Count Hemmendork

Holy crow, the Count Hemmendorff album is such a find! The aesthetic here is 8-bit cartoon haunted house music and if that don't appeal to ya'... yer borin'! Imagine dungeon synth if the dungeon in question was Broomhilda's or eight instrumental versions of "Spooky Scary Skeletons" and yr almost there. Some tracks are clearly highlightier than others but there's probably no better Halloween party music (sorry Kim Petras.)

e: look I'm actually posting a link for this hopelessly obscure album in the post! That's a thing I do now! Maybe this way I'll have more than... zero readers. Maybe. Here's the link: Count Hemmendorff. Enjoy! 

Hartman, Workman, Trumpet Man, Queef

Terumasa Hino's album with Johnny Hartman isn't as good as his (Hino's) album with Reggie Workman, or, as good as Hartman's with Coltrane, natch, and, even if Johnny stretches out of his comfort zone to slight embarrassment by showing a pulse,  it reminded me of how fucking immaculate he is - not only is he the only Great male jazz vocalist, he might be better than any of the ladies WHICH IS SAYING A FRICKTON OF A LOT. Dude could make my dad's panties melt. That was an unfortunate sentence.

broads of canadia

I was wrong, and I've rarely been wronger. I recently experienced one of my periodic bursts of canonicity, wherein I was compelled to download the relevant albums by three hipster superstars: Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada and Godspeed You! Black Emperor (more on those clowns later.) My memories of the music of all three were hazy and distant, but my official opinion on BoC in particular had stood the test of time: they were sickly insipid pablum, limp beats atop Yanni synths  with the constant undercurrent of children at play, right? Like Jon Hopkins remixing post-Ágætis byrjun Sigur Rós. That's what HAI insisted they were - the most offensively white and undanceable of the IDM vanguard. But then I actually listened to Music Has the Right to Children again for the first time in a decade and... this shit's hip hop. Like somehow this whole time, Boreds of Canaduh (haw haw) aren't just not IDM by the normal genre definitions, they're not even EDM!  Seriously, if that album had been released in this decade, it would have an "Instrumental Hip Hop" primary genre and maybe "Experimental Hip Hop" or "Lo Fi Hip Hop" as secondary. Those are gotdang boom bap beats, and they're kinda bangin'! Autechre are always hyping their rap influence through mixes and such but this is way more obvious than on any of their work. And it's actually really good! They take a small number of disparate influences (90s hip hop and synthetic 70s library music, with maybe a soupcon of drum 'n' bass/jungle and ambient techno) and meld and mold them into a distinctive, intoxicating whole. If MHTRTC isn't an absolute all-time classic in my book, it's because the music suffers a titch from paradoxically being too self-similar and too inconsistent, and being released in the decade of the necessity of filling CDs (both of which negatives are increased tenfold on Geogaddi, along with their extramusical esoteric preoccupations, aka getting sucked up their own asses, though I do like the "Kids Say the Darnedest Things About God!" closer, which is surprisingly wholesome given the rest of the album - Geogaddi is definitely less magical than its predecessor, even if it's more magickal. And IABPOITC pretty much is an all-time classic.) 

So yeah, it's periodically ambient instro hip hop with library influence - if you think that that's the equivalent of taking a dump on a DJ Funk album in the name of colonialism, you're just as boring and weird as the chin-stroking IDM nerds we were all raised to fear becoming.

Witches of England, You are a Disgrace

The bookending tracks from Violence Beyond the Snowline's Hollow Shit for Dull Suburban Witches are spectacular - really top-tier stuff, and unique to boot; too bad the middle two pieces are just kind of there. But you really need this anyway if you think dark ambient is best when fed through a glitch meatgrinder.

watch me nay nay

ngl, I am super disappointed in nay's Fox's Wedding, 'cuz it's just not nearly as cute as that A D O R B A B L E Z cover would suggest.

Turiyasangitananda

Maybe it's because my mp3 version of Turiya Sings is lo-fi to the point of being unlistenable but I'm thinking Divine Songs might be even better - it's more varied, and the tracks towards the end with the gospel influence are a better hybrid of Christian and Hindu music than Florian Fricke achieved with Hosianna Mantra (which would probably be a five star album if it wasn't for that dang guitar.)

And I never ever expected to hear synthesizers in this context without them turning the whole thing into the worst kind of treacly gloop, but she pulls it off, probably because they serve little melodic purpose and are basically just drones. And they're hecka analog. She may have the two best albums of the entire 80s, wow.

charles wuorinen and aileen wuornos walk into a bar...

