TODAY IS RECORD STORE DAY! My favourite secular "holiday." It happens to align with my least favourite secular holiday this year (besides kick a ginger day...), but that's another story.
This year I'm in Calgary and so had to wing it on which record store to go to. I don't have a local favourite yet. So I went to Heritage Posters and Music. Fun little shop with a decent selection, but a little heavy on the posters/cds to vinyl ratio. What really made the place was the owner, didn't catch his name but super friendly and helpful and more on the fun side of the scale than the weird. Proprietors can really make or break a record shop, it's really their personality in a store.
On to the haul!
Only picked up three records this year because of a tight budget, but I managed to get some beauts:
Captain Beefheart: Strictly Personal
Strictly Personal is a bastardized arrangement of weird blues and re-recordings of some of the Mirror Man sessions, which was kinda wrecked by the record company at the time. Beefheart didn't like the final product in the end but there are some decent jams including "Gimme Dat Harp Boy."
Rating 6.5/10 (Almost Great)
Captain Beefheart: The Legendary A&M Sessions
The A&M Sessions are some of Beefheart's most straight ahead blues tunes, but man they rock! I love this short LP to death.
Rating: 7/10 (Great)
The Move: Greatest Hits Vol. 1
I haven't listened to this (or anything by The Move) with the exception of their single "Brontosaurus" as of yet, but will give a brief review when I get to it. British Invasion psychedelia suggested by Greg Godovitz, my studio manager at OCL Studios. And there must be something to it, because when I brought it up to the counter at Heritage the owner's eyes looked up with delight and surprise and said in a british accent, "The MOOOOVE!" So. Looking forward to it!
That's it for now! :)
April 20, 2013
April 19, 2013
The Knife - Shaking the Habitual (2013) Review
Just keep on rolling with these blog posts I guess.
I'm finding music hard to write about. I either feel like I'm being too general about how something sounds or what is good or not about it, or I feel like I get so detailed that it's a pain to read. Let's see if this works.
The Knife, for those of you who don't know, are a brother/sister duo from Sweden who make dark synth driven grooves. They broke through (spawning tons of dark-synth-pop wannabes) with their third album, 2006's Silent Shout. Philosophically, being a big band doesn't seem to jive with these siblings, because after Silent Shout blew up they split up to follow solo paths (one result of which was the awesomely bizarre Fever Ray record). When they did return together as the Knife, instead of making a logical follow up to everything they had done so far, they made a bizarre electro-opera which tied Darwin's life to the evolution of life on Earth. Strange, long, with few driving beats, it was super interesting, and alienating. But now they've made the huge, double disc monstrosity Shaking the Habitual, which both sounds like the proper follow up to Silent Shout/Fever Ray, but also shows that their dabbling in evolution seems to have had an impact.
This is an incredible record, currently my top contender for Album of the Year. The album kicks off with three back to back great tunes over 24 minutes. "A Tooth For An Eye" kicks it off, taking tight rhythms and bright sounds and managing to make them creepy. "Full of Fire" throws out any pretense of normalness with a huge banger of a track which distorts and disintegrates over nearly ten minutes, never slowing it's pace but never feeling too repetitive. Karin (the sister/lead singer) makes her voice distort and crack through both vocal and digital manipulation, sounding like a little girl one moment and an old man the next - climaxing with her yelling "Let's talk about gender baby, let's talk about you and me" in a deep baritone which can barely hold itself together. And then another shift to "Cherry on Top", which begins with 5 minutes of really cool droning noise which wouldn't be out of place on The Seer (one of last year's favourite albums), then morphs into a creepy little nursery rhyme, and then back into creaking drones.
If all this record gave me was these three songs, it would be enough to put this album in my top ten of the year. The intricate rhythms, the amazing sonic manipulations, everything I love about these guys, summed up nicely in 24 exciting minutes. But it doesn't stop there, that's not even half of the first disc!
