TITLES: S

SALUTE Above The Law CD $12.98 Todestrieb

With an album cover that pushes testosterone-fueled 80's metal iconography to ridiculous heights and a fierce dirtbag metal assault that'll timewarp your skull back to 1985, Salute's awesome debut Above The Law means fucking business. It just came out on Todestrieb, the UK label that has in the past released some wonderfully damaged black metal offerings from Emit, Nuit Noire, and Extinction; Salute is all rock, however, clad in black shades and filthy denim, busting out a sleazy brand of Motorhead-meets-Celtic Frost proto-blackness that extolls the glories of boozin', fucking, and Satan. And this shit rocks, eight songs of ripping urban skeeze like "Downtown", "Leathered", "Vice Cobra"...nuthin' retro about it, these guys are out to kill. You know how High On Fire took classic Sabbathian riffage and updated it into their brutal brand of battle metal? Well, Salute do the same thing for classic 80's Euro metal. A total ripper. Comes in a jewel case with a full color 8 page booklet loaded with Salute's awesomely sleazy lyrics and gobs of photos.

SAMUS Desengano CD $4.98 Crucial Blast

Desengano is a surreal landscape of mutated freaked-rock comprised of lumbering sludge riffs that contort into tape/turntable manipulations amidst melodious keyboards and sustained guitar tones/drones. Ranging from the crushing droning doom-laden EARTH-esque guitar thud of "The Happy Sultan", and the bountiful melodies that playfully flow under the sugary electronica and plunderphonic jazz of "Super Orthopedic Caravan", to the expansive Ennio Morricone-influenced slide guitar ambience found in "Who's Pumping Estrada" and the wall reverbating drones and tape oscillating backwash that drifts into the no-wave dissonance of "Bone Ape Tit", SAMUS create a cohesive, multi dimensional soundtrack comprised of heavy duty psychedelia, avant-rock experimentalism, and opium-den cartoon soundtracks.

SANITYS DAWN / FETUS EATERS split CD $14.98 RSR
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A fastcore freak's dream come true! Sanitys Dawn (Germany) unleash 16 ultraviolent blastcore anthems,totally pummeling grindcore/fastcore with German samples before almost every song, with music like an even more hysterical and PCP-fueled version of INFEST! And Fetus Eaters (Burbank, CA) deliver 30+ bursts of insane avant-grind with bizarre instrumentation and brain destroying speed.Sanitys Dawn are masters of superfast blurrcore with a combination of shrieking / p-off' d barking / growls, really pissed off and tightly executed, with some BONE CRUSHING mosh parts and breakdowns. Killer German extreme HC, as powerful as countrymen (and crucial blurrcore gods) YACOPSAE. Burbank's FETUS EATERS are a cult name in the grind underground, having perfected their avant-weirdo-grindcore hybrid since the mid 90's. Blastbeat fueled exploitation of various appliances like saxophone, slides, bike horn, harmonical jaw harp; nothing remains unmolested in the FETUS EATERS attempt to transcend the familiar "bark-bark, woof-woof" of other extreme grind bands. The resulting sound is a mongrel fusion of ASSUCK and an infant form of John Zorn's NAKED CITY or PAINKILLER. Total vomitcore.

SATARIEL Hydra CD $13.98 Candlelight

Man, there was a point a couple of years ago where I was so deluged with hearing bands aping the Swedish death metal sound that if you even mentioned the word Gothenburg, I was headin' the other way. Sure, I thought At the Gates, Soilwork, In Flames, and Dark Tranquillity were all badass, and in the mid-90's I was convinced that the melodic Swedish sound was going to save death metal from it's redundancy. That is, until every new death metal and metalcore band on the planet started copping At The Gates riffs. So after getting totally burned out on that stuff, it takes an interesting approach to that trademark Swedish DM sound to make me perk my ears up. Satariel did just that with their third album, 2005's Hydra, which I just heard for the first time a few months ago - yep, Satariel are Swedish, they've got oodles of melody, and I'm hearing a heavy In Flames influence in there. But there's also an (un)healthy dose of black metal in there, too, and an awesome vocal performance from singer Par Johansson, switching effortlessly between a sickening blackened rasp, gutwrenching death growls, and soaring, soulful melodic singing. The riffs are crushing, and the guitarists whip out acoustic guitars all throughout Hydra to great effect. Some beautiful female vocals make an appearance a couple times on the album and the band drops in some killer hooks that almost remind me of gloomy, guitar-heavy indie rock. What makes Satariel really stand out is how killer their songwriting is - all of these songs are ridiculously catchy, there is a serious pop sensibility at work here that makes this album one of the catchiest, most richly melodic death metal albums I've ever heard, with a huge production sound. And there are alot of prog influences here too - just check out "Scattering The Time Web" with it's echoing vocal parts and promiment keyboards, and glistening space guitars ringing out over lush acoustic strumming, and then what sounds like a Fender Rhodes piano kicks in towards the end. Awesome! A prog-death-pop masterwork, totally catchy and memorable from start to finish. Highly recommended!

SAVAGE STREETS Wild In The Streets CASSETTE $5.98 Nurse Etiquette

Fucking AWESOME sub-fi skullfuck noise from...who? what? Who is behind this? Members of the noise band Taliban maybe? As with so many of the tape artifacts retreived from the Nurse Etiquette fold, little can be gleaned, and all I am left with is the bits and peices of brain and skull fragments left over after this blast of filthy, beyond-blown free-skree rips it's way through my pathetic headbone. It sounds like Neanderthals simultaneously raping the Melvins and Sword Heaven songbooks, I'll tell ya that much, these indiscernable spasms of sludgy mindless riffing smashing against primitive, bashing drums, like Burmese playing nuclear thrashpunk then suddenly exploding, bass notes fully in the red. 20 minutes of Terminal Destruction for fellow troglodytes like myself that groove on the noisiest, heaviest, skuzziest noise blast rock jams like Villa Valley, Burmese, Air Conditioning, Goslings, and Deep Jew. Pressed in a limited run of 77, hand numbered, totally sold out from everywhere but here.

SAW THROAT Inde$troy LP $14.98 Skuld
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An underground classic of progressive, experimental crust, Saw Throat's Inde$troy has been recently re-issued on vinyl after being out of print for ages, and is here presented in an eye-popping gatefold sleeve that blows Steve Hutton's artwork up to nightmarish vividness. Recorded in 1989, the doomsday visions of this album haven't lost an ounce of their potency. Saw Throat was formed out of the ashes of the seminal noisecore band Sore Throat, and featured members of Sore Throat and Doom along with Hammy from Peaceville on drums; the band completely broke away from hardcore convention and with Inde$troy produced one of the most iconoclastic, experimental albums to emerge from the Uk extreme hardcore scene of the late '80s. Inde$troy is just one song, but which has been divided into nine chapters parts, kind of like a crustcore rock opera/concept album centered around images of the environmental destruction that humanity wreaks upon the planet. But musically, the band was just as influenced by brutal industrial rock as it was gloomy, apocalyptic crust, and sounded like a grim combination of early Swans, Godflesh, Amebix and Axegrinder. The result was a spacey, vaguely psychedelic descent into scorched earth horror, a 40 minute crawl across a wasteland of grim industrial drones, pounding oil-drum percussion, icy keyboards, brutal rocking crustcore and hypnotic space rock dirges. Atmospheric and heavy, slow and crushing, but surprisingly catchy and rocking at times. Inde$troy was originally released on the long-defunct label Manic Ear, and it's a serious classic, highly recommended to anyone into epic doomy crust and spacey dirge metal. The album artwork is awesome, too - Steve Hutton's paintings feature nightmarish images of monstrous steel-jawed machine-monsters clawing through the earth and dripping black oil0blood, while human-like mouths open out of the earth like gaping wounds and spew torrents of polluted filth. Heavy shit. Also includes linernotes by Saw Throat singer and guitarist Rich Militia. Highly recommended.

SCHLOSS TEGAL Black Static Transmission CD $14.98 Cold Spring
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The fifth album of Lovecraftian dark ambient from Schloss Tegal, which many consider to be their best work. On Black Static Transmission, Schloss Tegal explore the phenomena EVP (electronic voice phenomena). fusing their heavy, cosmic synth-driven driftscapes to recordings of "dead voices on air",voices that have been recorded by the band themselves, and with help from electronic voice phenomena specialist and mortician, En Llewellyn. EVP suggests that the disembodied voices of the dead can be recorded through a variety of electronic devices. For Black Static Transmission, Em Llewellyn used these spectral voice recordings to loop together with other samples into dense, circular, hypnotic swirls of sound that drift over Schloss Tegal's eerie dark ambient. Whether you believe in the existence of EVP or not, this is an awesome darek ambient album that we feel is up there with the best work of Lustmord, Yen Pox, etc. Truly eerie.

SCISSOR SHOCK We're In The Trashbag CD-R $6.98 Crucial Bliss

An impossibly fast and noisy blur of technical tape carnage from the midwestern plunderer SCISSOR SHOCK. Just over ten minutes of insane dayglo digi-grind-splatter, like a battalion of attacking cassette players operated by cartoon mice advancing on your burg. Spastic drumming and hi-speed cassette catastrophe and razor-thin techno bleats are encoded in puzzle melodies and transmitted direct to your nervous system. Pretty shoegazer drones and electrocuted cut n' paste sweeten the cataclysm like Evil Dead on sugar overdose. Packaged in a hand-assembled, full-color cardsleeve in a resealable plastic sleeve. Limited to 250 copies (less than 10 left!).

(THE) SEA, LIKE LEAD s/t CD $8.98 Hope Records
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The debut release from this Pittsburgh trio balances sweeping melodic beauty with heavy-duty metallic post-rock, and it's one of our favorite releases in this field from 2005. It's seriously good, like a cross between the spacey, epic post-rock instrumentals of Mono, and Codeine's austere heaviness, somnambulant singing, and plaintive, spacious songwriting. And there are some quite heavy parts on here, particularly the crushing fuzz-sludge riff that closes out "The Search", massive and bombastic, a powerful metallic crescendo that comes as a shock after the quiet,Codeine-esque passage that precedes it. Pretty amazing considering the sparse instrumentation of The Sea,Like Lead's two-guitar and drums setup. Definitely recommended to fans of the heavier post-rock stuff like Pinebender,Mono, Pelican, Tides, etc. Excellent stuff.

