squealermag-blog

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SIGN YOUR INITIALS TO ANY BAND YOU PLAN ON WRITING UP AND DELETE ON PUBLICATION.

- Rabbits - ??

- Shotmaker - JV

- Thulebasen

- Eric Copeland

- Ghostkeeper

- Dem Hunger

- Plaid - DG

- Ketamines

-The Walkmen (new record scheduled 2012)

http://boomkat.com/collections/charts-2011-boomkat-top-100-albums

- Library Tapes side project thing

- Anthony Pateras

- 

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:(

Sorry kids. We really can't do this any more. Full-time jobs are taking up too much time and energy, sadly. We're still listening though.

We'll leave everything up in case there's any to-be discovered material hidden away in the archives, but no new news.

Your friends,

sqlr

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Incantation

A return, of sorts. We apologise for going off-duty over the past month, and would like to offer some classical US death metal by way of re-introduction.

Incantation's devastatingly powerful 1992 debut Onward to Golgotha is rightly regarded as a release that defined and shaped death metal. Formed of brutal hammer blasts of break-neck pace combined with a suffocatingly slow crush, Onward to Golgotha sits alongside similarly-timed releases by Death, Autopsy, Obituary, Immolation (et. al.) as an extraordinarily skilled and compositionally labyrinthine foundation of the genre.

Now over 20 years old - though as consistently vital as ever - a whole generation of metal bands frequently revisit the forceful and weighty delivery of destructive musicality here. Listen in full above.

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Sabbatico

We're out for a bit. But we'll be back.

Check this out in the meantime:

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Top 10 of 2012: Jefre Cantu-Ledesma

Our last post of 2012 accidentally becomes our first post of 2013 due to lethargy and the all-enveloping Christmas period taking over.

Delayed, but not forgotten, another Squealer-favourite Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - formerly of San Francisco's genre-defining Tarentel and owner of the superb Root Strata label - here contributes his list of the year just passed:

Suzanne Ciani – Voices Of Packaged Souls Roe Enney - All Or Nuthin (Rhyme Or Reason) The Durutti Column - Short Stories for Pauline Lee Gamble - Diversions 1994-1996 & Dutch Tvashar Plumes Aaron Dilloway & Jason Lescalleet - Grapes & Snakes Andrew Chalk - Forty-Nine Views In Rhapsodies' Wave Serene Jandek – Maze of The Phantom Woo – It’s Cozy Inside Gareth Williams & Marie Currie – Flaming Tunes Laurie Spiegel – The Expanding Universe

Jefre also kindly put together a stunning mixtape for us earlier this year. Listen here.

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Top 10 of 2012: Raime

Another of our picks for albums of 2012 with their fantastic Quarter Turns over a Living Line LP (Blackest Ever Black), London-based electronica duo Raime contribute their list:

Gnod - Shitting Through The Eye Of The Needle KTL - V Cannibal Movie - Avorio Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe - M'Bondo Version Wolfgang Voigt – Rückverzauberung 6 Oren Ambarchi - Sagittarian Domain Egisto Macchi - Voix Mika Vainio / Kevin Drumm / Axel Dörner / Lucio Capece - Venexia Dickie Landry - 15 Saxaphones Earth – Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II

Raime are written up here. (Please N.B. that the first paragraph is not specifically about Raime. We approached them, not vice versa).

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Top 10 of 2012: kandodo

While we have already opted to publish featured artists' end of year lists as opposed to our own, we will commit to picking our favourite record of 2012.

Bristol's kandodo (aka former Heads member Simon Price) and his self-titled debut album of dark, cascading, Africanised drones (released in June by Thrill Jockey) were an easy choice for our top spot. Nothing else quite like kandodo has reached our ears this year.

Price has contributed his own top ten for 2012 as part of our ongoing artists' choices feature. "In no particular order":

- Om - Advaitic Songs - Moon Duo - Circles - John Carpenter - The Fog OST - Witch - We Intend To Cause Havoc! - Dylan LeBlanc - Cast The Same Old Shadow - Grimes - Visions - Swans - The Seer - Delta Swamp Rock Volume 2 - Tame Impala - Lonerism - Can - The Lost Tapes

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Top 10 of 2012: Thulebasen

Here at Squealer, we are under no pretence of self-importance. We are aware that our audience is far more interested in what the artists that we feature have to say than the nerdy "journalists" that put together the write-ups on those musicians.

With this in mind, we will likely eschew a record selection to represent our interest in the releases of 2012, and instead feature the picks of the artists whose work is clearly far more important.

We begin with Copenhagen's Thulebasen. Featured here, and the first of plenty:

- Muzz - Light show (CS) - Lamburg Tony - Noise Dance - Lucky Dragons - Publicity Reform - Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland - The Attitude Era - Father Murphy - Anyway Your Children Will Deny It - THEESatisfaction - Awe Naturale - Daughn Gibson - All Hell - U.S. Girls - GEM - Girlseeker - 1-800-Greed - Lower - Someone's Got It in for Me/But There Has to Be More

N.B. The band "put in the link for Muzz because its hard to find and its extremely amazing."

