LR is another project from Loke Rahbek, also one of the main members from the well-known label Posh Isolation. I will be reviewing his record called “The Fragility Of Happiness”.
The first track starts with very spacious, wood sounding percussion (with much reverb from the space it was recorded in) and upcoming and fading static noise. Later on, a high ranged tone comes in, to be also joined by junk noise. It’s not really messy, but all well controlled actually. The second track, “America Disfigured”, has some soothing soundscapes, but quickly gets darker with very eerie power electronics, mesmerizing drones and cool sounding vocals, followed by screeching, rasp feedback intervals and harsh noise. “The Wife Is The Head Of The Husband As Christ Is The Head Of The Church”, the third track, (has a very long title but is a very short track) has some messing around with objects and a tone dial-like loop. The fourth one, “Olympia Dies Soon”, begins with a monotonous tone, maybe from a guitar. Whispering vocals, object noises and waved, high ranged tones join in later. On the background are some nice low ranged, dark loops going on. It is followed by “The Happening Casued Public Hysteria 1970”, which has a dark and deep wind, distant bass sequencers and frantic percussion. Later on they are followed by factory noises and all kinds of synth noises. A very nice track, with a old school feeling to it. The last track “Sabella”, has a very filthy and lofi sound, maybe a field recording. Mournful guitar tunes set in a very melancholic mood, joined by vocals. The field recording noise and vocals suddenly disappear, and the moodfull tunes are the only ones left to close of this mind shaking record.
I really enjoyed this album. It has everything you want it to have: dark, unsettling moods, rawness and freshness in sound. Listened outdoors, it gives a truly morbid and fascinating look on our society of today.
--------------------------------------------------- Huge fan of this. Between the FFH LP that came out this year and this are some of the best PE/noise to come out in a while. I would also say this is LR's best work too. This isn't as fierce as the newest FFH, Make Them Understand, or as noisy as the new Bizarre Uproar, Perverse Bizarre Humiliation, both albums I strongly recommend, but it's in the middle between them. I'm done explaining but you should buy this. I think it's sold out from Posh Isolation direct but there are probably a few places stateside getting them, don't miss out.
Black Sabbath's debut album is the birth of heavy metal as we now know it. Compatriots like Blue Cheer, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple were already setting new standards for volume and heaviness in the realms of psychedelia, blues-rock, and prog rock. Yet of these metal pioneers, Sabbath are the only one whose sound today remains instantly recognizable as heavy metal, even after decades of evolution in the genre. Circumstance certainly played some role in the birth of this musical revolution -- the sonic ugliness reflecting the bleak industrial nightmare of Birmingham; guitarist Tony Iommi's loss of two fingertips, which required him to play slower and to slacken the strings by tuning his guitar down, thus creating Sabbath's signature style. These qualities set the band apart, but they weren't wholly why this debut album transcends its clear roots in blues-rock and psychedelia to become something more. Sabbath's genius was finding the hidden malevolence in the blues, and then bludgeoning the listener over the head with it. Take the legendary album-opening title cut. The standard pentatonic blues scale always added the tritone, or flatted fifth, as the so-called "blues note"; Sabbath simply extracted it and came up with one of the simplest yet most definitive heavy metal riffs of all time. Thematically, most of heavy metal's great lyrical obsessions are not only here, they're all crammed onto side one. "Black Sabbath," "The Wizard," "Behind the Wall of Sleep," and "N.I.B." evoke visions of evil, paganism, and the occult as filtered through horror films and the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and Dennis Wheatley. Even if the album ended here, it would still be essential listening. Unfortunately, much of side two is given over to loose blues-rock jamming learned through Cream, which plays squarely into the band's limitations. For all his stylistic innovations and strengths as a composer, Iommi isn't a hugely accomplished soloist. By the end of the murky, meandering, ten-minute cover of the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation's "Warning," you can already hear him recycling some of the same simple blues licks he used on side one (plus, the word "warn" never even appears in the song, because Ozzy Osbourne misheard the original lyrics). (The British release included another cover, a version of Crow's "Evil Woman" that doesn't quite pack the muscle of the band's originals; the American version substituted "Wicked World," which is much preferred by fans.) But even if the seams are still showing on this quickly recorded document, Black Sabbath is nonetheless a revolutionary debut whose distinctive ideas merely await a bit more focus and development. Henceforth Black Sabbath would forge ahead with a vision that was wholly theirs.
