Ygolonac - Strange Aeons

Apologies for the unexplained absence for the preceding fortnight, gentle ones, but rest assured that posting will resume with gusto upon the arrival of the new year.  In the meantime, share with me this horrid lump of coal that I found in my inbox.  Another mad one man metal band in the mode of Brown Jenkins or Aarni, this Ygolonac seems fixated on the fictional grimoires of the Mythos, from what can be deciphered from the song titles and the band name.  Ygolonac is the lord of the perverse and sadistic, the only Old One outside of insidious Nyarlathotep capable of taking human form, and notorious for the ravenous mouths screaming for blood from his palms and groin, traditionally cast in the role of curating the library of suppressed tomes which tend to drive mundane minds into madness.  Ramsey Campbell's brutal and bitterly funny "Cold Print" is perhaps the finest Lovecraftian story produced in the seventies, and while the retro vibe of this nasty debut is probably meant to transcend time and space, I can sense a little disco cokestache under all the noise, maybe just slowed down 800x.

Down at the Bookstore

The Mummies - Play Their Own Records!

The Mummies were the ultimate lo-fi garage punk noise act, partially a nutty monster novelty group but also the best band playing in the style, hands down.  There's a lot more than just caveman rock here too: surf, bluesy vamps, biker anthems, spooky haunted house themes, instructional dance numbers, and frat rock classics, all smashed up into one glorious fucked up mess.  This first LP is only the beginning of a long stretch of classic material, but it's as good a place to start as any.

Food, Sickles, Girls

Fishing with John

This is the soundtrack to the cult television show "Fishing with John," starring John Lurie.  Taking the loose framework of a PBS nature show and twisting it into a hilarious beatnik riff on culture shock, cryptozoology, manliness, booze, frenetic dancing, and the nature of sport, the six extant episodes stand as one of the weirdest TV experiments ever.  With guests like Tom Waits, Willem Defoe, Dennis Hopper, and Jim Jarmusch, and wild expressionist music by Lurie's many amorphous jazz combos, it's settling nicely right now with the mixture of whiskey and cough syrup fueling your helpless narrator's feverish battle with Mother Nature herself, also nicely reflecting the over-arching theme of the show.  Perhaps tomorrow will find me more lucid, or perhaps floating face down in an icy bog somewhere.

Ahhhhhh.....

Peter Wyngarde - When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head

Tonight we have the mad album When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head by British TV actor Peter Wyngarde.  Originally commissioned by RCA to cash in on his popularity, it was released and quickly withdrawn a week later.  Presumably nobody had actually listened to it prior to its release.  Instead of the requested set of easy listening tunes, Wyngarde delivered a series of wild, pervy spoken word rants, backed by wild free-form noise jazz, tribal drums, lustful moaning, and shouts of exultation.  It's practically impossible to describe the myriad fragments sufficiently, and it boggles the mind to think of how this got made in the first place.  One of a kind, for sure.

Hippie and the Skinhead

Pussy Galore - Exile on Main St

Partially a sneering repsonse to Sonic Youth's continual threat to cover the Beatles' White Album and partially a genuine love letter to the original from Pussy Galore guitarist Neil Hagarty, Exile on Main St is a nasty, profanity-filled screaming match recorded on a shitty boombox and released on limited cassette (and eventually vinyl), a squealing, out-of-tune hate fuck for your tender ear-holes. 

Turd on the Run

The "Priest" They Called Him

It's been a moment since I dropped any William S. Burroughs material, so have this ten inch record of Uncle Bill reading his excellent short "The "Priest" They Called Him" with the squealing guitar background created by one Kurt Cobain.  A harrowing tale of a junkie at Christmas, a pair of severed legs, and the immaculate fix, punctuated by Cobain's "Silent Night"-based noise wall, this little miracle is as ultimately hopeful as it is nauseating.  Sweat it out.

Fight tuberculosis, folks...

Demon Fuzz - Afreaka!

Demon Fuzz is another one of those bands whose freaky, forward-looking sounds were far enough ahead of their time that they achieved little success and remain obscure outside of crate-digging DJs continually in search of more esoteric and obscure grooves.  While ostensibly being a funk band, Demon Fuzz combines jazzy, menacing dissonance with prog and psych tendencies and a soulful backbone that keeps even the strangest moments grounded.  The opening instrumental, "Past Present and Future," opens with a muted guitar figure that could've been lifted from a Fugazi record twenty years in the future, shortly followed by the sly insinuation of horns and a martial rhythm that unfolds into full-on brass band swagger and then dissolves into a Fun House-era Stooges freakout.  The vocals don't arrive until track two, the spidery "Disillusioned," but aptly named crooner Smokey Adams expresses righteous anger over a bed of organ, harmonica, and buzzing trumpet.  There's a few more killer originals and covers of the mandatory "I Put a Spell on You" and a song from the British Invasion combo Electric Flag, rounded out with another expressionistic instrumental capper.  Truly freaky.

