Posted in Whathaveyou on February 22nd, 2024 by JJ Koczan
A Geezer and Isaak split LP is an easy win for the universe. It’s out May 17, and I feel like that’s probably all I need to say, except to point out that I’m glad Geezer‘s “Little Voices” is coming out. That song was recorded when the Kingston, New York, trio were in Woodstock to track their 2022 album, Stoned Blues Machine (review here). On side B, Genoa, Italy’s Isaak — who were all-caps on their 2023 album, Hey (review here), which was their first full-length in eight years — have three tracks featuring collaborations with members of Liquido di Morte, Nerve and Ufomammut and they specifically promise an experimentalist ethic that is sure to expand their own sonic palette. Given the righteously cumbersome title Interstellar Cosmic Blues and the Riffalicious Stoner Dudes, the split already carries a lighthearted and unpretentious vibe that should fit nicely in the respective catalogs of both outfits.
First word came down the PR wire a bit ago, and you can stream “Little Voices” down at the bottom. Preorders and whatnot included:
Heavy Psych Sounds to announce split album GEEZER // ISAAK – Interstellar Cosmic Blues & The Riffalicious Stoner Dudes – presale starts TODAY !!!
Today we are stoked to start the presale of a brand new split album featuring the US blues rockers GEEZER and the Italian heavy stoners ISAAK.
The release is called INTERSTELLAR COSMIC BLUES & THE RIFFALICIOUS STONER DUDES !!!
RELEASED IN 10 ULTRA LTD TEST PRESS VINYL 100 ULTRA LTD COLOR IN COLOR TRANSP. BACK. RED/SPLATTER BLUE VINYL 350 LTD BLUE VINYL BLACK VINYL DIGIPAK DIGITAL
TRACKLIST SIDE A Acid Veins (Geezer) Little Voices (Geezer) Mercury Rising (Geezer) Oneirophrenia (Geezer)
SIDE B The Whale (Isaak) Crisis (Isaak) Flat Earth (Isaak)
ALBUM DESCRIPTION
GEEZER
As the “Interstellar Cosmic Blues” half of this EP, we consider these songs to be some of the best that we’ve produced. Songs that could all be “singles” all on their own. And they better be because “The Riffalicious Stoner Dudes” brought some savage riffage of their own! Put it all together with amazing artwork by Mirkow Gastow and release it on Heavy Psych Sounds, the BEST record label on the planet… and you’ve got all the makings of a great record! A modern classic right out of the box. Dig it!
Songs 1 & 4 Recorded and Mixed by David Andersen at the Artfarm (Accord, New York) Songs 2 & 3 Recorded and Mixed by Chris Bittner at the Applehead Recording (Woodstock, New York) All Songs Mastered by Scott Craggs
GEEZER are: Pat Harrington – vocals/guitar Richie Touseull – bass Steve Markota – drums
ISAAK
Art comes from change and experimentation. These three songs are exactly that. Three songs, three different souls.
This recording session is born from the collaboration of some friends invited by the band, and these are:
Fabio Cuomo from Gotho & Liquido di Morte – THE WHALE Fabio Palombi from Nerve & Burn the Ocean – CRISIS And last but not the least, Levre from Ufomammut – FLAT EARTH
ISAAK is Giacomo Boeddu – vocals Francesco Raimondi – guitars Gabriele Carta – bass Davide Foccis – drums
Posted in Bootleg Theater on February 9th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Sometime in the near notnow, long-running New York heavy rockers Thinning the Herd will release their third album, which has been given the synonymous title Cull. The first single from the record, which is the band’s first in the 11 years since 2013’s Freedom From the Known (discussed here), “Trampled by Deer,” is also the first output from the band since founding guitarist, vocalist, songwriter and sometimes-the-only-dude-in-the-band Gavin Spielman brought in drummer Rob Sefcik last Fall. Known for his work in Begotten and Kings Destroy (pretty sure he was in Electric Frankenstein as well?), Sefcik hits hard and has no trouble emphasizing the nod in Spielman‘s riff, a strong C.O.C. influence roughed up by the recording but still able to put through a punch of bass and account for a divergence into acoustics behind and alongside its solo section.
