Lykotonon

Promethean Pathology

Profound Lore

Lykotonon’s Promethean Pathology is a digitized descent into the darker side of the human psyche. It is the probing question that hangs over all of humanity in the quietest of moments. Avant-garde, industrial / electronic black metal featuring members of Wayfarer, Stormkeep, and Blood Incantation.

NOFX

Double Album

Fat Wreck Chords

***2021 saw the release of NOFX’s highly acclaimed, 14th studio album Single Album. What fans didn’t know then, is Single Album is only one half of what has ultimiately become NOFX’s very first double album; the second half of which is aptly titled Double Album. Reuniting with punk-rock legends BILL STEVENSON and JASON LIVERMORE for producer / engineering / mixing duties; it’s not hyperbolic to say NOFX are making their best music now. But that's not to imply everything else they’ve done was mediocre, either. Double Album reminds both ardent fans and casual listeners that NOFX weren’t born to follow trends. Indeed NOFX have carved their logo into the veneer of punk-rock culture for decades. With nearly 40 years in this circus, you’re going to meet people and do/see/conspire to get all the wildest shit done. Remember how one of the stipulations of the NOFX book Hepatitis Bathtub was that none of the band members could see what the other ones were writing about them? Well, this time, Mike got permission to blow up the foibles and peccadillos of people in song for maximum velocity and hilarity. There’s “Joanna Constant Teen,” a 78-second tribute to the dominatrix that spent six weeks in Fat Mike’s NYC-based Airbnb during the production run of his musical, Home Street Home. “Alcopollack” is about booking agent David Pollock, who has worked with the band for over 30 years and has lost more than his fair share of clients for his too-brazen honesty. “Fuck Day Six”...

Green, Al

I’m Still In Love With You

Fat Possum

50TH ANNIVERSARY GREEN VINYL EDITION!!!AL GREEN's magnum opus and one of soul music’s finest moments. By the time I’m Still In Love With You was released in 1972, the Al Green/Willie Mitchell Hi Records team was a well-oiled hit-making machine. With one number one hit under his belt, this album put Green right back at the top of the charts with hits like “Look What You Done For Me” and “Love And Happiness.”

Wedding Songs

S/t

Domino Sound

***Originally released on Philips Ethiopia in 1973, this seemingly impossible to find LP is available once again to the lucky humans of the world. With a mix of modern and traditional instruments these fourteen songs go through the progression of an Ethiopian Amhara wedding sung in Amharic. With the trio of singers, LEMMA G. HIWOT, ZENEBECH TESFAYE, and SELAMAWIT G. SELASSIE, alternating turns at the microphone, and sharing call and response duties, a relentless frenzy of hand clapping incites dancing and smiles. The consumption of tedj (honeywine) and the swirling love of a wedding was captured in the studio with euphoric energy to take away to play over and over again when the festivities are over. With hand screened covers and an insert of wedding photos accompanying the liner notes, this is the next best thing to an invitation to the real thing. A co-release with Mitmitta Musika of Addis Abeba, Ethiopia.

DOA

Something Better Change

Sudden Death

***NEW 40TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION!!! Sudden Death and DOA have gone back in time and restored one of punk’s seminal albums, Something Better Change, and reissued it on vinyl for it’s 40th anniversary. One also gets the original lyric sheet insert and the original foldout insert with pics of Joey Shithead, Chuck Biscuits, Randy Rampage and Dave Gregg.  “The product of two years of solid gigging in their native Vancouver, by the hottest punk rock band the West Coast ever produced this side of the much different Weirdos and Avengers, Something Better Change features a trio so molten, they didn’t even manage to get it all down in the studio. And yet it still is an absolutely awesome record. So heavy with chops it nearly leaks, soaring like the best Clash/Pistols/S.L.F. riffs filtered through an American anvil power even those greats couldn’t approach.”   —Jack Rabid, All Music

Redda, Tewolde

Eritrea's Guitar Pioneer, 1970-73

Domino Sound

***BACK IN STOCK!!! Note new price.  From Asmara, Eritrea (formerly Ethiopia) TEWOLDE REDDA revolutionized the sounds of traditional Eritrean music by amplifying his kirar, playing his Eko electric guitar, and recording six singles in the first part of the 1970s. Including the first Eritrean songs to use a horn section, traditional songs reworked into his new sound, and originals influenced by radio broadcasts from the United States military base in Asmara, Kagnew Station, these ten songs originally released on the Philips, Amha, and Yared labels show off his talents with stringed instruments, a talented back up band, and often the hand clapped beat shifting into double time near the song’s end. Tewolde’s thick, deep voice sings songs of love over somber and joyous tunes. Comes in a tip-on sleeve with extensive liner notes, lyrical translations, and unpublished photos. A co-release with Mitmitta Musika of Addis Abeba, Ethiopia.

Stonewall

S/t

Permanent

***BACK IN PRINT ON NEW "OUTER SPACED" COLORED VINYL!!! "So you're addicted to hard rock from 1972 and getting tired of LPs that don't take you for the full ride. You check out tons of 'em. Stonewall? Hmmm... only the most potent and rare stuff can get you off nowadays. Kicks intense enough to remind you why you got into it in the first place. Jams you can't wait to lay on your friends so uncontrollably alive you know it's gonna wipe 'em out. Yeah... you really need Stonewall. It's ritual time. Drop the needle into the groove. Side One. Stoned swaggering confidence, attitude and energy right out of the gate. Stonewall immediately take charge with 'Right On,' an 'incite-the-audience, invoke-the-jams' renegade rocker akin to 'Are You Ready?' by Grand Funk or 'Combination of the Two' by Big Brother conceptually but taken way further. I can't say more without some sort of spoiler alert. To mess with your head, after a near cluster-fuck with the audience in the opening track comes 'Solitude.' After a savage encounter with 'Bloody Mary' the side ends with my favorite track. As soon as the guitar riff ignites 'Outer Spaced' you know you're gonna get crushed. I hear people all over the world saying Stonewall is a 'Holy Grail'. I agree. 'Holy Grail' status for an LP requires the most extreme and exciting combination of quality and rarity. That's not all. It has to have mystery. It has to reek of humanity. There can be no...

Abdallah, Salum And Cuban Marimba Band

Ngoma Tanzania

Domino Sound

***Sweet and joyful sounds from the first half of 1960’s Tanzania. SALUM ABDALLAH AND CUBAN MARIMBA BAND were at the forefront of “muziki wa dansi”, the emerging dance music scene influenced by Cuban 78s, dance music crazes like the twist and cha cha cha, and the local sounds of their home country. Hailing from the smaller town of Morogoro, they rose to be stars across the country. Out of over 100 sides recorded for local labels, mostly Mzuri Records of Kenya, these twelve songs are the cream of the crop. Only a few of these have ever been re-released in any form, and that hasn’t happened for several years. Lots of toe tappers, smile enhancers, and downright dancers, with a few slower and simpler songs to round it out. Taken from 1961-65, these twelve songs shine a brighter light on an already bright light that was Salum Abdallah, taken away from this earth all too early at the age of 37. The 12 song LP comes in an old style tip-on sleeve with lyrics in Swahili with English translations on the inner sleeve.

Cosmic Putrefaction

Crepuscular Dirge For The Blessed Ones

Profound Lore

On Crepuscular Dirge For The Blessed Ones, sole mastermind Gabriele Garmaglia continues the Cosmic Putrefaction narrative begun on previous album The Horizons Towards Which Splendour Withers, wherein the only survivor from an apocalyptic annihilation of a dying planet walks towards its withered horizons. In this next chapter, this character ultimately finds an even more sorrowful truth at the end of his journey, one that shows the empyrean fall of man throughout the metaphysical world and the gods which inhabit it. On Crepuscular Dirge For The Blessed Ones, Gramaglia establishes even more his own vision of death metal, this time enriching his multifaceted sound with widened atmospheres and a patina of omnipresent melancholy suggested by distant arpeggios, e-bow guitars and sometimes even synths organically blended with the relentless, ferocious riffs always present in this new effort. To cap off this layered effort, Gramaglia this time relied on drummer Giulio Galati (Nero di Marte, Hideous Divinity) to deliver an extremely powerful and dynamic performance behind the kit. Cosmic Putrefaction was formed in 2018 as the death metal sonic incarnation of multi-instrumentalist Gramaglia (also behind The Clearing Path and part of Turris Eburnea and Vertebra Atlantis), who summoned the aforementioned musical entity to re-arrange and complete the unreleased album of his first band Oaken/Throne, which was begun in 2012 but left uncompleted due to the combo disbanding. This became 2019’s At The Threshold Of The Greatest Chasm, which absorbed six-and-a-half tracks taken from the aforementioned unreleased Oaken/Throne album. He later refined his formula...

Haunter

Discarnate Ails

Profound Lore

Discarnate Ails, the new album from Texas-based progressive death / black metal band Haunter is the follow-up to 2019’s acclaimed Sacramental Death Qualia (named as Stereogum’s 2019 Metal Album of the Year) and will unveil them as one of the most enlightening and dynamic bands and one of the pioneering prospects within the current movement. With this latest, Haunter have tapped into the next level, unparalleled, with their most complex, advanced, and most furious and heaviest release to date. The three epic chapters that comprise Discarnate Ails weave through intricate, dissonant and vitriolic passages that find a notable balance between challenging melodious movements and parts while maintaining the band’s sense of creating epochal songs of triumph and mastery.

Bedsore / Mortal Incarnation

Split

20 Buck Spin

***CLICK LP COLOR FOR LIMITED SILVER INSIDE ULTRA CLEAR VINYL!!! Italy’s Bedsore and Japan’s Mortal Incarnation, two bands separated by continents of distance, come together for a split release packed with fresh and intense death metal energy, with each band contributing a single epic length track.  Bedsore seamlessly melds astral black metal, technical death metal and ’70s progressive straight out of a planetarium laser show. Witness the rapid evolution of a band with a seemingly infinite trajectory of creativity and imagination. On the sixteen plus minute journey of “Shapes From Beyond The Veil Of Stars And Space”, Bedsore continuously twist into unconventional new directions of cinematic cosmic vastness . For the other track, Japan’s Mortal Incarnation present “In The Perpetual Torment Of Recurrence”, a massive fourteen plus minute track of bludgeoning inventive death metal with shards of doom despondency that rivals and sits equally beside the best bands of the style worldwide. Simply one of the best pure death metal tracks that will be heard in 2022.

Scarcity

Aveilut

Flenser

There’s a real sense of loss on Brooklyn experimental black metalists Scarcity’s debut album Aveilut, an inescapable presence of the realities of death. Multi-instrumentalist Brendon Randall-Myers (conductor of the Glenn Branca Ensemble since Branca’s passing) wrote Aveilut while processing the sudden deaths of two people close to him, tracked it while caught in Beijing’s first lockdown of 2020, and finished it while surrounded by the overwhelming plague visuals of New York’s early COVID peak. Back in Brooklyn, vocalist Doug Moore (of Pyrrhon, Weeping Sores, Glorious Depravity, and Seputus) soon found himself in the midst of an equally bleak lockdown experience—living next to a funeral home when New York City was America’s COVID epicenter. From conception through development, tangible death surrounded Aveilut. The result of such a profound closeness with death is this grief-stricken release, which takes its name from the Hebrew word for mourning. 72-note octaves, alternate tunings, psychoacoustic phenomena and macro-phrases embody the hugeness of loss, the inexplicable space of death’s void that Randall-Myers faced both on a personal and existential scale. Together with Moore’s gripping vocal delivery and stark lyrics, the album takes the form of a hyperobject, an entity with such vastness and reach that it’s difficult for the human mind to comprehend. Consisting of one 45-minute composition, the music is black metal roughly in the vein of Jute Gyte, Krallice, Mare Cognitum, and Enhare—with hefty doses of post-Branca microtonal guitar abuse, and a cinematic scope that draws on Randall-Myers’ work with orchestras. Aveilut’s mathematical abstraction and...

Reeking Aura

Blood And Bonemeal

Profound Lore

Reeking Aura is a NY / NJ-based death / doom metal band in the old school tradition comprised of known scene veterans from Long Island and NYC. Originally conceived as a project for guitarists Ryan Lipynsky (Unearthly Trance, The Howling Wind) and Rick Habeeb (Grey Skies Fallen, Buckshot Facelift) to share lead duties, additional guitarist Terrell Grannum (Thaetas, Buckshot Facelift), was brought into the fold along with fellow Buckshot Facelift alumni Tom Anderer (Grey Skies Fallen) on bass and William “Big Will” Smith (Afterbirth, Ex-Artificial Brain) on vocals in late 2019. Since releasing their debut three song EP Beneath The Canopy Of Compost on Parasitic Records in 2020, the band has parted ways amicably with drummer and friend Keith Harris (Afterbirth) and welcomed Sam Shereck (Blame God, Stabbed) behind the kit. Though unable to perform live during the pandemic, the group used 2020 and 2021 to write and record their debut full length album Blood And Bonemeal. They again chose to work with well-respected producer Colin Marston at his Menegroth The Thousand Caves studio in Queens, NY. Marston handled all stages of production from tracking to mixing and mastering with drums being recorded at Rock & Roll Gas Station studios on Long Island, NY. Blood And Bonemeal is a concept album centered around the caretaker of a desolate agricultural property and that person’s struggles with morbid psychosis. Musically, the band sought to further explore the possibilities of a three-pronged lead guitar team, while the revamped rhythm section held down the...

Dreadnought

The Endless

Profound Lore

For their fifth full length The Endless, Denver, Coloroado genre-defying progressive metal outfit Dreadnought present their most spellbinding musical feature yet. With riveting vocal performances, ferocious grooves, and soaring synthesis, the quartet offers a familiarity to the melodic awe of previous records Lifewoven (2013) and Bridging Realms (2015) as well as the dark complexities within A Wake In Sacred Waves (2017) and Emergence (2019), but with a beautifully fresh perspective in writing, production, and performance. At its inception in 2012, Dreadnought’s four members, including guitarist / vocalist Kelly Schilling, drummer Jordan Clancy, bassist Kevin Handlon, and keyboardist / vocalist Lauren Vieira, strove for a project laser-focused on creativity and exploration, pulling from all aspects of their musical backgrounds to craft something exciting and unique. Joining in the common ground of extreme metal, the quartet explores a blend of prog, doom, folk, jazz, classical, black metal, and post rock.

Heaven For Real

Energy Bar

Mint

"My life: a slow clap progression, pace rising; to celebrate in the smallest finding - feels right to show admiration that grows," Mark Grundy begins on “Slow Clap”, the first track from Heaven For Real’s sophomore full-length Energy Bar. Formed in 2012, and consisting of songwriter twins Mark and J. Scott Grundy (Quaker Parents) and their frequent collaborators, drummer Nathan Doucet and synth player/percussionist Cher Hann, the Toronto by way of Halifax project has been taking time to shape the follow-up to their 2016 Mint debut, Kill Your Memory. Springboarding from their early 2022 EP, Sweet Rose Green Winter Desk Top Tell This Side Autumn Of The Fighter Hot In A Cool Way, they describe the project as a “living collaboration”, one that strives to compress life’s truths into a distorted reflection of all of its facets. It’s this that drives Energy Bar – a hyper, trash-compacted mosaic of the band ten years that’s simultaneously dreamlike and alive. Recording the album with Jonas Bonnetta at Port William Sound, H4R aimed to cultivate an electrically charged live energy, which they fuse with rich and playful compositions. Tracks like “Lately” and “Energy Bar” are defined by tireless, wired drums, around which are woven buoyant guitar lines, sounding at times like the weirder shades of bands like Meat Puppets, Prefab Sprout and even early Cate Le Bon. Included too are hints of The Feelies, Mdou Moctar, Built To Spill and Cast; Heaven For Real’s approach is an experimental one, yet one unafraid to...

