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candygram
FRI 8/2 - SUMMERSQUASH MEADE PRESENTS THE ISLE OF DOGS FESTIVAL #1 Including Reservoir, The Naysayer, Kendall Meade (Mascott) Dave Derby, Phoebe Summersquash, Jud Ehrbar and Rainy Orteca.
8:00 RESEVOIR
9:00 THE NAYSAYER
10:00 SUMMERSQUASH MEADE"
made in the shade
"This is record number three for Greg Weeks, and the one that's really finally gotten our attention. His previous disc on Ba Da Bing! was a stripped down, boy-and-his-guitar folky singer-songwriter kinda record, and while he is still essentially playing folk music, on "Awake Like Sleep" he has begun to experiment with electronics and synthesizers resulting in a sound completely alien but warm and familiar at the same time: a sort of lilting chamber folk with electro-baroque flourishes, reminiscent of sixties and seventies folk-rock bands from England."
magnum force
"Finally in stock, the long awaited solo acoustic live set by Neutral Milk Hotel's beloved Jeff Mangum, about whom I simply cannot be objective -- the two NMH records *still* make me cry everytime I listen to them, they're that lovely and touching and brilliant. This 1997 concert was performed in an Xmas-light-filled room with an occasional baby enthusiastically chiming in alongside Mangum's super earnest vocal delivery. If you've ever seen Neutral Milk Hotel in concert, you already know that Jeff will deviate often from the recorded versions of his music, sometimes stretching out a multi-note wail for much longer, sometimes speeding up or changing a rhythm. That's what makes this live disc worth it -- for the variations he introduces, super sweet but just different enough to keep it fresh for those of us who have listened to the two NMH records hundreds of times already."
deer droppings
"Gosh. What can I say? This is absolutely the finest moment of Deerhoof's recorded output. At 34 minutes, there is absolutely no filler on Reveille: it is an astonishingly precise and accomplished half hour of some of the most challenging, interesting avant-rock we've heard in a long long time. Jeff loves this album so much he almost started a record label just to put it out! The local trio of Satomi Matsuzaki, John Dieterich and Greg Saunier are old school; you can hear in their music the lessons they learned from vintage Bay Area weirdos like the late great Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and Caroliner, and from the famously avant garde Mills College music program -- all of which have resulted in a great, eccentric band whose aesthetic is fully formed, mature and confident. Satomi's light, singsong vocal delivery (similar to Boredoms' Yoshimi, Blonde Redhead, Yoko Ono) careens from stereo left to stereo right, a dose of melody and almost j-pop sweetness that plays perfectly against the macabre repeating guitar lines and the great, unpredictable, muscular drumming. Sudden stops and starts punctuate eight minute songs against one minute collages of noisy audio squiggles. Much like the Thinking Fellers did, Deerhoof juxtaposes melodic passages against weighty, distorted guitar a la Sonic Youth; they rarely descend to all-too-easy verse/chorus/verse trad songwriting, yet amazingly enough the album is quite accessible. Experimental music that everyone can enjoy. Wonderful. This record is perfection."
rip it up
hero worship
"The amazing, beautiful, anarchic, DIY psych-folk-pop of Tony, Caro & John's terribly rare "All On The First Day" LP (originally privately released in an edition of just 100 copies) has now been revived on CD for, hopefully, a larger audience! This comes to us from the label that's been responsible for bringing us those fab "Love, Peace & Poetry" psychedelic rock compilations (y'know, the Latin American one, the Asian one, the Japanese one, etc.). Among the most recent installments in that series was a disc devoted to British psychedelic obscurities. One of that comp's highlights, we all agreed, was a cut by this trio. That track, the amazingly Neutral Milk Hotel-ish "There Are No Greater Heroes" appears here as well, on Shadoks' reissue of Tony, Caro & John's entire sole album, from 1972."
sunstroke
"The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band is one of those groups whose status in the collectorskum underground means that I once spent $75 on one of their LPs. Ouch. Thankfully most of their recorded output has finally been put out on cd by the excellent reissue label Sundazed. This band never quite made it big, never had a hit record, but god were they good. They were stalwarts on the LA pop scene in the late '60s and released six albums (I think). The music is arty and psychedelic but also totally appealing and approachable, like a weird mix of Capt Beefheart and the Association or the Byrds. Very fun and very "of its time" -- with several anti-Vietnam War songs, the requisite sitars, Fifth Dimension-style vocals, lyrics invoking fairies and dwarves, etc. Their sound was alternately sweet and silly, epic and serious... and you must hear it!"
juicy nug
john's children - desdemona
u r
"RJD2's debut album is nothing less than amazing. The Columbus, OH producer mixes vintage soul samples over cut and paste beats and includes appearances from guest rappers like Jakki da Motamouth and Copywrite. Like DJ Shadow's "Entroducing," these hip hop soundscapes will blow your mind!"