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DIIV

Admittedly, we have featured DIIV before, though this was before the release of their fantastic Oshin LP (Captured Tracks, 2012) and - more importantly - before bandleader Zachery Cole Smith changed the name of his project from Dive to the more obtuse DIIV. So, theoretically, we are featuring Dive once and DIIV once, and are doing our hardest not to break our own one-feature-only rule.

Oshin surfaced in June of this year. It is a Anglophilic record, full of off-beat snare hits, floating guitar lines and pressing bass melodies that reference Joy Division and New Order with ear-piquing nods to Neu! and Cole Smith's previous project Beach Fossils. Essentially, this recipe leaves us with an endearing and fruitful combination of the familiar and the contemporary. It offers plenty, encouraging repeat listens in its multi-dimensional swirls and heavily masked lyrics, but it is not so alien as to require deconstruction or method.

Recommended.

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Duets for Abdelrazik

We approached Canadian musician / campaigner Stefan Christoff's Duets for Abdelrazik project with some caution. Though the grounding moral message here is solid and valuable, and the list of musical collaborators respected, we have found that a politically vocal musical release can potentially manifest its own downfall. Despite strong moral intentions, musical projects can suffer from allowing the music itself to take a back seat, ending up contributing little to either cause. Not as a rule, of course, but occasionally "protest music" is in danger of qualifying as neither.

Happily, Duets for Abdelrazik does not fall into such traps. Born from the same protest circles and philosophies as the grassroots campaigns that Montreal has been so involved with and protective of, the musical performers here also span the city's pivotal scenes and artists. Recording took place at the near-legendary Hotel2Tango - home of Godspeed You Black Emperor! and the Constellation label - and features names that appear on several guest credits of important Montrealer albums.

The pieces are centred around Christoff's piano, and - as the title would suggest - feature a guest performer in harmony and foil to Christoff's lines. The results are (morally speaking) reflective of the anguish, outrage, resilience and fraternity that political victim Abousfian Abdelrazik went through during his forced struggle between the Canadian and Sudanese governments. It also, crucially, acts as a crier, demanding that Abdelrazik's troubles are not forgotten or ignored.

Musically speaking, the record is similarly evocative, combining elements and timbres of the melancholy and the exotic. One of two leaked tracks, the piece we feature below sees Sam Shalabi duet on oud with Christoff, a serpentine, Eastern melody that sits at odds with the comforting purity of the untreated piano, but spiriting the track into hauntingly beautiful territory.

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Apprentice Destroyer

The chief difficulty that we face in writing up San Francisco's Apprentice Destroyer is that this is is all we really know about him / her / them. Musical quality and an eccentric (lack of) back-story aside, several fruitless attempts at searching for further explanation have yielded us with information enough to write three definite sentences: the name of the project, its location, and the assertion that their self-titled debut release was recorded between 2009 and 2012 at Guitar Center on portable equipment (see: Apprentice Destroyer's bandcamp page above).

Baffling stuff, sure, but when accompanied with a musical output that references Eno, Robert Fripp, Tangerine Dream, Dustin Wong, Don Caballero, Joy Division, Ulver within three modest-length, untitled instrumental tracks, the information shortage does little to hold back the intrigue and interest.

Certainly worth some detective work.

<a href="http://apprenticedestroyer.bandcamp.com/album/apprentice-destroyer" data-mce-href="http://apprenticedestroyer.bandcamp.com/album/apprentice-destroyer">Apprentice Destroyer by APPRENTICE DESTROYER</a>

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Thulebasen

Having featured Iceage, Lower and Vår on our blog already, the time feels right to extend our remit out even further into Copenhagen's fertile underground punk scene. Branching upwards and outwards from the (relatively) straighter punk centre-pieces of the close-knit circle of bands, scene representatives Escho Records recently released Thulebasen's fantastic Gate 5 album.

Thulebasen are unlike Iceage and Lower in many respects. The latter's brittle punk rock references Joy Division, Birthday Party: dark, sneering influences who even underwrite major chords when they infrequently appear. Thulebasen, as an antidote, are neither saccharine nor summery; not a diet interpretation of their harsher siblings, but a freakier, more psychedelic foil. The foundation on punk is still there, of course, but theirs has been cross-bred with the acidity of Grateful Dead or Jefferson Airplane and the reverb-heavy spaciousness of Young Marble Giants.

Thulebasen are a superb live band; be sure to catch them on their upcoming dates alongside Ice Age.

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Raime

Very rarely, Squealer writers are personally approached by band members who have seen through our (very thin) veil of anonymity, and are persuaded to listen to their own music. An even rarer occurrence is that that encouragement actually yields interest on our part. The rule (or at least the trend) tends to be that the more vocal band members play in less interesting bands.

But, a recent conversation swerved the trend. With enough humility, modesty and restraint to inspire intrigue, London's Raime allowed us to tease information on their band and their upcoming release Quarter Turns Over A Living Line (Nov 2012, Blackest Ever Black) from them at a chance meeting, and led us eventually to this write-up.

