danny kolm, from new york's arklight, sent me a nice batch of albums. i'll do one for now, then come back and get to the rest, eventually. the first one that he sent was from abandon ship records, also based out of new york. coincidentally, nate from asr let me pick out a handful of tapes for review awhile back as well. i'll get to that at some point, but at least this way, i'm covering both at the same time. that's convenient.

the seventh seal
[2007, abandon ship]

in addition to danny, astoria, new york's arklight includes his brother gregory, as well as non-brothers tung sing wong and christopher pae.

antonius block kicks off the disc with two guitars not at all in sync with each other. one will actually play a short, but sweet, melody while the other is more concerned with random, chime-like strums. not too much later, both will kind of turn their focus towards just abstract plucks and sounds that they'll keep varied between a minimal and more involved, affected clamor. during block's second half, it'll get a bit more interesting with the screeching of restless feedback to now provide a foundation.

it's hard not to view antonius block as an introductory piece, despite its nine minute running time, since everything that follows has a far greater sense of cohesion than that opener did. it's kind of nice in the fact that you have this sort of unassuming beginning, and you're not quite sure to expect, but then they tighten up and it's pretty damn impressive.the drum machine beats on scratching at the water might still make you a little cautious, as they did me, initially, but the great guitar and vocal noise in the background won me over. the beats are so completely out of place (but not over the top), that it creates an odd contradiction, which for me, ended up enhancing the noise.

arklight were just starting to hit their stride, but now they're sprinting on skin cancer blues. for starters, that undulating loop in the background is incredibly good. there's also some rhythmic cymbal clashing, and great electric guitar playing over the top of everything. there's not really anything happening beyond those three elements, but they're hugely effective. i am all about this song... so fucking good.

throughout the disc, arklight will carry over elements from the previous song into the following one, and the best showing of that is on ballad of narayama. after beginning with eleven seconds of acoustic guitar and a synthy loop, it reprises the loop from skin cancer blues, but manipulates it a little, before returning to the opening segment, and then expanding upon that. despite the presence of the acoustic guitar, this is the most electronic track on the cd, with multiple layers of hypnotically rolling synth tones and drones, with another softly buzzing layer that flutters about and, lastly, more drum machine rhythm. the beats blend together with everything naturally this time, giving ballad an organic feel, even though there's so many synthetic parts to it.

a green blimp on a blue field in germany opens up in the same way, with a false start turning into remnants of the previous track. there's another beautiful background loop on this one, too. on the more involved pieces of music on the seventh seal, that's been a constant, and seeing as how establishing a firm rhythmic (or at least captivating) base is important, to me, i've been really impressed with their outstanding job. beyond the loop, they'll incorporate a vocal sample (of someone counting off to four), vocal moans, which are purely for atmosphere and lighter acoustic strumming. i did get a kick out of the part where they affected the vocal sample where he says "one" so that it sounded like pac-man.lastly is what you might destroy of an incomplete person. with another great subdued (and delayed) foundation, they'll mostly add squealing guitar noise, until another droning guitar pops up and takes its place, though, now it's relegated to the background. the cd will promptly end (as the song title somewhat alluded to), but not before some broken music-box-esque string plucks make their impression felt. damn, it's a shame that the album ends right when it does because i loved the vibe of those chords with the darker sound of the drone. oh well, there were plenty of other great moments throughout to keep me satisfied rather than dwelling on one little what could've been.

arklight appear to be under most people's radar, i know that i hadn't heard of them before danny got in touch with me. they do have releases on a couple of quality imprints in epicene and france's tanzprocesz, so i'm a bit surprised that the name had eluded me until recently. regardless of past ignorance, i'm definitely on board with this cd. in addition to being musically great, the seventh seal had a lot of personality and uniqueness to it. here's hoping the three other arklight releases i have can live up to the high expectations i'm now going to have, ha.