The song’s three and a half minutes long, so the break doesn’t last, and Spielman‘s guitar scorches back with a shredding solo as the video takes us out to a snowy field and woods somewhere outside the city (Westchester?), splicing in shots of animals and hunting implications, life, death, the icy river and ancient, drowsy Appalachian peaks. These make a fitting accompaniment for the band’s take on heavy rock, which is naturalist in its own way, and if they’re drawing inspiration from this setting — I don’t know the circumstances behind the clip’s making, but some of it looks self-filmed on a phone camera, which makes sense in terms of the story they’re telling here even as an impression given — and basing Cull around that, it seems only suited to their aesthetic generally. This riff breathes. I dig that.
It’s been a while since Thinning the Herd put out a full-length, as noted above, but they’ve trickled out singles and videos in the time since Freedom From the Known, including the 2021 single “Wolves Close In” (posted here) that boasted a guest appearance on guitar by Pat Harrington of Geezer. No clue if that song will be on Cull or not, but at very least if it was you could say it was on theme with “Trampled by Deer.” Rough times out there in the forest.
More to come I’m sure as we get closer to Cull, but here’s “Trampled by Deer” with all its attendant freeze and groove. Right on.
Enjoy:
Thinning the Herd, “Trampled by Deer” official video
We’re super excited to bring you the first single to be distributed worldwide since the last record!
The song “Trampled by Deer” is about those moments in life when a positive change only to finds you mentally worse off. The track also features a minor guest spot from an old crony Cosmos Sunshine. He plays the shorter bluesy solo after my fast one, after the acoustic break.
We’re already hit in the tail of this single, next one drops end of next month entitled “Next Level”.
We hope you enjoy and add our tune “Trampled by Deer” to your playlist, download and stream that shiz!
Thinning the Herd are: Gavin Spielman on Guitar and Vocals. Rob Sefcik – Drums
Posted in Reviews on February 5th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
After a well-received 2021 EP, Blood Feather (review here), announced their arrival, New York’s Guhts offer post-metallic cohesion and emotive visceralia throughout their debut album at a level such that they might need to add another ‘g’ to their name: “Gughts.” At 46 minutes and seven songs, with “White Noise” (8:24) and “The Wounded Healer” (10:13) bookending the ambitious collection, Regeneration arrives scorching the ground behind and/or in front of it, a willful kitchensinkery of piano, strings and synth from guitarist Scott Prater finding a balance between conveying overwhelm and actually being overwhelming. The album immediately puts vocalist Amber Burns in a class of singer able to be emotive, harsh or gentle in her delivery, the gnashing and screaming of one measure often giving over a melodic croon or some semi-spoken poetry recited with marked force and presence. With Brian Clemens on drums and Daniel Martinez on bass, Regeneration casts Guhts as all-in.
There’s very little that feels like it’s being held back throughout, and that too is on purpose, but it’s not to say Guhts want for dynamic. The fact that the band traveled to Salt Lake City to work with producer Andy Paterson (The Otolith, Iota, ex-SubRosa, and so many others but those would be enough) feels emblematic generally of their commitment to the sonic progression being set forth in “White Noise” as Guhts position themselves in aesthetic conversation specifically with the Julie Christmas-fronted Battle of Mice, who put out one of post-metal’s best records ever in 2006’s A Day of Nights (discussed here) before dissolving, and SubRosa, whose final two albums found a balance between heft and float, beauty and darkness, that seems to inform Regeneration all the more with Paterson helming. Not so much in the airy guitar and half-whispers of “Til Death,” which feels more Honor Found in Decay-era Neurosis in its not-languid gradualism. Through “White Noise” and “Til Death,” which is about half as long, as well as the subsequent “The Mirror,” which like “Handless Maiden” and “Eyes Open” still to come is a redux from the EP.
