Shoegaze rock legends RIDE, fresh off the success of their excellent return album The Weather Diaries, are already preparing a new EP, Tomorrow’s Shore, due out this February 16th. The newest single from it, “Catch You Dreaming,” is out now and mixes dreamy riffs with their uplifting lyrics. 2018 is already setting up to be a good year for shoegaze.
Keep your mind open.
[I often catch myself dreaming of you subscribing.]
Austin, Texas punk / no wave legends Terminal Mind only blazed through the Austin scene for three years (1978 – 1981), but they are back with a powerful release of rare cuts from their short time together. Recordings collects a rare four-song 7″, live cuts, and unreleased studio tracks. It’s a solid collection and already in the running for best reissue of 2018.
Opening with the skronky, bold “I Want to Die Young,” the band’s powerhook guitars are put front and center right away. “I see life as a TV at midnight, nothing but static and outdated reruns,” Steve Marsh sings as he dreams of becoming something better than he is now before he gets old and waits for a heart attack.
“Refugee” has Marsh continuing his themes of alienation as he sings, “In a war, there are winners and losers. I’m in-between.” The post-punk attitude of “Sense of Rhythm” is sharp as a hatchet (and so is the drumming). “Zombieland” sounds like an early Devo cut as Marsh sings about the joys of “living in negative space” and ignoring the suffering and injustice around you. The guitars on it devolve into a wild cacophony that almost sounds like air raid sirens by the end.
“Obsessed with Crime” has a raw energy not unlike something you’d hear from the Stooges. Terminal Mind once opened for them, so the influence shouldn’t surprise anyone. The guitars and bass on “Fear in the Future” are downright dangerous. Marsh growls “Time is a trigger, I hold it in my hand. I point it at the future. I think you understand.”
The live tracks begin with the snappy “Radioactive,” in which Marsh sings about hoping to have super powers so he can survive a nuclear war and watch everything burn around him. The equally speedy “Bridges Are for Burning” follows it.
“No one wants to know the meaning of life anymore,” Marsh sings on the angry “(I Give Up on) Human Rights.” “Black” is like Joy Division if they decided to speed up the beats and crank up the distortion. You can almost feeling the audience grooving during “Missing Pieces.” The keyboards on “Bureaucracy” slather the song in a glorious, distorted noise that ends the album on a high, post-punk note.
Three years was too short for a band this good, but at least we have this reissue to remember Terminal Mind. Let’s hope for some new material in the future. I’d love to hear their take on modern times.
Keep your mind open.
[I don’t want you to die young. I just want you to subscribe.]
Australian psych-rock work horses King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard set out at the beginning of 2017 to do something in one year that many bands don’t do over the course of an entire career – release five albums. Yes, five albums in one year. The band has always been prolific, but this seemed a bit nuts.
First came Flying Microtonal Banana, then Murder of the Universe, then Sketches of Brunswick East, then Polygondwanaland, and finally (released New Year’s Eve 2017, no less) Gumboot Soup.
The endcap on KGATLW’s crazy year is a mix of mellow and heavy that sums up 2017 pretty well for them. Opener “Beginner’s Luck” is, on its surface, a song about gambling in a casino but is secretly about addictions and temptations. The walking bass line on it is great. “Greenhouse Heat Death” takes us from the mellow feel of the opening track to the distorted and warped feel of KGATLW’s heavier material. Some microtonal touches are sprinkled in for good measure, too.
Stu MacKenzie‘s flute takes lead on the quirky “Barefoot Desert.” “Muddy Water” is a sharp track that I suspect might be a take on a Taoist story about being a happy turtle in the mud instead of becoming a glorious dead shell in a palace. The song builds into Middle Eastern-flavored rocker that never lets go of your attention.
Believe it or not, the band moves into a bit of synth-psych (or is it psych-synth?) on “Superposition,” combining synthesizers with flute, more great bass and drumming, and ethereal vocals. “Down the Sink” has a Bee Gees-inspired beat that I love. I hadn’t considered before if KGATLW were inspired by their fellow Aussies, but this track makes it seem obvious. It’s not a disco cut, mind you, but that wicked dual drummer beat is definitely something Barry Gibb might’ve cooked up in the studio.
“The Great Chain of Being” is a guttural chunk of stoner metal and a wild contrast to some of the earlier tracks. It’s like Sleep and Electric Wizard squaring off in a dirty pub. Just to mess with us, they follow it with “The Last Oasis” – a lovely track that reminds me of some of Thundercat‘s work, but with lyrics that sound like they’ve been lounging under a palm tree all day.