I'm so glad I waited until 2019 to listen to the first Lingua Ignota album because that just makes the first track even more elite and memorable, and it would already be one of the greatest album openers ever.

Is it weird that she reminds me of Naomi Elizabeth? Like, the evil version.

how fuckin milquetoast must you be

to think that black midi are "too experimental" or w/e?

first things first: their drummer is pretty dang great, they're the first popular rock band in decades to have a genuinely unique vocalist and even though people compare them to real try-hard, jerk bands I hate like (recent) Daughters and the Fall, they actually seem, like, nice and friendly - and I mean that as a huge compliment for a band working in a cluster of genres that attracts as many total assholes as anything noise rock-adjacent.

I'm probably alone in really digging Schlagenheim despite more or less hating their two previous singles and the KEXP show - I may revisit those, but it feels like there's a lot more subtlety and nuance and dynamics in the studio stuff than their vaunted live show - which is what one aims form, right?

Just wish I could fuckin remember where the riff from the last part of "western" was stolen from!

dearthspiel omuggle

I never truly realized the skills it takes to be an extreme metal vocalist until someone (RNG!) pointed out how rhythmically inept and generally terrible the dude from DsO is, even apart from the whole "paedophilia-themed power electronics" thing. You know how TMR partly sounds the way it does because the Cap'n refused to like actually listen to the other instruments when laying down his vocals? Mr. Darth Spell o' MEGA honestly sounds like he has no idea what the rest of the musicians are doing, like some accidental horrible indeterminancy. It ruins the music, which is generally of a pretty high quality. But with those vox over top, shit hasn't got a chance.

turkey jerky!

New Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek album is super nice. It makes me think of Pram (and Stereolab, to a less extent) more than any vintage Anatolian rock I've heard - that stuff always brings to mind swarthy men with huge moustaches and this stuff reminds me of... libraries, or something, if anything, which isn't to say it's clinical or square, though it is clean-cut for psychedelia. I dig it quite.

snazzy jazzy japanesey straveezy!

on first blush, listening to Takeshi Inomata's 1970 album Jazz Rock in Stravinsky reminded me of the time that a friend of a friend handed me his headphones so I could listen to a dubstep remix of "Bridges & Balloons." Thankfully Inomata's takes on "Petrushka" and "the Rite" aren't quite that tasteless, but it's still a weird and arguably futile mix we have on hand here - what keeps the album from being a total failure is that it's fecking hard to totally fock up these ficking ballets and it'll take more than shoehorned proto-disco beats and psych guitar to do so (one strange thing is that the version of "Petrushka" here is one I was unfamiliar with, with a totally different second half - maybe it's earlier?) and also, for my money, vintage jazz-rock and fusion is some of the most inherently agreeable music there is, so it's silly and unnecessary but far from unlistenable, even with a disappointing lack of improv and annoying fade-outs every couple of minute.

hippo critter

one day I chide people for praising an album that sounds like the early 70s took a dump and then the next day I give 4.25 stars to a fuckin' boom bap album from 2019, which in hip hop terms is like if the Weyes Blood album was Janet Klein and her Parlor Boys, and the NEXT day I give 4.5 stars to Aldous Harding's "The Barrel" which is like a goddamn Linda Perhacs song, so fuck it - insert Walt Whitman quote we all have been known to use to get us out of being called on our blatant hypocrisy.

pistfulness

the new weyes blood album is obviously well-made and enjoyable but it still makes me as apoplectic as I am any time the Hot Hip New Critically Acclaimed Album sounds like shit my parents would've been listening to in 1971. Non-metal non-electronic white person music is inherently irrelevant this decade. enjoy your new Carpenters album, I'll be over here living in the present (sometimes.)

(i like the carpenters, for the record. and I just gave 4.75 to a Karl Hector and the Malcouns album, so I'm a blatant hypocrite, but I find it funny that the album that just bumped WB from the top spot on the 2019 chart is like seven years old but sounds infinitely more modern.)

i should probably update this blog

but I have nothing to say.

uh... Shostakovich is really good? the new Jamila Woods is good but a disappointment? I'm really getting impatient for new Crying material? The arpeggiators in FL Studio 12 are fun as heck but I can't figure out to actually work them into songs?

that'll do, pig, that'll do.

sade should've known better than to title a track on her massive slump of a sophomore effort "Never as Good as the First Time." I mean duh.