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.

Nils, The

Shadows And Ghosts

Le Backstore / On The Roof

***In 2015, almost thirty years after the release of their first full album on American label, Profile, Montreal punk scene veterans, THE NILS, offered us a second album of new compositions. At that time, this new effort was only offered on CD and cassette and despite rave reviews has passed under the radar. Shadows And Ghosts is now available on vinyl for the first time. An album to discover byt melodic punk precursors. Features guest appearances from EVAN DANDO (LEMONHEADS) and JOHN KASTNER (ASEXUALS, DOUGHBOYS).

Jim Nothing

In The Marigolds

Meritorio

***Christchurch/Auckland DIYers JIM NOTHING are back with their debut album In The Marigolds. The sound of the album has strong roots in the classic '80s and '90s indie rock of the land it was born in, but other influences can be heard—especially the likes of The Go-Betweens, Breeders and Guided by Voices. It’s a varied, but cohesive album that brims with pleasantly scuffed, quietly considered charm: slightly-delic, all-out-rockers, reflective numbers and quirky perspectives, pitting JAMES SULLIVAN's salty vocals and jangling guitar against ANITA CLARK's candied vocals and violin. But also this album has at its core a feeling of homeliness, an understated dedication to DIY music making and the kiwi tradition of tinkering away in the garage. Songs nod openly to the South Island sounds-of-yesteryear without feeling hamstrung by nostalgic whiff. Rather Jim Nothing implement the rickety gallop of The Bats (Seahorse Kingdom) or chug-a-chug moves of 3D's (Yellow House) as a bed to bud their own groggy-headed guitar-steez. "Never Come Down" sports the kind of spring-loaded chorus Tamaki Makaurau futurist P.H.F. might mess around with, while "Borrowed Time" pits power-pop urgency against the easy thrum of Melted Ice Cream alumni, Salad Boys. Released by Spain's Meritorio and pressed on white vinyl.

Callahan, Bill

YTILAER

Drag City

***With a band consisting of MATT KINSEY on guitars, EMMETT KELLY on bas and backing vocals, SARAH ANN PHILLIPS on B3, piano and backing vocals, and JIM WHITE on drums, BILL CALLAHAN continues his journey, tunneling underneath the weathered exterior of what seems to be and into the more nuanced life everything takes on in the dark. With Bill’s voice making the extraordinary leaps and bounds that measure the lives of the songs, the band follow him through passages that seem to invent themselves; other times playing with deeply soulful grooves and/or desperate intensity, as these moments come and go. There’s nothing they can’t do.

Miquela E Lei Chapacans

Miquela e Lei Chapacans

Finders Keepers

***The first progressive girl group of the French Occitan language pop scene bring you folk funk, sun-baked bossa, Coltrane jazz and their own brand of punky "Dizco Rural" against an untouched French Balearic backdrop spanning the late '70s and '80s. If even the most assiduous of European record collectors consider the Occitan language music scene to be France's best-kept secret then it's as fair to say that the incredible multifaceted recordings of langue d'oc prog girl group Lei Chapacans has spent the last four decades hiding in plain sight. For those who are familiar with the rare and sought-after one-off solo album by Occitan singer Miquela and have craved for more, then you've come to exactly the right place. Lei Chapacans (a name that roughly translates to "The Vagabonds") is the all-girl vocal group assembled by Miquela herself just two years after her debut release, having toured the world and snubbed major label record deal offers with a steadfast allegiance to the protection of the Occitan language in which this album is primarily penned and performed (minus a small amount of German and sarcastic English in one rebellious instance). For European collectors with a penchant for French savoir faire, but have further yearnings for folkloric femme funk, then it's time to look towards the Occitan sunset where you will meet Lolo, Miquela, Sophie, Irena, and Denise. These amazing, and undeniably culturally important recordings might have taken some time to find a wider audience, but for music lovers, crate diggers and...

Daeva

Through Sheer Will And Black Magic…

20 Buck Spin

COLOR LP ON LIMITED BLOOD RED W/BLACK SPLATTER 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.

Adriani, Alessandro

Program & Rhythm

Mannequin

***Alessandro Adriani marks his comeback on Mannequin Records with an impressive body of work on this 2xLP 'Program & Rhythm', inspired by the Italian library music and soundtrack composers. Italian composers from the 60s to the 80s seemed limitless in their experiments and endlessly colorful, despite being a hidden part in the history of music. Library music takes weird and fantastic detours, between garish drum machines, seedy guitars, synthesizers gone haywire, and fractious brass sections. The scene’s big names included Ennio Morricone, Piero Umiliani, Alessandro Alessandroni, Giampiero Boneschi, Egisto Macchi, A.R. Luciani and Bruno Nicolai, just to name a few. After spending weeks on end in an improvised-by-covid home studio recording hours and hours of music every day, Alessandro was turning and shaping his analog machines into an experimental synth pop, psychedelic funky jazz and weird ambient fusion, making up six different releases called simply 'Program & Rhythm' from the Roland CR-78 programming buttons. The final selection of 42 tracks out of the six releases - originally intended to be put out as tapes - would finally compose the tracklist of the double vinyl presented here, with the catalog number PR and roman numerals used for the track titles. An exceptional document of music in Alessandro's discography, 'Program & Rhythm' enters into an ultimate unknown journey, creating music for films that do not yet exist, putting his steps deeper into a faceless obscure music.

Weir, Bobby & Wolf Bros

Live In Colorado: Vol. 2

Third Man

***Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros—consisting of Bobby Weir, Don Was, Jay Lane and Jeff Chimenti—are set for the release of their second vinyl collection of recorded material, Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros: Live in Colorado Vol. 2. “This was our first quick tour with The Wolfpack,” Weir says. “There’s a rawness to it that we’ll prolly never get again…”The album follows Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros: Live in Colorado, which was released this past February to critical acclaim. Vol. 2 also features songs recorded live at Red Rocks Amphitheatre and the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater in Colorado in June, 2021—a documentation of their first live audience concerts in over a year due to the pandemic—featuring Greg Leisz on pedal steel, along with The Wolfpack: Alex Kelly, Brian Switzer, Adam Theis, Mads Tolling and Sheldon Brown.

Melody’s Echo Chamber

Unfold

Fat Possum

***French pop songwriter MELODY PROCHE delivers an album featuring seven rare, unreleased tracks recorded shortly after her 2013 debut.

Hulder

(Color) De Oproeping Van Middeleeuwse Duisternis

20 Buck Spin

***ON LIMITED ULTRA CLEAR W/ BLACK SMOKE VINYL!!! De Oproeping Van Middeleeuwse Duisternis collects two early releases from one woman black metal band Hulder. The disc’s first five tracks comprise what was the Rehearsal 8/13/18 tape release, collecting an intro- and truncated rehearsal versions of the early demo tracks, indulging in the spontaneous harshness and pacing of a live recording. A Celtic Frost cover shows a primary influence. Tracks six through eight are the original Ascending The Raven Stone demo tracks proper that were Hulder’s first recorded release, immediately embracing the icy traditional black metal style of her forbears in both the Scandinavian and French scenes of the 1990s. An already well-developed sense of songwriting and atmosphere signal toward the dark future to come. These are the earliest raw steps of the project that would before long coalesce into evolved but no less bewitching form on the Hulder debut full length.

El-P

Fantastic Damage

Fat Possum

REISSUED!!! The Fantastic Damage album from COMPANY FLOW founder, RUN THE JEWELS member and one of hip hop's most respected figures, EL-P. Sixteen groundbreaking and inventive tracks of unparalleled lyricism rocked with cyborg funk, melodic vapor trails, and groove-pumping beats. Features appearances by AESOP ROCK, ILL BILL, VAST AIRE, MR. LIF, CAMU TAO, DJ ABILITIES and others. "Fantastic Damage picks up where Company Flow left off—slamming jagged boom baps into computer crash squeals, like the score for a Blade Runner sequel set in Brooklyn."—SPIN

El-P

I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead

Fat Possum

REISSUED!!! EL-P’s magnum opus. Four years in the making, I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead, is a culmination of EL-P’s profound musical, personal and political experiences delivered at the height of his power. Thirteen tracks featuring guest spots from TRENT REZNOR, MARS VOLTA, CAT POWER, AESOP ROCK, CAGE, MATT SWEENEY, and TAME ONE. "Nothing here is superfluous or inane; like his fellow heavyweight Ghostface, the density of metaphoric and visual content is incredible…that’s what Hip Hop has always been about at its core—and that’s why El-P remains so intoxicating."—Rap Reviews

El-P

Cancer 4 Cure

Fat Possum

REISSUED!!! Received an 8.5 Best New Music rating from Pitchfork. Independent rap icon EL-P's incredible solo album Cancer 4 Cure. Cancer 4 Cure takes another huge leap forward with a bombastic collision of synths, bottomless bass tones, live instrumentation, ear-worming melody, and tightly coiled drum patterns, setting the standard for hip hop production higher than ever. The obvious diversion from the previous album is the presence of El-P’s ever-developing vocal style, continuing to raise the bar on his already highly verbose flow that swiftly and muscularly navigates a rapidfire explosion of syllabic conundrums and quick-witted elocutions full of heart, purpose, style and grit. Rounded out by feature appearances by a host of high profile guests including KILLER MIKE, DANNY BROWN, MR. MUTHAFUCKIN’ EXQUIRE, PAUL BANKS (INTERPOL), and others.

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.

Baggett, Lee

Anyway

Perpetual Doom

***"Lee Baggett began a new chapter of his eclectic and varied songwriting career with the 2021 release of Just A Minute, and he’s continuing his experimental streak with his latest full length, Anyway. The seasoned musician is changing his stripes again with this 10-song collection by leaning into a more rollicking sound at times, as evidenced by the brisker feeling “Fruit Dog,” the album’s lead single, and the bustling and twangy penultimate track, “Highway Roll.” By embracing more country-tinged sonic elements like banjo, organ-sounding keys, and harmonica, Baggett is able to weave through winding narratives that poignantly parse through the challenging nature of change and evolution. On “Highway Roll,” he confronts how landscapes and settings he once knew are now unrecognizable, and takes that motif a step further on “Earlier Than The World” by achingly and vividly describing “concrete and rubble” amongst a sea of delicate, yet biting guitar riffs. Escape seems to be a viable option for Baggett with “Sink In My Dreams” and “Dust In The Wind” serving as the album’s soothing remedies, inviting the listener to sit back and get lost in Baggett’s mesmerizing guitar playing. His nimble guitar work is a prominent fixture on Anyway, acting as a crux at several key points. It resonates forcefully and feels emotionally charged. Just take the meandering bridge on “Earlier Than The World” as a prime example of how Baggett can aptly convey feeling through riffs."—Tom Gallo

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.

Cherry Cheeks

Cherry Radio

Under The Gun

***Kyle Harms has had a busy year on the grindstone since putting out the debut Cherry Cheeks LP on Total Punk records. He finally left the swamplands of Florida for Portland and is gearing up for a massive tour with fellow freaks and UTG alumni Gee Tee and Research Reactor Corp. Before getting out of the hellhole, Kyle recorded one last punk rock EP before giving the middle finger to the sunshine state for good. Entirely produced by Kyle (Art, Production, Songwriting, the usual trilogy) Cherry Radio sees Kyle exploring sweeter melodies and less wired riffage. Whereas the self titled LP sounded like a panic attack, this EP is more like a picnic with friends in the middle of a volcano.

Gunfighter

Ballads

Under The Gun

Prison Affair

Demo 3

Under The Gun

***Straight from a jail cell to the most lush red carpets punks can afford. Prison Affair's third demo (Originally a cassette on La Parca Te Busca that sold out in a matter of hours) broadens the horizons of the jailbreak kings while keeping their trademarked vibrato ridden snot sound that's constantly imitated but never replicated. For the first time the tempo slows down to a pace you and your lover could slow dance to before flinging you into mach 6 smashing your molars into a fine powder against a brick wall.

Melody’s Echo Chamber

Unfold + S/T 10th Anniversary

Fat Possum

***TWO ALBUM PACKAGE!!! Unfold the lost follow-up album to her self-titled debut Melody’s Echo Chamber, which includes seven rare and unreleased tracks. The album is released in tandem with the 10th-anniversary edition of Melody’s Echo Chamber. It’s a hypnotic and sometimes hypnagogic adventure of the senses, full of summery, shimmery songs that still sound as dreamy and vivid as they did a decade ago. Unfold pressed on black vinyl, Melody’s Echo Chamber on limited color.

Galaxie 500 / Mike Mcgonigal

Temperature’s Rising: An Oral and Visual History of Galaxie 500

Exact Change

REISSUED!!! A fascinating oral history of one of American indie rock's most enduring and influential acts. Slow, deliberate and deceptively simple, the music of Boston-based band Galaxie 500 was wonderfully at odds with the prevailing underground sounds of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Formed in 1987, the band split up in 1991 after releasing three acclaimed albums—Today, On Fire and This Is Our Music—as well as a Peel Sessions recording. The primary contributors to this long unavailable history of the band are the three band members—bassist/vocalist Naomi Yang, drummer Damon Krukowski and guitarist/vocalist Dean Wareham—but dozens of people were interviewed in all, including fellow musicians, record business folks, music critics and scenesters. Galaxie 500: Temperature’s Rising provides a complex, sometimes contentious account of the band’s rise to indie stardom and their acrimonious breakup. It also includes dozens of rare and never-before-seen photographs, as well as posters and other ephemera from the personal collection of Naomi Yang, who provides a running commentary to the images. This is the definitive book about Galaxie 500, and a crucial chapter in the story of indie rock.

Ganjas

Generation

Bym

***After 8 long years THE GANJAS returns with a new studio album, a joint production between JACK ENDINO and the band. Like the 2012 album Resistance, this LP combines sounds and styles that have marked the band since its inception; long space rock songs, neo grunge guitars, Manchester-reggae rhythms, and ballads with R&B vocal harmonies.

Polyhedren

Psychic

Bamp Records

***THE RESIDENTS, NELS CLINE (WILCO), JOSH FREESE (NINE INCH NAILS, A PERFECT CIRCLE, DEVO), RINI RAGHAVAN and IVA BITTOVA are just a few of the artists performing on the first collaborative album, Psychic, from composer and producer DREN MCDONALD's polyheDren project. McDonald spent the 90s running Vaccination Records Co. while playing in a few San Francisco Bay Area Bands. He eventually wound up writing music for film, TV and many video games including Counterstrike Global Offensive, Ghost Recon Commander and Cooking Dash. He released The String Arcade, a collection of video game music arranged for string quartet in 2014, and his music an also be heard in the Facebook Sound Collection used my millions of video creators every month. This new full-length is a shared musical vision that lies somewhere between funk, electronic, post-rock and world music with each guest artist revealing an unexpected performance to each track. 100% of the revenue to benefit the Bay Area Music Project, an after school music education, non-profit that bring music lessons to children who otherwise couldn't afford it. CDs in six-panl digipaks with coaster and other goodies. LPs pressed on random splatter vinyl in an edition of 200 copies.

