1970-1979 WTF - The Hard 'n' Heavy 'n' Loud + Krautrock, Arty, Noisy, Weird, Funky, Punky Shit - Albums Poll! - VOTING THREAD! Closes Mar 8th 11.59 PM UK Time - All ILXORS/LURKERS WELCOME

Hall of the Mountain Grill will DEFINITELY be on my ballot... Huge record.

I think im gonna listen to more music before making a ballot

Well shit, now I've heard Warrior On The Edge Of Time and In Search Of Space and I am completely bogged down in the Hawkwind discography. So many riches!!

and smoke?

the Robert Calvert album is also well worth a listen if you want more good 'Awkwind related doings

BTW how the heck did i manage to not nom Algarnas Tradgard? fuck fuck fuck with an extra serving of fuck on the side

Cool album not to be slept on: Randy Holden's Population II. Dude was in Blue Cheer for a while and had a whole side of the third album for himself; this album is an expansion of it and it is a behemoth. I'm not super keen on the first song but the rest is seismic riff action

a sample:

http://youtu.be/lnwVCDA9ZKQ

ok i guess its time to start on my ballot!

Just out of interest, did The Ex make the 80's poll?

i cant remember.

1936 Spanish Revolution made #365 on the albums poll.

ahh yes.

goddamn how fucking good is rocket from the tombs

one of my most treasured records is the life stinks bootleg, distinctly remember my astonishment at finding a sealed copy for $9.99 at my local store in '94 (only 600 were pressed). tho it was an unauthorized ripoff, for a loooong time it was the only way to hear rocket from the tombs stuff, such a crucial band for me at the time. I actually never got around to hearing the offical release, the day the earth met the rocket from the tombs... until today... buncha stuff on there that wasn't on life stinks!

so fkn gdamn good fuck

this shits all over the dead boys vers imo

http://youtu.be/WsCGTe38EEA

Never Gonna Kill Myself Again is one of my personal faves, it's an amazing collection.

Fucking amazing collection.

I know it's challopsy but RFTT > anything any of them did afterwards, doesn't help that dead boys/pere ubu's best songs were cribbed from them

RFTT are v. cool, but wtf were you maniacs thinking when you had a fucking meltdown cow over including this:

Steve Reich - Phase Patterns: http://youtu.be/BelPNaePHiU

Reich was feeding raw, aggro DNA to krautrock, no wave (and its rock descendants), industrial, Kraftwerk, etc. insistent, relentless and stripped, a psychedelia not from synesthesia but from extreme focus, the self imploded - machine thought. complete obliteration of the "I" in either case, but this particular psych legacy is still rolling out, ripping up inner space, and I think it's the paramount psych legacy of the 70s. you can grok this stamp across the board in contemporary music. Reich was building agitation made from thousand-yard-stares and the will to live, while Hawkwind were busy piloting the Goodyear Blimp into a mustache factory, thinking their spaceship had beamed into God's own asshole. and I really like Hawkwind.

Steve Reich - Piano Phase: http://youtu.be/

now I must prepare for this year's apocalypse in my flood-zone condo.

Albini built a goddamn cottage industry from this robo-pound impulse (did you think the cover of The Model was strictly for laffs?). after that, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Gore, Prong, Pantera, etc. all fell into line. Helmet were influenced by Big Black, but also by Hamilton's time w/Band of Susans and Chatham. multiple strands of minimalist echos/aesthetics floating around in rock circles. I'll vote f/Space Ritual, but I'm repping f/No New York in the blues-obliterated clamor category.

It's trippy and psychedelic, and is even more rock-influenced than most other Western art music, but I don't think it's crazy to say that Steve Reich isn't really hard-rocking, certainly not more so than early Pink Floyd or (especially) Dancing in Your Head-era Ornette. In fact, the overall effect is more meditative, intentionally so. I'm a fan btw: Reich probably means more to me than most of what's on this list but I wouldn't want to be ranking Steve Reich albums vs Cheap Trick albums in a hard 'n' heavy 'n' loud rock poll.

Branca and Chatham are another story.

