Subte Lip Can - Reflective Drime

In January I almost posted a year-end list of my favorite music from 2014. I’d been re-listening to a lot of what came out during the past year and figuring out what I’d listened to most, what I’d liked most. And, as you’ll notice, I’d already put together a books list, so I was poised to get back into the game of year-end nonsense after missing last year (and yes, it’s nonsense, but I love it all the same). What stopped me this year was an inkling that Drip Audio might’ve put something out that I’d missed. Drip Audio, if you’re not already familiar, is an absolutely amazing label out of Canada that only puts out the best of the weirdest best, often limiting themselves to one or two releases a year, and, following whatever cycle they’ve been running on over the past few years, often putting the stuff out in the middle of December, when everyone else is looking backward trying to tally the year’s offerings. So, of course, I pull up there home site, and what do I find? There’s a new Subtle Lip Can album. And, just like that, I’m unable to post my list—not without listening to this album. And not just because it’s a Drip Audio release (which will invariably demand a spot on any worthwhile best-of list), but because Subtle Lip Can’s eponymous debut stands as one of the best records I’ve heard in the last ten years. So, my apologies, you can find the list below*, but more importantly, Subtle Lip Can has a new record!! And, hot damn, it’s a brain scrambler. As well one would hope. Still swimming against the current, the trio (Josh Zubot on violin, Bernard Falaise on guitar, Isaiah Ceccarelli on drums) contort their instruments into plinging, gut-bursting, animal-heaving monstrousities. One of the things I really loved about their debut was this quality of playing that generated these gloriously animalistic sounds, nothing like traditional instruments, but more like the loosing of the souls of beasts. And Reflective Drime picks up that thread, those animalisms, with an added tinniness, a here-and-there bed of industrialism, with wide scrapes and pinnish micro-punctures. The bottom line of which is to say, thank everything, there’s a new Subtle Lip Can--get it now and be destroyed. There’s nothing like quite like them.
 

*20 other favorites from 2014: Alvaays – Alvaays, Angeles 9 – Injuries, Anne Guthrie – Codiaeum variegatum, Battle Trance – Palace of Wind, The Body – I Shall Die Here, Caribou – Our Love, D’Angelo – Black Messiah, Dragging an Ox Through Water – Panic Sentry, Each Other – Being Elastic, The Fun Years – One Quarter Descent, Goodwill Smith – The Honeymoon Workbook, Gordon Ashworth – S.T.L.A., Ian William Craig – A Turn of Breath, Nap Eyes – Whine of the Mystic, Posse – Soft Opening, Rhodri Davies – An Air Swept Clean of All Distance, St. Vincent – St. Vincent, A Sunny Day in Glasgow – Sea When Absent, Vladislav Delay – Visa, White Suns – Totem, Wold – Postsocial

Ratchet Orchestra - Hemlock

If you're looking to break into the world of contemporary jazz, Hemlock is the album. The third from Ratchet Orchestra in the group's 18 year lifespan, the album feels both comfortably experienced and stride-catchingly fresh. Which isn't to say that the band hasn't been striding along wonderfully since it's debut, only to point out that the group's third feels like its grand achievement, its youthful revelation--18 years in. Hemlock is a swelling set with enormous range, offering both orchestral jauntiness, and freely improvised chaos; moments of joyousness and playful abandon matched with loosely threaded melancholy; and all of it managed with a master-craft's touch. More simply, Hemlock is an expression of artistic genius, music that transcends genre. Ratchet Orchestra have tapped into something that demands being recommended in fevered tones, as if your life depended on listening to it. Who knows, maybe it does...it's pretty good.



At 30 strong memberwise, Ratchet Orchestra is no small operation. Check out the band crammed together in the Hotel2Tagno studio, working their voodoo...



More videos of the band recording after the jump.