Oh Sees

The Chapel, Sf 10.2.19

Silver Current

AVAILABLE AGAIN!!! The OH SEES at the peak of their prog obsession, super jammed out and totally dominating. The Chapel, SF 10.2.19 is a fifty-three minute, beautifully recorded, hi-fi-delity live explosion of orc puke and kraut-gone-punk rock dominance by one of the rippingest bands of the 21st century. Two record set on limited orange/red cloud colored vinyl with side D etching and faithfully (re)created TMOQ-style bootleg album art. Originally released for RSD 2021.

Archers Of Loaf

Reason In Decline

Merge

***As sculpted shards of guitar—tumbling, tolling, squalling—shower the jittery bounce of a piano on opener “Human,” it’s obvious that Reason in Decline, Archers of Loaf’s first album in 24 years, will be more than a nostalgic, low-impact reboot. When they emerged from North Carolina’s ’90s indie-punk incubator, the Archers’ hurtling, sly, gloriously dissonant roar was a mythologized touchstone of slacker-era refusal. But this, the distilled shudder of “Human” is an entirely different noise. In fact, it’s a startling revelation. Eric Bachmann and Eric Johnson, once headstrong smartasses inciting a series of artful pileups on the band’s four studio albums and EP, are now a fluidly complementary, sonically advanced unit. Notably, Johnson’s signature trebly lines peal clearly above the din instead of struggling to be heard. Second, singer-songwriter Bachmann, after throat surgery, relearned how to sing (this time from his diaphragm); as a result, he no longer howls like the angriest head cold on the Eastern Seaboard. And now, his lyrics balance righteous wrath with a complex tangle of adult perspective. In short, this is not your father’s Archers of Loaf, even if you’re a father now who was a fan then. (If that’s the case, congrats on surviving the Plague and getting to hear this fearlessly poignant record, you alt-geezer!) Otherwise, thank your youthful fucking lucky stars, kids! Enjoy Reason in Decline with fresh ears and do as the Archers have been doing: Stay humble, stay informed, express yourself creatively, and try not to lose your goddamned mind while the...

Mountain Brews

Mountain Brews

Perpetual Doom

***Perpetual Doom is proud to present a special double-LP from Mountain Brews. Spearheaded by Jake Longstreth, Los Angeles-based painter and co-host of Apple Music’s Time Crisis with Ezra Koenig, Mountain Brews was founded around a vital American tradition: sippin’ cold ones to the “tasteful palette of seventies rock.” Full of warm melodies and guitars that evoke a Mojave glow, Mountain Brews occupy the sunny spot right between the studio-slick hits of early Eagles and the laidback jams of the Grateful Dead. And now that their four previous EPS are available in a single package, there’s nothing left to do but grab a seat, turn up the music, and crack one open. Mountain Brews are pros at keeping things loose and light. Recorded by the same group of old pals that make up a LA based Grateful Dead cover band, Richard Pictures—including Longstreth, Aaron Olson, Ryan Adlaf, and John Nixon—these seventeen tracks celebrate the early seventies’ spirit of easy-going collaboration. You can hear it when a guitar slide greets the opening strum on the title track, an assuming ode to the pleasures of drinking and hiking: “As we get to the top of the mountain, there’s a view,” Longstreth sings. “Take a load off and crack a few mountain brews.” And while the song boasts virtuoso playing worthy of Desperado, the vibe is less barstool machismo than six-pack camaraderie.

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,...

Richard, Dawn And Spencer Zahn

Pigments

Merge

***The debut collaboration between New Orleans electro-revival dynamo DAWN RICHARD and multi-instrumentalist, producer, and composer SPENCER ZAHN. Pigments is a project about the power of self-expression through living art, through motion. It’s also a love letter to New Orleans, Louisiana. Not strictly classical, jazz or ambient electronica but rather a body of “movements,” Pigments is an expressive soundscape that is an immersive passage through the city as seen through the eyes of a young Black girl with dreams to paint her future with the pigments given to her. Richard explains: “Spencer wanted to create one long piece of music that would ebb and flow around my lyrics and emotions, which tell a story of growing to love my own skin. I wanted my voice to be moss surrounding the roots of Spencer’s compo- sitions, never forcing the moment to fill every space but rather reveling in the openness of thought and breath.”

Baba Commandant And The Mandingo Band

Sonbonbela

Sublime Frequencies

***Sublime Frequencies release the third LP from Baba Commandant and the Mandingo Band . Sonbonbela was recorded in the beginning of 2022 in the Republic of Burkina Faso. The group continue to hone their trademark fusion of Mandingue and Afro-beat styles. The Mandingo Band are a hit machine, sculpting seven new tracks of near Beefheart/Magic Band dynamics, Fela inspired groovers dusted out in the Sahel zone, rather than the humidity and sweat of Lagos, creating one of the most original and propulsive musical statements to come from the contemporary West African cultural juggernaut. As with previous releases, the band features the legendary guitar pyrotechnics of Issouf Diabate, truly one of the greatest West African (or Earth for that matter) guitarists of the last forty years. The band is completed by a near bottomless barrel of artistry from the Ouagadougou and Bobo Dioulasso musical talent pool. On bass guitar, Wendeyida Ouedraogo, on drums Abbas Kabore, and on percussion and balafon, Nickie Dembele. Leading the charge again is the captain himself, Mamadou Sanou on the Doso Ngoni featuring one of the most distinctive voices of the modern era. The opposite of the banal trends of auto-tune that have pervaded most of West African popular music, Baba's voice still impresses with its gravel and grit, showcasing a range that is ancient and defiant in equal measure. This LP is a non-stop hit parade of Afro-beat bangers destined to light dancefloors and living rooms ablaze! This album is dedicated to the memory of Massimbo...

Merciless Savagery

Demo 2050

Nuclear War Now

***Bestial black speed metal from Houston with schooling in Bathory, Witchcraft (Fin), and Sodom. Clunky and ugly as black metal should be. LP version will include bonus rehearsal tracks on side B. Limited to 200 copies.

True Iron Will

True Iron Will

Nuclear War Now

***Triumphant one man black metal from Austin Texas. For fans of Darkthrone, Moonblood, and Horna. Limited to 200 copies.

Abigail

The Lord of Satan - Gig Edition

Nuclear War Now

***Alternate cover version on swampy green brown vinyl. Limited to 200 copies for the October 2022 US "hit and run" tour through LA, Austin and NYC. Pure Black Metal played in a manner that is harsh and hostile.

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 

Smashing Times, The

Bloom

Meritorio

***"THE SMASHING TIMES, psychedelic twee freakbeat from a Baltimore basement, are back with Bloom their sophomore album, where they explode with a sound that’s pulling from ‘60s jangly guitars, kiwi poppers and paisley underground revivalists all at once. Instruments played by humans, bare feet touching the ground. Wrinkled button downs, sweaters filled with holes, music audibly and sometimes visibly made by humans. Can you change the strings on your guitar? Maybe, can you buy me dinner? Lock up your Rickenbackers, Thee Jasmine Monk is coming to town, can they stay on your couch?."—Ferd Merkin, Summer 2022. Released by Spain's Meritorio and pressed on green vinyl.

Thinking Fellers Union Local 282

Admonishing The Bishops

Bulbous Monocle

Bulbous Monocle, a new label focused on the legacy of the Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and the scene from which it reveled in between the years 1986-1996, is honored to launch the label with arguably the most lauded and concise testament from the band. 1993’s mini-masterpiece Admonishing the Bishops. Originally released on the Matador Records label, this title and most of the “Fellers” discography has been out of print for over 25 years. Now, newly remastered by Mark Gergis (Sublime Frequencies et.al) this perfect EP is sounding better than ever! “Formed in San Francisco in 1986, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 had the bad luck to display a range of cultural and musical reference points shared by relatively few members of that era’s archconservative “underground culture.” On any given day, you might hear that their records were too manicured or too chaotic, too cerebral or too absurd, too personal or too impersonal, too experimental or too pop. Above all, they were derided as “self-indulgent” by critics who expected artists to tiptoe deferentially around their audience’s blind spots. "To be fair, their early recordings had about as much relation to their in-the-flesh grandeur as a dripping faucet does to Iguazu Falls. Against steep technical odds, Greg Freeman of Lowdown Studio made their LPs work beautifully as aural monuments. But listeners who hadn’t seen the Fellers’ live could be forgiven for finding these albums a bit forbidding. "Which brings us to Admonishing the Bishops — a wholly unexpected breakthrough release comprising...

Thinking Fellers Union Local 282

Strangers From The Universe

Bulbous Monocle

Bulbous Monocle presents a first time vinyl reissue of The TFUL 282 masterpiece LP originally released in 1994 on Matador Records. Even in a catalog that bristles with pinnacles, Strangers from the Universe remains pinnaclier than most. Somehow harnessing influences from Bali to Cinecittà to Memphis to the wobbly Sunday morning organ at Oakland’s Rose of Sharon Missionary Baptist Church without feeling contrived or showoffy, Strangers is possibly and/or indisputably the most successful shotgun marriage of the Fellers’ disparate pop sensibilities with their outlandish song structures, their acre-feet of tape snippets with their hydra-headed arrangements, and their individual compositional and instrumental skills with their congenitally peculiar joint sensorium. Eager as always to experiment with unconventional (i.e., daft and cumbersome) approaches to writing and recording, the Fellers fine-tuned their working methods for Strangers, assigning individual members as “sheriffs” to oversee the arrangement of promising morsels into coherent compositions. Even more daringly, they decided to let Greg Freeman, their long-suffering engineer, control his own mixing board. “The result was a much more cohesive sound than we'd ever gotten with our usual approach,” says TFUL282 multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Mark Davies. The Fellers’ 1994 tour saw the band in full flight bringing the Strangers material to their growing fanbase. Sharing bills with Matador labelmates Pavement and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion for more high-profile gigs, TFUL 282 tore through the US playing from coast to coast and sharing stages with kindred spirits the Sun City Girls, Fly Ashtray, and a host of regional bands...

Martha

Please Don’t Take Me Back

Dirtnap

Durham indiepop-punks Martha return with their fourth album, and it might just be their best one yet. With their endlessly radiant hooks dialed up to the maximum setting, paired with another heart-rending and relatable lyric sheet that reflects on the universal scars of the pandemic years, Please Don’t Take Me Back is the work of a band in the form of their life. It’s also an instant classic—one that’s both smartly prescient and warmly addictive. Recorded at Nottingham’s JT Soar by “Bad” Phil Booth (The Cool Greenhouse, Rattle, Grey Hairs), Please Don’t Take Me Back is a timely collection of deliciously catchy pop songs about “resisting the feeling that the good days are behind us.” Two things set these songs apart: firstly, the sense of resolution the band provide by working through these fears to find what positivity they can—making this the go-to record for any ongoing existential crisis in 2022. Secondly, there’s the effortless brilliance which ensures every melody cements itself to the memory from the very first listen to the album closer. One will hear echoes of The Housemartins, The Weakerthans, Cheap Trick and Heavenly in their sound, but ultimately it sounds like Martha found a way to turn their strongest features all the way to eleven. What better way to process the aftermath of the past two years?

Blacklist

Afterworld

Profound Lore

Blacklist is an atmospheric modern rock band whose music has been described as “anthemic” (The Guardian), “darkly erotic, strangely sensual” (The Village Voice) and “a much-needed anomaly in NYC’s music scene” (Other Music NYC). Starting out as the flagship band of artist Pieter Schoolwerth’s Wierd Records imprint, their trademark sound is dense and dark, incorporating elements of shoegaze and heavy metal with coldwave. The members often cite influences like My Bloody Valentine and Motörhead alongside bands like Comsat Angels, Killing Joke, and The Sound, while singer Joshua Strachan’s (Vaura) lyrics split the difference between the anthemic manifestos of Manic Street Preachers and Sisters of Mercy’s Vision Thing. Blacklist’s debut album, Midnight Of The Century—produced by Ed Buller (Suede, Pulp)—was released in 2009. The album’s main focus was a rejection of what Strachan described as a fear of looming new forms of fascism aided by the rise of various political and religious dogmas. After a long hiatus, the band returned in summer of 2020 with the “Disorder” single, inspired by the racial justice protests in the United States, and the b-Side “No Secret Islands,” which takes aim at the dystopian fantasies of tech billionaires. In April of 2022 “The Final Resistance” was announced as the lead single from their upcoming album Afterworld, due to be released in late autumn via Profound Lore Records. Post-punk.com called it a “captivating and dense explosion of coldwave and unfettered emotion,” and Brooklyn Vegan said it “picks up where the band left off with widescreen scope...

Nadja

Labyrinthine

Broken Spine

Nadja’s latest full-length offering Labyrinthine, recorded during the pandemic and concurrently with their Southern Lord album Luminous Rot, finally sees a CD release on the band’s own label, Broken Spine. Labyrinthine explores themes of identity and loss, monstrosity and regret, extreme asceticism, the differences between labyrinths and mazes, taking inspiration from Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore, Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Tombs Of Atuan, and Victor Pelevin’s reinterpretation of the story of the minotaur and Ariadne, The Helmet Of Horror. While this might be Nadja’s heaviest, doomiest album to date, it is unique in the band’s extensive catalogue as each track features a guest vocalist: Alan Dubin, legendary American vocalist from O.L.D., Khanate currently Gnaw; Rachel Davies, vocalist and bassist from the British band, Esben & The Witch; Lane Shi Otayanii, a Chinese multi-media artist and vocalist in Elizabeth Colour Wheel; and Dylan Walker, American vocalist from grindcore / noise band Full Of Hell. Nadja has released numerous albums on many different underground labels—Alien8 Recordings, Daymare Records, Robotic Empire, Hydrahead Records, Gizeh Records, and Important Records, to name a few. The duo has toured extensively around the world, including performances at such festivals as SXSW, FIMAV, Roadburn, Donaufest, Le Guess Who, Incubate, and Unsound, and has shared the stage with such artists as Earth, OM, Khanate, Tim Hecker, Ben Frost, and Godflesh.

Wand

Spiders In The Rain

Drag City

***Since 2014, Wand have made five albums (and an EP) in the studio and a living playing on the road. Business/pleasure: the two sides of their (multiverticed, decagon) coin, flipping in the strobe light of ongoing self actualization. And yet, by doing both at the same time—making a record of them playing live—they’ve now made their best one yet. How do you get Spiders In the Rain? Start by going all the way back to January 2020. Do you remember? Wand do. They’d been touring Laughing Matter for ten months. They’d done the coast, spanned the country, crossed the water twice, came back home and kept on going... driving, flying, occasionally floating (or maybe just thinking they were?), always on to the next town. They did all kinds of shows—clubs, ballrooms, festival gigs with no roof overhead—the songs expanding and contracting according to the dimensions of each day. Seventy-nine shows, and everything that was involved—the miles that ran beneath them, the different places and people everywhere, the music as it reathed, making everyone change every night—alchemized the band, and they drove deeper into their far horizon than they’d ever previously gone. The essential truth of the live vibe—that it’s always better when everybody’s here—was clear, so they booked a few shows more in Cali, from L.A. up to Marin. They brought along light and projections from The Mad Alchemist Liquid Light Show and Mike Kreibel and Zac Hernandez too, to tape everything—to get the big-deck energy out of performances in...

