Brainticket-Cottonwoodhill (1971)

"Next time you feel like getting fried, listen to this! But never mind the first two songs on Cottonwoodhill; they are both a rather ho-hum affair. The real brillance on this disc is to be found throughout their 26 minute acid-fueled masterpiece, "Brainticket", the basis of which is a slightly varrying guitar/keyboard lock groove, kinda like Can at their most repetitive. Over this groove pulses all sorts of sound effects, such as machine guns, screams, gargeling, etc. Mostly, though, the overriding sound is their synthesizer, who, although not in the league of Klaus Sculze, nonetheless provides some very entertaining squawks, squeeks, beeps and drones, resulting is a very high-powered burst of aphetimene driven psychosis, dancable and meditative (but meditative in a disturbing, scary way)
But Brainticket the band doesn't stop there, and what really makes "brainticket" the song transcend ordinary greatness in pursuit of nutty brilliance is the voice of Dawn Muir. Sounding very Engish, she freaks out over the whole thing, recounting a very bad acid trip, doubting her exsistence, screaming her LSD-fueled insights, and just generally making a complete mess of herself.
...Suddenly you realize that the insanity is contageous, as the song stops, revealing a weird computer voice going "Brainticket Brainticket Brainticket" and you are left wondering just what the fuck is going on,just what is this I'm listening to? But then the song fades back in, and it's back to where we started...
Poor Dawn Muir, she sounds like a girl being dragged off towards a mental institution, and I wouldn't be surprised if she was still there. Because after this album, everyone in Brainticket freaked out, and only their keyboard player remained. While other Brainticket albums are interesting, none have the sheer grab you by the balls lunancy as witnessed all over Cottonwoodhill, the cover of which carries the helpful warning, "Don't listen to this record more than once a day or your brain will be destroyed!"

Here's a quickie before my computer dies and I'm stranded with no internet for another couple of days. If you like the mind-melting psych that is usually posted round these parts, there's no reason you won't enjoy this.

Pinky and the brain

Big Blood-Space Gallery 01/27/2007

"the phantom four piece of Asian Mae, Caleb Mulkerin, Rose Philistine and Colleen Kinsella perform only as a duo. An intimately willing team walking blind through each other's songs presenting one of a kind recordings tailor-made to the night's performance.

is Rose Philistine, Colleen Kinsella, Caleb Mulkerin, & Asian Mae"

Totally gorgeous psych folk, inexplicable in its beauty. One of my all time favorite bands for certain. Get it.

Glory daze

The Fall-Hex Enduction Hour (1982)

"or the uninitiated, entering the wonderful and frightening world of the Fall can be an overwhelming experience. Not only does the “band” (which has performed in various incarnations since the late 70’s, but always with the indestructible crux of the perennially trashed Mark E. Smith) have more albums than years of existence under their collective belt, but mucked-up distribution of their records has generated barrelfuls of compilations and odd re-re-re-releases. That said, if you are to delve into three records by the Fall in your mortal life, the recently reissued (cleaned up and expanded) Hex Enduction Hour ought to be one of them. To dispense with the formalities, it’s a good remaster for an album that deserved it, and while none of the second disc’s added goodies are particularly stellar, they nevertheless serve as a little gravy to an already superb record.

Originally released in 1982 as their fourth studio album, Hex demonstrates the culmination of “early” Fall: a monolithic beast of ragged grooves piloted through the embittering miasma of English society by the verbose acidity/Joycean all-inclusiveness of Mark E. Smith. By then, the band’s sound had expanded outwards, having graduated to two drummers and allowing the abrasive patchwork of Marc Riley and Craig Scanlon’s guitars to drift further into clattering abstraction, each player pulling their creativity taut from an invisible center. Along with Wire, the Fall serves as one of the earliest and most successful attempts to elevate punk formalism (i.e. the consciously simple, spirited, and non-virtuosic) to the level of more exploratory, experimental music, an approach that we now call “post-punk,” but whereas Wire turned to icy, synth-laden paranoia, the Fall (at this point in their career) folded in the Neanderthalic kitchen sinkism of early Faust and the lovingly crass fusion of Can, peppering them with some of the thudding, demeaned pop-redux that would come to mark their mid-80’s work.

