In view of the top # 5 selections below, I would like to clarify that I did not actually spend 2018 listening exclusively to psychedelic / noise rock from the North of England. Sometimes I listened to psychedelic / noise rock from the Midlands or the West Country too!

But seriously folks, what can I say… with regard to the multifarious other musical itches I need to scratch, it’s been *old stuff* that’s been providing the goods in recent years (which is to say, *newly discovered by me* old stuff, rest assured I’ve not just been blubbing over my old CDs in the attic), and, this is a list of NEW RECORDS, so… what can I say? By and large, it has been the amplifier-abusing denizens of the North who have still been doing the business re: regularly producing music that’s caused me to sit up and take notice. I have no personal connections whatsoever with these musicians, I’ve never visited most of their home towns, and I’ve never even seen many of them perform live – but there it is, take it or leave it, they are the ones who are currently allowing me to maintain a slight toehold on post-2010 musical culture.

Note, 7/2/19: If you're reading this post, please also read this one. Obnox is now honorary number one. It's positive discrimination, motherfucker.


1. Obnox – Templo Del Sonido LP 
(Astral Spirits)

Lamont ‘Bim’ Thomas has been part of Ohio’s underground rock community since time immemorial, most notably playing in The Bassholes, Compulsive Gamblers and This Moment in Black History during the ‘90s, but as far as the 21st century is concerned, he’s been Obnox, and Obnox is not fucking around.

Much like his fellow garage-punk survivors in Midnight Mines, Thomas seems to have responded to the creative deterioration of the scene that supported him by embracing noise, deconstruction and torturous DIY experimentation of one kind or another – but with very different results, needless to say. As difficult to hang with as the band name implies, Obnox mixes torrents of unapproachable, pedal-borne industrial skree with a chopped n’ screwed gangsta rap sensibility, each cutting through the remaining bones of some kind of blown out, rust-belt blues-punk aggro. It is heavy, unsavoury shit, whichever way you want to cut it.

At some point in the recent past, some bright spark at the Astral Spirits label seemingly asked Thomas to record a “free jazz album”. Rounding up a motley bunch of local collaborators, he seems to have gone about this task with gusto, and, if the resulting recordings veer so far from what one might reasonably term a “free jazz album” as to miss the mark entirely, they nonetheless made a really fucking good album, which I'm sure we can all agree is the main thing.

‘America in a Blender’ sets the tone for what follows, with a solitary horn dropping a mangled field of skree deep in the mix beneath Thomas’s earth-shaking, digitally-fucked distortion and disjointed drum tracks, as his bad-phone-line vocal bristles with barely comprehensible fury as he exhorts his fellow citizens to “..wake your punk ass UP” – the perfect opening to a characteristically punishing LP that frequently sounds like a demented, apocalyptic gutter-punk counterpoint the recent up-tick in socially conscious black music repped in the mainstream by the likes of Kamasi Washington and Kendrick Lamar.

On several tracks here, a guy named Morgan Phelps is credited with playing “warr guitar”, which as I understand it is some kind of twelve string bass. Needless to say, he gets far more convincing results from it than the guy from Cheap Trick ever did. On the instrument’s seven minute showcase ‘War Guitar’, extreme low end frequencies roar and shake alarmingly against Thomas and Chuck Cieslik’s equally damaged, killer wasp treble fuzz and wolf howls of pure feedback, exploding dangerously against the top end of the frequency range, resulting in a track that sounds like some strung out, alcoholic Transformer with earth-quake pounding arms tearing down a liquor store, crushing the bricks to dust.

After this, it’s mighty relief when Thomas & co temporarily nix the noise for arguably the album’s stand-out track, ‘Names’, proving they’ve got the chops to knock out a convincingly muscular slice of shimmering, cosmic funk – an exquisite backing track for poet Kisha Nicole Foster and vocalist Ngina Payola to do their suitably furious thing as guest artistes, calling out for spirits of those left dead or crushed by the accelerating inner-city turmoil reflected in the head-against-wall anxiety attack of Obnox’s more aggressive material – a more reflective POV shared by the exhausted and fragmentary ‘Gotta Keep Fighting’, which sounds like the ghost of an early ‘70s Norman Whitfield production being received second hand through an EVP radio séance.

From there, ‘Templo del Sonido’s second half heads back to the grind, like the sound of a city tearing itself apart; lingering fragments of rationality or comprehension are blown to pieces by incendiary bombs of jagged, speaker-toppling mayhem, each instrument suffused with a hellish miasma of effects-box carnage, as Thomas’s voice rants and seethes almost subliminally, like some hi-jacked police radio band spewing abuse on the last day before everything goes up in smoke. As an aural reflection of the kind of desperate shit that has presumably been going down on the ground level during the USA’s current cluster-fuck, Obnox feels right on the money.

Listen & buy via bandcamp.




2. Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – King of Cowards LP
(Rocket)

If you’d told me a couple of years back that a band incorporating two thirds of Blown Out’s line-up would be getting daytime radio airplay, plaudits in the broadsheets and sold out headline dates as far as the eye can see, I’d have…. oh, hell, I don’t know – bitten you or something. So, let me merely tell you something instead, it’s easier: speaking as the kind of grouch who hass more or less made a career out of abandoning bands as soon as they become popular or start contemplating a more ‘accessible’ sound, Pigs x 7 deserve the hell out of their success.

I’ve been lucky enough to see this band play live three times over the past few years – most recently a dangerously crammed sell-out at the Moth Club in Hackney – and on each occasion, they haven’t just been good, they’ve been verifiably awesome. Genuinely one of the most thrilling live rock bands around, they bring an exultantly positive spirit to the stage that, until recently, has perhaps been lost in the doomy murk of their recordings, scooping up the audience like so much rice from the metaphorical barrel. (And they play like absolute group-mind bastards too, needless to say.)

Seriously - sneer all you like, but catch these guys live and you will be floored. Likewise, if the recently acquired Radio 6/Guardian vibes put you off, I’ll simply ask you to play through ‘King of Cowards’ and point out the bits that do not legitimately rock.

Seemingly realising that it the brief Sweet Relief was the track that most connected with people in-between the two mammoth wig-outs on their previous album, the band’s decision to compress their sprawling jams into a series of more pointedly structured, battle-ready Sabbathian scorchers has proven an extremely wise one. Less an aesthetic sell-out (and let’s be honest, if you think the idea a rock band recording sub-ten minute songs constitutes some kind of betrayal, you probably need to check your head and/or weed intake), the move to shorter material feels more like a natural progression, allowing Pigs to lay down an album that more convincingly reflects the energy of their live performances.

None-more-classic influences are, as ever, easy to spot – Black Sabbath’s elemental riff henge, the pulsating, afterburner dirge of Hawkwind, and the increasingly frequent moments in which Matt Baty’s voice breaks and rasps as if he’s channelling Lemmy himself - but [sorry, cliché alert] the band are really growing into their own identity here too, establishing a cross-genre sound that’s purely their own and driving it as hard as it’ll go before the engine blows.

THAT particular groove that presumably succeeded in getting ‘em on the radio (cf: ‘GMT’ and ‘Cake of Light’)? I mean, I’m not quite sure how best to put this in relation to an ostensible doom/psyche/whatever group, but… it’s a bit, dare I say, glam? A bit Glitter Band / Slade? You know, that kind of platform-booted “stomping-down-the-street” feeling? Or am I going crazy? It sure seems to be getting them places anyway, so stomp on, boys. The way they ‘tease’ the riffs, building ‘em up and knocking ‘em down again, on ‘GMT’ and ‘Shockmaster’ is similarly inspired – a move perhaps inspired by playing to live audiences? - and when the full band proceeds to hit it full force… oh boy. We’re talking Panzer Divisions of Love, ploughing through the barricades, or whatever.

Keeping their recording process ‘in-house’ was, I’d venture, another great move, and guitarist Sam Grant’s production here is f-ing fantastic, mustering constant, edge-of-feedback bombast that sounds simultaneously crystal clear and brutally gnarly, ripped with muscular Oh Sees-ish contempo psyche signifiers and crushing, compressed-metal burn; heavy as a warehouse full of Relapse overstock, yet more fun than a B-52s tribute night.

Quite where Baty’s anguished lyrical reflections are supposed to fit into all this, who knows, but, like everything else about this band, it nonetheless just seems to gel so well, the longer tracks (‘A66’ in particular) cutting through the fun & games with a suffocating, Viking funeral intensity, the frontman howling through the maelstrom, driven to some kind of mad, impassioned excelsis. His climactic cries of “hold on” on closing track ‘Gloamer’ come on like Ahab rallying his crew as their harpoons pierce the hide of the white whale – and, for anyone still missing the fifteen minute numbers, let’s just say that if eight whole minutes of that shit doesn’t leave you satisfied, you should probably seek help.

Listen and buy via bandcamp.