Bourbonese Qualk

Bourbonese Qualk

Mannequin

***Reissue, originally released in 1987. The self-named LP marked the fifth album and end of the first incarnation of Bourbonese Qualk. Julian Gilbert left the group after The Spike (1986) to concentrate on writing and theatre, leaving Steven Tanza and Simon Crab who parted ways after touring in Europe in early 1986 and recording this album. Steven Tanza went on to found the group The State and while Crab continued as Bourbonese Qualk (with the new line-up of Miles Miles, Crab and Owen If ), dissolved the Recloose Organisation label and founded New International as the outlet for future Bourbonese Qualk and Recloose Org releases. Bourbonese Qualk were an experimental music group from England, active from 1979 through 2003. They were always obsessively and uncompromisingly focused on controlling their work: they ran their own record label, recording studio, tour organization, and music venue (the notorious Ambulance Station). They refused to integrate into the commercial music racket and turned down publishing deals from major labels, stubbornly opting for total independence. They're also known for their political activism, formed in the crucible of 1980s Britain amid such influences as the UK miners' strike, The Falklands War, Thatcherism, monetarism, local government corruption, squatting, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, and anarchism. Their work was often ambiguous and directly critical of cynical power-politics of any color, often irritating members of the traditional organized left. In 1984 Bourbonese Qualk occupied a large empty building—The Ambulance Station—on the Old Kent Road in South London, which they turned into a base...

Bourbonese Qualk

The Spike

Mannequin

***Reissue, originally released in 1985. Bourbonese Qualk's third album The Spike was recorded during the period 1984-1985 and published by the Berlin based Dossier/Atonal label while Bourbonese Qualk were involved in organizing the Berlin Atonal festival. Parts of side two of the album is a recording of pieces made for a dance and film performance at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London in 1985. Bourbonese Qualk were an experimental music group from England, active from 1979 through 2003. They were always obsessively and uncompromisingly focused on controlling their work: they ran their own record label, recording studio, tour organization, and music venue (the notorious Ambulance Station). They refused to integrate into the commercial music racket and turned down publishing deals from major labels, stubbornly opting for total independence. They're also known for their political activism, formed in the crucible of 1980s Britain amid such influences as the UK miners' strike, The Falklands War, Thatcherism, monetarism, local government corruption, squatting, anti-capitalism, anti-fascism, and anarchism. Their work was often ambiguous and directly critical of cynical power-politics of any color, often irritating members of the traditional organized left. In 1984 Bourbonese Qualk occupied a large empty building—The Ambulance Station—on the Old Kent Road in South London, which they turned into a base for their activities, a cooperative space for artists, musicians, and writers, and a center for radical political activism -- specifically as a coordinating center for the Stop the City anti-capitalist riots of 1984. This is music as much for then and today,...

Arsene Obscene & The Loozers

Don't Pay The Price!

Mono-Tone

***Second killer album for this new band featuring previous members of legendary French garage and punk bands such as the Electric Mormons, Flaschen, Motarlozer, and Veines. Fast as the Ramones, raw as the early Saints, poppy as the Nerves, brief as The Briefs, and with that inimitable "French punk" touch. Fourteen songs, all except one under the two minutes tag, fourteen instant hits! Melodic and crude at the same time, ultra-energic and full of catchy hooks, Arsene Obscene's songs are the kind you sing under the shower and on the terraces.

Xyz

5 Stars EP

Mono-Tone

***Third record for the transatlantic duo XYZ (Ian Svenonius from Escape-ism, Chain & the Gang, The Make-Up) and Memphis Electronic (from the Dum Dum Boys / NON!). Fuzz guitars! Drum machines! Analog synths! Groovy glam! Sexy soul! Dancefloor rockers! Five hit singles of electronic glam rock/space soul on one 12".

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.

Hulder

(Color) Godslastering: Hymns Of A Forlorn Peasantry

20 Buck Spin

***ON LIMITED ULTRA CLEAR W/ BLACK SMOKE VINYL!!! On earlier releases Hulder introduced her musical vision in primal form but with a direct sense of grimly melodic intent. Yet it was on debut album Godslastering: Hymns Of A Forlorn Peasantry that Hulder’s distinct penchant for crafting harsh anthems of mystical, invigorating grandeur and abyssic depth began to fully congeal. Throughout the album Hulder weaves the threads of various black metal strands together taking elements of pagan folk, ethereal symphonic majesty and the scraping raw melodicism of the most discordant and ghastly kind. Godslastering paints a vivid picture of lurking medieval darkness and long forgotten lineages plagued by disease and poverty, constantly under threat of armored plunderers with ill intent. In 2021 Hulder began the transformation into a live entity with a full backing band. And while plans exist to take the band far and wide throughout the world, musically Hulder remains the singular vision of its sole creator. First released in late 2020, Godslastering now sees domestic release for the first time via 20 Buck Spin, the band’s new label home.

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.

Early Moods

Early Moods

Riding Easy

The self-titled full length debut of Los Angeles quintet Early Moods is a marriage of classic underground doom like Candlemass, Witchfinder General, Pentagram, Trouble and Saint Vitus, paired with traditional “big box” heavy metal melodies and song structure. These two contrasting aesthetics may seem incongruous, but the skilled musicianship of Early Moods—some of whom have played music together since their early teens—manages to find the perfect balance between grit and gloss. “From the beginning, the purpose for this band was to incorporate our love of traditional doom metal with a heavy metal approach,” guitarist Eddie Andrade says. “We wanted to show that heavy doom can be complemented with melodies and harmonies. Black Sabbath meets NWOBHM is what we aim for, really.” The band was founded in 2015 by Andrade and vocalist / keyboardist Alberto Alcaraz after a few years of playing in thrash and death metal projects before the two realized that the classic doom that they’d grown up with was what they really wanted to explore. Going through a few lineup changes while delving deeper into the diverging influences that were calling, Early Moods arrived at the sound and lineup that grew their fanbase locally. The band soon captured the attention of German label Dying Victim Productions, who released their debut EP, Spellbound in 2020. Early Moods is Oscar Hernandez on lead guitar, Chris Flores on drums, Elix Felciano on bass, Alcaraz on vocals / synth and Andrade on guitar. Early Moods was recorded at 7th Street Studios in...

Hammered Hulls

Careening

Dischord

***Hammered Hulls' debut LP, Careening, may very well be the last record to be recorded and mixed at the famed Washington, D.C. area recording studio, Inner Ear. Engineered by studio owner Don Zientara and produced by Ian MacKaye, Careening was started right before the pandemic lockdown and completed in summer/fall of 2021. A new band of long-time players, Hammered Hulls' music hews close to some of their early influences. Alec MacKaye is the voice, Mark Cisneros is the guitarist, Mary Timony takes a nimble and rarely-heard turn as bassist, and Chris Wilson commands the drums. Each of them bring their individual imprint to the total sound. This concussion of strength upon strength, unified by vulnerable songs, only barely contained, is the signature sound of Hammered Hulls.

V/a

Brown Acid - The Fifteenth Trip

Riding Easy

Lo and behold, Brown Acid - The Fifteenth Trip is here, and it’s another mind-melting dose of brilliant long-lost, rare, and unreleased hard rock, heavy psych, and proto-metal tracks from the ’60s -’70s. Riding Easy’s crate-digging mining expeditions, and growing network of the original artists keeps on giving with more and more incredible discoveries every time they go back for more. Like they’ve done throughout this series, all of these tracks were painstakingly licensed legitimately and the artists were paid. Make oneself comfortable and prepare for yet another deep, deep dive into the treasure trove of dank, subterranean, wild-eyed and hairy rock ’n’ roll of yesteryear. Some key examples include: As usual, this Trip opens strong, as “Take The Time” swaggers along with switchblade stabs of guitar twang and frantic drumming that sounds like Nick Cave’s ’80s post-punk barbarians The Birthday Party on this 1969 single from the mysterious Boston area band The Looking Glass. Negative Space toil in the dark web of The Seeds, and dwell in the mystic haze of working class suburbs in Camden, NJ circa 1970. Their angry, nasty guitar sounds and frustration-bogged frontman Rob Russen ensure that the aggro fueled “Forbidden Fruit”—in which he confesses his love for his sister-in-law—will hit one right in the face. Truth & Janey might be familiar from their 45-only “Midnight Horseman” single heard way back on the Sixth Trip, and / or their incredible 1976 album No Rest For The Wicked. Their super-driven soul leaning cover of “Under My...

Upupayama

Upupayama

Centripetal Force / Cardinal Fuzz

***Upupayāma is the musical persona of Alessio Ferrari, an Italian multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who lives in a small mountain village above the city of Parma. Upupayāma’s music is rooted strongly in Easternand Western folk traditions, an approach that Ferrari blends with his own modern sensibilities and style. In addition to playing guitar, bass, keyboards, and drums on the album, Ferrari himself also incorporates a number of other instruments into his sound, including sitar, erhu, transverse and wooden flutes, and avariety of percussion instruments. He is also responsible for all of the recording that went into the project. Ferrari is currently in the process of putting together a group of musicians that will help deliver his vision of Upupayāma to a live setting. Informed by the wonders of nature that surround him high in the Northern Apennine mountains, Ferrari’s songwriting possesses a mystical quality, one that reflects the fantastical and surreal, yet simple, elements of the natural world. His use of imagery is strong and is communicated vividly through his music. This isespecially clear in “The Blue Magician’s Fantasy” and “Hello Green Man, I am a Tiger,” both of which aresongs in which he sings with his own invented language. True to the sense of magical realism his songsevoke, Ferrari is quick to point out that even the concept of Upupayāma, which means mountain hoopoe, “is surreal because the hoopoe is not a mountain bird.” As he puts it, “I like the fact that a mountain hoopoe and an invented language...

Forno, Carla Dal

Come Around

Kallista

***Carla dal Forno resurfaces with the news of plans to release her third album, Come Around , via her own Kallista Records imprint. Now, based in the township of Castlemaine, Central Victoria, the Australian artist returns self-assured and firmly settled within the dense eucalypt bushlands. Dal Forno grapples with ideas of home, disorder and insomnia in the swift pop structures of her DIY/post-punk forebearers such as Young Marble Giants, Virginia Astley, and Broadcast. Three years since the launch of her label, Kallista Records, dal Forno finds stability in Castlemaine (pop. 6,750), her third home city in as many albums. After nearly a decade of moving, recording and touring out of Berlin and London, Come Around embodies a newfound solitude born of/in elemental pop hooks and enlightened songwriting.

Gold Dust

The Late Great Gold Dust

Centripetal Force

***Western Massachusetts musician STEPHEN PIERCE has used GOLD DUST as a means for exploring his next journey, slowly piecing together songs that held the fragile wonderment of the Grateful Dead, the weary beauty of Elliott Smith, the melancholic twang of the Byrds, and the otherworldly density of My Bloody Valentine while always reaching for hope and connectivity in a way that was universal. Neither the slow-to-form creative process of the first album nor the ambling pace often taken by Pierce’s thoughtful, dreamily damaged psychedelia points to rapid evolution, but that’s exactly what’s taking place on second album The Late Great Gold Dust. The themes of isolation and self-doubt that floated on the first album have sharpened, and the language around these difficult feelings have taken on a new clarity. Pierce’s songwriting has always held a distant sadness, but with The Late Great Gold Dust, the melancholy cuts through, feels more present and alive within the songs. There’s a muddy narrative arc to these twelve songs, getting more harrowing throughout the album’s second half as screams echo in the void until an exhausted sigh that sounds something like acceptance rises out of the murk. The Late Great Gold Dust steps into new dimensions musically as well. Pierce continues the layers of jangle, fuzz, and sunny vocal harmonies that made the first album equal parts tender and strange, but takes new risks with production, texture, and instrumentation. Pierce played every instrument and sang every vocal on the first album, and while he...

Upupayama

The Golden Pond

Centripetal Force / Cardinal Fuzz

***Upupayāma is the musical persona of Alessio Ferrari, an Italian multi-instrumentalist and songwriter who lives in a small mountain village above the city of Parma. Upupayāma’s music is rooted strongly in Eastern and Western folk traditions, an approach that Ferrari blends with his own modern sensibilities and style. In addition to playing guitar, bass, keyboards, and drums, Ferrari himself also incorporates a number of other instruments into his sound, including sitar, erhu, flute, and a variety of percussion instruments. For Ferrari, Upupayāma's 2020 debut was all about the journey. The album served a series of musical vignettes that visited and weaved its way through a succession magical settings. The Golden Pond, conversely, is all about location. Inspired by his frequent visits to a small lake near his mountain home, Ferrari intentionally focused on the details of the place he inhabited, a practice he decided would translate well with his approach to writing music. This is something Ferrari feels is best exemplified with the album's opening companion pieces, "Cuckoos from the House of Golden Tin" and "Entering the Time of Wilderness." The Golden Pond also continues Ferrari's practice of using "invented language" in his lyrics. Ferrari wants his voice to be heard as if it were an additional instrument, a tool that does not convey specific messages. His goal is to allow the listener to assign personal meaning to the music. He says, "I want my incorporating invented language is a way of breaking down the barriers that are sometimes created...

Lass, Katie

Hypnopomp

Happy Happy Birthday To Me

***Katie Lass is strong, strange, and on the taller side of medium height. She probably cuts her own hair, but it looks awesome. Katie Lass will make art whether you look at it or listen to it, or not. Lass lives and works in the general Detroit, Michigan area. She works in a record pressing plant, and once lived in Arizona working for a record plating plant. Like everyone these days, she has good taste. I didn’t ask her any questions about her life, because you’re going to want to do that yourself. It’s not often that we are presented with original works, which seem to slide in and out of time and to adhere to their own aesthetic rules. This is her first album, Hypnopomp, and it is really great music. Something obviously is different here; after a few listens, the beautiful catchy stuff reveals itself. It’s perhaps like the first time you eat “real” licorice. When Warren Defever of His Name Is Alive and Third Man Mastering first heard this music, he raved. Warren is a friend and he knew I like Katie’s art work, as I’d run it in my magazine Maggot Brain. He doesn’t rave about much. “This music is wonderful; it’s completely insane,” he said after Katie first gave him her home recordings. I asked him just now what he meant and what he thinks of it and he said after spending the time doing whatever it is that mastering guys do, and he remarked...

Impugner

Advent of the Wretched

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Mysterious Norwegian death metal cult Impugner reissue their debut mini-album Advent of the Wretched worldwide (with new art and master) on CD via Sentient Ruin and on cassette tape via Caligari Records, after a limited self release tape had surfaced in Norway via the band back in 2021. "Advent of the Wretched" brings us back to the early and formative years of death metal when bands like Autopsy, Death, Pungent Stench, Nihilist, and Darkthrone in their Soulside Journey era were issuing their first works and laying the groundwork for what would become the perfect symbiosis between the gruesome morbidity and the executional excellence which has made death metal so loved and revered thereafter throughout the decades. In the same manner, and with a strong emphasis on traditionalism and timelessness, on this already iconic debut offering Impugner unfold a masterful slab of arcane-sounding death metal oozing with schizoid atmospheres, a putrid production quality and a demented prog-derived songwriting highly reminiscent of Morbus Chron, Obliteration, or of the founding masters mentioned above. The choice of using art for the work licensed from the Edvard Munch estate in Norway is just another sign of this band's insanely tasteful vision and of its deliberate approach in crafting the death metal art which favors a sense of timelessness, unpredictability and a strict adherence to its primordial strengths and vision of it being, and remaining, a timeless art of the absurd.