“All Is Known” is sort of a bridge between Flying Microtonal Banana and Nonagon Infinity as it combines the microtonal guitar work of the first album with the dead-run beats and mind-blown lyrics of the second. “I’m Sleepin’ In” could easily be a Sketches of East Brunswick B-side. I love its subtle harmonica work behind the distorted hip hop beats. The closing track is “The Wheel” – an acid lounge cut that tells us that the cosmic “wheel that spins us into our future” is the same one that brings us back to where we started.
It would’ve been easy for KGATLW to make their final release of 2017 a live album or a collection of B-sides and outtakes, but they stuck to their promise and delivered five albums of original material. Each of them is quality stuff, and Gumboot Soup is no exception.
Keep your mind open.
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Terminal Mind premiere track from forthcoming retrospective Recordings
Extremely rare collectors’ fave 7″, Live at Raul’s compilation cuts and unreleased studio & live tracks from Austin first wave punk trio
Hear & share “Refugee” (Soundcloud) (Austin Chronicle)
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“Grayscale art-rock with punk desperation channeled through instrumental and songwriting legitimacy…Terminal Mind remains an act locals still celebrate despite a short lifespan and being under-recorded.” — Austin Chronicle
First-wave Austin, TX punk trio Terminal Mind premiere the first track from their forthcoming retrospective album today via Austin Chronicle. Recordings collects the short lived band’s 4-song 7″ (which fetches upwards of $100 on eBay), Live At Raul‘s compilation cuts and outstanding unreleased studio and live recordings. Hear and share “Refugee” HERE. (Direct Soundcloud.)
Terminal Mind, formed in 1978, was one of the early first-wave punk acts in Austin, TX. Based far from the urban roots of a genre in its earliest stages, the band absorbed influences as disparate as Pere Ubu, Roxy Music, John Cale, and Wire. The life span was short, but their influence touched many of the next generation of Texas noise and hardcore acts as they shared bills with fellow proto-punks The Huns and Standing Waves at Raul’s, The Big Boys on the UT campus, and even opened for Iggy Pop at the Armadillo World Headquarters.
Founding members Steve Marsh and the Murray Brothers, Doug and Greg, started as a trio before adding synthesizer player Jack Crow. Steve Marsh moved to New York with his experimental noise band Miracle Room (before eventually returning to Austin and forming space/psychedelic rock band Evil Triplet and beginning an experimental solo project dubbed Radarcave), while Doug Murary joined the Skunks and Greg Murray played in a later version of The Big Boys. Jack Crow passed away in 1994.
This collection of songs is a journey back to the ‘anything goes’ first steps of American punk as it left the dirty streets of New York and Los Angeles and made its way into the heartland. Like the Austin of 1978, Recordings is a small outpost of musical individualism that planted seeds for the alternative music explosion familiar to later generations.
Recordings will be available on LP, CD and download on January 19th, 2018 via Sonic Surgery Records.
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 Artist: Terminal Mind
Album: Recordings
Label: Sonic Surgery Records Release Date: January 19, 2018
01. I Want to Die Young
02. Refugee
03. Sense of Rhythm
04. Zombieland
05. Obsessed With Crime
06. Fear In the Future
07. Radioactive
08. Bridges Are For Burning
09. (I Give Up On) Human Rights
10. Black
11. Missing Pieces
12. Bureaucracy
On The Web: |
Today is David Bowie‘s birthday. He would’ve been 71. There are many ways to celebrate this day, but one of the best comes from Neil Rodgers of Chic, who produced Bowie’s big comeback single, “Let’s Dance.” Rodgers has released a demo version of the track, with himself on guitar and Bowie having a fun time with the lyrics. It’s the skeleton of what would become a powerhouse single and the rest of the Let’s Dance album.
Keep your mind open.
[You can dance all week when you subscribe.]
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Spiny Normen premiere lead track from unreleased album 40-years after recording via Paste Magazine
1978 outsider psych-rock from Brown Acid compilation faves’ long-lost unreleased album coming soon from RidingEasy Records
Hear & share “Arrowhead” (YouTube) (Paste Magazine)
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“A dark masterpiece.” — Paste Magazine
Spiny Normen premiere the first track from their forthcoming posthumous album — 40 years in the making — today via Paste Magazine. Hear and share album opener “Arrowhead” HERE. (Direct YouTube.)
Spiny Normen is an incredible mid-70’s Houston hard rock, progressive, psychedelic rock band (yes, all that and more) that featured mellotron, vox jaguar, crunchy, heavy guitars, flute with echo effects, and lots more. A totally lost relic this album is, recorded at the community college and never released. This band has a very English, dark, mysterious and proggy but very acid drenched feeling to it.
