Tag: indie music

Narrow Lands – Popular Music That Will Live Forever – 20th November 2013

~ shaun tenzenmen ~ Leave a comment

Cat #: 148TZM

Once known to jangle, Sydney band Narrow Lands have turned their hands to rumbling. Since adding a baritone guitar to their mix, their music has become heavier, darker, weirder and, well, simply better.

On their debut LP, the guys from Narrow Lands mix the sweet grittiness of punk with a thundering mess of noise/feedback, in the spirit of bands like Swans or Dead China Doll.

Recorded in two days in mid-winter, in a shed behind Alan’s parents’ place on a little farm west of Bathurst, Narrow Lands aimed to keep the LP sounding as fresh, authentic and ferocious as possible.

Each ridiculous sound you might hear here is an experiment with the potential of an instrument, a way of allowing things to ‘freak out’ without forcing the issue. The result hits you like a friendly punch in the guts.

A co-operative release between tenzenmen and Octopus Pi (www.facebook.com/Octopuspi)

Yes I’m Leaving – 5th November 2013

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Cat #: 110TZM

“Yes I’m Leaving’s first self-titled album was recorded in a rehearsal room in an industrial district in Rydalmere a suburb in the outer west of Sydney over three hours on a date I can’t recall.

The band had been writing and playing sporadically for a while with members travelling or moving to eventually return to a time upon which their music could be captured to ‘tape’. Microphones were aimed at a set of guitar combos, a bass rig, a mouth and a drumkit and then plugged into a recording machine, quickly checked for levels and then, in the end, 13 songs were ringing away in the headphones.

I guess the songs are either attempts at nasty snide repetition, improvised ‘feel’, or just a stabby mean sound usually all at once. If you listen you’ll hear a string snap at the end of a song and a frustrated swear word. Some songs had only been put together the week before so were highly volatile. I don’t even know how I made some of the noises on that recording, I kind of like that. It was mixed the same night and originally put onto tape and cd as a release. Now it has been mastered with a bit more kick in the bass and an upsized screenprint + insert, on random coloured vinyl.” Billy Bourke.

Alpine Decline – Night of the Long Knives – 10th October 2013

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Cat #: 155TZM

One year after spiriting off to China, Alpine Decline return with their fourth album, “Night of the Long Knives”. Descending from the high altitude visions of their previous records, the duo walks us gassed out and head numb through chaos and time sickness, deep into the ruins of ancient alleyways and naked skyscrapers. This time under the expansive sonics of producer (and China punk godfather) Yang Haisong, “Night of the Long Knives” is Alpine Decline surfacing from the Beijing haze maze at the height of their powers, crafting songs with the ghost-memory quality of myths and guiding us deep into the cinematic and stereoscopic landscape of their world, real and apocryphal.

Somehow sounding both clearer and denser than their previous albums, “Night of the Long Knives” opens with “Day 213”, a broken transmission from the site of the band’s crash landing. Stepping away from the rubble, we again walk with the duo through a landscape that is equal parts fascination and horror (although never cynical, never sneering). This fourth album presents some of the bands most accessible, nearly pop moments, masterfully folded into experimentation and sonic exploration. From the deep hooks of “Drunk on Crystal Fire” to the zombie lurch of “Industrial/Domestic”, “Night of the Long Knives” is an album that proves, once again, Alpine Decline are making some of the most creative, exciting albums anywhere on the planet.

Alpine Decline – Visualizations – 9th October 2013

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Cat #: 149TZM

In the Spring of 2010, their self-titled debut still cooling on the racks, Alpine Decline left the sun-stained Sierra Nevada to trek through China from the Eastern capital to the Himalaya peaks in Tibet. Returning to the studio – this time working with L.A. experimental artist M. Geddes Gengras (Robedoor, Pocahaunted, The Congos) – the duo poured all the captured spirits of their journey into “Visualizations”, a ten-track-trip that revels in their expanded visions.

Though clearly a rock album, the songs on “Visualizations” seem to emerge from a more fleshed out landscape, with the guitars and drums rising up from a mist of drones that are sometimes ghostly and sometimes the full-throated OM of the otherworld. The songwriting and melodic craftsmanship, with vocals ripped up and glued together on magnetic tape, is more fleshed out than their debut, their identity more firmly realized, from the heart-pounding “Enter the Bullet” and “CCTV” to the mournful dreams of “The Fever Subsides” and “Deeper into the Part”. “Visualizations” lets you travel with Alpine Decline through provinces of electronic waste and shadow-warped night markets, dropping you off at the final notes short of breath but exhilarated.

