THE ICARUS LINE - 'ALL THINGS UNDER HEAVEN'

Formats

• AGIT033 - 2xLPs

  5060174958557

• AGIT033CD - CD

  5060174958564

Details

BRAND NEW album from legendary LA firestarters, The Icarus Line. Their third full length release for Agitated (their eigth album in total), following on from their imperious return to the fray in 2013 with the much lauded release of ?Slave Vows?, followed up by its companion? album release ?Avowed Slavery? in 2014. Recorded and arranged live as a group in Cardamone?s studio, Valley Recording Company in Burbank, the sessions ?were very private and conducive to conjuring,? the frontman describes. ?If you are lucky, you can capture something before it dies. I feel like all great music is a fleeting inspiration. You only have so much time to capture it before it either turns into routine or it turns its back on you.? The album features a guest appearance from legendary outsider artist Joe Coleman who helped coin the album title. Also appearing is Bad Seed / Grinderman/ Dirty Three band leader Warren Ellis who helped pen the track "Bedlam Blue" with Cardamone. Art work for All Things Under Heaven was found during the making of the record. Veteran news photographer Randy Taylor was receiving attention for some works of his that were created out of destruction. During the Sandy hurricane his archive was flooded and many of his photos were ?destroyed?. The pictures that would make up the record?s sleeve were simply a document of a 4th of July cookout but after the waters of Sandy they became the american dream in a car crash with mother nature. The perfect visual to compliment a document about a melted american dream. All Things Under Heaven packs the kind of swagger, raunch & ascent that would make Iggy Stooge and Sun Ra proud parents. It is a record that expands the vocabulary of what rock music can be without sacrificing the critical spirit that makes it Rock N Roll. The Icarus Line have summoned up the demons from the past, paid their homage and taken the sound in an entirely new direction; because this band are never ones to be caught on their knees. The album is a sprawling sonic landscape that has a timeless quality about it as it traverses between low valleys, towering skyscrapers and all the dirty alleyways that connect them. It?s a record that's as sprawling as the city of Los Angeles to which The Icarus Line have always called home. It?s a fuck you to the bite size society that has become music consumption. Life is bigger than that. And just like LA, this is a record that from the opening hollow echo swallowed pounding drums of ?Ride Or Die? to the final free jazz funeral lullaby of ?Sleep Now? is all its own world. The Icarus Line have been deep in the rock n? roll trenches since their debut album Mono in the late 90s, yet sound more significant now than ever. Over the years The Icarus Line have proved to be one of the most exciting and unpredictable live bands around, again and again. Their performances are explosive, dangerous and sexy all at the same time. ?Joe Cardamone slanks in a room like some sick fuck who actually knows how to live on the street, instead of pretending that he still does,? writes Permanent Midnight author Jerry Stahl. ?Walking down Vulnerable Hardass Ave ? the one where OG rock?n?rollers, the early eat-their-arms screamers and bar walkers that paved the way for posers and haircuts to come, first started screaming out the truth that was eating them alive.? For fans of all music styles American Primitive: Ayler, Patton, Howlin Wolf, Gira, Velvet Underground, Funkadelic, Sun Ra, The Psychedelic Stooges, Black Flag, Charlie Feathers, Tony Conrad Vinyl format, is deluxe double LP / Gatefold sleeve

Tracks

RIDE OR DIE

TOTAL PANDEMONIUM

EL SERENO

ALL THINGS UNDER HEAVEN (featuring Joe Coleman)

LITTLE HORN

MILLENIAL PRAYER

INCINERATOR BLUE

MIRROR

BEDLAM BLUE (featuring Warren Ellis)
SOLAR PLEXUS

I DON'T WANNA STAY

SLEEP NOW

Press

**** MOJO, **** UNCUT

Audio & Video

WOLF EYES - 'ENEMY LADDER / DULL MURDER TWO'

Formats

• TMR332 - 7"