3. David Terry – Sorrow tape
(Opal Tapes)

From April:

“Conjured up primarily from voice, keys, Fursaxa-esque accordion drones and a touch of distant, thumping percussion to keep time, there is a carefully wrought sense of slow mo melodicism to these pieces that set them apart from the vast majority of Terry’s lonesome tape droning contemporaries. The layers he builds come together with a more deliberate intent than the kind of accidental / circumstantial methodology that often governs such things, sometimes sounding like the moment of sublime tonal union when everything comes together in some grand classical piece, stretched out and extended across a 20+ minute duration. It’s pretty great.

Emotionally-speaking, ‘Sorrow’ belies the expectations of its title and cover art by neatly side-stepping the over-bearing affectations of woe and world-denying misanthropy that ensnare so many metal bands, instead evoking a more honest, more hopeful field of melancholic drift, suggestive of a deep immersion both in the contemplation of nature, and in the gleaming spires of the distinctly old school, capital ‘R’ Romanticism that so often accompanies it.

Far from the blackened deep space explorations of Bong’s earlier career, the feel Terry conveys here recalls the band’s inspired use of Turner’s ‘Thompson’s Aeolian Harp’ on the cover of their We Are, We Were and We Will Have Been LP from 2015, and – for me at least – it is a very good feel to find oneself on the receiving end of.”

---

Listen and buy download from Opal Tapes.


4. Bridget Hayden – 
Pure Touch Only From Now On, They Said So LP 
(Early Music)

Until this year, I was familiar with Bridget Hayden’s name only as a result of her on/off membership of Vibracathedral Orchestra, but the chance discovery of this solo LP, quietly released by Swedish label Early Music, has brought the nature of her talent home to me very strongly.

A set of home recordings united only by their raw, analogue fidelity and creative use of structure-dissolving distortions, ‘Pure Touch..’ finds Hayden working in a mode somewhat reminiscent of the early (and I would now consider, best) work of Charalambides, or the sublimated song forms of Grouper, but with a considerably harsher edge than either cutting through the reverb.

Led by a voice wraithed in a hill-smoke shroud of effects, ‘Don’t Knock on Your Door’ merges Hayden’s wordless lament with a tangled web of gnarled electric guitar, whilst the brief ‘On Your Way’ is senselessly beautiful, a time-stopping folk spirit ripped from the unlikely plastic guts of a four-track. Piano-led lamentation ‘Fires For Sorrow’ is nigh-on unbearable, touching on a graveside melancholy strong enough to ward off any hint of cliché or sentimentality; just devastating stuff. This leads straight into ‘Cold Steel Rain’, which largely follows suit, stretching this same feel into another extended string n’ voice meditation on weird, sub-lingual grief, its gently overdubbed choral reflections interrupted by disorientating, blown out bass frequencies that butt in rudely, like ghosts at a particularly lurid feast.

Elsewhere, malevolent, Vertical Slit-esque noise-rock rears its head, with the lengthy ‘There Was a Branch Breaking’ in particular standing out as a spirit-sapping downer, the light of glowing, witch fires only just creeping first toward the end of it’s nine minute moorland trudge. In fact, there is often a hostile, depressive kick to these recordings than scratches hard against their corresponding ethereal tendencies.

Reflecting Hayden’s apparent disdain for sullying her music with language, it is difficult to convey in words quite what a remarkable record this is. If anything I’ve written above strikes a chord with you, I would highly recommend spending some time with it.

Listen and download from bandcamp; vinyl available via Early Music.


5. Earthling Society – MO: The Demon LP
(Riot Season)

If you’re not familiar with director Chih-Hung Kuei’s fearlessly insane 1983 martial arts / horror film The Boxer’s Omen [known to Hong Kong audiences simply as ‘Mo’], there is probably not much I can say that will adequately prepare you for the experience of watching it. If you can find a copy, you’re probably best advised to just take a deep breath a dive in. It’s sink or swim territory, for sure.

If you’re unfamiliar with Fleetwood-based psychedelic rock band Earthling Society meanwhile, well… that’s a slightly easier one to get a grip on. A quick listen to their superb 2014 LP England Have My Bones should do the trick rather nicely.

To my great personal delight, 2018 saw these two unlikely cultural touchstones coming together, as the admirable Riot Season label [three separate entries on the this here Top 20 makes them Stereo Sanctity Label of the Year with a bullet – congrats!] presented the world with the vinylised results of a 2017 recording session that saw the aforementioned band blagging their way into a well-appointed studio at Leeds College of Music to record their own alternative soundtrack to the aforementioned movie. So… what more could the adventurous listener possibly need to know? Let’s dive in and try out our best astral front crawl within the psychotropic tide-pool of fire-gargling racket that must surely have resulted!

Well, I say that, but actually, whereas one would have imagined Fred Laird and his band-mates taking the opportunity to unleash a raging cacophony of molten, tentacle-slashing fuzz guitar chaos to match the hair-raisingly outré content of Kuei’s film (and to be honest, I’d probably have been fine with that), the band instead spin their interpretation of ‘Boxer’s Omen’ off in some entirely unexpected directions, perhaps riding some heroic contrarian impulse or other, perhaps taking inspiration from the film’s date of production, or perhaps simply taking advantage of the vintage gear lying around in the LCM studio.

Whatever the case, the LP is a real side-step of a third eye opener, mixing up familiar heavy psyche tropes with a lively smorgasbord of repurposed ‘70s art-rock / ‘80s mainstream tones, the prominence of which presumably led the band to throw shout-outs to stuff like Berlin-era Bowie and Magazine into the album’s press release.

And indeed, opener ‘Theme from MO – The Demon’ inaugurates a beautifully crystalline, clean-ish guitar tone, seemingly ripped through some kind of holy, Taoist chorus pedal, surfing atop Fairlight shimmers and strange, quasi-Asian riffs picked out on some synth bell thingy. Driven by a propulsive, upbeat groove from rhythm section, it sounds suspiciously like the kind of thing that theoretically COULD grace the opening titles of some neon-glazed, atmospheric ‘80s horror movie – if admittedly one that would have you leaping out of your seat to frantically try to google up details on who the hell composed this extraordinarily rockin’ music, especially once some slightly more contemporary, delay-wracked noise textures start creeping in toward the track’s end.

Both noise and groove continue to build across ‘King Boxer’, with E.S.’s highly rhythmic, multi-layered approach to instrumental psych creating a joyous, kaleidoscopic kung fu soundtrack of MDMA-addled dreams, summoning images of flipped out fighters flipping and kicking their way through a bottomless Shawscope vortex or mylar-textured deformities. As is only appropriate under the circumstances, I suppose.‘Inauguration of the Buddha Dome’ takes a darker turn, nixing much of the groove for an unanchored sinister noise exercise, more redolent I suppose of the film’s frequently foul and disturbing imagery, leading the way into the tangled, narcotic tendrils of ‘Mountains of Bliss’.

Soon enough though, the positive vibes are back in spades and the good guys are kicking ass again, ending Side A with the self-explanatory ‘Super Holy Monk Defeats Back Magic Motherfucker’. Here, gong-like synth washes drift back and forth across the stereo field as Laird dons the funny hat and goes full on Mr Vampire, coaxing a glowing morass of multi-layered eterno-riff ectoplasm from his axe. Thank you and good night, Black Magic Mofos - mission accomplished!

Given that the print of ‘Boxer’s Omen’ I watched does not conclude with a thirty-minute coda in which the surviving boxer chills out and gets high whilst recuperating at an Alpine ski lodge, I’m going to assume that this where the movie soundtrack stuff ends, because Side B here brings a different vibe entirely.

Initially, echoed spoken word fragments from actual Asian person Bomi Seo accompany passages of glacial, Eno-esque synth drift, leavened by some blissful, Philip Glass-esque slow mo melodies, like music for a particularly far-out documentary on movement of ice floes in the North China sea, before E.S.’s monolithic psych reasserts itself once more, the band sounding a little more relaxed and free-form than on the A, with Laird’s lead lines sounding particularly majestic, before the first of two lengthy tracks simmers down again for a quitter, more experimental conclusion, as unglued vocal fragments and meandering xylophone improvisations gradually fade away over a fairly long period of time.

Further surprises grace the final track, with an unexpected outburst of sitar-driven, Glastonbury fayre psych-pop, featuring the album’s only real singing, as Laird repurposes a chunk of Fred Neil’s ocean-skippin’ stonage for a brief, delightful bit of ‘Revolver’/Traffic bed-head reverie, before the full E.S. sound once again fades back in, fuzzed out SF ballroom stasis dancing us way out to the merry end of whatever the hell this thing is now the movie’s finished, to triumphant effect.

Listen and buy via bandcamp.


6. Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso UFO –
Reverse of Rebirth in Universe LP 
(Riot Season)

After twenty plus years and what seems like several thousand emissions of blurting cosmic hoo-hah from Makoto Kawabata’s Acid Mothership, even the most strident devotees of their captain’s particular aesthetic would be forgiven for feeling that we have reached a point where there have frankly been *enough* AMT records, and that Makoto & co might well be advised to cease foisting further extracts from their endless sea of blathering chaos upon rookie record label owners, before the collected weight of their vinyl legacy begins to assume the proportions of a global environmental catastrophe.

