Las Cruces - Dusk

Lovingly pinched from The Obelisk: As the follow-up to 1998’s Ringmaster, Dusk (Brainticket / Metal Rising), the 2009 offering from San Antonio, Texas, doom bashers Las Cruces, is something of a surprise. Mostly because, since the band more or less called it quits after self-releasing the The Lowest End EP in 2001, there was a good chance we’d have never heard from them again. If for no other reason than because two out of the first three tracks on Dusk have the word “wizard” in their title, that would have been a damn shame.

But not only is Dusk a long time coming in the sense of it being a long time since the band put out their last release, but considering they got back together in 2004 and recorded the album between 2006-2007, it’s been a while on that scale as well. We can only wonder what caused the probably numerous delays that held it back from seeing official release, but finally holding a finished copy of the record, Las Cruces don’t seem to have missed a beat.

Continue reading:  The Obelisk » Blog Archive » Las Cruces Ride at Dusk.
(Very special thanks to JJ Koczan for the kind permission)

While Heaven Wept - Vast Oceans Lachrymose

Lovingly pinched from Hellride Music: Since the early 90s, Virginia doom collective While Heaven Wept have resided in the shadows; a criminally underrated unit which has consistently released quality, emotional doom of the highest order. Whether it be 1998’s Sorrow of the Angels or 2003’s masterful Of Empires Forlorn, the outfit spearheaded by vocalist / guitarist / songwriter Tom Phillips has always delivered the proverbial ‘goods’ in spades.

2009’s Vast Oceans Lachrymose just might be the band’s most ambitious outing yet, however, incorporating a wealth of new ideas into their musical mix, while remaining loyal to their classic, traditional doom sound from first note to last. Deeper progressive leanings and faster tempos signal the most radical changes for this record-showcasing that all does not move in slow-motion for While Heaven Wept, apparently-and this combination ultimately works to the band’s credit in spades.

Continue reading:  HellrideMusic.com – While Heaven Wept-Vast Oceans Lachrymose.

Grand Funk - Live Album

Lovingly pinched from The Ripple Effect: “Here’s the group you’ve been waiting to see, GRAND FUNK RAILROAD!” And with those words my life was never the same. It wasn’t until about 10 or 12 years ago that someone hipped me to the fact that there was a lot more to Grand Funk than “We’re An American Band,” “I’m Your Captain / Closer To Home” and “Rock N Roll Soul” – all songs I still love to this day – but nothing prepared me for the onslaught of fuzz that is Grand Funk’s incredible LIVE ALBUM (1970).

Continue reading:  The Ripple Effect: Proto-metal Report – Grand Funk Live.

Lair of the Minotaur - Evil Power

Lovingly pinched from The Obelisk: My chief issue with destructive Chicago outfit Lair of the Minotaur has always been memorability. For each of their three albums prior to the latest, Evil Power (their first on self-release label The Grind-House Records), I’ve been psyched to get the disc, put it on, rocked the fuck out, usually woken up in a puddle of someone else’s blood not knowing where I’ve been or what I’ve done, then put the record on the shelf and completely forgotten about it. It’s happened three times now, and more if you count the Cannibal Massacre EP from 2005.

Back then they were on Southern Lord, and the hype around their brutal attack was palpable. Now people know what to expect from a Lair of the Minotaur album and dress accordingly — Kevlar, chain mail, bicycle helmets, etc. What that means is the trio, now consisting of guitarist / vocalist Steven Rathbone, bassist Nate Olp (Demiricous) and drummer Chris Wozniak, have to change things up a little bit.

Continue reading:  The Obelisk » Blog Archive » Lair of the Minotaur: Evil, Powerful, Pretty Good with Titles.
(Special thanks to JJ Koczan for the kind permission)

Black Boned Angel - The Witch Must Be Killed

Praise for Black Boned Angel’s The Witch Must Be Killed from San Francisco’s Aquarius Records: Latest slab of sprawling outsider minimal ambient sludge doom drone from this (now) duo, fronted by none other than Campbell Kneale, he of Birchville Cat Motel and Our Love Will Destroy The World, but as most of you probably already know, BBA is a whole ‘nother beast. A snarling, slow motion, glacial, tarpit, black crawling beast. A sparse, yet still dense assemblage of massive riffing, the riffs themselves doused in crumbling distortion and left to just decay before our ears, only to have another crunching chord wash over us, not so much riffs as long arrangements of massive notes and chords.  A forward momentum of nearly nil, these guys create some serious ultra doom, that rivals groups like Moss for sheer sonic weight.