Fewer experiments could be more revealing as regards the jump Guhts have made from Blood Feather to Regeneration than to listen to “Eyes Open” from the former and the latter back to back. What the band now calls a demo was made with the lineup of Burns, Prater and guitarist/synthesist Dan Shaneyfelt before the live incarnation of Guhts existed is cast as primitive by the fully realized churn of Regeneration‘s “Eyes Open,” keyboard bringing melodic punctuation to a progression that reveals itself as born out of Panopticon-style Isis but full in its arrangement in a way that band could never have been thanks in no small part to the all-over-it performance throughout from Burns. If the aforementioned Julie Christmas and Rebecca Vernon (now of The Keening, ex-SubRosa) are stylistic progenitors here, Burns takes up that physically-exhausting-sounding mantle — I mean that literally; her vocals come across like the kind of full body delivery that would make you tired after; need to go sit somewhere quiet when the set’s done and that kind of thing — with due passion and what Sourvein once called a ‘will to mangle.’
It is a stunning effort specifically for Burns, but her voice is just a part of the world being made throughout these songs, and even as “White Noise” shifts into its sweeter hook line about something keeping you from yourself (I took the ‘white’ in “White Noise” to be a kind of antifascist stance, and right on, but I realize in saying that I haven’t seen a lyric sheet to conform that or not), or the three-and-a-half-minute string-laced centerpiece “Handless Maiden” brings Guhts to perhaps their most weighted, impact-rumbling churn in the dug-in intensity of its first minute-plus, only to reveal at that point a backed-off-whatever-ribbon-mic-was-used-probably-so-it-didn’t-break, blown-out vocal from Burns that helps move the track from what might’ve been another part of a longer piece like “The Wounded Healer” into a standout in its own right that offers something distinct from the rest of the album at whose core it rests. It becomes crucial to the proceedings and an important part of the atmosphere on the whole, its structural shift serving notice of Guhts‘ expanded and hopefully still expanding creative reach while staying consistent in tone and general volatility of mood in volume.
The tremolo in “Handless Maiden” is well suited to the harsher spirit of the song, and “Eyes Open” brings another change with a more open feel en route to “Generate,” the semi-title-track, which feels willing to be hypnotic, to reside in its component sections, in a way that feels like growth. Textures of guitar and a more straightforward melodic vocal give the listener a sense of peace, however momentary in the song’s seven-minute run, maybe with Prater backing on vocals (?) as it moves into the shouts and intensity of the build across its second half, the noisy finish fading to silence ahead of chimes (or synth, etc.) to note the arrival at “The Wounded Healer.” A mellower verse reveals the transitional nature of “Generate,” though the tension holds firm throughout the first minute and a half before the explosion hits at 1:52, the band smoothly shifting to more consuming volume and crash — the cymbals on Regeneration want to eat you — before the march through the middle around the melancholy lead guitar and midtempo lumber take over, vocals restrained and brooding for now, waiting to lash out as they inevitably do.
“The Wounded Healer,” like “Generate” before it, splits at the halfway point and finishes with memorable repetitions of the phrase “Silence my heart” that build up, are complemented by percussion/strings making them feel that much rawer by comparison, caustic and insular, an implosion collapse. It’s a grand, final letting-loose, Burns‘ vocals owning the foreground with willfully unbridled layering adding to chaotic feel of culmination, the crashing behind almost cinematic. Peaking around 6:30, they finish in a sustained wash with a return to melody (ultimately partial), the message coming through that they haven’t revealed totality of their sound yet and that, ambitious as Regeneration is, their creative drive is growing no less than their sound. I won’t hazard to predict Guhts‘ future or how their personality and individualism might continue to manifest in their output — where they’re headed, in other words — but Regeneration is noteworthy for the clarity of its vision and the abiding sense of purpose brought to its expression and urgency. which are particularly resonant from a debut but would be impressive in any context.
Posted in Whathaveyou on January 26th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Surprised at new stuff from Clouds Taste Satanic? I think that’s how you get to nine records in 10 years. The New York instrumentalists are set to issue 79 A.E., their latest full-length, through Majestic Mountain Records on March 1. The band were recently heard from with the late-2023 holiday-themed covers EP, All I Want for Christmas is YourSoul, which if you can stand holiday music in any context whatsoever was surely a fine argument for its existence.
It was not far behind Tales of Demonic Possession (discussed here), their last long-player — again, nine records, 10 years; their debut was 2014’s To Sleep Beyond the Earth — which came out in Feb. 2023, so this is perhaps their resuming of their pre-pandemic just-about-annual clip. Fair enough. The last album also found them with time to play Europe for I’m pretty sure the first time, and no doubt the thematically-constructed 79 A.E. — the intended soundtrack to a screenplay — will see their attentions return across the Atlantic.
