TITLES: O

OAKEN THRONE issue Number Four - Winter 2006 magazine $6.98

With all of the polished glossy magazines and webzines that make up the majority of the "underground" music press, it's really refreshing to come across a elegantly designed, solidly-written, true underground publication like Oaken Throne. This latest issue was my introduction to the magazine, but I'm now completely sold on it, and we'll continue to carry this and future issues. Printed in a thick 7" x 7" format, Oaken Throne immediately reminds me of the crucial Bloodbook zine that Dwid from Integrity published intermittantly back in the 90's. Oaken Throne's focus has been primarily on the underground black metal scene, but with this latest issue, the editors are pushing the bounderies into other esoteric, abstract spheres of heaviness. In this issue, there is a wealth of articles and interviews with assorted Crucial Blast favorites: Campbell Kneale of Black Boned Angel and Birchville Cat Motel, Nachtmystium, Withered, Celestiial, L'Acephale, Temple Of Baal, Thralldom, Vorkreist, Graves At Sea, Wolves In The Throne Room, and Villains. All of these articles are detailed, in-depth explorations of the artists and their work, and are accompanied by fantastic graphic design, original artwork, and excellent photos. There are also loads of well written, informative reviews on everything from Wolfmangler, Solar Anus, Nadja, and Moss to Mrytu!, Dissection, Akitsa and Bone Awl. Even the printing on this is awesome, the covers printed on black matte paper with metallic silver ink, and the interior of the magazine offset printed in crisp black ink. Hands down one of the best underground magazines on the planet right now. HIGHLY recommended to all fans of adventurous, heavy underground music!

OBLOMOV Mighty Cosmic Dances CD $11.98 Deepsend

At the onset, Oblomov's debut full length offers a fierce hybrid of the systematic quasi-industrial post-black metal of Samael and Anaal Nathrakh, and the melodic hyperspeed death of At The Gates, a hellish regimented blackened blast loaded with awesome melodic hooks ripping out of buzzsaw guitars, precision blastbeats. the vocals a frosty screeching rasp. Brutal and ferocious modern blackness that's infused with Oblomov's fascination with the cosmic themes of science fiction writers Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg. There's also a definite prog rock influence at work here, from the synthesizer kosmiche of the albums intro track, to the discreetly layered flutes that follow the guitars in "Redefinition Of The Past". All in all, the first couple of songs are heavy enough and interesting enough....but once the fourth track "Lost Between Emotions" kicks in, the album gets blown apart with an AWESOME, totally unexpected saxophone solo from out of nowhere, reminiscent of Hawkwind ! This single moment is pure psychedelic death bliss. From here, Mighty Cosmic Dances continues to fall down a rabbit hole of astral, outsider blackened death metal/prog, dropping weird folk parts with flutes alongside the churning deathmetal riffing, droning didferidoos, and even freaking bongos as well as more of those fucking awesome sax solos, the songs becoming increasingly more complex and weird, with vintage synthesizers emerging through the blastbeats, forming a weird conjunction of Ephel Duath, Yes, At The Gates, Zombi, Dissection, and even Crucial Blast's own sax-driven thrashers The Mass! Very cool jewel case packaging utilizes a neat diecut booklet and loads of planetary paintings.

OBSESSED, THE Lunar Womb CD $11.98 Meteor City

All of The Obsessed's albums are massive, obviously; The Maryland doom rock group cemented itself early on as one of the finest Sabbath-influenced outfits on the planet, thanks to the indomitable will, concrete-coated guitar playing and pure soul of frontman Wino. But their Lunar Womb is arguably the band's best. Definitely a milestone in the band's career no matter how you cut it. The Obsessed were originally formed in the late 70's and oddly enough found themselves at home in the nascent DC hardcore scene of the late 70's/early 80's, but the band went kaput by the middle of the decade and frontman Scott "Wino" Weinrich went on to front doomlords Saint Vitus during their legendary run in the late 80's. After his stint in Vitus, though, Wino resurrected The Obsessed and produced an eponymous album in 1990 and this, their sophomore release, which originally came out in 1991 through the shortlived but highly influential German record label Hellhound Records. In the years since, Lunar Womb has gone on to become something of a doom metal classic, housing the band's most focused album beneath the nightmarish cover art depicting Saturn Devouring His Children by the Spanish artist Francisco de Goya. The lineup for this album smokes, for sure...Wino was accompanied by bassist Scott Reeder (who would go on to play in Kyuss a couple of years later) and drummer Greg Rogers (later of Goatsnake), and the trio deliver a lean, powerful set of 12 songs, every one of 'em is memorable, and in my opinion this material stands as some of the best in Wino's catalog of music, which, as any real doom fan knows, reached across his involvement with Saint Vitus in the 1980's and Spirit Caravan and The Hidden Hand over the past decade. The riffs on Lunar Womb are weighty and hook-laden, firmly planted in the soil of post-Sabbath blues crunch but coiling out around more up-tempo shades of metal, circa the late 80's, as well as brandishing some psychedelic flourishes and even a dose of ripping hardcore punk with the minute-twenty blastitude of "No Blame". But it's songs like the album opener "Brother Blue Steel" and "Bardo" which make this album a slab of solid doom metal gold, with massive riffage, and inventive and oftentimes mindbending soloing from Wino. Out of print for years after the demise of Hellhound, Lunar Womb has been reissued by Meteor City with a brand-new design, lots of great photos of the band from the era, hefty liner notes from Joe Carducci, author of Rock And The Pop Narcotic and Naomi, SST, and All That....

MP3 SAMPLE: "Lunar Womb" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Kachina" (excerpt)

OCOSI Here And Loathing CD $11.98 Manifold
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The long overdue blast of evil beats and shrouded drift. Mechnical groove in black-studded flesh, throbbing metal muscles burned to cinders. Catchy but evasive in memory, Here And Loathing is shot through with wordless sarcasm and genius patterns that shift and mutate. Another crucial DarkHop release from Economy Records. Paul Molyneux's blend of heavy murk 'n' heavier rhythms, led by deep, pulsating and hit-splattered ooze. Tracks like Carrier spew rustling particles into a spacey void, which precedes the thump-a-thon of Insex , which is almost jazzy in its downbeat delivery. Sludgy-yet-energized, the 10 tracks of here and loathing combine unknowable backdrops with not-overly-assaultive rhythm loops.

OCTIS Ocrilim CD $9.98 Troubleman

Ocrilim is a single 35 minute explosion of mind-frying shred-jazz-blast from Orthrelm / Crom-Tech guitar god Mick Barr, whose Octis project has him composing his insanely complicated hyperspeed fretboard squiggles over programmed drum machine beats. It's impossible to wrap your head around this stuff...every time I listen to this album, it's like engaging my third eye in some kind of complex calculus problem. Utterly amazing and hyper-complex shred metal guitar constructions that blossom into dissonant chords left to hang in midair before being knifed by another 1000 mph fretboard spasm. Awesome!

OCTIS Ocrilorx-2 7" EP $5.98 Troubleman
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Just in case Orthrelm's million-mile-per-hour avant-jazz-shred-metal is too easy-listening for you, here comes Orthrelm guitar wizard Mick Barr with his Octis project, which thematically is pretty much in the same ballpark, but instead of Mick's dizzying hypershred guitar action teaming up with a live drummer, he uses 400 bpm drum machine programming to go even faster and get even more fucked up and complex and intricate with his fractal-like fretboard compositions. A totally fkkn skull shredding avant-shred feast for anyone that's wanted to hear what Yngwie Malmsteen, Napalm Death, and Naked City would sound like in a blender. Awesome. Hand numbered edition of 500, packaged in a white zerox sleeve inscribed with Mick's killer weirdo fantasy doodles.

