TITLES: Y

YAOTL MICTLAN Guerreros De La Tierra De los Muertos CD $11.98
American Line

Yaotl Mictlan, which is derived from the ancient Aztec language Nahuatl and roughly translates to “warrior from the land of the dead”, is a quartet originally formed in Mexico in the late 90's before relocating to Utah, and includes several members of the notorious misanthropic black metal beasts Ibex Throne. Yaotl Mictlan's version of black/death metal is radically different though, a powerful, quirky blackened assault of speedy death metal with ferocious, snarling vocals and Mexican/Mayan chants, lyrics delivered in Spanish that are raged filled condemnations of the conquest and destruction of pre-Hispanic indigenous cultures in Mexico, Central and South America, and the spellbinding inclusion of various indigenous Aztec instruments and percussion like flute, horns, bones add a distinct cultural element, all of which come together to create a majestic, ancient-sounding atmosphere throughout the entire album. Heavy, heady stuff, tightly performed but ferocious, with strange touches like the use of dissonant clean guitars that are strummed ultra fast over straightforward black/death riffs, and the appearances of Mexican acoustic folk melodies that suddely appear over the bands blasting black metal. Some of the standout songs include "Neuvo Sol De Teotihucan", which opens with a joyous folk melody before erupting into an almost poppy metal riff and then abruptly shifts again into somber, atmospheric death metal; and the final song, "Caida Del Aguila", which almost sounds like a Mexican version of Neurosis, opening with several minutes of dramatic clean singing and haunting, folksy acoustic guitars, rainstick, and primitive percussion that builds into a crushing metallic dirge. Comes with a hefty booklet that includes not only the original Lyrics and liner notes in Spanish, but also English translations.

YAWNING MAN Rock Formations CD $13.98
Alone Records

Hailing from the Mojave desert, desert rock proto-supergroup YAWNING MAN finally materialize a full length album after twenty years of casting their spellbinding instrumental jams. The band has been around in one form or another since 1986, turning into THE SORT OF QUARTET in the late 80's and releasing stuff on legendary punk label SST Records. Featuring members of Kyuss, Queens Of The Stone Age, Fatso Jetson, and a whole bunch of other stoner/desert rock heavyweights, this isn't as heavy and rocking as you might expect...instead, Rock Formations is made up of ten marathon all-instrumental jams that takes elements of surf, space rock, stoner/psych, western, pounding post-punk, latin rhythms, and folk, and just takes off on lengthy freakouts centered around reverb-heavy underwater guitars that lock in on some truly trance inducing hypno-Western hooks n' melodic repetition, like Finnish hypno rockers Circle if they were from the American Southwest and doing a space-rock/spagetti-western film score. A perfect soundtrack for long desert drives, or for long drives anywhere, really. This is one of the best instrumental albums we think we've ever heard, very catchy and haunting and evocative and weird, similiar to that Slacks! album from last year that we absolutely loved, but lot more abstract and trippy. Very highly recommended.

YELLOW SWANS Global Clone CD $8.98
Troniks

More killer Yellow Swans action, this time in the form of a new CD collection of out-of-print, limited edition tracks from their 2005 cassette releases, under the Doubled Yellow Swans moniker. Global Clone collects their tracks from the Declawed Yellow Swans cassette on Tone Filth, their split tape with Skaters on Jyrk, their split tape with Sex With Girls from the Deathbombarc Tape Club, and the two tracks from the Damaged Yellow Swans cassette on 23 Productions. Five tracks in almost an hour of hazed ambient feedback n' heavy distortion droneouts and hum rituals, heavy and drifting and beautiful. Crushing, crumbling amplifier mud oozes over whining feedback tones, and eternally stretched throat chants soar through seas of metallic buzz and chopped up thudding un-rhythms. Sinister and hypnotic, meditative and heavy, altogether some of our favorite psychedelic guitar/FX disintegration from YS to date, especially the incandescent beast dirge of track #3, and the mega overrmodulated noise rock/post rock hallucinations of the tracks from the Damaged YelloW Swans tape. One time edition of 1,000 copies in the signature Troniks style B&W wallet sleeve.

YELLOW SWANS & THE CHERRY POINT Live At Camp Blood CD $9.98
Troniks

his disc immediately mashes you in the face with brutal feedback shred, and barely relents over it’s almost twenty minute running time. I don’t think I’ve heard anything this rough from the D. YELLOW SWANS camp to date…shows what happens when Phil Blankenship, a.k.a. THE CHERRY POINT, joins the fray. Live At Camp Blood is electro ultraviolence at its best, all strangled guitar screams and skin burning feedback yowl. This is what you get from sucking on powerlines all night long. Vicious shit, pure joy. Fans of harsh noise, MERZBOW's violent whiteouts, crashed/mashed electronics-you all need this.