From the PR wire:
CLOUDS TASTE SATANIC: NYC Post-Doom Quartet to Soundtrack the Apocalypse with New Album 79 A.E.
Majestic Mountain Records is thrilled to announce the official worldwide release of 79 A.E., the new album from revered underground doom quartet, Clouds Taste Satanic.
Ever since their formation in Brooklyn in 2013, the quartet’s penchant for harnessing deviant riff wizardry has taken listeners on countless voyages through the psychedelically charged realms of metal. The band melds the minimalist and heavy approach of bands such as Sleep and Earth with the instrumental fervour of Pelican and Bongripper.
Returning this March with their follow-up to last year’s critically acclaimed Tales of Demonic Possession, 79 A.E. is a monumental offering from the accomplished four-piece who have a long and prolific history of committing music on the dynamic long-player format.
Serving as a soundtrack to an unmade post-apocalyptic movie, also named 79 A.E., the album is a tale of doom following the Days of Extinction, where the remnants of humanity fight to survive amidst the devastating aftereffects of an asteroid strike.
“After the density and scope of our last record, we wanted to make an album that felt more open and spatial,” explains guitarist Steve Scavuzzo. “Still heavy but with plenty of room to breathe. Luckily this concept was perfect for a film score”.
Fast forward six months and with plans for the film shelved and the screenplay filed away, doubts over whether the film will be made at all didn’t stop the band pushing on with the recording:
“The nature of the instrumental music we make has always demanded a certain level of imagination. It’s key when you don’t have a singer laying out the concepts for you. While imagining a film that doesn’t exist may seem like a difficult task, imagining a post-apocalyptic world should come naturally to anyone who has been to the movies. This album just happens to be our version of that movie.”
Posted in Whathaveyou on January 8th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
I haven’t always thought of Grey Skies Fallen as a ‘fit’ with what’s covered around here generally in the past, as they kind of skirt the line where doom and metal intersect and the latter takes off in its sharper-pointed direction, where doom, I guess, skulks into a corner and feels bad about itself? That sounds about right. Regardless, kudos to the emotionally-steamrolled New York four-piece on signing with Profound Lore Records for the release of their sixth album, Molded by Broken Hands, which is up now for preorder ahead of a March 8 release and introduced to listeners by the video for “Knowing That You’re There,” which is below.
The album boasts production by Colin Marston, who should at this point probably be given some kind of grant for the work he does, and a mix by the returning Dan Swanö, who also set the balances for the band’s 2020 album, Cold Dead Hands, and, you know, a goodly percentage of the scope Swedish death metal more broadly.
The PR wire offered the following:
GREY SKIES FALLEN: New York Doom Metal Act Signs With Profound Lore Records For March Release Of Molded By Broken Hands LP; “Knowing That You’re There” Video/Single And Preorders Issued
Profound Lore Records announces the label’s first release of 2024, welcoming long-running New York City-based doomed dark metal veterans GREY SKIES FALLEN. The band’s first release for the label, Molded By Broken Hands, will be released March 8th, and today, a video for the lead single “Knowing That You’re There” has been issued alongside preorders and more.
GREY SKIES FALLEN’s sixth full-length album, Molded By Broken Hands sees the contingent offering their most triumphant work yet. This album carries that feeling of the underappreciated and underrated dark metal scene that was culminating in the US during the late 1990s, an era where the band grew from, while helping to signal a new resurgence of doomy dark metal artistry currently building. Through soaring, emotionally searing melodies, glorious epic harmonics, and with an overall conquering aura, Molded By Broken Hands will finally deliver the recognition GREY SKIES FALLEN is worthy of.
Molded By Broken Hands was recorded and engineered at Menegroth, The Thousand Caves (Krallice, Gorguts, Artificial Brain) by Colin Marston who also performed keyboards on the songs “No Place For Sorrow” and “I Can Hear Your Voice.” The album was mixed and mastered by legendary Swedish producer Dan Swanö (Opeth, Edge Of Sanity, Bloodbath) and completed with artwork and design by Travis Smith (Opeth, Death, Katatonia). The release date of Molded By Broken Hands also coincides with the 25th anniversary of GREY SKIES FALLEN’s debut album, The Fate Of Angels.
