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Exploring Japanese Psych Kraut etc

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Spun off from an exchange between @locust and @kaisfatdad in the Scandinavian thread, here’s one for Japanese psych. I’ll go first. Ghost were a long running (thirty years plus) band led by Masaki Batoh. The legend is that they lived communally in abandoned temples and disused subway stations, which would be very cool if true. The only album I have of theirs is 1999’s Snuffbox Immanence, which is at the pastoral / folky end of psychedelia, although there are some electric guitar heroics. Plenty of acoustic guitar, harps, and traditional sounding Japanese melodies. It’s very mellow, and even has a Rolling Stones cover.

Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard – Y Proffwyd Dwyll

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What does it sound like?:

Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard. I just wanted to type that again.

It’s time to develop a theory of nominative determinism as applied to band names. How could a band whose name appears to have been generated from cutups of Cathedral or Electric Wizard lyric sheets play anything other than crushingly heavy sludgy doom? Could a C86 band ever have carried this name? Could an act trading as MWWB pass muster as a twee folk act? Could The Shop Assistants have played grindcore? NWA been the new Mantovani?

This is the Welsh metallers’ second album in twelfth months, and the genre signifiers are all present and correct. There’s plenty of churning funereal doom, allied to crushingly dense monolithic riffs that sound like normal heavy metal wrapped in lead, condensed to the size of a pinhead, and dropped through the mantle of the planet.

That’s not all MWWB bring to the party though. A few tracks are adorned with stark cello, just in case you didn’t think it was scary enough already. Unusually for the genre, there’s no cookie monster vocals. Instead we have an ethereal female voice riding above the fuzz. Multitracked and reverbed, » Continue Reading.

Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End

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Platform:Playstation Age Rating:16+ Year of Release:2016 Review:

This is the fourth and final game in the Uncharted series, a set of adventure and exploration games that are Sony’s answer to Tomb Raider, all climbing, puzzles and ancient temples. The previous three were PS3 exclusive titles, but they have been recently remastered for PS4 and released as an omnibus collection. You should probably tackle them before playing this instalment. You’ll have a better feel for the story, and they’re great games anyway, especially the second.

The earlier games established Nathan Drake as a matinee adventure hero in the Indiana Jones mould, and introduced his supporting cast. There’s Victor “Sully” Sullivan, his genial cigar chomping, wisecracking mentor, and Elena Fisher, a reporter who becomes his love interest over the three games. As 4 opens, Drake has given up his life of adventure to settle down with Elena. He’s put risk behind him for a life of happy safety. He knows it’s the right thing to do, but there’s definitely still a part of him that regrets it. And then his long lost, presumed dead, brother Sam shows up, with a tale of pirate treasure and an urgent need to find it to » Continue Reading.

De La Soul and the Anonymous Nobody

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What does it sound like?:

Is it really eleven years since the last De La Soul LP? Yes, and it’s not that far off thirty since Three Feet High And Rising. Yikes. You may have read about how that classic and their other records are trapped in digital limbo. This time round, De La have dodged that bullet by creating their own sample library, recording more than 200 hours of jams played by their touring band, and using them to build this record. This gives rise to a tremendous variety of sounds, from the goofy lo-fi surf guitar of ‘CBGBs’ to the wistful daydream of ‘Memory of (US)’, all French horns and strings, to the smooth funk of the Snoop-cameoing ‘Pain’. No song sounds like the one before it, but no matter what the mood or the instrumentation, there is always a solid groove going on. It’s low key, laid back, summery, positive stuff (and refreshingly low on the N & B words @Sewer-Robot mentioned in his great review of Anderson .Paak). As well as the expected spots from R&B / hip hop luminaries like Usher and Jill Scott, we have the proverbial » Continue Reading.

RADIOOOOOO, or even more timewasting on the interweb

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I was just hipped to this by the Bigmouth website. I’ll let them describe it (full article here)

The way that Radiooooo works is so simple as to be almost comical. Through a web interface based on a world map – hand-drawn for a bit of human charm – you select a country, a decade and any of three simple parameters: SLOW, FAST or WEIRD. Radiooooo then serves up exquisitely rare and fascinating musical selections chosen not by an impersonal algorithm, but uploaded by hundreds of real music enthusiasts and crate-diggers around the world. There’s no pause button, no fast forward and no downloading, just a perfect evocation of (say) Weird Italy in the 1960s. It’s free, it’s completely addictive and it’s very French.