YELLOW TEARS Paint Gurgle CD-R $8.98
Epicene Sound

I'm totally lovin' Epicene Sound System right now. The latest batch of releases we've gotten from them has been taking my skull apart CD-R by CD-R, leaving my consciousness twitching in a pool of molten free-basement-metal noise love. First it was the awesome, brain flaying free-improv grind/black/skum metal annihilation of Goat Tunnel. Now I bow at the feet of sludge-noise titans Yellow Tears, a quartet of lava-slinging cavemen from Long Island whose Paint Gurgle CD-R is one of thee heaviest goddamn things to ooze across my desk all month. We're talking thoroughly stoned, freeform sludge/speaker hatred, an avalanche of evil electronics and subsonic drone thunder swirled together with detuned bass guitars, damaged doom riffs and wasted psychedelic/stoopid guitar noise, along with incomprehensible cries and the unyielding whine of a power drill all boring it's way into your cranium like some Boschian vision of hell scored by members of Wolf Eyes, Black Boned Angel, and Gravitar. Seriously fkkn heavy. This utterly boss disc is packaged in an equally boss paint-spattered vellum/inkjet sleeve tucked inside of a plastic sleeve, hand-numbered out of a limited edition of 100. Highly recommended.

YEN POX / TROUM Mnemonic Induction CD $8.98 THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.
Malignant Records

This collaborative effort between amp-bliss-invoking drone duo Troum (members of Maeror Tri) and subterranean ambient pioneer Yen Pox remains one of our all time favorite heavy drone|drift albums, ever. The 4 tracks that make up Mnemonic Induction perfectly combine Troum's hazy shoegazer drones and Yen Pox's nightmarish dark drift, and this excellent balance creates vast nebulous drones with gorgeous,fragile melodies rising to the surface and thick, billowing climaxes. Layers of sound shift and build. Yawning canyons of low end rumble emit flickering gossamer notes that spiral into the stratosphere. Utterly dreamlike and beautiful. Excellent, and highly recommended. The beautiful,hefty digipack packaging was designed by doomlord Stephen O'Malley (SUNN O)))/KHANATE).

YES SENSEI We Who Transplant, Sustain CD $9.98
Rok Lok

The follow up their What I Do Best... debut is a much stronger effort, more dynamic and noisy with superior songwriting going on. The Long Island quartet still mixes Jesus Lizard-meets-Shellac noise rock with skronky,bouncy Minutemen-style hardcore and loads of guitar noise, but adds some Ornette Colman style free jazz, additional instrumentation in the form of horns,chiming glockenspiel,cello and piano,LES SAVY FAV-esque angular artpunk, and electronic flotsam to the mix. Disjointed song structures slip in and out of raging grooves. If SST were still an active label, this would fit right in with that label's experimental hardcore roster.Cool, terminally funky avant-punk.

YES SENSEI What I Do Best Is What I Do Worst CD $8.98
Rok Lok

The eight song debut from Long Island's YES SENSEI lacks the free jazz and avant-punk stylings of their followup album,We Who Transplant, Sustain,instead finding the band starting off on a more Fugazi/Sonic Youth/Unwound tangent, noisy dynamic indie rock with lots of soft/loud and stop/start, with shades of the overt JESUS LIZARD influence that would find it's way onto their full length.

YES, COLLAPSE Final Diagnosis CD-R $8.98
Crucial Bliss

One of the new batch of Crucial Bliss discs that we've got percolating is Final Diagnosis, the final release from the Dayton industrial scum-dirge trio of Dan Rizer, Josh Fink, and Matthew Reis, together known as Yes, Collapse. These guys were pretty much the house band for the noise/core/drone label Epicene Sound System, releasing a host of ridiculously limited-edition cassettes and CD-Rs, oftentimes doing splits with likeminded heavy noise bands. I've been grooving on Yes, Collapse's blasted electronics and factory deathcrush since their Smeared White Sickness disc from a couple years ago, and ended up talking back and forth with Matt from YC for awhile about releasing something with them. Alas, at the end of last year, members of Yes, Collapse moved away and the band more or less ended, but not before recording this brutal full length which they gave to me to release as part of the Crucial Bliss CD-R series. And it is one of the heaviest, most corroded slabs of industro-violence to lurk in the Crucial Bliss catalog to date. Yes, Collapse has that distinctly midwestern brand of improvised noise-rock that you'll recognize immediately, but then they go and drop in caustic crawls through rust-coated computer doom, brutal factory scrape, tribal junk-metal percussion trances, guitars with the distortion pushed all the way into the red and beyond, deranged verbal rantings, and pure free-noise fuckery, all combined into a crushingly heavy noise-dirge epic that will strip the paint from your walls.
Final Diagnosis is packaged in a full-color foldout sleeve with the disc attached to the inner sleeve on a plastic hub, and pressed in a limited edition of 150 copies.

