Take one part Parson Sound/International Harvester style slo-mo mong rock, one part prime, blown-out UK psych/noise dirge (think pre-Carved Into Roses Skullflower) and stir in the ecstatic string work of Agathe Max or Henry Flynt, and you have the rough makings of my record of the year (so far): Myrrh, by Myrrh (Soft Abuse).
It really is a fucking beauty. An electric viola and drums duo whose crawling feedback mantras don't so much ascend into the sky as burn a fucking hole through the planet. This record presses more of my buttons than anything I've heard in a fucking age. Blues sodden modal viola riffs, plucked and bowed, slowly rotate round a granite-hard core of saturated drum thud (courtesy of Andie Mazorol), the like of which I've only previously encountered when Stuart Dennison was still a fulltime member of Skullflower, each beat landing like the foot of a very stoned elephant, raising huge clouds of tape dust that coats every surface in volcanic ash before Jackie Beckley kicks in the feedback afterburner and cuts the viola loose with a high and lonesome chainsaw wail, a screaming, roaring, beautiful wall of scorched earth fuzz that sends shivers up my fucking spine every single time I hear it. This is psychedelic mountain music people, and I urge you to seek it out. In the meantime, there's a couple of tasters here to be going on with...
Another record which I don't think really gets it due is Santana's absolutely fucking astonishing early 70s live album, Lotus. I hadn't listened to it for a while until someone mentioned it on Twitter a few days ago, and I'd almost forgotten just how fucking good it is. Face-meltingly intense at times, this is not the swinging latin west coast sound of the earlier stuff, but a fearsomely psychedelic jazz rock meltdown which has more in common with Dark Magus and On The Corner for much of it's duration than any of their own back catalogue.
I mean, it opens with a huge Alice Coltrane cover (Going Home), then slams into the more than a bit electric Miles 'A-1 Funk' in the midst of an echoplex ring mod laser battle and doesn't take it's foot off the gas for more than a few seconds at a time. It's six or seven minutes in that it really starts to kill, Carlos Santana's guitar scything into Every Step Of The Way's brooding funk with seriously violent intent. Fuck it, I could write about it all fucking day and still not convey just how fucking storming this record is, so here's the whole two hours...
And yes, that is Leon Thomas on vocals and percussion.
I'll warn you right now, the level of guitar and moog wank in this clip is off the fucking scale. But it rocks like a fucking mountain, which is why I'm posting it. Yes, I know it's Journey, but, and this is the important bit, it's long before they went pop (although most of the early stuff is still hideous) and not long after Greg Rolie and the other bloke left Santana*, probably because Carlos wouldn't let him play his moog like he does in the second song here. There's no excuse for this sort of behaviour really, but when it's done with this level of intensity, and accompanied by some of the funniest fucking facial expressions of profound ecstasy in the history of music, it's irresistible, like a dirty kebab after fourteen pints of scrumpy.
Skip ahead to 4.20 and 9.30 for the really good shit...
Christ, it's like a fucking cross between early ZZ Top and Goblin.
*The bass player and rhythm guitarist were previously in the sorely fucking underrated Frumious Bandersnatch, psych fans!
I've completely lost my fucking voice. All that comes out is this weird bassy rasp which sounds more like a broken EDP Wasp than a human voice, accompanied by a sensation akin to some fucker forcing a cheese grater down my gullet. Still, laryngitis aside, I'm actually in a damn good mood, and not just 'cos my throat-soother of choice, Isle Of Jura Elixir*, is so fucking delicious...
One of the reasons I'm in a good mood is because one of my favourite bunch of doom-mongers**, mad Italian space cadets Ufomammut, have got their act together again after a couple of disappointingly Isis-esque (or fucking boring, if you prefer, as far as I'm concerned the two terms are perfectly interchangeable) albums*** and remembered what they're fucking good at, namely riffs that sound like the Sun collapsing, incomprehensible cosmic bellowing, and huge swathes of wibbling analogue synths. Colossally dumb space doom of the highest fucking order, and essential listening for connoisseurs of heavy and stupid. Oh yeah, it's called Oro - Opus Primum and it's on Supernatural Cat, in case you were wondering.
Also on Supernatural Cat are another bunch of marvellous loons who go by the names Lin, Len and Lan, and are collectively known as Morkobot. They may be Ufomammut under another name, they may not, I have no idea, mainly because they have metal cubes for heads, as you can see...
