hold in the first place, the real standouts, the people and bands that have made something wholly original and visceral and against conformity that you must take notice. Intensive Care falls firmly in that realm. Coming from roots within the hardcore, metal and powerviolence scenes these cage rattlers employ a myriad of instruments including but nit limited to drums, bass, vocals, tape loops, junk, electronics and more to craft a stunning array of beat driven harsh noise and metallic industrial sounds that you can - if you're not already destroying your surroundings - almost dance to.

Mutated Void

Roses Forever

Iron Lung

Brain damaged skate thrash at it's lo-finest all the way from the eastern wilds of Halifax, NS. So raw that even the freshest catch calls it cannibal fodder. 14 filthy filthies come blasting at you in a mere 16 minutes, just long enough to back lip that crusty ledge, bail and pick the gravel out of your freshly opened road rash.

More Kicks

Punch Drunk

Dirtnap

Punch Drunk is the second album from London-based trio More Kicks. The band’s self-titled debut album was a concise and ragged lesson in pop songwriting dripping in melody, cynicism and energy—Punch Drunk marks a new era for the band. Heavier, more expansive, more twists and turns. It veers from sparkling harmonies to fearsome riffing in the blink of eye, with never a second wasted. As with the first record, it was recorded live on to 2-inch tape. It’s bottled lightning and the sound of a band firing on all cylinders. James Sullivan aka Sulli (vox / guitar), Kris Hood (drums),and Paolo Mantovani (bass / vox) have cooked up a rare alchemy. The result: a More Kicks song can touch on classic ’60s garage, ’70s NYC rock and roll, jagged ’90s guitar pop—all wrapped in a razor sharp bundle. A glance backwards and a decisive step forwards. “When the world collapsed in 2020, I realised more than ever how much I rely on music and More Kicks,” says Sulli. “This album became a total obsession and a lifeline. Stuck in one place, the songs all came from heartbreak, frustration, anger, hope. It feels like a unique set of circumstances that produced this record and I’m really proud of what we’ve done.”

Bent Arcana

Live Zebulon

Castle Face

“Recorded at Zebulon in Los Angeles as a warm-up show for a show I had booked in Holland. What was meant to be a jumping point for the ‘first show’ ended up being a real burning set. A slightly more stripped-down version on the ten piece band [Bent Arcana] (for sake of ease) keeps it nice and concise. Nerves sometimes bring out these little lost jewels of which this recording is full of…gotta love improvisation for fleeting moments.  “Recorded super-hot by none other than our sound person Liza Boldyreva. Selections of songs from Bent Arcana and Moon-Drenched—cockpit stoned space jazz here you come. Mixed by John Dwyer and mastered by JJ Golden. This hunky double disk sports a zoetropic screen-printed animation of the Death’s Head moth circling on its D side that works with a strobe light off yer phone...fucking cool. Fucking hot. Dig in and be well. ” —John Dwyer 

Heads, The

Undersided (Deluxe)

Rooster

Presenting a remastered, 20-year anniversary edition of The Heads’ third album proper, the under-rated gem in their canon that is Undersided! Originally released in 2002 on the Sweet Nothing label, Undersided was recorded in 2001 at WhiteHouse Studios in Weston Super Mare, with Martin Nichols engineering. For this reissue, the original recordings were remastered for vinyl and CD by long time Heads Masterer (!) Shawn Joseph. The resultant eight tracks are some of the best music the band have ever recorded, occurring after a bit of a hiatus following their 2000 US tour / Peel session (included in the boxset / on the 2xCD version here). The band then regrouped and worked out the tracks for Undersided, relentless rehearsing for the recording. This is a pounding sike-nightmare that shows The Heads at the peak of their powers. There’s a flow throughout the album of melding psychedelic noise rock to battering rhythms and creating a bad trip for all listening—even the gentle soothe of “Energy” is enveloped by a white noise fury, and the intensity of some of the other tracks, like the terror inducing “Bedminster” or “False Heavy” (a tour worn riffmonger from 2000) and the Magnet-esque “Heavy Sea,” showed the band as ferocious as any of the insurgent “stoner” genre bands of that time.