YETI The Man With The Lamp LP $11.98
Little Mafia

Limited-edition, one-sided LP is sadly the last (?) release from Texas psych/sludge/prog crusties Yeti, but at least the band gave us this bitchin' jam for us to blaze up to and eulogize both the tragic passing of Yeti keyboardist Doug Ferguson, and the demise of these lava-lamp crushers. The Man With The Lamp takes up the entire playing side of the 12", and the Yes ripoff logo might just tip you off that this is going to be a mindblowing prog-crust freakout...the song moves through several passages of dirgey sludgery, 70's prog worship, and mega stoned jams, and the whole trip takes off vertically into the void. A totally dense swirl of ELP keyboard vibes, precision rhythms, heavy fuggin fuzz jams, and whooshing synths. This song again situates Yeti at the intersection of Neurosis' heavy dirge, Tarantula Hawks horror prog, and the heavy free/psych of Subarachnoid Space and Bardo Pond. And to top it all off, the flip side sports a killer psychedelic screenprint that will have you seeking interdimensional doorways. The 12" is bolted to a screenprinted cardboard backing, but is easy enough to remove and re-attach. Killer!

YETI Things To Come LP $11.98
Life Is Abuse

Since we've been filling the holes in our own personal Yeti collection, and we've been selling a ton of Yeti's posthumous The Man With The Lamp silkscreened 12" LP, we figured we'd stock this older full-length LP from the Texan psych/prog crusties for fellow Yeti fanatics that haven't picked this up yet. Things To Come was the band's debut full length, and like Life Is Abuse labelmates Tarantula Hawk, Yeti bring a vitriolic post-hardcore heaviosity to the dark, spacey bombast of 70's progressive rock, in particular the sounds of 70's European Prog bands like Magma, King Crimson, Univers Zero, and Camel. The four tracks of crushing cosmic lava-lamp prog presented here are all-instrumental (save for some wordless vocal chorals), and track majestic vintage Mellotrons and Moogs soaring into the cosmos above thick, sludgy basslines and doomed drumming, crazy 70's prog rock/Zeuhl moves, smooth jazzy melodies, and lots of winding, exploratory freakouts, comparable to a mix of Magma, Neurosis, Goblin, Tarantula Hawk, Man Is The Bastard and Bardo Pond. The vinyl is on clear wax, comes in a full color jacket, and also includes a fantastic full size 18x24" poster with killer artwork penned by D.V.D'Andrea. Recommended.

YETI Volume Obliteration Transcendence CD $12.98
Life Is Abuse

Ultra dark and dirgy cosmic crust-prog from Texas, a rumbling, apocalyptic gloom fest, spaced out and festooned with phased synths and mellotron, combining their 70's prog influences (Magma, Goblin) with slabs of crusty heaviness that recalls both Neurosis and Man Is The Bastard-style damaged hardcore sloth, with tortured caveman growls and mindbending chorales. Killer stuff, like Neurosis gone bombastic 70's prog rock. Volume Obliteration Transcendence delivers just that with over four lengthy jams clocking in at close to an hour, trudging through crushing, doomy riffage and then lumbering off sideways into sweet circular noodle jams. Fans of Tarantula Hawk will definitely dig Yeti's bizarre space crust, as it's just as intense and spaced and heavy. Packaged in a boss digipack with killer stoned artwork.

YIP YIP / 2UP split 7" EP $5.98 THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.
Nail

Japan's 2UP spazz out with seven quick seizures of twitchy, minimalist no wave/art punk/thrash/mental breakdown screech weirdness a la a stripped down take on early Boredoms and Melt Banana, and features a member of Dmonstrations. Yip-Yip rip it with a single righteous jam of electro-casio-bubblegum-industrial-core zombie dance club nightmare. Quite excellent. Limited to 500 copies, on green wax with a full color glued-pocket jacket and full color inser