Vocalist/guitarist Steve Brudniak dishes on the band’s founding and this exceptional recording:
Circa 1976, Gerry and I would skip class, smoke whatever scrap of contraband we could scrape together and meet in the high school auditorium where there was a piano and bang out crunchy rhythms…. At home I shoved a mic into the family upright piano and overdrove a cheap recorder and home made echo-plex to get an impressive cacophony. Gerry was playing guitar, listening to Alice Cooper, hair down to his back and about the only Mexican American in a white bread school. He was cool! So when he said one day, “Hey man we should jam some time!” I was stoked. We did, man it was fun! I was soon on the lookout for a keyboard to become legit with. I found the already ancient Vox Jaguar in the Houston paper that had belonged to Fever Tree, one of the original psychedelic bands of the late 60s. I didn’t know how famous they were at the time but I bought it for $160 and a Kustom blue sparkle vinyl amp with a speaker that I blew out just right, that made the most beautiful distortion, accompanied by a beloved phase shifter.
We began torturing our parents in various suburban garages and bedrooms after adding Norman Davis on drums and Steve Koch on bass. Back then it was a Black Sabbath sounding, blues based crunch. Songs like “Carry Your Water” and “Space Age Flyer” were early comps.
We made a 4-track recording in a local studio around then that our drummer didn’t show up to the session for. All of us being Monty Python fans, and the Norman-no-show gave us the name Spiny Normen (with an E) which two more bands have since taken.
Over the next three years we began to experiment, waaaay off into the beaten path, spending months penning intense, bizarre, surreal and mind affecting pieces influenced by King Crimson, Pink Floyd, film soundtracks, Vandergraaf Generator, and the like along with some bad bad acid trips on my part. I was collecting keyboards …a melotron (hell yes!) a single key play moog. Gerry was adding echoes, early guitar synth and tons of pedals. I learned the flute. New bass player Bruce Salmon and a try at another vocalist Bob Riley and various drummers, my favorite being Robert Winters, were in and out. In we went with a hired stand up bass player and a little Gerry Diaz engineering knowledge to the Alvin community college 8-track recording studio and just played like psychedelic Mozarts. Timpani, live effects, sound effect records, backward echo, violin bow on guitar and plenty of echo. Gerry and I on vocals now. What came out was still, to this day, in my humble opinion, some very complex, untouched territory, holy-what-the-? stuff. We were all about 19.
It didn’t last long and we were way behind and way ahead of our time. I’m so ffffn thrilled though at 54 to see what this world of open-ended listeners will think of Spiny Normen now. The 19 year old Steve is getting his dream fulfilled. Gerry and I still experiment here and again with guitar and theremin in an effort called Psylobison. Just as touched, but its not going to give you such bad dreams.
Spiny Normen will be available on LP, CD and download on March 2nd, 2018 via RidingEasy Records. Pre-orders are available at RidingEasyRecs.com.
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 Artist: Spiny Normen
Album: Spiny Normen
Label: RidingEasy Records Release Date: March 2nd, 2018
01. Arrowhead
02. Wrecko Wild Man Ride
03. Carry Your Water
04. The Monkeyweasel
05. To Meet the Mad Hatter
06. The Bell Park Loon
07. In The Darkness of Night
08. The Sound of Younger Times
On The Web: Keep your mind open.
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The Soft Bulletin marked a departure for the Flaming Lips from their heavy, psychedelic guitars to, well, a softer touch and even more psychedelia. It’s a lovely record that explores the band’s now-frequent themes of the universe, the self, death, and love.
“Race for the Prize,” for example, is the story of two scientists burdened with the competition of finding a cure for something, even though the stress of it might kill them and leave their wives widows and their children orphans. The initial swell of keyboards lets us know right away that this won’t be a typical Flaming Lips record.
We learn that the scientists were successful on “A Spoonful Weighs a Ton,” even though the race did indeed kill them. The cure they found? Love. It’s always been right in front of us. The percussion on “The Spark That Bled” blends rock drums, orchestral beats, and psychedelic drippiness as lead singer Wayne Coyne sings about a moment of enlightenment. “The Spiderbite Song” has Coyne thanking the cosmos that friends of his didn’t die too soon from things as varied as a spider bite, a car crash, or falling into crazy love.
“Buggin'” is, appropriately, a song about insects. It’s rather peppy and fun, even as it discusses bugs dying against your car’s windshield. I can’t describe “What Is the Light?” any better than the notes on the back of the album: “An untested hypothesis suggesting that the chemical (in our brains) by which we are able to experience the sensation of being in love is the same chemical that caused the ‘Big Bang’ that was the birth of the accelerating universe.” That’s what this lovely, shimmering song not only discusses but also makes you believe.
