Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Summer Mix

This is just a compilation of some songs I've been digging lately. It's downloadable below as a zip file with all the mp3s in it. Oh, and these aren't necessarily "summer" songs, I was just lacking for a good title. All of these bands have information available online; in some cases, the records are out of print and are near impossible to find, but some collectors have generously shared them online, and I can forward the links to anyone interested. Alright, here's the tracklist:

1. Magical Power Mako- "Andromeda" from Super Record
Solo artist Magical Power Mako was the Japanese answer to Faust in the '70s, combining the universal musical language of psychedelia with traditional ethnic folk. Where Faust, Amon Duul, and the like drew on German folk, American/British rock, and minimalist composition, Magical Power Mako's music is distincively Eastern, with elements of traditional Japanese music and modern composition like Toru Takemitsu. "Andromeda" kicks off his masterpiece Super Record with a pitch-perfect blast of space-folk that anticipates the arrangements and songwriting of Sonic Boom and J. Spaceman (Spacemen 3), rhythmic acoustic guitars and minimal percussion laying the foundation for snythesizer swells and cosmic guitar leads. One trip to rule them all.

2. Loop- "Collision" from Fade Out
Loop is one of my favorite recent discoveries- one of the best neo-psych bands of the 80s whose entire discography is shamefully out of print. Pulling equally from late 60s psych rock, Krautrock, the Detroit power chord sound (the Stooges, MC5), and the noise/drone rock of the 70s and 80s, they strip those influences to their base and destroy amps while also inducing meditative states. The "Collision" in this case is between Spacemen 3 and early Black Sabbath; a droning power chord riff propels the song as the buried vocals and phased-out blues leads swirl around in the mix, creating a jam that's as heavy as it is soothing.

3. The Helpful Soul- "Fire" from First Album
I have very little info about this Japanese heavy blues-rock band. The record was released in '69 and features a mix of standards and originals, including excellent takes on "Spoonful" and "Crossroads". "Fire" sounds like its title- the band unleases a Blue Cheer-caliber rock fury on their instruments. The Helpful Soul reminds me a lot of recent Japanese garage blues bands like High Rise and Guitar Wolf, really solid stuff.

4. Fresh Maggots- "Dole Song" from Fresh Maggots
To my knowledge this British folk group only put out one album, this self-titled release from 1971. The album is like a fusion between the Jackson C. Frank/Bert Jansch British folk sound and Cream/Blue Cheer fuzz guitar leads. The beautiful ballad "Rosemary Hill" is perhaps the best song on the album, but "Dole Song" is a perfect summer anthem, switching back and forth from open-tuned acoustic guitars to nimble psych rock leads. Ben Chasny, i.e. Six Organs of Admittance, owes a debt to this particular brand of psychedelic folk, especially the song "Black Wall" from this year's The Sun Awakens.

5. Haymarket Square- "Train Kept A Rollin'" from Magic Lantern
Magic Lantern is perhaps the best album to come out of the San Francisco folk jam scene of the late '60s, although the band was actually from Chicago- six epic tracks of melodramatic fuzz ballads, featuring great male-female vocal harmonies in the Jefferson Airplane mold, and long instrumental sections that never get boring. Their version of the blues standard "Train Kept A Rollin'" is the highlight for me, picking up momentum early on and building into an infectious groove that places it in the category of ecstatic blues songs like "Born Under a Bad Sign".

6. Gandalf- "Hang On To A Dream" from Gandalf
Yes, the title of the song does sound like "Hung Up On A Dream" by the Zombies, and the comparison doesn't end there. I might describe the sound of Gandalf's 1968 self-titled album as an even more melodramatic take on "Beechwood Park" from Oddessy and Oracle. "Hang On To A Dream" is a cover, but it fits in perfectly with opener "Golden Earrings" and the rest of the album, baroque pop songs that distill the cool but impassioned mood of the Colin Blunstone/Rod Argent sound.