BUT - and you probably saw this one coming - I would urge those who feel themselves in sympathy with the viewpoint expressed above to give ‘Reverse of Rebirth in Universe’ a spin before getting to work on the AMT vinyl bonfire.

Having inaugurated a “new generation” line-up for the band in 2017 with the recruitment of a hot new rhythm section (AMT Juniors?), Kawabata and equally venerable founding member Higashi Hiroshi now seem to have been further energised by the addition of a full time vocalist – one Jyonson Tsu – and ‘Rebirth..’ sees the newly-minted five piece returning to some of AMT’s signature riffs with a spirit of spring cleaning freshness, resulting in a work that anyone who ever dug the band’s golden age recordings should be able to appreciate.

Eschewing the cyclopean heavy metal cacophony that tended to characterise many previous iterations of ‘Dark Star Blues’, the tune’s distinctive, Arabesque riff is here picked out on bouzouki as a kind of gentle, string-tanglin’ folk groove swings into effect, shaped and led by Tsu’s wordless(?), rhythmic vocalisations. It’s pretty much impossible to avoid comparing Tsu’s drifting, spaced out glossolalia to Damo Suzuki’s work with Can all those years ago, but regardless, he makes for an extremely appealing addition to the AMT sound, managing not to outstay his welcome even across 10+ minutes of churning, wigged out riffage. Of course, the expected torrents of strangulated feedback guitar and knob-twisting UFO synth abuse make an appearance later on in the track, but there’s a sense of purpose and a degree of subtlety at work here that’s great to hear from a band who have for so long dwelt at the furthest edges of self-indulgence.

An equally beautiful recording (Kawabata’s production here is especially superb), ‘Black Velvet Blues’ drags AMT back to some extent to ‘90s PSF territory, establishing a rarefied, shadowy atmosphere that perhaps even Keiji Haino wouldn’t turn his nose up at in one of his mellower moments. Slow, brooding tremolo chords crash headfirst into knotty clusters of strung out noise before the rhythm section manages to establish a mournful, head-nodding groove upon which Tsu makes his entrance, his vocals lending an eerie, oneiric feel to proceedings that really sends me. Where exactly, I’m not sure (a deserted, autumnal island if some kind, perhaps?), but so long as it’s SOMEWHERE, I’m happy.

On the flip meanwhile, ‘Black Summer Song’ takes a more experimental path, opening with string-chiming temple vibes and gnarly fragments of amp detritus, before Tsu’s ‘Future Days’-esque muttering rise alongside a swathe of beatific synth and drone textures. Drummer Nani Satoshima’s busy, burbling chops soon help initiate us into the realm of pure tape-choppin’, radio dial-spinnin’ Candemonium, with Kawabata riding the waves as is his want, dropping fried solos hither and yon – but, crucially, this session finds him feeling considerate enough toward his new bandmates to bow out before he goes completely overboard, leaving us to enjoy lengthy, guitar-free segments of weirdly blissful, perma-stoned Cologne-via-Osaka ambience.

In short then - if you can ditch the baggage and get with it on its own terms, ‘Rebirth..’ proves to be an intensely rewarding slice of long-form psychedelic rock; largely devoid of goofery or excess, it is arguably the best AMT record in years.

(And, it has absolutely fantastic artwork too, as any fool can plainly see. Mine has a different coloured background to the jpg reproduced above, and I like it more, but whatev.)

Listen and buy via Riot Season.


7. Greg Ashley – Fiction is Non-Fiction d/l 
(self-released)

In view of the caustic cynicism and accusatory anger that helped make Greg Ashley’s ‘Pictures of Saint Paul Street’ the most bracing excursion into trad singer-songwriter territory this writer has heard in living memory, one shudders to imagine the extremes of despair that the slow motion global car crash of the Tr**p epoch might have wrung from the poor guy.

For better or for worse, ‘Fiction is Non-Fiction’, an album length grab-bag of recordings quietly dropped onto his Bandcamp page in November, certainly doesn’t pull any punches in this regard, with Ashley taking his lyrical hatchet to such matters as the U.S. / North Korean nuclear stand-off (‘Thick Red Line’) and the moral bankruptcy of the “post-truth” era (“if fiction is the truth, let fiction try”, sneers the title track).

As well as expanding the range of his subject matter though, this collection finds Ashley stretching his legs a bit musically too. ‘Dissociative Pills’ marks a striking return to the kind of haunted, baroque garage-psych that he used to proffer in his bands Gris Gris and The Mirrors. A doomed lament for the love of a lady who seems to be a French school teacher, the song mixes some lyrics that border on brilliance with others so wantonly egregious they might have had a late period Serge Gainsbourg reaching for the tippex (I’ll leave it to the reader’s discretion to determine which is which). But, the fuzz-enhanced arrangement barrels along so persuasively, and Ashley spits out his verse with such depth of feeling, it’s difficult not to surrender and let yourself get drawn in to the unsavoury drama of the whole affair.

Elsewhere, the musical approach regresses further, arriving at the level of pure, snot-nosed drunken punk for the self-explanatory ‘Fuck The Army’ (a definite highlight), and then there’s ‘Blondes & Cyanide’ - a PC-baiting, POTUS-threatening outburst, positively writhing with disgust (both inward and outward-looking), that unexpectedly succeeds in delivering the best bad taste punk rock chorus of the decade. (Seriously, check it out.)

In between all this impotent rage meanwhile, things get pleasantly weird. ‘Indian Summer’ briefly recalls the shimmering, psychedelic reveries of 2007’s ‘Painted Garden’ album, ‘Karen and Catalina are Drinkin’ in Heaven’ is a doggedly repetitive waltz commemorating a pair of suicide victims (it’s one of this album’s surprisingly rare returns to the “drug addiction as pathetic abdication of human responsibility” themes that dominated ‘..Saint Paul Street’ too), and an acoustic cover of Sonic Youth’s ‘Schizophrenia’ makes one wonder at the uncanny extent to which the song’s opening verses sound like the kind of thing Greg Ashley would probably write.

Doubtless many listeners will be apt to deem some of the stuff Ashley sings about here tasteless, poorly thought out or just plain unappealing. There are moments when I’d agree with them, but hey, at least he’s never boring (which by my count puts him one up on every other human being who still persists in singing whilst holding an acoustic guitar), and there is an unfiltered grit and mad beauty to his music that is all too rare in these dark days, and that keeps me coming back for more. Somewhere in The Great Beyond, Warren Zevon and Laughin’ Len raise a glass to his efforts.

Listen and buy via bandcamp.


8. Melting Hand – Faces of Earth LP
(Hominid Sounds)

Having substantially rejigged both their MO and line-up since the drug-huffing guitar shoot-out of 2016’s ‘High Collider’[Terminal Cheesecake frontman Russell Smith is OUT, Marion Andrau (The Wharves - guitar) and Wayne Adams (Hominid Sounds boss - synth) are IN], Melting Hand’s core trio of Mike Vest, Gordon Watson and Tom Fug are back with a splendidly expansive, approachable motherlode of what I would normally tend to classify as cosmic, galaxy-rim space-rock, were it not for the fact that (perhaps with a glimpse of the same wry, genre police-baiting humour that inspired the title of Bong’s ‘Stoner Rock’ back in 2014), they pointedly limit the scope of their contemplation here to Planet Earth.

Hitting a pretty much perfect middle ground between all the instrumental heavy psyche stuff that has tended to dominate my ‘best of…’ lists on this blog in recent years, ‘Faces of Earth’ is a whole ton of fun. Opener ‘Dust’ spins out on a great, propulsive groove from Mr Fug, a sweet silver surfin’ guitar riff gradually leading the band to an exhilarating, free form white-out, wrenching acres of sweet fuzz from the miniature city of flashing lights arrayed at their collective feet.

The decision to cover ‘Earth’ from the Joe Henderson / Alice Coltrane album I reviewed here meanwhile also proves an inspired one, sitting alongside Earthling Society’s epic reimagining of ‘Journey in Satchidananda’ in the extremely rarefied sub-genre of contemporary British heavy psych bands getting to grips with cosmic jazz classics. Hearing Vest force Henderson’s central sax riff through his everything-on-all-the-time guitar set up is a joy, and if the track’s subdued middle section, featuring a spoken word intervention from Lower Slaughter’s Sinead Young (reworking Kenneth Nash’s stoned incantations on the original) initially feels a bit awkward, repeat plays see it settling in nicely, preparing the ground for a thunderous full band return to the riff; both Andrau and Adams make their presence felt here beneath Vest and Watson’s characteristic maelstrom, sending skittering, neck-scraping noise and electronic echo trails ricocheting through the mix.

