- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
Ambiguity hangs from every word that comes out of 25 year old Tahliah Barnett’s mouth. She sings about sex, love, craving, deception—and sounds direct enough doing it—but what she leaves out of her songs is just as important as what she keeps in them. Her accomplice, producer and Yeezus collaborator Arca, couldn't be more sympathetic. He matches her terse, enigmatic professions and weightless melodies with a magic show of slow-motion rhythms and phantom effects, making the best possible use of repetitious forms to emphasize and heighten the drama in her lyrics. EP2 is a pop record, but FKA Twigs and Arca pull it off so spectacularly that it sounds and feels like more.
In interviews, FKA Twigs admits that she likes to work quickly. "I don’t like to labour over things," she says. "In my experience, the first idea is usually the best one." That dedication to immediacy is most obvious in her lyrics. On opener "How’s That" Twigs sings a total of about six lines, most of them delivered in fragments: one question, one incomplete thought that could be read sexually or spiritually, and five moaned exclamations, which are repeated incrementally over a voluminous bed of chromatic noise. With every repetition Twigs and Arca add a level of intensity to the sung lines, giving mundane statements like "you know everything" a cathartic insistence and a special emphasis.
That is basically how the duo operates for the entirety of the record. Arca builds a house of mirrors around Twigs’s sparse lyrics, anchors it with a heavy low end, and adds bits of psychedelic color to help play up the uncertainty and immediacy of the written lines. There’s lots of pitch-bending and lurching rhythms, pulses that build pressure and then fizzle out, and awkward movements that stutter and hesitate before finally getting in line. When the strong climaxes do come, they seep into the mix like an injection of molasses. "Papi Pacify" practically explodes during its chorus; strings spasm and double over the top of each other; the wavering melody of the verse turns suddenly confident and dark; the rhythm picks up a thumping persistence, and Twigs’s voice rises to match Arca’s wave of noise.
It all sounds ecstatic, but Barnett avoids the usual love song clichés and digs into the meat of her subjects, pulling out absurdity, contradiction, and bathos for the attentive. She plays on the violent connotations of pacification, leaves the usual inside-outside dichotomy to be read either perversely or transcendentally, and pens a strange encomium to free love, which might also be a condemnation of objectification and prostitution—sexual or otherwise. Her videos, most of which are either directed or co-directed by her, reinforce that multiplicity. In "Papi Pacify" it isn't clear whether she’s being dominated physically or secretly pulling the strings, and "How’s That" treats the human form like an obstacle to something altogether more fluid.
Nothing is as it seems, which is actually a nice summary of the EP. Twigs and Arca are working with a formula everyone knows. It’s pop music. But the way they handle their material disguises that fact. They know the shape and extent of their art, and rather than playing by the rules or trying to bust it wide open, they’re walking a middle path, finding smart ways to stretch, dye, and warp it. It’s tempting to call EP2 experimental, but it’s clear that FKA Twigs knows exactly what she’s doing.
EP2 can be heard in its entirety on Youtube:
 
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
Stephen Bishop is best known as the man behind Opal Tapes, but he also releases some very deviant and noteworthy music of his own as the deceptively named Basic House.  While both of these albums were released in 2013, they take Bishop's otherworldly wrongness in two very different directions.  Caim in Bird Form is the much weirder (and arguably more unique) of the two, but the more recent Oats compensates for its comparative lack of derangement by incorporating a heavy noise/industrial influence that yields some impressively brutal results.
Caim has one of the more eerie and wrong-footing openings in my recent memory, as Bishop takes the hackneyed trope of using film dialogue to a bizarre extreme with "Aspirin Telepath."  Aside from some murky, throbbing synths, the piece is little more than a tense monologue pitch-shifted and taken wholesale.  Then that is followed by "I Found U," which opens with a crackling, near-incomprehensible answering machine message.  That message ultimately gives way to something resembling music, but just barely: it features only looped swells of static, a repeating hollow thump, and some uneasy echoing and machine noise.  It is certainly a very sparse and minimalist piece, but it is also quite an enjoyable one, recalling some sort of deep subterranean or sci-fi twist on The Loop Orchestra's mad brilliance.
