RARE
Welcome aboard.
[News]
New Tallest Man on Earth material surfaces
Swedish folk ace The Tallest Man on earth has a track from his forthcoming album, The Wild Hunt, up on his MySpace. It’s great.
The vinyl re-issue of Brand New’s superb 3rd album, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, is delayed yet again.
Buy the CD.
The forthcoming Dillinger Escape Plan album
…is worth mentioning simply because the deluxe edition contains a CD with playable vinyl on the reverse (which I’ve heard sound awful), luggage tags, a hat and, inexplicably, a machine that will turn off any televisions in the area.
[Recent Arrivals]
The Felix Culpa – Sever Your Roots
The Felix Culpa formed in Illinois in 2003 and have spent virtually all of the time since them not informing me of their existence. In hindsight I’d consider this a real shame, as their new album, “Sever Your Roots”, which came out on Youth Conspiracy Records on January 23rd, is spectacular.
To be fair, the band spent most of the last seven years not releasing anything. So the fact that they were new to me doesn’t come as much of a surprise. “Sever Your Roots”, as the title implies is an album about moving on. There’s an urgency and a passion about it that you can’t help but be swept up in. The vocals crack in all the right places and there’s an honesty to the lyrics, which unfortunately aren’t reproduced for the vinyl edition, that will keep them swimming in your head for days.
The Felix Culpa would sit quite well next to bands like Brand New or Thursday, but they have a heart-on-sleeve openness about their sound that would suggest they’d probably be nicer to you at the merch stand than either of those. The production on the record is excellent, and I’d recommend heading over to the “Sever Your Roots” website where you can read the details of the recording process and download demo versions of most tracks. The guitars are spiky, the bass gutsy and the percussion suitably dramatic. A lot of thought has been put into what you hear and when and it works perfectly.
The album clocks in at over an hour, and I won’t go into the details of each track, but it’s safe to say that the time passes quickly and (for me, at least) repeated plays are a regular occurrence. “Our Holy Ghosts”, “Mutiny” and “An Instrument” are all potential songs of the year and “The First One to the Scene of an Accident…” consistently renders me incapable of doing whatever it was I was doing for its duration.
This record was a long time coming and an ambitious undertaking, but it’s safe to say, a massive success.
Available on CD, double clear vinyl and digital directly from the band.
Slow Six – Tomorrow Becomes You
I’m going to use the word “post-rock” right here at the beginning to get it out of the way. That was my first thought upon receiving the new record by the Brooklyn, NY collective. But it’s a description which would sell them short. Guitar-driven instrumental music fans, amongst which I would count myself, are largely in agreement that the genre has gotten pretty stale of late. Dynamism is decidedly lacking and delay pedals have become mundane. Slow Six do a damn fine job of redressing this balance.
Opening piece, The Night You Left New York, is as good an instrumental track as I’ve heard in some time. A collision of modern classical acts such as Strangers Die Every Day or Rachel’s with your more usual p-r fodder. It’s playful and compelling and it had me hooked right from the start. It does however set you up for a surprise as the album progresses. The latter parts of the record get decidedly more atmospheric, with some ambient/drone elements and fuzzy processed samples. They change the pace quite noticeably, but succeed in never dragging the album down. In fact they make it more compelling – this band are no one trick pony.
If this is the shape of instrumental music to come in 2010, then I will be very pleased.
Available from Western Vinyl and all good retailers.
[From the Archives]
A blast from the past. The records you might have missed and that I almost forgot about.
Khanate – Things Viral (2003)
A very exciting thing happened this week! After several months of (not really) trying (very hard), I finally got into Khanate! Slow tempos, lots of abstract noise and a vocal delivery that verges between harrowing and downright scary, Khanate are a challenge to even the most adventurous ears.
Started by guitarist Stephen O’Malley and bassist James Plotkin, whose various projects could fill up a month’s worth of this column, and featuring Alan Dubin on vocals and Tim Wyskida on drums, Khanate tread a unique path in experimental music. On their second LP, Things Viral, the band steer you through four tracks which clock in at a little short of an hour. It’s a bumpy ride.
Blasts of rhythm punctuate layers of feedback, distortion and ambient noise while Dubin’s shrieked poetry slices through the whole lot with unnerving authority. The record is a challenge in the best sense. It requires some commitment on your part; a degree of trust. But the reward is that of the perfect horror movie: tension and relief followed by a lot more tension. When you start to enjoy it it is a really satisfying feeling, and you’ll be digging through the band’s brief back catalogue for more. If you’re one of those people who claims to listen to “everything”, this will test your metal.
Khanate are for life, not just for Halloween. Available on CD from Amazon and the like.
Khanate MySpace (unofficial)
