Tips Zum Selbstmord

Gripped W&R's Want record after that release picked up some steam in 2014. I didn't really Get It but I like experimental metal bands, or at least like to keep tabs on them. Alien Pains is a 4-track EP of Guided by Voices covers taken from their Alien Lanes LP. I've never been into GBV (not that I dislike them just not a band I ever investigated). So why devote time to a band I'm not really into covering a band I've never been into? Not sure. These tracks are cool enough, distorted and smashed into W&R's heavy/not metal/pop/whatever approach. "Always Crush Me" is a fave, I'll have to hear the original now...

As mentioned, ACR has had a track record of some outta-nowhere stunners so I pretty much give everything they put out a listen. Herbal Detonators is the new project of their graphic designer Jan Palatý aka Izanasz. It's in one of my favorite formats - short pieces on the theoretical side A, and then a 20-minute sidelong piece on the flip. If there's a vinyl press, this one's ready. What does it sound like? The first side is kind of glitchy, dreamy, electronica that I didn't find too enthralling, but the long track is a great. It sounds very...composed. And sonically, like a collision between Aphex Twin's more ambient outings and Daniel Menche's juddering, repetitive rhythms. I'll be thinking about it for a while, it's a good one.

I don't care for most any new rock bands these days, as this blog bears out, but Protomartyr are awesome. At least, their Relatives in Descent record from last year is, and so is this EP. It's incredibly short - 4 songs, 14 minutes - but these guys are so tight you just want to run it through again right after. The thrust behind this EP appears to be the two tracks featuring Kelley Deal, as they have become friends and collaborators lately (released a split with Deal's band R. Ring too) and those tracks are the meat of this short record. The other two are quick hits both under 3 minutes long. The drumming, as ever, is unreal and thuds in your chest, and Joe Casey is somewhat restrained from the usual wordstew that propagates Protomartyr's music. But yeah these guys rule.

Gotta say, I didn't know there were 8 of these. I bought an LP called Spiritual Jazz back at Cheap Thrills in the day and thought that was the end of it. Turns out over the years Jazzman has been putting out a survey of spiritual jazz across the globe? I thought Japan would be a good country to jump back into the series on. It's a cool set, I'll let someone else argue over just how much of these are spiritual, but some killer cuts - Tadao Hayashi with an absolutely stomping rendition of "My Favorite Things", the queasy weirdness of Keitaro Miho's "Kikazaru", Takeo Moriyama combining traditional Japanese instrumentation with bebop on "East Plants" and the only artist I knew off the top of my head coming in, Masayuki Takayanagi's New Direction For the Arts' "Sun in the East". Good stuff.

New album from The Thing, their 20th. Mats Gustafsson already showed up in my ear earlier this month with Chaos Echoes, here's his punk/jazz trio. This record features three tracks, the 21-minute "Sur Face" (written by Gustafsson), Frank Rowe's "Decision in Paradise" (featuring Joe McPhee) and "Vicky Di", written by bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten. Paal Nilssen-Love rounds out the trio on drums. "Sur Face" is the meat of this record and it's a gem of a composition - it starts slow and builds with plenty of ebbs and flows to a crashing climax, with lengthy passages for Nilssen-Love and Flaten to stretch out. Flaten's solo in particular is a memorable, groove-y near call-and-response thing before Nilssen-Love takes over and eventually rains down armageddon. I wasn't too cazy about their take on "Decision in Paradise", a stretched, tense affair, and "Vicky Di" features Gustafsson on soprano sax skronking away ...

Also Michael Morley (see: Gate) in his Righeous Yeah guise. This album is one 37 minute track called "Disseminate". The first half or so features a looped acoustic guitar riff over (under?) a heavy vinyl crackle. Slowly an ominous drone-y reverb seeps in and takes over and the second half is that ghostly resonance, again accompanied by crackle and fuzz. The back half reminds a lot of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room", I am not sure if the end result is achieved by the same means but nevertheless. Not major, but enjoyable. Seems Morley has a slew of other releases for me to get through this year on Bandcamp; he's been busy.

First "studio album" since Antropophagus. Like this one a lot more than Baba Yaga from earlier this year. Not a grand departure from the MSV sound - snakey, atmospheric, giallo-inspired synth witch house with the requisite whispered vocals and horror film samples. Some of these tracks are real boppers - dig "Incubus" and "Automatica Diavolo (Return of the Vogue Witches)". Nice.

I gripped Amen Dunes' debut DIA in 2009 (probably off a rec from Aquarius Records) and then went dark on him ever since. Didn't even know in 2014 his Love album was put together with Colin Stetson and the Godspeed dudes. Montreal connection. Freedom sees him working with a new set of collaborators on an album that's much more, ah, full-band-ed. This is some solid songwriting. It mines the kind of classic rock/twist vein a la War on Drugs and Kurt Vile, both artists I dig, so I dig this too. Will need to give it a few more spins to sink in but good stuff here.