While part of me hoped the album would continue to sound like an enigmatic radio transmission from deep space forever (or just listening to late night television on lots of hard drugs), the album arguably begins in earnest with the third piece "I Don't Remember Acid."  At the very least, it feels structured and has a clear beat/rhythm of sorts.  Bishop's "songs," however, are not techno/dance in any conventional sense–rather, they are a ruined, rusted, sickly sounding, and grotesque caricature of the genre.  Everything sounds scratchy, queasy, and anemic.  That is, except on the rare occasions when it does not, such as with the bassy, spaced-out dub techno anomaly of "64 Bummer."
While that piece is reassuring in that it shows that Stephen could competently make something more straight-forward if he felt like it, I am (predictably) far more impressed with his more outré excursions, like the blearily dissonant haze of "Field 0.08" or the shivering rhythm in "Ultra-Misted" that gradually degenerates into backwards-sounding whooshes.  Or the beat in the title track, which basically sounds like someone rhythmically sharpening a long knife.
My favorite piece, however, is the closing "TV Illness," which sounds like it appropriates the same string piece used in Severed Heads' "Wonder of All the World."  Bishop takes that beautifully melancholy piece in a very different direction though, as it sounds like it is fitfully reverberating through a cavernous parking garage.  It makes for a very hallucinatory and bittersweet listening experience, which is happily reprised as "In Illness Form," a remix by Scuba Death (the sole real difference being the addition of more hissing and a metallic machine-noise rhythm).
If Caim can be said to have a flaw, it would be that the individual pieces are all based on a few simple, repeating motifs–the sort of thing that other musicians might see as little more than studio experiments or the beginnings of something larger.  That did not bother me at all though, as they cumulatively form one hell of a bizarre and unique album.  Also, anything more elaborate or musical would have ruined my pleasing illusion that these are field recording collages made by a serial killer or madman hiding in a sewer: Caim works so wonderfully precisely because of Bishop's unwavering commitment to his broken, crackling aesthetic of cryptic dispatches.  Stephen certainly recorded some great individual pieces, but Basic House's brilliance lies far more in how it sounds than in the actual beats and notes being played.
Initially, Oats sounds a hell of a lot like its predecessor, as "AR II" offers up a healthy dose of tape hiss and a warbling, obsessively repeating loop.  It quickly makes some surprising updates to Bishop's formula though, as an actual house beat(!) appears alongside some very conventional high-hats and a burbling techno bass line.  That piece turns out to be an aberration in almost every way though, as the rest of the album is rarely that minimal or that straightforwardly musical.  The second piece, "Child Confession," is very much the one that sets the tone of what is to come: dense, murky, crunching soundscapes with subtly hallucinatory synth flourishes and lots of heavy machinery sounds.
The biggest thing that separates Oats from Caim is density: Oats is far more crushing and relentless than broken or crackling.  That difference is embodied nicely by "Interiors," which basically sounds like a fleet of street cleaners plowing through a pig farm.  Such thick, buzzing soundscapes happily make up a significant portion of the album, as Bishop returns to that theme again (minus the pigs) with both "L Wave & Comb" and the roiling factory noise of "Dry Contact."  The remaining pieces are divided up between ominous, pulsing ambient drone ("Time Table" and "Nurse"); haunted, minimalist dub techno variations ("C-Beat" and "La Coccinelle"); and a couple of curious divergences.