SEA LIKE LEAD, THE / BELEGOST split CD $9.98 Electric Human Project

Packaged in a beautiful Arigato case decorated with delicate psychedelic illustrations inked in sepia tones, this split full length disc features two instrumental outfits from both sides of Pennsylvania pairing up to create their own take on lush, epic metallic indie rock. The Sea Like Lead, a trio of two guitarists and drummer, start this off with "Anticline / Syncline", which begins with quiet, plaintive guitar notes that echo off into the distance before the band suddenly kicks in with a loud wall of heavily delayed guitars, rumbling low-end powerchords, and hard hitting drums, a heavy, distorted wave of shimmery shoegazer heaviness, lumbering and triumphant, circling around an epic melody that halfway through the song suddely screeches to a halt and explodes in a flurry of feedback and malfunctioning equipment. Then, quietly, a single guitar soaked in delay plays a beautiful melody while a voice, distorted as if being transmitted through a shortwave radio, recites a portion of text from James Hutton's philosophic geoligical text The Theory Of The Earth. It's a really intense piece of music. "Twilight Of The Gods" picks up right where the previous song leaves off, a quiet haunting minor-key guitar melody drifting over slowly played drumming and far-off howls of feedback, bits of what might be NASA voice trasmissions flickering in the background, that melody and rhythm building slowly and steadily, sounding alot like Codeine as a matter of fact, the clean guitars possessing a resonant weight that, despite the lack of distortion, definitely sound "heavy". Gradually the guitars begin to flake off chords and notes as the digital delay is steadily cranked up and the drumming becomes more forceful, more pummeling as the drummer ratchets up the power behind his hits, then the whole band pauses and allows their gauzy feedback to float for a moment before crashing right back in, much heavier now, still sounding like Codeine but way heavier and spacier, stopping and starting, new guitar melodies begin to appear and entertwine with one another until the song explodes at the end into a mass of billowy effects and pounding powerchords. Great stuff, heavy and shoegazy and with a crunchy, indie rock element that reminds me of Swervedriver and Hum but more metallic.
The Belegost side of this split is even better, if that's even possible...this Philadelphia ensemble, which has three guitar players as well as "reverb", tambourines, triangles, and "noise" all listed in their lineup, craft a single, 22 minute behemoth called "Nightwalker / Deergod", which starts off with fragile sheets of meandering feedback hovering in midair as a distant rumbling presence begins to appear on the horizon. The first couple of minutes here are all incandescent shimmering drone beauty, almost like a Troum or Double Leopards track, but then a wavering guitar melody creeps in and repeats for a couple of minutes, then dissipates in a cloud of amplifier hum. And suddenly the drums appear, huge and pounding, amps feedbacking, and a wall of guitars crash in with a single gigantic distorted powerchord, superheavy and droning, like a devotional Earth jam. A keening melody appears over the rumbling dirge as the band drones on that one chord, a massive spacious rumbling dirge that lasts for several minutes. But then they shift the vibe again as the guitars start to bash out an upbeat, downright poppy riff while the drummer bashes out a bouncy rhythm, and suddently the song turns into a massively loud, heavy indie rock jam, sort of like the new Pelican stuff, completely joyous and pummeling, making "Nightwalker/Deergod" one of the best instrumental heavy rock tunes I've ever heard! This disc is highly recommended for the Belegost song alone, but fans of heavy, majestic rock like Red Sparowes, Tides, Pelican, Godspeed, Mono, and similiar bands will love both of the groups on this split equally.

SEAR BLISS Decade Of Perdition DVD $17.98 Red Stream

We can't get enough Sear Bliss over here - I've been seriously obsessed with their progressive, comsic, impossibly catchy trombone-augmented black metal lately. And since Hungary's Sear Bliss have yet to tour the US, we can turn to this rad DVD that has been graciously assembled by Red Stream, which doubles as both a high quality live performance vid and a fairly detailed documentary on the band's decade-long career. The DVD documents the band's 10th Anniversary show filmed in Budapest from February 2004, and the quality of this set is top-notch with broadcast-quality cameras and multiple angles, and a massive 5.1 Dolby mix. The band delivers ten songs from across their seven releases, with lots of material off of their Glory & Perdition album, and they are even joined onstage by Atilla Csihar (ABORYM/MAYHEM/SUNN O))) collaborator) at one point. Plus, as huge a fan as I am of Sear Bliss, I gotta admit that one of my favorite parts of this DVD is simply watching the trombone player holding his instrument and headbanging in tandem with the rest of the band when he isn't playing. In addition to the live set, we get lengthy interviews with the members of Sear Bliss, vintage footage of the band, and an extensive photo gallery. This is absolutely crucial for Sear Bliss fans, and we bet that Sear Bliss newbies would become as infatuated as we are with them after seeing that live set! The DVD packaging features incredible artwork from Gyula Havancsak. A terrific document for one of our favorite black metal bands, period!

SEAR BLISS Forsaken Symphony CD $11.98 Red Stream

The 2002 album from Hungarian cosmic black metallers Sear Bliss. With each album, Sear Bliss has continued to polish their epic, melodic black metal, and Forsaken Symphony has some of the finest celestial battle hymns of their 10 year existence. The core sound of Sear Bliss is progressive, ethereal black metal with scathing vocal sneers, somewhat in the vein of bands like ...And Oceans, Enslaved, and early Dimmu Borgir, but the band makes distinctive use of brass fanfares and trombone as a lead instrument, not to mention the awesome fantasy/outer space synthesizers that sound more akin to 70's prog and 80's arena rock bombast than the pompous, symphonic sounds normally associated with keys in black metal. I'm pretty infatuated with this band at the moment, because despite the quirky presence of the tuba and trombone and their spacey atmospheres, Sear Bliss also write the catchiest black metal songs I have ever heard, bordering on "pop" catchy yet still awesomely evil and heavy and majestic, but minus the overt theatricality of bands like Dimmu and Cradle Of Filth. Magical, majestic, ridiculously catchy and unique spaced out black metal!

SEAR BLISS Glory & Perdition CD $11.98 Red Stream

The innovative, trumpet-toting, Hungarian black metal horde returns on this 2004 full length with more majestic melodic riffs, epic brass fanfares, and cosmic strangeness. I'm pretty hooked on this band; their Grand Destiny CD that we reviewed in the last store update knocked my socks off with it's blend of space-rock style synthesizers, blazing blastbeats, ripping thrash riffs, and those bursts of trumpets and trombones that appear at just the right moments to add tons of awesome, otherworldy atmosphere to what are already ripping BM attacks. Definitely one of my favorite albums from the more symphonic, progressive end of the black metal spectrum.
But then we got their seventh and newest album, Glory & Perdition, and it's the most amazing Sear Bliss music yet! First off, the album art is simply awesome, the cover featuring an illustration of horned-helmeted warriors standing above a heap of slain angels and blowing on enormous carved horns across a battlefield. A perfect album cover that I can't resist gazing at every time Sear Bliss breaks out the trumpets. The production values on this are much stronger, and while I generally dislike glossier sounding BM releases, this which actually works for their particular brand of epic black metal. The keyboards are even more spacey and cosmic sounding than on earlier releases, singer/bassist/keyboardist Andras Nagy delivers a deep, beastly growl that is sometimes treated with weird effects and occasionally sounds like he's doing some kind of weird throat-singing, and they even bring out Atilla Csihar (ABORYM/MAYHEM/SUNN O))) collaborator) on two songs to deliver some horrifying vocal intrusions! The riffs on Glory & Perdition are fkkn killer too, with lots of epic, impossibly catchy hooks, and acoustic guitars occasionally employed. And there are some weird shorter tracks, like the gorgeous New Age ambience of "Ode To A Dying Star", or the final track "Lacus Somniourium", a killer (and too short!) heavy bass-and-keyboards instrumental that sounds like the kind of thing that would be played over a training montage in an 80's teen movie. Musically, Sear Bliss do recall the spaciness of ...and Oceans and early Dimmu Borgir, but those bombastic brass fanfares and the trumpet playing and the way they utilize those space/prog-rock worthy keyboards so perfectly makes this a unique and essential dose of progressive black metal. Highly recommended.

SEAR BLISS Grand Destiny CD $11.98 Red Stream

The excellent 2001 album from Hungarian black metal oddballs SEAR BLISS starts off with the grim industrial-ambient intro of "The Slowing Of Time" before launching into 10 tracks of ripping, ultrafast black metal with loads of killer riffs, raspy vocals, and blazing blastbeat action, backed by somber droning synthesizers that thankfully veer well away from the symphonic pomp that often accompanies contemporary, progressive BM. But it's SEAR BLISS' use of a brass section that really sets them apart, with trumpets and trombones adding a weirdly medieval, baroque atmosphere to their songs that reminds me of a fusion of medieval, Ren Faire music, the sort of trumpet parts you'd here in 70's AM radio pop, and the Conan The Barbarian film score. Grand Destiny is really melodic and catchy, but SEAR BLISS keep all of these elements grounded in a framework of dark celestial thrash that frequently slows down into stately doom-dirges that guide the band through the eldritch starscapes illustrated in their lyrics and the paintings included in the CD's booklet.

SEGUE s/t 7" EP $5.98 Primary Thoughts

More post-powerviolence from Primary Thoughts Records. SEGUE rage through chaotic hardcore for the disillusioned. Choppy, violent hardcore / screamo, raw around the edges and boasting a gloomy atmosphere. Loose, jangling guitars go into overdrive as various band members pitch in with mostly scratchy vocals.

SEIZED s/t CD $12.98 Hater Of God

Finally got this back in stock after having been sold out of 'em for about a year and a half. This is a discography CD of compilation and split vinyl tracks from Canadian sludge band SEIZED. During their brief existence in the mid-1990's, these guys delivered some killer misanthropic sludgecore, part psychedelic human-hate a la DYSTOPIA, part MAN IS THE BASTARD bass-heavy craziness, and part DISASSOCIATE/BRUTAL TRUTH-styled hemp-fueled grind, with mosntrous, gutteral roars. The lyrics are pure negativity, but there are some surprisingly catchy hooks and uptempo chuggers on here beneath a triple bassist assault. Thats right, these guys had THREE BASS PLAYERS, no guitar, with the basses downtuned as fuck and eerily dissonant, crushing, winding bass lines driving these dirges along, a bulldozing heavy avalanche of catchy tarpit blast. There are also violins on some of these songs, making them even creepier than usual. Featured former members of the even more obscure Human Greed.

SERPENT ECLIPSE Seven Desires And Wolves Blood CD $11.98 Oaken Shield

Surreal, cosmic black metal from New Hampshire via the French label Oaken Shield. Instead of the raw and primitive black metal that most US bands traffic in, Serpent Eclipse falls closer in league with Dodheimsgard's 666 International and Mayhem's Grand Declaration Of War, with it's punishing electro rhythms and occasional rabid breakbeat, choppy violent black metal riffs and blastbeats, dreamy synth ambience, complex song structures delivered at 200 miles per hour, and sci-fi sounding electronics whooshing and bleeping throughout.