7. San Ul Lim- "A Flower in the Mist" from As Laying Carpet on My Mind
This is another band I haven't been able to much info about. They were a Korean band who started recording in the late 70s, three brothers on guitar, bass, and drums, and their sister on keyboards. The recording quality is clear but strangely mixed, with "floating" vocals, and it gives them the same type of amateurish charm as Beat Happening and Wire's Pink Flag, only with long instrumental sections and miles of guitar pedals. "A Flower in the Mist" begins with the cheesiest, most dated chorus-effected guitar arpeggio, but quickly jumps into a head-nodding groove of minor key organ and throbbing bass. Like all of the songs on the album, it is a dramatic, melancholy ballad in the guise of psych rock; the album has kind of a wandering stranger vibe like the films "The Searchers" and "Tokyo Drifter". Near the halfway point of the song, everything drops out expect the thickest, sludgiest fuzz bass I've ever heard, playing the main riff at double time; the rest of the band comes back in and hammers out an intense climax worthy of the song "Black Sabbath", with the drummer in Ginger Baker mode and the keyboards soaring. The entire album is this good, in my opinion, an unusual but exciting mix of unbridled rock joy, bedroom psychedelia, and first-rate songwriting.

8. Skullflower- "Black Rabbit" from IIIrd Gatekeeper
Skullflower was British drone/noise artist Matthew Bower's first band; today he mostly works under the name Sunroof!, and he also recently collaborated with Richard Youngs in Youngsbower. IIIrd Gatekeeper is one of their more rock-oriented albums, with the traditional guitar-bass-drums setup. Skullflower pulls from the usual suspects in modern experimental rock- minimalism, psychedelia, Krautrock, Black Sabbath sludge, and early 80s stuff like This Heat and Sonic Youth. They seem to be fond of taking old songs and even song titles, in this case, and using them as muses for new, unrelated pieces. In this case, it seems to be a reference to the Grace Slick/Jefferson Airplane classic "White Rabbit"; there are no surface similarities between the two, although both songs dance between two chords and slowly build to a climax rather than the usual verse-chorus structure. "Black Rabbit" is an example of something Skullflower does very well, using repetitive rhythms and melodic progression that seem to be stretching towards some kind of release that never comes- instead they just keep playing harder and louder and end the song on an unresolved note. The effect coincides with the song title, which suggests the listener took the wrong pill and ended up somewhere other than Wonderland.

9. Golem- "Stellar Launch" from Orion Awakes
This one-off Krautrock band from the '70s is one of the great undiscovered treasures of the genre. Like Magical Power Mako and Hawkwind, they prefigured the space rock explosion of the last couple decades, but unlike those bands, they work in much louder, more abrasive territory. "Stellar Launch" is the best example of that influence, a slow-burner that couldn't be more aptly titled. Guitars drenched in wah, tremolo, and fuzz slowly build to a violent climax over a motorik beat that explodes into chaos by the end of the song. The song repeats the same cycle three times, coming to a rest twice and becoming even more intense each time. It's a very simple but effective approach that ranks with the best of 70s instrumental rock and looks ahead to Spacemen 3's drone rock masterpiece "Suicide".

10. Flower Travellin' Band- "Hiroshima" from Made in Japan
One of the best Japanese bands of the psychedelic era, Flower Travellin' Band utilized thick Sabbathy riffs and Ozzy-fied vocals as if they were the originators of metal themselves. "Hiroshima" seems to be their trademark song; it appears in a longer, more jam-oriented form on their best album Satori, and was a live staple. The snakey central melody uses a scale that is usually associated with Eastern music, although it has since been assimilated into the tonal lexicon of metal. A creepy, visually evocative song, it proves that the Japanese can do not only film noir as well as Westerners, but psych metal too.

11. Mammatus- "Dragon of the Deep Pt. 1" from Mammatus
Mammatus is one of the most exciting new bands of the decade, in my opinion, a seamless hybrid of Black Sabbath-influenced groove metal and 70s psych/space rock. Their recently released debut record sounds like the product of a seasoned band- they do all the right things at the right times and make old styles sound very fresh and alive. And their live show demonstrates a band who have moved beyond the typical meaning of "rock" and into higher strata of creative destruction. "Dragon of the Deep Pt. 1" is a sprawling, endlessly climbing, building masterpiece of space metal that achieves an epic quality most stoner metal bands need an hour to reach. And that's not a knock on Sleep's seminal Dopesmoker- in fact, Mammatus seems to be Sleep's heir apparent among bands who think Black Sabbath is a genre, although some would give Boris that distinction. In any case, it's a nearly flawless 4-track album that will surely be in my top 5 by the end of the year.