It’s fun, obviously in its infancy (slow, fast and weird from Iceland in the 1990s was all Björk just now), but quite diverting, and an easy place to lose some hours.

http://i1058.photobucket.com/albums/t407/maggieloveshopey/radioooo-screen-21_zpswueerd70.jpg http://radiooooo.com/

Horseback – Dead Ringers

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What does it sound like?:

Horseback is a project of ambient and folk musician Jenks Miller. At various times, it has veered between drone, metal and Americana. This time round he’s gone for a kind of burnt out psychedelic trip hop, full of spectral keyboards, guitars that sound sampled from a lost spaghetti western, echoing rhythm loops and ghostly music-box tinkles. The Bandcamp page describes it as “the distorted swagger of Neil Young’s Crazy Horse sits at a table next to the haunted dronescapes of Sunn O)))”. On the face of it, that’s a ridiculous assertion, but after a listen you kind of see where they’re coming from, and I’d even throw in the slow motion post punk of the xx as well. It is somehow huge and intimate at the same time, a trick Miller pulls off by marrying the space and echo of heavily reverbed guitars to the hushed quiet room ambience of the aforementioned xx and the mannered vocal delivery of Coil circa Musick To Play In The Dark. Underneath all that synths drone, hum and throb, while loose krautrock rhythms keep the music progressing.

It’s uneasily beautiful, weirdly entrancing and lest that makes it all » Continue Reading.

Oranssi Pazuzu – Värähtelijä

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Here it is, number 68 on the Quietus’ Best Albums Of The Year So Far list! It’s Finland’s very own Oranssi Pazuza, with their fourth album, Värähtelijä!

A lot of the reviews of this record mention black metal at some point, which alongside all those umlauts and the silly band name (“Orange Demon”) might well be enough to put off cautious listeners. Relax, I am here to reassure you all. There is nary a blastbeat to be heard, and not much wild tremolo. Granted, the vocals are a bit growly, but compared to the ferociously dense attack of a Mayhem or a Darkthrone this is a record full of space and room to breathe. Nothing to frighten the horses, in other words, and it’s certainly not as aggressive or alienating as (minority) AW favourites Deafheaven.

That said, it is definitely metal, but it’s metal with a psychedelic space rock, even krautrock bent. Basslines wobble all over the place, synths sound alternately like an outtake from 2001 or Deep Purple, while guitars chime, roar or just sparkle in the void. Oranssi Pazazu just seem to be chucking whatever they feel like into the mix but it works and hangs together, » Continue Reading.

Early Day Miners – Offshore

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What does it sound like?:

(After my Studio review, here’s another look back at an unsung favourite of mine on its tenth anniversary. )

I found this album on a listening post in HMV Shibuya, suckered in by the sleeve sticker describing it as “a 37 minute epic in six parts”. Let’s be honest, it had me at that, and it didn’t need to be anything like the kind of emotional and musical heavyweight it is. I knew nothing about Early Day Miners at the time, but this was their fifth record – the internet variously labels them ‘post-rock’, ‘slowcore’ and other microgenres, just so you know where we’re coming from here.

The record starts with the cover, a nocturnal seascape illuminated by a sickly yellow light. It’s beautiful and slightly uneasy, setting the tone for what’s to come. “Land Of Pale Saints” opens, a pounding ten minute instrumental. There are layers and layers of guitars building on each other, muscular shoegaze augmented by rising and falling keyboard washes. About five minutes in the guitars drop out, and the drums take centre stage, as they will again and again throughout the record. Purposeful and ominous, they lend a » Continue Reading.

Dog identification

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We have no idea what breed our (rescue) dog is. Always figured she was the product of generations of inbreeding on the streets of Romania (sorry, you can’t escape Eastern European immigration even on a thread about dogs), and were never that bothered about it. Over the weekend my brother pointed me to a BBC report about the legacy of Chernobyl (we have a right old laugh together, we do). The dog that’s in this clip from about 52 seconds in is the absolute spit of our bad tempered, funny looking, much loved pooch. Would anyone like to hazard a guess to her lineage? Even if you don’t, you’ll still have seen an elderly peasant woman playing an accordion while a dog howls along, so KFD at least will be happy.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36136286

Studio – West Coast

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What does it sound like?:

I realised earlier tonight that West Coast by Studio is ten years old this year. There won’t be any deluxe remasters or box sets. It’s an album that never troubled the charts or the arbiters of cool. I can’t even remember how I came across it, but I’ve been grateful I did for almost all of that decade.

There’s no origin story, no great rock n roll myth, to Studio. They were just two guys from Sweden who thought it’d be a good idea to make an album that sounded like Can, Neu, Happy Mondays and The Cure dancing together in the rays of the rising sun somewhere in the Balearics. Somehow they pulled it off and gave us this gem, effortlessly pretty disco, krautrock, dub, and indie pop replayed through a sun kissed filter without falling into generic Cafe Del Mar blandness. Perhaps that makes it sound like Record Collection Rock, a faithful ticking off of the approved influences, but to think that would be to miss just how invitingly lush and lazy, blissful and beautiful, this music is. These are long hypnotic tracks that somehow stay the same while shifting and » Continue Reading.