The first of Oats' curveballs is "Est Oan," an alternately cartoonish and creepy experiment in pitch-shifted voices amidst brooding dark ambient throbbing and skittering.  The other aberration, however, is the album's masterpiece.  According to Alter's description, "B.G. Feathers" "evokes the grinding power of Maurizio Bianchi's best '80s material," a claim that I will have to take their word for, as I have never heard anything by Bianchi that sounds quite like it.  In any case, it is an absolutely crushing piece and a brilliantly simple one besides: it is essentially just a heavy, endlessly repeating, and blown-out industrial crunch, but the twist is that the crunch is constantly changing in violent ways.  In fact, it often sounds like the tape is literally being shredded, which is an extremely neat trick.  Few things make me happier than gnarled, unrelenting, mechanized crunches at high volume.  It breaks my heart every single day that I do not live in a futuristic dystopia terrorized by mechanized juggernauts, so I deeply appreciate Basic House for at least providing the fleeting illusion of one for me.
Ultimately, Oats hits higher highs than Caim while also being significantly more accessible, as Bishop's more beat-driven pieces offer enough of a semblance of normalcy to probably draw in the more adventurous strain of underground dance enthusiasts (especially given Stephen's role in the scene).  Part of me laments Bishop's evolution a bit though, as Caim in Bird Form was front-to-back otherwordly insanity.  Oats is certainly a logical and impressive leap forward, but Basic House's newfound force and quasi-professionalism necessarily comes at the expense of some of its its rickety predecessor's "outsider art" charm.  I still love both though.
 
 
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
This is the debut full-length from Brian Leeds' Huerco S. nom de guerre, one of the most exciting projects to emerge from burgeoning scene surrounding Opal Tapes.  While Leeds does not necessarily offer up anything truly novel, his skill at seamlessly blending together industrial clang, dub techno, hissing Tim Hecker-style ambiance, Boards of Canada-esque warped wooziness, and minimalist underground dance is quite peerless.  This is easily one of my favorite albums of the year.
The most immediately striking aspect of Colonial Patterns for me was that it is a mixture of several recognizable and predictable influences that sound so completely natural together that it seems astonishing that no one has thought to combine them before now.  After my initial bewilderment, however, I began to appreciate the incredible amount of craftsmanship and nuance needed to pull off such a feat successfully.  The base ingredients are simple: warmly crackling and sibilant synths; a slow, pulse-like thump; locked-groove-like repetition; and some subtly hallucinatory "damaged tape" effects.  What Leeds does with those various threads is extremely impressive though, as even the haziest bits are sharply realized and there is no clutter or superfluous sound to be found anywhere.  Colonial Patterns is about as deliberate and unerringly chiseled as an album can be, yet never feels suffocatingly or lifelessly overwrought.
Leeds' complete control and thoughtful construction even extends to the sequencing, as he breaks up the album with several different types of pieces, all of which somehow feel thematically and aesthetically consistent.  For example, there are a few great pieces in the aforementioned "Tim Hecker" vein, like the beautiful (but brief) "Chung-Kee Player" and "Monks Mound," which eschew beats for dreamily hissing and pulsing bliss.  Other pieces, such as "Skug Commune" and "Ragtime USA," boast strong enough beats and hooks to qualify as potential singles, but are still understated enough to blend with the rest of the album.  Still other pieces–most of them, actually–recall the late '90s golden age of dub techno artists like Pole and Kit Clayton.
The best and most distinctive pieces, however, are the ones in which Leeds manages to seamlessly blend all of those threads (as well as some others) together at once.  My favorite among them is "Quivira," which deftly blends a lurching, metallic industrial rhythm with warm, scratchy synth swells and obsessively see-sawing blurts.  Another particularly unique piece is "Annagramme of my Love," which embellishes its throbbing beats with little more than crackling static and a buried, stuttering vocal loop.  Brian also does warped-sounding mindfuckery quite well, though only the delirious and wobbly "Prinzif" fully highlights that knack.