12. Bardo Pond- "New Drunks" from Selections, Vol. I-IV (disc 2)
The recently released Selections is a wonderful collection of the band's studio jams of the last few years that haven't ended up on their full-lengths. For those who love the band at their loosest and most free-form, it's manna from heaven- the best space/psych band since Spacemen 3 doing what they do best with complete freedom from the concerns of accessiblity and moderation. "New Drunks" is an absolute gem, a stripped down, repetitive blues figure with Isobel's Damo Suzuki-like vocals floating over it. Despite recent bands like the Black Angels and the Kills (both whom I like) who draw from the primitive blues tendencies of J. Spaceman and the Reid brothers, I haven't really heard anything in this category as perfect as "New Drunks" since Spacemen 3's version of "May the Circle Be Unbroken" (which is featured as a bonus track on the CD reissue of Playing With Fire). It captures that tripped-out, cosmic vibe that blends beautifully with loose blues guitar playing. There's also a great live version of this song from a band-approved bootleg available on the internet.

13. Plastic People of the Universe- "Zacpa" from Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned
This band is sort of considered the Velvet Underground of Eastern European rock music. They began in Czechoslovakia in the late '60s making music influenced by the Western experimental rock of the day, like Zappa and Beefheart. Their debut record, Egon Bondy's...Banned is stunning, a challenging but endlessly inspired set of songs. "Zacpa" begins with some loose twiddling and organ playing that transitions into a vocal not far from the type of minor key melodies John Lennon was perfecting at the time. At the 3 minute mark, a brash horn section and things really start getting good. The song immediately kicks into a cool bass/drum groove reminiscent of Portishead, of all things, and a squawking saxophone soloes into the void, finally giving way to an eloquently atonal organ solo. Moving back into familiar tonal territory, the song ends with one final vocal refrain and the earlier horn figure. It's one of the shining examples of the emerging art rock movement, pushing boundaries and bopping heads at the same time.

14. Ignatz- "Rebound From the Cliff" from Ignatz
Another new artist with a surprisingly confident, assured debut album, Ignatz hails from Belgium, I believe, and makes some of the most interesting, original folk drone music I've heard. "Rebound From the Cliff" is bursting at the seams with textures and movement. The circular guitar swells, the awkwardly naive vocals, the little repetitive riffs that pop up here and there, the serpentine keyboard melody near the end of the song- all combine to creative a watery, dreamlike abstraction. The album is quite diverse as the style goes, too- there is "Echo All Acoustically Correct" nothing but sparse acoustic guitar picking and bursts of static, juxtaposed against the creepy lo-fi folk of "The Radiant Sheen", and more conventional minimalist drone as in "All My Hopes Have Collapsed". Highly recommended; I imagine fans of Phil Elvrum's more experimental moments will find something to like here.

15. Brast Burn- "Debon, Pt. 2" (excerpt) from Debon
Another Japanese band with very little information online. I think the reissue of their sole record even says something like "Please contact us if you have any information about this band" in the sleeve. Along with Karuna Khyal, which seems to be another incarnation of the same band, Brast Burn made some of the most interesting music of the early '70s. In two sidelong tracks, they explore ethnic folk, sound collage, and, of course, the good ole' psychedelic freakout. A variety of instruments and textures float in and out of the mix and draw the listener into a world out of time, making me think equally of things ancient and contemporary. The segment of side 2 I've included here is the high point of the album for me, a haunting vocal line repeated ad infinitum over a primitive beat and what sounds like a fuzzed synthesizer; it's a strange mix of old and new sounds, but it works incredibly well. I'm not sure what the lyrics are, but it sounds makes me think of a funeral procession scored by Toru Takemitsu, from a film directed by Masaki Kobayashi (Hara-kiri) or Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu). Thank goodness we still have access to this album.

16. The Jacks- "Stop the Clock" from Vacant World
A late '60s Japanese band that made garage rock on their own terms, not really sounding like anything from Nuggets. Their album Vacant World is quite good, full of doom-laden ballads and throaty blues rock. "Stop the Clock" makes heavy use of spacey vibraphones and sounds like something that might have come out on New Zealand's Flying Nun record label in the '80s. Like the previous song, I have no idea what they're saying, but the heartfelt simplicity of the vocals carries a note of post-tragedy reflection. Despite the melancholy of it, it's the perfect song to end a long, difficult day with, leaving the past in the past, and hoping for better things to come.

Download: http://www.sendspace.com/file/tqazzy
Sorry, it's a big file, but I couldn't bring myself to exclude anything.