The Fireman

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Author:Joe Hill

When news broke that Joe Hill’s new book was about a disease-inspired end of the world, it was hard not to think of his dad’s epic The Stand. I dismissed that as a hopelessly lazy comparison, at least to begin with (more on this later). The Fireman is a very different book in scale and mood. Civilisation may be collapsing across the world, populations are falling prey to Dragonscale – a spore that infects its victims, paints beautiful patterns on their skin, and then causes them to combust – but this book focuses entirely on New England, and the story of school nurse Harper Grayson, pregnant and infected. It’s one small story in a global catastrophe, which keeps the stakes low but very personal. Harper’s unhinged husband (wrongly) blames her for infecting him and is bent on carrying out a suicide pact he thinks they’d agreed on. She is determined to live and bear her child, and so escapes, whereupon she falls in with a small community of infected people who may have found a way to live with Dragonscale. One of these people is the titular Fireman, a mysterious fellow with an English accent and a dirty » Continue Reading.

It’s only Monday…

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…and I think I’ve found the bellend of the week already.

A private school head teacher has urged pupils not to read Game of Thrones books, claiming they can damage their “sensitive subconscious brains”.

Graeme Whiting also said fantasy titles – such as Lord of the Rings, The Hunger Games and Harry Potter – “encourage difficult behaviour in children”.

He told parents to steer clear of the “mystical and frightening texts” and they should instead read classics such as those by Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Shakespeare.

Writing on his blog, Mr Whiting – head of the independent Acorn School in Nailsworth, Gloucester – said fantasy books can be bought without a “special licence”, despite damaging the “sensitive subconscious brains of young children”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/06/fantasy-books-such-as-game-of-thrones-can-damage-childrens-brain/

Black Widow

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Author:Chris Brookymre

A new Christopher Brookmyre is always cause for celebration round these parts, doubly so when it’s a Jack Parlabane novel. Black Widow is a fast and gripping read, cleverly put together with a cast of characters that are interesting and / or likeable. The slapstick grand guignol humour of Brookymre’s earlier funnier stuff now seems to be permanently MIA, but this is still quietly witty, and unafraid to offer a mordant chuckle at some very bleak events.

Diana Jager is a surgeon with a controversial past who finds herself the chief suspect in the disappearance of her husband. Journalist Parlabane is at the lowest of ebbs, newly divorced with a career in the toilet. He is engaged by the husband’s sister to find out exactly what happened, and as is his wont, starts tugging on all manner of loose threads until the sweater is completely ruined.

Diana is a hunter twice over, in name at least. She’s cool, calm, ruthless when she needs to be and not afraid to break rules if she benefits. But is she a murderer? You will probably change your mind half a dozen times as you progress through this very well constructed » Continue Reading.

Central Station

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Author:Lavie Tidhar

Central Station is a middle Eastern border city, a huge spaceport between Israeli Tel Aviv and Arab Jaffa. Tidhar is more interested in those scrabbling to survive at the foot of the gleaming towers than the dream of space travel, however. If there’s a throughline to the novel, it’s the Chong family and their affiliates. The book follows several of these Chongs, with the most pagetime given to Boris, recently returned to Earth from space. His lovers, father, cousins and various other connections (an artist who makes and kills gods, a rag and bone man who may well be immortal, a young woman infected with a disease akin to vampirism that makes her thirst for data) all take centre stage for a while before fading back into the mass of humanity that makes up Central Station. And that’s really my only gripe with this book. You can throw around phrases like “mosaic novel”, or “collage fiction”, but there is no escaping that this book is a collection of short stories loosely lashed together. There’s no overarching plot (well, there are hints of something in the background), several dangling threads and not a great deal of action. But what » Continue Reading.

Great riffs that aren’t played on guitars

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The nagging synth riff at the beginning of Underworld’s Rez is one of my favourite moments in music. It’s like the end of Close Encounters (where the scientists and the mothership are playing notes at each other) taking place in a sweaty warehouse around 1992, only the scientists are all pilled up ravers and the UFO is a massive speaker stack. Brilliant. Listening to it yesterday set me thinking about other great riffs that aren’t played on electric guitars. There most be some more corkers out there. Synths, trumpets, thumb pianos, fiddles, kazoos… – lay them on me, groovers!

Chris Forsyth & The Solar Motel Band – The Rarity Of Experience

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What does it sound like?:

I think I wrote about Chris Forsyth’s last LP back at the old place, and I’m pretty sure I would have used the phrase “Television jamming with the Grateful Dead”. Which is a shame for those of you with long memories because I’m going to say it again. This new album combines the fluidity of the Dead with the angularity and NYC attitude of the See No Evil hitmakers, as well as their distinctive trebly twin guitar interplay. It even feels a little like a Dead live recording, as relatively concise and structured songs give way to long extended jams. The heroics are all in the first half, as Forsyth and his foil Nick Millevoi evoke the great guitar partnerships of Verlaine and Lloyd, Garcia and Weir, and Moore and Ranaldo. The calmer second part introduces trumpets and saxophones and starts to sound like ‘Agharta’ era Miles, especially on the excellently titled ‘The First Ten Minutes Of Cocksucker Blues’, all percussion and brass. Finally, in a shameless bid to curry favour with the lucrative Afterword demographic, the record finishes with a cover of Richard Thompson’s ‘Cavalry Cross’ and a glistening extended solo. All of » Continue Reading.