SEVEN ARTS Lullaby/Eulogy CD-R $8.98 Fargone

Another Seven Arts disc from Fargone main guy Ed Howard, utilizing laptop, voice, radio, and more to create two lengthy (59:57 and 14:53,respectively) tracks of clatter and drone. The title track is nearly an hour of subtle, microscopic field recordings, vocal improv, and ambient drone - quite cool, and richly layered and detailed. The second track features howling shards of feedback splattered across a bass-heavy drone. Cool stuff, and comes in a white digi-sleeve with full color art glued to the front and back covers, and hand numbered out of 50 copies.

SEVEN THAT SPELLS It Came From The Planet Of Love CD $13.98 R.A.I.G.

Entering on a luminescent cloud of metallic feedback and shimmering cymbals, Seven That Spells are back with their second full length album, the monstrous hard rockin' acid feast It Came From The Planet Of Love. Since forming in 2003 under the vision of band leader Niko Potocnjak, Seven That Spells have pretty quickly become the Coatian answer to Acid Mothers Temple, emitting gloriously zonked blasts of heavy instrumental psych-rock that sound to my ears like Black Sabbath's tripper songs taken to epic fuckin' extremes, massive side-long jams of thunderous pummeling drumming and thick, hypnotic bass guitar rhythms serving to guide Potocnjak's searing wah-overloaded psych guitar freakouts through the far reaches of the cosmos. On this disc, they get down to business quickly with the first of two epic tracks, the half-hour long "Towards The Planet Of Love". It's pretty much totally improvised, soaring through stretched out Sabbath metal thunder, stratospheric guitar shredding, descents into valleys of deep monk chanting, cosmic synthesizer blasts, and layers and layers of beautiful, howling feedback. As a matter of fact, feedback is so important to Seven That Spell's music that one of the band members, Hrvoje Niksic, is actually credited simply as "feedback surfer". Fuck yeah. By the end of the track, the whole band melts down into a massive wall of noise. The other song, "Erotic Meltdown/Bolero Love Grind", starts off much more lightly, a repetitive, krautrock guitar part looping over the rustle of cymbals and the hiss of the synth gearing up to take flight again, and then their off, blasting into another short eruption of crazed guitar freakery and pounding acid rock. That only lasts for a coupla minutes though, and the remaining fifteen minutes of the track gradually diminishes into a hazy, dreamy field of soft droning feedback and electronics. By the end, it's turned into a completely meditative feedback hum trailing off into the void.
A gargantuan serving of riff-heavy freakout, totally essential to anyone that wishes they could get a little more Sabbath in their Acid Mothers Temple, and a solid psychedelic rock album no matter how you cut it. Big thumbs up on the crazy full-color collage artwork that covers the album too. Recommended!

SEVEN THAT SPELLS My Mommy Wants To Kiss Your Mamma CD $13.98 RAIG

Heavy fucked up psych rawk from Croatian freak squad SEVEN THAT SPELLS that's headed up by by acid-guitar sorceror Niko Potocnjak. This is their debut full-length CD of high-intensity, brain damaged, instrumental psychedelic heaviness that plugs into a terrific stream of Black Sabbath-by-way-of-Acid Mothers Temple improvisation that is splattered in cosmic electronics, apeshit acid guitar shred, and Tomislav Kalousek's channeling of Geezer Butler's bulldozing bass riffs. The band launches into a killer series of psychedelic freakouts and early 70's kosmiche Krautrock style jams, all highlighted by total fucking gonzo guitar playing that blooms in vast scorched radiant unfurlings of solar fireworks. Reference points include 70's stoner rock, SubArachnoid Space, Kinski, Paik, Acid Mothers Temple, and 60s psychedelia at it's most heavily overamped, along the lines of a cross between Acid Mothers Temple and the earliest Guru Guru, but way more zonked. Recommended.

7000 DYING RATS Forced Boat 7" EP $5.98 Scenester Credentials
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Talk about a troubled release...this 7" from Chicago comedy grinders 7000 Dying Rats was recorded back in 2002 but due to an assortment of pressing plant problems, many of which stemmed from the band's "appropriation" of various pop culture flotsam, this EP was delayed for years, and finally saw the light of day in 2006. It's kinda weird hearing 7000 Dying Rats back in action all of a sudden, with this "lost" EP finally coming out, the new Season In Hell album that just showed up, and the band being featured in a recent article on "comedy grind" in Decibel magazine. I thought their last album, Sound Of No Hands Clapping, was genius, a bizarro cut-n-paste freakout somewhere in between the Butthole Surfers, Anal Cunt, Naked City, and Lawnmower Deth, so all of this new Rats action is more than welcome.
The Forced Boat 7" is a kind of hodgepodge of 7000 Dying Rats insanity, a collage of brutal grinding blurr, funereal violins, tape montages, with the EP's centerpieces consisting of a manic, drunken cover of 'Any Way You Want It', and a meth'd up rendition of Sabbath's 'Paranoid', the first half of which is delivered with distorted megaphone vocals and crunchy guitars, but then the second half is played on acoustic guitars and banjos. This is a very weird, very goofy EP that's not necessarly the best introduction to the Rats delirious assault (I'd direct the curious to check out either Season In Hell or Sounds Of No Hands Clapping first), but if you're already into these guys, the 10 minutes or so of ridiculousness on this platter is pretty zonked. Released in a a limited edition pressing of 440 copies on clear pink colored vinyl, in a full color sleeve with do-it-yourself 7" center labels sporting the faces of Don Knotts and Steven Segal and an insert sheet describing the full saga of the EP's release.

7000 DYING RATS Season In Hell CD $13.98 He Who Corrrupts Inc.

Chicago's 7000 Dying Rats return after five years of silence with a new full length of their self-styled "comedy grind" heaviness, loaded with 28 tracks of grindcore/goofball skit/genre-fucking weirdness that's so full of in-jokes that I gave up trying to keep up, and just let their insane, Naked City-style approach sweep me along in a wave of weirdness. If the album cover depicting a bat-winged Indian god farting bats out of it's ass in Hell doesn't clue you in to the brilliance of Season In Hell, you'll get the picture by song three. When these guys play it heavy, it's crushing, like with the ridiculously Slayerized deathcore of second song "Altar Of Goat Skulls", which takes a sudden left turn into cheesy Nightmare On Elm Street style synthesizers and samples from some obscure occult horror movie. Or the plodding Frostian sludge of "Bigfoot Destroy". I noticed that the metal songs and sections have a similiar sludgy thrash sound as Lair Of The Minotaur, due in no small part to Lair guitarists Steve Rathbone and Donald James Barraca both playing in 7000 Dying Rats. Weasel Walter from Flying Luttenbachers plays drums as well, along with a constantly shifting lineup that reads like a who's who of the Chicago underground. And of course there are all of the goofy bits in between the heavier stuff, like tons of awesomely cheesy 80's style keyboard interludes, atonal violin scraping, terminally dumb white-boy hip-hop, the heartfelt ballad "Your Studied Indifference is Duly Noted", the glammy cock rocker "Rock n Roll Weapon" that coulda been an Eagles Of Death Metal b-side. 7000 Dying Rats also turn Sabbath's "Paranoid" into a tripped-out techno/bluegrass meltdown, and present us with "Hellcatcher", a retarded medley of satanic bass-noise and live recordings of drunken covers of Journey's "Any Way You Want It" and Judas Priest's "Living After Midnight". “Ballad of Chico” is a hilarious, epic space-prog freakout. And Scott Kelley from Neurosis appears on "A Real Kneeslapper", a weird ambient-drone track with Kelley telling a story that I'm still not getting. The whole album is confusing like that, blenderizing off-the-cuff silliness, metal parody, bits of stage and studio banter, and genuine grind/death devestation.

SEWER ELECTION with TRERIKSROSET The Killing Sessions CD $10.98 Troniks

Here's another new disc from Troniks that features the Swedish harsh noise project Treriksroset, but here he's hooked up with Sweden's Sewer Election for a collaborative assault of total crunch blast. There are two tracks here, "Killing For Norrland" and "Killing For Finland", each one clocking in at just a few secs over 30 minutes, and each is a monstrous tempest of swirling distortion crunch and buried concrete mixer rhythms, massively crushing noise-walls filled with brain-scorching skuzz overload and millions of microscopic sound events squirming through the duo's dense nuclear fog. Total horror. Each of these tracks were originally released as individual cassettes on the Harsh Head Rituals imprint, and together make up one of the heaviest, most terminally skullcrushing wall-of-crunch slabs I've gotten my hands on here. Sam McKinlay from fellow wall sculptors The Rita contributes a page of somewhat impenetrable liner notes that nonetheless shed some light on the "wall" ideology. Like the other new disc from Treriksroset, this release foregoes the standard Troniks wallet sleeve for a jewel case package with rad homoerotic/S&M imagery.

SHADOWS INFINITUM compilation CD-R $8.98 Crucial Bliss

A companion piece to the RECORD OF SHADOWS INFINITE compilation CD on Crucial Blast. The wrangling of top-notch drone/psych/drift artists continues with this full length, extremely polished CD-r release, limited to 250 copies. Exclusive tracks from DEAD RAVEN CHOIR, ENCOMIAST, KORPERSSCHWACHE, EXISTENTIAL DILEMMA, BURNING STAR CORE, FEVERDREAMS, NADJA, MARAX, and UNHOLYDEATHMACHINE run the gamut: these further explorations of the drone touch on blackened folk creep, glacial hum and gorgeous ambient bliss, buzzsaw feedback rituals, imploding-sun droneblast, improvised clatter and drift, epic driftmetal, vampiric dronenoise, and schizophrenic kool-aid burble riots. Another exercise in intelligent, outsider droneworks from CRUCIAL BLAST.

SHALLNOTKILL s/t CD $11.98 213 Records

The latest (and last) release from French post-metalcore outfit Shallnotkill. It's too bad that this 5 song album is the band's swan song, as I really liked their double CD discography that we got in stock a while back, with it's weird mix of jangly indie rock, crushing death metal and sludgecore, avant-electro remixes, and art-damaged powerviolence assaults. At least we're left with this self titled disc...it's by far the most cohesive and heaviest sounding stuff they've ever recorded, while combining a variety of heavy elements ranging from chaotic math metal breakdowns, spacey psychedelic post-metal interludes and extended instrumental jams with huge resonant chiming guitar chords that remind me alot of a rougher, sludgier Pelican circa their debut EP, anthemic post-hardcore, full on jangly indie rock parts, slooow doomy dirges, epic textured feedback drones that sound like they just escaped from an Acid Mothers Temple session, and more...imagine a mysterious fusion of Pelican, Engine Kid, Mogwai/Mono post rock, proggy emo stuff, dark Tragedy/From Ashes Rise style crustcore, crusty doom metal, lysergic Boris strength amp drones, all stitched together into a dark, forbidding psychedelic post-metal dirge. Then the final track kicks in, featuring Shallnotkill material reconfigured by French droneologist Moon into a massive guitar drone epic with immense processed washes of metallic riff and pulsating synthesizer, equal parts Klaus Schulze, Sunn O))), Angelic Process, Fennesz, and Final, a majestic shoegazey wall of amplifier hymn that reaches out across the cosmos ! This last track (entitled "Shallnotlive") is worth the price of admission alone as far as I'm concerned, beautiful and grim and celestial.