The Peggy Lee Band - Invitation

The release stream from Drip Audio is sparse. Over the course of the last few years, the Vancouver label has been putting out between one and four albums a year. In an era when labels and musicians seem to be flooding the market with every spec of sound they can set to tape, Drip Audio is an enviable example of no-filler curation. It's more, though, than a simple avoidance of filler; Drip Audio is the diamond standard: when they release albums, you make room in your year-end top ten list. 2012 example: The Peggy Lee Band's Invitation, an album brim-filled with musical grandeur of the highest order. It doesn't get better. For their fifth album (where have I been?) the group has assembled a deeply dynamic set of both gilded and crust-inhabited arrangements, effortlessly transitioning between jazz, orchestral and free improv motifs, all of it cohering blissfully. It's a marvelous set, really. The back-and-forth between major key jauntiness and loose instrumental unraveling on "Why Are You Yelling?"; the languid beauty of "Your Grace"; the dirty, meandering, crushed improvisations of "Not So Far" which twine and resurrect into an unlikely, casual grandness--the album's a miracle. In the post-election haze here in the US, this is something in which you can find true hope. I think I'm just going to turn off the lights and listen to The Peggy Lee Band for the rest of my life...

Dixie's Death Pool - The Man with Flowering Hands

(Drip Audio, 2011)

Beautifully, Dixie's Death Pool's The Man with Flowering Hands, the sole 2011 release from the absolutely amazing Drip Audio label, is, like sunlight, a revelation.  Dixie's Death Pool is a collagist's dream, interweaving gorgeous psych-country balladry and ghostly, drug-addled folk-pop with an improvisatory sensibility.  Based around four or five perfectly composed songs, the band, a hodge-podge assortment of musically blessed criminals and specters and cowboys and, perhaps most accurately, Canadians (all lead by one Lee Hultzulak), quilt the album together with a wonderfully bewilderingly avant garde jazz featuring blustery electronics, chugging percussion, spectre-traced textures and other creepy atmospherics.  It is a fluid concoction, equal parts dark and light, inviting and menacing (read: menacingly inviting), and the best of what might be termed, loosely, as avant-country (or some such similar genre title).  My attempts to wrap words around this album are destined to fall short.  It's viscerally engaging, magnetic and unassumingly memorable.  Amidst contemporaries like Califone and Skygreen Leopards and Vibracathedral Orchestra and Jackie-O Samuel L. Jackson, Dixie's Death Pool's The Man with Flowering Hands is a volcanic, essential work. 

Dixie's Death Pool - Sunlight Is Collecting On My Face by Drip Audio
Dixie's Death Pool - The Man With Flowering Hands by Drip Audio

Fond of Tigers - Continent & Western (2010, Drip Audio)

RIYL = Do Make Say Think, Tortoise, Little Women

Remember like a decade or so ago when instrumental indie rock or post rock or whatever was really at its zenith and bands like Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor and even Explosions in the Sky, when they trotted along after them, were churning out these epic but ultimately predictable long-form jams and the claims that Tortoise was somehow infected with jazz were starting to wear thin and then, all of the sudden, the floor just fell through and they all disappeared? (True, some of them occasionally resurface with ever-decreasing relevance.) It seems like ever since then instrumental rock has been struggling to gain its footing. I’m sure there are plenty of exceptions – bands that have created really incredible instrumental and avant rock albums (heck, I’ve lauded plenty of them) – and there have been hybrids of every shape and size that have pushed the significance of these genre titles out the window, but I still have felt like there is a gaping hole that’s needed filling, something to really revitalize the idea of what instrumental avant rock can be. And then I listened to Continent & Western. And then I was happy and had hope for the future and for my son. And then I realized that Drip Audio is to me now what Constellation Records was to me in junior high: a bastion for the most challenging, forward thinking, insanely awesome, ‘I didn’t realize music could do this’ music out there. And Fond of Tigers, the label’s certifiable supergroup among supergroups, have gone and proved that there’s plenty of air left in the lungs of instrumental rock music yet. Continent & Western is a super deep, super solid record.