The Witch Must Be Killed is a two sided two parter. The first side begins with a long stretch of near silence, hushed ambient drift, before the band really kick in with a Neurosis-at-16rpm dirge, and calling it a dirge is being generous. It’s so slow, it’s almost like a soundscape assembled from bits of riff, and occasional crashing drum pound, but the result is intoxicating, gorgeously hazy and blown out and weirdly epic, especially with the addition of a whole other layer of sound, what could be distant waiting vox, or another high end guitar, or some sort of noisemaker, but what that extra layer does is add some serious pathos, tension, what would otherwise be a metallic creep, becomes something totally emotional and intense, like a metal Godspeed crossed with an even more minimal Corrupted, but WAY spaced out, cosmic and otherworldly, more in line with something like Jesu or Nadja, but way heavier, and WAY more metal.

Repetitive, hypnotic, mesmerizing, nearly endless, a sprawling primordial metallic ooze, that envelops and consumes, sucking the listener into a black vortex of minimal metallic sound, the song itself developing slowly, nearly imperceptibly, for it is an actual sound, not just a hodge podge of sounds.
A song that fills up nearly two sides, until about halfway through side two, when the band slip into their own sort of Filsofem, a blurred wash of buzz and rumble, of swirling hiss, of smeared effects and black ambience, laced with a haunting melody, played over and over, way off in the distance, partially obscured by the murk, while beneath it strange voices surface and swirl, the guitars smolder and burn, totally gorgeous and weirdly dreamy and otherworldy, as the record dissolves into an extended outro as bleary eared and buzzy as the best Birchville jam, just rendered via big amps and loud blackened guitars. Awesome.

LIMITED TO 500 COPIES!

Hard Stuff - Bulletproof

Last year I gave my friend Vinny a copy of Death Walks Behind You by Atomic Rooster. He loves Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake & Palmer but had never heard this gem. He freaked! It caused him to track down a bunch of their other records. On the search he stumbled across Hard Stuff, featuring guitarist John Cann and drummer Paul Hammond both from Atomic Rooster’s peak era.

The bassist is John Gustafson from a band called Quatermass, who had a song called “Black Sheep of the Family” that was covered on the first Rainbow album. It’s probably not a coincidence since Hard Stuff was on Purple Records, the label started by Deep Purple’s managers once they got rich. Originally the band was called Bullet but had to change the name due to litigation from another band with the same name.

Released in 1971, Bulletproof is less progressive than Atomic Rooster and more bluesy in a Groundhogs sort of way. The sound is pure British power trio with a great rhythm section and tasty guitar licks n chops. If you’ve ever wondered what Deep Purple In Rock might have sounded like without Jon Lord, then give this a shot.

Continue reading:  The Ripple Effect: Protometal Report – Hard Stuff – Bulletproof.

Saint Vitus - Die Healing

Praise for Saint Vitus‘ Die Healing from San Francisco’s Aquarius Records:  Doom. Vinyl. Die Healing. Need we go on?? Doom metal fans, probably all you need to know is that this album by LA godfathers of doom Saint Vitus, never before on vinyl, and long out of print on cd, is now here. However, we will go on…

Nobody could have guessed it back in 1995, when this album was first released, but 2010 is shaping up to be a pretty good year for ol’ Saint Vitus. Not just one reunion show, but an extensive, well-attended tour! Vinyl reissues of their SST era records! And this, a lovingly crafted vinyl version (first time on wax!!) for what was their 7th and final full-length studio album before calling it quits! We also hear rumors of a NEW album being made. However, as much as we’ll be excited to hear it, there’s no way they can top THIS.