Paranoid was not only Black Sabbath's most popular record (it was a number one smash in the U.K., and "Paranoid" and "Iron Man" both scraped the U.S. charts despite virtually nonexistent radio play), it also stands as one of the greatest and most influential heavy metal albums of all time. Paranoid refined Black Sabbath's signature sound -- crushingly loud, minor-key dirges loosely based on heavy blues-rock -- and applied it to a newly consistent set of songs with utterly memorable riffs, most of which now rank as all-time metal classics. Where the extended, multi-sectioned songs on the debut sometimes felt like aimless jams, their counterparts on Paranoid have been given focus and direction, lending an epic drama to now-standards like "War Pigs" and "Iron Man" (which sports one of the most immediately identifiable riffs in metal history). The subject matter is unrelentingly, obsessively dark, covering both supernatural/sci-fi horrors and the real-life traumas of death, war, nuclear annihilation, mental illness, drug hallucinations, and narcotic abuse. Yet Sabbath makes it totally convincing, thanks to the crawling, muddled bleakness and bad-trip depression evoked so frighteningly well by their music. Even the qualities that made critics deplore the album (and the group) for years increase the overall effect -- the technical simplicity of Ozzy Osbourne's vocals and Tony Iommi's lead guitar vocabulary; the spots when the lyrics sink into melodrama or awkwardness; the lack of subtlety and the infrequent dynamic contrast. Everything adds up to more than the sum of its parts, as though the anxieties behind the music simply demanded that the band achieve catharsis by steamrolling everything in its path, including its own limitations. Monolithic and primally powerful, Paranoid defined the sound and style of heavy metal more than any other record in rock history.
The shortest album of Black Sabbath's glory years, Master of Reality is also their most sonically influential work. Here Tony Iommi began to experiment with tuning his guitar down three half-steps to C#, producing a sound that was darker, deeper, and sludgier than anything they'd yet committed to record. (This trick was still being copied 25 years later by every metal band looking to push the limits of heaviness, from trendy nu-metallers to Swedish deathsters.) Much more than that, Master of Reality essentially created multiple metal subgenres all by itself, laying the sonic foundations for doom, stoner and sludge metal, all in the space of just over half an hour. Classic opener "Sweet Leaf" certainly ranks as a defining stoner metal song, making its drug references far more overt (and adoring) than the preceding album's "Fairies Wear Boots." The album's other signature song, "Children of the Grave," is driven by a galloping rhythm that would later pop up on a slew of Iron Maiden tunes, among many others. Aside from "Sweet Leaf," much of Master of Reality finds the band displaying a stronger moral sense, in part an attempt to counteract the growing perception that they were Satanists. "Children of the Grave" posits a stark choice between love and nuclear annihilation, while "After Forever" philosophizes about death and the afterlife in an openly religious (but, of course, superficially morbid) fashion that offered a blueprint for the career of Christian doom band Trouble. And although the alternately sinister and jaunty "Lord of This World" is sung from Satan's point of view, he clearly doesn't think much of his own followers (and neither, by extension, does the band). It's all handled much like a horror movie with a clear moral message, for example The Exorcist. Past those four tracks, listeners get sharply contrasting tempos in the rumbling sci-fi tale "Into the Void," which shortens the distances between the multiple sections of the band's previous epics. And there's the core of the album -- all that's left is a couple of brief instrumental interludes, plus the quiet, brooding loneliness of "Solitude," a mostly textural piece that frames Osbourne's phased vocals with acoustic guitars and flutes. But, if a core of five songs seems slight for a classic album, it's also important to note that those five songs represent a nearly bottomless bag of tricks, many of which are still being imitated and explored decades later. If Paranoid has more widely known songs, the suffocating and oppressive Master of Reality was the Sabbath record that die-hard metalheads took most closely to heart.