Skin Cancer Blues

$22,500

whew! funny how bi-weekly turns into bi-monthly, isn't it? meh. next step is quarterly. maybe i'll buy a new computer by then and that will solve my lack of hard drive space, since audacity eats up a lot of space when i put these together and that's my main impedance.

to make up for the lost time, i made two podcasts. i'll try and post the second one tonight, but they take for flippin' ever to load onto podomatic, especially with slsk running, but the second one, yeah, either today or tomorrow. something went awry and i accidentally deleted the second one. real nice. maybe i'll feel ambitious tonight, but i hate ambition, so next week sounds more practical on that one.

fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

okay, i feel better now; as for #10, it's heavier on the rock side of things, but there's a good bit of variation in terms of sound with post-punk, art rock, garage punk, older psychedelic rock, garage rock, punk, noise rock as well as a couple of more experimentally inclined songs.

a ton of music, and it's less than two hours long, i'm happy about that.

demon's claws - shadow of a castle
lamps - bertha walt
the krunchies - he's no
immortal lee county killers - train she rides
low point drains - $ + % = ?!
the monks - shut up
the fall - wings
hubble bubble - new promotion
the rezillos - glad all over
the demons - you
b-g system - fly away
old king cole younger - garden of eden
the index - israeli blues
13th floor elevators - reverberation (doubt)
desperate bicycles - don't back the front
warsaw - the drawback
operation s - cauchemar
the maggots - go away
digger & the pussycats - i got a lover
los huevos - suit & tie
sarah coffman - titta
end result - slash
the terminals (new zealand) - native waiter
lightning beat-man - fuck you
cj - single minded #1
jacuzzi boys - ghost ghost
gaye blades - keep your hands (off of my baby)
hipshakes - i'm gone
kung-fu escalator - lonely heart
jelly bean bandits - country woman
the chesterfield kings - time will tell
brimstone howl - red glare
spanish dogs - got a problem
terrible twos - alcohol + adderall
art attacks - i am a dalek
mojomatics - you know my name
april march & the makers - let him try
hue blanc's joyless ones - venice sun
kay bell & the tuffs - (the original) surfer stomp
the trashwomen - the happy taco

okay, something else old that i've neglected for awhile for no good reason. time and sobriety have not been on my side lately. anyway, eddie flowers (slippy town, crawlspace) sent me this cd after he checked out my review of their rears its lovely head, motherfuckers! disc where i mentioned that i didn't know how i felt about these guys ditching noise for the rawk (which is actually how they started out). we'll see if my skepticism was appropriate or not.

the spirit of '76
[2006, gulcher]

i felt that since this album was meant to be a return to their roots, that i should, in turn, meet them at their roots and i checked out some of the projects that lead to crawlspace; lazy cowgirls and gizmos. i was stoked on both. the cowgirls are a bit more punk, whereas gizmos were a(n) (occasionally crass) garage band indebted to 60s rock. both bands put me at ease when it came to (foolishly) questioning crawlspace's rock chops. there's also no need to doubt the bloomington, indiana label gulcher since they put out stuff back in the day by punks dow jones & the industrials, and, more recently, releases by joe+n (pengo), big whiskey, home blitz, joshua jugband 5 and magik markers.

out of the thirteen songs on the spirit of '76, only three of them are original recordings. that's alright though, since i've only heard a few of the songs that they're covering. it's new to me, right?
they'll actually lead off with one of their own songs, theme for a wet t-shirt contest. once i hear that sick bassline by joe dean, my reservations were immediately alleviated. the guitar just supplies some additional noise, as will flowers' shouts, but this track is all about the rhythm section.

the paul revere and the raiders' pillaged just seventeen is led by the gloriously distorted bass, and it's one of the best tracks on the cd. they have a great thing going with the rhythm, and the vocals are buried by the music just enough so that i focus the most intently on the bass. i can't seem to find the raiders version of this... bummin'.

that's followed by my least favorite song, hey joe [version version]. for starters, fuck, i'm so sick of hey joe. I DON'T CARE WHERE JOE'S GOING WITH THAT GUN IN HIS HAND. FUCK JOE. FUCK HIM. so, the singing i could definitely do without, but one thing that i actually like a lot about this particular cover is that at least it sounds different. eddie references some arthur lee / love arrangement, but i don't know what that means, but yeah, it's different than all the other hey joe's that i've heard. i really love the ascending guitar chords. so, hmm, kinda torn about this one. i really just don't like it because of what song it is, but instrumentally it's rad.