While it might have been their final record, a last hurrah, hardly noticed by an uncaring world, it was also one of their best ever. For one thing, it marked the brief return of their original and best vocalist, the amazing Scott Reagers. Apologies to Wino, who’s fronting the band for their current reunion… Some will differ, Wino certainly has his fans, we like him a lot too, Born Too Late and Mournful Cries are great albums, but let’s just say there’s no other singer quite like Scotty Reagers. Vitus was lucky to have had him in the first place, and lucky to have had him back for this. His dramatic and dynamic delivery, gloomy and ghoulish, yet classic castle-metal through and through, keeps us spellbound.

Guitarist Dave Chandler steps up with some great sludgy slo-mo Sabbathy riffs (of course) and wah wah’d out, psychedelic punk soloing (of course). The atmosphere is sooooo despairing. Opener “Dark World”, later covered by Reverend Bizarre, is a classic, what a riff! But that’s just the beginning… “One Mind”, “Let The End Begin”, “The Sloth”, “Return Of The Zombie”, heck all the tracks are awesome, any Vitus fan should agree. The entire album harks back to the feeling of their first few records in the mid ’80s, really as if Reagers had never left the band. And again his singing is crucial here, over the top wailing with a wretched, grotesque edge to it. Emotive and eccentric. Perfect for the plodding, fuzz-filled creepy-crawls that fill this pestilent platter. He might be singing about sloths and zombies (he IS singing about sloths and zombies) but damn does it sound sincere and MEANINGFUL – ignore him at your peril. Drop the needle on this and learn what it is to be doomed!!

While we should also list the abovementioned SST reissues, many of them must-haves too, this seemed even more exciting ’cause so few folks ever got the chance to get it, the cds were imports and it was one of the last releases on the label (Hellhound) before it folded. And like we said, there never ever was vinyl. Now there is, and fairly deluxe vinyl at that, complete with embossing on the cover for the Vitus logo. And yeah, of course it’s limited… even if it wasn’t, though, you gotta get it, we’d just be telling you to buy two of ‘em!!

Alcest - Écailles De Lune

Lovingly pinched from Blistering.com: High on the “most anticipated” list for this scribe and several others who were awestruck by the majesty that was 2007’s Souvenirs d’un Autre Monde, Alcest’s newest Écailles de Lune arrives with a newfound set of expectations, ones that just weren’t there last time around. Following up a career (and subgenre) milestone is a high mountain to climb and frankly, it would have taken a Herculean performance to top Souvenirs d’un Autre Monde. This doesn’t come close, but we’ll take it.

Characterizing the Alcest sound would fall somewhere between the unbridled optimism of shoe-gaze pop coupled with wishy-washy black metal overtones. What made Souvenirs… so captivating was the sense of optimism offset by the harsh realities of somber black metal. It’s a strange beast, although mainman Niege has a distinct knack for coalescing various moods into one sonic platform.

On Écailles de Lune, the optimism is tempered with a spate of hardened black metal sojourns, although that doesn’t stop the first half of “Écailles de Lune Part 1” from being the monumental high point of the album. The song is overflowing with glorious melodies and Niege’s wistful vocals, eventually decaying into a grim black metal landscape. “Écailles de Lune Part 2” follows suit in the dark department, employing a barrage of black metal advances that come as a bit of a surprise.

Continue reading: Blistering.com Review: Alcest – Écailles de Lune.

Dwarr - Animals

Praise for Dwarr’s Animals from San Francisco’s Aquarius Records: Eccentric outsider doom metal from the ’80s, from waaaaaay down underground. Now hold up, if the words “doom” or “metal” make you think, not for me, think again (maybe). This isn’t like any metal you’ve ever heard, really. More like spaced out ’60s heavy psychedelic guitar rock (one song’s called “Heavy Vibrations”, man), overloaded also with shrill synth symphonics and trippy effects…

That’s where the “outsider” tag comes in, Dwarr being a one-man band, all the work of South Carolina multi-instrumentalist (but especially guitar!) Duane Warr (hence the name Dwarr), whom we get the impression is quite a character. It’s so DIY that the CDs have his phone number on ‘em, in case you want to get in touch. His privately pressed music comes off like a cough-syrup dosed mixture of Black Sabbath and Todd Tamanend Clark (whom you should know from the double CD anthology we raved about a few years ago). Or, The Happy Dragon Band playing Pink Floyd, from beyond the grave. Maybe a lo-fi Captain Beyond, on even more drugs than Captain Beyond were ever on. Or imagine if Bobb Trimble was an ’80s metaller, perhaps (and worked out in the gym a lot more?). Sorry to use so many almost equally obscure references, but it’s hard to compare this confusional beast to anything else.