SHALLNOTKILL 2001-2004 2xCD $12.98 213 Records

This double disc set collects all of the recorded studio work from French hardcore/indie/noise group SHALLNOTKILL, along with an entire disc of "deconstructions" of the bands songs. From what little we have been able to SHALLNOTKILL seem to have been a part of French emo/hardcore scene, but their odd,fucked up brand of genre-mashing is definitely right up our alley. The fourteen studio tracks recorded during their brief 3 year existence that are presented on the first disc in this set are a strange conglom of seasick metalcore,jumbled mathy chaos, hoarse screaming and strangley warbly background vocals, Dinosaur Jr.-brand indie-noise blown-bass thunder rumble and accompanying melodic sense flowing into sloppy blastbeats and queasy stoner jamz,delicate post-rock arpeggios,brutal cookie beast grindcore melting into rainy guitar jangle, ISIS/CULT OF LUNA meets SONIC YOUTH armageddon dirge, and crushing death metal flatlines/freakouts that sound like Entombed collectively being shoved down a flight of stairs mid-song.
The second disc collects fifteen tracks from a variety of avant-electronic artists, where they take fragments of SHALLNOTKILL songs, sometimes nothing more than a bleat of feedback or a measure from a verse, and create a completely new and original piece of music, similiar in execution to the reconfigurations found on the ISIS Remixes double disc set from a few months back. All of this material is terrific,imaginative and alchemical reimaginings of the source material, but personal favorites include PRESSURE vs. Tin RP's hissing disembodied amp buzz that reminds us of our very own FULCI,SHIZUKA's cosmic/orchestral darkhop,the awesome glitchy dub meets epic EARTH style amp drone of EXTERMINATINGANGELS, and the MONSTROUS city-squashing dirge of AURAL SUISSE "ps grv/50 gfy". Other tracks range from apocalyptic 8-bit meltdowns,harsh noise,glitchy minimalist IDM with ogre vocals,fucked up noisy techno,dark ambient and sublime dronescapes,and lovely chopped-up trip-hop. Neat stuff.

SHEARING PINX Poison Hands 2 x 3" CD-R $9.98 Not Not Fun
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Fucking TOPS new double-disc set from this new-to-us Vancouver trio, blasting a mutant combo of head crushing noise/dirge rock, heavy skronk improv, and creeped out freeform clatter. The first disc has a bunch of crushers, six tough as nails noise/no wave/dirge-core jams that bust out some burly post-Am Rep riffage just when the time is right, and freak out over outbursts of spikey atonal thrash, the band falling apart at the seams but somehow managing to keep it all together. Completely fucking awesome, totally life affirming chaos, but way trancey with spaced-out vocals and apocalyptic droning riffs that build up to explosive noisy tantrums, reminding us of Harry Pussy, early 80's hardcore, art-damaged punk, and deranged Bay Area powerviolence. Heavy and noisy and completely blazed. The second disc has only one track, "Whitemud", starting out with a viscious, paint-peeling noiserock riff that devolves into one of the most immolating free-rock jams this side of Gravitar. This continues for about 20 minutes, the band melting down into a twitching heap of strangled guitars, buzzing cables, and mutant feedback, coaxing all sorts of tortured skree and mangled axe blurt from their instruments, before finally exploding into a blast of grindy noise. Crucial! As with all Not Not Fun jams, the package for this is total tactile eye candy...the discs come inside of an oversized cardstock sleeve with the two spraypainted/printed discs affixed to the inside of the sleeve on hubs, with a insert card glued to the opposite panel.

SHOEMAKER LEVY 9 Pantheon CD $11.98 Several Bleeds

Digging around on the net a little reveals that "Shoemaker Levy 9" was the name of a comet that crashed into Jupiter in the early 90's, but that doesn't get us any closer to wrapping our heads around this demented French band's combination of ridiculous Orthrelm-style spazz|shred action with art-damaged, Mike Patton-esque metal (down to some of the vocal stylings, as a matter of fact), 100% freaked grindcore, and cool electronic/ambient/electro/soundtrack passages. It's a cranium-splintering exercise in extreme fretboard gymnastics and impossible stop-on-a-dime changes and technical, often jazzy flourishes, with all sorts of horror-synth breaks and quick spurts of stripped down hardcore and glimpses of weird moody pop, totally fucked and inventive and rocking from start to finish. Definitely recommended for fans of dizzying tech-blast (The Dillinger Escape Plan,Ion Dissonance,Into The Moat,Meshuggah,etc), modern spazz action (Daughters, The Locust), Cephalic Carnage style math-grind, and Fantomas' schizo assemblages. Hell yeah.

SHORA Malval CD $12.98 Conspiracy

Malval, the second full length from Shora, marks an extreme stylistic shift from this Swiss band. Their earlier releases (2000's Shaping The Random and their 2002 split CD with Merzbow) dripped potent European metalcore influenced by Converge / Botch, chaotic and complex and fierce. But on Malval, the brutal angular metalcore of Shora's past has mutated into an AWESOME heavy hypno-post-rock form, taking precision proggy instrumental rock (that is, at times, quite reminiscent of Goblin) and locking into an ultra melodic, circular trance pulse, riffs repeating into infinity, that slowburns it's way through building layers of analogue electronics and LOTS of awesome burbling synths and dramatic (almost symphonic black metal-style) keyboards and glistening ambience and heavy (but not quite metallic) guitars...imagine Circle and Zombi and Isis and Red Sparowes and Loop rolled into one dark, heavy, spacey, perfect trance rock dream. Malval is seriously incredible. And around six minutes into the final track "Klarheit", Shora introduces a three-part female pop vocal harmony that knocks my skull out every time I listen to this. Comes packaged in a stately digipack. Another highly recommended Conspiracy Records release!

SHOW OF EXAGGERATION s/t CD $7.98 The Rectrix

A cosmic ambient passageway through aeons of space time. Ebbing tides of sonic conundrum, fading and waning military and ritual rhythms to convey a feeling of loss and eerie calm. A Synapscape/Centrozoon collaboration. Show of Exaggeration (Philip Münch, known for Synapscape, Ars Moriendi,etc, and Bernhard Wöstheinrich, of Centrozoon) produces something quite different from the harsh and energetic over-the-top industrial of Synapscape. Show of Exaggeration offers an hour of interesting dark soundscapes /drone scapes. The music is quite subtle, sometimes gaining in strength and then fading away again. Most compositions are calm, extended layers of sound with some gritty, noisy details surging in the background. Rhythms are used modestly and sparsely,such as in the first track 'Death Arch", which brings to mind the distant pulse of a heartbeat. The overall mood is mysterious, celestial space ambient.... Also impressive is the epic title track, which is divided into three parts. This track is probably the most industrial sounding part of the cd, with a few unsettling and noisy elements breaking through the wall of subterranean thrum. One of the more interesting releases in the dark ambient canon. Comes packaged in a full color wallet.

SHUNATAO / ANNA LUIF & NOEL AKCHOTE Autoretrat/Story Of Ball Paul CD $11.98 Amanita

This split CD features ten track of weird avant-folk/rock/noise from SHUNTAO, and eight tracks of experimental guitar and terrific pop from the duo of Noel Akchot and Swiss singer/guitarist Anna Luif. Akchot, a reknowned avant-guitarist who as racked up collaborations with the likes of Derek Bailey and Fred Frith. The duo of Luif and Akchote delves into more song-orientated terrain here, with one song even reminding us of Fiona Apple a little (Anna Luif's smoky vocals have a lot to do with that, we'd love to hear more from her but have been unable to track down any info on her or her releases at all). SHUNTAO, on the other hand, are wonderfully weird, sorta creepy, sorta whimsical, totally French, mashing together a bizarre mix of free jazz, brutal noise rock and sludgy riffs, free folk, and weird prog structures. And the vocals are even weirder - the male singer sings in deep croaking croons and gravel-throated rasp, sometimes dueting with the female singer who reminds me of Bjork a little bit....imagine Louie Armstrong, Tom Waits and Bjork fronting a stumbling jazz group made up of members of Deerhoof, Ruins, and No Neck Blues Band. Good stuff, the SHUNATAO stuff is def recommended for fans of Deerhoof, Welter Quarter, No Neck Blues Band, and Ruins

SIC ALPS Pleasures And Treasures CD $11.98 Animal Disguise

What do you get when Animal Disguise, a label known for releasing grim, skull-bashing noise, puts out what appears to be a neo-psychedelic garage rock album? You get San Francisco's Sic Alps, whose debut album Pleasures And Treasures feature members of The Hospitals and Erase Errata playing a super-noisy, seriously damaged version of psychedelic garage pop, slathered in blasts of brutal feedback whoosh and recorded so low-fi and blown out that the songs seem to crumble apart as they travel from speaker to ear. All of the songs seem to start off as a pretty, fractured pop/folk/garage tune with vocals drunk on reverb, and softly strummed guitars, very 60's-ish and super catchy, some occasional piano, but eventually each of these songs disappears beneath a wave of stumbling caveman drumming and amplified hiss, narcotized singing and scuzzy, shimmering feedback noise, melodies just suddenly fading out or disappearing altogether, like early Jandek or a tripped out Guided by Voices gone NYC noise rock, or a collision of sludgy wrecked Brainbombs rock, Jesus And Mary Chain fuzzbomb pop nodout, and Nuggets boxset gems. Noise pop? You bet, with emphasis on the noise, but still really catchy and occasionally quite heavy, a noisy, garagey, diseased, cough-syrup sort of heaviness. Mastered by Weasel Walter of Flying Luttenbachers for maximum ugh. Highly recommended!

SIEGE Drop Dead CD $14.98 Deranged

Essential digital version of SEIGE's extreme hardcore masterpiece. Pure primal-scream energy.
When it comes to extreme hardcore, Siege's legendary Drop Dead is the most important record ever. Can there be any doubt? C'mon, we're talking about the EP that influenced Napalm Death to play grindcore, and the music that birthed every blastbeat spewing outfit that has come since. It's fucking staggering to listen to Drop Dead today, in 2006...these songs, recorded way back in 1984, still sound every bit as berserk and apocalyptic and brain melting as they did then. Beneath Rob Williams' mach 10 thrash beats and Kevin Mahoney's psychotic, blood-curdling vocals, Siege's songs had hooks that any band would kill for, and one of the most destroyed guitar performances ever put to tape. These guys totally mutated hardcore in the early 80's and turned it into something completely new, just listen to the psychedelic hardcore epic "Grim Reaper" with Mahoney howling about a man being diagnosed with cancer as he belts out a freaked out saxophone performance over nightmarish tape loops and the rest of the band noisily improvising on one noxious riff. Total genius. Aside from Bad Brains and Black Flag, I can't think of any other bands that were this crucial to the development of the American punk underground. Drop Dead is one of my all-time favorite records, a statement of extreme music that has never been equalled in my opnion, and it's essential to anyone into extreme hardcore, grindcore, outsider heaviness, and free/noise/blast. Essential.