Girls In Synthesis

The Rest Is Distraction

Own It

***Experimental post-punk outfit Girls In Synthesis are set to release the eagerly anticipated follow-up to 2020's incendiary debut, Now Here's An Echo From Your Future. Entitled The Rest Is Distraction and available via the band's own label Own It, its mix of fractured guitar, crushing drums and bass, intense vocals and lyrical content create as challenging a record as you will hear this year. Formed in 2016, Girls In Synthesis are John Linger (bass, vocals), Jim Cubitt (guitar, keys), and Nicole Pinto (drums). The trio's double A-sided debut single The Mound/Disappear came out in the early part of 2017, and since then they have established themselves as the most forward thinking, viscerally challenging band around with unmissable live shows that continue to excite and astound in equal measure. Recorded last year amidst the uncertainty of continuous lockdowns as a result of the global Covid-19 pandemic, The Rest Is Distraction is far darker in content than its predecessor. Mainly exploring internal and mental struggles as opposed to external current affairs, it focuses on the claustrophobia of emotional anguish and continues to bravely delve into previously un-ventured topics. Featuring frequent collaborators funkcutter and Stanley Bad on horns and violin, respectively, two songs also see Eleni Poulou , ex-The Fall, on keyboards. The album was mixed by long-term collaborator Max Walker and features stunning landscape photography by Bea Dewhurst. Sonically atramentous and less one dimensional than the band's debut, The Rest Is Distraction takes its cues from Join Hands-era Siouxsie & The Banshees,...

Forbidden Overture

Turned On!

Dark Entries

The master sleuths at Dark Entries bring us Forbidden Overture, another tantalizing mystery from the hidden depths of sleaze. It all began years ago when Bijou Video’s Jules Zinn introduced the label to the soundtracks of the pornographic films of legendary filmmaker Steve Scott and gay superstar Al Parker. It wasn’t until The Magazine’s Bob Mainardi gifted a cassette copy of the soundtrack to the film Turned On!—a bathhouse fantasy from 1982—that the wheels started turning. The steamy, hypnotic sounds were credited only to “Forbidden Overture…” but who was that? This question remained unanswered for some time, and countless hours of research, Venn diagramming, and elaborate flow charts all proved fruitless. It wasn’t until a chance screening of Bad Girls Dormitory, a 1986 women-in-prison movie from gay porn director Joe Gage that happened to reuse some of the same music did the answer become clear: Forbidden Overture was none other than the mighty Man Parrish!​ The soundtrack to Turned On! consists of two epic side-long pieces, both of which employ classic Man Parrish production techniques. “Primal Overture” slinks along with brooding pads and ominous chords, building and oozing throughout its 27 minute runtime like a sultrier Goblin soundtrack. “Strictly Forbidden” takes a similar groove to a major key, but it’s optimistic chirp conceals a wry, mysterious wink. Says director Steve Scott: “It took us about two weeks to find the right piece for the jockstrap scene. But it's like anything else—you know when it’s right.” Turned On! is an exciting...

Redshift

Worst Timeline Possible

Boss Tuneage

***REDSHIFT is the latest band from US hardcore legend VIC BONDI. From being a founding member of political Chicago punk band ARTICLES OF FAITH, to his later bands ALLOY and JONES VERY to later solo releases and more recent projects REPORT SUSPICIOUS ACTIVITY and DEAD ENDING, Bondi has been one of the most influential figures in the US punk scene for over four decades. Worse Timeline Possible, is the debut release by his latest band, Redshift, and features Bondi teaming with bassist MICHAEL CATTS and drummer ADAM GROSS, coupling powerful punk with a twisted Dick Dale / Link Wray inspired surf edge. LP includes a bonus CD version.

Nace, Bill

Through a Room

Drag City

***"Bill Nace’s Through a Room represents a seismic progression from Both, his startling 2020 debut solo LP for Drag City. Nace’s career has been defined by a relentless probing of ways to frame the complex menu of human emotions, and that the guitar has been his primary tool for exploring this terrain is of little consequence. On this new release, he also employs tapes, hurdy gurdy, doughnut pipe, quelle est belle, as well as his latest instrument of choice, taishōgoto. This is also, ultimately, insignificant. What matters is the discerning spirit which animates his work. The tracks are carefully built from loops and phrases that talk to each other, subsume one another, overlapping and crashing and diving and expanding and emerging into unimagined vistas..."—Matt Krefting

Vantzou, Christina

No5

Kranky

While on the island of Syros in the Aegean Sea for a film festival performance, Christina Vantzou experienced what she characterized as “a moment of focus”—a specific vision for the sprawl of raw recordings she’d been amassing for her fifth album. Upon relocating to the Cycladic island of Ano Koufonisi, she situated herself outside at a patio table with a laptop and headphones, taking brief breaks to swim, and began the “reductive process” of shaving and shaping the source material into uneasy but lyrical movements, alternately austere and adorned with strange inflections: glottal groaning, cavernous water, glittering eddies of modular synth, languorous silences. Mixing the pieces herself without outsourcing to an engineer compounded the intimacy and autobiographical dimension of the music; she refers to Nº5 as “almost like a first album.” Drawing on sessions staged in February 2020, Vantzou’s editing instincts emphasize process and isolation, spotlighting resonance and restraint, liquidity and long tails. Fleeting configurations of piano, wind, strings, synthetics, and field recordings, these are spaces as much as compositions, surreal grottos of shifting light, suffused with a sense of invisible divinity. Although seventeen musicians appear on the record, the proceedings feel minimalist and malleable, sculpted from interstitial moments and oblique synchronicities. The definition of a composer as “one who joins things” is here both plumbed and proven; Vantzou describes Nº5 as “a letting go,” a place of “soft borders,” unfixed and undefinable.

Dumb

Pray 4 Tomorrow

Mint

DUMB had a classic start as a DIY outfit back in 2015, playing their first shows in the dining room of a tear-down in east Vancouver. The four band members, Franco Rossino, Shelby Vredik, Pipe Morelli, and Nick Short, were all part of a larger group of friends that jammed and partied together often. Seven years later, the band is set to release their third LP with Mint Records, Pray 4 Tomorrow—self-recorded at Choms, a studio co-owned by Nick Short and Franco Rossino. DUMB has toured extensively in North America and Europe, played with Wolf Parade and Dilly Dally, and are known for their catchy punk rhythms, squealing guitar feedback, and strongly spoken lyrics. Over the years DUMB’s songwriting has developed, and on Pray 4 Tomorrow their pop sensibilities manage to shine through the dissonant tones and syncopated rhythms borrowed from Yo La Tengo and Devo. Consider “Excuse me”, which finds a Beach Boys-esque melody placed gently atop the drop-tuned dissonance of Rossino and Short’s duelling guitars, or “Gibberish”—a heavy hitting post-punk bop that culminates in a melodic instrumental piano outro. DUMB is doing their best to balance their noisier tendencies with pretty melodies, in an approach similar to San Francisco’s Pardoner. Rossino’s vocals have matured from abstract rambling towards nuanced commentary, often poking fun at his own self-righteous attitude towards the stress of living in the information age. In “Out of Touch”, Rossino yells “I can see you talking but it sounds like simulations, I’m not sure I’ve got...

Dream Unending

Song Of Salvation

20 Buck Spin

The 2021 Dream Unending debut album Tide Turns Eternal was a marked shift in musical ambition for Derrick Vella (Tomb Mold) and Justin DeTore (Innumerable Forms, Sumerlands). While structured with a foot firmly in death / doom, a far loftier purpose and progressivism was its hallmark, as such distancing itself from others pursuing the style. Now returning only a year later with the stunning Song Of Salvation, that exploratory zeal is given substantially greater allowance to soar and shine. The fourteen minute title-track opener enters like a morning sunrise over a calm sea before ramping up into ethereal heaviness like the richly textured waves of a sudden ocean storm. The songs momentum never retreats into laborious repetition, always opening new doorways, ebbing and flowing like river water from its source. Like solitarily gazing at the downtown lights of the city at night from the window of a darkened room, “Secret Grief” features the guest talents of vocalist Phil Swanson and Leila Abdul-Rauf on trumpet. The tranquil interlude of “Murmur Of Voices” gives way to the evocative “Unrequited” that begins with a lonely solo guitar before transitioning into a drifting daze of afternoon reverie and subconscious meditation. Finally comes the album’s epic bookend, sixteen minute closer “Ecstatic Reign.” It features perhaps the album’s heaviest straight doom moments along with the return of Tide Turns Eternal featured guest voices McKenna Rae and Richard Poe. Tomb Mold drummer / throat Max Klebanoff also appears for a shattering back and forth vocal...

Drowse

Wane Into It

Flenser

In 2019, Drowse’s Kyle Bates set out to produce a self-recorded new album. Marked by moving across state lines, long-distance relationships, and deaths in the family, the following years proved to be metamorphic. Now, three years later, he’s emerged with Wane Into It, continuing a distinctly Pacific Northwestern tradition of self-recording indie experimentalists (Grouper, The Microphones, Unwound’s Leaves Turn Inside You). One of the most impactful moments came during the looming passing of a family member. With death expected, the choice was made to conduct a bizarre “living-wake” gathering—with the soon-to-be-deceased in attendance. Shortly after, Bates found himself disturbed, preoccupied with the abstraction of memory. The experience led him to reassess the tool one uses to curate our selective memories: the internet. The internet, which creeped into even more aspects of life during the pandemic, serves as our self-made digital link to the past. Its uncaring presence layered over humbling thoughts of death and his own childhood memories of the Oregon Coast as he worked on Wane Into It; life’s hyperreal texture sank into the recordings as he felt his body age and wane. Big sounds were captured in bedrooms, hallways, practice spaces, forests, and on highways throughout West Coast—vibraphones chime over black metal guitars, a mellotron drones under degraded samples, violins splinter against granular field recordings. In the process of documenting these aural moments Bates completed an MFA at Mills College, coloring the album with shades of avant-electronic and minimalist composition (Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Maryanne Amacher, Sarah Davachi...

Delivery

Forever Giving Handshakes

Feel It

Both broadening and defying the sounds of their first two 7” releases, Delivery continue their claim for the title of hardest and fastest working band in town on their debut full length LP ‘Forever Giving Handshakes’. Collecting songs written over the Melbourne five-piece’s two year lifespan and following on from the band’s bedroom project origins of ‘Yes We Do’ and the expanded one-two punch of ‘Personal Effects/The Topic’, ‘Forever Giving Handshakes’ captures Delivery at full force for the first time, leaning into the fully-realised live sound they’ve been quite actively working on since their first show in March 2021. Here the band collate a 12-track garage-punk opus, their five distinct voices simultaneously pulling songs in different directions while an undeniable chemistry reveals a combined hive mind ascending on a clear group mission… to rock. If you didn’t have the Delivery phenomenon yet, you’re about to. Marking the beginning of a victory lap for Delivery, the album rounds out a sprint of unrelenting live shows, impressive support slots and two stellar 7”s, all within a tidy 18 months. ‘Forever Giving Handshakes’ is a statement from Delivery and one of the strongest Australian punk debut albums of the past decade.

Strychnos

A Mother's Curse

Dark Descent

Danish extreme metal veterans Strychnos reveal their long-awaited debut A Mother’s Curse on Colorado Springs’ Dark Descent Records... Formed in 1997 by Martin Leth Andersen (also of Undergang fame), Strychnos might just be the Danish underground’s best kept secret. A Mother’s Curse is the product of a craft perfected over twenty-five years of toil, a true celebration of extreme metal mastery that surpasses all genre limitations. “We are proud to finally present eight tracks of pitch-black death metal tragedy as it was always intended to be: dark, atmospheric, brutal, and tragic!” exclaims Andersen. The intricately sculpted compositions shift seamlessly between moods of terror, hope, and tragedy, building a momentous atmosphere rarely achieved in this day and age. Add to this the inventive riffing and bone-shattering vocals of the highest order and the result is A Mother’s Curse. The truly complete work is wrapped in stunning cover by the inimitable Daniel Corcuera: “The chilling motif is based on Danish sculptor Niels Hansen Jacobsen’s statue Death And The Mother from 1892, depicting a young woman in the moment of ultimate tragedy. Jacobsen was inspired by the ending of The Tale Of A Mother, a story written in 1847 by famous author Hans Christian Andersen: ‘And Death walked with her child into the unknown land.’ ”

TISM

Collected Versus: The Complete TISM Singles

Seeland

In its twenty-year career, Australian band TISM became possibly the most notorious band in their country’s history, mixing the satire of Frank Zappa, the art-project long-game of the Residents, the songwriting chops and wit of Sparks, and the culture-jamming panache of Negativland. Now, forty years after forming and eighteen years after their last gig, an unsuspecting America can finally enjoy the pop-dance-satire band from Oz they never knew they were missing, as experimental music label Seeland Records proudly presents the TISM singles collection Collected Versus in a 2CD set that brings their greatest “hits” to U.S. audiences for the first time. TISM albums such as Great Truckin’ Songs Of The Renaissance, Hot Dogma, Machiavelli And The Four Seasons, and De Rigueurmortis became chart hits while the band wowed live audiences with a series of absurd performance art happenings that inspired equal parts head-banging and stage-diving, danger and glee, laughs and total confusion. Born of the early-1980s music scene of suburban Melbourne, the band was a hit onstage and on the pop charts, with the seven men of TISM remaining anonymous for decades. Performing in balaclavas and rocking stage names like Humphrey B. Flaubert, Jock Cheese, Eugene de la Hot Croix-Bun, and Ron Hitler-Barassi, their provocative live shows became the stuff of legend, as they blasted their fans with infectiously catchy guitar-laden electro-pop leavened with bottomless cynicism and dark laughs. Career highlights included appearing on a children’s TV show to promote their song “Saturday Night Palsy” and gradually increasing the size...

Dawn Riding

You're Still Here

Speakeasy Studios SF

In San Francisco’s Mission District, there’s a Victorian house with a garden full of towering tobacco flowers and rose vines so thick they’re pulling down the fence. Every Sunday, for a great span of 2021, songwriter Sarah Rose Janko would join producer and engineer Alicia Vanden Heuvel (Aislers Set, Magic Trick) there, to play guitar, sing harmonies, and hum lines for other instruments, before retreating to Vanden Heuvel’s basement recording studio (Speakeasy Studios SF), to roll tape on her Otari half-inch 8-track. This is how, week by week, Dawn Riding’s new record You’re Still Here, was chipped out of the ethereal and into an expansive album of meticulously crafted and deeply captivating songs. It’s an album steeped in intimacy and warmth, each song built with a level of restraint that leaves room for Jankos’s quietly fierce vocals and her powerful songwriting to sit front and center. Nothing is rushed and each song is presented almost as a vignette: some with so much stillness one can feel the relationships, some that build from the heart’s interior solitude into swells of emotional catharsis. Above all, the album drives and breathes with storytelling. You’re Still Here marks Dawn Riding’s third full-length album, dropping this November as a co-release between The Long Road Society and Speakeasy Studios SF, two women-owned Bay Area record labels, a fitting arrangement considering that the album’s creation was deeply collaborative. The credits reveal a wealth of Bay Area musicians lending their talents, with multi-instrumentalist Vanden Heuvel acting as producer...

