Whilst we here at Stereo Sanctity are of course inconsolable this weekend vis-à-vis the news that Kim Fowley, father of some of the most wonderful and demented pop music of the past fifty years, has passed away, we are also, in the back of our minds, somewhat relieved that this slightly alarming character is no longer stalking the earth causing trouble – a dichotomy that I suspect Mr. Fowley might have appreciated.

Whilst one shudders to think of the outrages Fowley may or may not have been party to in his glory days as the youth-stalking vampire of the Sunset Strip, now at least seems a good moment to draw a veil over the uglier results of his uncheckable egomania and celebrate him instead as a man who pretty much walked into a recording studio with nothing except the change in his pockets and walked out with a #1 hit creating his own world out of nothing but dust, glitter and goofery and living there ‘til the bitter end, never once breaking character, and dragging in whatever talent passed his way like some kind of irresistible vortex.

From ‘Alley Oop’ and ‘Pama-Oow-Mow-Mow’ onwards, the results of Fowley’s shameless, wild-eyed productivity run deep in the DNA of American pop culture. For his own work alone he is a trash-culture godhead on a par with Russ Meyer, Stan Lee or whoever else, and for dipping his pale fingers into the careers of artists as diverse as The Modern Lovers, Joan Jett, Soft Machine, Gene Vincent, Slade, Kiss, Warren Zevon, Blue Cheer, Cat Stevens and The Germs, well… you be the judge.

Separating fact from self-promotional ballyhoo and rumour can be a pretty tough gig when it comes to Kim Fowley, but readers who have no idea what I’m talking about are advised to go and give his Wikipedia page a read for a full info-dump. In particular, I draw your attention to the rather eyebrow-raising list of albums he recorded under his own name, which is a work of twisted poetry in and of itself.

The last time I checked in on Fowley’s tumblr account a couple of years back, he seemed to be ranting at length about his apparent estrangement from his fetish model girlfriend, and obsessively promoting some songs he’d already produced in response by some other presumably ill-starred Hollywood trash-starlet types – the result being a sad head-shake and a decision not to bother checking his tumblr account again. Behind the increasingly ragged Public Persona though, I guess there must have lurked an actual human being, and, above and beyond the snidey tone of this obit, death by cancer is never something to sneer about, and it’s hard not to be touched by the final sentence currently sitting on his wiki bio.

By way of tribute to the Animal God of the Streets then, here’s a quick run-down of some favourite Fowley moments that have brought me joy over the years, and will likely continue to do so until the day I meet a similar fate.

1. The Rangers – Justine (1964)

Anyone still cheerfully clinging to the notion that fully fledged punk rock didn’t exist until the 1970s needs to get a load of this 120 second masterpiece - one of the greatest, fastest and most stupidly exhilarating rock n’roll records ever made, and a readymade blueprint for ALL the garage/punk ramalama that’s followed over the next five(!) decades, whether it’s makers are aware of it or otherwise. [It was a cover of course - of Don & Dewey's only marginally more laidback '58 original. - Ed.] Strange but true: if I stop listening to all music for, say, a week, this and Link Wray’s ‘Comanche’ are the two songs that inevitably end up playing in my head on a continuous loop.

2. The Rivingtons – Papa-Oow-Mow-Mow (1962)

So I know The Trashmen’s subsequent ‘Surfin' Bird’ may be rawer and punker, with no need of the vaguely contemptible ‘understandable’ vocal dubbed over all the mrr-mrr-pow-powing on this one, for my money the Rivingtons cut has a marginally better dancing groove to it, and if nothing else, the whole incident stands as proof that some strokes of genius are so potent they can work again a second time with almost no development/alteration at all, and suffer no diminishing returns. Swings and roundabouts, collapsing under fifty years of rust, but if you’re a DJ in a sticky spot, one is still as good as the other for filling the floor.