OF DEATH Generation Of Vipers CD $4.98 Protoculture Audio

Seven tracks of screeching, thrashing screamo insanity from Texas. Like IN/HUMANITY if they recorded a diseased pop album in a slaughterhouse. It is pretty diverse on the changes...grindy,then changing to weird droning hardcore then blending into emotional discordant breaks. One of the most interesting elements is the vocals, which takes the ultra shriek to new heights of ear piercing frequency! Fans of JEROMES DREAM, BLOOD BROTHERS, and THE LOCUST take note.

OHM The Black River 7-inch EP $6.98 Release The Bats

Oh man, I knew I was going to like this as soon as I saw the cover (a psychedelic 70’s prog pastiche that looks bona fide), but I wasn’t prepared for the instrumental pop-prog perfection this three-song slab serves up. OHM knock out their take on classic synth driven heavy progressive rock with catchy-as-hell hooks and pulsating electronics. Imagine GOBLIN , if they were a ridiculously catchy indie pop band on Kill Rock Stars. Or maybe early M83 if they were scoring soundtracks for 80’s fantasy movies. This is some amazing shit, with killer organic production. The song “Opus Octopus” is incredible…a beautifully catchy indietronica-8bit-prog epic that we’ve already listened to a dozen times in the past hour. This 7” comes in a sweet looking glued pocket sleeve adorned with the aforementioned classic prog rock cover art, and is etched on thick European orange vinyl !!! Way recommended !!!

OLD MAN GLOOM Christmas CD $13.98 Tortuga

The latest album from the Old Man Gloom Simian Alien Defense League, which includes Isis vocalist/guitarist Aaron Turner, Cave In bassist Caleb Scofield (who also contributes vocals to OMG), Converge bassist Nate Newton (on guitar and additional vocals), drummer Santos Montaño and electronics wielder Luke Scarola. These high ranking members of the avant-metalcore elite come together to unleash a churning, apocalyptic avant-metalcore cycle with their fifth release Christmas, which is easily their most focused and accomplished collection yet. The 13 songs on this album bind together crushing, towering riffage and drop-tuned sludge with spellbinding acoustic guitars, thrashy eruptions of noisy crustmetal, hallucinatory electronic soundscaping, accordians and digitally-distorted incantory roars flowing through peaks and valleys of mystic metallic massiveness and grainy mesmerizing ambient drones. OMG's monkey mythos isn't presented as overtly here as it has been on past releases, but the imagery and vibe behind Christmas are still steeped in allegory and that daydream goofiness that colors their otherwise menacing heaviness. Coordinates include Kyuss, Godspeed, Troum and Neurosis, but OMG are more intense than just a sum of their influences, this is drone-heavy psychedelic metalcore that actually gets more aggro and crushing the further into the disc you get. The album artwork is some of my favorite Turner designwork too, a psychedelic collage of doodled LSD cartoons and old photographs, at times looking like something that an irradiated Dr. Seuss might have puked up.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Gift" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Accord-O-Matic" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Christmas Eve" (excerpt)

OLD MAN GLOOM Seminar III: Zozobra GATEFOLD LP $19.98 Magic Bullet

Long-awaited vinyl materialization of 2000's now classic Zozobra, a single half-hour track, here spread over two sides of this LP. Zozobra is a masterpiece of droneological post-metal heaviness, opening with a softly rising surge of distorted electronic drone not unlike Organum or Total that serves as the foundation for a epic strummed guitar figure, massive and desolate, like the more recent EARTH dust-rock manifestations, that slowly uncoils along with buried sampled dialogue and a tortured vocal performance into absolute crushing metallic dirge and some of the most dynamic riffing and psychedelic metalcore frequencies so far explored. Truly massive. This is our favorite recorded work from this project, that also features members of ISIS, CONVERGE, CAVE IN, FORENSICS, and DOOMRIDERS, effectively channeling the smoke-ring drone rock of SKULLFLOWER/SPLINTERED through a bludgeoning avant-metalcore assault a la NEUROSIS/ISIS/COALESCE, and closing out with one hell of an orgasmic wah-crazed psych guitar workout that floats away on a tide of grey feedback bliss. Presented in an attractive full color gatefold sleeve with metallic foil stamping.

OLNEYVILLE SOUND SYSTEM Efforts In Freedumb CD $11.98 Hospital Productions
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Like Lightning Bolt coated in molasses and crawling across the floor, this Providence trio murks out a monstrous sludge-funk with bass,drums, keyboards, and wind instruments. Heavily distorted bass groans buck up against grooving free drumming, while sax mud and mind-frying electronic improv is blown about the room. No wave as performed by lumbering reptoids. Fully hypnotic and droning free/jazz/rock.

OM Conference Of The Birds CD $15.98 Holy Mountain

Brand new one from the rhythm section of stoner doom legends Sleep...although really, the deep trance sludge that drummer Chris Hakius and bassist/vocalist Al Cisneros have honed to perfection with Conference Of The Birds really stands on it's own by now. This follow up to the great Variations On A Theme from last year continues to weave mighty, snakelike sludge mantras, spacious and spacey as they focus solely on the dense droning repetition between the saurian drumming and that fuzzed out bass, locking onto "repeat" and zoning your skull into new grey dimensions while somehow managing to reference Steve Reich, dub, psychedelia, and prog complexity throughout the course of the songs. This disc is made up of two long jams, each one an epic 15+ minutes in length, as the duo lumber through their thick cyclical stoner drone, heavy percussion, and Al's trance inducing vocal chants. Euphoric riff heaven that mandates mucho repeated listens. Thick, gooey production from Billy Anderson swamps you as you doze/dose out on your living room carpet to Conference Of The Birds .

OM Variations On A Theme CD $15.98 Holy Mountain

The 2005 debut album from Om now in stock on both CD and vinyl for anyone that hasn't yet dived into this masterwork of mantric sludge hypnosis. Formed by bassist/vocalist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius, both of whom made up the rhythm secion of legendary stoner doom gods Sleep along with guitarist Matt Pike, who went on to form High On Fire. Now, Om does sound a bit like Sleep, channeling those huge gluey Sabbathian riffs of the band's magnum opus Jerusalem, but here those grooves have been stripped of all guitars and reduced to a throbbing, more propulsive hypno-sludge beast, with Cisnero's simple, crushing fuzz baked basslines rumbling outta massive amplification (just check out the bass cabs pictured on the back of the case!) that lock in with Hakius' minimalist yet heavy drumming and create these enormous tranced out repetitive riff states. Variations is a perfect nod-out album, weaving it's circular riff forms and Cisnero's somnambulant chant vocals and consciousness-exploring lyrics around your lobes for epic durations- album opener "On The Mountain At Dawn" stretches out for over 21 minutes, while the other two tracks "Kapila's Theme" and "Annapurna" each clock in at 12 minutes in length. I've been carrying the disc around with me everywhere, I just can't get enough of Om's mesmerizing fuzzy, droning trance rock. They would follow up this album with the awesome Conference Of The Birds which is equally druggy and trance-inducing, and both albums are pretty essential.

