No Eyed Bird

Hair Police is a NOISE/PSYCH group out of Lexington, Kentucky featuring members Mike Connelly (Wolf Eyes), Robert Beatty (Burning Star Core), and Trevor Tremaine (Burning Star Core). Droning screams, alarm sounding keys, distant drums, and slowly sideways pick scrapes equate to a nightmare of analog terror. Side B is sounds of sullen sunken ship exploration using radiation detectors and underwater saws. The drums leave us and amp tones distort like a trip down a conveyor belt. The final track is an array of lost signals against a constantly swinging rusty gate.

-johnny darko

Big hole, white label vinyl, limited, live performance by former Wolf Eyes member Aaron Dilloway and John Wiese of (Sunn O))) back in 2006 in the UK at a place known as Chislehurst Caves. These man-made caves stretch 22 miles long under the eastern suburbs near London, used for such things as mining chalk & flint, they were also used to shelter the Brits during WWII air raids. Even more interesting, the caves are speculated to have been used by the ancient Druids and also by the Romans and Saxxons. From this very rich background it would seem there was little left to accomplish until more recently when the caves began to be used as a music venue. Bowie, Pink Floyd, The Stones, and Hendrix have all played there, and now too have ear-piercingly experimentalists Dilloway and Wiese. Art noise meets electronic crunch. Three untitled tracks totaling over 8 minutes of pure noise in possibly one of the nosiest settings imaginable. Imagine sounds of Satan vs. television fuzz in a battle with loop pedals plummeting asunder with each attack. Frequencies so high they may reinvent hearing by broadening the spectrum of the human ear. Later sounds resemble background tones of the Atari 2600 game Wizards of War. Loopiness to the point of near locked groves, but leave your patience at the door as no track even reaches 5 minutes in length, distance or circumference.

-johnny darko

Bienvenidos a Miami as Will Smith would say, yet somehow this trio didn’t hear him and dumped a blown out garage band in your lap full of cute art J. K. Rowling-esk lightning bolts, robots assembled out of the remnants of The Brave Little Toaster and as promised, bunnies. Drumstick hits tap out the start of this recently made OOP 7” delivers the robotic electric side of the bunnies. Loopy varying speed vinyl sounds with vocoder vocals and rock loops like Trans Am if someone made them record on a 4-track. The 2nd track features a short punk track with snotty Vandals style lyrics about how its “not about my sweater, not about my shoes…. I’m wearing beautiful pants”. Glad to know life is so simple over in Florida. Flip this over to find subtle psych behind bass driven lo-fi garage like slower instrumental Clash meets a druggier instrumental version of The Cure. Fun times ten as the album ends with some planned or unplanned cell phone to speaker interference. With all the choices of sound directions to go in, the Bunnies leave you wondering if in the future they’d rather open up for Abe Vigoda, Moldy Peaches, or Justice.

-johnny darko

Already out of press vinyl release on Sweet Rot Records by heavy distortion folk band duo from Portland featuring “Meth” Matt Hunter (guitar) and “Teeth” Kyle Raquipiso (drums) should freak you out with the cover art alone. Likely the work of Raquipiso, former art school student and recipient of Sub Pop’s Loser Scholarship, the sickly orange bus paint color and balloons with killer 70’s cartoon smiles are just gently held by a buried dead hand. Meth Teeth could plausibly be buried alive, and if they are, what they create underground is a hyper hoped up retreat into blown out speaker paper 70’s folk without the creepy drone of the Vancouver WA street people they idolize. Meth teeth are horrible abominations of disgust and nightmares to all the pretty indie children frolicking Portland with their crest white strips not to mention that actual pictures of the teeth are fucking rancid. The analogy is thus: Normal teeth are folk music, clean and innocent, but after the band corrupts them with filthy distorted garage musical style over them, they become Meth Teeth. It ‘s actually the exact way the band came to be as Hunter originally began the band as an acoustic folk solo project. The group is supposedly a trio now, so for the sake of this review, lets call them a four-piece.
-johnny darko

Split Seattle dual-duo 7-Inch with the heavy gritty industrial strength drone of Sparkle Girl (Kurt D, & Jim E.) on the A side. Their track Hexis fuzzes out to near silence like explosions in space breaking the needle with such heavily distorted bass shaking and vibrating in your chest. A ghastly snowstorm of metal chains and barbed wire to then just end abruptly. Side B is Slicing Grandpa playing a stoner doom-ish hypnotic rawk track. Lo-fi recording and experimental sounds keep it real and out of the any metal genre, but you won’t get a sense of their true sound from this track. I still like it.

This is a 300 limited pressing re-release of a 1993 album featuring the duo from Seattle: Slicing (guitar, vocals) & Grandpa (drums). Noise trash fuzzy forgot what we did last night anger inspired happy holocaust mesh of surprisingly ear-friendly experimental music. The high pitch feedback isn’t as abrasive as say Yellow Swans, and you can still hear rock influence on this 7”. Side one starts out as a more drone-y experimental minimalist piece with a solemn march beat, but ends up with a rock sound, while side two begins as a rough live rock recording that slowly becomes more experimental ending with freak-out screams and glorious feed for your spine.
-johnny darko

2002 Swiss Metal Grind label release from two Germanic bands: CROPMENT & VAGINAL INCEST. Only 333 vinyl pressed, but these two are fully evil. Cropment (Switzerland) = Death Metal (David-guitar/drum machine, Sebastian-vokills, Sascha-bass). Vaginal Incest (Germany) = Porn-Grind (Rene-vocals, Stephan-guitar, Adrian-bass/guitar, Claudio-drums. Vaginal Incest squeezes 6 tracks on the B-Side, with titles like “I vomit cuntslime” and “ejaculation during rectal knife fuck” bloody sewer bubbling lo-fi vocals over drum machine perfection. (don’t all metal drummers wish to secretly be a drum machine). Paying tribute to heroes Deicide & Cannibal Corpse, Cropment eats you away with dueling grunts and screams much like Cradle of Filth. They’re also playing Netherlands Braindead Fest Apr. 28. ‘08 for those looking to bake the beast.

