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JASSS - Weightless 2LP
(iDEAL)
Finally available, the hugely tipped debut LP from JASSS is a marvel to behold: music to believe in, to be inspired by. Spanish born Silvia Jiminez Alvarez (aka JASSS) has no formal musical training per se and has only been DJing for the last two years (releasing three dancefloor-stirring singles) but Weightless proves undeniably that hers is a fresh and daring new talent whose interests span styles, eras and continents. On Weightless, the club by-and-large takes a back seat to the artist's creative vision and avant-garde sound design, resulting in a rugged but measured melding of industrial dub, African rhythms, dark jazz inspirations and concrete electronics.
JASSS' music is very much an antecedent of Spanish industrialists, such as Diseño Corbusier, or Mecanica Popular/Randomize, and she firmly builds on that heritage with a uniquely pensive balance of percussive suss, synthetic bite, and reverberating spatial dynamics that makes her music heavy-as-sin and deliciously deft with it, patently forgoing industrial musics’ angry-guy glare in favor of far more feminine and Latinate pressure systems. It's extremely rare to hear industrial music done with such variation and individual distinction as Weightless, making it shine in a field so often associated with greyscale and monotone signatures.
Very, very highly recommended if you're into the more abstracted and experimental end of electronic / dancefloor excursions and / or such luminaries Throbbing Gristle (a comparison I do not make lightly), Christoph De Babalon, and the most recent adventures of Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement. Weightless will turn your head and your body. (Lee)
Check out a track here.
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Mass Marriage - Secrets CS
(New Forces)
Secrets is the newest release for the Vancouver artist Melissa Paget, who has performed a blend of high-concept power electronics / death industrial under the name Mass Marriage since 2011. Secrets is a 3-track cassette released by the Ithaca, NY based New Forces label, and I'm definitely bummed I didn't find out about this project sooner. The titular opening track starts off blazingly hot and menacing with a loop that swells and decays, eventually building to a more steady, low end rumble. Already the anxiety and wretched decay of classic groups like Genocide Organ and Atrax Morgue is touched on amazingly well. The small bit of Melissa's heavily affected vocals that appear in the middle and end, give the listener just a little cryptic peak into the world Mass Marriage is creating. The whole piece eventually builds into something downright suffocating, adding up the layers of incredibly heavy distortion until everything is swallowed. I was very impressed by the amount of palpable dread in these tracks. Particularly in side 2s opener, "Hand Me The Key", which has a seedy and voyeuristic narrative that is familiar within the power electronics genre, but stops short and leaves you a bit mystified. It's effectively creepy and the whole execution is wonderfully sickening. And the volume is massive! (VII)
Check out some of the sounds here.
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The Action - Rolled Gold LP
(Guerssen)
The Action is a relatively unknown UK beat / garage band from the heydey of psychedelia during the late 60’s. They had a deal with Parlophone and released some very respectable, Mod-flavored and pop-centric singles from ‘65-’67. However, they were also working on something broader and deeper in scope that would slot in nicely when bands like The Beatles, The Stones, The Kinks and The Pretty Things were releasing full-blown, album-length psych-pop statements.
They put together demo recordings that would become Rolled Gold and unfortunately, they never got pressed. They shopped them for a deal with a new label but when they found no takers, the band reconfigured as Mighty Baby; a more prog-oriented, hippified psych outfit, (which turned out to be pretty great!) But those Rolled Gold recordings gestated and in the 90’s, they were unearthed by the long-gone Dig The Fuzz imprint. The tracks are a revelation full of addictive hooks, strident jangle and psychedelic wonder merging the sounds of The Small Faces, The Who, The Creation and Tomorrow. These songs melodically and structurally, stand up against any of those bands bests moments. Matt Collar of AMG imagined it as if “Paul Weller time-travelled back to 1967 and wrote the best songs of his career.” He’s definitely onto something.
Since that Dig The Fuzz version, Rolled Gold has been out of print since the late 90’s, Guerssen is making it available again now remastered from the original tapes with full band cooperation. Serious attention needed here, this is top-shelf psychedelic joy. (Dom)
Check out a trailer here and full track here.
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Nick Cave & Warren Ellis – Kings OST LP
(Milan)
It's hard to imagine that when Nick Cave began his long and winding career, that anyone would expect him to end up scoring major motion pictures. His early work as the front man to the psychotic post-punk band The Birthday Party, in no way informed that he was capable of anything beyond a certain kind of musical ultraviolence. For the last 30+ years he has fronted the more subdued, outfit of The Bad Seeds, and for the last 15 years his co-pilot and primary collaborator has been Warren Ellis, formerly of The Dirty Three. For those of us devoted to all things Nick Cave we have been satiated over the years with various detours from Cave and Ellis. There was of course Grinderman, the short lived primate trash-rock that undoubtedly lit the fuse for what has been the most adventurous period on the Bad Seeds discography, (in my opinion).
But another major contributor to keeping The Bad Seeds fresh has been Cave & Ellis' catalog of film scores. Their latest, Kings, is no different. The last two Bad Seeds albums (Push The Sky Away & Skeleton Tree) have made it clear that abstraction is now an integral part of the recipe. This sense of tension and experimentation is central to Kings. Frail piano is laid atop Ellis' seamless loops and textures and Cave's signature dramatic style is somehow not lost whatsoever amongst these instrumental pieces, some of which are completely devoid of any melody whatsoever. Like most of their scores, you can hear the tracing of melodies and sculpting of moods that eventually end up within the canon of the Bad Seeds. Nick Cave & Warren Ellis continue to push the boundaries of their aesthetic but still give the sense that they are comfortable wherever they find themselves, Be it within the atmospheres of Kings, or firmly planted in the earth. A fitting companion piece to the most recent chapter of Nick Cave as well as a possible glimpse of what's to come. (Adam)
Check out a track here.
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