Details

Post-industrial/noise group Wolf Eyes and are set to release their new album 'I Am A Problem: Mind In Pieces' on October 30th via Third Man Records. Behold the album's first single "Enemy Ladder" b/w "Dull Murder Two. This is the their first new single / album release since 2013’s “Album of the year” (The Wire) “Lower Floors”, released on De Stijl. Michigan’s finest, with an uncompromising return

Tracks

Press

Audio & Video

L.VOAG - 'THE WAY OUT'

Formats

• SV083 - LP+7"

  857176003522

Details

The first-time vinyl reissue of the 1979 solo debut from the Homosexuals bassist Jim Welton (a.k.a. L. Voag) includes a bonus 7-inch of the rare Move EP. The Way Out is recommended for fans of Desperate Bicycles, This Heat and Mark Perry. "The start of recording The Way Out crossed over with the last days of my involvement with the Homosexuals. Lovely as they were, the guys were demanding unswerving, vanilla rock 'n' roll fealty from me – something I just couldn't provide given my need to taste eight thousand musical ideas at once. "The gravity around which The Way Out took shape issued from a decidedly asinine idea: what if we lived in a world where the music of the avant-gardists (Stockhausen, Oliveros, Henry) provided the best-selling, chart-topping pabulum of the day, while pop music (as we know it) was an obscure, nigh impenetrable, elitist niche product? L. Voag is a fiction used to describe a character from the pop milieu who, desperate for a hit, attempts to knock out a crossover album combining both worlds. Not surprisingly, he fails miserably. "The Way Out was recorded at Surrey Sound Studios, founded in 1976 by brothers Nigel and Chris Grey. While Nigel (sensibly?) concentrated on music biz staples The Police and others, Chris – a visionary with at least one if not both feet planted in the future – opened up the studio to all manner of experiment, actively inviting mavericks and crazies to participate. Maniacs like the Homosexuals, Milk From Cheltenham, and L. Voag were granted access to gold standard, 24-track recording equipment, so long as it was during so-called dead time between 1:00 and 7:00 A.M. The brothers were unfailingly generous, even on the occasion when Lepke retuned Sting's hand-turned lute to the obscure Mixolydian mode – by accident. "The middle of The Way Out sessions, which took just over six weeks to complete, were disrupted when L. Voag found himself arrested on trumped-up charges by the Special Patrol Group (SPG), London's own out-of-control paramilitary police force. Held for two days, L. Voag was dragged by the SPG to his Bloomsbury squat, special guest of a proposed drugs raid. As they smashed the doors in, he burst into a famous rendition of his now forgotten masterwork, 'The Police Are Raiding the Fucking House!' Halfway through the first verse, he discovered the boot of an SPG thug dancing up and down on his face and promptly stopped singing. Some days later in the slow dead hours before dawn, L. Voag sang again. If you listen carefully to The Way Out, you will hear the lisping special effect of twelve stitches applied to the lip. Beat that if you can, songbirds." – L. Voag

Tracks

Front Door
Hall
Kitchen
Toilet
Living Room
Bedroom
The Way Out
The Lengthy Pause
Franco's Prayer
The Raw End (of the Tits, Bum & Challenge Deal)
Boxing and Sparring (With the Third Dimension)
The Goalkeepers Fear of the Piss-Up
Planning ? Budgeting ? Shopping
Helping the Police With Their Enquiries
Your Own Hair ? Your Own Chance
El Cada Dia Del Gent? Comun
The Tuned Knife and Fork Toned Down to a Light Lunch
The Monumental
Bonus 7-inch Track Listing:

Beauty Spreads
Aural Terrorism
We Dress Up Our Ideas (To Make Them Seem Greater Than They Really Are)
According to Freud

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Audio & Video

MILK FROM CHELTENHAM - 'TRIPTYCH OF POISONERS'