millennium falcon
"Here's an apparently much sought-after rarity now reissued (thanks again to the fine folks at Sundazed), that we have to confess we'd never heard of until now. But that's one of the great things about reissues, isn't it? And as reissues go, this one's a doozy: three discs of sugary, sunshiney psychedelic pop dating from 1965-1968, produced by the interrelated studio groups The Millennium, The Ballroom, Sagittarius, Summer's Children, and others (all creations of, among others, songwriter/producer Curt Boettcher, a man whose work we're told Brian Wilson was stunned by). Demos, singles, instrumentals, unreleased alternate takes, plus the full albums (Ballroom's "s/t" and The Millennium's "Begin") from these guys: it's all here. And it's all pretty great -- magical, even. Often dreamy. Well, sometimes goofy too (unfortunately reminding us of that "Drugsachusetts" Kroft Super Show parody sketch from Mr. Show!). Ok, if you're not in the mood, it'll make you vomit, but if song titles like "Dancing Dandelion", "Sunshine Today", "Milk And Honey", and "Karmic Dream Sequence" make you smile, then you'll want to have this for those special moments when today's Elephant 6 output just doesn't cut it. (And by that we mean to suggest that if you're a fan of Olivia Tremor Control or Apples in Stereo, you'll find so much to love here -- the music is as sweet as the Olivias but with a really good grit to it too.) "
kennelmus
"Another fine reissue from fine reissue label Sundazed (who put this out in '99 -- so we're slow, sorry) of late sixties era psych rock. Kennelmus were from the Arizona desert and played a sunbaked style of almost surfy psychedelia, as documented on this, their sole LP release from 1971. Influenced by the Beach Boys, early Alice Cooper, and we'd have to assume some mind-expanding drugs, this is gorgeous stuff that's also weirdly unhinged as you'll discover as the album progresses. 'Indonesian instrumental '60s guitar pop band The Steps doing Morricone Western soundtrack music' (cool!) is the first thing we thought after hearing the initial three or four songs, but then as the tracks advance, more and more songs feature vocals, often silly, nasal ones...partially because of this, at times this reminds us of another strange band originally from Arizona, the Sun City Girls! "
grease monkey
"It's going to be hard to do this one justice... We just got a few copies in of this actually out-of-print double cd. Cheap, too! The Hampton Grease Band released this, their debut and only album, in 1971, to almost universal disinterest and, even, active dislike. It was, famously, the second worst selling album in Columbia history. It might not have helped that Columbia's marketers, doubtless confused by the dadaistic hippy rock weirdness of the Hampton Grease Band, pitched it to stores as a comedy album. It certainly is funny -- funny ha ha and otherwise -- but it's as an avant-garde rock record that we recommend it. Imagine Zappa, Beefheart and a southern rock band all rolled into one absurd, palpitating, guitar-totin' ball. The end result: gorgeous, dissonant, textural guitar-based instrumentals that wouldn't sound out of place on the best Polvo record you've heard, plus the raving loony vocal 'stylings' of one Bruce Hampton (who has kept up his antics as the leader of Col. Hampton's Aquarium Rescue Unit, which we definitely aren't recommending). He's untrained and maniacal and his screechy voice makes this sound at times like Sam Kinison fronting the Allman Brothers. An acquired taste, perhaps, we'll warn you -- it even took a few listens for Allan (the biggest, and maybe only, Hampton Grease Band fan here) to get into this originally. And he doesn't like Zappa, either. But annoyance soon gave way to enjoyment. There's definitely some stoopid stuff on here, but then there's the several extended (around 20 minutes long, three of 'em are) compositions/improvs in complex, interlocking time signatures and whatnot. Not normal rock, not jazz, certainly not jazzrock. Instrumentally, amazing. Lyrically, certainly odd -- Hampton often sang "found lyrics" from whatever text was at hand, like an encyclopedia entry about Halifax or the back of a can of spray paint. As it says in the cd booklet liner notes, the HGB were "an intensely musical group with an intensely non-musical singer"."
dream on
"This long-awaited legit reissue of the lost classic by one man band the Dreamies will easily provide hours of crypto-analytic fun in response to the question "Who else besides the Beatles have the Olivia Tremor Control blatantly copied/paid homage to?" Kidding aside, we promise you could totally mistake this for an OTC record...a *great* OTC record! From 1973, it is an outstanding if bizarre psychedelic album with spartanly bleak arrangements for acoustic guitar and hauntingly Donovanesque vocal melodies, injected with trippy sonic squiggles and snippets from 70s newscasts to paint a disillusioned picture of the failure of 60s ideologies. Mesmerisingly beautiful and faithfully reissued from the original masters. Recommended!! "
babar sings!
"First it was Frogs of North America invading our record bins, then it was Antarctic Seals and Penguins, followed by Insects in Stored Foodstuffs... now it's Elephants from Thailand! Brilliant recordings by non-human, um, sound-artists that we just can't get enough of here at Aquarius. In this case, the elephants are not just making their natural noises, they are indeed playing instruments! You may have read about this project in the New York Times -- when we found out about it we immediately contacted the label and ordered a whole bunch (based also on the on-line sample we heard at www.mulatta.org) and now here they are. These are elephants from a elephant preseve in Thailand who have been trained to play specially-built instruments (many marimba-like instruments similar to the traditional Thai renat, as well as such things as harmonicas, drums, and even a stringed "electric bass"), but they haven't been trained *what* to play, it's all improvised with minimal human guidance! Yet it's definitely music. It was kind of an experiment to find out how the creatures might express themselves, and we'd say it was very successful indeed. If we didn't know these were elephants, we'd think this was a strange No Neck Blues Band recording or something. Imagine a stumbling, primitive hippy folk jam on gamelan instruments, but not one that's random or erratic. The elephants play steady beats, the struck gongs or chimes interspersed with their vocalizations as well. With no overdubs and few edits this is certainly a very impressive recording!"
le meow
"Francoiz Breut is the modern Brigitte Fontaine, with a healthy dose of Cat Power thrown in. Acoustic loops, soaring strings and skittering drums all frame absolutely beautiful songs, full of emotion and intensity. Breut's voice is husky and deep, the lyrics all in French, making the songs dark and dreamy and romantic."