OM Variations On A Theme LP $17.98 Holy Mountain

A beautiful, limited-edition vinyl release of Om's Variations On A Theme, in a full jacket with inner printed sleeve.
The 2005 debut album from Om now in stock on both CD and vinyl for anyone that hasn't yet dived into this masterwork of mantric sludge hypnosis. Formed by bassist/vocalist Al Cisneros and drummer Chris Hakius, both of whom made up the rhythm secion of legendary stoner doom gods Sleep along with guitarist Matt Pike, who went on to form High On Fire. Now, Om does sound a bit like Sleep, channeling those huge gluey Sabbathian riffs of the band's magnum opus Jerusalem, but here those grooves have been stripped of all guitars and reduced to a throbbing, more propulsive hypno-sludge beast, with Cisnero's simple, crushing fuzz baked basslines rumbling outta massive amplification (just check out the bass cabs pictured on the back of the case!) that lock in with Hakius' minimalist yet heavy drumming and create these enormous tranced out repetitive riff states. Variations is a perfect nod-out album, weaving it's circular riff forms and Cisnero's somnambulant chant vocals and consciousness-exploring lyrics around your lobes for epic durations- album opener "On The Mountain At Dawn" stretches out for over 21 minutes, while the other two tracks "Kapila's Theme" and "Annapurna" each clock in at 12 minutes in length. I've been carrying the disc around with me everywhere, I just can't get enough of Om's mesmerizing fuzzy, droning trance rock. They would follow up this album with the awesome Conference Of The Birds which is equally druggy and trance-inducing, and both albums are pretty essential.

OMEGA MASSIF Geisterstadt CD $12.98 Radar Swarm

A stunning debut from this German quartet, Geisterstadt ("Ghost Town" in German) weaves a tale of ancient abandoned silver mines, treks through deep mountain tunnels, and forsaken boom towns illustrated through Omega Massif's massive instrumental metal. Slow and brooding, the songs on Geisterstadt bring flurries of soaring melodic guitar lines to elephantine riffage descended from Pelican's Australasia and a dustbowl ambience that sounds like what Earth's Hex mighta sounded like if Dylan Carlson had injected that album with a high level of chugging saurian metalcore. The voiceless nature of the music turns the focus on pure atmosphere, and they deliver it, layering the pulverizing repetitive metalchug with a sense of gloom and longing that becomes near-suffocating at times, but there are also lots of gorgeous ethereal melodies that remind me of Year Of No Light - not too surprising then that this album came out on Radar Swarm, the French label run by Johan from Year Of No Light and home to a host of amazing, arty metalcore/"post-metal" bands like YONL, Spinning Heads, Gantz, and Cortez. Sure, Omega Massif are following fairly closely in the footsteps of bands like Pelican, Year Of No Light and Isis with their debut, but their mix of meditative, epic ambient rock and destructively heaviness is so perfectly rendered that I can't get enough of this album. The last track "Exodus" in particular is a scorcher, shifting between crushing percussive riffage and wobbly Loveless-esque guitar float that ends in a lethal metalcore breakdown. Quite the burly closer. This disc also has some great artwork, the packaging depicting sepia-toned photographs of ghostly abandoned mining towns.

OMEI A Single Sickened Cell CD $11.98 Beauty / Pain Records

The latest full length from SICKNESS figurehead Chris Goudreau. 7 tracks of oppressive dark ambient / post-industrial drift, which fans of occult dronesters SCHLOSS TEGAL and RAISON D'ETRE would particularly appreciate. OMEI forgoes the ultra harsh electronic noise blitz of SICKNESS yet still mines an unsettling vein of nightmarish sub-bass frequencies and processed sounds that create a disturbing and uncomfortable atmosphere. Minimalist blackened drift is punctuated by periodic outbursts of destroyed dialog and noise. Low frequencies soaked in distortion buzz gently stretch into tectonic slabs of ambient hum. Excellent grim soundscapes / drone constructions.

OMNIUM GATHERUM Rectifying Human Rejection CD $9.98 Life Fluid

Adelaide's extreme deathgrind champions Omnium Gatherum deliver more than a dozen breakneck explosions of technical grind madness on this, their debut CD.... propelled by amazing drumming and a rapid-fire vocal tirade that lurches from a shriek to a grunt almost in the same breath. Rectifying Human Rejection is eloquently packaged, well-produced and teeming with short sharp bursts of intense, percussion-driven grind. Now signed to UK label RAGE OF ACHILLES (Anaal Nathrakh, Mistress, Cult of Luna), OMNIUM GATHERUM have established themselves as one of the most potent and boundary pushing deathgrind outfits on Earth.

ONE STARVING DAY Broken Wings Lead Arms to The Sun CD $11.98 Planaria

An excellent debut album that came out about a year and half ago from this heavy Italian group, who combine evocative string instruments (cello, violins, etc) and piano with propulsive drumming, crackling electronic-Prog textures and the occasional surge of distorted, metallic guitars. There's almost a chamber-rock meets folk element here, very reminiscent of Godspeed You Black Emperor but with odd electronic sounds and proggy keyboards swirling underneath the band's spare, minimalist arrangements. Even when the songs suddenly burst into cascades of heavy, Neurosis-esque dirge riffs and deep, bellowing screams, it's still pretty spare and stripped down. Broken Wings... is comprised of five long, winding tracks, several of which run 10-12 minutes in length, allowing the musicians to really sprawl out with their drifting, bass-heavy electronic drones, jazzy rhythms, and hypnotically repetitive melodies that are for the most part instrumental, although those aforementioned intense roars appear just at the right moment when the band kicks in to the rare heavy part. Fans of Cult Of Luna, Rosetta and Mouth Of The Architect would more than likely dig One Starving Day greatly, as these guys have crafted a similiarly distinctive epic atmosphere with an emphasis on stirring, melancholy melodies that reference both grandiose instrumental rock and the leaden weight of Neurosis without sounding derivative. I love the way they employ the keyboards and electronics on this album too, especially with songs like "Fate Drainer" where the song takes a sudden detour into psychedelic, spaced-out kraut rock territory straight out of the 70's, before kicking into a heavy, ominous riff. Definitely has a different feel than alot of their post-Neurosis peers, especially with the presence of the string instruments and vintage analogue electronics. Comes in a cool gatefold 4-panel case a la Stumptown Printers, with strange abstract architectural drawings and minimal liner notes printed in silver ink on black stock.

OREN AMBARCHI Triste CD $14.98 Southern Lord

A complete live performance from Australian guitar explorer Oren Ambarchi that took place in Holland in 2001, Triste was originally released as a vinyl-only title from Touch Records in 2003 and has long been out of print. Triste, offered in two parts, is a superbly realized piece of understated guitar-based minimalism, epic in length but delicate, fragile notes plucked and suspended in midair and left to decay, overtones floating dreamlike across Ambarchi's open spaces. Sparse and slow burning melodies appear, sad and forlorn, as the minutes drift by. By thirty minutes into the piece, subsonic bass frequencies and sublime feedback shimmer emerges and contorts into glitchy out buzzings and crackling currents and the angelic hum of a shorted instrument cable, woven together into rich shimmering drones and high end skree. Absolutely gorgeous. The original LP version on TOuch came with a 7" of extended remixes of Triste by Tom Rechion of the Los Angeles Free Music Society, and these tracks are also included on this CD...these are dense interpretations of the source material, yet just as lovely as Rechion adds Hammond organ, tape loops, synthesizer and cds to the mix, taking the originals and building thick melodic dronescapes, stacked with layers of warbling electronics and woozy melodies. Southern Lord has done a killer job of repackaging the original idea-label 220gsm/stoughton heavy-stock aqueous gloss sleeve edition into a stoughton cd-gatefold (retaining the original tina frank/inwirements design). Highly recommended.