YOUNG WIDOWS Settle Down City LP $12.98
Auxillary

Man, still feels like it's 1994 all over again - there's been such a resurgance of balls-out, noisy, blown n blasted pig-fucking NOISE ROCK action since the middle of the decade that I can barely contain myself. And it's not like it's a mindless aping of past styles like with what we saw in the late 90's/early 00's with bands appropriating New Wave and post punk sounds and regurgitating them for the larger masses. Fuck that shit, what we have here is simply a continuation of what was happening across the post-Hardcore landscape of America some two decades ago, musicians getting ugly and raucous and taking the hardcore punk and metal that they had been chewing on in their teen years and churning out the gnarliest rawk damage possible. This latest swarm of damaged heaviness is even heavier than ever, like Young Widows; essentially the band Breather Resist minus singer Steve Sindoni, Young Widows (great fuckin' name, there) is made up of remaining BR dudes Evan Patterson (guitarist and former member of Black Cross and National Acrobat), bassist Nick Thieneman, and drummer Geoff Paton. Patterson started singing for 'em, and they morphed from the metallic, Am Rep-tinged hardcore of Breather Resist to this new, darker sound, reverb-heavy guitars snarling and spewing atonal slidework and brooding grooving riffs over a granite-heavy, start-n-stop bass/drums sludge backbeat, a brutal catchy battering that recalls Melvins, early Nirvana, Jawbox, Shellac, and Jesus Lizard but ultimiately has them coughing up their own brand of crushing post-punk sludge rock with hooks galore. Thickened, heavy as hell hypnotic noise rock greatness with fucking great song titles and lyrics ('Mirrorfucker', 'Bruised Knees', and 'Glad We Ate Her', which is an obvious nod to Jesus Lizard's "Gladiator"), wrapped up in a crazy cool silkscreened poster sleeve and insterted lyric sheet, both with some seriously fucked up artwork.

VAROUS ARTISTS You've Got Your Orders Volume II CD $12.98
Chrome Peeler Records

The second in the series of compilations curated by CP label owner Jason Ziemniak, where a variety of artists are given a song title and instructed to write a song around it. This collection sees less of the rock that was delivered in the last release. Rather, the CD delves much further into sagacious weirdness, many tracks being ambient stuff from the likes of Phil Puleo from Cop Shoot Cop/Swans ("Albino Rainbow") and sometime Stooges saxophonist Steve Mackay, who gives a smacked-out Bitches Brew-era tribute to Miles Davis during "You Could Smell the Nightmares on the Pillow". Likewise for offerings from avant-garde composer- guitarist Elliot Sharp ("Barbed Wire Hotel") and trailblazing ’70s space rocker Simeon Coxe of Silver Apples ("Empire of Ashes"). There are some shin-kickers as well, however. The Testors’ Sonny Vincent rips out a scorching "Totally Fucked", and the Scheme (featuring David Thompson of Boston neatnicks the Pills) gleefully deliver the sardonic "Teenage Millionaire". Other honorable mentions include Fu Manchu/Kyuss drummer Brant Bjork’s aviator-sunglass-Palm Desert-funky "Cop Moustache" and Los Staightjackets hatchet man Eddie Angel’s caustic surfer twang in "Space Monkey Vertigo". Also includes Nikki Sudden (SWELL MAPS), Rich Hoak (BRUTAL TRUTH), Amps For Christ, The Scheme, Brent Eyestone (Corn On Macabre/Waifle/Forensics),Black Lipstick,Stephen Brodsky (New Idea Society/Cave In), Paradise Island (aka Jenny from Erase Errata), and more.

YUMA NORA Jewels In The Snakepit CD $10.98
Not Not Fun

Fun-as-fuck freeform noise punk from this Portland trio made up of drummer Aaron Reyna, guitarist Jake Anderson, and singer/noise processor Amy Vecchione, who performs live cloaked in a silver spandex ski mask with microphone lodged inside. This kicks off with a flurry of improv brass freakery, polyrythmic/retarded tribal percussion, disconnected guitar skree, smooth girlie vox, and some sort of electric wave form generator. It's a junkfield of strewn electronic belch, atmospheric cascading sheets of tumbling drums, warped blues, and seething spikey jazznoise across these sixteen tracks, a combo of vibrant maximum improv burst and druggy shamanist punk blurt that mixes up misshapen No Wave circa 1981 n' Sun Ra's Koethek with drowsy,druggy female vocals and a malfunctioning video game. Some of this is very pretty and dreamy, most though is a psychedelic railroad spike right through your head. It's barely left our stereo. Not Not Fun has packaged Jewels In The Snakepit exquisitely in a jewel case with handmade paper collage underneath the clear disc tray, a tiny rubber snake imprisoned inside the jewel case spine, and small green jewels glued to the outside of the case.