Alpine Decline – Disappearance – 8th October 2013

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Cat #: 152TZM

Something is amiss in the world of Alpine Decline. Just months after releasing their sophomore album “Visualizations”, the band returned to M. Geddes Gengras’s Green Machines studio in East Los Angeles to record “消失/DISAPPEARANCE”. Whereas the previous album found the duo wandering through some ghost world without a map, on “消失/DISAPPEARANCE” they are in control, pulling you down by your ankles into their deep deep sleep. Opening track “The Anesthesiologist” twists radically from bone-crushing guitar and drums into a warped brain-burning seven minute dronescape. When it finally lets you get up, brush yourself off and look around, you are undeniably in uncharted territory.

Haunting melodies, vocals that flutter in the ripples of a gas leak, cryptic guitars, bleeding synthesizers, and hypnotic drumming combine into something both headphone-ready and made to make you move. This is rock music for the mythically inclined. “An Accident” and “Now You Believe in Vanishing” are radio singles for an FM that never existed, and the band fearlessly steer the ship into the polyrhythmic got-down-on-the-one bump of “The Other Side” and the strobed-out hypnosis of album closer “Frontier Religion”. By now, putting on an Alpine Decline album has become a kind of ritual passage, stepping into a space both instantly familiar and completely otherworldly, but when the tape reels stop spinning and the machines cool down, the band is nowhere to be found. Before the album hit the pressing plant, Alpine Decline themselves had disappeared, not to resurface again for almost a year in the rubble and chaos on the outskirts of Beijing. 

Alpine Decline – 7th October 2013

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Cat #: 145TZM

From the opening strains of “Encounter”, the first track on Alpine Decline’s self-titled debut, the listener is guided across the chasm and into a narrative just beyond comprehension. With a more immediate and bracing sound than the albums to follow, “Alpine Decline” draws attention to the band’s ability to craft unique melodies while bloodying your nose with buzzing guitars and twenty-ton drums.

From their previous incarnations in various L.A. bands, the duo doesn’t so much rise up from the ashes, but rather smear the ashes on like war paint and go marauding into the night. From the spaghetti western kill guitar and church bells of “The Pilgrim Got Drunk” to the blissed escape of album closer “Stole Away”, Alpine Decline’s first foray is here and gone in seven tracks that lay the blueprint for the work to come.

Imported under license from Alpine Decline. We’re all in this together!

The All Seeing Hand – Mechatronics – 1st October 2013

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Cat #: 146TZM

Mechatronics is the second album by The All Seeing Hand. It will be available on vinyl and CD from October 1st through Muzai in New Zealand and Tenzenmen in Australia. While the bands’ first album documented the band’s original incarnation as a turntable and drum duo Mechatronics presents the band in its new, three headed form!

The first album was absolute sonic freedom and although improvisation allowed them to reach aural destinations impossible to reach conventionally it meant that often the turntables and drums existed in totally different universes. Fortuitously, there were parts where the band would fall into perfect synchronization and these moments gave glimpses of a way forward.

On Mechatronics the drums and turntables are in-sync, interlocking, moving, and sounding, like huge cogs in a mechanical production line. Where once any human voice would be scratched samples from ethnic folk records, there is now a real living throat; singing! Rather than just contributing a looped texture the voice now tells an entire story and its rich-tone, gritty screams and percussive yelps drag the drum and turntable rhythm section up to the heavens.

Although all the pieces on Mechatronics stem from this tight palette of overtone singing, turntables and drums the subject matter and images projected into the mind are diverse. From sprawling mechanised assembly lines (Mechatronics), robotic nano-surgery (Surgery) and riot control (Grab & Smash) to shamanistic séances (Cadentia) and hectic theme-music for extraterrestrial road tripping (Maximum Capacity). 

The album was recorded at Scumbag College, a beaten up but much loved DIY studio, lurking under Wellington Airport. The album features contributions from Deane Hunter on guitar and previous live collaborators St Cosmos and Samin Son on vocals.

The album artwork is a fantastically detailed masterpiece from the twisted mind of Wellington prodigy Daily Secretion (a.k.a Hannah Salmon). In perfect visual analogy to the music, it combines the mechanical, the biological and the cosmic into a work of terrifying beauty.