ORDO TYRANNIS Vasa Iniquitatis CD $11.98 Flood The Earth

Scorched industrial dirge from members of subterranean black metal troupe Black Funeral, sounding to our ears like some debauched mutation of GODFLESH's Streetcleaner gone ambient funeral doom cabaret, like the score for some hellish, buried black mass happening in the dampest corners of your basement at 2am, or themes for a plague-infested carnival. Either way, this is some sinister shit. Spartan, dubbed out drums linger somewhere back in the shadows while the vocalist invokes negative energy over a framework of carnivalesque, martial post-punk/avant-industrial played by bone machines. Listening to this is like staring into a vast black maw of total dankness. Not really "heavy", but definitely evil, unsettling stuff, and summons similiar vibes as the recent batch of outsider-black metal weirdness we've landed from Supernal...fans of Benighted Leams, Emit, Esoteric, and similiar pitch-black clang and demonic atmosphere would do well to check this out.

ORGANZ! The Cuts CD $5.98 Underadar

Wrecked/damaged hardcore outbursts with three, three bass players dropping bowel shaking punk spasms and brutal low-end powerviolence murk into thick grooves of post-punk sass,bizarre proggy sludgecore, and pseudo-Swedish death metal weirdness. This is awesomely fucked, Lightning Bolt doing Masters Of Reality-era Black Sabbath, grinding together messy grindcore and retarded faux-soul singing into stop-start dance beats and rampaging hardcore punk. And no guitars. Just drums, vocals, and three fucking basses. Whenever we listen to this disc, we imagine Man Is The Bastard crashing a Yeah Yeah Yeahs show and turning a flamethrower on the crowd. Packaged in a plastic foldout sleeve with boss artwork from Sam McPheeters of Born Against/mens recovery Project/Wrangler Brutes.

ORODRUIN Claw Terror & Other Tales Of Terror CD $11.98 Psychedoomelic

The newest CD effort from these American true DOOM monsters is divided into two chapters...Chapter 1 contains four newly recorded compositions, while chapter 2 features their "Sons Of Nature" (1999) and second (2002) demos, plus one early version of the title track from their debut, Epicurean Mass, here called "Deity Of Wrath" (2001). The earliest material is more classic heavy metal / NWOBHM, but shows the epic path they would set on with later releases. All of this is top notch orthodox doom metal that fans have come to expect from Orodruin. 9 tracks/62 minutes of total raw mind-crushing DOOM for fans of Candlemass, Place Of Skulls, and Saint Vitus.

ORODRUIN Epicurean Mass CD $11.98 Psychedoomelic
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Total Doom metal bliss! Bluesy epic doom, think a cross between the sweeping epic dourness of SOLITUDE AETURNUS and the grisly sludge of SOUR VEIN, with slick clean vocals that perfectly fit the morose vibe of this Doom masterpiece. This NY band brings the super downtuned monster Sabbath-esque riffs, clean vocals that sound like a less melodramatic Messiah Marcolin (CANDLEMASS), and mournful lyrics. Fans of SAINT VITUS, CATHEDRAL, PLACE OF SKULLS, or the newer Finnish doomsters like Reverend Bizarre or Spiritus Mortis, you’ll love this! 8 tracks of slow, crushing power.

ORQUESTA DEL DESIERTO Dos CD digipack $11.98 Alone

This all-star outfit has Pete Stahl (Goatsnake/Scream/Wool/earthlings?) on vocals alongside members of Kyuss, Hermano, Cave In, and Yawning Man, painting huge airy panoramas of sunny desert psych/pop/art rock. The Orquestra takes heavy blues and stoner rock moves and adds all sorts of trippy 70's AM radio pop brightness, organs, mariachi horns, acoustic guitars, n' Latin percussion and rhythms, classic soul, late 60's psychedelia, and a post-punk tumbleweed spirituality that reminds us alot of the Meat Puppets....it's all very mellow and catchy and soaring, pure stoned summertime sound.

ORTHRELM Asristir Vieldriox CD $10.98 Troubleman

Guitar/drum duo Orthrelm's legendary, mind-fucking 99-track disc from 2001. With the longest track clocking in at 14 seconds, Orthrelm applies Napalm Death's "Scum" aesthetic to microscopic blasts of ultra-complex, instrumental warp speed jazz/prog/metal, with chopped up speedmetal shred courtesy of guitar god Mick Barr (Crom-Tech/Octis/Ocrilim/Flying Luttenbachers) swarming over dense tangles of Josh Blair's (ABCS/Supersystem) insane percussive cyclones. Those of you that dig on wrapping your craniums around the kind of aggressive complexity dealt by The Flying Luttenbachers, Naked City, Behold...The Arctopus, etc., this could be your nirvana.

ORTHRELM Asristir Vieldriox LP $12.98 Troubleman

Awesome vinyl version of Asristir Vieldriox on white wax, the 99 tracks on one side, and an intricate etching of Mick Barr's viral doodle artwork covering the other! Limited quantities!
Guitar/drum duo Orthrelm's legendary, mind-fucking 99-track disc from 2001. With the longest track clocking in at 14 seconds, Orthrelm applies Napalm Death's "Scum" aesthetic to microscopic blasts of ultra-complex, instrumental warp speed jazz/prog/metal, with chopped up speedmetal shred courtesy of guitar god Mick Barr (Crom-Tech/Octis/Ocrilim/Flying Luttenbachers) swarming over dense tangles of Josh Blair's (ABCS/Supersystem) insane percussive cyclones. Those of you that dig on wrapping your craniums around the kind of aggressive complexity dealt by The Flying Luttenbachers, Naked City, Behold...The Arctopus, etc., this could be your nirvana.

ORTHRELM Ov 12” LP $13.98 Epicene Sound System

Limited vinyl edition of the OV album on Ipecac, a single 45 minute composition from DC/SF guitar n drums duo ORTHRELM. OV takes the ultra concise shred/thrash/jazz that was delivered in brief, disciplined spasms with zero repetition via their previous albums, and stretch out Mick Barr's (Crom-tech, Quix*o*tic, Octis and more) squiggly guitar shred and drummer Josh Blair's ( also of ABCS, WWIII, Supersystem) frantic polyrhythmic drumming into an epic minimalism, a trance inducing string of million-notes-per-minute frenzy that changes shape ever-so-subtly every few minutes, leaving you hypnotized and cross-eyed. There is no respite, no rest from the constant, unending circle of high-end density shred repetition. Total trance-thrash. Speed metal acrobatics getting appropriated by the early minimalist of Tony Conrad, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. This melted our spinal columns thoroughly. Limited edition of 500 copies, we've got 'em on black wax. Full color LP sleeve with different art than the CD version on Ipecac. Sweet.

ORTHRELM / TOUCHDOWN split LP $11.98 Troubleman

Vinyl version finally in stock of this two-headed prog/spazz thrash attack!
A ripping half-hour instrumental avant-math-thrash meltdown from two crucial out-blast duos. This is an older split album that has Orthrelm's resident guitar god Mick Barr (Octis, Crom-Tech, Flying Luttenbachers) and drummer/human calculus problem Josh Blair (ABCS, Supersystem) blazing it full-on avant shred metal style, way more thrashy and metallic than the minimalist hypno-lixx that their OV album explored. The four songs they drop here are a bit longer than usual, ranging from 2-5 minutes in length, and are mind melting explosions of crazed complicated drumming and insanely speedy axe shred with a couple of detours into bona fide thrash metal riffage and distinct free-jazz steez. Killer. Brooklyn bass/drums duo Touchdown follow up with nine splattery, prog/hardcore/jazz workouts that kinda connect Orthrelm's ADD afflicted thrash with Ruins' low-end power. I definitely dug Touchdown's jams on this split, and already being a huge fan of Orthrelm, this split is pretty hard to beat.