Back down to “earth” (ha), side B opens up with some seriously punkoid, uptempo riff rock on ‘Terra’. Recalling the maximalist stoner-fuzz moves of Vest’s recent work with Blown Out and Dodge Meteor, the track even accelerates to the point where it begins to sound like some weird, mutant cousin of ‘Jesus Built My Hotrod’ for a few bars. Wowza. ‘Giaia’ is more laidback, relatively speaking, functioning as a great work out for the rhythm section, with the pedals and amps of the noise-makers growling and hissing behind them, before the closing ‘Dirt’ kicks in with a monolithic, doom tempo trudge, its simplistic, two-part riff pushed to the edge of oblivion, lumbering under the weight of what sounds like about a hundred delay-addled, feedbackin’ guitar overdubs. It was this one, I think, that really blew my mind when the band drove into total oblivion during the Desertfest set I wrote up here. Much like Vest’s Haikai No Ku project, it’ll prove an endurance test for some, but a city-crushed-to-dust bliss for devotees such as myself. After thirteen minutes of that, well – job done, needless to say.

Listen & buy via Hominid Sounds.



9. Mountain Movers – Pink Skies LP 
(Trouble in Mind)

If Mountain Movers self-titled LP from 2017 sounded like a heavy psyche lead guitarist carrying out a hostile takeover of an unsuspecting slowcore indie band, ‘Pink Skies’ finds Kryssi Battalene’s maximalist, PSF-styled fuzz warfare fusing rather more organically with the sound made by her band-mates, as the group settle into a more cohesive sound. Rhythm sectioners Rick Omonte and Ross Menze in particular can be heard upping their game here, playing dense, knotty grooves reminiscent of early ‘00s Oneida for Battalene’s amp ectoplasm and delay goblins to play around in, building tracks like the opening ‘Freeway’ into muscular, low key eterno-jams, whilst drifting off elsewhere into strung out, Spaceman 3-esque repetition.

Admittedly, this approach does lead to the impression of second guitarist / vocalist Dan Greene being rather side-lined here, especially given that much of ‘Pink Skies’ remains instrumental, but his presence as an oft-silent partner still proves important, lending structure to what otherwise feel like a fairly directionless bunch of rehearsal jams, particularly on album highlight ‘Snow Drift’, in which his spoken word tale of trying to make it home during a blizzard allows the song to really take flight, with Battalene’s feedback whiteout crashing in to ecstatic effect after a trudging, slushy build-up.

Though of a considerably rougher hue, the song reminds me of simple pleasures I used to experience in simpler times, zoning out to Galaxie 500 or Yo La Tengo’s noisier moments as if they were the first, last and only music on the planet to touch such heights. I thank them for the memories.

For a band vaguely located somewhere on the indie-rock spectrum to still push quite so much electrifying racket into the atmosphere circa 2018 seems little short of miraculous. Perhaps the relative isolation of Newhaven, CT helps? I dunno. Anyway, it’s spiriting to know that bands like this can still attain escape velocity without having to front like they’re anarcho-punks or folkies or psychedelic warlords or metalheads or jangle-pop fundamentalists or whatever. Just playin’, man, that’s all it is. It can get results.

(Really not sure about that cover art though, I’ve got to say.)

Listen & buy via bandcamp.






XXX. Skullflower – 
Werecat Powers of the Crossroads at Midnight LP
(Nashazphone)

Whilst the multitude of home-recorded demos and sessions regularly uploaded to Skullflower’s bandcamp page are not without their charm, for my money the series of LPs the duo of Matthew Bower and Samantha Davies have produced for Cairo-based Nashazphone label (this is the second, following last year’s The Black Iron That Fell From The Sky, To Dwell Within) are working on a whole other level, presenting some of the very best material that has ever emerged from beneath the auspices of this storied band name.

‘Werecat Powers..’ may cut down somewhat on the aggression generally expected of a Skullflower release, but it loses nothing of the project’s traditionally overwhelming scale. The A side’s ‘We Move On Points of Shattered Mirrors’ verily crow-bars open the third eye, with vast-immensity-of-the-universe-opening-up-before-you stomach-trembling synth walls reminiscent of Alice C’s ashram recordings echoing off ancient stone tomb walls; a bead curtain made of motherf-kin planets swinging hither and yon, leaving milky way trails of star debris. Benign oceans of horizontal laser arcs spreading across a grid-like sky of angelic, treble overload, as if Bower’s Sunroof! project calmed down and had a nice cup of some ancient Tibetan tea, whilst his amps shrieked on with an impossible immensity of cosmic light. But, the desert winds still howl and shrill their assault upon a much-abused prayer bowl lost somewhere in the mix, bringing shadows of shambling, parchment-gangling sharp toothed mummies much like the one glimpsed in Ahmed Nosseir’s cover illustration. They of course are the ones who are gradually gonna take this cut over, as knobs are twisted right and overtones accumulate; sand swinging in a hurricane, downing choppers as the ghouls feast on dead soldiers in exultant, dictator-crushing slo-mo, their voices all the while singing mightily from dust-choked, formless spectral throats.

And that’s just the bloody A side! The B (comprising ‘Charnel Ground’ and ‘Departure Lounge’) has more of a glass n’ chrome frippertronics kind of feel to it, but is equally blissful. Mirrored airport glide sucked down a wormhole of cult ritual and black static; obscene UAE air terminals collapsing in upon themselves as ancient giants rise.

That abrupt shut-off when each of the album’s three pieces ends, volume dropping to zero without warning, is a killer. Wherever you’ve been whilst the transistors were squalling and the amps pulsing, the crash back down to The Real is unbearable.

There are a lot of people around offering “psychedelia” these days. Eh – some of them are alright. If you can still find a copy of this LP though, plug in the headphones, get loose and enjoy a dose of the real thing.

Labels: Acid Mothers Temple, best of 2018, Bridget Hayden, David Terry, Earthling Society, Greg Ashley, Melting Hand, Mountain Movers, Obnox, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, Skullflower

This is going to be the first of two posts counting down my favourite new releases of 2018. #11-20 are below, and a second post running down #1-10 will follow soon. Simple, right?

It should be noted that I have heard so many good records this year, I could easily do a top forty, time and consciousness permitting. But, time and consciousness does not permit, so 20 it is. Psychic apologies to all those hard-working noise-makers left hanging just below the line.


11. Anthroprophh – Omegaville 2xLP 
(Rocket)

In the course of trying to process the rage, confusion and futility hard-wired into every second of ‘Omegaville’, I’m inclined to bypass the album’s ostensible near-future timeframe and instead take a step back into the past, reflecting on the wider possibilities for life that you, I and (presumably) Heads guitarist and Anthroprophh main man Paul Allen have all seen forcibly torn away from us over the past fifteen or twenty years.

Readers old enough to remember for themselves may wish to join me on the journey, thinking back to days of waking up safe and sound in yr little basement flat, walls painted whatever colour you like and the landlord won’t complain so long as you keep the bathroom and kitchen working and don’t bother him too often. Spend the morning tinkering with effects pedals or doing some drawings, have a smoke or two. Mooch down to the library and put in some obscure stock requests, see if you can get hold of those weird German records your drummer’s always going on about. Do a few shifts in your mate’s shop every week to pay the rent, safe in the knowledge you can pop back down to the Job Centre and start filling in forms if things get hairy.

It was great, wasn’t it? Life there to be lived, available to everybody. Well, not anymore. All that’s gone, never to return. In the UK circa 2018, I scarcely need to remind you, you’re either affluent or you’re desperate. Either way, you’re probably sweaty, red-eyed and exhausted. And if you’re priced out of the lovingly scrubbed refurbished semis and you can’t get a foothold on the perilous, built-to-burn eco-system of the new-builds (money traps set by gangsters, primed to catch uni leavers like so many wasps)… what then?

‘Omegaville’ fills in the blanks, beginning with Lisa Allen’s beautifully detailed gatefold cover art, depicting a ‘near future’ approach to Bristol city centre. Nix the ‘They Live’-style satirical billboards and it all looks distressingly believable too, a notion cemented by the inner sleeve’s montage of photos (provided by the band members), in which boarded up pubs, skeleton tower blocks, barbed wire gateposts and one-man tents pitched on rubbish-strewn waste ground all combine to tell an all-too-real real estate horror story.

Musically, things begin hard and heavy as the electrified corpses of The Groundhogs, Pink Fairies and Third World War jolt upright on their slabs, bulked up Reanimator style for ugly new times. This is thick-skinned, chemically-altered battle-ready street-rock, executed in proto-h/c speed-freak tempo and pumped up with enough 21st century compression & multi-tracking to make veins in even the hardest Head throb with anxiety; particularly when Allen’s consummately frazzled solos hove into view, squeezed onto the tracks like flaming ether from some heat-resistant toothpaste tube.

On ‘Housing Act 1980’, Allen gargles venomously in the guise of a Farage-faced Tory autocrat, passing the gift of property to his offspring whilst invoking scattered references to Fray Bentos pies, guard dogs and “sunlight reflecting off the bonnet of the Austin Austin”, but in terms of linear comprehension that’s about as close as ‘Omegaville’ gets. Elsewhere, every discernable lyric or moment of simple rock pleasure is sabotaged by thuggish, mind-of-a-madman echo or tangled tendrils of out-of-control synth freak-out.