SOHEB

Aeroplane Trio - Naranja Ha (2010, Drip Audio)

I expect to write a fuller review of this album on Foxy Digitalis in the near future, but as for now, hopefully this brief paragraph will do. Drip Audio was kind enough to send me copies of three of their most recent releases and, I must say, I’m completely smitten with each. I’ve already spilled my fanboy guts all over Subtle Lip Can. Now: Aeroplane Trio and Naranja Ha. This album is absolute gold. From what I understand, the trio – consisting of JP Carter on trumpet/cornet, Russell Sholberg on bass/saw, and Sky Brooks on drums – formed over eight years ago and have never before Naranja Ha released an official album. That means there is 8+ years worth of skillful refinement and chemistry bred into this sucker. The group works from a hook-laden jazz template that swings and grooves happily before they blotch and smear their improvisations into more sickly territory. Naranja Ha is both slickly palatable and free-flowingly manic, never bowing down to conventions, but rather incorporating them into something more dynamic and interesting. The tug and pull is wonderful, ranging from ridiculously catchy to squalidly free form. I am by no means up on contemporary jazz and its touchstones, but I couldn’t imagine a more solid entry point than Aeroplane Trio’s Naranja Ha. As it stands, Naranja Ha promises to be a go-to jazz album in my catalog for years to come. (And, I haven’t watched it just yet, but it should be noted that the album also contains a DVD with a short documentary and live concert.  Bonus!)


Whitehorse by Drip Audio

Subtle Lip Can - Subtle Lip Can (2010, Drip Audio)

RIYL = Kingdom Shore, Zs, John Wiese

A goal this year on Forest Gospel is to not worry so much about keeping up with the Joneses. This means that there will be a lot more reviews of albums not released in the present calendar year. That said, Subtle Lip Can’s 2010 self-titled debut is still very new, having been released less than two months ago. And Subtle Lip Can is exactly the reason why I recommend that you, young music fanatic, abandon the rat race for the hippest, newest, most obscurest grail of instant music holiness of 2011. Because it was released in 2010. By a band named Subtle Lip Can. Muscular, taut and hellish, Subtle Lip Can’s debut wraps itself into your subconscious with a contortedly fingered, godly grip, flexes then wrenches. You could call it free jazz or noise or both, but ultimately Subtle Lip Can’s sound can’t be categorized. The album feels mythical and utterly prehistoric, bleak and catatonic, menacingly restrained and methodically supernatural. I could tell you that the trio features Isaiah Ceccarelli on percussion and piano, Bernard Falaise on electric guitar and Josh Zubot on violin, but I could probably just as easily convince you that the album was conceived by a trio of demigods and recorded using a sampling of lacerated tendons, marbled sinews and splintered bones. The band’s invented a tonal vocabulary all its own; a language crimped, parched and folded; a sound that communicates a different kind of communion. Absolutely, most definitely essential listening.

Runst From Thag by Drip Audio

Butcher/Muller/van der Schyff - Way Out Northwest

Butcher/Muller/van der Schyff
Way Out Northwest
(03.2008, Drip Audio)
File Under = Out-there jazz

Way Out Northwest is definitely not for everyone. In fact, I am still figuring out if it is for me. So why am I posting on some obscure record without coming to a clean consensus about it? Well, probably because it is one of the more compelling, destabilizing and exciting things I’ve heard all year. For some reason I keep coming back to it despite the fact that my experiences have ranged from wide-eyed adoration to blunt confusion and annoyance. It is a difficult album to get one’s head around, but on the occasions when the elasticity of my head proves extensive, it is also one of the more enjoyable pieces of abstract-anything I’ve been listening to. It’s just out there, “way out” there. Rooted in jazz, Butcher, Muller and van der Schyff (none of whom I am super familiar with) simply go a little haywire, turning their improv away from natural grooves or musical touchstones like melody and time structures, opting instead to amble along like a psychotic animal suffering from the post traumatic effects of electric shock therapy. So, yeah, turns out that I am kind of into that…I guess. Actually, I am not really into that. I guess that's the oddity. Way Out Northwest plays with your head, alternately convincing you and then dissuading from agreeing with it or liking it or feeling like you are that psychotic animal. You can see how it would be - at the very least - intriguing. In practice it extends far beyond intrigue. With just a saxophone, contrabass and drums, this trio performs an aural exorcism of monstrous proportions. This is avant free-jazz on the edge, teetering towards a free fall. For those who find themselves up to it – it’s pretty exhilarating.

-Mr. Thistle