3. The Runaways – Dead-End Justice (1976)

The Runaways may have grown into a better and stronger band once they ditched Fowley, but nonetheless, their first, Fowley-dominated LP remains the one to go for, and this extraordinary closing track remains one of the prime documents of his genius: a lunatic heavy metal epic in which girl gangers Joan and Cherie are busted by the fuzz and confined to juvie (“Where am I?”, “You’re in a cheap, run-down teenage jail, that’s where”, “Oh my god!”), from whence they subsequently bust out with all guitars blazing (“Joan, lets break out tonite”, “Ok Cherie, whats the plan?”). Full of semi-improvised idiot-genius couplets (“on the planet sorrow / there’s no tomorrow”?), stomping, arena-worthy bombast and an appropriately nihilistic crime movie ending, it’s like Jack Hill’s ‘70s filmography compressed into a seven minute rock song, and it’s just about the greatest fucking thing you ever heard. Makes me smile just thinking about it.

4. Kim Fowley – Bubblegum (1968)

And speaking of exploitation, nobody squeezed a few bucks out of the psychedelic revolution quite as shamelessly or enjoyably as Kim Fowley (hell, he enjoyed it so much he was still doing it in 1998), and this immortal psyche-bubblegum mash-up is one of all-time best, perhaps marking the moment at which total cynicism finds itself consumed by genuine mind-blasting mysticism of some dazzling, peculiar kind.

5. Althea & The Memories – The Worst Record Ever Made (1967)

Oh my god, have you heard this thing? Straight up genius. (“Do you know how hard it is to yell in a microphone for two and a half minutes..? Pretty hard.”) I’m guessing that Althea & The Memories was neither the first nor the last time Fowley grabbed a gaggle of passing teenagers off the streets to serve as his ‘girl group’ for the day like some poverty row Phil Spector, but this “oh my god, we’ve got five minutes left to record a b-side and the tape’s due at the pressing plant first thing tomorrow” travesty remains a unique bit of presumably intoxicated self-indulgence that could only ever have mistakenly found its way onto vinyl via this particularly fruitful alignment of time, place and personnel – a combination probably never to be repeated, which is unfortunate for those as in love with the idea of rock n’ roll as a total shuck as I am.

6. Kim Fowley – The Trip (1965)

See notes on #4. Temporal overlap makes it difficult to judge whether this one is a an exaggerated piss-take of Sky Saxon and The Seeds or actually a key influence upon their style, but either way, most commentators will agree that it remains totally nuts. Pretty damn early on the psychsploitation drug jive front too in ’65, and is there anything more sinister in the annals of recorded music than Fowley drawling “you’re doin’ it right baby… just put your head back…” at the end, like a comic book amalgam of every abusive Laurel Canyon psycho who subsequently crawled out of the innards of the ‘60s..? BRR.

7. The Snowmen – Ski Storm (Pt. 1) (1963)

And speaking of a chill….. (see, I’m not just throwing this shit together at random you know)…. a classic demonstration of the Fowley thought process is the period when, after the craze for surf music hit in the early ‘60s, he single-handedly attempted to popularize the competing genre of SKI MUSIC, briefly flooding the market with cheap-jack instrumental singles by the likes of The Alpines (‘Shush Boomer’), The Rangers (‘Snow Skiing’, which preceded the aforementioned ‘Justine’ by a few months) and The Snowmen, whose ‘Ski Storm’ (apparently featuring Shaun & Danny Harris, later of The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, who by my calculations can't have been older than about fourteen at the time) is the only evidence I can currently find on Youtube of this short-lived but no doubt hilarious racket.

I don’t think any of these saw much chart action, BUT HEY, you’ve gotta laugh, and god knows, he probably ripped off the studio, paid the teenage musicians in smokes and broken promises, and even got a hit out of it in the end with the tangentially connected ‘Popsicles & Icicles’ by The Murmaids, which topped out at #3 in the US charts. Win-win!

8. The Runaways – Cherry Bomb (1976)

So I know you’ve banged yr head to it all too often at your local queer-punk/feminist disco, thrilled to it on the soundtrack of some movie or other, maybe even done it at karaoke, but were you truly raising your fist for the dream of an empowered teen-girl heavy rock band, or for the gutter-crawling psycho-hustler who probably scribbled the lyrics on the back of a porno mag or something? It’s a tricky tightrope, so let’s puul in the slack and embrace both sides. Brain disengaged, cake both had and eaten. It’s usually the best way forward.