ORTHRELM / BEHOLD...THE ARCTOPUS split CD $5.98 Crucial Blast

This CDEP features a new, exclusive song each from New York tech/prog metal wizards BEHOLD...THE ARCTOPUS and shred meltdown duo ORTHRELM, overdosing the listener on spastic complexity and insane instrumental prowess that will liquify your grey matter. Adorned in eye-blazing original artwork from VOIVOD's Away. DECIBEL Magazine said "...Both Behold… the Arctopus and Orthrelm stake their reputations on disciplined improvisation, but the work itself necessitates auto-destructive imperatives. Their elusive, dizzying sound evokes Zorn’s work with Painkiller and Masada and is equally reminiscent of Coltrane’s abandonment first of bebop, then the matrix he developed with Giant Steps before venturing outward into the spiritual impossibilities of modal jazz. Behold’s “PAINcave” begins a dialogue between guitar and drums that culminates in a regurgitation of what’s just been digested. Unlike Orthrelm, their use of viscous sounds lubricates and combusts, taking a circuitous route through dialogical syncopation, call and response, and load noise intensity. Like Zorn’s work, it’s moody and agitated, at once brooding and decisive, storming and wailing with purpose between chromatic tantrums. Conversely, Orthrelm’s “Pithot 1” abbreviates their 2005 ode to concentration, OV. A series of profound declensions and cartoonish riffs, it scrawls a Mike Patton caricature, then burns it in effigy. As much a song as a trigonometry lesson, Orthrelm’s guitars and drums chase a parabolic rollercoaster, cascading down asymptotic peaks with fearless elegance. Orthrelm draw a smiley face on repetition, the hallmark of nightmare logic allowing cat and mouse to lose meaning only to become a chicken or egg proposition in which the cat’s left chasing its tail. Each generation is more distorted, violent, and funny: as Tweety is to Sylvester and as Tom is to Jerry is to Itchy is to Scratchy ad infinitum; or as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? playwright Edward Albee once put it, “Good, better, best, bested.”

ORTHRELM / BEHOLD...THE ARCTOPUS split 7" EP $7.98 Eyes Of Sound

The 7" vinyl version of this split came out last year, but I've had a tough time getting my hands on it until now. Fetauring one exclusive song each from Orthrelm and Behold The Arctopus, this EP is a killer double-shot of contempo avant-shred metal from the best in the biz. NYC's tech/prog metal wizards Behold The Arctopus serve up "Paincave" and it's a scorching assault of hyperspeed fretboard shred; Orthrelm follow with "Pithot 1", which continues the maximalist shred meltdown steez of their Ov album on Ipecac. An overdose of spastic complexity and insane instrumental prowess that will liquify your grey matter. This 7" version has exactly the same music as the CD single version that we released through Crucial Blast last year, and also features the awesome sleeve art from VOIVOD's Away...I still can't believe we were able to get him to do this, being a HUGE Voivod fan, it was a dream come true to have him do the artwork for one of our releases. Anyways, this 7" comes on either red or green vinyl, our pick based on what we've got here. Limited edition as would be expected.

ORTHRELM / TRENCHER Trans Atlantic Asthma Attack 5" EP $7.98 Superfi

A teensie dose of blazing avant-blast on a cute blue-vinyl 5" record, imported straight from the UK. Being an asthma sufferer, I thought the artwork on the jacket for this split was awesome; and cut into the grooves is a tagteam assault of three songs each from shredders Orthrelm and casio grinders Trencher. The three Orthrelm jams are all untitled, and rip through a lean series of bass/drums fretboard spasms and avant-speedmetal outburts - awesome as always. The Trencher stuff is equally great, brutal and short, with bass and drums locking into crushing spazz-grooves a la Lightning Bolt while calliope casio melodies shriek around the room, a manic carnival-powerviolence freakout that's over before you know it. Super limited and sold out from the labels to the best of my knowledge.

ORTHRELM / TOUCHDOWN split CD $11.98 Troubleman

A ripping half-hour instrumental avant-math-thrash meltdown from two crucial out-blast duos. This is an older split album that has Orthrelm's resident guitar god Mick Barr (Octis, Crom-Tech, Flying Luttenbachers) and drummer/human calculus problem Josh Blair (ABCS, Supersystem) blazing it full-on avant shred metal style, way more thrashy and metallic than the minimalist hypno-lixx that their OV album explored. The four songs they drop here are a bit longer than usual, ranging from 2-5 minutes in length, and are mind melting explosions of crazed complicated drumming and insanely speedy axe shred with a couple of detours into bona fide thrash metal riffage and distinct free-jazz steez. Killer. Brooklyn bass/drums duo Touchdown follow up with nine splattery, prog/hardcore/jazz workouts that kinda connect Orthrelm's ADD afflicted thrash with Ruins' low-end power. I definitely dug Touchdown's jams on this split, and already being a huge fan of Orthrelm, this split is pretty hard to beat.

ORTHODOX Gran Poder CD $11.98 Alone

Colossal 4-song debut from this Spanish trio who summon shambling acid-doom jams from the outer limits of psychedelic sludge/doom metal, with the central theme of reclamation of Spanish Catholocism and the folklore of Southern Spain, a purging of the Catholic psyche. According to the label, "...The result is a liturgic music with obsesive repetitions, minimalism, feedback, distortion and endless drones creating a primitive feeling that leads to trance and remains as a perfect soundtrack for every dark point of christianism: opression, sin, suffering, guilt and pain..." Absolutely crucial free-doom that has already earned an Album of the Month distinction from Julian Cope’s Head Heritage site. When the doom comes in on Gran Poder ("Great Power"), it's a CRUSHING avalanche of circular, hypnotic megariffing at a snail's crawl, with weird warbly singing rendered through some sort of effects over ORHTODOX's monolithic riffs. Imagine WARHORSE's As Heaven Turns To Ash reshaped into glacial improv-crush with YOB/THRONES style vocal weirdness and miles of reverb, sometimes speeding up into chaotic rocking raveups or krautrockish grooves at 2mph with a drummer who occasionally breaks away from the ironclad groove and explores some clattery jazz-improv drumming while the doom riffing rolls on, and sometimes rotating one singular doomdrone earthquake like EARTH or SUNN O))), grinding on like ancient machinery, sending comet trails of feedback streaking across night skies as each of these LONG tracks lumber to a close. Close to an hour of the heaviest trance-inducing DOOM that's appeared so far for 2006. Absolutely ESSENTIAL for fans of CORRUPTED / SLEEP / UFOMAMMUT / YOB / SONS OF OTIS style ultradoom. Jewel case packaging. Spanish import.