"Beamed directly from Timbouctou, Mali to Portland, USA via WhatsApp". This is terhardent (like a rough-sounding lute) player Agali Ag Amoumine's group Tallait Timbouctou. Takamba is music "played on traditional guitar (tamashek: teheredent), with a remarkable distinctive rhythm tapped out on a calabash and accompanied by a beautiful ghostly dance". I guess we miss out on the full effect of the dance but the music, two long pieces in accompaniment with Oumar Kane (bass tehardent) and Ibrahim Dicko (calabash), is hypnotic enough stuff. Slow-paced and groovey with vocals from Amoumine and loping, head-nodding calabash rhythms. Nice record, love the cover art too.

Really nice lengthy trio of tunes from Michael Morley's Gate project. "Night and Morning" is a grizzled guitar drone sounding very much like Dead C, something that could easily be heard running in the background of a track like "Helen Said This". "Morning and Dusk" is my personal favorite, a more subdued, repetitive riff noodling that sounds like Skullflower nodding off. Finally "Evening and Night" closes off with an even cleaner-toned drone with a beam of pure night at the close of its 22-minutes. As far as guitar improv goes this is primo, three distinct tracks coming together to form a perfectly thought-out whole. Beauty.

JOR's 39th Steamroom missive and 2nd this year, I was pleasantly surprised - not sure why surprised but I was anyway. It's a 40 minute track that sounds a lot like Hermann Nitsch's Harmoniumwerks, although it was probably a synthsizer, and it's a nice, oscillate-y drone-y piece that's great to fall asleep to.

Was suckered in by all the good press this debut is getting, and ten years ago I would've loved it. I see Opeth comparisons thrown around a bit but I don't get that. I even saw some guy throw around Neurosis which is what made me grab it, but that's not it at all either. Conjurer combine so many styles you can see where people are grasping wildly for a basis of comparison. It's a prog/death/metalcore record and I admit they do combine the genres well (even a touch of black metal in there). Spawn of Possession and a sludgy/metalcore band like His Hero is Gone were the names that came to my mind the most. Cult of Luna too. Either way this is ably played just not really my thing anymore and I didn't find it unique enough to give it much attention.

For no real reason other than I guess the fact that he felt he had to put an album out, Ye was cobbled together in a month. And it shows quite plainly. As much as I praised the Ye-produced DAYTONA for making a fully formed album out of a mere 20-odd minutes, here Ye sounds like an odds-n-sods compilation - it literally sounds like a snapshop of a month in the studio with Kanye. Look, I have a lot of time for Kanye('s music). Yeezus is one of the best hip hop albums ever, to say nothing of the classics that preceded it. Obviously most people look at Yeezus as the dividing line between New Kanye and Old Kanye, but I still love it. The Life of Pablo was a little more dicey - it was slipshod, haphazard, scattered, bloated. I was hoping with this new 7-song limit we'd get back to Yeezus-style tightness. Not so much. You can count the good things on this album on one hand - the hooks on "Yikes" and "All Mine", "Ghost Town" which sounds like the only ful...

Never really been into William Bennett's Cut Hands project much, but I keep tabs on it because I'm still a sucker for Whitehouse and anything those guys cook up. Cut Hands always seemed a little...amateurish? I guess? Not harsh enough for noise and the African beats and instrumentation used sound kinda...generic? Like just loop some African drums over a breakbeat and you've got Cut Hands. Nevertheless. There's a few good cuts (ha) on here - "Festival of the Dead Ondo" is where the shtick works best, and is more a fully fleshed out track than we usually get from this project, and "Drink Them Like Milk" has an insistent rhythm (no harshness) that is undeniable. "Prototaxic Distortion" is a slow, menacing more ambient-ish track and "Damballah 58 (Benin Mix)" is one of those predictable repetitive Afro rhythm tracks but it goes on for so long it almost comes back around to being enjoyable. Two other shorter ambient pieces that make u...

Long time collaborators Steve Baczkowski and Ravi Padmanabha in one of my favorite formats, sax/drums duo. This is a short little 7" that these guys can dash off in their sleep but both cuts here bring the heat, these guys sound like stampeding elephants and I love it. Muscular.

Nice, a follow up to the first African Scream Contest from way back when. I kinda take issue with these comps, much as I like Analog Africa - not these specifically but all these comps that brand African music something insanely stupid and vaguely noble-savage-esque like PSYCHODELIC MINDFUCKERS FROM THE AFRICAN BLOOD JUNGLE or whatever. But then I remember lots of white music comps have insanely stupid titles too so anything to sell a buck. Some of these cuts (here and on the original) are not exactly "scream contest" material, some are perfectly chippy sounding doo-wop or disco cuts, although some are certainly boneshakers - dig the opener, which almost oversells the whole comp, I never wanted it to end. Not too much stuck with me but this is a good summer listen fo sho.