The rest of the album is in turns exciting, terrifying, meditative, and actively disconcerting. They also get outside of just electronic sounds on this record - it is called Shaking the Habitual after all. Without "You My Life Would Be Boring" has flute playing that reminds me of some of the weirder jazz records Don Cherry and Sun Ra recorded in the early 70s. There are tribal drum jams (closer to what was on Fever Ray) and there are weird chirping noise tracks. The record paces itself well, with tracks ranging from under a minute in length to nearly twenty minutes, and nothing is ever boring, or ever rehashed. Despite the fact that the basic elements are mostly represented in the first three songs, all of those elements take on new faces which themselves take on new masks. You can tell that this album came out of restless creative energy, but the best part is, it not only was born there, but it furthers the cause: of pushing and striving and destroying any and all boxes which might inhibit the minds growth.
Rating: 7.5/10 (Great +)
I'm finding music hard to write about. I either feel like I'm being too general about how something sounds or what is good or not about it, or I feel like I get so detailed that it's a pain to read. Let's see if this works.
The Knife, for those of you who don't know, are a brother/sister duo from Sweden who make dark synth driven grooves. They broke through (spawning tons of dark-synth-pop wannabes) with their third album, 2006's Silent Shout. Philosophically, being a big band doesn't seem to jive with these siblings, because after Silent Shout blew up they split up to follow solo paths (one result of which was the awesomely bizarre Fever Ray record). When they did return together as the Knife, instead of making a logical follow up to everything they had done so far, they made a bizarre electro-opera which tied Darwin's life to the evolution of life on Earth. Strange, long, with few driving beats, it was super interesting, and alienating. But now they've made the huge, double disc monstrosity Shaking the Habitual, which both sounds like the proper follow up to Silent Shout/Fever Ray, but also shows that their dabbling in evolution seems to have had an impact.
This is an incredible record, currently my top contender for Album of the Year. The album kicks off with three back to back great tunes over 24 minutes. "A Tooth For An Eye" kicks it off, taking tight rhythms and bright sounds and managing to make them creepy. "Full of Fire" throws out any pretense of normalness with a huge banger of a track which distorts and disintegrates over nearly ten minutes, never slowing it's pace but never feeling too repetitive. Karin (the sister/lead singer) makes her voice distort and crack through both vocal and digital manipulation, sounding like a little girl one moment and an old man the next - climaxing with her yelling "Let's talk about gender baby, let's talk about you and me" in a deep baritone which can barely hold itself together. And then another shift to "Cherry on Top", which begins with 5 minutes of really cool droning noise which wouldn't be out of place on The Seer (one of last year's favourite albums), then morphs into a creepy little nursery rhyme, and then back into creaking drones.
If all this record gave me was these three songs, it would be enough to put this album in my top ten of the year. The intricate rhythms, the amazing sonic manipulations, everything I love about these guys, summed up nicely in 24 exciting minutes. But it doesn't stop there, that's not even half of the first disc!
The rest of the album is in turns exciting, terrifying, meditative, and actively disconcerting. They also get outside of just electronic sounds on this record - it is called Shaking the Habitual after all. Without "You My Life Would Be Boring" has flute playing that reminds me of some of the weirder jazz records Don Cherry and Sun Ra recorded in the early 70s. There are tribal drum jams (closer to what was on Fever Ray) and there are weird chirping noise tracks. The record paces itself well, with tracks ranging from under a minute in length to nearly twenty minutes, and nothing is ever boring, or ever rehashed. Despite the fact that the basic elements are mostly represented in the first three songs, all of those elements take on new faces which themselves take on new masks. You can tell that this album came out of restless creative energy, but the best part is, it not only was born there, but it furthers the cause: of pushing and striving and destroying any and all boxes which might inhibit the minds growth.