ORTHODOX Gran Poder CD $14.98 Southern Lord

Here's the domestic release of Orthodox's amazing dronedoom debut on Southern Lord, which features an additional exclusive bonus track for any of ya that haven't already picked this up...a cover of Venom's "Genocide", executed Orthodox style!
Colossal 4-song debut from this Spanish trio who summon shambling acid-doom jams from the outer limits of psychedelic sludge/doom metal, with the central theme of reclamation of Spanish Catholocism and the folklore of Southern Spain, a purging of the Catholic psyche. According to the label, "...The result is a liturgic music with obsesive repetitions, minimalism, feedback, distortion and endless drones creating a primitive feeling that leads to trance and remains as a perfect soundtrack for every dark point of christianism: opression, sin, suffering, guilt and pain..." Absolutely crucial free-doom that has already earned an Album of the Month distinction from Julian Cope’s Head Heritage site. When the doom comes in on Gran Poder ("Great Power"), it's a CRUSHING avalanche of circular, hypnotic megariffing at a snail's crawl, with weird warbly singing rendered through some sort of effects over ORHTODOX's monolithic riffs. Imagine WARHORSE's As Heaven Turns To Ash reshaped into glacial improv-crush with YOB/THRONES style vocal weirdness and miles of reverb, sometimes speeding up into chaotic rocking raveups or krautrockish grooves at 2mph with a drummer who occasionally breaks away from the ironclad groove and explores some clattery jazz-improv drumming while the doom riffing rolls on, and sometimes rotating one singular doomdrone earthquake like EARTH or SUNN O))), grinding on like ancient machinery, sending comet trails of feedback streaking across night skies as each of these LONG tracks lumber to a close. Close to an hour of the heaviest trance-inducing DOOM that's appeared so far for 2006. Absolutely ESSENTIAL for fans of CORRUPTED / SLEEP / UFOMAMMUT / YOB / SONS OF OTIS style ultradoom. Jewel case packaging.

OSCILLATING INNARDS Irretrievable 7" EP $5.98 Troniks

An excellent platter of dynamic noise destruction from Oscillating Innards that balances brutally dense walls of harsh distortion akin to a recording of a hundred car wrecks occuring simultaneously, with passages of tranquil melodic drones and heavenly feedback. When the A side starts up, you're greeted with a fuzzy wash of granular distortion that has an almost Hecker/Fennesz vibe to it, but right when you think some haunting buried melody is going to float out of the grit, a sudden blast of mega-Merzbowian noise armageddon wipes the slate clean. It's only at the end of this jam that the droney bliss resurfaces, to killer effect. Irretrievable is OI's debut on the 7" format after a herd of CD-R and tape releases, and is some of the best material I've heard from this project so far. At it's loudest, the three tracks featured here easily reach ultra heavy levels of in-the-red distortion, but those droney parts and the amount of detail that's placed on the compositions really knock this one up a notch. Released in a limited edition of 300 that is already sold out from the label, presented in a silk-screened sleeve. Cool stuff!

OTHER PEOPLES CHILDREN Cold Meat/Loved One 7" EP $5.98 RRRecords

Sweet vinyl slab from RRRecords featuring 2 sides from Colorado teen noise beasts Other People's Children, who fly screaming off this wax with side A blasting your face with vicious distortion war, thick and mucked, and side B hoses your charred mug down with a fucked melange of jazz-noise bluuurt, harsh obscene static, and junk metal waves. Heavy stuff for a bunch of high school kids!

OTHER PEOPLES CHILDREN Vulverine CD-R $8.98 Fargone

Mucho earshred from harsh noise splatter squad OTHER PEOPLES CHILDREN. Apparently these are indeed kids, around 14 years old? Which makes the intense white-noise attack on this disc all the more impressive. This super short run (only 39 copies made) disc features 3 long tracks (over 40 minutes) of tinnitus-instigating hi-end feedback skree cut up with loads of razor-sharp contact-mic violence and grey-matter-baking junk assault. Full on nervous-system obliteration that advocates of Prurient and Hair Police would find comforting. The disc comes in typically minimal Fargone Records packaging, this one in a white digi-sleeve with front/back labels and hand numbered out of 35 copies. Brutal.

OTESANEK s/t CD $10.98 Electric Human Project

Demolishment via ultra-slow, ultra-noisy doom plod, and feedback driven, apocalyptic mud violence. Huge chords and avalanche drumbeats surge and decay beneath freakin’ BRUTAL male/female vocals. As bleak and diseased as Khanate’s ambient crunch, as blackened and crusty and demonically melodic as Unearthly Trance. Awesome. Sounds like thunderclouds and bad days coming in a slow tide over the horizon. 2 songs, 30 minutes. OTESANEK, along with Sunn O))), Boris, Earth, and the aforementioned Khanate and Unearthly Trance, explore the sublime space and speaker grit between monstrous riffs and feedback decay. And JESUS, when this thing kicks into a "groove", it’s sickening. Any fans of the extreme doom spectrum will love this. Features ex-members of PURITAN and HASSAN I SABBAH.

OTHER SIDE OF THE SKY, THE Rorschach CD $11.98 Retribute

This new full length from Floridian heavy post-rockers THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SKY travels along similiar scenic,cinematic highways as PELICAN,MONO,EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY,ISIS,RED SPAROWES,etc,etc, balancing soft,droning,super pretty and melodic instrumental passages that blossom into crushing crescendos of behemoth metallic riffing....fans of the heavier post-rock stuff will def love what these guys are doing. It's nothing groundbreaking, but they handle it expertly, and instead of simply aping the likes of GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPORER and MOGWAI in their quieter moments, they get propulsive and melancholy with a dark (but really catchy/hooky) melodic sense that keeps reminding us of THE CURE's Disintegration each time we listen to this (and we've been listening to this ALOT since we got it in stock). Plus, the heavier parts are far more grounded in the sheer crunch of metalcore than many of their peers, with crushing riffage and vicious vocals a la Aaron Turner of ISIS. Recorded at Godcity by Kurt Ballou ( CONVERGE ) Again, def recommended to fans of the above mentioned bands, ISIS and NEUROSIS, MOGWAI and all of that stuff.

OUBLIETTE Iron sword & silver Key CD-R $8.98 Audiobot

On this 12-track, 24 minute private-press disc from Southern bedroom hedonist Oubliette, ears get splattered with the Oub's goddamn caustic combo of transgressive field recordings, Atari/vinyl cut-up, leagues of contact-mic hiss, and seriously grungy improvised crud. This latest private press disc from Oubliette on the always-juicy Audiobot label, spattered in candied spraypaints and housed in an insano-cartoon foldout poster sleeve, follows up the equally primitive noisecore/musique concrete slop of the Isengard. Un-good time sounds, like some baked Pseudoarcana minimalism getting drowned out by fucked up, destroyed guitar playing, lobe-scorching electronics, and video game soundtracks.

OUTLAW ORDER Legalize Crime CD $8.98 Deep Six

Essentially Eyehategod minus Jimmy Bower, Outlaw Order is sort of like the hardcore alter-ego of EHG; the band spewed a 7" EP called Legalize Crime back in 2003, four tracks of sludgy, filthy feedback-infested Sabbathian boogiecrust, released on Southern Lord during an Eyehategod hiatus and which quickly went out of print. This new disc collects those 7" tracks and remasters 'em, and adds an unreleased live track titled "Worst Liar I Ever Met", recorded live at The Howling Wolf in New Orleans, Louisiana from 2003. The disc art is total Southern Nihilism Front, all negatory punk collage and William S. Burroughs quotes. It basically sounds just like Eyehategod, maybe a little more uptempo and thrashier, but with all of the bad vibes, filthy downtuned blues riffs, and gnarly feedback that you'd expect from these dudes. Fucking killer NOLA sludge destruction from the GODS.

OVERPOWERING Cementerio De Esperanzas CD $10.98 La Idea

The picture of two guys brandishing guitars and performing live alongside a jacked-up mixing board/drum machine tipped us off that this was going to be fucked up. This ferocious disc from Spanish duo Overpowering starts off with a nasty vocal noise/guitar feedback loop, then erupts into ultra-fast noisy powerviolence destruction, like a Spanish version of Infest, but with bizarre drum programming and weird noisy guitar riffs and leads and tons of feedback and screaming amplifier abuse. The rhythms alternate between hyperfast blasts and bizarre stuttering breaks. Like Agoraphobic Nosebleed meets Crossed Out with shredding thrashcore psych-punk guitars. Rippin'!