Howlin Rain

Under The Wheels Vol 5: Live From Pioneertown, Ca

Silver Current

Coming in hot for the final show of the crazy year of 2021 and with an impressive new line up, Howlin Rain hit Pappy & Harriet’s in Pioneertown California full of adrenalized confidence, deep grooves and their signature, expansive guitarmony-laden jams. Captured on multi-track, Live From Pioneertown is Howlin Rain’s highest fidelity live album since 2014’s Live Rain. This latest entry to the Under The Wheels live series showcases songs from The Dharma Wheel as well as two fan favorites from 2008’s Magnificent Fiend. Available in a vinyl one-time “handmade” edition of 500, all jackets screen-printed by Monolith Press and signed and numbered by Howlin Rain bandleader Ethan Miller, also available on CD and digital.

Fall-Outs

Fine Young Men

Hex Enduction

***The first ever recording by the great & much-loved Seattle punk and/or garage and/or rock n’ roll and/or mod band the Fall-Outs released on Hex Enduction Records! Originally released as an 8-song cassette by Green Monkey Records in 1986. This new LP release has been augmented with two unheard songs from the same session. Remixed & remastered by Kurt Bloch, plus fancy new artwork with photos from the time & liner notes written by the band. The Fall-Outs would go on to record classic records for Steve Turner of Mudhoney’s Super Electro Sound Recordings & Estrus Records run by Dave Crider from the Mono Men as well as a number of top notch 7”s for various other labels.

Trost, Heather

Desert Flowers

Ba Da Bing!

As Heather Trost put together her new album Desert Flowers, she imagined herself sitting out on the mesa amidst the arid climate and sand. Even with such little water to survive, wildflowers bloom. This vision is an embellishment of Trost’s Albuquerque surroundings, an intersection of rural splendor and emptiness. She remains focused on those purple, yellow and orange flowers with faces beaming up to the sky, thriving on very little. “How does a flower grow in the desert?” she sings. Desert Flowers postulates the potential for new life. Using the messages from the unconscious during sleep, the record ultimately conceives a bridge to the world beyond one’s own. Written and recorded in her home studio, Trost began with harmonic frameworks, allowing the melodies to naturally take root. Introductory track “Frog And Toad Are Friends”—yes, named after the book—is like a surf song from a sci-fi movie. Trost sees it as a mindwipe, “a playful kind of romp to help shake off the cobwebs and get the bones moving.” The album ripens as it progresses, and “Sandcastles” best embodies the spirit of the record. Lush strings and bass are complimented by a slow guitar groove, as Trost soulfully fantasizes about Earth’s regeneration. “In time, the bullets and tanks, and all of humanity’s violent creations will melt back into mountains and the ocean,” she says. Integral to the record’s creation was Trost’s cohort in A Hawk & A Hacksaw and record label Living Music Duplication, Jeremy Barnes. “This album wouldn’t sound the...

Nichunimu

Un Cacho de Metal, Un Resto de Vaiven

577 Records

***NICHUNIMU is a Chilean improvisational trio working at the edges of free jazz, ritualism, noise, minimalism and krautrock music. Since 2014, Benjamin Vergara (Trumpet), Nicolás Carrasco (Synthesizer) and Matías Mardones (Percussion) have been inspired by repetition, textures and friendship through the sound, focusing on circular shapes in music that bind them together. Based between the cities of Valdivia and Santiago, their members have also collaborated on projects like La Kut, Cariñito 3, Dubitativos, representing a substantial part of Chile’s experimental scene in the last 20 years. On this project, Un Cacho de Metal, Un Resto de Vaivén, which was recorded the day after their performance at Relincha Festival, the trio was again inspired by patterns of circularity and repetition, tending towads sweet sounds like on “Entrechócanse,” darker affect on “Suplidos,” and experimental noise music on the opening track “Cachos.” Their music, eternally youthful, gracefully combines acoustic and electronic effects.

Lunsford, Kilyn

Custodians Of Human Succession

Ever / Never

***Philadelphia’s Kilynn Lunsford had been conceiving her first solo album since she was a young teen. Growing up through the MTV era of Missy Elliot, Timbaland and the Swing Mob collective, and drawn towards its “sometimes ridiculous, but overloaded” qualities, she found herself returning to that state of emerging adulthood when the moment for a solo record finally arose. The image of Britney Spears being recorded in an empty field somewhere in her native West-Philly—“like Alan Lomax recording Betty Boop near the Delaware water gap”—provided a key 'mental mood image’ for what would eventually become Custodians of Human Succession. As if Blackout was re-imagined by Throbbing Gristle, Lunsford’s debut straddles unclear boundaries between electro-pop, post-punk and the avant-garde; it delves into those liminal spaces between pop culture and experimentalism, between city and country, between verse and chorus. Written over four years, drafted during long car rides from work, hewn out first thing in the morning or last thing at night Custodians…is Lunsford’s first work since the dissolution of her former project, noise-punk outfit Taiwan Housing Project in 2021. Being now uninhibited by the democratic needs of a band writing and jamming in the practise-room, choosing to ‘go solo’ liberated her songbuilding process. While some arrangements would be hammered out for weeks, sometimes it was a loose, “off-the-cuff” take that could make the final cut: “Wanting to combine irreconcilable elements”, Lunsford explains, “we would set up for hours and then do one take, always allowing for the aleatoric to come through”.

Soulside

A Brief Moment in the Sun

Dischord

***Soulside formed in Washington, DC, in 1985, split up in 1989, then reformed in 2014 and has continued playing and writing music since then. After releasing their debut album on Sammich/Dischord, they recorded Trigger (Dischord, 1988) and Hot Bodi-Gram (Dischord, 1989), which were combined on the Soon Come Happy CD in 1990. The band toured extensively in the US and Europe during these years, including groundbreaking shows in Poland and East Berlin shortly before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. In 2020, Soulside put out a new 7-inch, This Ship, their first release in 30 years, which was recorded in Prague. In late 2022, Dischord will release a 12-song Soulside album, A Brief Moment in the Sun, which was written during the heart of the coronavirus pandemic and recorded in person by J. Robbins in November 2021.

Rider / Horse

Feed 'Em Salt

Ever / Never

One hundred miles north of New York City is a post-industrial hardscrabble up-and-down town called Kingston that currently lies somewhere in-between. Kingston is where Rider/Horse came to exist, and where they now call home. Before the Rider/Horse team-up, Cory played guitar and sang in Spray Paint, while Chris was a hired gun for the likes of Trans Am, Les Savy Fav and Scene Creamers.

Real McKenzies

Songs of the Highlands Songs of the Sea

Fat Wreck Chords

***Founded in 1992 by the larger than life, Scottish punk-rock poet laureate, Mr. Paul McKenzie, this merry band of miscreants has spent a quarter-century circumnavigating the globe to bring the McKenzies gospel to an ever-expanding throng of rebels and scallywags With their latest offering, one thing stands out immediately: You already know these songs. Even if you’ve never been to Scotland, even if you’re not a seafaring type, you know them. That’s because the twelve anthems—and make no mistake, these are anthems—The Real McKenzies have picked for this new album have been sung by others for decades, if not centuries. A dual celebration of Scottishness and the band, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, Songs of the Highland, Songs of the Sea is comprised entirely of famous traditional sea shanties that are roughly divided, as the record’s title suggest, between land and sea. And even though the idea for the album was initially proposed by guitarist Mario Nieva, these songs speak to frontman Paul McKenzie’s heritage as well as who he is, and who he always has been. Some might have been written long before he was born, but these are still his stories, wound inextricably into his life experiences. Whether a lifelong fan of The Real McKenzies, a seafaring dreamer, or simply a fan of the simple sing-along lullaby, Songs of the Highland, Songs of the Sea is sure to become an instant catalog favorite.

Climax Golden Twins

Climax Golden Twins

Fire Breathing Turtle

***The first new Climax Golden Twins record in many years. Founded in 1993 by Robert Millis and Jeffery Taylor, Climax Golden Twins is perhaps best known for the soundtrack to Session Nine (directed by Brad Anderson in 2001, original soundtrack on Milan International). CGT have released ambient recordings (Lovely on Anomalous Records), compilations of rare 78rpm shellac records (the Victrola Favorites book on Dust-to-Digital), field recording, collage, and musique concrète experiments (Dream Cut Short in the Mysterious Clouds on the Japanese Meme label), and instrumental rock, noise, and improv (5 Cents A Piece on Abduction Records and Imperial Household Orchestra on Scratch). Their new double-LP continues many of these threads and features contributions by friends from Seattle's vibrant music scene and beyond including Alan and Richard Bishop (Sun City Girls ), Ko Ishikawa (master Japanese sho player), Greg Kelley (extended trumpet technique specialist), Porest (Sublime Frequencies' Mark Gergis), members of Kinski, Diminished Men, the A Frames, Dreamsalon, and more. The last official Climax Golden Twins release of new sounds was 2008's Journal of Popular Noise. In the years since, CGT composed the score to the film Chained (directed by Jennifer Chambers Lynch in 2012), united with Seattle's A Frames to record a few LPs as AFCGT (including one on Sub Pop), released further Victrola Favorites cassettes and CDs, and continued to perform live. In addition, Jeffery Taylor plays with the improv outfits Hound Dog Taylor's Hand and Spider Trio, while Robert Millis has released solo recordings, pursued installation and sound...

Antiseen

The Dawn of Antiseen 1984 - 1986

Bang

***Witness the sonic evolution of Antiseen with these tracks, originally released on their mid-80s EPs and now all together for the first time on vinyl. Newly remastered and with previously unreleased photography, this is the "Kings of Destructo-Rock" at their most primal! According to Jeff Clayton's words: "What you have here is a collection of the earliest releases of a band made up mostly of small southern town guys trying to make a name for themselves in the 'big city'. With little help or guidance (with the exception of a few very influential cases) we created what became our sound and our attitude that would stay with us for four decades. Come hear the Dawn Of Antiseen." Edition of 600.

Kill Devil Hills, The

The Drought

Bang

***Killer reissue of the second album by The Kill Devil Hills, The Drought, originally recorded in November 2005, where the band goes toward dirtier and rawer sounds. The band continues in the direction of their first work, Heathen Songs, but adds dirtier nuances and rock. If in the first album you could mention Nick Cave and Hugo Race as influences, in this second one you can easily add The Beasts Of Bourbon to the list of influences, when listening to some of the rawest songs of it. This gang of animals from Perth, Australia, take their swampy folk-blues and take it to a new world of more extreme and wild sounds where melodies and violins create a wall of sound that involuntarily forces you to listen. After their successful tours of Australia and America, The Kill Devil Hills released this album in which they showed you that they were not "the next big thing", they were really a great band with overwhelming live shows. A key band and a pillar of the new emerging and ardent scene that has once again made Australia a hotbed of creativity. Bang! Records returns to edit this band, and as usual, with the quality Bang! Edition of 500.

Alien Nosejob

Stained Glass

Total Punk

Much loved, relentless rocker, Jake Robertson is back yet again with the next instalment of his ridiculously productive solo project, Alien Nosejob. Jake’s got a brand-new bag of tricks and I ain’t gonna beat around the bush; it sounds like AC/DC! Stained Glass may be his finest and most stylistically suited work to date. Ironically, and to quote his own sarcastic lyrics from the album’s second track, he definitely fits this shoe. Not only does Jake have the high-pitched pipes while many others don’t (obviously a vital part in this sound), but the guitar chops to pull off the sweet, sustained lead breaks of this particular style. And he does so in great fashion as you’ll be made immediately aware from the scorching solo on album opener, “Beatles vs, Stones”. Trust Jake to write a song with that title! But alas! it’s not all Bon Scott’s and Angus Young’s. Some Rikk Agnew guitar lines shine through on album closer, "Mouldy Dough". "Shuffle Boogie" marks Jake’s first ever stab at the shuffle backbeat - which he says is him knicking from Rose Tattoo what they knicked from AC/DC - but it also kinda sounds like a sped up Jean Genie or some lost Bowie boog. "RNR Rubbish Bin" stomps its way through five minutes of electrified solo’s and witty lyrics. Even Brian Johnston makes an appearance on the Ausmuteants sequel, “Coastal Living 2”; about growing up on the NSW Central Coast. The bulk (backing tracks) of Stained Glass were recorded by...

Childese

Minor Eden

Not Not Fun

The music of St. Petersburg keyboard fantasist Vova Kolbin aka Childese fuses reverie and melancholy in a wobbly mirage of memory, tape hiss, field recordings, and cosmic church organ: welcome to Minor Eden. Inspired by a particularly idyllic childhood summer spent in a dilapidated country house with his fisherman father, the album feels dazed and suffused with longing and wonder, nostalgic for early mornings out on the lake, dawn light streaking the sky. Kolbin describes his process as a form of magical realism, at the threshold of new age and hypnagogia, shaping sound like a funhouse mirror. This is devotional music in its truest sense, in thrall to times enshrined and things past, to golden ages and paradises lost, the hourglass of youth forever spilling softly in a dream half-remembered.

Frunk29

The Fifth Season

Not Not Fun

Moscow multi-instrumentalist Marat Shainsky aka Frunk29’s newest opus of bedroom Balearica birthed in a room with a view: trees, rolling hills, and a mountainous, majestic landfill (“It looks like Fujiyama in winter – or how I imagine it”). Stirred by a muse he describes as “magical and foggy,” he began crafting soft-focus fusions of 4th world electronica and sunrise shoegaze with synthesizers, 5-string bass, and a thrifted Phil Pro electric guitar. The Fifth Season floats between warm and wavy, hang gliding above windswept fields and glittering harbors. It’s music of vistas both seen and felt, looming in the distance and hidden in the heart.

Tokio Ono

Individuals

Not Not Fun

Yokohama multi-instrumentalist Tokio Ono’s debut is a collection of 13 confinement compositions woven from field recordings, percussion, various keys, samples, and a sense of being far away. He characterizes it as a type of “island music” – isolated but introspective, fueled by fleeting dreams of “the space between.” Like some surrogate 4th world travel brochure, Individuals spans a 50-minute map of emerald atolls, shimmering bays, and fog-shrouded isles, equal parts dislocated and devotional. Shuffling rhythms tip-toe, shape-shift, and spiral through tropical temples and whispering villages, attuned to innerspace horizons forever unfolding and indivisible: “Differences don’t separate, but bound all things and people in one individuality.”

Mela, Francisco Feat. Cooper-Moore And William Parker

Music Frees Our Souls Vol. 2

577 Records

***Can music liberate us? Francisco Mela, who worked and partnered with the legendary jazz musician McCoy Tyner, believes so. On this album, the second volume of Music Frees Our Souls, Mela collaborates with pianist Cooper-Moore and bassist William Parker to build a 2-part extended track project of advanced dialogue between 3 of the genre's most important instruments. Tyner was well-known for his boundless musical talent, and perhaps best-known for playing in John Coltrane’s quartet, which revolutionized the jazz world and fundamentally influenced the music world at large. Despite his indelible, wide-reaching impact on experimental jazz, it was Tyner’s mentorship that truly touched Francisco Mela: Tyner encouraged him to explore the boundaries of both his personal expression and his musical ability, affirming the philosophical conviction that music was a gateway to liberation. This album is again dedicated to Tyner’s mentorship and encouragement, suggesting we all embrace experimentation and musical freedom. This second volume/album will be available on limited edition dark red vinyl (100 copies), black vinyl, CD, or download in January 2023. Music Frees Our Souls Vol. 3 is also planned for release in the near future.