As the first disc progresses, tracks get longer, stranger, more excessive. ‘Why Are You Smiling?’ detourns Soft Machine’s bucolic, hippie-era provocation into a brutal, urban death march – the sound of the last scattered inheritors of an “alternative society” bitterly trudging the outskirts until they come face-to-face with the tarmac. Perhaps the album’s single best track, ‘I’ ebbs and flows like a band on the verge of collapse, Crazy Horse/Dead Meadow-esque psych drawl soon stomped to death by an Earache metal killdozer – the sound of waking up fuzzy-headed one morning to hear iron clanking, glass breaking and tarmac splitting, right outside your bedroom window.

In time-honoured ‘Tago Mago’ style, the second disc goes way out there – two side long pieces that see Allen initially struggling to narrate the tale of one of those one-man tent-dwellers crashing out into street drug-fuelled mystic oblivion on side C, before the machines and the twisty knobs take over entirely on side D, the band huddled between condemned tower-blocks of back-line as a phantom M4 opens out before them, offering extended thumb sanctuary towards….. somewhere?

If I were feeling facetious, I’d say that I hope the Allens got their house move sorted out ok, but regardless – ‘Omegaville’ represents an extraordinary document of UK underground rock facing up to an ugly present, and an uncertain and evil future.

Listen & buy via bandcamp.


12. Comacozer / Blown Out – 
In Search of Highs Vol # 1 split LP 
(Riot Season)

From March:

“Veering more toward the instrumental stoner rock approach taken by Mike Vest in his Dodge Meteor project, Blown Out’s recordings here put me in mind of what the classic era Monster Magnet line-up might have come up with, had Dave Wyndorf buggered off for a while and left them to their own devices. […] It’s totally sweet – as fiery as anything this band have ever recorded; this is a slightly more ‘accessible’ sound than their customary side-long wig-outs perhaps, but there’s nothing half-assed about the world-eating skree that takes over each time the drums drop out.

[…]

Colour me happily surprised upon discovering that [Comacozer’s] seventeen minute ‘BinBeal’ is actually a pretty benign affair, with a gently propulsive Cecil McBee-via-Hawkwind bass groove taking centre stage, ranging hither and yon ‘cross an interplanetary landscape, accompanied only by shards of hard-echoed, clean toned guitar dopplering away into the distance and some low level patches of DikMik style primitive electronics hovering into view now and again. […] a swell example of bombast-free contemporary rockage, and a welcome reminder that not every space-rock track needs to be a one way power blast through the centre of a black hole.”

Listen & buy via Riot Season.


13. Potion – Women of the Wand tape 
(self-released)

As I’m sure I must have repeated to the point of tedium in these pages in the past, it is my firm belief that doom metal lives or dies by The Groove.

Whereas many of the genre’s more sinister and cvltish adherents seem content to leave some slumbering drill sergeant behind the kit, occasionally rousing himself to deliver some stern, poorly-executed snare roll before fading again into the darkness, I reckon it is the duty of a doom drummer to work it hard, to remember the shining, jazz-inflected example of Herr Ward and shoulder the weight. Heads must bang involuntarily, however slowly. Riffs must crash ‘gainst cymbals, just so. Otherwise it’s going nowhere.

Potion are certainly going somewhere, that’s for sure. Hell, maybe they’ll even make it to Perth occasionally. I’ll confess, I wasn’t aware that Australia had much of a doom scene, and indeed, checking these guys’ social media would seem to suggest they’re first in line for support slots whenever a touring outfit of that general ilk hits Sydney. On the strength of this brief tape furthermore, I think it’s likely they must be blowing bigger names off the stage on a regular basis. Here’s hoping we’ll be hearing more from them soon.

In the meantime however, the two tracks / twelve minutes showcased here have The Groove in fucking spades. They’ve got The Texture too if we’re keeping score – thick, airless psychedelic sludge, dripping down the furry walls of sleep like ‘Come My Fanatics’-era Electric Wizard; atavistic hell creatures clawing the earth through mud-scooping bass drone whilst echo-addled guitar leads sear their way through some classically nasty triad moves.

Rehearsal room / tape mastered fidelity brings a uniquely muffled, pitch black heavosity to proceedings, like an old carpet thrown over the head of God, feedback shrieking with genuine menace between onslaughts. Drummer just won’t let those toms be, but under the circumstances that’s just fine.

Some of the absolute best doom I’ve heard from any corner of the year this year, in other words. Just EXACTLY what I need from the genre right now, boiled down, greased up and ready to go. A whole album or two of this stuff, unmolested by label/studio tinkering, would make me nigh on unimaginably happy.

Listen & buy via bandcamp.


14. Warp Transmission – The Process Ultra CD & d/l 
(self-released)

Funny where the byways of bandcamp can lead you these days. Here for instance, we have a Finnish space-rock group, deeply in thrall to both The Heads and the distant exhaust fumes of Dave Brock’s dreams, rocking a garden shed recording aesthetic only a degree or two more sophisticated than yer average basement black metal loner, and throwing a thick blanket of retro-futurist, Man or Astroman? style vintage sci-fi shtick across the console for good measure (yeah, dialogue samples and everything). Wild, man. Bring it on.

Raw guitar fuzz bombs across this half hour galactic opus like a burning toy dragster, leaving ashes all over the carpet, whilst the knob-twisting synth gloop goes totally out-of-control within the opening minutes and never returns to earth. Davros-inspired vocals curse and howl malevolently as the rhythm section pushes forward, ever forward, gearing up to a near-thrash level warp speed but never quite crashing over the line, much to the chagrin no doubt of whoever’s playing on the lead guitar overdubs which elbow their way in every now and then for a shrieking burst of twiddle, lurking just a few twists of the frequency knob away from the local high school’s Iron Maiden tribute band.

In the midst of all this carnage, ‘The Insect’ briefly shifts focus to some collapsed, alien electronics, before ‘Crashing Waves’ slows things down for an excursion into the kind of slightly-more-conventional, head-nodding psyche groove-out that the Brian Jonestown Massacre occasionally do so well. Of course it all builds up into yet another hulking monolith of sonic overload, but what did you expect? ‘The Stranded’ is a lovely little “cool down” track too, sounding as if Davros and his evil pedalboard joined forces with his fellow Whovians in Solid Space.

Mainly though, it’s in-the-red, freaked out madness that predominates here, and a thrilling, ridiculous journey into the furthest reaches of uncompromising, home-baked space-rock excelsis it is too. Yes, please sir, more of this kind of thing emerging from the musical underworld of this tired planet in 2019 would be lovely, thanks very much.

Listen and buy via bandcamp.


15. Windhand – Eternal Return 2xLP 
(Relapse)

On first impression, you’d be forgiven for thinking that “melodic doom” sounds like a pretty shit idea for a sub-genre, but give it a few moments consideration and you’ll no doubt realise that melody and song construction was key to the success of most of the genre’s all-time greats – so, hey, why not. Likewise, Richmond VA’s Windhand could easily be accused of sounding like an indie-rock band playing at two-thirds tempo with downtuned guitar… but, blinkers off, is that really such a terrible prospect..?

Well actually, I’ll admit, these concerns, combined with vocalist Dorthia Cottrell’s tendency to stretch out those descending vowel sounds as if she was in The Smashing Pumpkins or some shit, have caused me to prematurely write off this band on the first, second, and maybe even third, occasions on which I’ve given them a listen. Both personal recommendations and the more generalised quantity of ever-growing love they seem to have accumulated in recent years have kept me coming back though, and, after spending a bit more time with their new record this year, I think I’m finally sold.

Admittedly, acoustic-y interlude ‘Pilgrim’s Rest’ stands out as pretty questionable, but hell, even Sabbath’s best album put us through Changes, so anything’s possible. Elsewhere, moreover, this album is ON. The Groove is in full effect, the riffs are mighty and the songs have a lilting, Pre-Raphaelite arena-psych grandeur that really hits the spot, stretching out across some legitimately epic track lengths without losing sight of their compositional unity.

Jack Endino’s production is top notch too – a deeply comforting wall of luscious, dark green fuzz, top end dulled for maximum bonged out satisfaction. I particularly love the imaginative psychedelic touches that ‘Eternal Return’ brings to the band’s sound too; Garrett Morris’s slightly out-of-sync, multi-tracked solos, the hard echoed pick slides exploding all over the exultantly murky outro to opening cut ‘Halcyon’ and the cacophonous entirety of pedalboard-blitzing instrumental cut ‘Light into Darkness’ are all great examples.

Precisely the kind of stately, atmospheric but unapologetically rocking alt-metal that should rightly be blasting out of a million teenage car CD players across the globe right now, ‘Eternal Return’ hits the same oneiric psyche pleasure centres that keep sending me back year after year to early Dead Meadow, Bardo Pond and various things of that general ilk. A very particular sweet spot, and one rarely serviced by commercially successful metal bands, I’ll admit, but I’ll take it where I can, and I’m getting tons of it from Windhand right now.

Listen and buy via bandcamp.


16. Holly Golightly – Live in London LP 
(self-released/SFTRI)

Earlier this December, some friends and I ventured out to catch Holly Golightly and her band at the Lexington in London. Turns out the last time I was present for one of her semi-regular Christmas(ish) shows in a scarifying ten years ago. But, worry not, little has changed. She’s still got Bruce Brand on the drums (worth the entry price alone!), she’s still got that big chap with the quiff on stand up bass – but, she does now have a young, hot-shot lead guitarist (why, he must be about thirty years old or whereabouts) to shake things up a bit, dispensing slick, session-man licks with consummate grace and good taste.