9. The Hollywood Argyles – Alley Oop (1960)

The place where it all began! Ah for the days when a bunch of layabouts could convene in a back alley recording studio, lay down an ode to a cartoon caveman whilst, quoth vocalist Gary S. Paxton, “all participants were senselessly drunk on cider”…. and then turn it into a #1 hit, an oldies compilation staple, and presumably a lifetimes-worth of royalty cheques for some lucky sonofabitch. All that and it’s still a hoot to listen to too - like a record made by finger-clicking beatniks from a Hanna Barbara cartoon.

10. Kim Fowley – Animal Man (1968)

Like ‘Bubblegum’ above, this is one of many fruitful collaborations between Fowley and a guitarist who was perhaps his match on the eccentrictiy front, ‘Born To Be Wild’ composer Mars Bonfire, and also one of many Fowley solo endeavours that is likely to see your pets racing for the front door never to be seen again and your neighbours making anxious calls to social services, should you decide to rinse it too frequently or enthusiastically. Genuinely unhinged, I think it’s fair to say.

Labels: deathblog, Kim Fowley

You could reasonably argue that Ian Svenonious has been making variations on the same record for at least the past two decades. But when the questions he is raising remain largely unaddressed, whether within pop music or in society at large, can we really say that his output has become any less relevant (or indeed enjoyable) in the intervening years?

NAY I say, and with Ian and his rotating cast of collaborators now comfortably settled into their Chain & The Gang identity, his core agenda (both aesthetic and political) felt more pointed than ever in 2014, and this, the group’s strongest LP to date, hit the sweet spot for me in a big way, needless to say.

I was actually quite pleased with the review I did of it back in June, so why not go and read that, if you missed it the first time around.

Listen and buy from Chain & The Gang on bandcamp, or get the vinyl from Fortuna Pop in the UK, Dischord in the US.

Labels: best of 2014, Chain and the Gang, Ian Svenonious

Well, you all knew it was coming, and the fact remains: if you’d told me five years ago that I’d spend much of 2014 engrossed in a record named ‘Stoner Rock’ by a band named ‘Bong’, I’d frankly have been a little concerned. The Newcastle group’s sly humour vis-à-vis their chosen nomenclature is easy to miss alongside the venerable seriousness with which they approach their music itself, so, before we move on, I will fall back on the words of bassist/intoner Dave Terry, as quoted in this album’s press release:

“It is a tongue-in-cheek dig at our usual classification as stoner rock and what the term has come to represent. The idea is to create our own definition of ‘stoner rock’ by creating an album so utterly stoned and repetitive to be a million miles away from the usual definition. Those who know Bong already will get both the humour and the philosophical redefinition… those who don’t know us will either get it when they listen or will never understand Bong at all.”

So there ya go. 2011’s incredible ‘Beyond Ancient Space’ and 2012’s sublime ‘Mana Yood Sushai’ may have been mammoth enough achievements for Bong, or so you’d think, but, fittingly given it’s emblematic title and scale (two tracks spread across over 70 minutes), ‘Stoner Rock’ sees the band striving for a whole new peak of sonic magnitude, seemingly setting out with a deliberate intent to make this one the ultimate, definitive Bong statement.

And do they succeed? Well… kind of. To bring in a totally out-of-leftfield comparison for no other reason than that I feel like it, you could say that if ‘..Ancient Space’ and ‘Mana Yood..’ collectively formed Bong’s ‘Electric Warrior’, then ‘Stoner Rock’ represents their equivalent of ‘The Slider’; pushing beyond their previous triumphs to create a record that is bigger, bolder and more ambitious in every sense, to the extent that it eventually finds itself staggering just over the edge into excess and exhaustion. Like ‘The Slider’, ‘Stoner Rock’ might not be the one that history will record as everyone’s favourite, but also like ‘The Slider’, that doesn’t stop it from being a bloody magnificent listen.