queen chartreuse

I just listened to four King Crimson live albums with their current three-drummer line-up (three of which were three disks) and I can answer the question "does King Crimson really need three drummers?" with a rousing "King Crimson definitely does not need three drummers." Long answer: "Lark's Tongue in Aspic, Pt. 1" aside, there's not a single moment on any of these albums that truly benefits from having multiple drummers, because there are virtually no moments on these albums where either the drummers aren't all trying too hard not to get in others' ways that you can't even fucking tell there are multiple drummers or the stickwork is laughably over-busy and ill-fitting (and even at its most cluttered, the three drummers together aren't half as octopus-armed as one, count 'em, one, Christian Vander or Jaki Liebezeit, heavens forbid a Tony Oxley or Milford Graves!) Honestly, the first half of "Indiscipline" off of Live in Vienna is one of the cringiest instrumentals I've ever witnessed, somehow distilling in purely musical form the same quintessential godawfulness that is the hallmark of Petey (Hop)Sinfield's lyrical contributions to the band's "golden era." (It's still not as excruciating as the Chicago "Islands," where they go Kenny-G-adult-contemporary-yacht-pomp on our asses.) The whole thing is a gimmick, which isn't an inherently bad thing by any means, but it's an unsuccessful, pretentious gimmick, and those are the worst kind. Then again, if sloppy tom fills are your catnip, have at it.

And I can answer the potentially more pressing question "did they finally get a vocalist who doesn't suck?" with an equally assured and spirited "fuckin' 'course not  - it's the Crims, ya' dims." New dude's (or dudes are?) still better than John Wetton, though, but that's as faint as praise comes.

Thee Kyngez ov Krymzun are still kind of too prickly to stoop to the putrid asinine sentimental vapidity that exemplifies most modern non-avant-prog, even from former genre masters (which they never were) but if you still need proof they've gotten equally as conservative as Yes or whomthefuckever in their should-be-retired years, it's here in great green gobs. Listening to another crappy "Letters" or fine-but-indistinguishable "Level Five" I can't help but remember the old yarn about Henry Cow disbanding at near the top of their powers because they found themselves transformed against their will into "just another rock band, playing the same thing every night" (compare "Living in the Heart of the Beast" with "Erk Gah"), something that Frippy boy clearly doesn't find limiting or frustrating in the least. Henry Cow, of course, were trillions of times better at their worst than King Crimson were at their best. Of course. 

Of course, I can't even fucking stand "Epitaph" or Red, so actual fans will likely find these affairs a bit more positive than I. I will admit Mel Collins' flute's always a treat when it pops up and his sax is probably the most consistently non-terrible instrument here, though the guitars get more highlights.

The weirdest thing about this line-up is that their takes on "Pictures of a City" are uniformly better than their "21st Century Schizoid Man"s.

The other two pertinent questions all this raises are "are these releases really necessary?" to which I reply "yeahno, not really, like at all" and "why'd you go on this crap attack marathon in the first place?" Honestly, I don't fucking know. Glutton for prog punishment, I guess. Lizard and the perpetually underappreciated Earthbound (no, not Mother 2) remain the only truly exceptional/great-ish releases in their discography.

Also, their 70s Bowie cover sounds like 80s Bruce Springsteen and yeeeeeesh it's as much of a misfire as you'd expect these guys imitating that guy would be.

If you do venture into this hellscape (not in a fun metal way), Live in Vienna is where to go for noodly atmospheric improv (still not a gargantuan amount) and Live in Chicago is the punchiest, most energized (for the first disk) and full-sounding and, bonus points for me, has twenty minutes of Lizard material! (Then again, the Viennese version of "Cirkus" is better and the suite is all of least good parts of the album stuck together in an inferior version, so bonus points redacted.)

I WOULD love Sookie Jump by Eldridge Skell's the Rude Staircase

but it's just too plain jane indie in places for me now, mostly the vocals. still, remember when avant-indie was a thing? I miss that shit and that album captures its moment very well indeed. Now we've got the Dirty Projectors doing (atrocious) alt. r&b and Eleanor Friedberger making blatant Starbucks music and people still haven't caught up with Cloud Becomes Your Hand or Make a Rising yet so that particular boat has not just sailed but sunk. UNTIL I HAVE A BAND OF COURSE.

new CRJ could slot into e-mo-tion without anyone blinking

which is of course a huge compliment and a fairly cutting criticism

turns out

that Richard Dawson has an album from 2005 that by his standards sounds like Ed Sheeran. And now you know the rest of the story.

top three "doot doos" of all time ever, winter 2019 edition

1. Lavender Country - Come Out Singing
2. Des'ree - Life
3. BABY SHARK

that's it!

