I've Never Met a Traitor I Didn't Like -- Hot Cross' Cryonics

To avoid getting mired in an excessive numbers or numerals, I'm moving away from the titling format for this discussion of these releases--also reflecting the fact that this is the last of a previously singular post broken down into the separate releases that were to compose it. I'd gotten up to this album, wrote half of it, realized it was going to be a stupidly long post and asked my friend Brian who agreed splitting things might be advisable. So, now, I'm breaking away from even that and simply writing on the albums on their own terms. I'll still tag them as part of that series, but let the posts have a little breathing space from uniformity.

This was the find that day, for sure. While Special Wishes was nice in that it wasn't going to be easy to find cheap, I've seen Harvey Milk albums float around and did not know at the time it was a rare one--indeed, I'd bought the compilation of their early singles and splits from the very same store. Of course, I learned in the course of my usual dissection and reassembly of compiled tracks into their original sources that the insert for that CD is basically the only place you can find the cover art for those old Harvey Milk singles!

Still, I picked up Hot Cross's Risk Revival a few years back, only because its listed label was Equal Vision Records, which was the first label Coheed and Cambria was on--at least, under the name Coheed and Cambria (obsessive fans know that of course the Delirium Trigger EP was released under the name "Shabutie," and it came out on the label Wisteria). Admittedly, Equal Vision does stop off into stuff that I don't feel like I have time to sift through, so this isn't a guarantee, but looking into Risk Revival led me to the track "Turncoat Revolution," which has one of the most blisteringly fantastic central riffs around (comparable in some ways to the riff from Converge's "Dark Horse" I mentioned in the previously).

Allegedly, the album is "screamo," which is one of the most derogatorily used genre names I've ever heard--both dismissive and denigrating--in almost every context I've ever seen it used. The reviews I found were the ones on Amazon, though, which meant there was only a handful of them, all three stars and all from a community embracing the genre names rather than using them as catch-all insults. I always prefer finding such reviews to get an idea of what genres mean, as I read things like "While Hot Cross may most commonly be known as the band that came after Saetia," as it gives me a nice context for what a band is to the community it comes from. Of course, I still haven't ever seen any Saetia so, despite the fact that they were clearly a central figure here, I haven't a great idea what they sound like.

The album, though, was great--sure, Billy Werner is screaming throughout the album (if you take that reductive approach of "aggressive vocals are always screaming" that doesn't appreciate the variation in methods used to achieve aggressive vocals), and yes, it's got a sense of betrayal, loss and emotional frustration and anger, but the lyrics are intelligent and interesting. But forget all that--the thing smokes:

That was probably one of the best  pseudo-blind purchases I ever made on an obscure, defunct band out of a morass of random titles--a set of releases dumped at an FYE because the labels had damaged stock, missing slipcases or re-packaged used titles. There was a lot of Equal Vision, plenty of Earache and a few other labels that would catch my eye quickly. It was the same boxes of miscellaneously labeled stuff that spawned some of the purchases mentioned here.

Soon, Hot Cross entered my regular listening for its mix of melody, aggression and expression. It manages to ride a crest of energy that more aggressively abrasive bands (such as the death metal bands I listen to) can occasionally become tiring with, never quite crossing that point as the clever guitarwork carries the sound for the part of me that appreciates the "prettier" side of things. By this time, I let Chaz over at Bull City Records know I was on the lookout (inspiring the usual response to mentions of Hot Cross: "Man, haven't heard that name in a while!") and he suggested I check out Level Plane Records, which is a label he told me would carry similar material.

So, when I saw Cryonics at the store that day, I snatched it up without hesitation as my jaw dropped for seeing "Hot Cross" on a split card in a CD section in the first place. At this point, the band apparently functioned with two guitarists, creating a different variety of more complicated and often more subdued sorts of textures, exemplified in songs like "Frozen by Tragedy" (which tends away from naked aggression) or, "A Tale for the Ages":

 

 

And, of course, what label was Cryonics released on? Level Plane.

Tiny Music...Songs from Various Record Shops VIII -- Harvey Milk's Special Wishes

 Tiny Music...a series of entries on recent and seemingly random purchases. Why I made them, and why, perhaps, you ought to do the same--or at least take up the methodology!

Part I              Part V

Part II            Part VI

Part III           Part VII

 Part IV                        

Harvey Milk is a peculiar band. Named for the assassinated, openly gay San Francisco politician, Harvey Milk (the band) has no political associations to speak of, no clear stance on anything political, no openly gay members or anything else to indicate why they chose the name. If someone has an answer, that would be awesome. Until then, please explore their merch page and perhaps reconsider taking their attitude--whatever it is, anyway--seriously. There's weirdness, humour and experimentation melded into a band that is primarily, I suppose, sludge/doom/stoner metal. It's almost all very down tempo, loud, and heavy in the sense that it is full of low-end and pounds and thuds its way out of speakers.