A bass, drums and synth trio, they specialise in angular, convoluted space/noiserock and vaguely remind me of an instrumental Supernova-era Today Is The Day, albiet without the gun fetish and raging misanthropy, and their latest, Morbo, sounds (a bit) like a King Crimson loving spider jamming jazz-rock hardcore with Tar§. In other words, very bendy and very good. Goddammit, they even chuck in lashings of slide bass, and apart from Mark Sandman and me, there really aren't many practitioners of that dark art around. And Mark Sandman's been dead for years, so if you crave the injured elephant call of bottleneck bass you know where to go. They're also so tight it fucking hurts, chucking odd time signatures around like it ain't no thang and they never, ever veer into the dread zone of prog toss. If you like NoMeansNo, you'll fucking shit yrself over this lot. Fucking brilliant.
Right. More later, but the painkillers are kicking in and my brain wants to take a power nap.
*12yo, sweet, fruity and honeyed. Get thee to a Sainsbury's and grab a bottle. You can't buy it anywhere else as far as I know.
**With the emphasis on the mong.
***Eve and Idolum. Really fucking boring. Unlike the preceding three LPs, Godlike Snake, Snailking and Lucifer Songs which are simply fucking sublime.
§Another brilliant AmRep band no one seems to remember any more.
It's hard to express just how much I fucking love this song. It is, quite simply, a motherfucker*. I'd advise turning this up very, very loud and playing it at least twice.
Quick note for anyone whose appetite has been whetted by this and wants to check out Mad River's glorious first LP, do not buy the double cd reissue that's got the inferior second album, Paradise Bar & Grill, in the same package. The reason Mad River sounds so weird and wired is that it was accidentally mastered at slightly too high a speed, giving it a sharp, edgy, bad trip vibe, and someone decided to remaster the fucker not only at the correct speed, but in such a way as to dull the hugely trebly impact of the three (oh yes, three) guitarists, rendering one of 'em almost inaudible on some tracks. It's a fucking disgrace, and I urge you to seek out an unfucked-with copy.
*And the theme song of my late teenage years. But we'll say no more about that.
Keeping with the spacerock theme, here's the band that arguably invented the whole thing*, Amon Düül II, knocking seven bells of psychedelic shit out of their classic Phallus Dei sometime in 1968.
*Their bass player, Dave Anderson, undoubtedly invented spacerock bass. There's a good reason he ended up in Hawkwind a couple of years later...
I did write a really long post about struggling with pain and whatnot, a positive one for a change, as I've conquered a few demons that have been royally fucking with me all year, but I deleted it. Because when it comes down to it, I'm finally in a good fucking state of mind, most parts of my life seem to be going rather well thank you, and I'm not sure that huge blog posts analysing what's going on with my fucked-up nervous system and it's attendent effects on my inner life are actually that fucking helpful. So instead, here's a song which I think sums up my current mood quite fucking nicely...
I fucking love this record. It's genuinely fucking bonkers. Especially as the preceding album (Sorcerors) was pretty standard vaguely psychy folk stuff*. Not sure what happened in the intervening couple of years, but it sounds like it involved a Soft Machine album and a fuckload of acid. This is the shortest (and heaviest) track, a mere eight minutes compared to the expansive weirdness of the nineteen minute opener, Sun Symphonica, or the jazzfolkpsychprogfroth they work up over thirteen minutes on Call Of The Wild, but what a fucking eight minutes. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mice And Rats In The Loft by Jan Dukes De Grey.
*Not my bag, too much fucking Donovan and Tull in the mix for me.
This is fucking brilliant. I can't overstate how much of an influence John Martyn has had on my guitar playing. This may surprise some people, but bear with me, this will make sense when you've seen this fucking fantastic version of Skip James' I'd Rather Be The Devil, from 1973.
Bastard. That's just so fucking good. It doesn't matter how many times I hear that song, I'll never, ever tire of that echoplex guitar. And I'll happily and shamelessly rip it off wholesale when I'm in the mood, because unlike so many echo/loop pedal fiends who (consciously or otherwise) use the Göttsching/Hillage/Fripp/Pinhas style of looping and layering, John Martyn never wasn't much of a looper, preferring to use the percussive nature of the dying echoes along with what is possibly the greatest left hand of any guitarist I've ever seen to create a shifting, pulsing forward motion that has more in common with a conga player than the usual billowing tonefloat associated with heavy delay abusers. And that, in a nutshell, is why I love his guitar so much, he took the same tools as so many other contemporary musicians, went completely his own way with them, and in the process created a whole new perspective with them, one which was decidedly not ambient and slowly evolving, but simultaneously driving and fluid, so you don't hear the tapestry, you hear the shuttling of the loom, and trust me, that's way fucking harder to do.
