Tag: indie rock

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.

Seahorse Divorce – 13th September 2013

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Cat #: 142TZM

All life on Earth began innocently in the primordial, prenatal waters of creation, and so too it was that love drew its first delicate and vulnerable breath. If you have known love you will be aware of the terrible pounding and crushing pressure pushing all oxygen from your chest, leaving you gasping for air and looking to take up the nearest sharp object and carve gills into your neck. This is the spirit of the ocean calling to your most ancient protozoan ancestral memory, speaking its most primal intuition and evoking a near implacable yearning to drown yourself in the nearest body of water.

Consider this, then, the conceptual crux of the debut LP from regenerate Brisbane dandies Seahorse Divorce; 11 tracks of unfettered, unapologetic and organic affection prevailing in the face of the invariable estrangement and painful separation of life. Lacking ulterior motive or any concept of predestination, the songs are offered in homage to the other, the oft-ignored remainder after opposing and dominating forces of creative or emotional obviousness wear themselves thin.

Left, then, to wander through an ever-shifting landscape of light and darkness in search of hearth and hospice, as street urchins Seahorse Divorce simultaneously abandon and are abandoned by the bygone progenitors that first gave them life, and yet are clearly distinguished and inescapably marked by their genetic and cultural heritage.

Recorded live, Sun Distorted, punk in intent but never in form, it is unlikely that Seahorse Divorce is the proselytizing litany of a new age but have stranger things not happened? 

Golden Blonde – Gwen – 2nd September 2013

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Cat #: 135TZM

‘Gwen’ is GOLDEN BLONDE’s debut full-length album – recorded and mixed with local engineer Tim Carr.

The recording sessions saw the members adopting a cut-and-paste aesthetic inspired by hip-hop producers such as Doom and Madlib.

Electronic and percussive elements come to the fore creating an acoustic and electronic mix of choral melodies, brutal sub frequencies, loops and field recordings.

GOLDEN BLONDE is
Adam Guzowski – Vocals, Guitars, Clarinet & Tenor Recorder
Austin Buckett – Rhodes, Hammond B-3, Synths, Piano, Fujitone & Percussion
Hugh Deacon – Drums & Percussion
Joshua Becker – Bass Guitar

Additional vocals by Amy Wilson on tracks 4, 5, 8 & 11.
Recorded and mixed by Tim Carr at Studio 301, Sydney, Australia.
Mastered by Jeff Lipton and Maria Rice at Peerless Mastering, Newton, USA.
Composed by GOLDEN BLONDE.
Post-production and field recordings by Austin Buckett at various locations.
Co-directed by Austin Buckett & Adam Guzowski.