Rating: 7.5/10 (Great +)
April 18, 2013
Return to a form of the former form / Ash Borer - Bloodlands
Well, I am temporarily out of musical projects to be working on. So I will attempt to write some reviews, or just blog posts music related. Briefer ones than usual I think.
First of all, there are three projects I have engineered/produced over the last year which are in that "finished but awaiting official release" phase. I am super proud of them and super stoked for them to come out. I will post about them in greater detail when the time comes.
******************
I want to kick off a new season of blogging by mentioning a band which has been slowly creeping up on me: Ash Borer. They are a Californian Black Metal band signed to Profound Lore. The last 3 years or so has seen an incredible explosion in the American Black Metal scene. There have been a few stand outs in this scene so far: Krallice, Liturgy, some members of the Black Twilight Circle collective, and Wolves in the Throne Room. I must confess that despite my love for these bands, the rest of the music to come out of the ABM scene has mostly bled together into one big blast beat, tremolo picked, incoherent screech.
Ash Borer however has cut through the milieu for me recently. It's not that they are breaking any new ground (the already mentioned bands above have done a lot of that already) and I've been trying to put my finger on why I kept going back to their 2012 release Cold of Ages. I think with the fairly new Bloodlands EP I am finally starting to be able to solve this connundrum. These guys aren't just great players with crazy chops playing as fast as they can, they are intelligent musicians who want to tell stories. Their songs take their time to get to the blast beats, it isn't just madness straight through. They build songs, drawing you in. They make you wait for the pay off and then kick you in the teeth. They're like professional fishermen, reeling you in, then cutting you just enough slack to let you think you've gotten through before hitting you even harder.
The production quality of both Cold of Ages and Bloodlands is better than a lot of black metal too. These are sonically rich albums, everything is crisp. There's no over-trebled hiss, like a lot of black metal has. Everything sounds good, and the songs are good. I don't know whether there has ever been a blast beat that has had a real weighty impact on me as much as the one which appears around the 7-minute mark of the 20 minute behemoth that is "Dirge / Purgation." Check it out below via ashborer.bandcamp.com
Rating: 7/10 (Great)
First of all, there are three projects I have engineered/produced over the last year which are in that "finished but awaiting official release" phase. I am super proud of them and super stoked for them to come out. I will post about them in greater detail when the time comes.
******************
I want to kick off a new season of blogging by mentioning a band which has been slowly creeping up on me: Ash Borer. They are a Californian Black Metal band signed to Profound Lore. The last 3 years or so has seen an incredible explosion in the American Black Metal scene. There have been a few stand outs in this scene so far: Krallice, Liturgy, some members of the Black Twilight Circle collective, and Wolves in the Throne Room. I must confess that despite my love for these bands, the rest of the music to come out of the ABM scene has mostly bled together into one big blast beat, tremolo picked, incoherent screech.
Ash Borer however has cut through the milieu for me recently. It's not that they are breaking any new ground (the already mentioned bands above have done a lot of that already) and I've been trying to put my finger on why I kept going back to their 2012 release Cold of Ages. I think with the fairly new Bloodlands EP I am finally starting to be able to solve this connundrum. These guys aren't just great players with crazy chops playing as fast as they can, they are intelligent musicians who want to tell stories. Their songs take their time to get to the blast beats, it isn't just madness straight through. They build songs, drawing you in. They make you wait for the pay off and then kick you in the teeth. They're like professional fishermen, reeling you in, then cutting you just enough slack to let you think you've gotten through before hitting you even harder.
The production quality of both Cold of Ages and Bloodlands is better than a lot of black metal too. These are sonically rich albums, everything is crisp. There's no over-trebled hiss, like a lot of black metal has. Everything sounds good, and the songs are good. I don't know whether there has ever been a blast beat that has had a real weighty impact on me as much as the one which appears around the 7-minute mark of the 20 minute behemoth that is "Dirge / Purgation." Check it out below via ashborer.bandcamp.com
Rating: 7/10 (Great)
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