Right. I'm back. Again. I should have known that would happen. A week or so after the 'flu fucked off, my immune system kicked seven bells of shit out of me. Not the full-on fucking evil of a few years ago, but enough unpleasantness to require some serious fucking painkiller/trank administration. Now I've never really hidden my fondness for temporarily rewiring my brain, but tramadol and temazepam is not a recommended combination. Not if you want to hang onto yr grip on reality anyway. I spent a week or so in a deeply weird state, bordering on hypnopompic* at times, and it wasn't nice**, not really able to think coherently, thoughts (such as they were) sliding out of my grasp like eels, the weird disassociated feeling that my conscious mind was just about alert enough to watch, but too fucking knackered to do anything, content to let the reptilian part of my brain take over unless absolutely fucking necessary. Not nice people, not nice at all. But I am properly better (and conscious) now, just in time for the appalling levels of gluttony and debauchery the next week or so will hopefully bring forth. And now I'm going to roll a fucking huge reefer and listen to Coloured Balls*** very, very loud. More shit later...
*I specifically mean hypnopompic here too, not hypnogogic. No matter what anyone says, they're qualiatively not the same. For as long as I can remember, I've experienced really long periods of both on many, many occasions, and nothing on earth, with the possible exception of DMT, can compare with the sheer fucking weirdness I've experienced getting stuck between being asleep and waking up. Getting stuck going the other way is nowhere near as strange.
**Ok, it was occasionally enjoyably mongy, but most of the time it was fucking unpleasant. Not as unpleasant as the pain and a complete inability to sleep tho.
***Early 70s proto-punk, proto-metal hard psych Aussie lunatics featuring Lobby Lloyde, one of the meanest fucking guitarists you've never heard, and a man who, like me, has a penchant for ring-modulating his guitar into oblivion. Not all their stuff is good, but when they got it right (the early shit), they got it so fucking right. Check out G.O.D. from Summer Jam with it's fucking magnificent Hawkwind vs Stooges riff and you'll get the rough idea. Oh wait, here it is:
Goth. The influence that dare not speak it's name. I'm not talking 90s-onwards gloomy sub-metal bollocks here, but the proper stuff, yer Bauhaus, Nephilims and, most gloriously of all, The Sisters Of Mercy. I may have mentioned my penchant for the Sisters before, but I'll say it again; when they were good, they were fucking brilliant, a lo-fi concoction of equal parts Suicide and Hawkwind with a dash of early Stooges for bouquet, which is a damn fine cocktail in my book. The reason I mention this is that the latest, and possibly greatest, Robedoor LP, Too Down To Die (Not Not Fun) is pure, unadulterated proper goth worship*, and yet not a single review I've read picks up on this. Maybe because the reviewer doesn't want to damage their hipster credentials, or maybe they're just too young to remember when goth was actually a vibrant, musically distinct offshoot of post-punk less concerned with a certain look and attitude than creating a (then) modern reconfiguration of psychedelia, a darker vision which nevertheless sought to offer some escape from the rotten, decaying state of Britain in the early 80s.
But, just for a change, I've wandered off my own point, which is that Too Down To Die is the best goth album of the last 25 years, bar none. Imagine crossing Blood On The Moon/3rd From The Sun-era Chrome with early Sisters and you've got a pretty fucking good idea of what this record sounds like. Spindly, endlessly flanged guitars coiling round a super-mechanical rhythm section, icy synths slowly rise and fall, creating an ever shifting landscape of bad-trip dread, minor-key spacerock bass leads you by the hand through this shifting, monochromatic haze as the low, deadpan voice whispers and croons things in yr ear you don't really want to know. Beautiful, epic and happily, wallowingly world-weary in a way I haven't encountered for a very long while.
Note to hipsters: If y're gonna rip off the 80s, at least try to do it as well as this.
*See also the latest Religious Knives album, Smokescreen (Sacred Bones). I think they should just be fucking blatant about it and cut a split 7" with Robedoor doing "Lights" and Religious Knives doing "Kiss The Carpet"** (both from The Reptile House EP, the greatest goth record ever). Just a thought...
**It's always good to see the penny drop when an over-serious goth finally realises what this song is about.
Sandy Bull. One of the finest and most original guitarists America has ever produced, and for my money anyway, by far and way the best of the first wave of the so-called "American primitives*". "Blend", the appositely titled opening track to his first LP, Fantasias For Guitar & Banjo (Vanguard) is a twenty-odd minute dialogue between Bull's extraordinary acoustic guitar and the unstoppable invention of Billy Higgins' drumkit and assorted percussives, which manages to absorb modal jazz, blues, Indian, Middle-Eastern and Nubian influences into it's untouchable whole, at times coming on like a psychedelic acoustic Bo Diddley jamming with Can in a souk. And this was in 1963.