As far as uncompromising, glacially-paced drone-metal goes, I’ve always appreciated the way that Bong are a pretty listener-friendly proposition. By that, I mean that on most of their previous recordings, they like to get straight to the point and hit you with the good stuff (a result, one supposes, of their parallel antecedents in psychedelia and space-rock). The monumentally drawn out opening to ‘Polaris’ however signals a rather different ambition for this particular outing: ten solid minutes of distantly rumbling, Sunn 0)))-esque sub-bass drift, with percussion entirely absent and variation limited to near inaudible trickles of more crystalline overtones from Benjamin Freeth’s amplified Shahi Baaja. As the monolithic amp walls pulse and growl, Terry’s grandiose recitations from the Lovecraft story of same name almost dares you to either lose consciousness of the outside world entirely, to else call it out for the preposterous nonsense it is.

All this is mere build-up of course, atmos-building meditational stasis, bringing us gradually to the moment when the first, hesitant bits of hi-hat and kick drum filter in, falteringly gaining ground over the next ten minutes, as the guitars gain more mid/high-end and the drone twists into baleful, raga-like webs until finally, at about the 18 minute mark, the kick and snare start to coalesce, the beat gradually takes shape and, finally, we’re away! Think of a massive, vertical take-off Chris Foss spaceship; it’s already floating god knows how high up in the void, and now it is ready to MOVE FORWARD, commencing an epic, diesel-fuelled grind that spreads across a further 18 minutes of ‘Polaris’ and continues throughout the duration of disc 2,‘Out of the Aeons’, which forms perhaps the single greatest, most monumental stretch of slo-mo cosmic devotion that Bong have yet laid down (no small boast, that), the journey eventually taking us…. where?

Hopefully not to the Bong equivalents of ‘Tanx’ and ‘Bolan’s Zip Gun’, but hopefully you take my point. Wherever we end up, there’s no turning back at this stage. As a soundtrack to watching the solar system and milky way receding in the rear screens as your rusty craft sets forth towards glittering unknown vistas of Weird Tales pulp splendour, ‘Stoner Rock’ remains unequalled.

Listen and buy via Bandcamp, or get the vinyl from Ritual Productions.


(In other Bong news, it’s worth noting that 2014 also proved a great year for reissues of their work. New editions of early sets ‘Idle Days on the Yann’ (on Blackest Rainbow Records) and ‘Bethamoora’ (on Visual Volume) both provide a wonderful glimpse at the more overtly psychedelic side of the band, and the new vinyl edition of ‘Beyond Ancient Space’ on Ritual Productions is absolutely IMMENSE – all are recommended about as highly as it is possible to recommend anything. With the sheer amount of vinyl I end up buying off these guys each year, I’m probably putting their kids through college, but what can I say? The quality never slips an inch. One of the best bands on earth, no question.)

Labels: best of 2014, Bong

When I started putting this list together a few months back, I was unsure whether this album could really be counted as a 2014 new release. Appropriately enough given its creator’s methodology and general concerns, ‘The Death of Rave’ is a collection of sounds that, though first unveiled in their current form in 2014, nonetheless drag us back toward several previous temporal flashpoints, but hey, The Quietus had it on their new releases list, so if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me.

So the story goes that, back in 2006, James Kirby (aka V/Vm, aka The Caretaker, aka… well, you know the rigmarole by now, I’m sure) produced and offered for download a total of 19 hours of raw audio, all of it generated from tapes & sundry recordings he had accumulated during his youthful immersion in England’s ‘90s rave culture. Reflecting on the sad demise of the naïve utopian spirit that fuelled that scene, Kirby had subjected these recordings to the same sinister processes he applied to 1930s ballroom music in his work as The Caretaker, with, it must be said, markedly similar results. Returning to this mammoth outpouring of undifferentiated sound eight years later, Kirby has, for reasons best known to himself, seen fit to issue a few selected highlights from the project as an LP, entitled ‘The Death of Rave (A Partial Flashback)’.