If you ever doubted the Flaming Lips are inspired by Pink Floyd, just listen to “The Observer,” which is practically a lost cut from the Dark Side of the Moon sessions. Wayne Coyne described “Waitin’ for a Superman” as “a sad song” when I saw them live two years ago. It is a song about depression, and how even Superman can fail so we shouldn’t be crushed when we do the same. It’s one of the Lips’ greatest songs, really. It’s uplifting and bittersweet at the same time.
“Suddenly Everything Has Changed” is about one of Coyne’s favorite subjects – embracing the idea that one day we’ll all be dead. Little moments of existential panic are actually reminders that we should appreciate things like the clouds we see on the drive home, the vegetables we just bought at the store, and the fact that we can fold laundry while floating on an orb in an endless universe. “The Gash” is a call to fight on even when to do so exposes wounds in us that must be healed no matter how frightening it is to confront them.
“Feeling Yourself Disintegrate” continues the Lips’ theme of not being afraid of death, for “life without death is just impossible,” as Coyne sings while the rest of the band plays bright keyboards and whimsical guitars behind him.
The album ends with the instrumental “Sleeping on the Roof,” a beautiful send-off that could be the sound of a dream, a funeral, a birth, or all three. The entire album could be played during any of those events. It’s another masterpiece by the Flaming Lips and still uplifting after nearly twenty years.
Keep your mind open.
Happy New Year! What were the best albums of last year? Well, these topped the list for me.
#5 – Blanck Mass – World Eater
The somewhat startling cover is a warning for a powerful, teeth-baring electro record that somehow catches all the chaos this year displayed. There was a lot of early buzz about this record upon its release, and for good reason. It’s a stunning piece of synthwave, dark wave, and psychedelic fever dreams.
#4 – All Them Witches – Sleeping Through the War
This psychedelic blues-rock was pretty much a lock for my favorite rock record of the year as soon as I heard it. ATW brew up haunting tracks that range in subjects from being stuck in purgatory to internet addiction (which are pretty much the same thing).
#3 – LCD Soundsystem – American Dream
Their reunion was possibly the most anticipated of the year, and they proved they hadn’t lost a thing on this great record. Front man James Murphy‘s lyrics are as searing as ever as he confronts aging, love, social media, partying, and Millennials. One of the singles, “Tonite” (one of my favorites of the year) is a great example. It’s a song about songs, but it’s also about the fears and joys of aging.
#2 – WALL – Untitled
This is a bittersweet choice because one of the best post-punk records, and best records in any genre, of the year is by a band who broke up before it was released or even named. WALL‘s only full-length record is shrouded in mysterious lyrics about the current political landscape and the band itself. It’s also full of sharp guitar hooks and sass that is sorely missed. Consider yourself blessed if you caught one of their too few live shows.
#1 – Kelly Lee Owens – self-titled
I read a review of this album that described it as “a breath of fresh air.” I’m not sure I can beat that description because this stunning debut is the most beautiful record I heard all year. Ms. Owens’ synth soundscapes immediately seem to lighten gravity around you. It’s a tonic for the toxic atmosphere we’re living in right now (both in the real world and in the one that blitzes us from cyberspace every day). If 2017 got you down, listen to this album today and you will have a much better outlook on the year to come.
Keep your mind open.
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It’s my top 10 of the year. Who’s here? Read on for the first five.
#10 – Sleaford Mods – English Tapas
Bold, brash, and at times brutal, this is a punk rock album disguised as a hip hop record. The minimalist beats get under your skin and the scathing lyrics stick it to the Man, ourselves, and everyone in-between.
#9 – Gary Numan – Savage (Songs from a Broken World)
This industrial powerhouse of a record was a great return for Gary Numan and a fantastic concept album (about life in a post-apocalyptic world) to boot. It has some great riffs and Numan’s synth work is top-notch. He shows no signs of slowing or aging.
Recorded beginning to end in just one take, this amazing record combines three drummers with four other people playing vintage synthesizers, drum machines, and sequencers. It’s an impressive piece of work and it produced one of my favorite singles of the year – “Missing Wires.”
I picked up this album after hearing just one song from it, “Dream Come Now (another one of my favorite songs of 2017),” and was astounded by the rest of the record. It’s fierce and chock-full of garage-punk riffs that flatten nearly everything else I’ve heard this year.
This is one of the most beautiful records of the year and marked a big return for not only Slowdive but also the entire shoegaze genre. Everyone wondered how this record would sound once Slowdive announced their reunion, and it exceeded everyone’s expectation. It’s easily the best shoegaze release of 2017.
Who makes the top five? Tune in on New Year’s Day to find out!
Keep your mind open.
[It’s not too late to subscribe this year.]