Formats

• SV084 - LP

  857176003539

Details

The first-time vinyl reissue of the sole album from UK DIY legends Milk From Cheltenham, originally released in 1983 on famed It’s War Boys imprint, is recommended for fans of Swell Maps, The Faust Tapes and LAFMS. “Flashback to no-when (1978) in a musty cellar beneath a record store in Brixton, later to become the humble 8-track recording studio of It’s War Boys. Milk From Cheltenham would regularly jam and invite friends / enemies to participate with whatever weapons / instruments they chose to deploy, making live recordings on an odd triple microphone input cassette player. By the time of the recordings at Surrey Sound in 1981-82, we had reduced in size from a hive of toxicity to a triptych of poisoners: Victorr Lounge, Salamander and myself. “Like rabid quantum monkeys with broken typewriters, we were allowed to run loose in the studio, under the supervision of tonmeister Chris Grey and head zookeeper L. Voag. There was always a cornucopia of exotic instruments including kettle drums, synthesizers and electric sitar. To make some of the basement tapes sound bigger, Chris would play them through vast speakers and re-record the results. The footsteps you hear is our mate strolling around in cowboy boots on top of one of the speakers. “Milk were hot—like a triplet mega-brain generously juiced on creative steroids—and this was before our special splice-and-be-damned bricolage of the tapes, interpolating into the jams a pastiche of Morricone lock grooves, early Sparks, radio fragments, a JFK speech and samples from our most cherished record, Christmas Carols With Breezy (a creepy singing rabbit). One track mined a session at Cold Storage (home studio of This Heat) where everyone played in different parts of the building, separated according to instruments and without much idea of what anyone else would be doing. “I remember scrawling a dead cow on a napkin in a café. The albums, all printed by hand, took longer to make than the recording because the screens would often disintegrate. The back cover art was printed at Recommended Records and spray glued—poor ozone layer! Almost half the song titles were borrowed from Le Corbusier’s book The Radiant City. The record was released to spectacular indifference and just 500 copies made their way into an unsuspecting world.” —Lepke B

Tracks

1. The Man Who Cried
2. Where Is the Money to Come From?
3. Mr. Fridge
4. International Questionnaire
5. What About Air War?
6. Do the Ready Can
7. Decisions
8. Snappy Fingers
9. The Plan Must Rule
10. El Toro Saldr? Cuando Suena El Clarin
11. Our Dictator
12. Invitation to Action
13. Das Elefantenkalb
14. Air ? Sound ? Light
15. Passport to Happiness!
16. Triptych of Poisoners 17. Krazy Golf
18. Can a Vacuum Cleaner Really Work Quietly?

Press

Audio & Video

DEPARTMENTSTORE SANTAS - 'AT THE MEDIEVAL CASTLE NINETEEN 100- YEAR LIFETIMES SINCE'

Formats

• SV095 - LP

  857176003478

Details

The Departmentstore Santas’ LP is a underground rock classic of the highest order—from its carnivalesque front cover to the sixteen home-schooled tracks contained inside. Information about this mysterious band has been as scarce as original copies of their self-released album, yet purveyors of lo-fi pop esoterica have whispered about the Santas’ raison d’etre for the better part of the past three decades. Recorded in the early ’80s in La Mesa, California, At the Medieval Castle Nineteen 100-Year Lifetimes Since features quirky sing-alongs, wide-eyed lyrics, echoey instrumentals and outsider folk-punk à la Daniel Johnston. While bandleader Joseph D’Angelo’s unique charm may not fit comfortably in any one style, his preternatural world is united by the warmth and grit of these bedroom recordings. Out of step with other music of its era, Departmentstore Santas uncannily anticipated the 4-track movement of the ’90s. This first-time reissue is recommended for fans of Television Personalities, Guided By Voices and Cleaners From Venus.

Tracks

1. Bactol
2. Bank Acct
3. Surfboards, Convertibles, and Dark, Lonely Beaches
4. Hey (What?s Going on Here?)
5. Kids on a Merry-Go-Round
at Eucalyptus Park
6. Play in the Sun
7. R. Joseph D?Angelo Theme
8. An Open Letter to
Seniors From Mackenzie
9. Jewel of the Hills
10. Photo Album of Baby
11. Lost at Sea
12. Egypt
13. W
14. A Song for a Sunny Day
15. Monkeys and Organ Grinders
16. Kaleidoscope

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Audio & Video

SPELLJAMMER - 'ANCIENT OF DAYS'

