Wednesday, January 11, 2017
Sultans - (2004) Shipwrecked CD
Shipwrecked is John Reis in stripped-down rock-and-roll command mode: no horn-section grandeur, no sprawling Rocket From The Crypt mythology, no extra chrome. The Sultans take the Reis vocabulary and boil it down to a lean, fast, dirty machine: guitar, bass, drums, hooks, sneer, sweat, and songs that know exactly when to get out of the room.
Released by Swami in 2004, Shipwrecked was the band’s second album and, for a long time, a CD-only object. That matters. This was not originally a deluxe vinyl monument or a retrospective artifact. It was a compact, direct blast from the Swami universe, carrying that San Diego rock-and-roll intelligence where punk energy, garage economy, power-pop hooks, and 1970s bite all snap into place without fuss. The songs sound casual only because the craft is so deep.
The title fits the mood. Shipwrecked is full of motion, but it is not polished highway music. It feels like the van broke down, the show still happened, and everyone came back with better stories because of it. The record’s charm is in that rough confidence: short songs, sharp titles, a little romantic wreckage, a little comic bitterness, and a rhythm section that keeps everything moving like it has already been told to pack up and leave.
As a personal rip, this post carries extra ache. A CD once owned, played, transferred, posted, and later sold becomes a small lesson in how collections change shape over time. The physical copy may be gone, but the rip preserves the encounter: the disc, the Swami imprint, the moment it passed through your hands, the decision to keep the sound moving even after the object moved on. Shipwrecked is a record about damage and momentum, so maybe that afterlife suits it. Some ships sink. Some leave wreckage bright enough to follow.
Magnog - 1997 - More Weather 2xCD
More Weather is a perfect title for Magnog because the music does not feel composed so much as gathered from atmosphere. These recordings came from the band’s home-recorded jam archive, and that origin matters. Nothing here feels rushed toward song form. The pieces drift, thicken, dissolve, and reappear, guided by guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, delay, and the patient confidence of musicians willing to let a moment become a landscape.
Magnog sat beautifully in the Kranky universe of the mid-1990s: post-rock before the term hardened, space rock without costume, drone without total stasis, psychedelia without retro pageantry. The trio’s connection to the same Pacific Northwest air as Hovercraft and Jessamine helps explain the sound, but More Weather has its own soft gravity. It is less confrontational than noise, less polished than studio psych, and more open-ended than most rock records. It feels like a room slowly filling with cloud.
The double-CD length is important. More Weather does not argue for itself in a compact statement. It sprawls. Short fragments sit beside long exploratory pieces, and the record gains power from that unevenness. Some passages feel like full transmissions; others feel like weather notes, small pressure readings from a private system. That makes the album feel closer to an archive than a conventional follow-up. It is a selected field of recordings, not a single hallway with exits clearly marked.
This being your rip adds another layer. Kranky’s original CD object was already a preservation act, gathering home tapes into an official release. A personal FLAC rip from the 2xCD keeps that chain moving: home recording to label artifact to private archive to public post. For music this atmospheric, that transfer history feels especially fitting. More Weather was always about traces, drift, and suspended time. The post lets the clouds keep moving.