OVO Miastenia CD $12.98 Load

I'm still a relative newbie to Ovo, the wild Italian duo with a lady known for dishing out wicked sludge-metal riffage and contact-mic'ing her dreadlocks and actually playing them with a violin bow, her partner Bruno, his snare-n-tom bashing backbeat acting as the anchor for their spastic freakery. I'd previously only been exposed to the Italian duo through their releases on Bar la Muerte, but I've loved everything that I've heard from them so far, including this latest (2006) album, their first for the Providence-based Load Records imprint. The disc comes inside of a digipack case printed in black and metallic silver ink, inscribed with strange, childlike drawings of deformed women and little girls created by Ovo's singer/guitarist Stefania, who also plays violin cello, piano, and harmonica on Miastenia. The goofy, cutesy album artwork belies the band's sound though, a bizarre frenzy of noise-damaged hardcore punk, lumbering art-damaged doom, and twisted avant garde-isms fronted by Stefania's unconventional, otherworldly vocals that go from mewling, creepy little-girl singing to chirpy hardcore shouts to hyperventilating robotic yelps to a sickening, scarred-larynx deathscreech that bleeds insanity. Like a weird mutation of Diamanda Galas and Yoko Ono with Melt Banana and Melvins, the album switching between jazzy playground pop songs ('Coco') and screeching hardcore thrash ('Fobs Unite'), to splattery skronky sludginess ('Mammut') and creepy droning cello ambience and heavy floor tom freakout ('Voodoo'). The centerpiece of the album though is the 20 minute title track that appears at the very end, a gnarly lumbering plod of crumbling feedback guitar and slowly scraped strings and heavy creeping drumming. Awesome, primitive blackened prog-doom nastiness, like Khanate or Moss but with with those gutwrenching witch-snarling vocals.

OVO Miastenia LP $11.98 Load

I'm still a relative newbie to Ovo, the wild Italian duo with a lady known for dishing out wicked sludge-metal riffage and contact-mic'ing her dreadlocks and actually playing them with a violin bow, her partner Bruno, his snare-n-tom bashing backbeat acting as the anchor for their spastic freakery. I'd previously only been exposed to the Italian duo through their releases on Bar la Muerte, but I've loved everything that I've heard from them so far, including this latest (2006) album, their first for the Providence-based Load Records imprint. The LP comes inside of a jacket printed in black and metallic silver ink, inscribed with strange, childlike drawings of deformed women and little girls created by Ovo's singer/guitarist Stefania, who also plays violin cello, piano, and harmonica on Miastenia. The goofy, cutesy album artwork belies the band's sound though, a bizarre frenzy of noise-damaged hardcore punk, lumbering art-damaged doom, and twisted avant garde-isms fronted by Stefania's unconventional, otherworldly vocals that go from mewling, creepy little-girl singing to chirpy hardcore shouts to hyperventilating robotic yelps to a sickening, scarred-larynx deathscreech that bleeds insanity. Like a weird mutation of Diamanda Galas and Yoko Ono with Melt Banana and Melvins, the album switching between jazzy playground pop songs ('Coco') and screeching hardcore thrash ('Fobs Unite'), to splattery skronky sludginess ('Mammut') and creepy droning cello ambience and heavy floor tom freakout ('Voodoo'). The centerpiece of the album though is the 20 minute title track that appears at the very end, a gnarly lumbering plod of crumbling feedback guitar and slowly scraped strings and heavy creeping drumming. Awesome, primitive blackened prog-doom nastiness, like Khanate or Moss but with with those gutwrenching witch-snarling vocals.

OVO Vae Victis CD $9.98 Bar La Muerte

Immediately after returning home (like, the next day) from a tour that took them across Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and their home base of Italy in 2001, Ovo zoomed into the studio to record this 20 minute session of abrasive, sludgy no-wave/dirge/improv. Ovo's core duo of singer/guitarist Stefania and guitarist Bruno are accompanied by friends in a high energy improvised free-for-all of gnarly grindcore, free-jazz sax, blocks of sludgy Melvins riffage, snarls of skittery violin abuse and berserk computer sounds, and all kinds of clattery, clanging free-improv noise. A pretty explosive session, highlighted by Stefania's distinctive mewling, babbling vocals. Imagine a more freaked out Noxagt mixed with Melvins and Skin Graft/no wave, with a rabid little girl fronting the band. It'll drive non-noiseniks up the wall, but fans of skronky, splattery, HEAVY improv noise rock will be all over this. Packaged in a red card wallet sleeve with insert.

OVRO Gegendurchgangenzeit CD $11.98 Some Place Else

Excellent submerged dark ambient from Finnish sound artist Ovro, whose fairy-tale drone/noise constructs we really dug on her split collaborative album Live At Placard #7 with Niko Skorpio. She is also a member of the excellent KAAOS IN ECCENTRIS improv/noise group (whose EP we carry elsewhere in the webstore), as well as the Helsinki Computer Orchestra. According to the liner notes, this newest full length from Ovro was originally recorded in a single night and given as a gift of a single burned copy of the recording. Some Place Else decided to give this a wider release, which is good news for drone ambient fans as Gegendurchgangenzeit is an excellent foray into SLEEP RESEARCH FACILITY / BENEATH THE LAKE / LULL style drift. The seven tracks on Gegendurchgangenzeit basically tie in together as one extended, album-long piece, a gritty, crusty, deep-earth-rumbling series of subterranean thrum alive with distant echoes and organic shimmering, the softened metallic clanking of underwater church bells, and all sorts of subdued watery flutter. The entire album has this underwater, underground feel, like you’re enclosed in an enormous tank of water deep beneath the planets surface. Claustrophobic and isolated ambience, but still quite enveloping and hypnotic. Excellent deep listening dronescapes.

OVRO Mosaick The Serpernt / Vipera Aurea CD $11.98 Someplace Else

About a year or so ago, we listed a couple of releases from a young Finnish lady named Ovro that took us by surprise. Her Gegendurchgangenzeit CD on SomePlace Else was an impressive, immersive album of deep dronedrift in the vein of Lull, Beneath The Lake, and Sleep Research Facility, with deep-earth subterranean rumblings and distant, dreamy echoes of shimmering feedback. We also mightily dug Ovro's collaborative disc with electronic/industrial surrealist and SomePlaceElse owner Niko Skorpio, entitled Live At Placard #7. That live collaboration was possessed by strange, hallucinatory dreamscapes and ominous laptop constructions, and was a terrific meeting of the artists' distinctive styles. Everything that we have been hearing from Ovro has been great, and she has continued to develop a unique language of imaginative, phantasmagorical dronescapes, post-glitch laptop weirdness, and nods to the creepy early-industrial/psychedelic sound collage of artists like Nurse With Wound and Coil.
This newest disc from Ovro continues that vein of sonic collage via a conceptual release that is split into two complimentary halves, each section of the CD identified by a seperate full-color, multi-page booklet that accompanies the disc. Mosaick The Serpernt / Vipera Aurea is a strange, hallucinatory journey through Lynchian urban dreamscapes, surrealist sonic cut-and-paste with nods to Nurse With Wound, grim and blackened ambience, menacing alleys stalked by overmodulated, tube-scorching Whitehouse-style electronics, beautiful clouds of shimmering skree, and lots of freaky vocal loops and processed vocal sounds. The disc comes packaged with two 12-panel full-color foldout sleeves, full of lyrics, liner notes, photos and artwork all created by Ovro herself. Another winner from the SomePlaceElse camp.