SIEGE Drop Dead LP $12.98 Deep Six

When it comes to extreme hardcore, Siege's legendary Drop Dead is the most important record ever. Can there be any doubt? C'mon, we're talking about the EP that influenced Napalm Death to play grindcore, and the music that birthed every blastbeat spewing outfit that has come since. It's fucking staggering to listen to Drop Dead today, in 2006...these songs, recorded way back in 1984, still sound every bit as berserk and apocalyptic and brain melting as they did then. Beneath Rob Williams' mach 10 thrash beats and Kevin Mahoney's psychotic, blood-curdling vocals, Siege's songs had hooks that any band would kill for, and one of the most destroyed guitar performances ever put to tape. These guys totally mutated hardcore in the early 80's and turned it into something completely new, just listen to the psychedelic hardcore epic "Grim Reaper" with Mahoney howling about a man being diagnosed with cancer as he belts out a freaked out saxophone performance over nightmarish tape loops and the rest of the band noisily improvising on one noxious riff. Total genius. Aside from Bad Brains and Black Flag, I can't think of any other bands that were this crucial to the development of the American punk underground. Drop Dead is one of my all-time favorite records, a statement of extreme music that has never been equalled in my opnion, and it's essential to anyone into extreme hardcore, grindcore, outsider heaviness, and free/noise/blast. This latest edition from Deep Six Records comes on orange vinyl with two unrleased studio tracks ("Two Faced" and "Trained TO Kill"), in a gold printed jacket with complete lyrics.

SIGH Gallows Gallery CD $11.98 Red Stream

We've been waiting for this follow up to 2001 masterpiece that was Sigh's Imaginary Sonicscape, and boy does it deliver, just not quite in the way we were expecting. Less "psychedelic", at least stylistically, than Imaginary Sonicscape, whose Venom-influenced metal was mutated by a brain baking conglom of Goblin-style prog rock, Hammond organs out the wazoo, and a total psych overload that converts your spinal column into a lava lamp, Gallows Gallery takes Sign on an even further trajectory from their origins as the OG black metal outfit that was supposed to release their first album on Euronymous' Deathlike Silence label before he got stabbed to death. We're not even really hearing anything close to black metal on Gallows Gallery...nah, this is total power metal, all bombastic Iron Maiden-on-steroids guitar harmonies and insanely dense, heroic vocal harmonies, but totally fucked up and hijacking all sorts of non-metal sounds into the mix, just as we'd expect from these guys...incorporating classical music, melodic punk, jazz, J-pop, and good old 80's heavy metal, as well as the sonic weapon experimentation that's caused some minor question marks about this release. There's also all sorts of "non-metal" instrumentation (Fender Rhodes, clavinet, sitar, tabla, gong, Yamaha DX-7, Taisho-Koto (a type of electric banjo), Tibetan bells, Minimoog, theremin, glockenspiel, and samplers)...and a crapload of guest musicians: Gunface (The Red Chord), Gus G. (Firewind, ex-Dream Evil), Niklas Sundin (Dark Tranquility), and Paul Groundwell (Thine) all drop guitar solos, Bruce Lamont ducks in with a sweet saxophone solo (the song "In A Drowse" is our fave track off the album and sports a killer sax/guitar hook), and Killjoy from Necrophagia and Metatron from Meads Of Asphodel show up to narrate on two of the songs. The whole album is so immensely catchy and anthemic, like an avant-garde power metal Anime soundtrack, or a metallized Yes-scored Nintendo game score. Definitely the heaviest shit these guys have done so far. Absolutely recommended !!

SILENCER Death Pierce Me CD $11.98 Autopsy Kitchen

New reissue of the out-of-print album originally released on Prophecy Productions in 2000. This is a high-water mark in the field of truly disturbing, suicidal black metal, a series of deeply tortured death-screams and intensely etched portraits of personal disintegration ripped from the soul of singer Nattramn. Written and recorded over the years 1995-2000, Death-Pierce Me is the only album that Silencer recorded, as Nattramn was apparently institutionalised shortly after the release. It's not surprising either, as his vocal performance here consists of some of the most intense, wretched shrieking and high pitched cries, quite unlike anything else we've heard, vocalizing all of the different shades of severe abject misery and lonliness through overwrought screams and miserable choking, grief-stricken weeping and diseased coughing. It's extremely unsettling and deeply emotional to hear, a total psychotic break transmitted to your nervous system, and feels closer in vibe to Alan Dubin's anguished shrieking in Khanate than anything I can think of in the black metal realm. The music perfectly matches Nattramn's tortured vocals, a ripping, buzzing blast of thrashing black metal, with somber and repetitive minor key melodies and layers of obsidian distortion swirling together into an oily pool of deeply personal pain. Silencer's thrashing black metal is broken up with chilling passages of melancholy piano fugue, doomy crawls, ambient casio dirges, and minimalist, droning acoustic guitars that hover in the blackness before being swept up again in the buzzing swarm of power chords and swift funeral riffs. Absolutely horrific, heartbreaking depressive black metal misery. Heavily recommended for explorers of the recesses of the destroyed human psyche, collectors of suicide notes, and devourers of the grim, hope erasing blackend buzz of Xasthur, Nortt, Leviathan, and Bethlehem. The booklet contains nearly indecipherable lyrics and notes, as well as pictures of the band members, including a truly weird and disturbing photo of Nattramn. Recommended.

SILENCIO Dead Kings CD $9.98 Mountain Collective

It's utterly mystifying to us that we hadn't heard Silencio's Dead Kings before now. I mean, this was released in 2004, and we just found out about it now? The fact we even picked it up for inclusion in Crucial Blast was sort of a fluke; the label that released it, NYC's Mountain Collective, has recently gone kaput, and we wanted to order a bunch of the weirder Mountain releases (Flying Luttenbachers, Kites, Iceburn Collective, etc...)for the store before shit started to sell out/go out of print. While we were going through their list of releases and figuring out what we needed to get from them, we noticed a CD listed from a band called Silencio from Columbus, Ohio that we had never heard of before. There was a Naked City reference in the label's description of the CD, so we were naturally curious to see what they sounded like. Well, we finally got the CD in our hands this week and checked it out, and we can honestly say that this is one of THE BEST avant-heavy-instrumental albums we have ever heard in our freaking lives, a mindblowingly catchy pop/grind/jazz/avant/prog/salsa/death EPIC !!! This quartet blazes through a sort of genre-hopping that indeed remind us of Naked City, but Dead Kings is really more like Naked City if they actually had immensely catchy, honest-to-goodness songs, meticulously assembled and played with an amazing amount of technical precision and melodic skills. Seriously, while listening to this album we had to stop and restart several songs just to be able to wrap our skulls around some of the amazing songs these cats have put together. And the songs don't just hop from one genre to another, it's more like they blend various styles and sounds together simultaneously into something that comes out new and amazing, in a way that we honestly think is totally seamless and just freaking perfect. We can't remember the last time we heard an album that was this intricately assembled and genuinely avant garde while being totally listenable, and amazingly catchy!
Silencio's musical journey across the seven tracks on this album (all of which are ambiguously titled "15ifteen", "13hirteen", "11leven", etc., and in no apparent order) begins with a touchdown in some seriously fucking INSANE salsa inflected avant-prog-metal, like The Mars Volta with Orthrelm's Mick Barr splattering sick guitar shred across Latin percussive forms, then shifting to pretty, Fender Rhodes flavored post-rock, then mind boggling grindcore compostions, to painfully beautiful folk-pop with soaring vocal harmonies that explode into symphonic death metal dissolving into digitized pools of avant noise that reconstitute into ferocious metalcore crunch. And that's just the first 3 songs ! And like we mentioned before, the conglomeration of styles is strongly anchored by the band's ability to mold everything into really catchy, almost "pop" songs with hooks and killer riffs and a melodic mastery that you wouldn't expect to hear from a band crafting this sort of post-Tzadik avantism. Obviously we really, really recommend this to everyone that's into weird, eclectic instrumental/experimental music, as we really do think that Dead Kings might be our favorite avant instrumental album we've ever heard! It's hard to put into words just how fucking rad this is, and quite how weird and precise and progressive and HEAVY yet packed with so many "pop" elements this is. Silencio's vibe reminds us of, well Naked City of course, but also they remind us of some other Tzadik Records alumni, namely Time Of Orchids and Kayo Dot, although the similiarities are more in spirit than in sound in the way that these bands use a broad musical pallette to create a style that's very unique and cerebral yet capable of being crushingly heavy when need be. There are also some moments that reminded us of Infidel?/Castro!, particularly when Silencio starts slinging around some crushing digitized doom splatter, and elsewhere the band jacks into hardcore jazz in the spirit of Iceburn, but in the end, Silencio are something very different, and come very highly, highly recommended!

SILENTIST Chariot Swing CD $9.98 Celestial Gang

SILENTIST's previous debut EP was a hit here, one of the more unique CDs we laid our hands on in 2005, a dense assault of modern classical piano, blastbeat drumming, and all-around dramatic tuneage. Killer stuff. Chariot Swing, the second EP from SILENTIST, is a bit different, however. Instead of the hyperspeed drumming and raspy, vaguely black metal vocals that were splattered across the debut, Chariot Swing lets fly dense clusters of atonal, seemingly haphazard piano forms over heavy, splattery tribal drum patterns from which amazing melodies surface and coalesce. Shimmering washes of cymbals and intricate,jazzy rhythms wrap themselves around Mark Evan Burden's clouds of repetitious piano figures and dramatic shamanistic croon. Guitar strings scrape and skitter like forest vermin. It all comes together as thoroughly weird, creepy, gorgeous avant/pop/jazz dream, until the final track rises out of low filthy distortion and a queasy, awesome piano-driven indie rock hook underpinned with frantic drumming and wailing vocals, a buzzing, morose epic with one of the greasiest, creepiest guitar howls I've heard since Afghan Whigs Congregation, ending in a doomy trudge infested with blastbeats and hissing amplifiers. Pure beauty. This EP demands repeated listens. As with the previous EP, the gatefold package on this CD fkkn smokes.