There's something in me that wants to root for Desiigner even though most of the rest of the music world has turned on him. Or maybe it's because everyone is so down on him. I'll be the first to admit his first release, New English, was junk. Maybe rushed to capitalize on the success of "Panda", but either way - it showed that Desiigner was and is a very immature songwriter. But the guy can write hooks - "Panda", "Tiimmy Turner", and the first single off this release, "Priice Tag", bear that out. Maybe that'll be his niche - writing hooks for other, better rappers. No shame in that. L.O.D. is still not a great release (still not a full album yet) but it shows steps in the right direction. Does he still sound like Future? Sure and he probably always will. As mentioned, "Priice Tag" features another bomb hook, but instead of repeating it 20 times for a 4 minute song, here he keeps it trim - just 1:50 in length. Is it reve...

The best word I can come up to describe this album - labyrinthine. From the album itself to the songs itself. This album is in some ways a severe corruption of pop music while maintaining all the gnarly-ness, of Daniel Lopatin's past efforts. His OPN project has moved past merely bizarre synth/ambient/electro/vaporwave/whatever and into whole new waters. "Babylon", "The Station" and "Black Snow" are almost undeniably poppy (albeit very twisted) while tracks like "Same" and "Still Stuff That Doesn't Happen" are among the weirdest and harshest that Lopatin has ever produced, here augmented by a sharp and smartly selected group of collaborators like Prurient, Anohni, James Blake and others. It's a real interesting album, one that will take a few more spins to get my head around, but I like it.

Pretty intense album culled from many hours of field recordings made by Felix Blume in Port Au Prince in 2016. Scope out tracks like "Maestro Turenne's Brass Band "LOT BO RIVYE A"" with a bereaved woman wailing for her mother over a not-as-somber-as-you'd-expect brass band tune. Or, well, "Cries" which is both haunting and cathartic. "Prayers, Singings and Maestro Midouin's Saxophone Solo" and "Marijuana, Rhum and Music around the Graveyard" are beautiful meldings of those very things - not sure if it happened that way naturally or if it was edited after the fact but either way it's mixed beautifully. Very interesting, haunting, and at times strangely uplifting sounds.

I've always liked A$AP Rocky for his experimental-ish tendencies. Namely his tracks with Clams Casino, shit like "Electric Body", "Wild for the Night" with Skrillex (hey it's a good track), etc. On Testing A$AP set out to push the boundaries even further, or at least being more brazen in his attempt at making an experimental hip hop record, as opposed to a hip hop record with some experimentation. Hence the title. There's a whole whack of interesting collaborators on here - FKA Twigs, Dev Hynes, Moby via a "Porcelain" sample, Frank Ocean, Clams Casino, Dean Blunt...as well as some less-eyebrow raising names like Kid Cudi, Kodak Black, French Montana, Juicy J...so what's the verdict? Well it sounds as unsettled and restless as A$AP likely was while putting this together - it's less an album and more a collection of experiments. I can't even confidently say it's a better album than LONG.LIVE.A$AP. or AT.LONG.LAST.A$AP. But I resp...

I'll admit the cover art sucked me in during a Bandcamp scroll. Pretty hard to beat. GosT is an, I dunno, dark synthwave artist? Is that what you call em? Him? Heard it might be along the lines of Perturbator, who is cool, and what I like about this album is that it's got more of a metal bent - that first track is HARSH. There's vocals on a few tracks which I hear is a first, although some of the album gets bogged down in that boring retro 80's synth sound that's gotten very overplayed. Not bad.

Chaos Echoes are a 2xguitar/bass/drums quartet that I have no familiarity with, and Mats Gustafsson is a saxophonist needs no introduction because he plays on a million records a year. Here they team up for Sustain, comprised of two 13-minute pieces. Both are long, droning, bass-y, rumbling, atmospheric ditties that wouldn't be out of place on Southern Lord (Stephen O'Malley provides a blurb here). Overall I feel like the whole band+sax=long form drone thing is a little played and these two pieces are nice but not particularly innovative or challenging.

I don't usually bother with new Sun Ra reissues unless they're significant but hey...a tape label out of Russia with an (apparently) official reissue of a tape that was originally released in 1986...keeping the dope cover art and not giving it some new garbage...couldn't resist. I also don't usually fuck with 80's Sun Ra because that's when things get dodgy but this is a good set. It's a pretty full line-up with many key players present and there's a new nice vocal versions here, "Rocket No. 9" and "Space is the Place" plus Ellington's "Prelude to a Kiss". Sound quality is not bad either. Cool.