With 1973's Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, heavy metal godfathers Black Sabbath made a concerted effort to prove their remaining critics wrong by raising their creative stakes and dispensing unprecedented attention to the album's production standards, arrangements, and even the cover artwork. As a result, bold new efforts like the timeless title track, "A National Acrobat," and "Killing Yourself to Live" positively glistened with a newfound level of finesse and maturity, while remaining largely faithful, aesthetically speaking, to the band's signature compositional style. In fact, their sheer songwriting excellence may even have helped to ease the transition for suspicious older fans left yearning for the rough-hewn, brute strength that had made recent triumphs like Master of Reality and Vol. 4 (really, all their previous albums) such undeniable forces of nature. But thanks to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath's nearly flawless execution, even a more adventurous experiment like the string-laden "Spiral Architect," with its tasteful background orchestration, managed to sound surprisingly natural, and in the dreamy instrumental "Fluff," Tony Iommi scored his first truly memorable solo piece. If anything, only the group's at times heavy-handed adoption of synthesizers met with inconsistent consequences, with erstwhile Yes keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman bringing only good things to the memorable "Sabbra Cadabra" (who know he was such a great boogie-woogie pianist?), while the robotically dull "Who Are You" definitely suffered from synthesizer novelty overkill. All things considered, though, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was arguably Black Sabbath's fifth masterpiece in four years, and remains an essential item in any heavy metal collection.
Sabotage is the final release of Black Sabbath's legendary First Six, and it's also the least celebrated of the bunch, though most die-hard fans would consider it criminally underrated. The band continues further down the proto-prog metal road of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and this time around, the synthesizers feel more organically integrated into the arrangements. What's more, the song structures generally feel less conventional and more challenging. There's one significant exception in the blatant pop tune "Am I Going Insane (Radio)," which rivals "Changes" as the most fan-loathed song of the glory years, thanks to its synth-driven arrangement (there isn't even a guitar riff!) and oft-repeated one-line chorus. But other than that song and the terrific album opener, "Hole in the Sky," the band largely eschews the standard verse-chorus format, sticking to one or two melody lines per riffed section and changing up the feel before things get too repetitive. The prevalence of this writing approach means that Sabotage rivals Vol. 4 as the least accessible record of Sabbath's glory years. However, given time, the compositional logic reveals itself, and most of the record will burn itself into the listener's brain just fine. The faster than usual "Symptom of the Universe" is a stone-cold classic, its sinister main riff sounding like the first seed from which the New Wave of British Heavy Metal would sprout (not to mention an obvious blueprint for Diamond Head's "Am I Evil?"). Like several songs on the record, "Symptom" features unexpected acoustic breaks and softer dynamics, yet never loses its drive or focus, and always feels like Sabbath. Less immediate but still rewarding are "Thrill of It All," with its triumphant final section, and the murky, sullen "Megalomania," which never feels as long as its nearly nine and a half minutes. But more than the compositions, the real revelation on Sabotage is Ozzy Osbourne, who turns in his finest vocal performance as a member of Black Sabbath. Really for the first time, this is the Ozzy we all know, displaying enough range, power, and confidence to foreshadow his hugely successful solo career. He saves the best for last with album closer "The Writ," one of the few Sabbath songs where his vocal lines are more memorable than Tony Iommi's guitar parts; running through several moods over the course of the song's eight minutes, it's one of the best performances of his career, bar none. Unfortunately, after Sabotage, the wheels of confusion came off entirely. Yes, there were technically two more albums, but for the non-obsessive, the story of Osbourne-era Sabbath effectively ends here.
We Sold Our Soul for Rock 'n' Roll is a good single-disc collection of many -- but not all -- of Black Sabbath's best tracks from the Ozzy Osbourne era, drawing about half of its material from the group's first two albums, Black Sabbath and Paranoid. That makes it ideal for the fan who only wants one Black Sabbath disc, but those who want to dig deeper should be advised that all six LPs from the Osbourne period contain high-quality items not present here, especially the under-represented Master of Reality and Vol. 4. Still, there's no quibbling with what is here.