Immediately, “The Classical” sets a tone that characterizes the entirety of the record: dreary, cluttered, and seemingly decaying, but lurching forward with an unflinching certainty—the only flickering torch song in a cavity of deadened automatons. “There is no culture is my brag, your taste for bullshit reveals a lust for a home of office.” Of course, it’s ultimately Smith that gives a name to the beauteous shitstorm, delivering his dense, volatile rants in a trademark nasal snarl with a sing-speak pace that truly lets them cook, unmasking their dissent and pure poetry, erratically crying out “THIS IS THE HOME OF THE VAIN!,” only to consent that “I’ve never felt better in my life” in a bleary deadpan, ad infinitum, a comment whose inscrutability verges on chilling.

What’s tremendous, singular, and affecting about Smith is that it’s hard to tell where he actually stands: the heartbreaking scope and sensitivity of his lyrics shows a mind not of suffocating nihilism, but keen detachment, cynicism, and understanding, setting him as much at odds with the spitting reactionaries of punk as with the tidy Thatcherite society that fueled their hatred. If “The Classical” partially mimicked the illusory freedom and faux-revolutionary discontent of youth, “Fortress/Deer Park” takes aim at it, exposing the squatter squalor of a Nazi fortress where, after talking in circles “with four left wing kids,” Smith tiptoes by the toilets to the sound of a urine-stained fanfare: “and Good King Harry was there fucking [BBC’s original ‘Top of the Pops’ DJ] Jimmy Saville.” It’s upon his exit that the sky begins to open up for the gloriously apocalyptic scene of the deer park: when Smith says “I took a walk down West 11, I had to wade through 500 European punks” his voice coursing through a droning organ, a single flame on the verge of being blown out, it exudes chaos on the brink of pure bliss, the sound of Smith entering hell itself. The band reaches its boiling point, a relentless Stooges-like stomp tied together by an endless ribbon of gnashing teeth, Smith drowning in the deluge of noise, twisting amidst the inescapable artists, kids, and subculture hawks swarming like locusts all around, cheating out “the young blackies… in the English system they implicitly trust, see the A&R civil servants, they get a sex thrill out of a sixteenth of Moroccan,” a suffocatingly pathetic tableau of disappointments masquerading as hedonistic idealism, an interminably mounting pile of human trash.

And is there a way out? “Just Step S’Ways” is the closest the Fall gets to a motivational moment, and it’s hardly anything to smile about, as Smith leads the Fall Soul-Wrangler Revue trumpeting the empty rah-rah sentiment to “just step outside this grubby place today,” employing the falsely empowering sentiment of advertisements, the illusion of a life-changing consumerism. We’re left with our fists flaccid in the goddamn air with absolutely nowhere to look, before being piled like waste into the subtle, lopsided discord of “Who Makes the Nazis?,” to which the answer is, basically, everyone, from intellectual half-wits to George Orwell to the BBC. If there’s any moral, it’s a difficult one to swallow: everything we see wrong with the world is a conspiracy of our hates and our loves, every antagonist has its circumstances, its foils, its antecedents—more than anything, it’s a plea for thorough consideration of one’s surroundings, a deep-seated skepticism that perpetually disrupts the spirit yet elevates understanding. Smith laments on the loping infinity of “And This Day” that there’s “just no fucking respite for us here… you even mistrust your own feelings.” Like the cover of the record itself, Hex is a concrete chunk of clanging urban graffiti, a haze of cryptically scrawled half-thoughts preached like glossolalia to form a cross section rife with painful contradictions and holes too deep to fill, a picture whose dizzying intersections of raw, loose ends only serve to elevate its bleak beauty."

An old favorite of mine for certain. It's hard for me to get over those jagged guitars, tight rhythm section and snarled, alienated vocals as the years go by. Many of you probably have this or have heard it but it is an absolute classic and is deserving of a listen at the very least. Highly recommended.