Seeing this disc amongst the merchandise on offer served to remind me that, despite owning much of her back catalogue in digital form (booo – artist, label-owners & fanbase), I don’t actually have any Holly Golightly on vinyl. Reflecting on just how nice it would feel to drop the needle on some of her sublimely unfussed Jerry Reed-meets-Wanda Jackson stylings whilst enjoying a cuppa on a Sunday afternoon, I decided that a recent, gigs-only live album would be the perfect way to rectify this oversight.

Recorded two and a half years prior to the gig in question (May 2016), the event commemorated here on plastic took place at the same venue, featured the same band (give-or-take a guest harmonica player on a couple of numbers), and indeed much of the same set list, if the grab-bag of old faves presented here are anything to go by. (‘Crow Jane’, ‘Wherever You Were’, ‘Big Boss Man’, ‘Sally Go Round The Roses’ – all present and correct and exactly where you’d want them.) Different banter though, naturally; touch of class.

Though the results couldn’t exactly be expected to match up to the drunken grandeur of 2003’s magnificent Down Gina’s at 3, they nonetheless make for another valuable performance document from a woman who by this point has been sticking to her story since her current lead guitarist was in nappies.

This ugly old world can do as it may, but she and her collaborators implicitly understand that the art n’ craft of playing this kind of slow-burning, low key rock n’ roll properly transcends any kind of hot-stepping retro bullshit, keeping just enough Medway grit in the mix to ensure no one’s going to mistake this for some supper club oldies gig after a few tins of real ale. Past, present, future – the records keep spinning as long as the kettle keeps boiling, and it’s nice to have a new one.

(Pedants may wish to note that there’s an unfortunate fadeout halfway through the final tune – maybe batteries on the mini-disc gave out or something? But hey, you can’t have everything.)

More-or-less self-released, but with a nostalgic shout-out to Sympathy For The Record Industry on the sleeve (long time no see!), this LP is solely available from gigs insofar as I can tell (I even had to take a picture of the cover myself). Holly also has a new studio LP out this year on Damaged Goods, but I’ve got had a chance to play it yet – my wife’s taken custody.


17. Tashi Wada with Yoshi Wada & Friends - Nue LP 
(RVNG International)

Tashi Wada is an LA-based composer in a minimal/ambient vein who quite possibly has the qualifications to prove it. (Perhaps he even has an accompanying tendency to earnestly discuss his ‘practice’ in a manner befitting an embattled small town dentist, but who am I to cast aspersions?) Tashi’s dad Yoshi meanwhile appears to be a happy-go-lucky fluxus artist who, in his capacity here, enjoys making a right old racket with bagpipes, chanters, alarm clocks, sirens, and ‘audio generators’. What fun!

Together with a few of Tashi’s friends (synth player & vocalist Julia Holter, percussionist Corey Fogel amongst others), father and son got together in September 2017 to record these ten varied slices of warm, familial drone, full of benevolent dawn chorus analogue synth trails and happy bursts of controlled, harmonious noise, redolent of new days, cold, sunny mornings, parting clouds, happy collaborative friendships and all the rest of it, leaving the stresses, anxieties and confusion of the world outside the studio a long, long way away.

Sometimes sounding a bit like those eerie interludes on Boards of Canada records extended into bright, four/five minute meditations on nature n’ nurture with all the eeriness carefully scrubbed out, and sometimes touching upon passages of space-lab choral harmony so pure and meticulously realised they could quite possibly single- terraform the nearest gas giant single-handed, the results are engrossing and exultant, full of deep, drifting tones that feel both intensely familiar and strikingly new.

This is beatific headphone communion that won’t take up too much of your time, but will leave you in just the right frame of mind as you enjoy an appropriately head-spinning night-cap before hitting the pillow eight hours prior to a another working week. Wondrous, droning peace.

Listen and buy via RVNG International.


18. Guttersnipe – My Mother The Vent LP 
(Upset The Rhythm)

I remember, back in the distant past, I used to try to sell people on Melt Banana by describing them as “pop music from the future”. Well, I don't know abnout that anymore. I suppose the future’s looking a lot bleaker and crazier than it did back at the turn of the century, which is probably why similar formulations spring to mind when trying to find SOME way, any way, to account for the existence of Guttersnipe.

Let me say straight off that, in terms of its level of uncompromising achievement, its sheer, mind-blowing totality, this album deserves to be *way* higher on this list than it is. The reason it’s lurking down here in the lower teens is simply than I’m a sensitive soul, and I find it pretty difficult to listen to in anything other than short bursts, to be honest.

A full-blooded realisation of the kind flattening, full spectrum racket Guttersnipe make live, ‘My Mother The Vent’ comes on like some unholy amalgam of Carcass, Teenage Jesus and the Boredoms, stretching finger-in-the-socket death across expanses of five or eight minutes; it’s… too much, man. I can’t take it.

Nonetheless though, one of the keys to Guttersnipe’s singularity I think is their stated declaration that they wish to remain a rock band, despite pushing the concept to it’s further possible extreme. This makes me happy, and makes me like them even more, because I like rock bands. For all the excesses of their sound – each drum hit setting off a disorientating cacophony of overlapping delays, every guitar note filtered through a miniature city of transistors and lunatic EQ adjustments – there is still a feeling here of two human being playing off each other, of the wood and wire and fingers and wrists that can always keep me engaged where button-pushing electronic whiteout just leaves me cold.

Is this what the future sounds like? I don't know. Could be. I picture above-ground solar panels crackling in protest as subterranean tunnels roar with hordes of post-gender telepathic mutants, rinsing the power grid in a last gasp electronic overload. Could be worse, right?

Listen and download via bandcamp, vinyl available from UTR.


19. Mule Team 7” (Episode Sounds)

Finally, Mule Team on vinyl, and the vinyl is in my hand. Thank you, Episode Sounds. Still no download option, but it’s a start re: bringing them to the wider world. You might ask why, on an end-of-year list otherwise dominated by psychedelic rock and sundry other heavy nonsense, I have made room for these unassuming proponents of foot-tapping rock n’ roll? Well, the truth is, if there were twenty groups around the world playing foot-tapping rock n’ roll with the particular je ne sais quoi evidenced by Mule Team, I’d probably have ‘em all up here, assuming I had any energy left to write them up after going to see whichever of their number was currently closest to my locality each and every Saturday night.

As the entity once known as “garage rock” continues year on year to drift in the general direction of its own fundament (certain sainted veterans notwithstanding), mixing reheated leftovers with obnoxious, gimmicky clowning, Mule Team – warm, welcoming, no nonsense folks that they are – bring it back to base with music that is correspondingly warm, welcoming and devoid of nonsense. Skimming over the storied musical legacies of Memphis, Detroit and Nashville with a deep understanding that renders any strutting retro posturing immediately obsolete, they cradle their gear with a crafty respect learned from men who actually needed the damn stuff to earn their living, and indeed, they proceed to kick it as of they were earning a dollar for every head that nods.

A mild-mannered rave up built on a prehistoric Chuck B shuffle, ‘Give Up’ throws a wistful power-pop chord or two into its chorus for the sake of variety before the James Burton-esque melodic lead that’s been chasing the vocal through the song steps up to duke it out with the strident rhythm gtr over the break. The oddly named ‘I'm Going To Miss You Mr Illegal Civ’, reappearing after its initial bow on the band’s 2016 tape, ups the grit a bit with raucous, reverbed group hand-claps and some scarifyingly sweet guitar interplay, before ‘Grew Up in a Can’ takes us into full blown punkabilly territory, bolshy, overdriven bass stomping about like an early Fall track (of all things) whilst down-the-phone-line vox snarl against needle-peakin’ trebly guitarwork.

Most importantly of all though, the beat just keeps clipping along, Creedence-style, through all these numbers - a backwoods motorik choogle powering on eternally over the hill to the next roadhouse. Flaming arrows could bring down the ceiling and tear gas canisters take out the windows whilst these guys are playing, but feet would continue tapping as long as their backline stays plugged in.

Listen and buy via Episode Sounds bandcamp, but keep an eye out for the postage if you take the plunge, fellow Westerners.


20. Bo Gritz – Tape EP (Sad Tapes)

I don’t know why, but I continue to get a particular kick out of what these London scoundrels are cooking up. Still haven’t caught them live. From August:

“Point is: of all the endless, minute variations of bad-tempered, hopeless noise-rock that exist in the world right now, Bo Gritz - on the basis of this cassette release at least - play one of the few that I actually want to listen to.

Which is to say: the guitar sometimes sounds like a demonically possessed analogue radio that’s come to life and started attacking people, the bass is content to lurk shadily in the background, a hooligan under a tree in a nocturnal park, whilst the drums thud away in exhausted, groovelessly utilitarian fashion, rather like Simon King of Hawkwind reaching his own personal dead-end after X hours of LSD fuelled battery. None of the players display any flash whatsoever. No time-changes, no ‘look-we're-tight’ turn-around bits, no twiddly riffs - it’s just pure ug. Simple, beautiful idiot-rock, laced with a bit of Messthetics bend n’ scrape.

