Steady Teething

The Steady As She Goes continued to roil in the deep dark night, a behemoth breaking the surface in slow motion, the spiked moonlight  sparking off its glistening carapace. The one-man Gothic doomsayer scorches the (E)arth on 'Kindred', the sepulchral opener to new release Teeth Dreams, before the Man In Black saunters through the smoke, a haunted gunslinger looking for his 'Throne Of Want'. I know that Tal will hate me for some of this - but I felt like I was trapped in a vacuum with three speakers spewing forth Tangerine Dream, Ennio Morricone and Pink Floyd in an unholy triumvirate of textured sound. I personally absolutely love it - it has become my soundtrack to my current spate of late-night writings. 'You Don't' is more in the scheduled TSASG vein, a slow-grinding leviathan of heaving waves of expectation and expulsion, before the nightmare crawl of 'Toluca' takes into the delicious darkness. The Steady As She Goes is one of the best things about the Brisbane music scene in my opinion - defiantly dark, dense, idiosyncratic and intense, a solo journey to the centre of the earth with no promise of return. More please - always fucking more.

Frolicking In Field Hymns

I don't talk about them as much as I should, but one of my favourite labels of the last couple of years is the outre electronic bathysphere that is Field Hymns, constantly finding outlier synthetic sonics to stroke the brain and stimulate the soul. This morning I am enamoured by the 8-bit via cerebral ambient malaise that is Three Fourths Tigers' Indoor Voice.

The title track opens up proceedings, and somehow manages to be cavernous and intricate in synapse-frying scope. But its the dial-tone (both regular and irregular) that permeates the nebulous cryogenic lagoon that is 'Line Connector' where we realise something unique is happening here; it is a psychotropic mind melt in the first half, before holding a note like a cut-off tone before surreptitiously dipping into ambient analogue modulation. 'Windows Excel' is a more "traditional" kosmiche undulation, taking tantric synth into wide, spacious realms - an oddly soothing psychedelic suspension. 'Petrifloral' is almost pastoral in its ebullient waves, both synthetic language and organ epiphany. 'Rainbow Russ' is the score to a existential point-and-click emotive adventure, all VGA colours and vivid imaginations. 'Visitor Sphere' takes the bubbling brook motif that a lot of naturalistic sound collagers use as a carpet foundation to build more expansive, mindbending constructions, but here is allowed to complement a somewhat simplistic sonics to energise an otherworldly terrain - both field recording and satellite sound capture. The wonky buzz and hum that opens 'Other Landings' evokes the ascent/descent of extra-dimensional craft, before a bell rings off and silence, other than an oscillating permutation and a ringing presence persists - a fluttering middle-ground, a floating stasis within the mind, everything out of sync, focus, weightless ambiguity. Finishing with the slow-building amalgam of electro-futurist pioneers that is 'Ensphynx', Indoor Voice is a stunning piece of work.

But I feel remiss if I don't mention some of the other recent releases the label has pushed, especially after my post on Brisbane fringe dwellers FEET TEETH yesterday. There is Murmurs and Echoes from Norway's Andreas Brandal, which somehow manages to inhabit the iconic realm of the Spaghetti Western score made famous by Ennio Morricone, and make it a mechanised Other, with flourishes from introspective, ancient Japanese folk, immolating tape, scraping metal on deserted concrete floors, and latter-day Earth-esque meandering sunburnt instrumentals. I actually love this release more than Indoor Voice - but came to it later. Seriously though, it is bloody breathtaking.


Then there are these two - the Krautrock-via-Pink Floyd dream that is The Snowfields' new album How To Get Good Sound From A Dead Ear; and The Man Who Drank God, the truly warped parallel universe lost recordings of a death cult that is Ak'chamel The Giver Of Illness.



Field Hymns are always pushing the boundaries, confronting and consuming, and will always be worth your time.

Novels In The Dunes

I have somehow missed the myriad delights that solo guitarist Sarah Lipstate has put into the ether under her Noveller moniker, but with Fantastic Planet due out on Fire Records next year, there is no excuse. She has been around since 2005 though, so I have a lot of catching up to do. Plus she has collaborated with the likes of Lee Ranaldo, Cold Cave and Parts & Labor, so her explorations of the electric guitar form is well versed and admired. And my first taste of it rose the hairs on the back of my everything. The haunting ethereal grind on album opener 'Into The Dunes' is spacious, dark, gritty - it's as if Lipstate has taken some of the contemplative latter-day musings of Dylan Carlson, run it through a crystallised synthesiser, distilled it in a modular vacuum, headed back to 1968 and handed the results to Stanley Kubrick. It could go for seven times the size and still be as astrally hypnotic. Fantastic indeed.

You can pre-order Fantastic Planet (on delectable aqua vinyl) here.

Expect Real Pain Supernova With No Anchor

Last year Flingco Sound System put out a sampler of bands on their roster, one of which was no Anchor. Their song 'Wolves Bite And Disappear' killed, and Ive been hankering for some of their joint ever since.

now, not only do they hail from my hometown of Brisbane, Australia, but on the 9th of May 2011, No Anchor hope to release their new album Real Pain Supernova. They would LOVE to guarantee that this album will be released but there are no guarantees in this world. None. The band could all die mysteriously between now and the 9th of May. They could all take up dice living and just decide not to do the band ever again. Things happen. The apocalypse might happen, you never know. They could all be dead by the time you read this.