This is the home of the vain

Mountainhood-The River/The Road (2009)

Great little Psych Folk ditty that I have been listening to a ton. Really beautiful, fragile melodies. It makes me even happier having looked for these two exact tunes for months. Dig in.

Here I go into the world

Howlin' Wof-The Genuine Article (1995)

"Howlin’ Wolf ranks among the most electrifying performers in blues history, as well as one of its greatest characters. He was a ferocious, full-bodied singer whose gruff, rasping vocals embodied the blues at its most unbridled. A large man who stood more than six feet tall and weighed nearly 300 pounds, Howlin’ Wolf cut an imposing figure, which he utilized to maximum effect when performing. In the words of blues historian Bob Santelli, “Wolf acted out his most potent blues, becoming the living embodiment of its most powerful forces.” Howlin’ Wolf cut his greatest work in the Fifties for the Chicago-based Chess Records. Many songs with which he is most closely identified - “Spoonful,” “Back Door Man,” “Little Red Rooster” and “I Ain’t Superstitious” - were written for him by bluesmen , a fixture at Chess Records who also funneled material to Wolf’s main rival, . Howlin’ Wolf himself was an estimable songwriter, responsible for such raw classics as “Killing Floor,” “Smokestack Lightning” and “Moanin’ at Midnight.”

In 1910, Howlin’ Wolf was born on a Mississippi plantation in the midst of a blues tradition so vital it remains the underpinning for much of today’s popular music. His birth name was Chester Arthur Burnett; “Howlin’ Wolf” was a nickname he picked up in his youth. He was exposed to the blues from an early age through such performers as Charley Patton and Willie Brown, who performed at plantation picnics and juke joints. Wolf derived his trademark howl from the “blue yodel” of country singer , whom he admired. Although he sang the blues locally, it wasn’t until he moved to West Memphis in 1948 that he put together a full-time band. Producer recorded Howlin’ Wolf at his Memphis Recording Service (later Sun Records) after hearing him perform on radio station KWEM. Some of the material was leased to Chess Records, and in the early Fifties Howlin’ Wolf signed with Chess and moved to Chicago. He remained there until his death.

Howlin’ Wolf served to influence such blues-based rock musicians as and . In fact, he recorded a pair of albums - The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions and London Revisited - with his British disciples in the early Seventies. Howlin’ Wolf’s distinctive vocal style and rough-hewn approach to the blues can also be heard in the work of such diverse artists as Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band and . Slowed down for much of the Seventies due to serious internal injuries suffered in an automobile accident, Howlin’ Wolf gave his last performance in Chicago in November 1975 with fellow blues titan B.B. King. He died of kidney failure two months later.”

That voice is really all you need. I mean, it's THE voice. The Wolf also took very good care of his band (paying them well, giving them health care-no joke) so all of the musicianship is top notch. They have this hypnotic quality to their playing and it is utterly orgasmic. I can't say enough things about the Howlin' Wolf and the band. So influential, so essential, pretty much what you expect when you think of electric blues. Insanely recommended.

I asked for water

Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band-It Comes To You In A Plain Brown Wrapper (1972/2008)

"The high-def vinyl, 2-LP set that is It Comes to You in a Plain Brown Wrapper was, in its original form, the blues-on-blues followup to Don Van Vliet and his mangy merrie men’s Safe as Milk debut. What it wound up as, in 1968, was the gutted-not-gutbucket Strictly Personal – a much despised item that got noodled and re-edited by Blue Thumb (Beef’s then label) to include cutesy psychedelic sound FX and other clichéd oddities.

Don’t get me wrong. As it stands, Strictly Personal is downright creepy. Not Trout Mask Replica odd/majestic; filled with mean gnarly blues and fragrant angled instrumentation (to say nothing of Beefheart’s Dada lyricism and crusty howl) it’s almost what the Captain ordered.