Black Sabbath was unraveling at an alarming rate around the time of their second to last album with original singer Ozzy Osbourne, 1976's Technical Ecstasy. The band was getting further and further from their original musical path, as they began experimenting with their trademark sludge-metal sound. While it was not as off-the-mark as their final album with Osbourne, 1978's Never Say Die, it was not on par with Sabbath's exceptional first five releases. The most popular song remains the album closer, "Dirty Women," which was revived during the band's highly successful reunion tour of the late '90s. Other standouts include the funky "All Moving Parts (Stand Still)" and the raging opener, "Back Street Kids." The melodic "It's Alright" turns out to be the album's biggest surprise -- it's one of drummer Bill Ward's few lead vocal spots with the band (Guns N' Roses covered the unlikely track on their 1999 live set, Live Era 1987-1993).
In the Golden Autumn from 1983 kicks off with “Renee”, a driving pop song anchored by a drum machine and shimmering guitar jangle that recalls a rougher version of the Police at their peppiest. Having released several cassette albums prior to this one, Newell was working as a kitchen porter at this point, depressed and broke after a book deal gone bad. If Newell was in a dark place at this point in his life, he was still writing insanely catchy earworm pop songs. From the triumphant acoustic bounce of “A Halloway Person” to the Beatles Revolver-era stomp of “Please Don’t Step on My Rainbow” to the delightfully demented dance rock of “Marilyn on a Train”, In the Golden Autumn is stacked to the brim with hit songs from an alternate universe. Newell sounds genuinely hopeful throughout this album with only “Ghosts in Doorways” and the eerie sonic experiment “The Autumn Cornfield” providing moments of darkness. Newell brings a huge amount of sonic experimentation in to the pop song templates of In the Golden Autumn resulting in some of his most interesting work. “Sandstorm in Paradise” is a maelstrom of guitar meltdowns and vocal freak-outs over an eerie synth line that never takes away from the song’s underlying groove.
A collaboration between Will Isenogle (Merryl) and David Grubba (Enea). These four tracks contain fifty minutes of pure drone and pulsing rhythms in an improvisational setting. This is Prophet-heavy synth bliss.
Western music may live forever, but in the early '60s it had already suffered a decline. The singing cowboys had all but disappeared from the silver screen, and the days when western attire and repertoire were expected of country artists would soon be over. The album format became the new domain of commercial western music, and stalwarts like the Sons of the Pioneers and Tex Ritter continued to release moderately successful albums long after their hitmaking heydays. Eddy Arnold had a number one hit in 1955 with one of his recordings of "Cattle Call," but this 1963 LP was his first all-western album and his first to make the Billboard album charts. In addition to the expected western standards on Cattle Call, Arnold "westernizes" popular songs like "The Wayward Wind," and his smooth baritone fits these songs just as well as that of Rex Allen or Johnny Western. The re-recording of the title track is a haunting beauty with a real yodel rather than the falsetto vocal treatment it often receives, and is the version that is frequently anthologized even though it wasn't a hit. Well made and well remembered, Cattle Call is perhaps the most significant western album of the '60s.
As a consummate display of Atkins' refined finger picking style, this album sets its own lofty standards. A nearly invisible rhythm section underpins Atkins' one-man guitar ensemble with very subtle rhythm support on side one, where each number shines like a finished gem. To cite two examples, "Swedish Rhapsody" has dignity and subtle swing -- the perfect expression of a country gentleman -- and the note selection on "Liza" is astonishingly right every time. On side two, Atkins goes it alone, often leaning toward short, sometimes hokey classical pieces, the exception being "Unchained Melody," which has a simply stated first chorus followed by an echo-delayed overdubbed second chorus. In general, the tunes with rhythm on side one are more ingratiating than the unaccompanied pieces on side two, yet they all display a relaxed, confident musicality at all times.
Chet Atkins Picks the Best is the title of a recording by guitarist Chet Atkins. At the Grammy Awards of 1968, Chet Atkins Picks the Best won the Grammy Award for Best Pop Instrumental Performance.
Heroin were one of the defining innovators in early '90s hardcore. The first 7" record by the band, released in 1991, also marked the first release for upstart label Gravity Records. Operating out of San Diego, CA, Gravity was soon to be one of the preeminent representatives of the '90s emo vanguard. Interesting, innovative, mysterious, and somewhat pretentious in presentation, Heroin made amazingly dynamic landscapes out of one minute blasts of noisy vitriol. While Heroin's influence may be substantial, the back catalog left behind is not. Nearly two years after the initial 7" release, the sole full-length release and final album from the band was offered up in 1993. Matt Anderson went on to engineer and occasionally perform on several releases with artists such as A Minor Forest, Angel Hair, Kari Bunn, and Mohinder. Ron Avila kept hangin' tough with Antioch Arrow, Final Conflict, and Get Hustle.
