Caesarian Section : Incision 12”

My friend and I were in Athens on the last day of a recent vacation to Turkey and Greece and we decided to visit one last record store. That store turned out to be a goldmine compared to anywhere else we had visited – we each walked out with stacks of records after spending over 100 Euros apiece. My friend found this record and put it on the store’s turntable. The crackly intro fed into crashes of industrial percussion and a noisy mess of guitars and echoing, repetitive vocals.

“Whoa… this sounds like a fucked-up version of Danse Society”, exclaimed my friend.

He was right. It was slightly more industrial sounding, and noisier, as if Danse Society had a marathon listening session of Swans and Einsturzende Neubauten albums before recording.

New Rosary, the leading song on the EP, is a definite strong point. Voodoo Jazz repeats the formula on the previous track, but obscures the vocals, adds shrieks and yelps, and ups the ante on the psychotic percussion.

The B side is a bit less noisy, and slower-paced, but still quite good. Barb Wire Teddy is almost shoegaze in a Jesus and Mary Chain sort of noisy, effected way (but with more emphasis on atmosphere and percussion than on guitars). The final song, Fact Not Fiction, is virtually formless, with tinny percussion pushed to one side and occasional clangs of metal piercing the din of effects and delays and echoing vocals. It’s a great way to end the record, in a cocoon of completely unrefined noise. This is currently dirt cheap on discogs at the moment... I wonder if it will remain that way?

Caesarian Section: Incision 12”

1987, Incision Records

A1: New Rosary

A2: Voodoo Jazz

B1: Barb Wire Teddy

B2: Fact Not Fiction

Click here to listen!

Mock: Skyryder EP

With all the recent synth and post punk and new wave records I have been posting as of late, I thought that maybe it would be a nice idea to completely digress musically for a day. The above-mentioned genres are just some of my favorite; but sometimes I just love to put on a shoegaze album and bliss out to a warm blanket of hazy sound. I know there are a lot of others who love post punk and shoegaze with equal fervor - maybe it's because of the atmosphere and mood that the two genres create, maybe it's because both genres are the perfect blend of rebellion against the greater music world and embracing of fringe elements of pop sensibility.

This record - a completely unknown gem from a UK band called Mock - is one of my current favorites. In only four (long) songs, they pack an entire album's worth of reverbed beauty. They take their cues from the best of the shoegaze set - especially Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. In fact, the song Diving sounds so much like it's off of Souvlaki that I sometimes have to take a look at what record I have on just to verify. The song is an epic of sloooow, deliberate percussion, dense washes of guitar noise and bass fuzz and vocals that are reverbed to the point of abstraction. The title track features stabs and plucks of warm guitars on top of a thick wall of sound, with dual vocals that simultaneously sound male, female, and androgenous. The first song, Poppy, and the final song, the wonderfully titled Vertigo Melt, are the real rock songs on the album; Vertigo Melt in particular sounds like it could have come from pre-Loveless MBV.

I cannot recommend this highly enough. If you have a passing interest in shoegaze, you'd do well to take a listen to this. What it may lack in originality, it more than makes up for in ear-piercing euphony.

Mock: Skyryder EP

1994, Bites Back! Records

A1 Poppy

A2 Diving

B1 Skyryder

B2 Vertigo Melt

Click here to listen!