Colonial Patterns is the rare album in which I thoroughly enjoy almost every song, no matter how long or short it is or which direction it takes.  The worst thing that I can say about it is that the quality dips a bit near the end, as both "Canticoy" and "Angel (Phase)" allow merely decent ideas unfold much longer than necessary.  Still, 12 excellent songs out of 14 is one hell of an impressive success rate, particularly when the listener is as jaded as I am.  Leeds clearly set out to deliver a flawlessly realized, perfectly flowing masterpiece and came as close as I possibly could have hoped for (uniformly brilliant albums being a truly rare phenomenon in the single-driven world of underground dance).
 
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
[SIC] comes in a handmade cover, each copy individually crafted from recycled plywood and cloth, decorated by use of stencils and printing blocks. Optional second disc [SIC] - Bonus
Three tracks are: 1:Letter from Topor; 2: Eyes of a Scanning Girl; 3: Monsterkamer (Orgasm)
Optional second disc [SIC] - Bonus contains 1: Letter from Topor (Draft); 2: Eyes of a Scannong Girl (Draft). These are different mixes of the tracks on [SIC]. [SIC]
You had to wonder first time through their eyes. Primary means sensory concept. Forty people squashed in a small room. Guy called Bushy played dumb dumb to crowd surfing toilet. Multitude swayed and cried fronting the Chinese rock'n'roll takeaway band. 19 pre-pubescent pterodactyls list vampire records chronologically. Bushy feels they came to be frustrated in new little venues. Procession of bats and traffic in urban sound design.
Acoustic instruments used in creating [SIC] and [SIC] Bonus include: locust pod, reco-reco, atabaque, vozembouch, cuica, hungu, slide carambolade, double breasted field jacket, agogo, caxixi, Shakuhachi, double bass, violin, santoor, zither, chimes, bells, gongs, piano frame, fishing line, didgeridoo, bicycle wheel (alloy), daxophone, chinese metal shaker, conch, piano, sarangi, straw cymbalom, to mention but a few.
[SIC] costs including shipping worldwide € 35.- including shipping worldwide
available from www.aranos.org
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
[SIC] comes in a handmade cover, each copy individually crafted from recycled plywood and cloth, decorated by use of stencils and printing blocks. Optional second disc [SIC] - Bonus
Three tracks are: 1:Letter from Topor; 2: Eyes of a Scanning Girl; 3: Monsterkamer (Orgasm)
Optional second disc [SIC] - Bonus contains 1: Letter from Topor (Draft); 2: Eyes of a Scannong Girl (Draft). These are different mixes of the tracks on [SIC]. [SIC]
You had to wonder first time through their eyes. Primary means sensory concept. Forty people squashed in a small room. Guy called Bushy played dumb dumb to crowd surfing toilet. Multitude swayed and cried fronting the Chinese rock'n'roll takeaway band. 19 pre-pubescent pterodactyls list vampire records chronologically. Bushy feels they came to be frustrated in new little venues. Procession of bats and traffic in urban sound design.
Acoustic instruments used in creating [SIC] and [SIC] Bonus include: locust pod, reco-reco, atabaque, vozembouch, cuica, hungu, slide carambolade, double breasted field jacket, agogo, caxixi, Shakuhachi, double bass, violin, santoor, zither, chimes, bells, gongs, piano frame, fishing line, didgeridoo, bicycle wheel (alloy), daxophone, chinese metal shaker, conch, piano, sarangi, straw cymbalom, to mention but a few.
[SIC] costs € 35.- including shipping worldwide
Available from www.aranos.org
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
VOD120: V/A Rising from the Red Sand Volumes.1-5 5LP set
"Rising From The Red Sand" was one the most comprehensive compilations of early 80s industrial, wave and underground music, spanning a total of five cassettes, compiled by Gary Levermore for his own Third Mind Records label (which has also recently been revived).
The original five tapes are now released as a 5xLP set, following several months of tracking down as many artists as possible to obtain their permission to reissue their material. Almost all were found, although nine tracks are missing from this box. Rising From The Red Sand was a precursor to the two later double-LPs Elephant Table Album and Three Minute Symphony, but due to the vastness of the project, it offers a more complete insight into the musical underground of the early-mid 80s period.