Hawkwind's strain of psych really re-emerges in the 90s in free noise but also in power electronics, which aggressively overdrives machine-tech aesthetics into smoking, protean blare with a return-of-the-repressed obsession w/the corporeal (sex + death, really).

xxp

I wouldn't want to be ranking Steve Reich albums vs Cheap Trick albums in a hard 'n' heavy 'n' loud rock poll.

zero difference between this and comparing Bon Jovi and Keiji Haino is the 80s poll, and one of things that made that particular poll different from the bazillion other 80s polls. AG put his foot down f/that poll, but perhaps trolling fatigue got to him a bit by the time this one rolled around and he caved on this particular point. but there's a truck-sized hole in this poll w/minimalism's name on it, and excluding minimalism was a mistake IMO.

and Floyd is wet-noodle slobber compared to the links I posted above. to paraphrase our friend EIII, if you don't think Phase Patterns rocks, then I don't understand you.

furthermore, the fucking fuck subway is closing at 7. what would Zoogz do?

zero difference between this and comparing Bon Jovi and Keiji Haino

Well, that does seem different to me, although I don't know if I'll convince you. Keiji Haino is an electric guitarist coming from a rock background (which Reich most certainly did not). Fushitsusha is clearly a heavy rock band, albeit one that is more abstracted than Bon Jovi. Even Haino's noisy guitar improvisations still seem to be coming out of a post-Hendrix/Who rock-out aesthetic to me, which I never see in Reich.

AG put his foot down f/that poll, but perhaps trolling fatigue got to him a bit by the time this one rolled around and he caved on this particular point. but there's a truck-sized hole in this poll w/minimalism's name on it, and excluding minimalism was a mistake IMO.

This seems like an odd statement. Minimalism was not included in the 80s poll either. Some of Reich's best work is from the 80s but no one was clamouring for it to be included in the 80s rock poll.

"...most certainly was not (coming from a rock background)"

yeah there was no minimalism in the 80s poll iirc

and there was a LOT of complaints when some was included in this poll

early minimalism is v. clearly more abrasive and dissonant than the more florid later works. and w/the 80s, there was so much genre convergence, that minimalism was already in a sense included in the poll in a number of different guises that I've referenced above. look, what's done is done w/r/t the poll, but denying the connections between the obsessive psych Reich was pushing and later rock is madness.

I hope you guys aren't sleeping on the riffage, hard rock onslaught on these records!!!
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8186/8131243843_de6b10cee2.jpg
Sabbath will probably take this poll, but meanwhile Bang was feeding Christians to lions on their self titled Metal Monster!! Here's my favorite RYM review of Bang
“Bang” by Bang, from 1971, it’s a futile, stupid exercise on the Black Sabbath mimicry, a singer who sings like Ossie Osborne, a guitarist who guitars like Antonio Iommi, and a drummer who drums like William Ward.
Ack: throw me all the fucking shit you want: Bang, and their retarded synonymia bores the fucking Atlantic ocean out me: songs that want to emulate the menacing vibe of Balck Sabbath, meh and more meh.
How, for the life of me will you name “Bang” a band? And their first and eponymicist album is also called “Bang”??!!? Wot the chac?
There are in here attempts of a sensitive folk bullshit, namely “Last will”, which is deader than your GYBE! (get yer bollocks east) Or how the fuck is called.
I don’t get tired of repeating all these proto metal obscurities are a 87,6 percent crap, what’s the point, what’s THE GRACE in digging this? Who the fuck? These are the Black Sabbath roadies: I don’t want, give me the originals, or give me Soulja Boy, or Soja, or soy, but not these lousy impersonators.
In the tune “Come with me” there is “tapping”, fact that shows that Edward Van Hat did not invent this technique, technique that, on the other hand, is quite a twathead of a way to play guitar, if you ask me. “Our home” is, regardless, such a fine cunt-rock, barbaric admixture of Black Sabbath with The Beatels, with heavy-hippie chorus, and I bet that “Bang” barely used to take showers: did I guess right? On the other hand, “Future shock” is more kleptomania from...from who could be? YES: YOU GUESSED RIGHT
It’s from Black Sabbath...but then is not on the other hand: it’s on the same hand, heh *falls unconscious, stands up suddenly, keeps on typing* Someone told me that this kind of music is to listen to if you are stoned, but I think that if you listen to Bang being stoned, the hallucinations may turn into vivid nightmares, especially because Bang are horrible.
I recently knew that the guitarist composed the whole album in 2 hours, listening to “Paranoid” out loud with headphones, and drinking wino “pajarito”: at this stage of the game, the mimetism turns into unbearable for the listener to stand these souls with out a personality, playing the same caveman’s riffola which goes the fuck nowhere, I mean: yeah, “you imitate Sabbath: great, but hey: why the cocks don’t you do “the shift”, and cut the fucking crap once for all: cannot do something a bit different?”
No: Bang cannot do something else than this poor art, this beggars’ banquet: after a song that has an 1% of Uriah Heep influence, the blessed end to these 34 minutes comes, with “Redman”: more stolid riffa-raffa, cowbell, and overall, less grace than a shoe soup.
Unfortunately after the release, the bassist committed suicide while listened to this, but survived, because the bullet experienced a weird parabola into his skull, and the bullet still is there: into his skull today, 2009, the doctors say that if the bullet is extracted, this poor man would get suddenly dissolved in seconds, turning into a gluey dough like that Edgar Poe’s Mr. Valdemar, lol.
Possibly if Black Sabbath never existed Bang would have played skifle; or Paraguayan polka, tango nuevo, maybe Andean folklore, carnavalito perhaps? Don’t know, it’s hard to guess. Listen to Bang!!!