Their outspoken frontman, Creston Spiers, suggested that this, Special Wishes was their best album yet, and that the acclaimed follow up from 2008, Life...The Best Game in Town was their worst. Of course, that album was my first, stumbling into a similarly random-seeming cover: another badly-angled shot of a wall, but this time bearing a crumpled poster for Iron Maiden's second album, Killers, the last with first vocalist Paul DiAnno. It's familiar enough that that one jumped out at me when I saw it, despite the fact that both albums, as you can see, give no front-based indication of who or what they are.

Stylistically, at least, there is not a huge change between the two albums as the style is pretty thoroughly their own. While notions of other extremely slow--though not quite Sleep's Dopesmoker slow--sludge bands reach your ears, eventually songs like "Once in a While" or "Instrumental" with its bizarre radio-trivia-sample frame that references the Alan Parsons Project's The Turn of a Friendly Card appear and make you wonder what is going on.

This was a lucky find, too--it's no longer in print and was not easy to find in the first place. This is part of the absolute joy of the approach I take: while you can find things online with relative simplicity in many cases, the hunt and the find, and sometimes the unrealized find, has a thrill to it that you can't get from clicking through Amazon's used section. In fairness, this did come from the used chain of stores that also once contained the extremely out-of-print Josef K album(s) and compilations for a total of $59, and they often research and price in accordance with such information. Fortunately for me--unlike when I picked up those Josef K albums which, yes, I did, despite that being $59 for two CDs--this was just priced as a plain ol' used CD at the time.

"Once in a While"

Tiny Music...Songs from Various Record Shops VII -- Out Every Window the Snap of Envy and Greed

Tiny Music...a series of entries on recent and seemingly random purchases. Why I made them, and why, perhaps, you ought to do the same--or at least take up the methodology!

Part I              Part V

Part II            Part VI

Part III                       

 Part IV                        

 

Tiny Music...Songs from Various Record Shops VI -- How to Compose Popular Songs That Will Sell by Bob Geldof

First, a brief interlude. Coloured vinyl is a pretty, pretty thing and I never miss a chance to show it off:

Tiny Music...a series of entries on recent and seemingly random purchases. Why I made them, and why, perhaps, you ought to do the same--or at least take up the methodology!

Part I

Part II

Part III

 Part IV

Part V

Tiny Music...Songs from Various Record Shops V

Tiny Music...a series of entries on recent and seemingly random purchases. Why I made them, and why, perhaps, you ought to do the same--or at least take up the methodology!

Part I

Part II
Part III
 Part IV

Released as part of the "Original Masters" series with this cover, this is the first purely ambient solo album Eno released, two months after Another Green World, the first Eno solo album I ever bought. If you want something up-tempo, danceable, short, fun, etc, this is not an album for you by any stretch of the imagination. Ambient music is generally quite long as a result of the languid nature of the music: indeed, the genre's name is derived from the intention to make the music a part of the ambiance of an environment.

In defiance of many expectations, when I first delved into Aphex Twin, the album I was most interested in finding was not The Richard D. James album with its frenetic Drum and Bass/Jungle/etc (please, please don't ask me to figure out what electronic genres are which--I have enough trouble with distinct, classically-recognized instruments-based bands) but Selected Ambient Works, Vol. II which was a follow up to the ambient-techno (it's a different thing, promise) Selected Ambient Works 85-92. SAWII was a sprawling, 3LP, 2 cassette, 2 CD monster that was 25 tracks on vinyl and cassette and 24 on UK CD (the US release inexplicably dropped another track, which has annoyed me for years) and primarily consists of slow, beat-less tracks in the 7-10 minute range.  

Discreet Music is similarly "ambient" (not "ambient techno") in that its first half is the 31 minute "Discreet Music," which flows gently along for 30 minutes with no audible beat and nothing grating, intrusive or otherwise attention-grabbing. But it's incredibly pretty and pleasant, which is something I often find appealing, myself. The second half is a re-interpretation of Pachelbel's Canon in numerous variations, similar in end result to "Discreet Music," though it is performed by actual live strings instead.

Caustic critic Christgau called it "good for hard bits of writing," as it functions in that place that Satie envisioned a lot of his music would, to some extent: musique d’ameublement or "furniture music," as it is most commonly translated. Of course, Satie was, in some respects, creating the idea that did become ambient music. Richard D. James himself (aka the Aphex Twin) has noted the influence of Satie before, and referenced him pretty openly regarding the much more mixed album Drukqs, which contains a number of solo piano style pieces reminiscent of the peculiar French composer.

