Neil Young - Roxy: Tonight's the Night Live (Reprise, 2018)

Another welcome entry in the Neil Young Archive series - back when the Roxy in LA first opened in 1973 they asked Neil Young and his band the Santa Monica Flyers to perform. They were fresh of rehearsing and recording for Tonight's the Night and that material makes up the bulk of this album - excluding, understandably as it was included on TTN more as tribute to the recently-deceased Danny Whitten, "Come On Baby Let's Go Downtown" and "Borrowed Tune", one of my favorites but a piano ballad that would've been out of step with the rest of the material here. "Lookout Joe" is also absent (it was performed by the Stray Gators on TTN) but "Walk On" from On the Beach closes the set. Interspersed throughout the set are the banter ("raps") that have become signature to the live entries in the Archive series. The sound quality here is pristine, and Young & Co. are in a jovial mood from the get-go - something of a countenance to the general mood of TTN which is quite the opposite. The band sounds impeccably tight and downright rollicking on these tracks. There isn't too much deviation from the versions on TTN - as they were new songs at the time the band obviously aren't already experimenting with them - so this album doesn't pull back much of a shroud on any hitherto unseen corners of the vast Young archives (lowercase 'a') - but it's still a good solid live record.

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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...

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.

Jan Jelinek - Zwischen (Faitiche, 2018)

Last year's reissue of Jan Jelinek's Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records put him on his radar for me forever. This is an shortened version of a radio play he put out called Zwischen. Jelinek sources interview clips from a pretty diverse cast - John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Slajov Zizek, Lady Gaga, Yoko Ono, Marcel Duchamp - and extracts all the pauses, silences, gaps, ums, ehs, ahs, hahas, etc from their answers. So you get track titles like "Yoko Ono, you were born into a rich, aristocratic family in Tokyo. Do you see that in yourself?" and "Karlheinz Stockhausen, which difficulties are involved in conserving electronic music on magnetic tape?". On top of that the audio cues present trigger synthesizers creating undercurrents of sound amidst the quasi-verbal utterances. It's a cool concept, interesting listen - all the responses have different moods. Zizek's is particularly stressed as he seems to be rushing through an explanation of something important ...

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