Mosaic is a new statement of purpose for ANCIENT SKY and a record that defines the band as one of Brooklyn’s heaviest & most dynamic units. It is the sound of a band revitalized. With the addition of ADAM BULGASEM as second drummer, PAT BRODERICK's signature swing hits even harder. KEVIN LAMIELL & BRANDON EVANS add bass & keys respectively, leaving main-man BRIAN MARKHAM to handle the singular guitar, one that riffs & drones in classic Ancient Sky form. From metallic street punk, to swinging celestial psych, to the crunching terror blues, this is a band showing that maturity means knowing your strengths and also knowing how to keep pushing it. Listen - Know
NOW AVAILABLE ON VINYL!!! Received a 7.9 rating from Pitchfork. Little is known about Bay Area enigma BOSSE-DE-NAGE, since the band rarely plays live, doesn’t disclose its membership, or partake in promotional activities like interviews or promo photos. Nonetheless, the four-piece has a solid and distinct repertoire at their disposal. A cassette demo (released by Aesop Dekker of Agalloch / Worm Ouroboros / Ludicra fame) and two full-length albums (on Flenser Records) have made an impression within the underground, and the band’s vitriolic mix of minimal black metal, indie rock and post-punk has garnered reviews describing them as a black metal version of the legendary Slint. Their latest album titled simply III, is the most sophisticated and introspective Bosse-De-Nage release to date—one of the most powerful collisions of indie rock and black metal you’ll hear this year. LP limited to 500 copies. Listen - III
Bathetic is pleased to bring to the masses, Make All The Hell Of Dark Metal Bright, the debut long player from KWAIDAN. This project brings together MIKE WEISS (ZELIONPLE), ANDRE FOISY (LOCRIAN), and NEIL JENDON—when you look at a line-up like this, it's easy to see how important and profound the outcome will be. Heavy, lumbering, and dense, Make All The Hell Of Dark Metal Bright is a sprawling affair with a foggy aesthetic—bleak, but beautiful and all-surrounding. Pass it off as a simplistic drone album? Never. This is high-art, utilizing minimalistic percussion, swirling beats pulsate, a trance takes hold. Guitar and piano come forth from behind a wall of electric vibrance. So precisely put together, these layers form a pattern; pull your eyes away and it's all a great swirling grey of splendor. Listen - *Excerpts from the album
The fifth album from Bay Area weirdos Mamaleek, Via Dolorosa is the duo’s darkest and most experimental release, incorporating black metal, psychedelia and electronic music. It is also the first Mamaleek record featuring live drums. At once harsh, frightening and beautiful, Via Dolorosa is like an evening at the darkest jazz club as it might appear in the depths of a child’s fever dream. Though the group’s two anonymous brothers hail from the San Francisco Bay Area and their work is rife with themes of death and nihilism, musically they stand apart from the city’s most well-known black metal exports (Weakling, Leviathan, et al.)
Listen - Nothing But Loss
Nurse With Wound’s Lumb’s Sister has been newly remastered from the original analog tapes by Denis Blackham. “This music was originally conceived as raw material for the film project Lumb’s Sister by Chris Wallis. During the long evolution of his movie, Chris decided to use alternative source sounds and subsequently none of these pieces ever made it onto the completed film.
Uniform - Perfect World LP (12XU) $36 SGD/ SOLD OUT (Available for Pre-Order)
UNIFORM formed in New York City in late 2013 when old friends BEN GREENBERG (HUBBLE, THE MEN, PYGMY SHREWS) and MICHAEL BERDAN (YORK FACTORY COMPLAINT, DRUNKDRIVER, BELIEVER/LAW) realized they lived on the same street. Their impulsive collaboration quickly yielded "Our Blood" / "Of Sound Mind and Body" single. The six tracks that comprise the equally abrasive but more refined Perfect World have been coming together between tours and work ever since. The music that Greenberg and Berdan conjure up under the Uniform moniker is immediate, aggressive, and even primal in form, but it plumbs untold depths. Berdan’s venomous voice mines deeply personal themes of resentment, regret, reflection and addiction over the hum of Greenberg’s almost impossibly disciplined guitar, bass synth, and drum machine lines. Greenberg uses the word “templatized” to describe their approach to writing songs for Uniform. “There’s this set bunch of gear to create sounds, and it only creates sound through a certain process, or within its own limitations,” Greenberg said. “The goal of songwriting is to see how many different kinds of sounds you can get from the same basic process and machine.” On Perfect World, that machine is firing on all cylinders. The guitar is run through a cheap ’80s preamp marketed to metal kids. The drum machine is equally no-frills, an Akai XR20 that Greenberg says “most people wouldn’t want to keep around.” These humble components are combined with noisy synth and Berdan’s profound howling to form something much greater. Post-punk, synthpunk, and industrial traditions are borrowed from as needed, but the constraints placed on the process mean the result is unique to Uniform. Berdan describes his lyrics as the consequence of feeling “so full of pain, confusion, deep selfishness, and general animosity that you make some horrible mistakes and have to learn how to forgive yourself for them.” 'Perfect World' feels like the sum of all that pain and confusion, but it also feels like the catharsis. Listen - Perfect World
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