Visions & Phurpa - Monad (Cyclic Law, 2018)

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.

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Sunburned Hand of the Man - Get Wet with the Animal (Manhand, 2018)

I keep up with Sunburned only intermittently these days, they seem to be taking a more rock-ist approach lately. Like this one. Each track is about 4-5 minutes of pretty ramshackle, jammy, funky, boogie rock...almost spoiled by the throaty, beery vocals shouted over the top of each one of these tunes with nonsensical platitudes. I almost shut it off after a couple tracks but I stuck it out and kinda came around on some level. I was oddly reminded of My War era Black Flag sludge punk. The band sez "these Holy Grail fueled recordings are a mix of iphone and zoom recordings run through garageband, reaper and some plug-ins. We're still working on the much more listener-friendly Black Dirt session..." and point taken, listener friendly this ain't.

Nachtmystium/Leviathan - In the Valley of Death, Where Black Metal is King: An Homage to the Roots (Ascension Monuments Media, 2018)

What the fuck is that title. Okay I get the first part is a Judas Iscariot tribute, but did we really need "an homage to the roots" in there? Hey wouldn't it be funny if these were actually covers of the band The Roots? Anyway. This album was supposed to come out 10 years ago, but it was blocked by the bands' respective labels. Now I guess they've figured out a way, or Blake Judd needs money for drugs so he's figured out a way, to put this out. The Bandcamp version has 8 tracks, 5 from Nachtmystium and 3 from Leviathan, but I've seen a 10-track tracklisting elsewhere. On the version I have, we have Nachtmystium covering Judas Iscariot, Ildjarn (twice), Von and Burzum. Leviathan tackles Ildjarn (twice) and Von once. I seem to be missing Leviathan's Judas Iscariot cover ("Where the Winter Beats Incessant") and one of Nachtmystium's Von covers ("Von"). Weird. Wonder if there were some licensing issues or something. All four Ildjar...

Kamal Keila - Muslims and Christians (Habibi Funk, 2018)

Pretty cool album compiling two long-lost tapes of a long-lost Sudanese musician Kamal Keila and his band. The songs are sung in both English and Arabic and the backing band is lightly jazzy, punchy, RnB...talented for sure. Not the most far-out interesting thing Habibi Funk has ever put out but nice.

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