But what Beefheart really wanted as his second album was what fills the inside of this Sundazed package, featuring stunning cover art from Zappa/Straight Records house painter/collage maven Cal Schenkel. Here is the unadorned by echo-phase-outs and pop-psychedelic panning raw powered purity (if being swampy and skuzzy has that essence) of “Gimme Dat Harp Boy” and the menacing free “Beatle Bones ’n’ Smokin' Stones Pt. 1 & 2.” While the rangier of versions of “Safe as Milk” here outshine the Magic Band’s first crack at lyrics like “Yesterday’s paper headlines approach rain gutter teasing rusty cat sneezing/ Soppin wet hammer dusty and wheezing,” hearing Beefheart tear holes into the lustful “Big Black Baby Shoes” and a frightening “Trust Us” is worth the new price of admission."

If "Strictly Personal" sounds a little too tinny and flanged out to you, this is your calling. Fat and bluesy, it's everything I love about early Beefheart. And that harmonica playing! Goddamn. This serves as a pretty good introduction if you're uninitiated but it's not his best. But that doesn't really matter. I mean, it's Beefheart.Those of who who gobble this stuff up should know what to do.

Trust us

King Crimson-Lizard (1970)

"When I first heard this album I really didn't know what to make of it. It's like nothing else in the Crimson body of work, and it's not much like anything else by anyone else either. Most immediately noticeable is the way Fripp hangs around in the background, picking on his acoustic guitar and adding some mellotron lines here and there; there are no screaming electric leads at all. The whole album is very warm and acoustic, and in fact the best performances (aside from some excellent acoustic guitar from Fripp in the opening track) come from sax-and-flute player Collins and pianist Tippett. Even Sinfield's lyrics are very different from other King Crimson words; the whole album reads like some kind of nightmarish fairy tale.

Of all the tracks here, only "Lady of the Dancing Water" has a clear comparison - it's another quietly pretty acoustic ballad in the style of, say, "Cadence and Cascade". The first three tracks are all short, psychotic freakouts that go in decreasing order of effectiveness. "Cirkus" is the coolest thanks to its weird juxtaposition of evil mellotron and clear acoustic guitar; "Happy Family" is the weakest thanks to Haskell's terribly distorted vocals (I don't have a problem with his singing in general, but that distortion is just too much for me). The title track is the only side-long epic King Crimson ever wrote, and it's a little rusty. The opening two sections are great - Jon Anderson's vocals in "Prince Rupert Awakes" are a fresh surprise and work very well within the framework of the music, and the improvisatory middle and beautiful closing part of "Bolero" are equally effective. However, the band seems to get a bit lost in indulgence in the ten-minute "Battle of Glass Tears" - this section has never gotten through to me. "Big Top", on the other hand, is a fittingly weird closing track to a uniquely insane album.

Lizard is perhaps the most underrated of King Crimson's albums, and contains some of the band's most unique, demented, and enjoyable work. While it'd be a poor place to begin exploring the world of KC, it's a strong effort overall, whatever Mr. Fripp thinks about it."

This album is love or hate as far as Crimson fans go but I think it's utterly fantastic. It's weird for sure but you probably knew that already. Some songs are lush and beautiful, others are just straight bizarre. It's true that this probably isn't the best Crimson album to start with unless you like way weirder music to begin with. Which may be the case. Either way, this is a great album. Dig it.

Playing indoor games

Staff Carpenborg and the Electric Corona-Fantastic Party (1970)