http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8336/8131112722_14ec0fb864.jpg
Jeff Liberman channels Carlos Santana on his second record titled 'Solitude Within' and it is kind of a lonely record, when you can turn out solos like this!!! The record is spit between instrumentals and hammered vocals where he sings like he's trying to charm a lady out of her dress. This record shreds!!!!

Rise Above reissued the Bang albums.

yeah they're on spotify too, I'm checking them out for sure!

I dont think they're on spotify here

or they weren't a month ago when i checked. Just albums by someone else with the same name but it looks like some stuffs been added

Albini built a goddamn cottage industry from this robo-pound impulse (did you think the cover of The Model was strictly for laffs?). after that, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Gore, Prong, Pantera, etc. all fell into line.

and w/the 80s, there was so much genre convergence, that minimalism was already in a sense included in the poll in a number of different guises that I've referenced above.

Come on, saying that Ministry and Nine Inch Nails may have been influenced on some level by minimalism is not the same as saying that minimalism itself was thus included in the 80s poll. (Plenty of psychedelic rock has been influenced by Indian classical music but that does not mean that Hindustani music itself is part of the poll.) And thinking that Reich should be excluded from this poll is not the same as denying that there is any connection between his work and that of rock artists.

With any sort of genre distinction, there is some grey area. If you're mainly emphasizing abrasiveness and dissonance as the defining criteria, then perhaps you would include this stuff (although it would make even more sense to include Penderecki and Ligeti then, which you might also favour). I tend to place significant importance on timbre/instrumentation and beat/rhythmic patterns, to a lesser extent song forms, although not exclusively. Many of the bands in these lists played around with all of these elements but still seem to use them as a reference point. There is an obsessively repetitive and heavily emphasized rhythmic pulse in Reich but I don't see it as having much to do with a rock backbeat. (It has more to do with West African drumming patterns, if anything.)

In any case, I think it's going too far to say that people who would want to exclude Steve Reich, who is almost universally categorized as a classical composer, from a 70s heavy rock poll are trolling.

Come on, saying that Ministry and Nine Inch Nails may have been influenced on some level by minimalism is not the same as saying that minimalism itself was thus included in the 80s poll. (Plenty of psychedelic rock has been influenced by Indian classical music but that does not mean that Hindustani music itself is part of the poll.)

the key phrase I used was "in a sense". obv minimalism per se wasn't included in the 80s poll, but I think that a lot of its more aggro traits had by that time been absorbed by rock (and can even be said to have been transforming rock during that period). also, minimalism in the 80s (at least in its most commercial incarnations) had really evolved (or devolved, depending on your perspective) into a cloying sort of lite/NPR-approved art music that I think is fairly distant from rock (I think minimalism split itself in two at some point, perhaps towards the late middle of the 70s, with its more aggressive elements being absorbed and transformed by a number of other genres, while minimalism proper gradually grew more and more baroque and compromised). the really key early 70s works, though, obviously hadn't been absorbed until after their appearance, and for this reason I think the notion of their inclusion in this particular poll has merit (even though it's kind of ridiculous to argue about it at this point).

