E*Rock - Conscious - 12"

E*Rock is the founder of Portland based Audio Dregs Recordings, publisher of Thumb zine and a widely published visual artist and illustrator. After several years in the making E*Rock delivers his long awaited debut CD. Creating colorful and highly melodic electronic tunes formed from a variety of instrumentation and sound sources including, Conscious makes use of guitar, flute, synthesizers, live percussion, field recordings, and toy instruments to achieve a unique sound. His production maintains an organic quality not unlike that of his brother E*Vax. The music flows with a acoustic-electric methodology, at times very abstract, constantly deconstructing, but always with an underlying pop sensibility. E*Rock has previously released a collaborative EP with Harald "Sack" Ziegler (Staubgold, Mouse on Mars, Tomlab) and an album with his other “group” Carpet Musics (Audio Dregs), as well having made at least half a dozen compilation appearances in the past year. In addition E*Rock has produced soundtracks for dozens of projects by New York animator Mumbleboy, including a piece displayed last December in Grand Central Station. Joined on many tracks is Colleen French (who studied guitar with the late John Fahey) playing guitar, flute and vocals. Ben Barnett (Kind of Like Spitting, The Thermals) also makes an appearance on guitar. Reccomended For fans of Múm, E*Vax, and Kim Hiorthoy.

Electric Birds - Temescal - 7"

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED !!! Thematic colour artwork. White vinyl. New from Mike Martinez aka Electric Birds. Leaving San Francisco and now based in Seattle, Electric Birds, head-honcho of Deluxe Records has become an important name in the electronic scene in the past years. Hypnotic layered sound-scapes with a deep groovy bass, high-grade dub twists & percussion and glitchy clicks and cuts result in an enjoyable record. Dark driven ambient that reminds us to the work of Pole, Kit Clayton, Vladislav Delay, Maurizio, Gas and Basic Channel. Electric Birds’ warm and deep atmospheres will embrace you in a gentle gloomy experience.

Electric Shadows- Break The Rules - 7"

Electric Shadows - DMR006
Break the Rules 7"

The long overdue debut release from New York's Electric Shadows. This is vintage rock n' roll power pop at its finest. The Shadows borrow sounds from The Soft Boys, Flamin Groovies, and The Only Ones with some of the greatest Chuck Berry influenced guitar work we at DMR have ever witnessed. This two song single is what power pop revival should have been like all along.

Elevator- Taste of Complete Perspecive - 12"

Rick White's old band, Eric's Trip, was arguably the best and most deserving of a place in history of all the various pop groups from the early 90's that could be associated with the term "lo-fi." They wrote amazing songs and did so prolifically. In their five or six years of existence they created a surprisingly large catalog of cassettes, seven inches, EPs and full length albums, none of which, to my knowledge, contained a single un-great song. They wrote prettier, catchier melodies than Sebadoh, and bigger, meaner riffs than Royal Trux, and their trademark was combining the two--enveloping sweetly sung, sincere lyrics in a haze of blistering fuzz. On an Eric's Trip album you could always count on hearing everything from the loudest Stooge-like barrages, to the quietest songs played on acoustic guitar, and always woven seamlessly together in a white noise collage of tape hiss and found sounds. Though Eric's Trip was far from an unknown band, they never really achieved the kind of recognition they deserved, and in 1996 when they ceased to exist, few people seemed to notice.

Toward the end of Eric's Trip, though, Rick White and his wife Tara began Elevator to Hell. It started as a side project which provided an outlet for songs that were even more eclectic and varied than could wash in Eric's Trip, which was by then a band with a relatively established "sound." However, Rick had been apparently the principal of three song writers in Eric's Trip, and with that band's demise and the integration of drummer Mark Gaudet into the line-up, Elevator to Hell became the heir to, and something of an extension of, Eric's Trip.

