BLANK DOGS “On Two Sides” (Fuck It Tapes)

As commonly happens in our current accelerated music hype-topia universe, there’s often bands/artists/styles that one only hears about via blogs or magazines or mass-texts saying that “you gotta check out so-and-so, they’re the new thing!” Sometimes they are and sometimes they’re not but Blank Dogs are a band/dude I always read about in the context of someone ranting “The latest BD single is his best yet! But it’s sold out already! So try to grab the next one!” I guess maybe my internet connection is just slow or something, cause I’ve yet to succeed in grabbing any of his sides. So it’s cool to hear this, thanks to J. Earl handling the CS edition of Blank Dogs’ TMU full-length. And it’s cool to learn that the underground blogosphere is ranting/raving about a dude who sounds identical to this CDR of Soft Cell demos a friend gave me in 2002. Pre-“Tainted Love,” Marc Almond’s shit sounded JUST like this. Mid-tempo drum machines, poppy robot guitars, lo-fi space age singing – New Wave for dudes on the dole basically. This is the American food stamps version.

WARMER MILKS “In This Room” (Fuck It Tapes)

Mikey T. continues his careless hopscotch hitch-hiking across musical modes, this time sitting on the edge of a hotel bed and playing 11 very straightforward, mid-fidelity singer-songwriter tunes into a microphone. Two are covers, the rest are originals, but it doesn’t much matter as they all operate in identical emotional terrain: slightly bummed, strum-heavy, mumble-folk. The lyrics are rarely discernible and never memorable, and the acoustic guitar-work is mellow and traditional (makes even straightjacketed normalcy folk outings like “James and the Quiet” seem wildly psychedelic). On a couple tracks he lets things fray a bit at the edges and get slightly free/outsider but that’s very much the exception not the rule. Once again I reach the conclusion of a Warmer Milks album feeling strangely let down and confused.

MV + EE “The Ground Ain’t Dirty” (Fuck It Tapes)

Vermont’s most stand-up citizens (except for Ben and Jerry) unleash a little more of that homespun hippie-folk-raga beard-divining they keep touring the world with. I couldn’t really jive at all with the macho/retro studio slickness of Gettin’ Gone so I appreciate this CS’s sonic scene immensely by comparison. Tape-hissy drone-folk of the laid back and lonesome variety, played with the confidence of a couple so comfortable jamming together they don’t even have to pay attention any more. A few of the tracks seem pretty phoned in (but not in a bad way) and a few really shine as rough-cut gems from an inner mental mine that just keeps givin’. With a nice J. Earl fold-out j-card that reminds me of some Krazy Kat warped western landscape: a simple horizon line, some moons, a tree, and emptiness.

MENEGUAR “Tone Banks 1: Some Downs” (Fuck It Tapes)

Most message-boarders know Meneguar for their tireless touring and tightly honed indie anthems on TMU. But until now there was little to zero publicly available recorded expression of their looser moods. Which is where “Tone Banks” comes in. “Some Downs” is the first volume in what’s supposed to be an ongoing documentation of Meneguar’s practice space explorations and pre-song musical map-making. And it’s pretty fucking good. The A side starts off like a “Strangers In Our House” hit before unraveling into a propulsive instrumental engine room of cyclical guitars and driving drums. The second song, “Fields of Gaffney,” is a sparkling wasteland of chimes and psychic strings that could easily pass for a sweet Shepherds outtake. The whole B side of “Some Downs” is composed of an epicly bizarre jazzy reverb chamber come-down called “House That Home/Over and Over” that sounds nothing like Meneguar or anything else on FIT/Woodsist, and is all the better for it. Comes in a J-card with a typically sick Jeremy Earl collage cover. Probably sold out already, but maybe not.

AXOLOTL “Plane of Partials” (Fuck It Tapes)

Predictably mesmerizing and sublime patchwork of drifting vision fog from Karl Bauer’s faultless violin/electronics alias. Hard stuff to describe, and even harder stuff to stop listening to. The A side is perhaps a bit more erratic, with some sharper sonic/tectonic shifts and evolutions, but the composition is always exquisitely paced so as to never break the slithering drones’ bath-trance brain vice. But the B is the manna from heaven’s gate cascade…steam rising from a holy skull on an emerald mountaintop in the center of a sacred isle. Impossibly beautiful and endless. No wonder the edition of 100 sold out in six seconds flat.

LOOSERS “Sidelights” (Fuck It Tapes)

Fantastic. “Sidelights” is a beautiful, revelatory shuffle into the psychic periphery from this long-running Portuguese triad, and it’s a step into the ether away from their past audio documents. The A track was apparently recorded live on a radio show, and it unfurls with a hazy grace and soft touch not often seen/heard in previous Loosers albums. Sidewinder percussion spirals around fluttering rhythmic electronics while chimes jingle on ropes…free spiritualism soaks the microphone in Sun Ra gauze until all hard sounds cease and only the echoes of outer space resonate and pan and morph in the studio air. Things veer damn close to so-psych-it’s-goofy at a certain point, but then they pull back, and coax the majesty into quiet. “Banyan Fig,” the flip, is more easily recognizable as a Loosers chemistry, with restless “world” drumming weaving webs into ringing island steel, communal voice exercises, and dub fragments. Deep in the zone they pivot and drop the beat, replacing it with fried, wild cymbal shimmer and joyously mangled saxophone that escalates into a epiphanic frenzy before suddenly dying. Then the song’s afterlife drifts on with an odd palette of loops, murk warble, and buried pulse, like a dreaming corpse. A quiet masterpiece in the Loosers discography, no question.