Rising From The Red Sand includes the likes of Chris & Cosey, Nurse With Wound, Die Tödliche Doris, Test Dept, Attrition, Colin Potter, Muslimgauze, Ian Boddy, We Be Echo, Konstruktivists, Portion Control, Metamorphosis, Bene Gesserit, Legendary Pink Dots, P16.D4, Nocturnal Emissions, Human Flesh, Bushido, Smegma, Ptose, Kopf Kurz, Merzbow, Tone Death, Pseudo Code, Conrad Schnitzler, Cultural Amnesia, John Hurst, Section 25, Fan Tan, Un Departement, Scram Ju Ju, Five Or Six, Sylvie & Babs, James Braddell, Onnyk, Nexda, Hula, Dave Knight, and Irsol.
Liner notes are written by Frans de Waard (of the Korm Plastics label and Vital Weekly), and he writes: "I still regard it as the best compilation of industrial music from that time - a five hour Encyclopedia Industrialis."
More information can be found here (due out in late November 2013).
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
VOD119: Hafler Trio A Cure for Kenophobia–An Empowerment in 4 Easy Stages at Very Reasonable Rates: Recordings 87-99 4Lp Set
This very special box-release with booklet and containing almost 4 hours of Hafler Trio archive recordings recorded between 1987 and 1999 gives a great opportunity to dig into the universe of music-mastermind, multi-talent and concept-art genius Andrew McKenzie and his electronic/drone/ambient/music concrete-like music-output as Hafler Trio. None of the collected songs have ever officially been released on vinyl or CD up to this point.
In 2012, Frank of VOD went through a whole pallet of tapes, DATs & reels with Hafler Trio Archive-Recordings; some released, but many still previously unreleased. Frank of VOD digitalized several of his favorites and Andrew chose the final recordings to be selected for this release and also made this very beautiful conceptual design for the box. This is the ultimate Hafler Trio experience for die-hard fans, as well as new open-minded listeners not aware of Andrew McKenzie's work.
The 4 LPs contain the following audio:
Lp1: The Hafler Trio Play The Hafler Trio Play The Hafler Trio By The Hafler Trio
Lp2: I Love Children But I Couldn’t Eat a Whole One
Lp3: Regicide, Fratricide & Feneration for Dummies
Lp4: The Generosity of the Body with Explicit Diagrams
More information here (due out in late November 2013).
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
The first official account of the iconic record label.
This Mortal Coil, Birthday Party, Bauhaus, Cocteau Twins, Pixies, Throwing Muses, Breeders, Dead Can Dance, Lisa Germano, Kristin Hersh, Belly, Red House Painters.
Just a handful of the bands and artists who started out recording for 4AD, a record label founded by Ivo Watts-Russell and Peter Kent in 1979, a label which went on to be one of the most influential of the modern era.
Combining the unique tastes of Watts-Russell and the striking design aesthetic of Vaughan Oliver, 4AD records were recognizable by their look as much their sound. In this comprehensive account concentrating on the label's first two decades (up to the point that Watts-Russell left), music journalist Martin Aston explores the fascinating story with unique access to all the key players and pretty much every artist who released a record on 4AD during that time, and to its notoriously reclusive founder.
With a cover designed by Vaughan Oliver this is an essential book for all 4AD fans and anyone who loved the music of that time.
"4AD get the lavish label history they deserve" – MOJO
"Aston has impressive access to some of rock’s most reclusive figures" – Q
"Facing The Other Way represents one of the greatest stories to emerge from rock and roll's modern history" – DROWNED IN SOUND
"The conviction of Aston's storytelling blows dust off the needle so that those records and their often magical beauties are dragged out to be admired once again… Compelling stuff" -MOUTH MAGAZINE
"Martin Aston's 600-page chronicle is a suitable extravagant enterprise" -Guardian
More information here.
