skullflower - exquisite fucking boredom

First release in 7 YEARS from mighty UK heavy/drone/psych gods Skullfower. Matthew Bower (Sunroof!, Total) resurrects his slumbering free-noise behemoth with this gorgeous blast of hypnotic, pummeling, droning crush, equal parts shimmering skree, damaged motorik rhythms, murky and druggy psych-rock riffs and swirling fuzzed-out guitars.

Exquisite Fucking Boredom's core is the epic, expansive and never ending, four part suite 'Celestial Highway', a sludgy sabbathy seventies rock riff, repeated adinfinitum, a dangerously unstable entropic jam whererin the riff slowly drifts apart, sinking into a churning tarpit of abstract whir and hum, gradually mutating into a drifting, throbbing pulse, as warbly synths, chirping birds, and thick washes of dreamy sonic turbulence overtake and subdue any traces of the original riff. Mesmeric and hypnotic and totally otherworldly. Like UK mantric rockers Loop, on repeat play, while your boombox runs out of batteries, or a sweeter, prettier version of Dutch minimal metal gods Gore, or imagine Steve Reich or Terry Riley composing for Black Sabbath.

The remaining tracks retain their Krautrockish propulsion but drift closer to Sunroof! territory, loosening the psychedelic electronic riffscapes from their moorings, letting them float lazily through a gauzy soundscape of buzzing melodies, luminous shards of shimmering feedback and rumbling waves of drowsy, druggy drone. Like Neu! or Kraftwerk, doped up and drifting off, run through a bank of cheap effects, and broadcast out of an underwater leslie speaker, the lo-fi rhythms suffocating under a thick blanket of gossamer guitars and sonic detritus.

Hypnotic and savage, dreamy and otherworldly, quixotic and godlike! -tUMULt records

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lol

guru guru - ufo

Guru Guru's debut album shows why the band, even if it never reached the levels of appreciation and influence the likes of Can or Neu! did, still maintained a healthy reputation over the moons for its early work. Opening number "Stone In" has a quite appropriate title for a starting track -- it is wonderfully tripped out, to be sure, and if Manuel Gottsching was more of a guitar god, Genrich kicks up a lot of frazzled noise. The principle of the Trepte/Neumeier rhythm section seems to have been "find loud weird grooves and then play them, sometimes chaotically." Again, they aren't Can's wickedly effective combination of Holger Czukay and Jaki Leibezeit, but they're not just falling over themselves either. The title track is the most memorable song, almost entirely eschewing conventional rhythm for an inward collapse of feedback and noise that sounds either like the Stooges' "LA Blues" even more strung out or early Main with a conventional band lineup. "Girl Call" and "Next Time See You at the Dalai" (a classic example of a just-groansome enough Krautrock pun that only Germans seemed to love) makes for a good combination, the increasing freakiness of the one leading into the start-stop chug and explosion of the latter. Genrich really gets to show off a bit on both, demonstrating that there is such a thing as technical ability that doesn't equal pointless fret abuse. "Der LSD-Marsch" is actually the most conventional of the tracks -- while a good-enough slow burn up to a freakout (mostly provided by Neumeier's drum solo), it's too short to be truly epic and not otherwise distinguishable from many similar songs by the likes of Amon Duul II, say. For all that, though, it ends this enjoyable effort well enough.

(allmusic guide)

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Amon Düül II - Yeti

hey i can be hip and awesome and post psych and kraut and weed albums too!!!

The second album by Amon Düül II (not to be confused with the more anarchic radicals Amon Düül), 1970's Yeti, is their first masterpiece, one of the defining early albums of Krautrock. A double album on vinyl (most CD issues have squeezed the two discs onto one CD by cutting three minutes out of "Pale Gallery"; the Captain Trips CD restores it to its full five-minute length), Yeti consists of a set of structured songs and a second disc of improvisations. It's testament to the group's fluidity and improvisational grace that the two albums don't actually sound that different from each other, and that the improvisational disc may actually be even better than the composed disc. The first disc opens with "Soap Shop Rock," a 12-minute suite that recalls King Crimson's early work in the way it switches easily between lyrical, contemplative passages and a more violent, charging sound, and continues through a series of six more songs in the two- to six-minute range, from the ominous, threatening "Archangels Thunderbird" (featuring a great doomy vocal by mono-named female singer Renate) to the delicate, almost folky acoustic tune "Cerberus." The improvisational disc contains only three tracks, closing with a nine-minute stunner called "Sandoz in the Rain" that's considered by many to be the birth of the entire space rock subgenre. A delicate, almost ambient wash of sound featuring delicately strummed phased acoustic guitars and a meandering flute, it's possibly the high point of Amon Düül II's entire career.

(allmusicguide)

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more will come :)

war exists and AIDS exists but not in my first-world

the last ten moments of pure, unadulterated joy:

1. being pushed in the pool by soccer girls at a team dinner
2. walking through sam's club with my buddy's kids while he and his wife shopped
3. finding wart-ish objects on my genitalia three nights after a drunken, blurry one-night stand (i think?)
4. defeating chivas of mcminnville 8-2 in adult league soccer action
5. completing a new york times crossword for the first time
6. consuming unhealthy amounts of alcohol before previously mentioned one-night stand-ish type thing
7. riffin'
8. wikipedia search results for: fordyce's spots
9. "is that fuckin' putnam county? holy shit! that's so cool, man."
10. "are you rolling a cigarette...?"

what is my life coming to? or, better yet, to where is it diverging? is my consciousness splitting? can this happen? please? i'll do anything? i'll do anything to be cool again? but i'm already somewhat cool, right, if i can have a drunken, blurry one-night stand-ish type thing? at least being attractive to 46 year old women is somewhat cool, right? right? right? left?