But if not, enjoy this raw, apocalyptic album - hey maybe this will be the harbinger of things to come? It was mastered for vinyl by Mell Dettmer [Boris, Earth and Sunn O)))] and will be available in s 2 x LP format from the band's website www.noanchorband.com (and their bandcamp). When was the last time an Aussie band fucked with double vinyl? Almost all of the album packaging is hand made by the abrasive trio and their screenprinting buddy Matt Deasy. There are only 150 copies of these all up, 25 of whcih will include deluxe versions (AKA extra shit like shirts and woodcuts). THERE WILL BE NO CDs - they are as dead as Diana! However, a free/donation digital version of the album will be available online on the 9th of May 2011 here, which you can stream now below! Unless, that is, something bad happens. And it might.


If you havent picked up on this already, Real Pain Supernova is out May 9 (and look at the artwork! Stellar...) No Anchor will launch the sucker on May 13 alongside Undead Apes and Dreamtime at Brisbane's Woodland venue.

No Anchor - Wolves Bite And Disappear

Woodsman Are On Far From Rare Form

I have been mightily excited about Woodsman's Rare Forms album since midway through last year, when I stumbled across their EP Mystery Tapes and systematically lost my shit. And before I say "I told you so" - and I will - I found it absolutely infuriating (and a little ironic seeing as I had just reviewed Toro Y Moi's newie Underneath The Pine - see that review here) that some of the initial thoughts labelled the sound of the new LP as chillwave.

Chill-fucking-wave?!?!

Im sorry - maybe Ive been confused all this time about what that supposed "genre" was all about (and yes, its in past tense, because the fucking thing is DEAD. The best bands and artists that spawned out of that sound have grown exponentially since then and have invariable spurned the genre, whilst the rest died from internal haemorraging after participating in a 24hr bumming circle with themselves). Shouldnt there be sampling, effects, loops, and hypnagogic bullshit as opposed to live instrumentation and inventive percussion that swirls into a psychedelic haze that only strengthens as it stretches taut? Sure, there are shoegaze and psych elements in most of today's music scenes, but generally those who are labeled 'chillwave' come across as trite, self-involved and...well, shit. Or its incredibly lazy journalism. Or both. Usually both.

Wow. Talk about angsty...

But back to the review. I cant say that Rare Forms is an original album in the sense that some of the tracks have more than a couple of Animal Collective's fingerprints molded into the amber, especially the middle pair of tracks 'I Cant Move' and 'Future Pulls' - melded as one it is like hearing a rustic hoedown cover of 'Banshee Beat'. Even 'Beat The Heat' cant escape this comparison, despite the haunting harmonics and tribal drumming that swirls to the forefront of the track - and this is solely due to the new vocal additions by band member Mark Demolar. But that should not be a bad thing - and the rest of the album justifies this momentary aping, as the Denver trio endeavour to capitalise on the gruff axe-wielding haziness that Mystery Tape intimated. The dark 'No Dialogue' is an Earth-esque desolate instrumental with Branca-esque dissonance, whilst on 'Burial Ground' the percussion rises into a cacophonous maelstrom ridden by soaring choral vocals. Opener 'Insects' retains much of the sound inherent in their earlier stuff, and remains just as exciting, enhanced by Demolar's off-kilter vocals.

So even though this was not the instrumental psychedelic blitkrieg I had envisioned, it is an utterly beguiling album nonetheless, and should not be hindered by its adherence to certain AC traits. It is a tightly wound yet surreal sonic journey, and heralds an exciting band that will surely flourish in the next 12 months.

And they aren't fucking chillwave.

Rare Forms is out on Lefse Records - buy it here.

Woodsman - Insects
Woodsman - Beat The Heat

Angels And Demons Brought Back To Earth

I have to laugh when I read forums that bicker about Dylan Carlson, the man responsible for drone doom. When he burst onto the scene in the early Nineties with his Earth persona, his grunge inflected minimalist dark masterpieces blew everyone away, and is the sole reason why we have Sunn O))) today. Then Earth disappeared off the scene for a bit, but many didn’t notice as the drone doom genre flourished. Then in the early 00s Carlson returned, riding a flaming horse of death, and his music mirrored this – an underworld version of the true Western. His sound now encapsulates the type of music Ennio Morricone may have produced if he was scoring the end of the world. Both directions that Earth have taken are brilliant in my mind. Im not sure where Earth could have gone in its earliest guise, and this spectral dark country music that he now specialises in is scary in its resonance.

And so we come to Angels Of Darkness, Demons Of Light I, the first in a series of thematically similar releases that are due out this year. Earth returns to the drone, riff-empty ethereal ism of albums like Hex, yet remains light years away from the acid white noise of yesteryear. These five tracks meander through a sonic wasteland that is so visceral you can feel the murk, gunk, dirt and stench of a dying badlands. The use of cello in the title track add further gravitas, through not inhibiting the flow of the music by becoming an anchor. In fact that is the point – these tracks drift along at their own pace, both cynical and resigned to the fate of the world. Its dark, yet somehow beautiful in its apocalyptic malaise. This is not going to appease the purists who have not let sleeping dogs lie since Carlson returned in 2005, therefore the forums will continue to run bright with shouts of blasphemy, defamation and heresy. But seriously, Dylan Carlson is still a giant of brutal orchestral sonic beauty, and even though he has gone all hellish frontiersman, he rides his pale horse defiantly.

Angels Of Darkness, Demons Of Light I is out on February 11 on Southern Lord Records.

Earth – Old Black