SILENTIST House On The Hill CD $9.98 Celestial Gang

SILENTIST continues to blow us away with their unique avant-grind that incorporates modern piano composition into art damaged grindcore forms, fronted by the talented Mark Evan Burden, formerly of GET HUSTLE. The previous two CDEPs, Nightengales and Chariot Swing, were stunning pieces of post-thrash weirdness unlike anything else going on, and each release has found the band evolving and exploring varying shades of the piano/drums/vocals equation. House On The Hill finds Mark teaming up with vocalist August Alston, who has previously done time in mind scrambling powerviolence outfits LORDS OF LIGHT and SOCIETY OF FRIENDS, and this disc takes on an atmosphere of horror and madness that's much heavier than the earlier EPs. The first song "Cut" is an ominous slow core dirge, with a deep bass drone drifting with narcoleptic sung vocals over tense drumming, much like an evil CODEINE. "Evil Triad" is the second song, an eerie post-punk scorcher with distorted keyboards and tinkling music box melodies, dark and scary, with heavily reverbed moaning vocals, ending in an climactic flurry of blastbeats and twitchy heavy riffing. Then "Strangle" erupts as a horrific 25 second blast of INFEST-in-a-wind-tunnel grind violence. "Corpse Decay" follows with the sort of atonal, insane free jazz piano that infested the Nightengales CD, and "Worship" is death metal vomit stripped down to the most skeletal frame of just monstrous inhumanly deep cookie monster growls run through a fog bank of reverb and spastic blasting drums...and then it's on to the title track, the highlight of this disc and what might be the best song SILENTIST has yet recorded, beginning with Mark playing a gorgeous, emotional piano arrangement that explodes into bass-driven, blasting thrash accompanied by the evolving piano lines, then shifting into a crushing, impossibly beautiful lamentation. Their most emotionally gripping work to date. Packaged in a gatefold digisleeve with insert card. Highly recommended.

SILENTIST Nightingales CD $9.98 Celestial Gang

Silentist is the new piano/drums duo featuring Mark Evan Burden, formerly of Get Hustle and Glass Candy and the Shattered Theatre...you might also know him from his solo work on his split with Growing. Silentist is something else,though...our type of metal band, one with modern classical/jazz piano weaving angular melodies, mournful dirges, and Charlemagne Palestine-esque drone around wicked drumming that ranges from pummeling blastbeats to frenzied, complex free-jazz spasms, like Darkthrone meets Phillip Glass, or Rick Wakemanjamming with Dave Lombardo. Some shrieked vocals and guitars appear occasionally. Weird, heavy, creepy, but melodic and very pretty at times.

SICKNESS / SLOGUN Scars Of Happiness/Always Numb CD $7.98 Troniks

A re-issue of the super limited double 3" CD-R on Ninth Circle that was released for the 2003 Slogun/Sickness/Bastard Noise/Control Japanese tour. Sickness serves up 4 blasts of swarming death-rays, brutal, bone crushing harsh noise loops, and shrill metallic feedback engagements, and includes a cover of Slogun's "Kill To Forget". New York based "True Crime Electronics" technician SLOGUN provides searing power electronics rants awash in hellish feedback fuzz, echoing verbal abuse, and a dank, diseased murk that won't wash off for days. Violent, dirty, and harsh electronic violation. This is another PACrec noise blitz, packaged in a cd wallet with four panel insert booklet.

SIN OF ANGELS From The Ashes CD $11.98 Not Common

Ultra heavy, satanic/psychedelic death/sludge action! This New England trio does an amazing job of combining primo Sabbathian riffage with filthy leaden deathsludge and blasphemous black metal undercurrents. Eruptions of double bass drumming, wah n' effects splattered solos and crushing Iommi inspired riffs are fused to stuck-in-molasses death metal vibes and passages of gluey black metal frost. Sin Of Angels are almost like a burlier, death/black metal version of Electric Wizard, or some monstrous combo of Autopsy, Black Sabbath, High On Fire, Cathedral, Eyehategod, Darkthrone, Unearthly Trance, and killer Hendrix/acid rock leads. The highlight of the album is the final track "Garden Of Stone", a gloomy but cathcy doom crusher that ends in a beautiful haze of delayed clean guitar melodies.

SISSY SPACEK Remote Whale Control CD $13.98 Misanthropic Agenda

A brutal improv vomit attack recorded in May of 2001 by drummer Danny McClain, guitarist Corydon Ronnau, and noise celeb John Wiese on guiatar/electronics/processing. This is the second album from Sissy Spacek, and had previously only been available as a limited edition 12" that provided the source material for their subsequent Scissors album - here, the original tracks are joined by a previously unreleased live track from St. Louis in 2002. Brutal guitar n' drums free-noisecore action is captured in the moment and then cut-up into wicked blurts of processed audio violence; drums are tossed off of skyscrapers, thrash riffs are played with broken bricks, festering feedback sits rotting between blasts of playing, and rapid edits slice across the jams like razorblades, like free jazz renditions of the AxCx songbook. When they really get going in the middle of the disc, it starts to feel like your flipping through different dimensions at warp speed. I'm not hearing any of the "grind" elements (beast roars, discernable riffing, etc) that has appeared on some of Sissy Spacek's other releases, but this is still free-improv played with brutal energy, and with the addition of the immolating live track tacked on as a bonus, Remote Whale Control is now presented as a fully flesh rending experience. Comes in a digipack case.

SIXES Cursed Beast CD $7.98 Troniks

Sixes' Cursed Beast originally came out as an LP on Enterruption, in an edition of 200 copies that sold out pretty quickly. A seething black pit of crushing drug FX, Cursed Beast cloaks it's heavy haunted atmopsheres in gutter metal iconography with track titles like 'Slow Burial', 'Baptized By Fire', and 'Reign In Hello'. Heavy malformed dub rhythms, swirling echoplex noise, dissonant, wrecked guitar noise and downtuned droning doom chords, growling damaged synths, and monstrous vocals buried deep in the murk. All of the Sixes stuff that I've been listening to over the past few months since first hearing 'em have been great, crushing rituals of ecstatic black sludge, and this album is no different, combining the intense vibes of demented black metal abstraction and lobe melting psychedelic FX fuckery. This CD version of Cursed Beast is packaged as a miniature version of the LP in a limited edition of 1000 copies, in a gnarly looking 3-color wallet sleeve printed in black, gun-metal silver, and gold ink on black with the images screenprinted slightly out of alignment so that each cover is slightly different and unique.

16 BITCH PILE-UP Bury Me Deep CD $11.98 Troniks

Bury Me Deep is the first new release that I've heard from 16 Bitch Pile-Up since the band relocated to San Francisco from Ohio and pared their numbers down to the current power trio lineup of Sarah Bernat, Sarah Cathers, and Shannon Walter. Right off the bat, my eyes are glued to the awesome package for Bury Me Deep, which was designed by Damion Romero. The album design looks like a ultra-trashy splatter video cover straight off of the video store shelf circa 1988, with bold purple electric neon lettering and the tag line "...the beaches were covered in blood...and so were the bitches!" roaring across the album cover. If you've got a love (as I do) for that breed of straight-to-video grime from the 80's, you'll love this cover...it's one of the more imaginative "noise" covers I've seen lately. Digging inside, the booklet folds open into a poster with several photos of the girls, sprawled out and posed dead on som litter-covered beach and covered in gross gore, the killer photography courtesy of David Lim of Tralphaz. Killer nasty imagery that totally sets the mood for the hour of heavy terror drone-noise contained on the disc. Bury Me Deep plays like a single extended piece chopped up into chapters, like the film-scores of several mindless exploitation videos melted down into a pool of psychedelid gloopy melted tonal drift and layered action, moving through passages of splatter movie soundtrack, scraping textured noise, thickened vocal syrup, and deep, heavy drones submerged in creepfest samples. Limited edition of 1,000.

16 Zoloft Smile CD $13.98 At A Loss

It always baffles me to think that 16 never became a huge band. I mean, these guys were the ultimate in picking up where Helmet left off after Meantime, a perfect marriage of bonecrushing stop-and-go riffage and primal youth angst and hige hooks, all filtered through the burliness of the West Coast extreme hardcore scene of the early 90's and endorsed by Pushead, for chrissakes. I dunno, maybe it was the seething negativity and lurid tales of retribution that scared people off, or maybe it was the band's commitment to increasingly intensify their rage over the course of five albums. Sadly, 16 called it a day right after releasing this fucking monster of an album in 2003, after slogging it out for over a decade in the underground. But at least they left us with one of the heaviest albums in their discog, eleven sludge-loaded tales of urban decay, domestic despair, revenge and hatred and abject misery. Terminally negative downer tirades, distorto hammer riffs, machinelike rhythmic propulsion, like pre-Betty Helmet conspiring with Eyehategod to drain you of your will, with tastefully applied spacey effects and stoopidly crushing grooves laying waste to everything. Freaking awesome album, right up there with their classic Drop Out and Blaze Of Incompetance. Recommended.

666 VOLT BATTERY NOISE Audio Super-Predator CD $9.98 RRRecords

Another richly-textured distortion storm from RRR by someone called 666 Volt Battery Noise. I wasn't able to track down any information on this project anywhere, which sucks as I really enjoyed the turbulent brain-flattening this hour long disc laid on me. The four tracks on here are LONG, ranging from 9-23 minutes, and each one is a dense ocean of swarming, squiggling, fried-out distortion and feedback tones in the vein of The Rita, Cherry Point, and Knurl, with what sound to me like vocals run through a mile-long chain of distortion pedals. Now, maybe it's only because I've been listening to so much of this type of stuff lately that it's fucking with my inner ear, but 666 Volt's wash of noise feels a little, uh, softer, more hypnotic than what The Rita and Cherry Point are doing; listening to this disc makes me feel like someone has tossed my head into a concrete mixer filled with steel wool pads and set it to spin, a "soft" but abrasive blast of white noise enveloping your senses, the sound of billions of pixelated insects swarming in and around your skull, your third eye opening to reveal an eternity of buried riffs and melodies. Like I said, it's probably just me; this is some heavy duty distortion wipeout aktion. Packaged in a xerox-damaged wallet sleeve in the archetypal PURE/RRR steez.

SKEPTICISM Aes CD $12.98 Red Stream

Ever since Skepticism entered upon the doom metal scene in 1995 with their stellar Stormcrowfleet album debut, they have defined their unique "funeral doom" sound with plodding, funeral march drumming, distant distorted guitars that create more fuzzy ambience than actual "heaviness", deep death metal vocals drifting on reverb from the bottom of a forgotten woodland well, and sheets of droning, church organ style keyboards that morphs their hypnotic doom into a Cthulian church service. Aes is the standalong mini-album released in 1999, and contains a single half-hour song of gloomy dirge with majestic, downer keyboard drones and some quieter forays into almost post-rock, instrumental passages. This epic jam is rawer than the Farmakon album that would follow it, and is still one of the band's most depressing eulogies ever. Recommended to doom heads into the cavernous hymns of Esoteric, Bunkur, Moss, and Monarch. Comes in cool translucent jewel case packaging.