I threw out the terms "abrasive" and "dissonant" merely to emphasize the radical starkness of the v. early minimal works as compared to the later, more complex and more melodic pieces that most people actually associate w/minimalism. while I think that minimalism's radical simplicity was in and of itself hugely influential (especially in punk-related spheres), I agree that rhythm is really more of the defining characteristic. now, the issue of minimalism's inclusion doesn't pivot around Reich's intentionality in terms of whether or not he in any way saw himself and what he did as being related to rock, but rather the effect of his music on rock. also, while "West African drumming patterns" may be the academically correct way of referring to Reich's rhythms, I hear in his early works speed-freak tempos and a monomaniacal drive that easily transcends the realm of the metronomic and pushes clear into rock territory. also, any relation to West African drumming necessarily brings us in a roundabout way back to rock (or a "rock backbeat"). so, in a way I don't really care if Reich is "universally categorized as a classical composer", b/c that's a mere abstraction and I'm talking about v. specific and concrete traits regarding his early work that I think were hugely influential in rock.

now, generally speaking, I'm mainly referring to the earlier minimalist works, so perhaps our disagreement stems in part from a misunderstanding on that point. you may also be using Carducci's definition of rock and automatically excluding everything that doesn't refer to small-band music centered around guitar and live drums. the main problem w/sticking with this formula is that you end up green-lighting horseshit like Bon Jovi and excluding Keiji Haino. for me, music that can be described as rock (or rock-influenced, or rawk or rocking or w/e) generally has to have either a v. genuine sonic or conceptual aggression, and I hear both in Reich's music, and furthermore can very easily hear where this aggression later emerges in rock music. (I suppose using the general definition of this poll, Bon Jovi is rock but doesn't rawk, while Reich's early synth and piano works definitely rawk).

finally, the 80s poll was trolled incessantly by people up in arms about the criteria, and when this poll's inclusion of minimalism looked like it was going to ignite a similar amount of controversy, the plug was almost instantaneously pulled. now we have a v. nice, normal poll w/out any drama, but this has proved unexpectedly unfortunate.

it's an internet bulletin board poll.
get a grip !

^^^

c'mon man, this is the most action this poll has seen in two weeks!

and wtf, the very definition of internet bulletin board poll involves inane hair-splitting and ridiculous arguments.

ah, i see.
IMO the qualification criteria were wildly elastic and inconsistent, but it wasn't ever my poll, so fair do's.
back in the seventies rock was rock. reich was fringe academic classical. at that time very different spheres / audiences. rhythm pre-dates minimalism.
BTW i nearly nommed algarnas tradgard, but it didn't get over my own rock threshold despite guitars & drums.

Albini built a goddamn cottage industry from this robo-pound impulse
urgh i was sick in my mouth there for a second

IMO the qualification criteria were wildly elastic and inconsistent, but it wasn't ever my poll, so fair do's.
back in the seventies rock was rock. reich was fringe academic classical. at that time very different spheres / audiences. rhythm pre-dates minimalism.

tbf, no one could ever find any cluster of criteria that would satisfy everyone. I think the poll has been fairly consistent given the task at hand, but there have been times when my own picks were booted, so naturally I have gripes. really, my point here is more to boost Reich in the context of 70s psych than tear down the poll. in terms of "rock was rock", we ran into the same issue w/the 80s poll where REM were v. early on in their career lumped in by association w/punk, but in retrospect seem v. twee and not at all punk rock.

urgh i was sick in my mouth there for a second

ha! it does have a distinctly stomach-churning quality, for a variety of reasons.

oh yeah - nowt against AG or the poll. genres only exist by distinction & no two people distinguish the same so, there's always going to be friction. i'm still peeved that i didn't get my cecil taylors through, but it doesn't really matter.
the very thought of assigning any value to anything steve albini has ever done makes me queasy, though.

but he's #!

Ha, I think I'd sooner include Steve Reich than Cecil Taylor (whom I also like plenty).

Hm, Black Oak Arkansas are actually sounding pretty good.

BOA sound great! Very underrated band, IMO.

Have you guys been checking out Blue Mountain Eagle!
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Otc_okvDfzU/TOn18hjdy1I/AAAAAAAAATE/nbCkLCjtA48/s1600/bluemountaineagle01jpg.jpg
Searing Heavy Heavy Psych with a hint of southern rawk , it's got melodies too!! Check out Feel Like a Bandit, Loveless Lives, and Trivial Sum.