If Kanye West did one good thing this year, it was the 7-track rap album. This album clocks in at 21 minutes and it's a beaut, killers from beginning to end, book-ended by two absolute classics - "If You Know You Know" and "Infrared". The latter, of course, with its thinly-veiled jabs at Drake, set off the beef of the year. I thought at the time Drake shouldn't even bother responding - let's face it, ghostwriting jabs are nothing new, dude's gonna have to live with them his whole career, whatever, just move on. But nope. Classic cranky Drake, rushed to the studio like it was Meek Round 2, put out "Duppy Freestyle", and was promptly annihilated so hard with "The Story of Adidon" that he's spent the whole summer in damage control mode. Does anyone even remember what "Duppy Freestyle" sounds like anymore? But alas. I bring up Drake because this album also presents an interesting juxtaposition between the two - DAYTONA,...

James Ferraro released this EP as a prelude to a much larger project he's working on, supposedly due out in four releases this year. What was Ferraro's last "real" release? Human Story 3? I thought that one was pretty lame. It definitely sounds like he's onto something different here. Four Pieces For Mirai (in typical confusing Ferraro fashion, there are six tracks here...unless the four pieces are the four releases yet to come...who knows) is almost like a MIDI keyboard opera, mostly but not totally devoid of the Far Side Virtual sample-heavy stuff that marred Human Story 3...remember in Forgetting Sarah Marshall when Jason Segel's character is working on that vampire concept opera thing? I kind of get that vibe here. No doubt Ferraro is serious with this project, but that's just it, this is so deathly serious it's almost hard not to laugh, especially remembering what a, uh, jester Ferraro can be. Not sure what to make of it but as a prelude to some...

After witch house blew up (and after becoming one of the few witch house artists worth listening to) oOoOO promptly took some time away from that crappy and toxic scene - respect points. He reemerges here in a collaborative effort with Islamiq Grrrls, a relative unknown producer/vocalist from LA. On Faminine Mystique they sling tattered witch house garb over the bones of pop tunes, to a really strange effect - some of these songs feature references to Chris Isaak, the Eagles, breakbeat, hip hop...as usual within that Scene, it's hard to tell how much of this is loving homage, irony, or pastiche. But it works pretty well. I'm not sure if each musician wrote their own lyrics but it seems to me that the tracks with Grrrls' vox feature clunkier lyrics which kind of weighs the project down, and they never truly lift off into completely uncharted avant pop territory but it's certainly a departure from "witch house typical" and definitely shows two artists trying to...

I've listened to just about everything Gas has done, and it almost adds in that "nice enough but ultimately forgettable" zone. This one is different though. Designed to be listened to as one whole piece (split into 7 tracks for navigational purposes only) it's a beauty - it sounds more tense and unsettled than any Gas release before it, with a surprising amount of percussion pushing the pace forward. This piece pulses, and it reminds me low-key of LCD Soundsystem's 45:33, which was in turn inspired by krautrock which very much comes through in Rausch. It's hypnotizing from start to finish, if you haven't been keeping up with Gas give this one a listen.

For whatever it means, this is the beginning of Corrupted's "Hollow" series. Maybe the clue is in the music? Unlike Corrupted's traditional ultra-slowed down, Spanish-sung, Japanese doom metal this is instrumental harsh noise. Still filthy and angry and depressive but sans vox and also more or less sans metal. Both untitled sides are meant to be played at either speed. The result? Meh. I miss Corrupted's brand of doom, this relatively anonymous harsh noise is fine and all but if I'm listening to Corrupted...well I know what I want. Skippable.

Phurpa are an intriguing band. How many Russian groups inspired by Buddhist throat singing and ritual music are out there? They're pretty cool. Here they're teaming up with Visions, not a project I'm familiar with. Visions is Cyclic Law label boss Frederic Arbour's dark ambient thing, and I have to compliment the pairing here because of course dark ambient compliments Phurpa's ritual music extremely well - although admittedly it feels like Sunn O))) mined this vein already. At 40 minutes it's surprisingly short for a Phurpa outing and if you already like them then you'll like this as it's nothing too out of the box but more of the same goodness.

Not sure what prompted me to check in on JOMF, I haven't heard anything from them since 2005/06 with Candyland, America Mystica, Flags of the Sacred Harp, etc. They always struck me as kind of an inbetween band. They've got the post-rock Americana thing going on like Spiritualized (but without the great songs), they've got the improv/collective thing going on like No-Neck, Sunburned, Vibracathedral (but not quite as freaked). Fig. 5 was a formative record for me but beyond that they've been in a lot of limbo. Maybe this is a vein they've been mining recently and I missed out but Bloom has some out-and-out Songs. "The Strike" is one of the most invigorating tunes I've heard from them. "The Pipe" is a drone-y intro track (the band rehearsed in an area surrounded by steel pipes hence the reference) but from there things get fairly straightforward. There's only 6 tracks here and the longest is 8:37 so they've definitely reined it in some...