Known as "the thinking man's hillbillies," Homer Haynes and Jethro Burns got a lot of mileage out of an act that shouldn't have lasted or gone as far as it did, at least on the surface of things. Certainly there were other, far more established duos mining similar turf on the country music circuit, with Lonzo & Oscar leading the way. But Homer & Jethro were far more than just two hayseeds doing cornball send-ups of pop tunes. Underneath the cornpone facade were two top-flight musicians with a decidedly perverse sense of humor and a keen sense of satire.
In his liner notes to this release, John Fahey mentions his desire to have an entire world orchestra in his guitar, Western to Eastern, bagpipes to gamelan. Perhaps it's this mental approach that sets his music so deliciously far apart from other so-called folk guitarists. Requia is essentially in two sections. One is a series of blues-based pieces in line with music he had previously recorded. These include the lovely "Requiem for John Hurt" and a wry "Fight On Christians, Fight On," both of which sound remarkably modern more than three decades after they were recorded. The slightly off-center variations he works on these songs are more vital and gorgeous than any ten of his peers. The second major section here is a four-part suite, "Requiem for Molly," which interpolates tape collages with his guitar playing. These do, in fact, sound a bit dated, largely because his source material ("Deutschland Uber Alles," marching bands, screams, etc.) sounds heavy-handed and trite in retrospect. Still, he anticipates similar usage by Charlie Haden in his Liberation Music Orchestra from the following year, as well as pointing toward wider explorations in that field that Fahey himself would undertake in the future. Requia doesn't rank up with the absolute best of his releases, but contains enough fine and interesting work to recommend it to Fahey fans.
Magic Trick is the '60s psychedelia and '70s folk-influenced band led by the Fresh & Onlys' frontman, Tim Cohen. The group began in San Francisco as Cohen's solo outlet between Fresh & Onlys tour dates, which yielded the albums The Two Sides of Tim Cohen, Laugh Tracks, and Tim Cohen's Magic Trick between 2009 and 2011. When it came time to play the songs live, Cohen tapped James Kim (Kelley Stoltz), Alicia Vanden Heuvel (Aislers Set), and Noelle Cahill, with Magic Trick eventually morphing into a full-time band. The first official Magic Trick release, The Glad Birth of Love, arrived on the Empty Cellar label in 2011, featuring four long-form compositions infused with Cohen's vivid lyrical imagery and sounds ranging from acoustic blues to dense ragas to lush harmonies, followed later that year by the Bad Blood EP for Captured Tracks. Magic Trick jumped to the Hardly Art label in 2012, offering sophomore album Ruler of the Night that June. In 2013 the project found itself on yet another label, with third album River of Souls arriving on Empty Cellar late in the year.
The Glad Birth of Love. This is Tim Cohen's fourth album following his 2009 debut, The Two Sides of Tim Cohen (Empty Cellar), and two full-lengths (Laugh Tracks / Tim Cohen's Magic Trick) and one EP (Bad Blood) on New York's Captured Tracks label. Featuring guest appearances by JOHN DWYER (THEE OH SEES), GRACE COOPER (SANDWITCHES), DIEGO GONZALEZ (GONG, CITAY, JONAS REINHARDT, DRY SPELLS), JOE ROBERTS (BLACK FICTION), AMBER LAMPRECHT (RODRIGUEZ BAND), and STEVE PEACOCK, The Glad Birth of Love is the first Tim Cohen album to not directly bear his name, but the name of his band, MAGIC TRICK. Recorded in a tower at Tim Cohen's home this album marks a departure from his signature radio-ready song craft. The Glad Birth of Love is a 45 minute album composed of four epic long-form compositions saturated with Tim's uncanny pop sensibilities and vivid lyrical imagery. Transitioning seamlessly from sparse acoustic blues, to dense psychedelic bass & oud ragas, to lush layered vocal harmonies this album is a culmination of Tim's work to date.