Whilst this aesthetic of mournful, depression-fogged middle-aged rave nostalgia has been a common trope for a good few years now (at least since all the palaver surrounding Burial and Tim Hecker’s similarly conceived ‘Ravedeath 1972’), you’ve surely got to give Kirby the nod for being slightly ahead of the game dropping this stuff in 2006, and, even if the whole concept arguably feels rather tired here on the first day of 2015, the beauty and resonance of the selections herein retains a more elemental power, untarnished by such fleeting trends.

Indeed, what we have here is some real Prime-era Kirby, reminiscent of the crushing, intangible poignancy of The Caretaker’s ‘A Stairway to the Stars’, but furnished with a set of personal/emotional ties that reject that project’s comforting sense of generational distance and historical enquiry, instead cutting straight to the quick in its examination of the way an era that lays safely within the lifetime of all of its listeners already seems as dead, dusty and far removed from the present as the ghostly manoeuvres of The Haunted Ballroom.

Sonically, the tracks here are often more abstract but also more concrete than the Caretaker material, as the maximalist approach of house music finds itself boiled down into slabs of pure, undifferentiated sound whose weight is sometimes over-powering. The Caretaker’s music, I suppose, at least allowed for the *recollection* of friendship and community, long departed and fading into the oblivion beyond living memory perhaps, but somehow graspable all the same. The scenes and feelings lurking behind ‘Death of Rave’ on the other hand are far closer to home, but already feel as if they simply never were.

Whereas the original 2006 recordings went unnamed, Kirby has here gifted his chosen extracts with scene-setting titles of great and touching specificness, the simple act of naming increasing the power of these largely abstract chunks of sound enormously, cementing them forever in a time and place whose human inhabitants have moved on, leaving their memory to ferment and rot in isolation. As buildings are torn down or repurposed, fields tarmacked, tarmac cracked & replanted, ghosts of the life-changing youthful revelry that once took place on the same spots are chained, buried and forgotten.

In ‘Monroes, Stockport’, Kirby’s slow-drag treatment creates a sound akin to a giant, dematerialising tardis, beating like a bubble through the brain of some doomed raver, as the faint echo of some intractably vast, transcendent melody line warps into a melancholy that suggests his fate wasn’t pleasant. ‘Machetes at the Banshee’ meanwhile is a dense and terrifying few minutes, full of gate-clanging boneyard dread and creeping, Eraserhead-like squeaky skree.

‘Moggy & Wearden’ brings a feel of epic, inhuman vastness, like some big reveal of a Giger-esque alien cathedral, or an accompaniment to a stage-play of Lovecraft’s ‘At The Mountains of Madness’, drifting toward a more soothing, womb-like beauty in it’s final minute, whilst ‘Acid Allen, Haggis & Scott’ offers descending helicopters and the sound of an alien invasion blurring into the primeval hum of seaside video arcade.

The heart-rendingly titled ‘Big Eddie’s Van, Bowlers Carpark’ mixes busted speaker bass distortion with what sounds like the relentless churn of a giant subterranean waste disposal system, but ‘Marple Libradrome’ is perhaps the track that most clearly represents ‘The Death of Rave’s particular heart of darkness - a distant hum of crowd chatter just out of earshot beneath the threatening, subliminal buzz of electronic security fences and rotor-blade reversed percussion pulses, invoking the loneliness and lurking quietude of the empty, 4am carpark in which this entire LP seems to take place.

Do these feelings in any way reflect the experience of looking back on ones attendance of provincial early ‘90s rave events? Or one man’s foggy exploration of the emotionally-twisted emotions associated with such activity? Or simply nothing at all? As an outsider – young enough to have to rely on 2nd hand recollections of such events, if that - I have no idea. Maybe the conceptual aspect of this album may seem contrived or tedious or even offensive to some, but the depth and gut-level power of the resulting sonics is undeniable. An extraordinary record.

Listen and buy from Leyland Kirby via Bandcamp.

Labels: best of 2014, Leyland Kirby, V/Vm