The lead single from Molded By Broken Hands, “Knowing That You’re There,” arrives through a video created and directed by friend and former bandmate Craig Rossi. Founding guitarist/vocalist Rick Habeeb states, “Sometimes in life, those that we care about the most are fighting a silent internal battle. This song is about helping guide someone through those dark times. Imagery in the video conveys these emotions and ties them together nicely with the lyrics.”
GREY SKIES FALLEN’s “Knowing That You’re There” video is now playing, and the song is now streaming on all digital platforms.
Molded By Broken Hands will be released on LP, CD, and digital formats on March 8th. Find preorders, merch, and more at THIS LOCATION:https://linktr.ee/greyskiesfallendoom
Watch for the band to post announcements for special live performances and more supporting the album to post over the months ahead.
Molded By Broken Hands Track Listing: 1. A Twisted Place In Time 2. Molded By Broken Hands 3. No Place For Sorrow 4. I Can Hear Your Voice 5. Cracks In Time 6. Save Us 7. Knowing That You’re There
GREY SKIES FALLEN: Rick Habeeb – Guitar, Vocals Joe D’angelo – Guitar Tom Anderer – Bass Sal Gregory – Drums
Posted in Whathaveyou on November 27th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
The coming of a debut album by partially-New York-based outfit Guhts has been long foretold by, well, the band, for one. Begun as a pandemic-born offshoot of Witchkiss, the 2021 EP Blood Feather (review here) provided an introduction to the new project’s heavier-than-you-usually-think-of-heavygaze and industrial-informed nod, and as they’ve undertaken a couple tours in the time since, they’re only more ready in my mind for the task ahead of them. Regeneration is out Jan. 26 through New Heavy Sounds and a US CD issue on Seeing Red Records.
You can — and if you’re still reading, you probably should — stream the first single, “Til Death,” at the bottom of this post. If nothing else, it’s a reminder of why you (by which I mean I) have been looking forward to this album for the last two-plus years. The cover art and the song are below, along with the tracklisting and preorder links, because that’s how we do on a Monday. We do thoroughly.
From the PR wire, or socials, or somewhere:
New York-based GUHTS (pronounced ‘guts’) declare themselves to be an ‘avant-garde post-metal project, delivering larger than life sounds through, deeply emotional music’. For sure those aspirations are amply delivered in the form of their debut album ‘Regeneration’
Musically ‘Regeneration’ is a powerful and intense series of songs, topped off by some seriously powerhouse and expressive vocal performances.
It’s slow-moving chords, moving like sheets through sludge.
High guitar lines above, ranging from piercing and shimmering to nasty. Drums pound but not without groove.
There are strings, pianos and synths widening the palette.
Atmospheric sludge, Metalgaze, maybe, but there’s also that link to the New York Noise lineage from The Velvets and Sonic Youth, becoming a type of post-hardcore in the process, while gaining a connection to metal partly due to the sheer heaviness. A raft of creative experimentation that pushes beyond the realm of post-metal.
And then of course, the very first thing that hits you is Amber Gardner’s unbelievable, hypnotising vocals – as scary as a banshee while also intimate and persuasive.
Of the album, vocalist Amber says, ‘Regeneration symbolizes the power of self-renewal. Through regeneration, change becomes empowering, allowing new facets to emerge. It’s a courageous, transformative process, inspiring others to overcome fear.’
In short ‘Regeneration’ is a bold and startling debut, that will reward and enthral listeners the deeper they delve into its many layers.
Posted in Bootleg Theater on November 24th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
Let the record show I was can-you-keep-this-moving-for-me stirring the base for a cheese sauce soon to go on cauliflower because my wife loves me when the email came in that King Buffalo had just released Live at Burning Man as a free download. And so, a little softshoe in front of the stove and my transformation to Old Weirdo Relative at Holiday is complete. I had it on after dinner too while I did dishes. For like four hours. Family milling about this way and that. I’m hunched over the white sink merrily scrubbing and singing along to “Orion.”