YOUTH OF THE BEAST “Two Mothers” (Fuck It Tapes)

Andy Spore’s young beast project continues to evolve/devolve into a even stranger creature. “Two Mothers” is the most loopy and musical YOTB outing so far…lots of sampled sax-skronk, detached talk-sing/songing, and sputtering mixer noise. The A side starts with a womb of chimes (hence the first track’s title – “Chime”) but it slowly erodes into an echoing, claustrophobic cavern of ping-ponging mixer destruction. The B zone is where Spore throws it all on the frying pan, and fucks the initial rhythmic quotient exploration. Sharp bursts of machine, headless drum kit battering, toy raygun warblings, all sequenced together audio carcrash-style. Eventually he locks into a slow stomp beat and the track gets 20 times fiercer. “Seagull” breaks rank though, engaging a twittering pan-pipes sounding Wizards & Warriors theme song melody that cant help but RULE. And “Many Names,” the final jam, marches out a Spartan drum-and-flutes battle hymn that’s both rousing and depressing. It eventually builds into a flooring white-out inferno of howls and rumbling. Without a doubt the most unclassifiable and intense Youth/Beast outing to date.

HUSH ARBORS “Row Life” (Fuck It Tapes)

Folked up and (color) photocopied C36 by Keith Wood’s pretty impeccable Hush Arbors identity. I’m no expert on his discog (it’s fairly broad and deep and hard to keep track of), but this strikes me as a bit more varied and electric than some of his stuff I’ve heard (like the “Under Bent Limbs” 2xCD for example). The first song, “Poppi On My Mind,” intertwines fingerpicking daydreams with really eloquent amplifier gestures, sweeping melodic feedback, and subconscious pulsing sub-beats…near the end everything coheres into a beautifully focused war of hypnotic tension and elemental desperation. One of the most powerful Hush Arbors pieces I’ve heard. The B side tracks don’t let up on the intensity much either…”Rowed On Home” devolves from an acoustic reverie into a blown-out sludge-noise dirge that sprawls on for surprisingly long. And the tape closer, “Ripped Raw,” unfurls a poppy electric guitar melody against melancholy moaning and some tonal emoting that totally tugs at the heartstrings in a blissed, bummer soundtrack sort of way. A near-flawless tape by one of the post-folk realm’s most visionary gatekeepers.

OWL XOUNDS EXPLODING GALAXY “Touch The Iceberg” (Fuck It Tapes)

Wowl Sounds man. This relentless free-jazz rotary club is dropping a lot of releases these days, but this is the best one I’ve heard so far. Or wait, the A side is anyway. “Oh Sweet Iceburn” is a live minidisc recording/document of a raging, intuitive shakedown set at the Flywheel in West Mass with Thurston Moore on second guitar and it SLAYS. Owl Xounds’ side of the Mef Teef split on Arbor was great too but the tape-recorder low-fidelity blurred a lot of the action/interplay. Here, shit shines a lot brighter, Adam Kriney’s drumming flies, the dual basses rumble and slam and stop on dimes, the guitars fray into fried piles of string smoke…exploding galaxy indeed. But, for better/worse, the B side isn’t really Owl Xounds, it’s an electronic remix of the side A set by Liek Twi (aka Hektor Fontanez and Anthony Lebron). It’s by no means bad per se, but the majority of it is extremely digital and computery and the glitchy deconstructionist approach to Owl Xounds’ sound eliminates all the untamed analog primitivism and intensity which seems to be their deepest strength. So, I don’t know. It seems like a strange choice. But strange is subjective, so touch the iceberg yourself – does it feel cold to you?

SUNBURNED “The Pegadrift” (Fuck It Tapes)

FIT follows up its stunning archival NNCK tape with another chunk of historical audio by a similarly canonized New York psych institution, Sunburned (Hand of the Man). “The Pegadrift” collects a quartet of recordings from the fall of 2005, many (all?) of which document sets from the Sunburned/Magik Markers US tour. They played LA/The Smell on this trek and I recall a hairy guy dropping his pants and hitting a keyboard with his dick, which weirded out the bulk of the under-21 all-ages punk youths there so much that they left, leaving SBHOTM to play their half-hour of jams to roughly 9 people. Fortunately this CS finds them in slightly less confrontational form, and the editing/clothing helps immensely. The A side track, “Horse Country Blues,” is a great, condensed, overtly musical organic psych rhythm slipstream, drums and guitar mantras pounding in runic unison. They start the B side with a muddled/muddy hippy spoken word piece that goes on for waaaaaay too long but eventually it ends and Moloney revs up the drums into a brambly drunken groove, which motors the proceedings to a better place. Momentarily. Then Rob Thomas gets BACK on the mic and spits out more incoherent stream-of-consciousness beatnik babble until the C30 runs out of tape. Love it or hate it, this is what Sunburned is: a sweaty, ragged, intoxicated stink of open mouths and burned minds. Smoke on or sober up.

NNCK “The Large Taquat” (Fuck It Tapes)

Wow. Jeremy Earl pulls some Fuck It strings and scores 11-year old archival No Neck recordings for this historical C37. NNCK are definitely a band who left me in the dust so long ago, discography-wise, that I haven’t really heard much of the past 3-5 years worth of releases/albums. So it’s a treat to get this. Can’t tell if it’s all just live in the practice space, or if the tracks were spliced together, but the editing/pacing is fantastic, way more thoughtful and focused than I think they’re often pegged as being. Plucked Asiatic strings give way to waves of flute drones and quiet hand drums…synth specters flutter in the rafters, bearded voices sing against the city. Communal brain-leeching in the style pioneered by NNCK (and Sunburned) inevitably produces some bored/boring passages where the gang’s each lost in their own respective K-holes, but most of Taquat has been shaved of hairy wankery. Overall, a poignant, faded Polaroid of this legendary crew of psych-squatters back in their younger days/daze. Swank glossy tri-fold J-card keeps the FIT standard up to par.