Read More
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
How Dominick Fernow made the transition from home taping noise artist to celebrated techno musician still baffles me. I do not think it was a trajectory anyone could have imagined or expected, but that is exactly what happened. To that fact, Remember Your Black Day makes for his first LP proper amidst confusing limited tape formats and vinyl collections of out of print material. To that end, it does sound like a fully realized album, but is still distinctly Vatican Shadow, for better or worse.
For me, my exposure to the project was an mp3 download of questionable legality of one of the first releases, and I was rather surprised at what I had heard.While Prurient releases up until that point had occasionally flirted with melody or rhythm, it was always hidden amongst layer after layer of noise and feedback.Here it was up front, with just the right amount of raw, low fidelity production to keep it in line with Fernow's other work.
I did not, however, find it to be some revolutionary discovery, or a project I thought would have the impact that it has.It was moody, interlocking loops, appropriately spiky FM synths and sparse drum machines.If it had been a major hit within the noise scene Fernow started from, I would assume it had something to do with the novelty and unexpectedness.But its acceptance into the wider world of electronic music caught me completely by surprise.
To be fair, there is definite development and expansion of the sound here."Enter Paradise," released as a teaser before the album came out is perhaps the most striking song here, and shows Fernow's development in instrumentation and approach since those earliest releases.The slow, but unrelenting digital snare punch and what is either sampled guitar or a very guitar-like synth line is simple and repetitive, but triumphs in that structural simplicity.Album closer "Jet Fumes Above the Reflecting Pool" borrows a similar overall sound to "Enter Paradise," but with a slower, more introspective pacing and significantly more variation throughout.
"Not the Son of Desert Storm, But the Child of Chechnya" also works its repetition well, with a rapid fire beat that mixes things up (drum and bass snares, electro handclaps) amidst distortion and dirty, grimy layers of synthesizer."Tonight Saddam Walks Amidst Ruins" has a nice surge in synthesizer towards its latter third that layers on tension beautifully.Throughout the album there is a greater sense of feel and structure, and not just seemingly haphazard starting/stopping of loops that plagued some of the earlier works.
"Remember Your Black Day," however, is where things begin to fall a bit short.A rapid, galloping rhythm that exhibits little change for its eight minute duration obscures some nicely understated rising/falling synth pads, but stretched over that length, the novelty gets lost in a sea of repetition that does not manage to be nearly as gripping as "Enter Paradise".Cut back a few minutes, it could be great, but here it just seems to go on for far too long.
Remember Your Black Day is the most realized Vatican Shadow release to date, and definitely feels the most consistent.It is not, however, a revolutionary piece of art that is going to change the face of electronic music as we know it, regardless of what the hype around it (and Vatican Shadow in general) might seem to indicate.It is a good disc of 1980s industrial influenced music that is not always quite danceable.With that in mind though, I enjoyed this disc quite a bit, and definitely as a whole more than I have the other releases thus far, which I have found could be patchy at times.
- Muscle Hijacker Tribal Affiliations
- Contractor Corpses Hung Over the Euphrates River
- Not the Son of Desert Storm, But the Child of Chechnya
Read More
How Dominick Fernow made the transition from home taping noise artist to celebrated techno musician still baffles me. I do not think it was a trajectory anyone could have imagined or expected, but that is exactly what happened. To that fact, Remember Your Black Day makes for his first LP proper amidst confusing limited tape formats and vinyl collections of out of print material. To that end, it does sound like a fully realized album, but is still distinctly Vatican Shadow, for better or worse.
- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
I suspect Not Not Fun deliberately release one album every year that I would absolutely love, hoping that I will miss it in order to punish me for not paying more attention to them.  I have no idea what 2012's masterpiece was (there almost definitely was one), but Gagged in Boonesville has now joined Peaking Lights' 936 (2011) in instantly flooring me upon first listen.  Stylistically, it most closely resembles what I would expect if Jandek and Dirty Beaches teamed up to make an indie pop album, yet it is somehow far weirder and more disturbed than even that highly improbably event could be.
