reviews & post-punk

[hogge@p.cs.uiuc.edu (John Hogge)]

Some record reviews:

1. Scraping Foetus off The Wheel: "Nail"
   Very good album; orchestrated industrial with raunchy vocals.  Half the 
   cuts are mean dance, half are conceptual orchestral work.  Personally
   I prefer the latter...

2. Severed Heads: "Clifford Darling, Please Don't Live In the Past"
   Very average industrial conceptual noise double album.  It does have 
   interesting stuff here and there, but unfortunately way too much use of
   tape loops, to the point of boredom.  For my noise dollar, Nurse With Wound
   and others do more interesting work.
    
3. Nocturnal Emmisions: "Songs of Love and Revolution"
   Interesting vocals, weird minimal music with one-finger keyboard technique
   and drum machines.  I wouldn't pay a whole lot for it, though.

4. The Residents: "Fingerprince"
   Side 1 su*cks, Side 2 makes it worthwhile with a side-long weird (of 
   course) percussion ensemble with occasional electronics and vocals.

   [In case any of you aren't familiar with The Residents, go immediately
    and buy "The Mark of The Mole."  The Residents (at least on this album)
    are sort of the Tomita of the underground, and the Mark of The Mole is a 
    brilliant story of epic struggle between conflicting cultures.]

5.  Toto: "Hydra"
    What a truely poor album.  I think I'll record a Residents album over it.

6.  Controlled Bleeding: "Headcrack"
    Interesting (and *excellent*) combination of industrial noise with
    meditative, melodic doodling.  

7.  The Ex "Pokkeherrie" LP
    Excellent post-punk with tasteful vocals mixed real low in comparison to
    the music (which is how I like it when the music is that good) and 
    strong, no b.s. lyrics.  The music is intricate, structured noisy
    guitar and good drums.  Comes with a poster and nice lyric booklet.

Uh, oh forget the descriptions.  Here are some other albums I've bought lately
that I like alot.  You'll notice several "post punk" things--by this I mean
punk influenced rock with interesting instrumentals leaning towards 
wall-of-noise and/or noisy guitar rifts, epitomized by say Sonic Youth.  (Is
this a good description of post-punk?  BTW, under this definition, what good
post-punk type things do you know of?)

Post Punk:
  Uzi --Sleep Asylum EP
  Ritual Tension  --latest (only?) LP
  Killing Joke --What's This For? LP
  Rat A Rat R --their LP
  Emma compilation --two sides of hardcore, two sides of post-punk.
   From Holland, live recordings from a club there.  Not all the cuts on
   this are good, but much of it is.  Nice booklet.  (This compilation is
   what got me interested in The Ex.)

Unclassified:
  Cyan Review -- grey LP--I forget the name
  Royal Family and the Poor -- We Love the Moon LP.
  Venus in Furs -- Platonic Love
  SPK -- latest LP with "Necropolis" on it.  Great orchestra w/ industrial 
         influences and *no* dance cuts.  (And by golly...)

Disliked:
 Social Unrest --didn't like it; too political & boring instruments


So, buy all this and then tell me how you liked it.  
--John