Rumskib are a Danish shoegaze outfit making the kind of straightforward gauzy guitar love spiked with dreamy female vocals that simply hasn’t been attempted, much less achieved, since the beloved genre’s first trip around the sun nearly 2 decades ago.
Yoko Ono. Divisive to many, divine to few. And a patron saint of confident weirdness to certain odd souls, myself included.
Zach Hill, one of the most prolific and varied modern drummers, has been involved with bands ranging from Hella, Nervous Cop and more, to collaborations with Rob Crow and even left-field electronic artist Prefuse 73 on their combined Diamond Watch Wrists project. In 2008 he finally unleashed his own solo debut – and to the surprise of many, it’s much more than the masturbatory percussion fetish expected when drummers go solo. Instead we’ve got a progressive psychedelic mind-warp of a journey from fractured hard trance grooves to massive Black Sabbath-style epics to splintery noise jams, all wrapped up in a free-jazz melange that keeps shifting underfoot, subverting expectations as the ride moves along.
Starting with what sounds like an air raid siren filtered through a vocoder, Astrological Straits is forthcoming about the pressurized sonic onslaught being unleashed. Despite avoiding the obvious perceived pitfalls about a percussionist’s album, the skins are beat mercilessly right out of the gate: pummeling, shredding, and outright assaulting his set is what the man’s become known for, and he doesn’t disappoint. The surprising element is the very arrangements themselves – sometimes moving in expectedly grandiose directions, sometimes twisting into a weird techno-jazz-crunch where the drums submit to the gathering maelstrom and become one with the mix.
Speaking of that mix: for this album Hill enlisted the help of Tyler Pope (!!! and LCD Soundsystem), Marnie Stern, No Age, his own Hella bandmates, Les Claypool and many more interesting players. This may give a hint as to the breadth and scope of the album, but certainly not its direction. Growing from a jumbled, crushing stop-start tentative seed to Boredoms-inspired tribal hypno-grooves, through noise-pop freak-outs, then straight off the planet into a prog-funk-metal-fusion jam that ends the album over 9 breathless minutes. It’s this restless enthusiasm for change and the ebb and flow of energy which clearly displays Mr. Hill’s jazz underpinnings. He may be oft compared with high energy percussionists like Brian Chippendale of Lightning Bolt but his head (and prodigious ability) lies in another realm entirely. This is so much more than impressive musicianship; it’s a new world being ripped open by an intellectually primal beat explorer. I’ll leave you with a quote from the man himself:
Q: What’s in the future for you? Where are you headed?
A: I want to change the world of my instrument in a large way. I want to get to the highest place with my instrument that I can possibly get and change the instrument for the better. I want to innovate. That ‘s what I set out to do and that’s what I’m going to do, whether anybody’s paying attention or not.”
– Modern Drummer, August 2006
[get your hands on this overlooked gem at boomkat, insound, and of course amazon]
Gang Gang Dance released their self-titled (and initially vinyl-only) sophomore album in 2004 and quietly set alight their singular brand of cavernous, sample-fluent, tribal psychedelia with this tripped out onslaught of free form beat-laden soundscape exploration.
So, holy shit. I finally got around to listening to this album. An album I should have discovered years ago when I was knocked on my ass by God’s Money. Jesus. I was waiting until I found the real McCoy, and succeeded in my quest. I’m so thankful. This is better than it has any right or percentage of probability to be. Though leagues more free-form than God’s Money or Saint Dymphna, it’s got far more focus and drive than the murkey Revival of the Shittest. 2 tracks totalling 40 minutes wind through movement after movement like a song-based album broken apart and shuffled into a smooth blend by a mad scientist DJ’s hand, giving ample evidence that the masterly flow of the band’s later efforts didn’t materialize out of the wild blue ether.
So truly odd and uniquely rewarding, I’ll leave it up to the listener to understand my enthusiasm and infatuated prose. Just hit play and sit back, resist the urge to skip around on the slow-building opener and make sure to note the point, halfway through the second half, when you’ve completely lost track of time and place. Or don’t.
In memoriam of Charles Bukowski, I had a vodka drink and listened to scandalously good music tonight – then I wrote. This is the one thing item being shared, however. And I mean it. You may feel disoriented, lost, and slightly apprehensive. But in the end you’ll thank me for that final push, what made you take the plunge.
[the album is somewhat of a rarity but one can obtain it via amazon sellers]
A.R. Rahman is, simply put, one of the most thrillingly inventive, widely adored, and extremely prolific composers of this generation. His fortuitous partnering with director Mani Ratnam birthed numerous undeniably addicting musical gems, my favorite of which is shared here: the throbbing, kinetic masterpiece Dil Se.
Boris with Michio Kurihara is a celestially inspired combination. The greatest modern heavy rock band is hosting a mind-meld with the transcendent axe man of the greatest psych group in Japan. The results speak for themselves.
Ghost are the premier Japanese psych-folk-prog rock group, led by singer Masaki Batoh and brought to ecstatic, piercing life with guitarist Michio Kurihara’s electric wizardry. In 2004 they reached a career apex with the release of Hypnotic Underworld to near-universal acclaim.
Starting with the four part title suite, the album kicks off in true old school progressive style. Building through a darkly ambient jazzy labrynth before upping the ante in part two with flitting woodwinds and jangling percussion, the track explodes with buzzing, agressive guitar work and pounding rhythm until – just when it seems to be running out of steam – Ghost hit the afterburners and take off with the appropriately titled, 22 second, coda: Leave the World! Regrouping with the hypnotically beautiful Hazy Paradise, the album shifts into a more standard structure with tracks exemplefying their uniquely accessible blend of psychedelic otherworldliness. Ganagmanag, an exotically percussive jam at the album’s center is a clear peak after the opening behemoth; expansive and inviting, it’s the sort of song which, when the excitement and focus ramps up well over halfway through, it’s surprising to realize almost 10 minutes have passed – and disappointing that there aren’t 10 more. Ending with an unrecognizable cover of Syd Barrett‘s Dominoes, the band drifts out on a quintessentially classic psychedelic note.
[grab this album at the fantastic boomkat store, on cduniverse or find a copy via amazon]
Optimistic Underground 