Category Archives: Mini-Review

Kami Octet – Spring Party

by Dæv Tremblay

The Music

The Words

We truly are well treated in this early 2018. So much great music has been knocking on my eardrums that it’s difficult to keep track. Although a late 2017 release, France’s Kami Octet, an avant-garde jazz eight-member ensemble, and their album Spring Party, was only just now heard by yours truly. The release is an adventurous and thorough experiment on contemporary jazz, sharing similarities with Fire! Orchestra and other such modern artists like Jaimie Branch. I’ve noticed the former mainly due to the vocal eccentricities of Christine Bertocchi, who at times recall moments of … Read more

Death Drag – Shifted

by Dæv Tremblay

The Sounds

The Words

Iluso has a great track record for providing us with some of the wildest, most adventurous jazz albums out there. I think I’ve become acquainted with the label through dMu’s Synaptic Self, which was a true revelation to me! Today, they’re back with Death Drag‘s debut album, Shifted.

Shifted is like a free jazz album built with the tools of noise metal. The trio consists of drummer and composer Mike Caratti, aided by Santiago Horro on heavily distorted bass guitar, Roberto Sassi on guitar, and Luke Barlow, who plays keyboards and Rhodes. Each … Read more

Ouzo Bazooka – Songs from 1001 Nights

by Dæv Tremblay

The Music

The Thoughts

This sound is not brand new, not anymore. Last year, Aussie psychedelic rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard treated us with the first of five albums in a year: Flying Microtonal Banana. The album used quarter-tone instruments in the band’s own blend of surf, psych, and prog rock. Although the effort was a bit hit and miss, it was interesting and showed great potential for this sort of “desert surf” rock sound.

Enter Ouzo Bazooka, and their latest album, Songs from 1001 Nights. While not their first release, it seems to … Read more

Containor, I.O, Arnaud Bukwald, Blame, Aviations, Clavicus Vile, Tolstoys, 死リーパー (Death: The Reaper), and Xenosis

by Dæv Tremblay

Containor – Asshole

Continuing a long series of musical experiments in the vague vein of black metal, the Hathenter page offers us Containor‘s Asshole. This one in particular is a brutal display of aggression towards the poor, innocent drum kit, layered with a variety of acoustic and electronic nonsense. It’s perhaps the most free-jazz-like metal album I’ve heard, and it’s amazing!

I.O – Fragments Humming for Sun and Stars

Oddly enough, this is quite similar in mentality to the previous album in this post, but within the experimental or math rock realm. This one-man expectoration is a drum-centric … Read more

We Pyrrhic Conquerors – The End Is Nigh

by Matt Matheson

The Music

The Thoughts

The general free-flowing complexity of zeuhl music and the band name We Pyrrhic Conquerors suggest a sizable ensemble of musicians, performing with some level of loose improvisation. Yet Bandcamp informs us that the richly composed The End Is Nigh is the product of one Joey M. Bishop. That’s about all the information I can glean about the artist; there’s no Facebook page to refer to, no specific location given (Bandcamp tags the project as United States, but the drums were recorded at a studio in Indonesia?), and even Google currently returns zero results for the band … Read more