While I was out shopping for all of these things, I did eventally stumble into a (slightly mutilated) copy of Erik Satie's own writings and musings collected as A Mammal's Notebook, too. I do like the French composer's work, actually, though not, as always, to prove some kind of point about my taste or style, but because the minimalist approach to music hits the right chords--well, notes--for me. I carry around a small list of the Satie works that are apparently some of the best recordings, and own a compilation of Aldo Ciccolini playing them.

But I'm really getting away from the primary point here: Eno is known as a producer more than anything these days, or as a collaborative artist, especially when he works with David Byrne, but for a time in the 1970s he did independent work like this and Another Green World and hit various poles of music in the process. It's good stuff--this one I have listened to a few times and quite liked!

Tiny Music...Songs from Various Record Shops IV -- An Emotional What? Junk What?

Tiny Music...a series of entries on recent and seemingly random purchases. Why I made them, and why, perhaps, you ought to do the same--or at least take up the methodology!

Part 1

Part 2
Part 3 

With respect to a stack of some weird and out-there choices, An Emotional Fish's Junk Puppets was probably the most random selection of all. Of course, it was part of the 2 for $3 mess, so I did need to walk out with an even number of titles. Still, the cover art was intriguing, and while the metaphor of books and covers may hold, the actual literal meaning of judging inert objects by their covers can turn out quite well.

Finding out what this disc was was one of the more peculiar events of the trip, as it's one of those lingering, obscure titles in the Amazon database which has had incorrect cover art assigned (Amazon thinks this is the cover). Similarly, Wikipedia has no articles on their respective albums, despite three of them being released. They're a band from Dublin, and opened for U2 on the Zoo TV tour (on the backs of Achtung Baby and Zooropa).

Their first album was even released on U2's own label, Mother Records), after their single "Celebrate" even hit the top 5 on the US Modern Rock charts. They apparently maintained far more popularity in their home country than anywhere else and sort of fizzled after this, their third and final album. It's a bass-heavy 90s rock album that, as yet, does not jump out and grab me, but I'm still giving it some time.

Tiny Music...Songs from Various Record Shops III -- The Cult's Sonic Temple

Tiny Music...a series of entries on recent and seemingly random purchases. Why I made them, and why, perhaps, you ought to do the same--or at least take up the methodology!

Part 1

Part 2

I wandered into The Cult more by chance than anything else. I discussed the Beggars Banquet Omnibus Edition series releases some time ago, and The Cult's Love was amongst them. I didn't know the band and they had a weird reputation--weird in the sense of "normal." It meant it was the last of the Omnibus titles that I purchased (The Fall followed The Fall, and Bauhaus came close behind). The liner notes themselves reference this, noting all the reviews and interviews that suggest that "rock" was a 'dirty word' at the time of Love's release, at least in the independent community that they came from.

Tiny Music...Songs from Various Record Shops II -- Walking With Thee by Clinic

As I'm failing to focus on any group long enough to create a distinct article on anything. I've decided to break down the things I pick up and explain the whys, wherefores, and sometimes the end results of the purchases I've made semi-recently, via short discussions of each that I began previously.

Part 1 can be found here.

This series will take us from my first "classic" period Bad Seeds album through to the far more obscure Kno album Death Is Silent, as seen (somewhat blurrily, for which I apologize, but I do not have the discs handy to replicate and touch up the photo!) below:

 Today, we have Scousers Clinic and their second album, Walking With Thee.

Tiny Music ...Songs from Various Record Shops I -- Tender Prey

As I've only created an increased avalanche of incoming music that I am happily making my way through, I'm going to continue with the compressed formatting of explanation for the purchases I showed off previously to explain my relative quietness, moving on ahead through the alphabet. I left off before with The Byrds' pre-Byrds demos known as the "preflyte" sessions--though, of course, this isn't a completely fair name. They weren't the Byrds yet, but they were the Jet Set, which is still about flying--but nevermind that.

This will take us from my first "classic" period Bad Seeds album through to the far more obscure Kno album Death Is Silent, as seen (somewhat blurrily, for which I apologize, but I do not have the discs handy to replicate and touch up the photo!) below:

This was a string of peculiar trips to various stores, mostly an FYE, a few locals and one chain used store, so it's going to continue as a truly weird selection.

To avoid complete overload, I'll go through an album a day here, hence the reference in the title to someone-or-other's weird, off-kilter third album.

If I Forget Thee, Lowcountry

While I was pondering an expansion of notes on the last update on acquisitions I made, I realized it said "Here's an image," and I managed to forget to include an actual image! Well, that has been hastily (with shameful expression) corrected and can now be viewed, even in its full glory. Sorry about that!

Of course, I do that and I've long since opened the previously unopened titles appearing in those stacks and created an entirely new stack over the last week or so through thrifty poking about here and there, but for today let's take a closer look at the top of that first stack. I talked previously about how I find music, but this will address the details that lead to my often seemingly arbitrary decisions by looking at why it is this band or that album warranted enough interest to take up more of my rapidly diminishing space.