Coultrain

MUNDUS

Positive Elevation

Musician A.M. Frison, known mononymously as Coultrain, is well-known for his experimental, psychedelic and world-building music. Coultrain is an esteemed experimental artist and active member of 577 Records’ sub-label, Positive Elevations, which is dedicated to electronic experimentation and avant soul. On MUNDUS, Coultrain overlays spoken word performance and his honeyed voice over smooth soul-inspired instrumentation, gentle snare and electronic melodies. The result is a lyrically-focused album that emphasizes Coultrain’s singularity as a musician and poet in equal parts. Considered by the artist to be a natural sequel to Phantasmagoria (577 Records, 2021), it's a further demonstration of his far-reaching talent.

Magnetic Fields

House of Tomorrow (reissue)

Merge

***Cast your mind back to notable landmarks of 1992. Outside the Twin Cities, Mall of America opened to the public. Frank Gehry’s enormous golden fish sculpture, El Peix, welcomed Barcelona Olympians. And The House of Tomorrow, a four-song 7-inch on a small indie label, ushered in a new era for The Magnetic Fields. When Susan Anway, who sang on early albums Distant Plastic Trees and The Wayward Bus, left the group, Stephin Merritt stepped up to the microphone. He sought to sound simple, subtle, and unobtrusive, à la the Japanese concept of shibusa. Likewise, the arrangements and production of The House of Tomorrow felt less polished overall than on its predecessors, even as the band’s sound was evolving. Newly remastered and available as a 12-inch for the first time.

Coachwhips

Bangers Vs. Fuckers

Castle Face

Feeling listless? Falling asleep behind the wheel? Need a soundtrack for your backyard Fight Club (with the lucky possibility of a muddy mid-fight kiss)? We have just the thing: a fully re-spruced version of the Coachwhips’ classic LP, Bangers Vs. Fuckers.  If you’re unfamiliar, this record may be the loudest thing ever put to tape. Weasel Walter’s mastering job is more of an act of terrorism than anything else but it perfectly captures the intensity of seeing them live in, say, your bathroom. This record right here is Coachwhips at their bloody-nosed best, way past in the red, shoving white-hot heart-attack anthems like “You Gonna Get It,” “Evil Son” and “Thee Alarm” straight through your reptilian brain and into the sweaty crowd behind you. Essential listening for anyone with a pulse and a chip on their shoulder.  Remastered and recut at 45 RPM for maximum blunt force. We found the artwork all beat up but we nursed it back to health. It’s never been louder, clearer or more fun than this, and it’s out on Castle Face Records.

Drones, The

Wait Long By The River And Bodies Of Your Enemies

Bang

***Acclaimed second album by The Drones finally reissued by Bang! Records, originally released in 2005. Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By draws influence from the likes of Neil Young and The Birthday Party, though it has been described by lead singer/guitarist Gareth Liddiard himself as a punk rock album. The lyrics, penned by Liddiard, deal with issues such as death, depression and alcoholism in its depiction of Australian working-class life. The album received critical acclaim upon release, regarded later on as the band's "break-out" and one of their most popular releases. The track "Shark Fin Blues," in particular, went on to become a concert staple and was voted by contemporary Australian songwriters as the greatest Australian song of all time in October 2009. The album itself was performed live in its entirety many times, even as a part of the acclaimed Don't Look Back concert series. In 2008, The Age ranked it the best Australian album of the 21st century. Three years later, the band's contemporaries and "industry experts" would vote it the 24th best Australian album of all time. Gatefold sleeve.

Water Damage

Repeater

12xu

***"There is something really special about music based on drones. Whether it's the vocals of Pandit Pran Nath, the ARP 2500 of Eliane Radigue, or the nearly-blown amps of Sunn O))), by changing the listeners's focus on details to one that favors flow, drones are uniquely capable of transporting our brains far far away. The debut LP, 'Repeater', by this loudly droning Austin septet is a goddamn splendid example of how the process works. Using the motto, “Maximal Repetition Minimal Deviation,” Water Damage create glowing fields of post-rock lava that pretty much suck you right in and boil you alive. Water Damage, while technically a septet, actually operate in various configurations, with the proviso there should always be two drummers and two bass players on hand. They prefer if each of their sonic ideas takes up a whole reel of tape, and once they start they don't look back. Everything proceeds towards an imaginary end point that is only achieved when the tape starts flapping. What a way to run a railroad! But the folks in the band are all vets of various projects—Spray Paint, USA/Mexico, Marriage, Black Eyes, Thor & Friends, among others—so let's assume they know what they're doing. And why not? They sound fucking great. Their approach to the form is less front-loaded than most of their peers, and the surface of their sound is sometimes ruffled by aural events of an un-drone-like nature. But the main gush is usually a blend of harmonic tones and textures pointing towards...

Amba, Zoh + William Parker, Francisco Mela

O Life, O Light Vol. 1

577 Records

***Originally from Kingsport, Tennessee, New York-based Zoh Amba is a precocious, notable star in the avant-garde music scene. Growing up in the Appalachian mountains, Amba practiced saxophone to the forest that surrounded her home before she later traveled to study with David Murray in New York, and also at the San Francisco Conservatory Of Music & New England Conservatory in Boston. Today, her music is full of folk melodies, mesmerizing refrains, repeated incantations and powerfully executed Free Jazz reminiscent of Albert Ayler. Her sound is courageous and bold, commanding her instrument with a loving force that soars from muted hums to squeaky trebles, producing a confident sound imbued with spirituality. On this project, Zoh Amba is joined by legendary artists William Parker (Bass) and Francisco Mela (Drums), who temper her daring saxophone with a lush percussive foundation and a reassuring bassline. On one of the album’s 4 tracks, Amba also opts for flute, cutting through the noise with a quieter, adventurous tone, and offering listeners a more exclusive look at her multi-instrumental prowess.

Incandescence

Le Coeur De L'homme

Profound Lore

Incandescence, an epic black metal duo from Quebec, Canada comprised of multi-instrumentalist Philippe Boucher (Beyond Creation, Chthe’ilist) and vocalist Louis-Paul Gauvreau, have completed their fourth full-length album Le Coeur de L’Homme.  Ever since this project’s inception in 2011, Incandescence has been a vessel for Boucher—known mostly as a formidable top-tier drummer within the death metal scene due to his involvement in Beyond Creation and Chthe’ilist—to explore and expand his musical horizons in the realm of black metal (which he has also done with his other black metal project Décombres). Here he handles all the instruments and songwriting with his counterpart Gauvreau handling all the vocals, lyrics and concepts.  Le Coeur de L’Homme follows 2019’s Ascension and a string of previous notable releases, and reveals itself as a glorious towering black metal release that will stand as a watershed moment for the Quebec black metal scene and finally make aware of Incandescence as one of Canada’s more significant present day black metal outfits. This release is an expression highlighting the creativity that continues to dwell within the heart of Quebec black metal, a grandiose work of furious epochal ascending black metal, where virulent and hostile gesticulations stabilize themselves with that of the classic black metal traits of the melancholic, despondent, and sorrowful.

Art Gray Noizz Quintet, The

The Art Gray Noizz Quintet

Bang

***Spearheaded by twisted Australian guitar legend Stu Spasm of Lubricated Goat, Crunt, and The Beasts Of Bourbon, The Art Gray Noizz Quintet were originally formed for an afterparty celebrating the New York City premiere of Amphetamine Reptile documentary The Color Of Noise. "It was obvious I must assemble a supergroup of the finest noise rockers New York City had to offer," says Stu Spasm. First choice was basher extraordinaire "Bloody" Rich Hutchins, veteran of such explosive musical exports as Live Skull, Of Cabbages And Kings, and Ruin. Next, Skeleton Boy of Woman was recruited. "Who, just as Leadbelly was the king of the twelve-string guitar, is himself the king of the two-string bass." Then came the twang, with the addition of suave slinger Andrea Sicco of Twin Guns. "When our guitars merge, it forms a most piquant aural mélange." In a nod to the latter half of his birth name, Stu Spasm now became Art Gray, and an entirely new mess was born. The Art Gray Noizz Quintet have recently been witnessed onstage opening for kindred spirits such as The Scientists and Mudhoney, and 2019 saw them survive a successful tour of the West Coast. Catching the eye of no wave queen Lydia Lunch led to teaming up for a collaborative musical effort, and sharing a few stages including bookending the pandemic, with one of the last shows of 2020 NYC before lockdown hit, and a triumphant return to the boards in July 2021.

Spencer, Jon & The Hitmakers

Spencer Gets It Lit

In The Red

The incredible, indelible Jon Spencer (Blues Explosion, Boss Hog, Pussy Galore, Heavy Trash, etc) is back with the incendiary HITmakers—and with his hottest record yet! Spencer Gets It Lit is classic Jon Spencer taken to the extreme—electro-boogie, constructivist art pop, and a psychedelic swamp of industrial sleaze and futurist elegance. It is an epic master work of freak beat from the world’s weirdest garage. Across brain-boggling layers of fury, fuzz guitar, and a crash-bang battery of phaser blasts, photon torpedoes, and otherworldly zounds, he frantically spits, croons, rhapsodizes, and seduces. Spencer Gets It Lit is his most complex and groovy record in years, a dark, danceable odyssey—both a studied take-down of the early 21st century, and a celebration of the place where electricity meets the mind.  Thirteen wicked hot songs of love, loss, lust, life—from the Farfisa-fueled, warped psycho-punk rave-up of “Junk Man,” to the intimate lover’s plea of “My Hit Parade,” to the outer-space, end-of-days country funk of “Worm Town,” Spencer Gets It Lit delivers all of the friction, excitement, and post-modern depravity one could ever ask for! Says Spencer, “Send out the Hit Signal! This is the most uncompromising album I’ve ever made!”

Ackerly, Jessica / Patrick Shiroshi / Chris Williams / Luke Stewart / Jason Nazary

SSWAN: Invisibility Is An Unnatural Disaster

577 Records

***SSWAN presents their first outing Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster a raucous jaunt of free jazz on the premiere fire music label 577 Records. The music is rooted in the Black American art form of jazz, stemming into the branches of free improvisation, noise and experimentalism while pushing to the edges of each idiom. The idiosyncratic playing of guitarist Jessica Ackerley starts off the album’s title track and jumps headfirst into a Hendrix-tinged duo with drummer Jason Nazary. Patrick Shiroishi quickly joins in to take the energy up a notch with soprano sax wailing in both mimicry and opposition to Ackerley’s phrasing. Just as the wall of sound is beginning to crack an abrupt halt shifts the energy and Luke Stewart’s crawls dialogue with the smearing spattering trumpet solo from trumpeter Chris Williams.    SSWAN is an ensemble that consistently augments sonic themes and pushes the bounds of standard quintet instrumentation while simultaneously executing a unique musical language that is elevated through a strong group chemistry. ‘Pattern Phases’ takes the listener on a tour of the various sound worlds accessible to each group member. Communication exists on the level of sound and velocity rather than pitch and harmonic information. Sensitive listening and each members ability to paint with different non-pitch vocabulary creates a perfect breathe of fresh air after the tour de force of “Invisibility is an unnatural disaster”. The record is rounded out with a synthesis of questions posed in tracks 1 & 2 on “A miracle’s worth”. A...

Carter, Daniel / Evan Strauss / 5-track / Sheridan Riley

The Uproar In Bursts Of Sound And Silence

577 Records

***The Uproar in Bursts of Sound and Silence is a sort of emergent collage that came together over four years of composition, improvisation and production. The foundations for this album were initially recorded in 2018 by producer/engineer Jack Endino (Nirvana, Soundgarden, Mudhoney, Skinyard) at Soundhouse in Seattle, WA with myself (Evan Strauss, electric bass and upright bass), 5-Track (Guitar) and Sheridan Riley (Drums). The initial foundations of this music consisted of my long-form graphically notated conceptual compositions based on the calls of the Veery songbird (Catharus fuscescens), the astrological transits at the precise time of the recording session and some thematic elements from Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed.   In 2019 the album was given the working title Bird Songs for the Stars and I commissioned the cover art, Night Fisher, from Jeane Cohen. Also around this time, Daniel Carter had emphatically told me, “I’m going to become a rapper by the time I turn 90.” So, a few weeks later Daniel and I were hanging out, recording music and eating stir fry in my Ditmas Park apartment and I convinced him to make some progress on his goals by recording his voice into a microphone. Daniel began by recording an excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and continued by recording some of his own poetry.  The recordings of Daniel from that afternoon would eventually make their way onto this album alongside my own experimentations in production inspired by Lee Scratch Perry, J Dilla and Ingram...

Blatant Dissent

1985-1986

Alona's Dream

***BLATANT DISSENT's story is the story of evolution. They started in Dekalb, Illinois, in 1983 as a cover band. Over the next few years, Blatant Dissent developed and recorded their own distinct brand of midwestern indie-skate punk. By 1988, the evolution was complete and they had become Midwest noise-rock stalwarts TAR. Their music had the backbone and energy of hardcore punk but Blatant Dissent were too smart and well informed to play run-of-the-mill uniform hardcore. Their style was also illuminated by the innovations of contemporary bands including Naked Raygun, whose JEFF PEZZATI produced their first session. Also influential were Chicago punk pioneers Trial By Fire as well as innovative national acts like Husker Du, The Minutemen and The Replacements. After an initial demo, Blatant Dissent eventually recorded a total of 22 songs over two sessions between 1985 and 1986. Recorded by IAIN BURGESS and STEVE ALBINI respectively, these sessions offer insight into the development of the group as they tightened their song writing and laid the groundwork for later becoming Tar. During 2021 the original multi-tracks were remixed by the band with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in Chicago. The music was subsequently mastered by CARL SAFF and pressed into 160-gram color vinyl in Chicago at Smashed Plastic Record Pressing. 22 song limited edition blue / white swirl color vinyl LP. Comes in 20pt board jacket with full color, four page booklet.

Foil

Foil

Violent Pest

***Ripping full band demo from Kansas City's red hot FOIL makes it's way to vinyl in the form of a neat little flexi disc. Get em while they're hot. Don't wait.

Penetrode

Penetrode

Violent Pest

***PENETRODE emerges from Philadelphia with a powerhouse debut LP. Dramatic, intense and precisely played hardcore punk! Penetrode oozes attitude in a way most contemporary bands can only aspire to. “First full-length release from these Philly hardcore freaks. The more I listen to this, the more I like it. While all rooted in noisy, dark hardcore, the songs are all very distinct from each other and occasionally go from fast punk to slow dirges, like on 'Psychic Death.' There are some sonic similarities to bands like GAG and NERVOSAS, but the real stand-out here is vocalist/artist Bootsie. The vocals go from sung to shrieked to spoken and back again, with a distinctive yelp at the end of many lines. They’re great and sound confident, passionate, and exciting. Every song is a banger, but I keep going back to 'Ebb & Flow.' It’s got layers of negative bummer punk distortion with a catchy opening riff, time changes, dissonant vocals, and lyrics like (I think), 'Pick me up and spit me out.' It’s basically everything I want in a punk song. Check it out—this is a killer tape from a killer band.”—Nick Odorizzi (MRR #463 • DECEMBER 2021)

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

Made In Timeland

ATO

***"Made In Timeland has been whispered about on fan message boards for almost 2 years. Like so many other things, it was delayed by the pandemic. It was finally released after the band's marathon 3-hour show in Melbourne."

