The Grodeck Whipperjenny s/t
Tom pointed my way to this 1970 rarity, another one of those obscure outfits who managed to condense the entire period into one album. I love listening to albums like this that don’t know if they’re beat or funk, that fade orchestral segments in and out and are generally wildly experimental in terms of their blend, while still remaining at heart a beat or pop band. In fact the album was almost too much to take in at once, at times I’d hear a groove, at others it sounded like Jefferson Airplane was on their minds. I wouldn’t be able to grade something like this after a first listen, my mind was basically engaged with the strangeness of it all and didn’t really get down to the song level so much. Tom mentioned Stark Reality in the same breath as this and I get the comparison in terms of its almost sidestepping quality, that is, if you see the late 60s/early 70s as a flowering tree, there were a couple of flowers that didn’t lead to more seeds, that still sit there looking exotic decades later.
Averse Sefira - Battle’s Clarion
Suffice it to say, Tom did NOT point me in the direction of this album, in fact I think I read about this years ago at the site, ahem, anus.com (or at least it used to be). Sort of a champion of Nietszcheian (sic) extreme metal, I learned quite a bit about early death and black metal there. Averse Sefira are a rare Texan black metal group who will automatically be compared to someone like Absu, except that AS might be a little closer to the originals like Darkthrone with the “razor” guitar work. The comparisons to Absu are with the occasional complexity, it’s not quite as proggy or concept-heavy as Absu could get, although they’re apparently raiding the qlippoth sections of their kabbalah books via Crowley. I loved it overall and found it to be one of the more engaging black metal titles of the last decade or so. Pretty pleased to see they recorded another a few years later, so will have to check that out too…
Cardiacs - Live
Fairly pleased with this 1988 released live recording by the Cardiacs in that I’m starting to get some names to songs that I saw on the fabulous rare video DVDs. While this album isn’t quite up to the incredible performance on the first DVD, its not far off the live audio recording I mentioned from about mid-80s, it’s still the original band with the sax and keyboards, it’s just that the performance level isn’t quite up to their best day here. But even an average day is good for this band and with the good quality sound I found this to be quite excellent, if 10ish (rather than the 12-13ish quality of the first DVD). Plenty of complex cabaret pogoing going on here…