There are vocals in there too I suppose – potentially snarled down the same drain-pipe that used to belong to Jim Shepard or The Heads, more recently liberated from City Yelps – whilst the four track tape recording keeps that nasty treble in check and helps to bake the band’s potentially upsetting, bulbous aggro down into a warm and nourishing aural porridge.”

Listen and buy from Sad Tapes.

Labels: Anthroprophh, best of 2018, Blown Out, Bo Gritz, Comacozer, Guttersnipe, Holly Golightly, Mule Team, Potion, Tashi Wada, Warp Transmission, Windhand

1. High Rise - II LP
(Black Editions)

Well, here we are folks – having once held an original pressing of this 1986 LP in my hands in an Osaka record shop before realising that the price tag was roughly equivalent to a salaryman’s monthly pay cheque, I now sit back and laugh in the face of collector elitism, as Black Editions once again do the lord’s work, their marginally cheaper 2018 reissue bringing this eternal, irreducible MONSTER OF ROCK back into circulation, to the sweaty, speechless delight of… well, me, for starters.

The year is important to note here I think. 1986. I mean, it’s a bit before my time, but I nonetheless feel confident in asserting that NOTHING sounded like this in 1986. For aficionados of the Japanese heavy psyche sound pioneered by the PSF label through the ‘90s and ‘00s, High Rise II can be considered Ground Zero, with all the weight of expectation that implies, but I’d also contest that the appeal of this disc extends way wider than that. To put it plainly: if you’ve ever banged your head or shaken your fists to the sound of loud, unapologetic rock music and retain a desire to do so, this’ll floor you.

Bassist/vocalist Nanjo Asahito may have taken his Rallizes-derived, static-gargling / feedback-bleeding recording aesthetic to more challenging extremes in his subsequent Mainliner project with Makoto Kawabata, but here the energy level of the rock n’ roll buzz remains high enough to actually spark flash-forwards to the similarly blown out ‘90s garage-punk excelsis of Teengenerate in places, if you can imagine that.

What I’m trying to say is: High Rise weren’t just pushing a load of formless, bonged out noise blather. High Rise ROCKED. Clearly drawing as much from Motorhead and ‘Raw Power’ as from the weird, intangible engine fumes left behind by Blue Cheer and The Velvets (the stated inspiration for many of their peers in the Tokyo psyche sweepstakes), High Rise did songs, and largely kept ‘em under six minutes too. If you claim to know what Nanjo-san is actually going on about in any of them, you are lying, quite frankly, but, even when they don’t have riffs to die for (ala the inadvertently Mudhoney-birthing epic ‘Pop Sicle’), they still kick out the kind of smoke-belching, punkoid churn that would have seen Lemmy & co happily through to the end of another lager-blackened night.

Few of High Rise’s precursors though dared storm the gates of godly feedback with quite the howling gusto displayed here, and crucially – oh, so crucially – none of them had a guy like Munehiro Narita flipping out over those pulverising blocks of chord either.

Carve that name in stone, brothers and sisters! Munehiro Narita. WHAT a guitarist! I remember reading somewhere that, after High Rise’s glory days, he gave up on music for family reasons, but the Narita family’s gain is music’s considerable loss, and I weep at least weekly for my inability to listen to another couple of decades-worth of his evidently amazing talent. I realise that I will inevitably sound a bit dad-rockish, sitting here praising some lead guitarist’s technical wizardry, but seriously folks, this guy’s particular shred is just exhilarating, shrieking out across these tracks like a mass of sentient, crackling loose wires – he is a precise, jelly-fingered madman, conjuring thrilling, unpredictable shapes from the fuzz-wah trash can fire.

As you will have gathered, I quite like this record. It fairly rules. Certainly, if you’ve spent the early years of the 21st century taking tea with, say, Comets On Fire and their successor bands, Boris or The Heads, there is much to be gained from rolling the clock back to ‘86, courtesy of Black Editions. Sometimes the collector-scum get it right, I suppose.

Visit Black Editions here, listen and buy in U.S. dollars here, or check local dealers for vinyl if other currencies and non-eye-watering postage are preferred.


2. Causa Sui – Free Ride 2xLP
(El Paraiso)

More humungous, capital letters ROCK business here I’m afraid, but you should probably have expected that, in view of my recent tastes.

I am a total newcomer to Denmark’s El Paraiso label and to the members of the band Causa Sui who seem to be chiefly responsible for recording, designing and co-ordinating its prolific output, but I bought this double disc re-do of the band’s 2007 album ‘Free Ride’ largely on a whim, because I thought it looked cool.

I’m very glad I did.. Back at the ranch, first spin of the first side just flattened me with joy.

Though chiefly the vision of guitarist/producer Jonas Munk, at this point at least, Causa Sui seem to have comprised a trad four rock band piece line-up of monstrous potency, and as such they seem to have set out to record something akin to the Ultimate Heavy Rock Album – a task which they proceeded to bring off successfully, with an admirable mixture of stereotypical Scandinavian professionalism and raw, Anglo-Saxon gusto.

Seriously folks – if ever a group of long haired, muscular men are standing on an outdoor festival stage prior to sun-down with a wall of amplifiers behind them, THIS is the sound I want them to make.

The opening title cut throws us a feint, fading up bongos and acoustic strumming for an indelible bit of sun-dazed, Cali desert-psych (“..last night we crossed the border line..”) – it’s lovely, actually, but we know it’s just a tease. As soon as the second number (‘Lotus’) kicks in with a fearsome wash of low-end feedback, a preliminary drum roll and a spirited “yeee-eaaahhh…. ahwohall-ri-i-ight” from vocalist Kasper Markus, we know it’s ON. Even the sound of these guys strolling on for a contrived studio line-check is awesome.

Cue THE RIFF, rolling across the horizon like an MDMA-blasted 21st century ‘Immigrant Song’, crushing all in its path. At which point, I think I quite possibly went “yeee-eaaahhh…. ahwohall-ri-i-ight” myself.

As things progress, Causa Sui spread out, with tracks blithely skipping over the ten minute mark and Munk’s extended wah-wah excursions becoming so remarkable that I think he deserves some kind of award for the most sensitive feet in Northern Europe, yet they remain prostrate before the holy ideal of ‘70s stadium grandeur throughout. Even when echo-laden flute and burbling synths hove into view for the much-needed cool-down mid-way through side # 2, drummer Jakob Skøtt’s extraordinary, Bonham-worthy pummel doesn’t let up for long.

I realise there is no way for me to get through this without sounding like some deathless Classic Rock Magazine bore, so let’s just take a deep breath and get it over with: the production on this album is excellent (the drum sound alone is enough to send most home studio bods off into a fit of silent weeping), and the playing by all members of the band is excellent. The breadth of the compositions is excellent, and the energy of the core performances are excellently captured, even as the mix groans beneath the weight of overdubs.

I realise of course that the world is full to bursting with bands playing workable pastiches of this kind of music, particularly in Scandinavia, but few if any of them can capture the sheer, lightning-in-a-bottle, nostalgia-resistant exhilaration that Causa Sui uncorked for us here.

‘Free Ride’ is not some smug exercise in vintage store aesthetic box-ticking – it’s a record with the power to make grown (wo)men scream and cry and stagger backwards making weird, uncoordinated gestures of excitement, like surly teenagers who just heard ‘Led Zeppelin II’ or ‘Volume 4’ for the first time. Fuck me, is it ever good.

What was I doing back in 2007, anyway? Trying me force myself to like Animal Collective or something probably. God, what a pillock. Growing up is great.

Listen and buy direct from El Paraiso, or check yr usual vendors to avoid international postage (the label has both UK and US distribution).


3. Joe Henderson feat. Alice Coltrane – The Elements LP 
(Fantasy / Jazz Dispensary)

In spite of its misleadingly dull cover design, this unfairly-overlooked-until-recently 1973 LP is some heavy cosmic business, in some ways feeling very much like an unlikely follow-up to Alice C’s all-time classic ‘Journey in Satchidinanda’, even as the very different personnel and varied instrumentation spin it off in some rather more curious directions from that album’s beatific, all-consuming drone.

As the title suggests, the record is framed as a suite around the four elements (hey, why not), and, as the cover’s nomenclature also implies, West Coast tenor sax player and band leader Joe Henderson remains front and centre in the mix, and his strident, rhythmic playing – sometimes bordering on post-Ayler “discombobulated marching band” kind of territory – certainly provides a striking contrast to the lyrical flights of fancy that Pharaoh Sanders made de rigour for cosmic jazz horn-work. Meanwhile, the great Charlie Haden works his usual poised, cerebral magic on bass, pursuing a considerably more exploratory direction than Cecil McBee took with his hypnotic, rock-inspired electric bass lines on ‘..Satchidinanda’, even as he drops just as much of an eternal ear-worm on the opening ‘Fire’.