White Lightning

Thunderbolts Of Fuzz

Riding Easy

Standout favorites of Riding Easy Records’ Brown Acid compilation series, White Lightning’s stellar discography of rare and under-appreciated heavy psych, proto-metal rock gets a vital revival for new generations to learn how swinging, swaggering and often blazingly fast rock’n’roll is done. White Lightning was formed in Minneapolis, MN in 1968 by guitarist Tom “Zippy” Caplan and bassist Woody Woodrich after leaving garage psych band The Litter (themselves popular standouts from the Nuggets and Pebbles series of garage rock rarities.) Originally a power trio, the band later expanded to a five-piece in 1969 while shortening its name to Lightning. The quintet’s brilliant and rare 1970 self-titled album on Pickwick International’s P.I.P. imprint provides six of the ten tracks on Thunderbolts Of Fuzz. The original White Lightning trio only released the one 45-rpm single “Of Paupers And Poets” during their existence (on local Hexagon label in 1968, later reissued by major label ATCO Records in 1969.) A long out-of-print posthumous album released in 1995 gathered unreleased recordings, three of which are found here. This rounds out this collection of recorded highlights from the band’s rocky history. Taking their name from a particularly potent type of LSD, White Lightning laid out from the start that it was not cute and cuddly ’70s rock. In fact, the band’s aggressive tempos are like punk rock way before punk. However, their dirty blues groove and musical prowess shows the band was more than unrefined ne’er-do-wells, they had true versatility.

Innumerable Forms

Philosophical Collapse

Profound Lore

The new album from cult death / doom metal outfit Innumerable Forms Philosophical Collapse, the follow up to 2018’s Punishment In Flesh, is a pillar of death / doom enormity unparalleled. Helmed by founder Justin DeTore (aka DFJ), Philosophical Collapse (which was produced by Arthur Rizk) emerges as Innumerable Forms’ most triumphant work as alongside DFJ (Dream Unending, Sumerlands), guitarists Chris Ulsh (Mammoth Grinder / Power Trip / Devil Master) and Jensen Ward (Iron Lung), drummer Connor Donnegan (Genocide Pact), and bassist Doug Cho deliver an opus that coalesces the old school Finnish death metal cult of the early ’90s and the early ’90s UK doom glory of Anathema / Paradise Lost.

Ruth, Rich

I Survived, It's Over

Third Man

***Recorded under a loft bed in the guest bedroom of his Nashville home, MICHAEL RUTH aka RICH RUTH's I Survived, It’s Over starts in a humble space. And while many contemporary music projects are produced in such an environment, I Survived, It’s Over sets itself apart in its transformative properties as well as its transparency. What we have here is honest sound exploration, session musician-level instrumentation, and a true love for nature run through the fingers of a dude who can channel some acute and undeniable magic. Underneath the swell of the strings and the shredding of the guitars, this record has hard working, rustbelt, drum-heavy roots all over it (which makes sense as Ruth hails from outside of Toledo, the album was mixed by JOHN MCENTIRE from Chicago band Tortoise). Many of the flutes, saxophones, pedal steel, and other instruments were recorded remotely because we live in the future, but this only adds to the collage of sampled and sample-able material that Rich Ruth has to offer. The organic relationships between the artist and other musicians on the album is evident even in the compilation style sampling that needs to occur in putting such a project together. I Survived, It’s Over is a record you should buy for your friend, your foe, and yourself. It’ll sit perfectly on your shelf between Alice Coltrane and Hiroshi Yoshimura.

Liquids

Life Is Pain Idiot

Violent Pest

***From the fine minds at Drunken Sailor (UK), Computer Human (Aus), Nail Biter (Shipshewana) and Violent Pest (Chicago) comes: LIQUIDS—Life Is Pain Idiot LP. After a year plus lingering in the purgatory of the “post 2020 record pressing plant supply chain hell”, Liquids Life Is Pain Idiot finally emerges on the vinyl record format. Proper record sales protocol now demands a listing of the physical features of the record, I mean it better be good to wait this long. And it is a real blow-out of a physical package but I’m not going to spoil the exquisite details for you here. If you buy this record, you want it for the music no doubt. The music is really the only part that matters, right? Well, ok if you must know, it’s a regular record, black vinyl. Liquids recorded this album (a contemporary masterpiece of Midwestern misery) with the help of ERIK NERVOUS. Then Erik mixed, mastered and released it via his label Nail Biter Records. L Includes a surprise extra flexi disc with four bonus songs and a huge lyric sheet / poster. limited edition of 1376 world wide.

Science Man

Nines Mecca

Swimming Faith / Feral Kid

***Hardcore but born from punk. Lab grown and hidden away in the rust belt of Buffalo, NY is JOHN TOOHILL's ever evolving solo project SCIENCE MAN. Now mutated from a wacked-out, solo garage punk experiment into a full band of mouth foaming, deranged hardcore. Science Man's now third LP, Nines Mecca, is ten songs of blistering punk, super charged with the complex pummeling of an enigmatic, genre-bending hardcore band. "...some kind of mix of Warthog and the Stooges"—No Echo

Tropical Gothclub

s/t

Third Man

***DEAN FERTITA has been at the heart of American rock ‘n’ roll for almost two decades, from his role as an invaluable member of QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE and THE DEAD WEATHER, touring keyboardist with THE RACONTEURS, and backing musician on records by JACK WHITE, KAREN O., IGGY POP, BRENDAN BENSON, THE KILLS, BECK and more. While his own music had been the focus in his role as lead singer, guitarist, and founder of THE WAXWINGS and on recordings as HELLO=FiRE, Fertita began TROPICAL GOTHCLUB with no clear mission for a solo album under his own name. In early 2020, the TN-based musician put up a small A-frame in his backyard to use as a writing and recording space while stuck at home during the looming pandemic. With rare time on his hands, Fertita set to work recording demos of the many musical ideas he had accumulated over the years, building upon songs and fragments written during different stages of his busy career. Fertita then enlisted his old friend DAVE FEENY—a veteran Detroit musician and owner of The Tempermill recording studios in Ferndale, MI—to help develop the recordings even further, pushing the original demos in deliberate new directions to create a showcase for his wide-ranging songcraft and visionary imagination.

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...

Ares Kingdom

In Darkness At Last

Nuclear War Now

***Immediately after completing the recording of By the Light of Their Destruction, released in 2019, Chuck Keller, the brilliant guitarist and compositional mastermind behind Ares Kingdom, began writing material for another album. He spent the next year working on a body of songs that he intended as a companion to By the Light of Their Destruction, viewing the new material as an extension of the preceding work. Entitled In Darkness at Last, the band’s fifth full-length is inarguably their most aggressive recording to date. Still operating as a trio consisting of Keller, drummer Mike Miller (Order From Chaos), and bassist/vocalist Alex Blume (Nepenthe, Blasphemic Cruelty, Perdition Temple), Ares Kingdom continue to refine, polish, and sharpen their sound—a caustic assault of precision deathrash. Every track on In Darkness at Last evokes the majesty of violence and the entropic preeminence of decay as Keller’s guitar rides triumphant upon the chariot of Miller’s drumming, drawn by the furious power of Blume’s bass. Indeed, there are few bands in the underground whose degree of musicianship rivals that of Ares Kingdom. One can hear the intuitive chemistry between the band members, crystalized from decades of playing and performing together.

Lykotonon

Promethean Pathology

Profound Lore

Lykotonon’s Promethean Pathology is a digitized descent into the darker side of the human psyche. It is the probing question that hangs over all of humanity in the quietest of moments. Avant-garde, industrial / electronic black metal featuring members of Wayfarer, Stormkeep, and Blood Incantation.

Converse, Bill

Take Parts

Dark Entries

***Underground hero Bill Converse returns to Dark Entries with Take Parts, perhaps his most muscular and floor-focused work to date. Converse has honed his analog craft since the early days of the Midwest rave scene, absorbing lessons from luminaries like Claude Young and Traxx. His skill as a producer has been established with releases on labels such as Dark Entries, Fit Sound, and Obsolete Futures, and his prowess as a DJ has been witnessed on floors the world over. On Take Parts, Converse peels away the layers of acidic gauze that have characterized much of his work, revealing his sharp grasp of dancefloor dynamics and DJ functionality. While the 808’s, 909’s, and 303’s are on full display, Converse does not indulge in retro-fetishism; he channels the future forward impulse of the originary rave ethos. Tracks like “Stroke” and “What You Have” pit seasick chords and analog squelch atop funky but unsettling loops. The flurry of 808 snares on “Measurement (Of What?)” nods towards both footwork and jungle, but feels ultimately planted in a world of Converse’s own. With the acid-electro masterpiece “Take Apart”, Converse implores us to both join him in this new world and reconfigure the one we’re living in now. The 6-tracks on Take Parts present a new focus for Converse, and will excite DJ’s and thrill dancers.

V-3

Hit Dead Center With My Disease

Bravecloud

***One of three V-3 reissues, the legendary Columbus, Ohio band that featured Jim Shepard and Nudge Squidfish. "As I was reviewing V3's cycle of works from early 1986 to the end of Roxanne Newman's tenure in late 1991, I became increasingly flabbergasted at the band. At the time I just wasn't paying attention to the writing and production. I was focused on trying to keep the balance between our love of exploration and our focus on creating what I would call weirdo pop. In hind sight I see where I greatly underestimated our advance way of making musci. What ended up on the 3 releases of that era was only the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully with this release a glimpse into the inner workings of that era can be evaluated. Basically V3 can be divided into two parts: with Roxanne and without Roxanne. After Rudy and I left the band Jim chose to slowly move away from V3 and focus more on his solo work. While Leland Cain and Sam Brown brilliantly held up the flag of the old material, the creative experimentation was gone. Once Jimbo acquiesced to the need for sales he was faced with a choice. He had to either become an artistic renegade, or become the major label organ grinder's monkey tipping its hat for spare coin. Even though Jim and I could write pop til the cows came home that was not our strict passion. Roxanne on the other hand focused more on the...

V-3

No One Speaks My Language Here

Bravecloud

***One of three V-3 reissues, the legendary Columbus, Ohio band that featured Jim Shepard and Nudge Squidfish. "As I was reviewing V3's cycle of works from early 1986 to the end of Roxanne Newman's tenure in late 1991, I became increasingly flabbergasted at the band. At the time I just wasn't paying attention to the writing and production. I was focused on trying to keep the balance between our love of exploration and our focus on creating what I would call weirdo pop. In hind sight I see where I greatly underestimated our advance way of making musci. What ended up on the 3 releases of that era was only the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully with this release a glimpse into the inner workings of that era can be evaluated. Basically V3 can be divided into two parts: with Roxanne and without Roxanne. After Rudy and I left the band Jim chose to slowly move away from V3 and focus more on his solo work. While Leland Cain and Sam Brown brilliantly held up the flag of the old material, the creative experimentation was gone. Once Jimbo acquiesced to the need for sales he was faced with a choice. He had to either become an artistic renegade, or become the major label organ grinder's monkey tipping its hat for spare coin. Even though Jim and I could write pop til the cows came home that was not our strict passion. Roxanne on the other hand focused more on the...

V-3

The Enemy Within

Bravecloud

***One of three V-3 reissues, the legendary Columbus, Ohio band that featured Jim Shepard and Nudge Squidfish. "As I was reviewing V3's cycle of works from early 1986 to the end of Roxanne Newman's tenure in late 1991, I became increasingly flabbergasted at the band. At the time I just wasn't paying attention to the writing and production. I was focused on trying to keep the balance between our love of exploration and our focus on creating what I would call weirdo pop. In hind sight I see where I greatly underestimated our advance way of making musci. What ended up on the 3 releases of that era was only the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully with this release a glimpse into the inner workings of that era can be evaluated. Basically V3 can be divided into two parts: with Roxanne and without Roxanne. After Rudy and I left the band Jim chose to slowly move away from V3 and focus more on his solo work. While Leland Cain and Sam Brown brilliantly held up the flag of the old material, the creative experimentation was gone. Once Jimbo acquiesced to the need for sales he was faced with a choice. He had to either become an artistic renegade, or become the major label organ grinder's monkey tipping its hat for spare coin. Even though Jim and I could write pop til the cows came home that was not our strict passion. Roxanne on the other hand focused more on the...

Zimmerman, Tucker & Joshua Burkett

Tunnel Visions

Idea Records

***In The 1970s, Tucker Zimmerman made some low-key acoustic guitar records in England. He was raised in Caifornia, and sang like it. And between those two circumstances, Zimmerman happens to have sat in with a whole lotta famous people; The Spiders From Mars, guys from Yes & Traffic & T Rex, Mary Hopkin, Paul Butterfield, Aynsley Dunbar, Ricky Fataar, and plenty more. The seriously famous are always moving along to whatever's new. But Zimmerman has kept his hand in. There were a couple records in the 80s, an interest in novels and words, one in the 90s, an 00s collaboration with another American expat who works on the Belgian version of The Voice, etc. Now he has a new record for the teens. Of himself reading poetry no less. And that is exactly the sort of project that could easily degenerate into the underground dude's answer to a Stan Lee cameo. The reason it doesn't is less about the words chosen(though they're fine) and more about the obvious lived grit in the mucinex-wracked glottis that is Zimmerman's voice these days. The sensitive folk rocker has given way to a grizzled gentleman. Zimmerman is more confident as his 77 years and sounds like a paisley Sam Elliott who spends days wandering outside dispensing advice to clouds & dogs. Zimmerman has also found a precise complement in accompanist Josh Burkett, whose life reads like an indie update to the performer Zimmerman was in the 70s. Burkett runs a record store in Western...

NOFX

Double Album

Fat Wreck Chords

***2021 saw the release of NOFX’s highly acclaimed, 14th studio album Single Album. What fans didn’t know then, is Single Album is only one half of what has ultimiately become NOFX’s very first double album; the second half of which is aptly titled Double Album. Reuniting with punk-rock legends BILL STEVENSON and JASON LIVERMORE for producer / engineering / mixing duties; it’s not hyperbolic to say NOFX are making their best music now. But that's not to imply everything else they’ve done was mediocre, either. Double Album reminds both ardent fans and casual listeners that NOFX weren’t born to follow trends. Indeed NOFX have carved their logo into the veneer of punk-rock culture for decades. With nearly 40 years in this circus, you’re going to meet people and do/see/conspire to get all the wildest shit done. Remember how one of the stipulations of the NOFX book Hepatitis Bathtub was that none of the band members could see what the other ones were writing about them? Well, this time, Mike got permission to blow up the foibles and peccadillos of people in song for maximum velocity and hilarity. There’s “Joanna Constant Teen,” a 78-second tribute to the dominatrix that spent six weeks in Fat Mike’s NYC-based Airbnb during the production run of his musical, Home Street Home. “Alcopollack” is about booking agent David Pollock, who has worked with the band for over 30 years and has lost more than his fair share of clients for his too-brazen honesty. “Fuck Day Six”...

High Back Chairs

2 Songs

Dischord

***Two songs by the High Back Chairs, released in 1992. Peter Hayes (vocals & guitar) Jim Spellman (guitar) Charles Steck (bass & vocals) Jeff Nelson (drums & vocals)

Warmers

s/t

Dischord

***The Warmers' full-length record, released in 1996.