OVRO & NIKO SCORPIO Live In Placard #7 CD $11.98 Some Place Else

More manic electronic burble from Niko Skorpio, the guy behind digiblaster project REPTILJAN and the cool Finnish record store/experimental electronics label SOme Place Else, as he teams up with fellow Finnish artist OVRO. This disc captures live performances from each artist and a collaborative piece from the duo at the Placard Festival held in Helsinki, Finland in May 2004. The Placard Festival was a "self-organizing" online streamed "headphone event" that took place continously for three months, and the two artists' performances fit the concept well. The disc begins with OVRO's set, eight tracks of deep subdued electronic drones and crunchy 8-bit fractalizations with OVRO's narrative female voice reciting abstract fairy tale vocalizations that are often subtly warped by electronic processing, with feedback winds, wolf howls, and sonar blips echoing in the background. Pretty and eerie and vaguely paranoid, an avant-electronic Alice In Wonderland in deep space. This is what Laurie Anderson might soud like if she had taken a trip on the Event Horizon. The halfway point of the CD features Dreams Which Burn, which finds Niko and Ovro collaborating together to create a nearly eight minute insectile drone underpinned by layers of scorched cavernous ambience and hissing electronics. Very cool. Skorpio then finishes out the disc with seven tracks of eclectic laptop constructs that range from micro-glitch rhythms and clicks and pops, to dissected vocal debris and highly detailed feedback drones, and brutal robo-beats drive looped middle eastern ethnic music samples side by side with squashed Death Metal roar until the whole thing crashes beneath the weight of a massive trip-hop rhythm. Skorpio's material is more mysterious and evocative than the harsher, relentless onslaught of his music recorded under the REPTILJAN banner, but we definitely like this just as much! Limited to 500 copies, with the inner traycard hand numbered.

OXBOW Love That's Last CD + DVD $15.98 Hydra Head

Greatly anticipated double CD/DVD set from Hydra Head serves as a primer for the Oxbow aesthetic. Since the late 1980's, this band has been carving out harrowing, confrontational post-hardcore with evil slide guitar, ambient droning, and singer Eugene Robinson's distinctive primal scream vocals. Love That's Last is a collection of unreleased live tracks, improv jams, rare compilation tracks, and some of the key songs off of their difficult to find early albums, including the "Insylum" duet with Marianne Faithful from 1996's Serenade In Red, to the 1998 live recording "Glimmer Bird", to "Yoke" from their 1989 Fuckfest debut. Ten tracks of deep psychic punishment. Oxbow somehow combines the heaviest post-hardcore with the sleaze of the Birthday Party, free improv reminiscent of No Neck Blues Band, devilish old-time swamp blues, combined into a seriously fucking menacing avant-rock juggernaut. Limited pressing comes with a bonus dvd featuring 5.1 mixes of a handful of Oxbow classics, plus filmmaker Christian Anthony's Oxbow documentary Music For Adults, and live performances from Belgium and San Francisco. Booklet contains commentary and lyrics. Recommended.

OXBOW The Narcotic Story CD $13.98 Hydra Head

It amazes us that Oxbow has been around for 20 years. It's even more amazing that it's taken this long for the larger underground rock audience to begin to take notice of Oxbow's awe-inspiring music, although it certainly seems possible that some of that recent interest is of a prurient sort, created by the band's mythic performances and singer/fighter/scholar Eugene Robinson's hulking, cathartic live presence, which often involves stripping his clothes off, assaulting members of the audience, and howling psychotically. If you've been following Oxbow's amazing career and discography though, you know that's only a fraction of the equation. Oxbow are playing some of the most exciting, emotionally charged rock yer ever going to hear, with a damaged heavy blues-pummel that lets their roots with SST show through while dishing out the catchiest songs of their career. Seriously, "She's A Find", "It's The Giving Not The Taking"....these songs are the catchiest, hookiest jams Oxbow has ever kicked out, and we think The Narcotic Story could easily be the album that finally turns everyone onto their genius. It's their first new full length in five years, following An Evil Heat and the recent best-of collection Love That's Last (which was their first release on Hydra Head). Dare we say it...you could almost call some of this album pop, and the orchestral piano and string arrangements that make an appearance toward the end of the album blew our doors off. But Oxbow's spasmodic heaviness and threatening emotional nakedness is just as powerful as it's ever been. This isn't the only album in this week that we've drawn references to Afghan Whigs with, but Oxbow are as deserving of that correlation as anyone. Robinson's lyrics are world-weary, wrecked, and thoughtfully masculine in a way that totally reminds us of the Whig's Greg Dulli. Dark, smouldering heaviness, with a vibe that feels like the album was dreamed up by a feverish Beat writer. Amazing stuff, highly recommended. Stands side by side with the Grinderman album for soul-baring noise rock album of the year.
MP3 SAMPLE: "Down A Stair Backward" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Frank's Frolic" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "She's A Find" (excerpt)

OXBOW / WHITE TORNADO Oxbow meets White Tornado split CD $11.98 Wallace
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

This warehouse find is going to interest both fans of Oxbow and weird, heavy 90's noise rock: released in 1999 on the Italian experimental rock label Wallace Records, this disc pairs two exclusive songs from those provocative mutant bluesmen Oxbow and three songs from Italy's White Tornado. I knew I was going to dig the Oxbow jams, as I was already a fan of their bluesy, hardcore noise-rock; "Pretty Bird" is an awesomely creepy, leering love letter with Eugene Robinson's hushed croon sung over a feedbacking amplifer, Birthday Party-ish slurred slide guitar, heavy and sinister as hell, and "Pannonica" is an instrumental landscape depicting a beautiful melody being slowly fingerpicked out of an acoustic guitar over a psychedelic bed of roaring feedback drone, processed vocal sounds, and unidentifiable street sounds. Both tracks are terrific and certainly recommended to Oxbow fans. I was surprised by White Tornado and how solid their contribution to this disc is, having never heard them before. Generally split releases tend to be weighted in one band or artist's favor, but White Tornado impressed me with their brand of slow, heavy noise-rock and muffled, manipulated vocals and half-spoken shouting, the music an angular and sludgy crawl, pummeling lurching drums rolling over weird guitar arpeggios. They sound pissed off, with a burlier take on the 90's Skin Graft sound. Kinda reminds me of a weird mixture of Colossamite (whom they had actually shared a split EP with prior to this CD) and Rollins Band, actually, and their music manages to nicely compliment the Oxbow songs. The disc comes in a neat six-panel digisleeve thingie with letterpress printing .

OXIDISED RAZOR La Realidad Es Sangrienta CD $11.98 American Line
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

The title translates into The Reality Is Gore, and they’re not kidding. Wonderfully low-fi and atrocious grindnoise from Mexico. Some of the filthiest and rawest stuff I have ever heard: minimal (but loud) production, monstrous unintelligible vocals, spastic leads that congeal into greasy noise, over caffeinated blastbeats that fall apart into grinding noise, severely downtuned riffs that don’t waste time with any semblance of melody…no subtlety here. Bassist Luisa lays down some bulldozing bass, and the low-frequency splatter that she generates helps ground the vomitous riffs and blasts erupting from the rest of the outfit. Features covers of GUT and MORTICIAN, just in case you’re unsure of where these guys are coming from. Disgusting Mexican gore photography rounds out the packaging on this. 12 tracks of unrelenting gorechug, splatter noise, and chaos blast.