This is a self-titled limited split 7” (33rpm) EP limited to 500 copies featuring Yellow Swans and The Goslings out on Not Not Fun Records as part of the bi-monthly Bored Fortress 7” series. The Yellow Swans untitled track is like a police chase on acid. You can sort of hear the sirens coming after you, but you can’t get all the sticky honey out of your ears. The guitars are freaky and cool and the scraping, static textures fit well with the vinyl. This side of the record ends without warning. So that was your warning. The Goslings track ‘Saw-Horse’ features demented, echoing, female vocals and a simple electronic drum beat in the background with haunting keyboard bass tones as well as slow hitting cymbals. It’s a much slower yet complex track with tempo changes, almost unexpected on a Yellow Swans release. You can buy the record here from The Goslings website.

Third release in a series called The Social Club, and debut album for Taketo Shimada and Tres Warren (from Psychic Ills) and their group Messages. Tone generated sounds are creepy and could serve ad good background songs or ambient soundtrack pieces. It is too bad this is only a 7-inch as the tracks leave room for development. On the first track entitled ‘Destination’, sounds echo over a humming bass, leaving you standing at the end of a tunnel that leads to your nightmares. Creepy buzzing slowly rolls up your toes and down your spine. A drum signals the end and a fuzzed out guitar acts like the alarm of awakening. The B-side ‘Glades’ bobs up and down with like a merry go round descending into a pit, screwed deeper into the ground with each turn. Like an engine with an unsteady idle, the repetition feels like a broken machine working hard but not steady as it was intended. Before this broken machine should end comes a fuzzy electro beat to add enormous depth to the album as a whole. Released by The Social Registry, you can pick up a copy from them here.

-johnny darko

1. The Naughty Villain
2. The Great Society
3. Dandy in the Underworld
Punchy, pop flute violin sax melody drives the single down the fun freeway. The sixties have nothing on this UK import dish. The B-side ain’t too bad either. Octet-ed vox, plus guitars, plus the ever so clever use of silence equals audible happiness. When I hear “The Great Society”, I feel like its Christmas, Turkey Day and summer vacation all rolled into one and I’m at home starting a family band with my 2 brothers and 3 sisters (serious Brady). The 2^nd B-Side is a cover by 70’s Glam queen Marc Bolan called “Dandy in the Underworld”. They’re able to change the doo-wop feel of the song into something closer to The Ramones with the listless vocals that melt of the tongue slow like honey. Dark green vinyl cleverly matches the jackets leaf art theme.

-johnny darko

“We could have an orgy in the birdbath baby” (Soap Bopper) Perhaps Ned just suffers from an acute case of Aviant-philia, as seen in this lyric from ‘Soap Bopper’. Someone better explain to them that 99% of birds live in socially monogamous pairs. Ned is a 4-piece experimental electro-rock group out of Oakland, CA and always left unclassified in that unknown 1% other category. Since Oaktown it basically the breeding grounds for hybrid music, its no wonder this band blends sounds so well. The tracks fuse funk, pop and electronic music with new wave style vocals. While I read the band would be liked by fans of Beck, Primus and The Locust, I found their actual sound similar sound to Xiu Xiu (actually more like the pre-Xiu Xiu band IBOPA), Mr. Bungle and Santa Cruz’s Estradasphere (who also mixes their rock with electronic 8-bit/ vintage keyboard sounds).

The A-side ‘Soap Bopper’ is manic yet pulsating, regular and dynamics free. Like a Halloween dance party minus the “trying to be scary” scary sounds. It starts of with some noise and then rolls into a cool keyboard intro. Ned always seems to know the right nostalgic analog sound to stream over their simple electronic drum beat. The B-side ‘Omaha’ is an all electronic playground featuring sounds you’d normally hear from a Commodore 64. The track ends with a abstract vocal noise loop that at first sounds like a locked grove but flows to the end of the vinyl where it abruptly cuts off. (very reminiscent of Sergeant. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, era Beatles.)

Ned doesn’t make it easy to find their material.
You either have to email the band on their myspace or hunt down their first release Coloring Book on cdbaby.

-johnny darko

Noise record solo project by Sailor Winters featuring loops and analog “black noise”. Combine side A and B to make the whole track. Play it on 45 rpm! Side A opens with a haunting drum beat echoing a hellish drone and joined with curdled, monotonous grunts, so distorted that one message becomes clear: It is coming from the seediest pits of hell! Tracks like this should replace the phony ’scary’ soundtracks of alien videogames like Doom and Halo. Try to imagine a lawnmower running over a high school marching band stuck in a pit of tar, sluggish and sticky but constant in its carnage. No samples were used on the album, and lyrics accompany the 7 inch insert.

-johnny darko