Braen’s Machine - Underground (Liuto)
Bizarre Italian freak out group’s first album and another example of how much of interest something this obscure can be. In fact with a listen I’d probably have pinned this a German or at least Swiss record, because it’s so Ohr label-like in quality. For one thing the band’s got a guitar player who seems to have both the tone and relative experience level of Edgar Froese on Electronic Meditation, which basically means even the bad notes (and there are several) sound good, and it really does just fuzz out for the length of the album, meandering dementedly over the kind of basic pop/rock/jazz combo that would have been generic in a different context, here it just further pushes the surreality of the album into left field. It all adds up to a relic of the psychedelic era that again reminds you of how rich the terrain was at the time.
Cattle Decapitation - To Serve Man
I might have given the last Cattle Decap I blogged about a bit short shrift, or at least I’d think so thinking To Serve Man was actually around the same quality, but earlier. Titles like “Collonic Vilus Biopsy Performed On the Gastrointestinally Incapable” signify a whole lot of old Carcass worship going on as well as being thankful yet again that I can barely understand any death metal growler in front of a mike. It’s pretty close to the central genre, built around riffs; intense, brutal and muscular energy propelling the band down mostly generic songs, with the occasional segments that foretell the brilliance to come. The album definitely didn’t stand up next to some of the other metal I’ve been listening to lately, which is often a decent identifier of its relative quality level. Karma Bloody Karma still sounds league ahead of these earlier titles.
Saul Stokes - Radiate
A very minimal Stokes release, definitely less in the vein of his early Hypnos work with the microscope turned on the timbral atmospheres that seem to be the focus of the long pieces here. It’s not that there aren’t any pulses or beats, they just seem uncommonly buried in the mix at times and rarely active enough to make this more than a droning sort of album. Overall I think I’ve heard better work from Stokes, but I’ll need to try this in a more inactive mode of listening to be sure it’s hitting the right spots.