Thursday, December 08, 2005

Paranoia & The Psyche.


I've been skipping through a couple of alien8 releases today, which is no easy task given the lead-like nature of one of them. The Nadja debut Truth Becomes Death has a hefty dose of doomy, Neurosis-esque baroqueness, at about 16 rpm or so, and loosely based on a number of texts relating to the Golem myth, which should make it a shoe-in for placement alongside the Tzadik trading cards at one of my neighbourhood's Hasidic grocers. I never had much of a stomach for the procession of grinding and almost paralyzingly slow noise bands, but it makes a nice palate cleanser after enduring to the myriad of mp3s, cassettes, 7"s and albums from the bastard-children of Lightning Bolt et al. that I'm usually swamped in while seeking out new music.
Buy it at Insound!



The Shalabi Effect - Pai Nai.mp3

Also in the pile was the most recent Shalabi Effect album Unfortunately, which begins with Out of The Closet: a paranoid and schismed cut-and-paste opus, stomps through Pai Nai (about the closest to a pop construct the quartet makes it - Hawkwind communing with Harriet The Spy) and seems to warn off any spiritual seekers. Y'know, the path to transendence (injected, inspired or otherwise) is crooked, off, sinister and foreboding, leading to a series of dead-ends or caverns. What moments of cheer and exubriance glimpsed here have a manic, creeping quality. Cinematic, dark, more than a little macabre but ultimately seductive, I don't think that I'm in possession of a strong enough mindset to listen to this under the influence. Buy it!

Clips available on the alien8recordings website

1 comment:

shepherdofsharks said...

the shalabi effect song was very unexpected. thanks for the heads up.