It is Alice herself however who plays the biggest role in defining this music’s feel and texture, variously playing piano, harp, harmonium and tamboura (often within the same track), and doing so with instinctive brilliance, as was her want. Drummers Kenneth Nash and Baba Duru Oshun further drive home the mystic feel, hitting up a tidal, open-ended storm of tablas, skittering rim shots, bells, shakers, woodblocks and cymbals, lounging behind their expanded kit like a pair of lazy, eight armed vishnus, doing anything in their power to avoid the indignities of a straight snare/kick drum hit. Taken to its furtherest extreme on ‘Air’ and ‘Water’, this lackadaisical approach to time-keeping leaves the music feeling entirely unmoored, lost in space.. which is all to the good, needless to say. (Nash also contributes a memorable spoken word incantation to the closing ‘Earth’, sounding baked out of his brain, if I may be so bold.)

Michael White’s violin remains a silent partner through much of this, but it’s nonetheless great to hear him crashing in for an extended solo on ‘Fire’, and undertaking a soaring duel with Henderson towards the end of ‘Air’, throwing a further spanner into the works of modern jazz’s expected sound palette.

Though ‘The Elements’ is basically an acoustic set, extensive use of overdubs and effects clearly sends us into post-‘Bitch’s Brew’ terrain – indeed, the hard echo applied to Henderson’s screeching, staccato blasts on ‘Fire’ seems to be directly riffing on Miles - whilst the general avoidance of extended solo spots in favour of a democratic, ego-free ocean of rhythmic, pulsing sound puts us firmly within the psychedelic continuum, with the record’s densest moments liable to put modern listeners into an almost Necks/Vibracathedral-esque headspace, even as Joe (like Miles before him) seems to be struggling to overcome his reliance upon boss man / band leader bombast.

Like most of Coltrane’s post-‘..Satchidinanda’ work, ‘The Elements’ pointedly sidesteps the clichés of “spiritual jazz” which she and her collaborators helped to create, instead opening up an endlessly rewarding sonic wormhole into the murky depths of collective mind-meld that the-thing-that-used-to-be-called-jazz was capable of morphing into through the early ‘70s. Doing their damnedest to bypass genre altogether, sessions like this always feel as if they could best be classified as pure psychedelic music, and needless to say, I can’t get enough of it.

The label page for this reissue is here, but check local dealers for copies and Youtube for the sounds and yada yada yada. I mean, you don’t need me to tell you this, do you?


4. Serge Gainsbourg & Jean-Claude Vannier - 
Les Chemins De Katmandou LP 
(Finders Keepers)

I’ll confess, I get totally mixed up about all these iffy-sounding hippie/drug movies that Serge Gainsbourg seemed to spend much of his time participating in through the late ‘60s / early ‘70s – I mean, there are just so many of them. All persistently muttered about and mythologised by Francophile collectors, and all pointedly lacking in any kind of legitimate, English friendly exposure, they represent a cultural honey-trap that I have thus far resisted falling into. But, Finders Keepers assure us that the music for this particular one is THE HOLY GRAIL, so who am I to argue?

Never previously pressed to disc and allegedly sought out, Indiana Jones-style, for decades before the master tapes were finally discovered in a shoebox (or something), the painstakingly remastered results are indeed an extraordinary find, sounding for the most part like an illicit, sun-and-drug blasted celebration of everything that was brilliant about the decadent movie n’ music culture of Europe in the days when everything was pink and orange and fuzzy and scented with exotic spices, just before the cold, hard dawn of the 1970s began to harsh the buzz.

In slightly more practical terms, this means that the best tracks here (‘Pleasure Pit’, ‘Colin-Maillard’) sound as if some members of the same secret order of razor sharp session men who went on to define the sound of Gainsbourg & Vannier’s storied collaborations over the next few years gate-crashed the sessions for a Bruno Nicolai Jess Franco soundtrack.

Which is to say: deeply inappropriate sitars and sundry other ‘ethnic’ droney things roar and jangle in a demented ring-o-roses as flick-knife lead guitar broods and pounces, Vannier’s Clavinet dredges up the faux-archaic riffs from the title city’s crumbling, sandstone finery and the tightest rhythm section in existence cook up a muscle-twitching lysergic groove. Heaven - just pure heaven.

What a time to have been alive, when you could lay back in whatever hip pad you happened to be in at the time and just dig this shit, without having to worry about environmental devastation, cultural misappropriation, global inequality, sexually transmitted diseases and basic human rights.

I mean, so long as we all keep rutting like dogs, there’ll be another generation along in a minute to sort all that out, won’t there? So let’s smoke smack whilst the sun is shining and keep on rocking those sitars….

(…those BASTARDS.)

Anyway. Elsewhere, things go a bit haywire in the way that reconstituted movie soundtrack LPs often tend to, with a brief collection of slightly more traditional Vannier string pieces (not bad actually), a field-recorded acoustic guitar and jew’s harp jam entitled ‘Opium Den’ (nice atmos), and even a brief outburst of some murky Jujouka style flute n’ drum type business (hmm..). Must have been quite a movie.

Oh, and as for Serge meanwhile? Well, his name’s on the front of the record, as you will have noted, but if he’s hiding in here somewhere, I can’t find him. So if the absence of the dirty old bugger muttering anyway in his usual charming fashion constitutes a deal-breaker for you, please bear that in mind before rushing to place an order.

Not ALL of the music rescued from oblivion on this LP is revelatory by any means – if I’m splitting hairs, perhaps FK could have cut some of the extraneous bits and bobs and cut it down to a 10”? - but the highlights are so damned high that a few successive spins will probably leave even the most steadfast of 21st century modernists blubbering away in the corner, chanting “…make it 1969, make it 1969…”. Which I THINK is a recommendation? (It certainly works for me.)

Buy the LP from Finder-Keepers here, but please note that, for some reason (licensing restrictions, perhaps?), they have not made it available to sample, stream or download online in any form. Bummer.


5. Cosmic Invention – Help Your Satori Mind 2xLP 
(Drag City)

As much as I love preposterous Japanese psyche-rock, Masaki Batoh’s band Ghost have always just been a bit *too* preposterous for my liking. This is frustrating, as there were some superb musicians in the group’s classic line-up, most notably singularly inspired guitarist Michio Kurihara (ex-White Heaven), whom you might also know from his early ‘00s collaborations with Boris and Damon & Naomi.

As such, the moments on the one or two Ghost albums I’ve sampled over the years when the band are allowed to get a groove on are pretty spectacular, but…. Batoh’s particular brand of baleful, avant-acid-folk conjuration just really tests my patience, to be honest. I “cannot hang”, I believe is the phrase.

So, when Drag City announced this expanded reissue of a set of mid-‘90s recordings that see the ghost line-up kicking back on some unapologetic classic rock jams under the name Cosmic Invention, after Batoh apparently let them off the leash as means of chilling out after a particularly trying time laying down one of his albums, I had to take a chance and pull the trigger.

Whilst the resulting album is unlikely to flip the switch for anyone not already well disposed to this-sort-of-thing, it’s certainly a sweet retreat for those listeners apt to describe themselves as “heads”, as these hirsute Tokyo retro-warriors gradually loosen up and unravel their collective chops across four lengthy sides of low-key freak-out, digging up the hoariest ol’ free festival era influences they can find.

Much time is naturally spent in pure Quicksilver/SF ballroom territory, vintage organs burbling deliciously as Kurihara’s reverb-drenched picking spins celestial webs of light, but the earlier, more song-based material sees some hulking, Band of Gypsies-style business going down too, with Batoh even deigning to temporarily descend from the astral plain for some straight up rock band front-man duty on side # 1.

Elsewhere, the ghosts of Traffic and (whisper it) Santana are invoked and dismissed, and, quite a lot of the time (this album basically feels as if it lasts forever), things get weird, with long stretches of ominous, burbling analogue electronics, tinkling echoed bells and congas contributing to a sort of sinister, lounge feel, buoyed up by what I think we’re duty-bound to call ‘kosmiche grooves’. I think there's even a saxophone at one point. If these bits had been done by some Germans in the early ‘70s, folks would be murdering each other for copies, but y’know – time and place. What comes around goes around. Or whatever.

the celestial Boz Scaggs cover on side 2 is absolutely sweet, and the final side, aptly named ‘Long Jamming’, is a real monster, with the sainted Kurihara really going to town across twenty whole synapse-sparking minutes. For a guitar-fixated fool like me, it’s pretty unbeatable.

Basically the sound of a bunch of guys just doin’ their thing with no particular goal in mind, Cosmic Invention are unlikely to change lives or minds any time soon, but if you’ve already got the sprawling, psyche-rock pneumonia or the Tokyo Flashback flu, then congratulations – your life-long background accompaniment to creative endeavour and/or filing your tax returns is right here.

Buy or download direct from Drag City here, or listen to some bits here.

Labels: Alice Coltrane, best of 2018, Causa Sui, comps & reissues, Cosmic Invention, High Rise, Jean-Claude Vannier, Joe Henderson, Serge Gainsbourg