fight for liberation (patrick sky) is a musically minimal shout-a-long that centers around the banjo. as odd as it sounds, these guys are a few pints of guinness away from sounding like something that they'd play at the wake of a fallen ira member.

crawlspace will again do the cover of a cover thing for the rollicking leavin' here (the birds by way of eddie holland). the deeper that i get into the disc, the more apparent it is that these guys are great in terms of raw garage rock, but as eddie himself said, "we're old, old motherfuckers", and that comes through the most in flowers' vocals. too often throughout spirit of '76 i'll find myself separating the music from the singing, and thinking that youthful energy would be more harmonious, especially when i tend to equate rawness with youthfulness. maybe my preconceived notions are to blame, but when i hear this cover of deep purple's space truckin', i yearn for singing that better compliments those killer riffs. this isn't a knock on eddie so much as it is a simple matter of preference, or better yet, what i'm used to.crawlspace's third piece of original music (the second, take your war on vacation is too short to leave an impression), never never, is really great and does better than just hold its own on an album filled with other people's music. one thing that these original compositions do that i like, is better match flowers' vocals with the music. he's far more successful in this setting than i feel he is when he's trying to fill other people's shoes. again, i'm captivated by dean's velvety bassline which gives the song a jammy vibe (in a good way) and keeps never never from getting too rambunctious. the guitar works perfectly in tandem with it, but while it's not as memorable as its counterpart, the repetitious chords maintain the band's smoked out vibe suitably.

the next two songs, by the cunts and the saints, respectively, show off the differing rates of success that these guys have covering punk songs. with a distortion pedal, they'll beef up chemicals in the mail, and eddie's vocals (along with singing style), go together well with the song. conversely, the saints' erotic neurotic thrived on the punky charisma of chris bailey, and i think that that gets lost in crawlspace's reinterpretation. also, while they doubled the playing time of the cunts' chemicals in the mail, they'll cut erotic neurotic down to one minute and eleven seconds, which is a shame.

lastly is the overreaching cover of the rolling stones' sympathy for the devil. perhaps being cognizant of the fact that you can't just do a straight cover of the stones, c'mon, you can't rock as hard as vintage stones did with their own material, don't be a dick, they'll add on quite a few bells and whistles that make their version worthwhile. the greatest edition might be the fifty-four second cover of roky erickson's two headed dog (red temple prayer) which they expertly transition into the riffs for sympathy. beautiful. i dig that the music sounds a lot more garage rock (they'll forgo the world beat hand drumming) than the stones', and while eddie flowers is no mick jaeger, i think he does a commendable job here. i like that he switches up the chorus a bit, too, drawing out the y's on the end of the my's. another big key is that instead of the "woo woo's" and mick's caterwauling towards the end of the song, they'll jam out for a bit, then begin to deconstruct it, until you're hard pressed to pick up on anything from the stones' original version, then, when everything finally falls out, they move into relaxing field recordings for the next three minutes. this cover is eleven minutes long and i think they attempted an extremely ambitious (while staying moderately faithful) cover and it paid off greatly.

overall, there were songs that hit, and songs that didn't quite work. altogether though, spirit of '76 was an enjoyable album. for some dudes that i knew by their experimental noise music, i must concede that these old motherfuckers know about some rock and roll.