Look at that insane cover painting, a surreal post-apocalyptic landscape (that’s a malevolent-looking Statue of Liberty sunken in polluted looking water next to a cave populated by long-haired, skull-faced cannibalistic mutants, with an avatar of Dwarr himself, we’re guessing, striking a heroic he-man pose in the upper right hand corner). The music itself is as surreal and apocalyptic and ridiculous as that image, matching up to it much more than most other “metal” albums ever match up to their cover art, both in subject matter and, ah, execution.

Just from the cover painting, let alone the music, this Dwarr album is SO perfectly Aquarius, you’d almost think we made it up. But no, Dwarr’s for real, something we’d vaguely heard tell of and been curious about for years, and finally went to the trouble of tracking down (not so hard, thanks to the Internet, now that everybody and their grandmother’s bands are on MySpace). And lo and behold, it turned out Dwarr had issued ALL four of his albums (two from the ’80s, two from the ’00s, believe it or not!) on compact disc. So we had to get a bunch of this one, his second, from 1986, probably his best and “heaviest”. A Record Of The Week, easy.

There’s 13 tracks, each one incredible (or incredibly strange). There’s nothing that’s NOT freaked out about this. Even the poppiest songs (like the title track “Animals”) are full of sluggish grooves, druggy lyrics, buzzing electronics, melodic stoned vocals, acid rock guitar (and acid WTF synth). Elsewhere it gets away from rock / metal song structure entirely, with interludes of eerie atmospherics, spacey soundscapes overlaid with ominous whispered declamations, and weirdass instrumentals, like the squirrelly, proggy bombast of “Chocolate Mescalyne”, a track that if you sped it up a lot would almost fit in on a Orthrelm album.

And then there’s the DOOM. Oh yeah, while it’s not “normal” doom it IS doom. Sludgy, Sabbath-riffed doom indeed, despite the trebly production. “Ghost Lover”, for instance, gives us the feel of both the Sabs’ “Iron Man” and “Electric Funeral”, and Duane’s vocals are particularly Ozzy-ish on the uber-heavy “Evil Lures” too… Great stuff if you really really appreciate the stranger, more psychedelic aspects of true doom artistry, the spirit is HERE.
Three cheers for avant garde new wave downer rock hippie heavy metal weirdness! That gives special thanks “to the Columbia High School Band for the use of their percussion instruments”.

We are so pleased to play a role in sharing this culter than cult classic with you, which by the way comes in fairly no-frills packaging, the cd in a thin cardboard sleeve with full-color album art front and back but no lyrics, liner notes, nothin’ like that. It’s pretty cheap though. Not that you should need any further incentive to pick this up, after reading our ravings above.

Spiritualized - Ladies and Gentlemen...

Lovingly pinched from Pitchfork: “There’s a hole in my arm where all the money goes,” moans Jason Pierce at the start of “Cop Shoot Cop…”, the 17-minute closer of Spiritualized’s third album and lone masterpiece, Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space. His bedraggled voice drips through the words. He’s an addict, but it’s as if he realizes none of it mattered, anyway — there’s no salvation, no redemption, only cold life and sudden death. One cop lives to kill another cop. Or a junkie survives only long enough to shoot up again. The world keeps turning. Just like in his opening line, he quotes John Prine: “Jesus Christ died for nothing, I suppose.”

Since the 1997 release of Ladies and Gentlemen, Spiritualized have recorded three LPs, a handful of singles and EPs, and two double-disc sets called Complete Works. And the noise-gospel rock sprees that followed Ladies and Gentlemen cemented Spiritualized’s reputation as one of rock ‘n’ roll’s best live spectacles.

Continue reading: Pitchfork: Album Reviews: Spiritualized: Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space [Collector's Editon].