SKEPTICISM Ethere CD $11.98 Red Stream

Crucial re-issue of the obscure 1997 disc from Skepticism, the Finnish masters of soulcrushing woodland drone doom. Even heavier than their previous recordings, Ethere consists of three lengthy tracks for a total of twenty-seven minutes of liturgical ambient doom that surrounds you in fog, dragging you under the tread of Skepticism's crawling, minimalist riffs, thick droning layers of funereal keyboards, buried gutteral chant, and plodding trance rhythms. The last track, "Chorale", is hands-down one of Skepticism's best songs, a majestic post-rock melody that bursts into a devestating medieval dirge and ends in a sky-reaching, organ-heavy climax that is so powerful and epic it kills. The heaviest, most depressing dronerock band on the planet, bringing together crawling forest doom, stately churchlike vibes, and almost Kranky Records-style drift. Brilliant.

SKEPTICISM Farmakon CD $12.98 Red Stream
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

On Farmakon, Finnish doomlords Skepticism return with their heaviest, most esoteric album yet. This album boasts a much improved production job that doesn't take away at all from their unique atmospheric downer metal; instead, the clearer, more detailed recording really accentuates the sinister suicide hymns and adventurous moves into post-rock weirdness. Skepticism's trademark buzzy, ultradistorted guitar sound is heavier than ever, and it's more prominent compared to previous albums where the guitars grinded away far off in the distance. And those massive layers of church-organ style keyboards are thicker this time as well, swirling waves of droning keys drifting over the funeral march drumming. Plodding and massive, majestic and stately, this album strikes a perfect balance of regal doom metal riffs that could have been influenced by the film score from Conan The Barbarian, lengthy passages of eerie melodic post-rock, and shoegazy dirge. Farmakon is my favorite Skepticism album so far, and it's recommended to all of you narco doom heads into the likes of Esoteric, Bunkur, Thergothen, Monarch, etc. The CD packaging has some cooler than usual, stylized design work and black-on-black printing that compliments the music well.

SKEPTICISM Lead & Aether CD $12.98 Red Stream

Second full length of immense funereal drone-metal from Finland's Skepticism. Few bands are capable of materializing the sound of total despair the way Skepticism does; on Lead & Aether, the narcoleptic, tympani-like pulse and depressing, liturgical gloom is as stately and beautiful as ever, backed by the droning of the church-organ style keyboards that are layered in the background alongside those monstrously distorted guitars that crawl slowly forward. Monstrous vocals creep through the mix, sometimes offset by clean monotone chanting, as wave after wave of majestic slow motion riffage is piured over your head like leaden honey. One of our fave Skepticism albums, due in large part to the even heavier presence of the church organs. Total crushing suicide dirge. Absolutely essential for Skepticism fans, obviously, as well as anyone into the ultra grim sounds of Corrupted, Evoken, Esoteric, Thergothon, Shape Of Despair, etc.

SKINLESS Miscreant 7" EP $4.98 Hater Of God

The new Skinless 7" is power driven with machine-gun bass drumming and demonic vocal. The packaging is amazing, even compared to other Hater of God releases; it features a die-cut cover with KILLER artwork. Prepare to grovel at the feet of the deathgrind slam gods.

SKULLFLOWER Obsidian Shaking Codex CD-R $8.98 RRRecords

In conjunction with our release of "Orange Canyon Mind", we're stoked to offer this early 90's full length from the mighty Skullflower, "Obsidian Shaking Mind". Released on RRRecords and kept in print via RRR's short run CD release, this 5 song, 72+ minute full length features an incredible haze of beautiful droning feedback and freeform heaviness from Matthew Bower and crew. Songs like "Sir Bendalot" and "Circular Temple" create a dense fog of improvised violin screech over cyclical, melodic guitar riff and buried freeform drum bashing, while "Crashing Silver Ghost Phallus" starts off pretty with a lazily strummed acoustic guitar that quickly gets obliterated by a roaring jet-engine drone and a swarm of chiming bells. "Diamond Bullet" weaves wah-wah soaked guitars and oscillating feedback around a steady rock beat, and the disc closes out with one of the best Skullflower songs EVER, "Smoke Jaguar", a 10+ minute drone epic with a recurrent,triumphant melody and miles of hypnotic humming feedback and free-jazzy drum skitter, awesome and meditative, heavy and psychedelic.
Being one of RRRecords shortrun CD releases, this is packaged similiarly to the simple, but effective "Pure" series: a black cardstock wallet sealed by a paper label that wraps over the sleeve (we had to whip out the Exacto knife to slit ours open without mangling the cover), which contains a plain silver disc with a small label affixed to the face.

SKULLFLOWER Orange Canyon Mind CD $11.98 Crucial Blast

The new full length from the legendary UK free/drone/psych outfit Skullflower, featuring some of the most searing, synapse scorching droneworks that Matthew Bower (the man behind Skullflower, as well as Sunroof!, Total, and The Hototogisu) has unleashed to date, in our humble opinion. Orange Canyon Mind is the follow up to 2002's awesome Exquisite Fucking Boredom (Tumult Records), and continues that albums utter mutation of stoned out riffs pulled taffy-like into eternity/oblivion and star-rupturing blasts of sonic white light. Over the 8 tracks/60 minute running time, Bower and cohorts build massive horizontal drones and melodic supernovas. Superb, beautiful, brain melting stuff.

SKULLFLOWER Tribulation CD $11.98 Crucial Blast

The new emission from the UK trance-noise legends SKULLFLOWER. A black-void beaming of utterly destroyed drone rock and crushing amplifier obliteration that rains down black ash and punishing blasts of feedback skree on the listener. A dynamic, bleary-eyed meditation. An avalanche of powerdrone that threatens to take your cranium apart and transport your grey matter into filthy new dimensions infested with melodic razor cuts and submerged mantras. A triumphant eruption of apocalyptic meta-metal and radioactive raga swarms, guaranteed to loosen eardrums. This album is one of the heaviest, harshest slabs of guitar armageddon from Matt Bower since the glory days of Total, and bridges the void between the krautrock/celestial free drone influence of the last few Skullflower albums, and the blackened molten death of his Mirag material.

SKYE KLAD Cupid's Orkustra Asleep in the Magick Powerhouse of Oz CD $9.98 Dark Holler

Skye Klad has always been known for working without a net, and this latest effort is no exception. After nearly eight years pushing the envelope of the darkest psychedelic/occultic noise rock imaginable, the group has once again confounded the faithful by returning from the cocoon of a long hiatus with a new album stemming from an approach most unexpected by anyone who has followed them in the past, and sure to intrigue and entice new listeners as well. Their fascination with the ancient and the esoteric has not waned in the slightest, but the approach and instrumentation is utterly different from past efforts, while maintaining their adventurous and singular vision. Where past efforts pushed listeners through the sonic vortex and past the threshold of pain via dense, fuzzy, post-apocalyptic metallic sheen and pulsing, flowing rhythm, "Skye Klad Plays the Musick of Cupid's Orkustra Asleep in the Magick Powerhouse of Oz" seeks to reach the same end by much more meditative and organic means. Acoustic instrumentation is at the fore, augmented by field recordings, french horn, tribal percussion and a mantric sensibility. There are guitars and basses of course, but there are also more exotic stringed instruments such as saz and the custom, sitar-like "witchfynder" as well as flutes and a variety of unsettling found sound and echo effects. Not willing to completely eschew the loves of the past, there is still the occasional transcendent fuzz guitar, but in a much subtler fashion. Group leader Jason Kesselring's vocal style and lyrical sensibility have matured considerably since past efforts, and the lyrical motifs that he explores will certainly appeal to the shuttered bibliophiles among us; those who know the risks of their interest and forge ahead despite the consequences of their actions.Musically, Skye Klad have always shown a knack for wearing their influences on their sleeves while amalgamating them successfully into a unique and modern aesthetic. Listeners to this latest effort will detect the influence of Bert Jansch and the ghosts of Davey Graham and Robbie Basho, as well as more modern influences such as early Cure and Echo and the Bunnymen, AntiGroup and others. In short, another adventurous album by this unique group, delivering the unexpected once again. Welcome to the new dawn.

SKRUPEL s/t CD $11.98 R.S.R.

This debut full length from German speedcore / power-violence demons SKRUPEL delivers 17 tracks of harsh, blazing hardcore, played unbelievably tight and precise. Sort of along the lines of a Tuetonic CROSSED OUT or INFEST, pedal to the metal, ultra pissed speed brutality with some perfectly placed slow churners.

SKY BURIAL s/t CD-R $9.98 Housepig
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Excellent spankin'-new full length private-press disc from Housepig, who never fail us in quality heavy abstraction. Sky Burial is an offshoot project of Michael Page from Massachusetts harsh noise outfit Fire In The Head, who lays down 6 meaty jams of heavy cyclic drone crush that starts off with a great hazy blurr of layered feedback loops and angelic sunlit drones, as whirring electronics and neverending melted melodies pinwheel in the light, propelled by heavy drum machine beats sounding akin to recent Skullflower output fueled with Godflesh -style percussive might, or soaring over heavilly processed, almost dub-like industrial ryhthms. Sooo beautiful and majestic. Some of this reaches Final levels of density with the sort of harmonic overload that Justin Broadrick has been drowning his recent music in, and Sky Burial even drops some druggy shoegazer swirl with tracks like "Distant Dissonance Disappearing", a thoroughly melted blast of heart-rendingly gorgeous angel voices and blurred melody, like a cassette tape of My Bloody valentine's Loveless that's been left in the sun for too long. Elsewhere, Sky Burial delves into pointilist guitars, dark cavernous low-end drones, blurred and battered underwater casio beats, and tons of shimmering, shifting, beautiful hum. Definitely situated between the heavy sunkissed power drones of Skullflower, Sunroof!, and Vibracathedral Orchestra, the gooey basement dreamsludge of The Goslings, as well as serious dark ambient like Lustmord and the pulsating free noise of Bower's Hototogisu. Really, fans of Skullflower will lose their shit over this. You get six long tracks in 46 minutes, and the disc comes with a silkscreened cd face, packaged in a swank silkscreened handsewn heavy canvas pouch. Limited edition of 150 copies, so move quickly. Very recommended.

