New Music: Clinic, Deerhunter, Roy Montgomery

Still having trouble with getting the www.audiversity.com address to work. Any interweb savvy people out there up to helping out? Also, I moved all old Music-versity posts over to Audiversity so all old links have been broken; not good really, but we're kinda starting anew, so fuck it. Lots of good music this week, still much more to come. Enjoy.





Clinic - Tusk (mp3) - Visitations (Domino 2007)

Clinic – Visitations / Domino

So I was meandering through the vast farmlands of Illinois the other night when the clouds slowly separated, the sky blinked a burgundy hue and a silvery spacecraft etched a bright bolt across the horizon stopping directly in front of me. As lower exhaust fumes bent the crops below into mysterious circles, I took a much-needed step back staring dumbly at the eerie saucer elegantly landing on four spindly legs. Before I could strategize the best way from where I was standing to wherever a spacecraft was not, haze spout from the underside of the ship and a large square platform began to lower itself. The air around was instantly filled with a sound not unlike rock music but distinctly alien; angular guitar riffs danced around plodding drums, menacing keyboards lit up over an elastic bass, and a high-pitched, warbling drawl hissed through clenched-teeth from the forefront of these figures. As I stared wide-eyed at the surgical mask-clad extraterrestrial band (perhaps their alien lungs can't take the Earth's polluted atmosphere) a large, flashing sign lit up from behind the stage just as the climax hit during their 3-minute rock outburst; it read, in blinking caps, CLINIC. The song ended, the platform elevated and the ship ascended back into the empty sky. Before the spacecraft disappeared, I caught a glimpse of a Liverpool license plate and was immediately smacked in the face by a furiously falling copy of their new, self-recorded album, Visitations. The following weeks were spent obsessively scanning the night sky and keeping the mysterious disc on repeat. Each spin reminisced of The Velvet Underground, Can and Suicide but as heard through otherworldly radio waves and reproduced in an urgent, surgically clean manner with recording technology far beyond our meager studios. I've spent every night since the aural abduction contemplating this strange but familiar grit-rock and endlessly dreaming of their faraway home planet, Liverpool.








Deerhunter - Spring Hall Convert (mp3) - Cryptograms (Kranky 2007)

Deerhunter – Cryptograms / Kranky

The tumultuous quintet that is Deerhunter could very much be focusing their sound into something truly hype-worthy. Check the bass line from Octet, primped and poised for mashing and smashing indie dance floors everywhere. Peak the layered vocal harmonies of Hazel St. and tell me that they don’t rival the post-Beach Boys psych Grizzly Bear is capitalizing on. Ease into the glistening minimal ambience of Red Ink and prove to me that they couldn’t be signed to Kranky… oh, they are signed to Kranky, never mind that part. Instead of deciding on one marketable sound, the weathered boys of Deerhunter infuse all of their influences, from 80s post-punk to 60s psyche-pop to the ambient explorations of all eras, and dump it into a bucket of feedback and tape hiss… and you will be absolutely thanking them for it. Their sophomore album and Kranky debut, ordered chronologically from two separate days of recording (the split being after Red Ink), is an adventurous trip through unsettling ambiance and epiphanic songwriting literally mapping the psychological ride of bringing the album to life. You stream along somewhat aimlessly but not all unpleasantly throughout the first half of the album through bogs of feedback and thick atmosphere, stopping for two darker underground club numbers in the title track and Octet. Beginning with Spring Hall Convert, the band is strikingly more optimistic in their songwriting, melodies and tone. In fact, wrap up tracks 8 through 12 as an EP and you would be dealing with some substantial stirring in the current post-psyche scene. Cryptograms as a whole is an excellent array of sounds and moods compiled in an album that reads somewhat voyeuristically and somewhat sheer mystery. All and all, an excellent, challenging record worth your time. And if you get a chance, read the concert testimonials on their MySpace, utterly hilarious; who actually goes out of their way to write stuff like that?







(couldn't find album pic)

Roy Montgomery - On the Road 2 (mp3) - Inroads: New and Collected Works (Rebis 2007)

Roy Montgomery – Inroads: New and Collected Works / Rebis

I'm fully convinced that at the tips of Roy Montgomery's fingers are some kind of synapse or nerve that let's the him actually feel the vibrations being created with each pluck of his guitar and stay in control of these feelings as they later leave his amp as cluttered soundwaves. The experimental guitar player from New Zealand was brought up on the electric through garage rock and post-punk in the 70s and early 80s with stints in Pin Group and the Shallows, where he honed an interest in the drone aesthetic, before leaving the music scene. He reappeared in the 90s with dirge rock group Dadamah and continued his space-psyche sound in collaborations with Flying Saucer Attack and Bardo Pond. But this 2-disc compilation, culled from comp tracks and 7 inches, focuses in on the matured sound of Montgomery whose solo releases on Kranky, Drunken Fish and VHF gained him recognition and a cult following as an otherworldly guitar player and artist. The first disc of Inroads concentrates on the more ambient and melancholy side of Montgomery. His hypnotic guitar solos are not the product of perfected tone or technique, but the manipulation of his instrument to produce sounds alien to traditional method. Recorded mostly on simple Tascam 4-tracks, Montgomery eases his guitar to tape letting each vibration fully developed and degrade with care, which make songs like On the Road 2 so mesmerizing with the knowledge that it's all coming from a single instrument. On more than one occasion, it resembles a mystic, timeless form of raga. The second disc, on the other hand, features Montgomery's more emphatic and noisier side. Tracks like Sister Clean sound like Sandy Bull strapped with an electric and tour-worn amp covering a looping piece from Reich; he utilizes the reverberated overtones as much as the original soundwaves to create one throbbing creature of sound. During the following track, Last Days of Mankind, rays of higher frequencies find your ears through a typhoon of feedback adding extra stabs of awe to the already unbelievable sound. Montgomery has an undeniable understanding of the evolution of sound after it leaves the instrument and the foresight to control the reverberations well before they start to weave themselves into the already vibrating tapestry of frequencies, not as much a wall of sound but a living, breathing entity in its own. He finds a much-needed niche between the acid-induced psychedelic guitar rock of yesteryear and the drone experiments so popular today.