Formats

• EZRDR055 - LP

  603111999517

• EZRDR055CD - CD

  603111999524

Details

“We like things on a grand scale,” says Spelljammer bassist/vocalist Niklas Olsson. That’s a bit of an understatement considering the Stockholm, Sweden trio’s penchant for massive, slow-burning sludge riffs intercut with dramatic melodic interludes. There’s the pummeling heft of detuned guitars rumbling across the rugged expanse of unwieldy drums counterbalanced with moments of Master of Reality-era Sabbath’s introspective acoustic breaks and Pink Floyd’s Meddle-era psychedelia. These extreme shifts in dynamic give the band’s third album a sense of epic depth unlike most of Spelljammer’s peers. “The vastness of everything is something that I seem to think about a lot,” Olsson says, “and I guess that shows in the lyrics.” Some of Ancient of Days’ words were inspired by the epic poem Aniara by Swedish author and Nobel laureate Harry Martinson in which a spaceship leaving an uninhabitable Earth is hurtled off course, sending its thousands of passengers on a steady course in the wrong direction and there is nothing they can do about it. They will all slowly die as the ship continues from the solar system, forever into nothingness. This type of apocalyptic woe permeates throughout the 5-song, 40-minute album in perfect bond with the vastness of the music. Ancient of Days is not just the band’s third release, but in many ways, a rebirth. It’s Spelljammer’s first recording as a trio — with Olsson taking over bass duties and new drummer Jonatan Rimsbo battering the skins — and the culmination of a progressive move toward a heavier, doom-laden sound, away from the desert rock leanings of their 2010 debut Inches From the Sun. Vol II saw the band spreading out into darker territories. After writing sessions fell apart in 2013 for a followup to Vol II (reissued in early 2015 by RidingEasy Records) Olsson and guitarist Robert Sorling scrapped nearly everything following the departure of half of the band. The two began to build from the ground up as a duo with new ideas that resulted in the invigorated Ancient of Days. It’s the band’s most focused and deliberate in both its complexities and simplicities. “Having recorded the previous two albums in a more patchwork kind of way,” Olsson says, “we were very set on going into one studio and doing the entire thing.” In so doing, they banged it all out over a weekend in January 2015 at Ingrid Studio in Stockholm, with engineer Christoffer Zakrisson at the helm. Here, syrupy guitars ooze from the speakers, the drums sound like they’re perched atop a giant barge and howling vocals float throughout the proceedings. Ancient of Days very effectively embodies the boundless, otherworldly essence of its inspiration.

Tracks

Meadow
Laelia
From Slumber
The Pathfinder
Borlung

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Audio & Video

TIMMY'S ORGANISM - 'GET UP, GET OUT'

Formats

• TMR328 - 7"

  813547021557

Details

A new single from the hardest working punk in show business. Timmy Vulgar, Detroits favorite son, and most ambitiously amphibious creative force doesnt need much of an introduction to anyone familiar with subversive punk music over the past decade and a half. Hes been such an irreplaceable figure in each of his musical endeavors since his emergence in such legendary acts such as the Epileptix and Clone Defects back in the late 1990s, right up through his shape-shifting efforts in the mollusk-like Human Eye and the prog-soaked Reptile Forcefield, and straight into his latest nerve-numbing scatterbomb known simply as Timmys Organism.'' Todd Killings, Hozac Records How can KURT VILE fans sleep at night knowing that this fucking guy is out there, ruling the universe? Seriously, Timmy Vulgar - makes everyone else look like a fucking joke. Mitch Cardwell, Maximum Rock'n'Roll A new Timmy's Organism album is set to drop on October 30th via Third Man, for fans of their forbears Captain Beefheart and Destroy All Monsters, while amply ramping up the slop culture rapture of classic punk 'n' roll like Chrome, Crime, and the Damned as well as contemporaries like Thee Oh Sees.

Tracks

A: Get Up, Get Out
B: The Thrill Is Gone

Press

http://www.stereogum.com/1823008/timmys-organism-get-up-get-out-stereogum-premiere/mp3s/

Audio & Video