It was Thanksgiving in the US, and we hosted north of 20 people at the house, so it’s a good thing King Buffalo‘s set at the fabled Gen-X/Millennial do-art-and-maybe-drugs gathering was long. The edited video of Live at Burning Man — streaming free on YouTube (second player above) — is half an hour, but the audio of the full performance tops 93 minutes and was clearly put together with the idea of featuring a couple more sprawling jams. So you get “Longing to Be the Mountain,” as well as “Repeater” and “Red Star 1 & 2,” “Cerberus” and “Shadows” past or near 10 minutes, and if you’re an established fan of the band, any single one of them should be enough impetus to hear the thing.
Whether it’s the extra bit of sneer in Sean McVay‘s voice in “Grifter” or the burn of guitar in “Longing to Be the Mountain,” the shimmer prompting cheers at the start of “Orion,” the graceful build into “Repeater” with Dan Reynolds‘ e’er smooth basslines and Scott Donaldson‘s somehow-restless-and-unhurried drumming giving the push. “Silverfish” and “Grifter” are the gateway. From there, it’s a deep-dive, headline-style set recorded by engineer Grant Husselman, who also helmed 2021’s Acheron (review here), the middle installment of King Buffalo‘s ‘pandemic trilogy’ that began with the 2021 godsend The Burden of Restlessness (review here), Acheron, which found the trio (and Husselman, and me at least for a bit) recording in a roadside attraction cave off the New York Thruway, and 2022’s Regenerator (review here).
Whatever King Buffalo do from here — and they said the Winter US touring that of course follows the Fall European touring will be their last stint out until they at least write their next LP if not finish it — there’s no question that their ‘trilogy era’ stands as a thing unto itself. It’s the difference between a band with two records on the rise and beginning to capture and audience’s attention and headliners with five records under their belt, an increasingly progressive course and like three hours’ worth of material to change up any set you like to such a degree that, when tapped for a fest like Burning Man outside the heavy underground’s own conventional circuit, they can accommodate that audience by playing longer, jammier, more psychedelic songs. They can lean into “Repeater,” and roll “Cerberus” to a consuming, massive finish to leave blown minds in their wake. They not only have the flexibility as artists to do so, they have the professionalism to actually do it.
Live at Burning Man is the third live outing from King Buffalo behind 2016’s Live at Wicked Squid Studios (review here) and 2020’s Live at Freak Valley (discussed here), and one might look at that from a band who put out their first record in 2016 and be like, wow, that’s a lot, but each one of those captures them at a different point in their evolution, and Live at Burning Man feels no less like a realization than the three studio albums whose tracks comprise most of the set. “Loam” precedes “Cerberus” in closing, and the two — from The Burden of Restlessness and Acheron, respectively — complement each other well in crafting a build in intensity that begins with the second part of “Red Star 1 & 2.” And if you watch the video, it gets especially trippy right around there as well. Justifiably so. King Buffalo don’t go full-Hawkwind space rock very often, but they’ve got the synth for it when they do.
And I guess that is kind of the lesson of Live at Burning Man. It’s that whatever’s coming next, King Buffalo are ready for it. Those last shows in December and January linked above, and in a way this surprise release — at least I didn’t know it was coming — of Live at Burning Man as a name-your-price Bandcamp special Thanksgiving whathaveyou is perfectly timed as a capstone to the previously-noted ‘trilogy era.’ Considering the scope of the work and the progressive blossoming that their third, fourth and fifth albums wrought despite being issued in such relatively quick succession, to underscore the point that not only did King Buffalo launch the 2020s with three of its thus-far most essential heavy records, but that when it was possible for them to do so, they then went out and hand-delivered those songs to an established and growing audience.
As for Burning Man itself, well, you don’t record in a cave and you don’t chase down playing Lincoln Center in Manhattan as an ostensibly underground band if you’re not into creating an experience for yourself as well as your audience. I’ve no doubt this one was a trip, and I know I’ve been very glad to have caught them the couple times I have since the world started happening again — most recently was this past summer at Freak Valley (review here) — so despite not having been at the show, the documentation of this band playing these songs at this time is something to be appreciated now and in the future. I’m glad to count it as a fourth in that trilogy.