Yes, you did read that right, 1963. In the same fucking year as the fucking Beatles wheedled and whined their insipid way into the world's consciousness, and Coltrane was still a year or so away from A Love Supreme and tentatively dipping his toe into freer, more turbulent waters, Sandy Bull was... somewhere else, somewhere new, somewhere better. It's one of those records that's just too damn early, too fucking far ahead of the pack, that it seems to sit outside of the normal timeline, like a digital watch accidentally dropped in 1920 by a careless time-traveller. If this had fuzz on the guitar, it would be the exact music that Jerry Garcia and Jorma Kaukonen were trying so fucking hard to make in 1968. Those free-flying raga-tinged freakouts that came a few years down the line? They started here, and very few have ever come close.
More on the eclectic, erratic, eccentric genius of Mr Bull very soon, for now, I'll leave you with the full version of Blend for yr delectation, delight and other words beginning with "d".
*What a fucking stupid term for playing the acoustic guitar. I can't decide what I hate about it most; it's utter meaningless in the face of the sheer harmonic and technical sophistication that musicians like Jack Rose or (in his early days at least) Leo Kottke employed to conjour such dense, complex clouds of sound from their instruments**, or it's semantic and lexical dubiousness, reeking as it does of such lovely concepts as "noble savage" and the like, the term's implied presumption that music rooted in folk, blues or early country is somehow backward and unsophisticated. I don't care that the sainted John Fahey himself*** coined the term, apparently in homage to the French Primitive painters, it still rankles with me, with it's aura of condescension and it's unwitting borderline offensiveness. It displays that same fucking patronising 50s/60s attitude as all those sniffy white folk fans who got all up in a froth when black people dared to play the blues on electric guitars because it wasn't "authentic". It's all fucking folk music, get over yrselves, and yr silly fucking ideas.
**Go and listen to Jack Rose's Raag Manifestos and tell me there's anything primitive about this music. Well, you can if you like, but you'd be wrong and I'd probably just tell you to fuck off.
In lieu of being capable of saying anything even vaguely coherent or sensible, due to a severe lack of sleep over the previous few days, I advise you to follow this link and immerse yrself in the wild and wooly sounds of this years Tinderbox Festival, which can be found here.
Oh yes, I kid you not, this is indeed the shit. If you like early Hawkwind*, but crave a little more fuck you and a bit less cocking around, if you think that Comets On Fire went downhill from their first LP onwards until they disappeared in a cloud of FM rock wank, if Circle are a bit too clean, a touch too metal and prog for you, and, like me, you worship at the altar of The Heads, then this is the band for you. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Men, a band whose spacerock riffing is shot through with a scum-encrusted viciousness redolent of the finest Amphetamine Reptile bands. Pigfuck in space if you like, and I know that you do.
Anyway here's () from their latest LP, Leave Home (Sacred Bones), in which they stomp all over the grave of Spacemen 3's Revolution, and therefore, by default, the MC5's Black To Comm**, and leave a glorious, blown out mess of fuzz in their wake. More later, I've just realised I missed Torchwood and the iplayer beckons once more...
*You should also go to BBC4 iplayer and watch Hawkwind: Do Not Panic as soon as possible. You may notice small objects, such as ornaments, oscillating...
**I love Spacemen 3, but let's face it, originality was never really their strong point...
I need a drummer. Badly. Someone who's equally happy locked into a krautrock/frogprog groove and clanking out off-kilter greasy Chromesque psych-damage* with a side order of mucky garage, a Trashy Liebezeit if you will**.
The reason being that I thought I'd treat myself to a new guitar, as I've been having a shitty time of it, and, breaking the habit of a lifetime, I bought a Fender***, a Duo-Sonic to be precise, and it's a rasping trebly snot machine par excellence which makes me want to blast off into sleazy motorik space every time I pick the fucker up. So yeah, I need a drummer, any takers?
*Think Damon Edge as opposed to John Stench. Owning a 50lb bomb casing is optional.
**Sorry, can't help myself.
***Yes, that was a flying pig that just streaked past yr window. Contrary to popular belief, I don't hate Fenders, I just hate Strats.
Ok, here's some proper damaged brainwrong, and something I didn't expect to turn up on youtube. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, from the grey depths of 80s Britain*, the excellently freaked-the-fuck-out fuzzbomb that is Get Stoned Ezy by High Speed & The Afflicted Man.
Warning: this record contains extremely long guitar solos. Really, really fucking long ones.
*1982, not sure whereabouts they're from exactly tho.