Mercy (variation 1)

Melvins - The Undisputed Renegade Spaghetti Garage Pin-Ups

Here's another fairly thorough all-covers bootleg, this time from the mighty Melvins. Flipper, Wipers, Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Wendy Carlos, Fleetwood Mac, Malfunkshun, Warlock Pinchers even...something for everybody, mangled and stomped on. Interestingly, though this album is two full-length discs, many of The Melvins' better known covers don't appear here, perhaps assuming that anybody who would bother with
something this weird already owns them. It's a bit difficult to sit through the entire two hours, but there's tons of mixtape fodder and surprisingly reverent treatment, representing the breadth and depth of their influences.
Jerkin' Krokus

Let the Right One In

Well, let's have a bite of this excellent, expansive soundtrack to one of my favorite newer movies, composed by scholarly Swede Johan Söderqvist. Anyone who has seen the film will no doubt remember the haunting dirge-like drones punctuated by slashes of noise and splatters of dissonance every time violence erupts onscreen. Evoking the icy chill and desolation of the movie and also the weight of sadness and inevitability, this wonderful, horrible soundtrack is for nocturnal use only.
Then We Are Together

Philosophy of the World

I'm a bit surprised that I haven't posted this already, as much as I've talked about it and compared other weird albums to it - so, here we go. The Shaggs were three New Hampshire sisters coerced into forming a "rock band" by their domineering and possibly unhinged father, who not only forbade them from taking lessons or listening to actual music but also financed and released this bizarre platter, sure they were going to be the next Beatles. The sounds contained within only barely resemble music in the conventional sense, with the guitar and bass playing completely different patterns as the drums wander in and out of sync at random. The sheer originality and naivete are charming, but there is an unsettling undercurrent beneath all the forced good cheer, as if the band were comprised of the children from Village of the Damned. The Shaggs had a bizarre career that I neither have the time nor inclination to dissect here, but this first album stands as a pinnacle of so-called "outsider music" and certainly stretched the boundaries of what could be done with guitar, bass, drums, and a little ambition - talent be damned.
Why do I feel?

RIP Wild Man Fischer

The Monkey and the Donkey

Daniele Luppi - An Italian Story

An Italian Story is a love note to Italian soundtrack music made with many of the core players on such famous films as The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, notably the unmistakeable whistling stylings of Alessandro Alessandroni. The album shifts through diverse moods, from laid back summer hedonism to tense fight music and horrific psychedelia. Composer Luppi became famous for his collaborations with Danger Mouse but this fine little record seems to be out of print, making it Swamp fodder for sure.
Psychovision

Death Grips - Exmilitary

I must admit I don't know a whole hell of a lot about this screaming, scary madman; aside from this album and some stray mp3s there's not much to be heard out there, and he seems deliberately uninterested in any crossover appeal whatsoever. What we have here is lo-fi, homemade, psychedelic, twisted hip-hop with samples from the Ventures, Black Flag, and stranger places. Trippier than the weirdest sizzurp-flavored nightmare and more headache-inducing than cocaine cut with Drano, even at a brief (for hip-hop) fifty minuted running time, Exmilitary feels like a black hole of crazy that you'll never escape from. Don't say you weren't warned.
Blood Creepin

Ythogtha - False Faith

Named for Lin Carter's son of Cthulhu, as presented in "The Dweller in the Tomb," Arizona's black metal monster Ythogtha serves up ten tracks of awful scraping madness (including the most fucked up Black Flag cover of all time) in thirteen minutes. Fans of Bone Awl and the like will enjoy this but frankly their horrid sound is entirely their own. Further pushing the boundaries of taste and listenability, False Faith is a sure-fire way to end Thanksgiving early!
Opener of the Way

Java Java Indonesia Screaming Fuzz

Back just under the wire for a quick post. Here we have a surf/psych/weirdness comp from Indonesia, full of wild, wacky tiki rock for the space-age caveman in your life. Sorry for the kiss and run but it's time to hibernate after an extended psychedelic weekend. More gibberish tomorrow, gentle reader.
Tinggalkan Ku Sa Orang