(Chic's "Everybody Dance" was disqualified on the technicality that it's a "doodoo DOODOO" rather than a "doot doo.")

top three greatest songs of all time ever, winter 2019 edition

1. Lipgloss Twins - Doodle
2. Baby Dee - Weakness for Roses
3. Sonny Sharrock - Portrait of Linda in Three Colors, All Black

that's it!

name a more iconic album opener than "Come Out Singing."

I'll wait.

nu atheist weird folk king Richard Dawkinson

though it was my most listened to album of 2017 during 2017, I always felt that, beyond being a textbook sell-out attempt (which worked), Richard Dawson's Peasant would lose even more of its lustre once I finally got around to really internalizing his back catalog. Well, I finally got around to internalizing his back catalog (and crying a lot in the process.) I really don't have much to say about it other than what I just said and pointing out "Prostitute" is the one track that packs anything like the same punch as a "Black Dog in the Sky" or "Nothing Important" and also pointing out that the choral bit on "Ogre" is EXCRUCIATINGLY overlong except that FUCK I KNOW THAT'S HIS STOCK IN TRADE BUT HIS LYRICS SOMEHOW GOT BETTER. This might be the album in the entire history of the English language that it is the most important that you keep Genius open. "Ogre" actually does become a kind of hysteric sequel to "Ghost of a Tree" when you read along, Arcade Fire crescendo and all. I really think he just fucking one-upped Joanna with this one, in terms of lyricism. Fuck, some of these texts would be modern poetic masterpieces entirely removed from their lodgings in sound. I don't think I've ever said that about any lyrics before ever. fuck.

OH MY GOD "BEGGAR" IS THE MOST BRUTALLY DEPRESSING SONG HE'S EVER WRITTEN AND HE WROTE "POOR OLD HORSE"

ten years on...

that BLK JKS record is the most maddeningly frustrating and tantalizingly promising thing to ever exist maybe. About as good of an example of a band that could've powered Dyson spheres if the stars had aligned but what we got out of it is just kinda mostly crap. they hint so hard at a future transformation into a powerhouse but they seem neurotically uncomfortable at shedding their TVOTMVisms, which are painfully blatant. Maybe I'm just too enamored with the idea of African prog (Rick Wakeman dunnae count, fool!)

e: yeah, turns out these guys get terribleer and terribleer as the album goes on. just a waste.

*sigh* caravanserai is just future days with Guitar Hero soli, isn't it?

I... don't know how to feel about that.

e: heh, Cantana. Sancana. Eh. *deeper sigh*

SOPHIE/LINN DA QUEBRADA COLLAB WHEN?!

no, I ain't been banging the MC Bin Laden collab on the Tommy Cash album...

Goddess Bless June Jones

Sword Songs is the most perfect antidote possible to midnight dysphoria triggered by viewing Jazz Jennings and friends shop for prom dresses. White soul-analogue music at its most analogous. AOTD, no doubt, where the D is decade. *hugs*

5 Star Review: Heather Leigh Murray - Throne

Somehow it didn't make much news that the greatest 70s hard rock album of all time was released a few months ago, and it wasn't even released by any kind of rock band.

Heather Leigh Murray's Throne is the sound of Zeppelin at their most mystical, Sabbath at their most bludgeoning, Leaf Hound, High Tide, Amon Duul II and Mellow Candle sucked through a black hole and forced to build a Stargate for the fusion tyrant demiurge that used to be Jennifer James Herrema and Kenneth Anger. It's not deconstructed as much as sublimated - the skein of hot Critic Words that best describe it is the "nocturnal, hushed, somnambulant" cluster,  but also "quicksilver, mercurial, alchemical." It levitates, just Murray and her pedal steel spinning/summoning the simultaneously lightest and heaviest filigree of soundstuff. And it's heavy in a way that has nothing to do with its musical quality, like a Clarice Lispector novel or summat.

The songs seem to recount a loosely-connected tale of lust and magick, shot through with vintage 70s lingo and a blending of the intensely personal and the cosmic. Hypnotic opener "Prelude to Goddess" can barely contain its insinuation of macho swagger and latent menace and "Lena" plays with slang to spin a memory that may only want you to think that it's about incest.

In the end, the album plays like apologism for the entire edifice of 70s cock rock that it teases and appropriates - like a sage nod in the direction of your secret belief that "Kashmir" still kicks more ass than any New Order or Depeche Mode song if we're going to be perfectly honest, and it does it without ever actually sounding a damn thing like Grand Funk or Deep Purple or apologizing for the musicians' celebrated debauchery, thank the Goddess.