• Browse Collection (149)

• Browse Wantlist (159)

• Contact

Mobb Deep - The Infamous - 30-May-08 12:20 AM
Of all the gritty SP-1200 laden early 90s NYC hiphop masterpiece albums (you know them, anything RZA touched, Nas, etc.) no production feels as fresh in my mind as The Infamous. I mean this album is unbelievably dark and dirty. Every sample seems buried under layers and layers of record hiss, rain and fog. It's so hardboiled, urban, deep and atmospheric, that I would doubt that modern dubstep producers like Burial and Vex'd aren't huge fans. Havoc & Prodigy's rhymes have a deadpan, stone cold but wavering delivery that carries the the straightforward beats along, but they never get old or samey. Being a sound art junky the moments that hit me the most on this album are the more noisy/ sound effect-like, in specific the sample of a humming streetlamp (yeah!) in "Party's Over." A kind of ambient sense not seen in many other (true, street, and un-pretentious) hiphop productions. The best part is that it feels (of course) real and not inserted for the sake of the experimentation of some bloody college students.

Autechre - Quaristice - 27-May-08 11:17 AM
Autechre never went 100% digital, and never before has this been as evident as on Quaristice. What Ae has done more often than not is run an arsenal of basic old-school equipment with a Max/MSP brain. The melancholy analog synths of classic releases like Amber and Incunabula, and early Aphex Twin, make their return here, as do moments of broken late-80s electro and classic drum machine sounds. Nevertheless Booth & Brown have as always sharpened their digital ambient-glitch blades on this release, here so much that their awesomely daring collaborations with the Hafler Trio are somewhat less surprising. Yet they've allowed their old equipment to breathe in these tracks, introducing elements of daring familiarity. Ae's beats, since their software phase began, have had a spastic, irregular stimulus that many have found irritatingly arrythmic, and others have found positively exhilirating. The familiar elements of this release may convince the former listeners by offering clearer reference points in conventional techno sounds.

Whitehouse - Never Forget Death - 22-May-08 03:10 AM
Never Forget Death is a great document of some truly powerful renditions of these classic songs. This album is massively heavy and brooding. It isn't quite the hybrid that made Great White Death such a masterpiece: the hybrid of their early-albums' spry youthful high-frequency feedback assault and less noisy but more twisted viscious ambience. What this is is much more the latter, a sound they never really returned to after this EP. The vocals are shredded with effects that make them sound positively viscious without screeching and ear piercing, the broken keyboards or whatever they made this with are truly making dark, brooding drone music. Nevertheless there is still the forward and direct burning analog sound of early Whitehouse and the still-deafening "Torture Chamber" doesn't let us forget that. Another highlight is "Now Is The Time," a rendition, of the vocals at least, of "Right To Kill." When William Bennett screams 'Kill!' at the top of his lungs as the war synths of the song peaks, chills run down my spine like no other Whitehouse work.

Skinny Puppy - Last Rights - 14-May-08 04:46 PM
I bought this album in one of its Capitol incarnations in the late 90s, so by then the track problems had been fixed, but I could imagine that was quite annoying. Technicalities away, this is definitely Skinny Puppy's opus. It is a good example of a well-rounded album in my book, one which, while having some stand-out tracks ("Killing Game," "Knowhere?," "Scrapyard"), does not interrupt the flow with singles-to-be. The band really explores extended ambience as well as the peak application of Key's live drumming and abrasive sampling. The album is like a stripping away of layers and layers of self and ruined emotion towards a spiritual preparation for death. Every track coheres into this theatre of the mind. That said, the album really does suffer from the lack of the original Track 10, Left HandShake. It was the most simulataneously mirror-stare meditative and medicatively gut-wrenchingly disorienting track on the album, a perfect climax before the stunning explosion into satori that is Download. However anyone who uses a computer who's acquired Track 10 knows how to arrange the album the way it was intended to be heard in the first place.

Current 93 / HÖH* - Island - 09-May-08 02:04 PM
This is Current 93's "electronic" album, but a perhaps more apt description is that it's their 4ad album. It's what you'd expect from that description, lots of absolutely spine-chillingly beautiful moments ("Falling," "Anyway, People Die") and a fair share of cheesy synth pop ("Crowleymass"). Also, the instrumentation is reminiscent of 4ad greats like This Mortal Coil or especially that 1987 Pieter Nooten & Michael Brook album, "Sleeps With the Fishes." Lots of digital synth pads, bells, and strings, with an austere neo-classical or Arvo Pärt-esque composerly approach. Really any instruments that amp the emotionality up as much as possible. While I know Crowleymass is supposed to be a comedy song, against the other intense, somber works of the album, it's a sour note. Nevertheless the first four songs of the album still nearly bring me to tears, it is definitely reminiscent of Iceland to me (Ísland is Icelandic for Iceland), a special place of crisis, pilgrimage and transition. Things I'm sure it meant for David Tibet as well.

View all 41 reviews...