The dishes outlasted the set, but that chug at the end of “Cerberus” was a good rhythm for scrubbing, and the cauliflower was delicious. Thanksgiving — the narrative utterly ludicrous and atrocious in the true American tradition of racism — is celebrated in my house as a chance to be with family, cooking and eating and enjoying each other’s company. I know that maybe putting a record on while you try and shake that last bit of soap out of the bottle of Palmolive and fall completely into your own head thinking about the songs doesn’t scream ‘family togetherness’ in most situations, but speaking exclusively for my own brain, sometimes it feels like the one thing that helps the other happen.
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoy. And if you celebrate Thanksgiving, I hope it was a good one.
—
Next week is a Quarterly Review. Not going to be a lot of posts besides that, but there are a few news things and such I’ll want to post. But 10 records per day for at least five days. I’ll decide this weekend if I want to go longer than that. It’s a LOT of stuff I want to catch up on — David Eugene Edwards I’ve been trying to review since Spring — plus newer things like Primordial and Tortuga, Fuzz Evil, Dune Pilot, on and on, and I hope it’ll be a good mix. Last QR was tough. Sometimes without meaning to I’ll slate like, three or four psych records the same day. Can’t do that shit! My brain goes numb. “Duh, sounds like mushrooms?” Review over.
But anyway that’s the plan. Through the holiday, into the Quarterly Review. Then after that I’m digging into year-end time, trying not to let it go too long and end up posting it on Xmas Eve or something silly like that, which I’m pretty sure I’ve done in the past.
Thank you if you’ve contributed to the year-end poll. Thank you if you intend to. Thank you for reading. Thanks for being alive. I mean that shit. It’s work to get through a day. Thank you for whatever in your life led you to the end of this sentence.
Have a great and safe weekend. I think we’re mostly in recovery mode, but I’m sure we’ll find some silly shit to get up to while I also stress about the Quarterly Review in that special way that The Patient Mrs. loves so, so, so much. It’ll be fun.
Posted in Whathaveyou on November 10th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
Okay. I mean, when Roadburn announced Khanate, it was billed as exclusive, but two additional shows in Copenhagen and Berlin isn’t exactly a six-week tour, so whatever. More live Khanate means more corrupted souls. Fair enough. [EDIT: It was the first show that Roadburn has, not exclusive. My mistake. — ed.]
The earth-spoiling extreme drone-sludge outfit darkened skies earlier this year with their first album in more than a decade, To Be Cruel (review here), thereby pissing over every bought-at-Target t-shirt with a saccharine positive message on it — “Good vibes all the time!” and so on — with a sort of hatefulness that can only be called signature, and their return to the stage is an organic outgrowth from that. I don’t think I’ll be at Roadburn — you may (not) be shocked to know festivals aren’t lining up to fly my irrelevant ass out to various locales — but I haven’t seen Khanate in a long, long time and if my psyche could handle it I think it might do me some good. Like electro shock treatment, but in reverse where it makes you more miserable. And that’s definitely something I need. Not enough feeling-bad-for-myself around here lately.
Come on, Khanate. Let’s go be wretched today:
KHANATE ANNOUNCE LIVE SHOWS IN COPENHAGEN AND BERLIN IN APRIL 2024
SHARE LIVE FOOTAGE
PHYSICAL REISSUES OF KHANATE AND THINGS VIRAL ARRIVE 1ST DECEMBER VIA SACRED BONES RECORDS.
On the heels of their first confirmed performance in nearly two decades, as part of Roadburn 2024, Khanate have announced two additional shows; Copenhagen on April 22nd at Basement and Berlin on April 23rd at Berghain, giving fans further unique opportunities to experience the band live. Tickets for all shows can be purchased here https://khanateofficial.com/liveaktions.
Alongside this announcement, Khanate shares a compilation of live footage, with clips taken from the Dead & Live Aktions DVD released in 2005.
Reissues of Khanate (2001) and Things Viral (2003) come via Sacred Bones on 1st December. Pre-orders for Khanate can be found here https://lnk.to/KhanateST and Things Viral https://lnk.to/ThingsViral here. Capture & Release and Clean Hands Go Foul reissues are forthcoming.