While Elevator to Hell (which was later briefly renamed Elevator Through Hell, then Elevator Through, and now simply Elevator) retained much of the Eric's Trip sound and approach, and in fact many people seem to want it to actually BE Eric's Trip, it has nevertheless continued to be its own thing, a band which is much less straightforward, both musically and lyrically. Not surprisingly, this has never been more true than it is on Elevator's new album A Taste of Complete Perspective. While Eric's Trip was generally heart-on-sleeve transparent, this is an album which is best characterized by its almost complete obscurity, mysteriousness, and impenetrability. The lyrics are incomprehensibly weird, and are made even less direct to the listener by thick effects, loops, and burial within the music. The music itself is also given an ambiguous strangeness by the use of multiple layers of sound within the songs, and atmospheric clips of noise and sound which bind the album into a nearly continuous hour long flow. It is absolutely dense with sound. This is bad trip music at its best--disjointed, confusing, dark and just a bit scary--but almost always engaging.

An example of Elevator's use of layers to tamper with the listener's perception is "I'm a Radio Station." Maybe the highlight of the album, this is a light, pretty, upbeat pop song. The song is very nice by itself, but to complicate things, it's placed on top of a bed of eerie, atonal drones. As a result, the song is not just beautiful, but bizarrely so. The album is full of such juxtapositions, which, when done right, add strange new dimensions to the stock sounds of pop music and the feelings automatically associated with those sounds. Sort of disorienting in a nice way. Plus, there are some just plain old good songs to be found here.

A Taste of Complete Perspective is by no means perfect. If you're like me, you'll find that the lyrics are sometimes overbearingly odd-ball, and that the album doesn't really swing into full gear until about track four or so. But don't give up too soon! Listen to the whole thing and then listen again. It will grow on you.

Epsilons - ST - 12"

From Dusted:

These days, with so many scenes and conduits for distribution, it can take years for DIY efforts to pay off. By the time most bands gather an audience, the members are old enough to be taking the bar exam. So it is signifgant that the four Epslions are still under twenty. It's more significant that they're pulling off garage punk as good as any ever made. But it's really something that they've got a complete sound, when they're at an age when most promising teen rockers are probably distracted with pop-punk, dance-punk and rap-metal influences that they're going to shed later on.

Part of the success of Epsilons is that there's nothing pure about them. This kind of music is usually the provence of gearheads and trainspotters obsessed with retubing valve ampilfiers or tracking down mint-condition LPs- not the best set of habits for capturing the howl of Sixties dorks trying to grab a piece of the Rolling Stones' action. Epsilons drop lines like "Girl take off your clothes, don't forget those pantyhose" and it's a little rougher than you'd have gotten in the Sixties and a lot hornier than you'd hear in most revival bands. It's like the contemporary garage millionaires have provided just enough envy and inspiration for a fresh group of dorks to try to get in on the action.

Like a many of the standout punks of the last few years, they top their sound with cheapo synthesizer. Their take on it doesn't evoke New Wave. It's more like a knife that cuts through the fuzz better than Farfisa. The songs stick to sloppy and shuffling go-go beats, and nearly every lyric has a line which ends with "GIRL!" They drag it through the skatepunk crud of their Orange County upbringing. "Snap Crackle Pop!" has thrashy guitars which grind along like D.I. or Dr. Know, but the Casio turns the song title into a hook, bursting and bubbling above the distortion. The skeletons of their songs could have come from 1965, but in execution, it's neither a recreation or a self-concious update.

Beyond finding rhymes for "pantyhose", they don't have much to say. The album opens with the lines "The train is coming / coming real soon." However, that's proceeded by a strummed acoustic false start, a lilt that dissolves as the drums come in, and is obliterated for the rest of the set. They don't let their shortcomings work against them. They know when to quit a riff or drop in an unexpected turn.

So even though the songs hang tight to the garage genre, there's something eccentric about Epsilons- Ty Segall's nasal voice cuts as sharply as the keyboards, and with the hollow reverb and out-of-control distortion, it brings to mind the Swell Maps. Two members switch off on the drum duties. Right now, they're leaving out the right stuff. They could develop into something very original very quickly, once they've worked through the teenage kicks.

By Ben Donnelly