"All right, we'll admit that we were a bit doubtful about this at first, just from reading the hypesheet/liner notes, which claim, in part, that this is one of the "last great Kraut secrets" and because of its discovery, "the history of Krautrock has to be rewritten". And we're still not entirely sure if the person who wrote that was actually joking or not. But, while this is definitely not some undiscovered classic on the order of a Can, Faust or Neu! (or even the more obscure likes of Siloah, Kalacakra, Necronomicon, etc.) it IS pretty cool. And weird. Especially weird. Imagine Reynols or Yahowha 13 gone lounge, trying to entertain a bunch of jet-setters at some hip, swinging '60s party... It's called Fantastic Party after all and that's what it was meant as, a party record! Some cheesy German record label in 1970 put this together, presumably paying (with drugs?) a bunch of studio musicians to create a one-off psychedelic exploitation album by a nonexistent "band". A dime a dozen back then, maybe, but these guys really really went for it. It is pretty darn tripped out. Groovy but really off kilter and demented. Maybe we'd compare it to the children's songbook funk of Stark Reality, if you've heard the reissue of that. Or some totally dosed jazz combo doing porno music. Good times. Yup, it's got stinging fuzz guitar solos, flute warbling, hiccuping percussion, damaged "singing", bizarro titles... this has LSD written all over it. If you went to this "fantastic party" you'd know that Peter Fonda would be there for sure. And go-go dancers with dayglo body paint. And Timothy Leary, and midgets, and people who look like extras from a Terry Southern penned movie too.
A track from this appeared on the Kraut! Demons! Kraut compilation from a few years back, and if you have that, well rest assured, the entirety of this album is of the same high quality of fucked-upedness. So, true krautrock classic or not, we're glad it's been reissued, we're digging it! We only have to wonder, why did the reissuers hate the original cover so much that they felt the need to provide a new, totally ugly one?? Fortunately the LP's real (and actually quite rad, despite what they thought) cover is reproduced on the tray card, featuring a bevy of good-looking, polyester-clad partygoers truly having a FANTASTIC time."

Weirdo Kraut Lounge Jazz? Something like that. Initially found these guys on the ever popular Psych Funk 101 compilation that everyone here seems to be digging hard so I figured I'd post this gem. It's awkward and groovy, two of the best words ever. Enjoy that fantastic party, eh?

All men shall be brothers of Ludwig

Shellac-At Action Park (1994)

"Shellac's first three singles (especially Uranus) suggested that Steve Albini was moving into more subtle and dynamic territory after the musical and lyrical brutality of Big Black and Rapeman, but the group's first full-length album, At Action Park, proved that the misanthropic noisemaker responsible for Atomizer and Songs About Fucking was still very much present. "My Black Ass," "Dog and Pony Show," and "Il Porno Star" revealed Albini was still obsessed with sex, violence, and anti-social behavior, and the hard, metallic guitar figures of "Pull the Cup" and "Song of the Minerals" were as uncompromisingly abrasive as ever, with Albini's trademark engineering (dry, stark, and crystal clear) making the rough edges all the more punishing. But At Action Park does reveal a band more musically intelligent and imaginative than Big Black, and while it hits a good bit harder than the 7"ers that preceded it, Shellac is still significantly more concerned with the space between the notes than any of Albini's earlier projects. Just as importantly, in drummer Todd Trainer and bassist Bob Weston, Albini had found a human rhythm section that lived up to his exacting specifications, with Weston adding both melody and force with his thick, meaty tone and Trainer displaying both precision and an expressive abstraction behind the kit. And while Shellac's idea of a good time would still make most folks uncomfortable, there's a dark but genuine humor to a few of the cuts (especially "Il Porno Star"), and "Song of the Minerals" suggests Albini may actually feel compassion for one of his protagonists. At Action Park made it clear that Steve Albini was slowly but surely maturing, while stubbornly refusing to compromise in the process."

It's Albini. It's noisy. It's intense. It's mandatory.

Pull the cup

King Tubby-Declaration of Dub (1970s?)

"King Tubby is to this day synonymous with dub. He was a man who had a passion for fiddling with sound equipment, and turned that passion into a new musical genre and a veritable art form. He may have started his career as a repairman, but before he was done, his name was one of the most respected around the world. He worked with virtually every artist in Jamaica, and his name on a remix was like gold, a seal of quality that was never questioned."

Not a whole lot of good info on this one but my roommate popped it on last night and I was flying. In orbit. So I believe this is a session from the 70s remixing some Bunny Lee tunes (like much of his output) and it bumps like some good Dub should. So what else do you need, right?

Thanks Robert. Good find.

Dub nasty