Nikki Sudden and Rowland S. Howard - Kiss You Kidnapped Charabanc

Here's another album of unlikely collaborators - Nikki Sudden, front man of the wildly underrated post-punks Swell Maps, and Rowland S. Howard, guitar player of The Birthday Party. Come to think of it, can you call a band post punk when they started in the early 70's? Proto-post-punk, does that work?
Nonetheless, no post-punk this; instead we have dirge-like acoustic jangling stabbed through with sinister two-note electrical stings from Howard, with each man trading off vocals. Not many lovey-dovey duets here, sadly. The atmosphere of dread is palpable, with much pregnant weight lurking between the sustained notes, and steadily-rising maddening percussion and ambient racket on certain tracks. Chilling.
Hello Wolf (Little Baby)

Dynamite Masters Blues Quartet - The Essential Sounds From The Far East

Perhaps it's a bit lazy to post two Japanese psych-freak bands in a row, but suppress your internet-bred automatic scorn response and just listen to this fucking thing. Contemporaries with luminary ronin like Guitar Wolf and Thee Michelle Gun Elephant, DMBQ are as gnarly and crazy as either of those bands without sounding anything like them. Heavier than a subway tube full of sarin gas, and wilder than a sake-drunk Godzilla staggering home and farting fire, this album is a hybrid of a more abstract MC5/BellRays joint and a lucid mid-period Boredoms record. Pound pound, scream, pound pound, scream, freak out, wah wah, scream scream, pound. Just like that, the album whirls like a massive wheel, threatening to hop the rail and crash directly into your forehead. Brace yourself.
Mo-Ya Mo-Ya

Karen Black

Named for the actress known for her roles in everything from Easy Rider to Spinal Tap to Pootie Tang, and fronted by horror and porn star Kembra Pfahler, Karen Black (later known as The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black) was a wild art-damaged punk performance art troupe more than an actual band. Their live shows were dominated by body paint, nudity, props, and general chaos and thus the albums tend to be soundtracks that lose some impact out of context. This early seven inch record was released before they had fully developed and so contains two primitive, snarling abstract songs played by barely competent budding musicians. With some Dead Milkmen style in-song banter, Lou Reed speak-singing, Plasmatics power-plod, and Throbbing Gristle scrape, this is a good way to flay your mind open on one of those boring suburban nights. Could be the soundtrack to Kenneth Anger's Grease.
Cleaner than what?

Magic Lantern - At the Mountains of Madness

Remember way back when I was debating making a weekly feature of concept albums based upon At the Mountains of Madness? Well, it's probably a good thing I didn't, as I would have run out of material in a few months and my ability to consistently post anything has waxed and waned with the seasons to the point where I would have forgotten or given up before long anyway. So, in the spirit of keeping it loose-limbed and addle-brained, here's a wild one by psych rock ensemble Magic Lantern. I really know nothing about these guys other than the fact that they're from California, they sound sorta like Hawkwind, and they're probably hipsters but since they don't pretend to play heavy metal nobody gives a shit. This is two ten-plus minute songs that reverberate like the tiny army of UFOs buzzing around inside my skull, futilely attempting to escape back into their own parallel universe.
skreeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Oh, and presumably you're aware of this situation, but are prepared to wait strange aeons...

Trike

Woof, Swamplings! Holy Shit! Just freshly back from the bar, humoring a geographically proximate birthday boy, who wanted to go see a "party rock and roll" band. I lasted perhaps thirty minutes and three double shots into an indescribably awful "rap"/screamo hybrid abortion before slithering out the back door and into the comfort of my little happy place. I'm aware that this style of music exists, though my experience is limited to brief horrified fragments from Metal Inquisition videos. However, I was not aware the phenomena had encroached this far into Swamp territory, let alone performed by grown-ass men visibly older than myself. Horror!

As a psychic enema, let us peruse this nasty and inscrutable album by one-man band Bob Log III, late of the mighty Doo Rag. A sloppy cocktail of blues, garage-rock, titty obsession, noise, jumpsuits, vaccuum tubes, and cheap whiskey, Mr. Log III's second album comes on like the runt of a pack of giant squid left alone to figure out Hasil Adkins tunes on King Buzzo's down-tuned-to-oblivion guitar with only a stack of Barely Legals and yesterday's bacon and eggs as sustenance for all eternity, captured by Richard Nixon's Oval Office tape recorder and shot into space. Much more sensible than what the kids listen to these days, yes?
Clap Your Tits