Subscribing to a dark, post-Photek / pre-Burial school of repetitive, noise-based electronica, Raime's vocabulary is of sizzling, screeching industrial sound design and distorted rhythmic hypnosis. In a very different sense to their immediate peers Actress, patten and so on, Raime's beat-count tends to be agonisingly slow, crafting a horror movie-score of dischord through metallic samples.

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MY DISCO

Australian three-piece MY DISCO are another band who really caught our attention as a live outing. Much like our recent write-up of Nately's Whore's Kid Sister, the recorded material has existed somewhere on the outer rings of our interest since initially hearing the band - always intrigued but rarely inspired. However - also like NWKS - MY DISCO hit Brighton's Sticky Mike's Frog Bar whilst touring for a late-night test of early-homegoers' patience and staying power, and their music suddenly, instantly fell completely into place for us.

Sitting somewhere awkwardly between black metal, dub and post-rock, MY DISCO are relentlessly repetitive; by the end of their first track and the beginning of the second, it is almost a shock to the system to hear a new chord wrenched from Ben Andrews' aluminium guitar neck. Fed by plenty of cosmically-intricate counter melodies between the Andrews brothers and loose, delayed snare drum, full length Little Joy (2011, Temporary Residence) and new single 'Wrapped Coast' (2012, Temporary Residence) are fascinating examples of how to marry hugely divergent influences into a powerfully dark vortex that recalls Crescent, Tortoise, ROME, Killing Joke and pure black metal with a intense, reductive minimalism.

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Fimber Bravo

Despite steel pans genuinely nestling near the top of Squealer's "favourite instrument" list (don't worry; we won't bore anyone with the publication of this list), we hope to be forgiven for only recently uncovering the work of master player Fimber Bravo. A Trinidadian repatriate now residing in London, Bravo's steel pan work is largely documented in the "additional performers" sleeve notes of better-known musicians hiring his skills: Hot Chip, Morcheeba et. al. He is also visibly politically active, forming civil rights and Black arts bodies in the UK.

Existing musical and philosophical credentials aside, Bravo has recently re-surfaced with the first few glimpses into his forthcoming solo LP Con-Fusion (Moshi Moshi, Jan 2013), already a record to get excited about, months before its release. Trailed by leaked track 'Life After Doomsday', the material here is the type to silence even the loudest speaking voice around the hi-fi. Fittingly named, 'Life After Doomsday' - a collaboration with London-based Japanese producer Zongamin - is a dark, angry mourn; a heavy synth journey that retains a sense of melancholia and dread even when juxtaposed against Bravo's colourful steel pan splashes.

A reason to look forward to 2013.

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Circle Of Ouroborus

Though Joy Division and black metal may share plenty of stylistic elements (and fans, no doubt), it is rare that a band can be described using those two marker points alone. Tampere, Finland's Circle of Ourborous - a two-piece consisting of vocalist Klemi and multi-instrumentalist Avatar - however, attract both with a fair degree of accuracy.

Like Liturgy, Deafheaven, Krallice and countless other experimental "black metal" bands before them, there is controversy surrounding Circle of Ourborous' inclusion in the genre. Clearly, it is only the "kvlt"-friendly purists that voice these reservations, but the distance between Ourborous and, say, early Mayhem is palpable in just as many respects as the similarities. There are no blast beats, but there is an Arctic darkness; there are no painfully fuzzed-out guitar bursts, but there are terrifying, tormented howls from Klemi. Combined with the brittle timbres and synth-bolstered alienation of Manchester's early 80's post-punk scene, the results sound quite unlike anything else currently operating.

New album The Lost Entrance Of The Just (2012, Handmade Birds) is (roughly) the band's 30th release, but is claimed to be the closest representation of their ambitious ideals so far.

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Nately's Whore's Kid Sister

Newcastle-based 5-piece Nately's Whore's Kid Sister (named after an unnamed character from Catch-22) excel in distancing themselves from their own influences. It is fairly easy, of course, to throw out a list of names with a band's press release, but in many cases this serves more as a hindrance than a benefit, muddying the waters or forcing a larger expectation.

NKWS mention several names, sure, but their music is more a distant relative of the collective middle ground of atmospheres offered by the band's music marker points than music devices borrowed from them. The weed-hazed repetition of Sleep, the twin galaxies of light and dark that Bjork so effortlessly jumps between (both names NKWS mention), the crushing, suffocating heaviness of Grief or early Boris and the dirtiness of Delta blues (Squealer's additions) - Nately's Whore's Kid Sister act like a Venn diagram between everything here, albeit one coloured with greys and black as opposed to the science-textbook primary colours.

A small shortcoming is that the longer form collections - self-released debut EP Ribs and its demo predecessor - occasionally seem like expansions of strong, solid material with weaker pieces. Forgiveable, certainly, but the sign of a potential shining through the immediate delivery.

<a href="http://nwkidsister.bandcamp.com/album/ribs" data-mce-href="http://nwkidsister.bandcamp.com/album/ribs">Ribs by Nately's Whore's Kid Sister</a>