Just Seventeen

The Saints @ Paddington Town Hall; Sydney, New South Wales, Australia 4/21/77

1) This Perfect Day 2) Run Down 3) Erotic Neurotic

wow, i'm actually about to finish up the crucial bliss / blast set with this here album. go me. the daturas have a new cd, return to disruption, coming out, i think, towards the end of april, if cduniverse.com is to be trusted*, but this is the u.s. reissue of 2004's dead in the woods, put out then by crashing jets.

dead in the woods
[2007, crucial blast]

if you're into heavy psychedelic music (or psychedelics) and don't know who the grey daturas are (or what a datura is), you're in luck! because i'm about to tell you. first, the band: it's comprised of robert macmanus, bonnie mercer and robert mayson. now, the plant: (referred to as jimson weed, as well) it grows naturally in india and australia, but also in north (not you, canada) and south america. it's so strong that it doubles as a lethal poison. this would be the bad kind of drug which makes you go insane rather than blissfully trip out. not good. here's a choice quote from some institute, "the overwhelming majority of those who describe to us their use of datura (and to a lesser extent, belladonna, brugmansia and brunfelsia) find their experiences extremely mentally and physically unpleasant and not infrequently physically dangerous".

knowing the meaning behind the name certainly helps to get a feel for where this trio's coming from, musically. the psychedelic influences are there, but the pummeling sound that they can conjure is reminiscent of the datura's harsher side.more than any of their later releases, dead in the woods did the best job of showing off the band's different aspects. it also has fifteen tracks, which is more than all i see is nothing, blood trail and path of niners combined. really though, it didn't just exhibit that they were capable of doing different things, but that they could perform them at a high level. for playing a type of music that, unfortunately, gets labeled merely as stoner rock, they're so much more than that. true, they certainly can play into the stereotype, just check out the monolithic headbanger golden gate blues. the huge, repetitious guitar riffs joined by some nice drumming make for one of the album's most singular songs, and it's just getting warmed up. towards the end of the track, the drumming becomes more hurried and deliberate as the guitars emit feedback and other squeals amidst their distorted rumbles.

she was the cutie of camp cooke, instead, builds off of a great rhythmic foundation, something that's a rarity for this disc. while one guitar churns out the repetitious rhythm, the other one is concentrating more on free-form distorted guitar noise and drone.

grey daturas will make it a point to pace out their rocking out with tracks which are solely sound exploration, as well as subtler pieces of music which, by design, won't pack the same punch as songs like my sciatica.

i like how the experimental tracks range in sound and purpose as well. some are transitory, seeming to exist just as a buffer in between their more tangible ideas, while others, such as the excellent answer february are long and can stand on their own. that one is all pedal play and guitar fuckery, crafting, at first, an ominous atmosphere, it will move into spacier territory, but with an ideal amount of noisier touches. as february hits the midway point, they'll manage to tweak the knobs just right and achieve a pretty memorable final stretch. this is immediately followed by the playful minute of who's gonna fill them shoes? i feel pretty confident that this will be the closest that grey daturas will come to playing free jazz (which is to say, still pretty fucking far off). feedback filled guitar noise, plucked strings and sporadic drumming. kind of nice, actually.

while i dug that brief track by itself, it's best served as an introduction to the blistering black panther tribute, for huey p. newton and bobby seale. there's a sense of urgency in those terrific driving guitar riffs and the way that they'll use feedback as point of accentuation is brilliant; they'll riff away, then in shrieks the feedback, then they'll start jamming again and it's killer. this music makes me want to take down the man. or at least flip off passing cop cars from the window of my nice apartment... with the blinds down. f the police.
a japanese romance is one of the songs that embodies the more nuanced, and delicate aspects of the band, and it's a great, if unexpected, piece of post-rock. they'll completely abandon the whole distortion-heavy power chords sound for cleaner guitar lines, which are nicely offset by occasional bass strums, and the minimal percussion helps give romance a light, airy feel. just as all good post-rock should do, this song will slowly build towards a noisy squealing climax, and then a beautifully minimal rehashing of the song's main chords will ease us out.

if, somehow, this disc managed to make it past you the first time around without you knowing about it, you definitely shouldn't make the same mistake twice. the rest of you might want to dust off your grey daturas mp3s and remember how rad dead in the woods is.

For Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale

*cduniverse.com is, apparently, not to be trusted, since the credits for this cd include a bunch of people who are not at all affiliated with grey daturas, and none who actually are. well played.

Grey Daturas (-1 Robert, +1 George Chen (KIT, Zum Media...)) @ 21 Grand; Oakland, CA 11/07