SLEEP RESEARCH FACILITY Dead Weather Machine CD $11.98 Manifold Productions
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Dark exquisite ambient, simply perfect. Manifold toyed with the idea of not telling anyone the source sounds for this record. Since it would be hard to decipher the very common origins of something so enormous, brooding and doomed-sounding as this. Indeed, the titanic waves of impenetrable sonics slowly swing from out of the far-away darkness like the tentacles of some galaxy-sized beast, moving through clouds with the power of a silk-covered sledgehammer, thudding at the other side of the world. Several tracks of slightly differing technique are just chilling, huge and deep...scary deep. Like the electrically-charged shade of Lustmord 's 'Place Where The Black Stars Hang'. Monstrous. Somehow threatening. The previous SRF record, 'Nostromo' used the first few seconds of the film 'Alien' to create an expansive, chilling work of ambient. Here, the artist was living in a small flat in the UK with a heating/ac unit that was slowly breaking down, clogged with dust, slowly choking on it's own decay. The artist found the slowly changing sounds fascinating, suggesting larger, more serious possibilities - and so recorded them, creating a work for purely personal satisfaction that he never expected to be published until Manifold requested some material for possible release. Dead Weather Machine tells monstrous tales of things and places and feelings that it's common beginnings would never seem to suggest. But then imagine being as small as a piece of dust, trekking through some enormous, dying mechanical landscape, the sounds of world-sized storms swirling all around you. A microscopic entity, floating for ages through the channels and chambers of an enormous, dying machine, a machine that makes the weather for an entire world. A machine that is slowly dying.DEAD WEATHER MACHINE is an enticing descent into regions partially explored by Lustmord, Sunn O))), Thomas Koner, and Asmus Tietchens in his driftier moods.

SLEEPYTIME GORILLA MUSEUM Grand Opening And Closing CD $13.98 The End

Grand Opening and Closing is the debut album by Oakland, CA based dada-metal ensemble Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, which included members of Idiot Flesh and Tin Hat Trio in their ranks, and was originally released on Seeland in 2001. This re-issue comes via The End Records, and is presented with three previously unreleased songs in a swank gatefold digipack. Even at this early stage, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum had nailed their confounding, crushing style of theatrical prog/metal/math rock. Some of these songs ("Sleep is Wrong", "1997","Powerless") are thunderously heavy, like a bizarre, arty fusion of some super abstract doom/sludge band, Neubaten informed junkyard percussion, King Crimson, Univers Zero/5UU style Rock In Opposition, Residents weirdness, and White Zombie's grunge metal. At their heaviest, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum are a lumbering, metallic avant-prog troupe swinging crushing math metal riffs that suddenly invert upon themselves, with strange percussive sounds and disjointed, carnivalesque melodies and scrap metal ambience giving it an uneasy, surreal vibe, and fronted by a powerful range of dramatic female vocals, unhinged male roars, and straight up death metal growling (although that is used extremely sparingly on this album). Elsewhere, the ensemble offer up creaky haunted ballads ("Ablutions") and old-timey instrumentals run through a sort of weird cosmic prog prism ("The Miniature", "Sunflower"). Part of why this music is so far-out and imaginative can be attributed to the presence of eight musicians all contributing to the songwriting process behind this band, which apparently begins in large group improvisations which are then revised and hypercomposed. Another distinctive part of SGM's sound is their use of found objects and homemade instruments and toy pianos that add a wealth of strange, otherworldy sounds to the music (much of which is played by famed junk-percussionist Moe! Staiano, whose brand new album is listed elsewhere in this weeks update). Bottom line, Grand Opening And Closing is an awesome album, absolutely essential not just to current Sleepytime Gorilla Museum fans, but anyone even remotely into heavy, metallic avant-prog.

S.M.E.S. Cameltoe Manicure CD $11.98 Last House On The Right

Forget subtlety or good taste, here's a brand new album of crazed, psychedelic electronic grind/techno from S.M.E.S., the solo side project of Erwin de Groot. Groot is probably better known by fans of underground goregrind as the singer for the Dutch band Last Days Of Humanity, and anyone familiar with LDOH is aware that Erwin is in possession of the deepest, most ridiculously low-end vomit vocals that you've ever heard, an extreme subsonic belching rumble that ceases to sound anything remotely like a human voice, and is more like the bubbling rumbling of a malfunctioning septic tank, or pitchshifted lion roars. Totally ridiculous and badass sounding, believe me. Well, Edwin has also been recording a bizarre brand of technotronic glowstick gore/grind under the S.M.E.S. moniker since 1999, with several CDs under his belt as well as a bunch of cuts on the Dutch Assault compilation that Relapse put out a couple of years ago. Blenderizing goofy samples, ridiculous drum-machine dance beats and hyperspeed blastbeats, processed splattergrind riffs and his absurdly garbled bowel-rumbling vocals, Cameltoe Manicure is his latest dose of utter bad taste and amazingly fucked synth blast from S.M.E.S., a warped, grooving mashup of computerized polka, techno/house breakbeats, gabba blasts, weird dance-music effects, and crushing digital riffage like Gut-style splattergrind crashing violently into 80's dance Industrial and the Super Mario Brothers theme or some other old 8-bit Nintendo videogame music. If the album title wasn't idiotic enough for you, you've got songs called 'CLothespinhead', 'The Infestigation', 'Retro Rectal Renewal', and 'See These Seedy CDs', among 12 others. Over the top and retarded and quite awesome, this is right up yer alley if yer into the eGrind/drum machine blast of bands like Lymphatic Phlegm, Dataclast, Libido Airbag, and Gigantic Brain. Comes in a full color jewel case, and the artwork is just as fucked up and psychedelic as everything else on this release.

SNAKE APARTMENT Paint The Walls CD $8.98 Parts Unknown

Now available on CD!
Parts Unknown just keep the awesome noise rock comin'! This newest wipeout from PU is the debut disc from Rhode Island's Snake Apartment, with six tracks of murky, feedback soaked hardcore noise rock, super noisy and blown out, amplifiers squealing out of control, the guitarist slinging thick, gunked up riffs right outta Greg Ginn's playbook, and stumbling, syrupy drumming thundering through the skuzz. The vibe is like Siege's 'Grim Reaper' and the gnarly guitar playing on Corrosion Of Conformity's Eye For An Eye run through the gluey antisocial sludge of Brainbombs and later Black Flag, with a stoned singer crooning through a wall of echo, and the whole band tromping through a swamp of fuzz and distortion, fuzzy murk clinging to all of the instruments. I love this stuff. Ugly and heavy, but super catchy and melodic at times too, and totally crucial for fans of the neo-pigfuck of Clockcleaner, Pissed Jeans, Violent Students, and the howling OG scum of Am Rep Records, Flipper, Brainbombs, and Liquorball. This CD version of Paint The Walls looks just as great as the vinyl, with a boss 6-panel digipack case filled with James Gunsho's gloopy artwork.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Florida" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Paint The Walls" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Pigs Is Pigs" (excerpt)

SNAKE APARTMENT Paint The Walls LP $12.98 Parts Unknown

Parts Unknown just keep the awesome noise rock comin'! This newest wipeout from PU is the debut LP from Rhode Island's Snake Apartment, with six tracks of murky, feedback soaked hardcore noise rock, super noisy and blown out, amplifiers squealing out of control, the guitarist slinging thick, gunked up riffs right outta Greg Ginn's playbook, and stumbling, syrupy drumming thundering through the skuzz. The vibe is like Siege's 'Grim Reaper' and the gnarly guitar playing on Corrosion Of Conformity's Eye For An Eye album run through the gluey antisocial sludge of Brainbombs and later Black Flag, with a stoned singer crooning through a wall of echo, and the whole band tromping through a swamp of fuzz and distortion, fuzzy murk clinging to all of the instruments. I love this stuff. Ugly and heavy, but super catchy and melodic at times too, and totally crucial for fans of the neo-pigfuck of Clockcleaner, Pissed Jeans, Violent Students, and the howling OG scum of Am Rep Records, Flipper, Brainbombs, and Liquorball. Limited to 500 copies, pressed on awesome green swirl vinyl, and packaged in a full color jacket with killer artwork from James Gunsho. Brilliant!

SNAKE APARTMENT / LANDED split 7" EP $5.98 Corleone

The back of the 7" reads "Ugly Providence Boogie Rock", which is pretty apt if yer idea of "boogie rock" is having two-chord sludge riffs smashing your skull through a thick haze of blown out distortion and feedback. This 7" delivers the superheavy noise rock nicely with one song each from these Providence bands - Snake Apartment, whose Paint The Walls mini-album and split LP with Work/Death are recent favorites over here, is back with "Ugly Poltergeist", a dirgey, crushing slugfest, massive blownout riffing and howling chanted vocals, Melvins meets Brainbombs, a spectacularly catchy jam. Landed deliver "Tip Of The Whip" on the b-side; I've only heard a couple things from this band in the past but I don't remember hearing anything this heavy from 'em, the song starts off as a near-doomed dirge, ultra heavy and at Rusted Shut levels of distortion overload, then twisting through some spastic, mathy freakout rock and tangled nerve-damaged riffing. Total noisy sludge rock from both of the highest quality, inscribed on black vinyl in a red/black/white jacket.

SNAKE APARTMENT / WORK DEATH split LP $12.98 Corleone Records

Before Parts Unknown recently released that killer Paint The Walls 12", there was this split LP with fellow Providencians Work/Death. I was buggin' over the Paint The Walls record, where Snake Apartment channeled the gnarliest bits of Greg Ginn's skronky guitar playing, Siege's 'Grim Reaper', and Brainbombs-level transgressive sludge rock into a thickened assault of neo-noise rock caked with distortion, feedback, and DXM-fueled effects. Excellent psychedelic noise rock/hardcore shit, right up there with the recent output from Pissed Jeans and Violent Students. So there's this spllit LP, which by all accounts is now totally sold out from the label, but we've tracked down the last stash of these. It was released in a limited edition of 300 copies, and comes in six different variations of silkscreened sleeve, with sleeves designed by Will Schaff, Ben Barnett, Mike Taylor, Merdith Stern, Scott Reber and Mat Brinkman! You can't choose which sleeve you get, since we have such a limited supply of these, so all orders will receive a randomly picked record/sleeve.
Snake Apartment bust out a single epic jam, "Fourth Blood", emerging amid howling feedback and a menacing bassline, then kicking in full force with a lumbering two-chord riff that plows through a murky smog of vintage amp howl haze, blasted psych'd-out solos, and the singer's fucked up mumbling vocals, who switches to damaged screaming off and on throughout the song. These guys climbed right out of the same protoplasmic sewer that coughed out the classic mongoloid 'core a la Drunks With Guns, Flipper, and later Black Flag, but like Violent Students and Brainbombs, this shit veers so far out that it kicks you right in the base of yer spine. Not too many bands can destroy like this with just two chords. Amazing, violent, tripped-out sludge rock.
The Work/Death side, on the other hand, is a live performance titled “The Fragile Ego of Any Half Succes