Providence, RI's Carlos Gonzalez has been recording as Russian Tsarlag since 2007, but his output has been entirely restricted to a slew of limited cassette-only releases until fairly recently.  Despite that, he has still amassed quite a devoted following due to the fact that there is literally no one else on earth making music like this: nearly every description that I have seen includes some type of newly coined hyphenated genre involving the words "sewage," "slime," or "mold-covered."
The reason for that is quite simple, as literally everything about Boonesville sounds broken, murky, haunted, and out-of-tune.  Yet despite all that, Carlos genuinely seems to trying to make melodic, hook-filled, and emotionally resonant music.  That fundamental perversity is what makes Carlos' work so wonderful: it is like someone in the most nightmarish, rat-infested dystopia imaginable set out to write a smash pop album using a broken guitar and a water-damaged tape machine before they succumbed to leprosy (or their roof collapsed...or both happened simultaneously).
Appropriately, there is some kind of over-arching theme to the album that involves a tenement building being "mentally poisoned by an ancient poster of Medusa haunting the basement," but that would not have been at all apparent to me if I had not read it (though it does partially explain the terrible, terrible cover art).  As gloomy as that sounds, only "Island of Lost Souls" truly feels like a dirge, as it consists mostly of a simple, minor key piano melody and mumbled, downcast vocals.  While it is definitely the album's weakest piece, it avoids "mere filler" status by opening with a dreamlike loop of Johnny Cash singing the line "I'll see you in my dreams," which illustrates another great thing about Gagged In Boonesville: there are a number of moments of genuine warmth and Romanticism lurking amidst all of the shadows, rot, and uneasiness.
The instrumental "Become Solid," for example, is genuinely beautiful and weirdly hopeful (despite its mutilated-answering-machine-message accompaniment), while the twangy and wistful "One Way Out" sounds like a classic Roy Orbison love song distantly emanating from a heating vent.  Such touches make it seem like album's characters are totally unaware that they are essentially living in a horror film, tenderly (naively?) clinging to their hopes and dreams despite their fundamentally doomed situation, which is kind of beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time.
Boonesville's stand-out songs are a bit more rocking though.  My favorite of the batch is easily the perverse would-be anthem "Feels So Good," which could not possibly sound more blown-out and somnambulant.  On most other albums, its tempo would be rightly described as "plodding," but in this context, its leaden pace is a pulse-quickening sign that something is actually alive amidst the ruins and is possibly having a very depressing party.  Both the title piece and "Green Woman" are great as well, approximating a hallucinatory, slowed-down, and pitch-shifted New Order.  Most of the remaining songs stick to that territory too, filtering wobbly synths, a steady drum machine beat, clean guitars, echo-y vocals, and catchy hooks through a distinctly "cough medicine overdose" aesthetic that works remarkably well.
That said, the most stunning aspect of Gagged In Boonesville (for me, anyway) is how natural it all sounds.  Aside from perhaps the stuttering, backwards weirdness that opens the closing "Plastic Door," I never get the impression that Carlos is willfully trying to make his music seem otherworldly and warped through some kind of artifice or theater: this is probably just what comes out when he attempts to write a song.  It almost feels like the work of somehow who has spent their entire life at the bottom of a well and has only encountered other humans through faintly overheard snatches of the radio, except there is somehow an infectious sense of macabre fun amidst all the filth and longing.  Obviously, something so ruined, forlorn, and grimy is unlikely to attract much attention outside of serious subterranean music obsessives, but Gonzalez is an absolute genius at whatever the hell it is that he is doing.  It is truly rare to find an artist as creepily, hermetically distinctive as he is and practically unheard of for something so ugly and so wrong to be so subversively entertaining and infectious at the same time.
 
Read More
