Gatekeeper - Giza EP (2010) [Merok] // Grade: B+

The anticipation started with “Chains.” When Chicago EBM masters Gatekeeper dropped the first Giza single early this fall, you could almost hear the collective crunch of jaws hitting the floor; not only did it make good on the promise set forth by last year’s Optimus Maximus EP, it bested every track. And now that we’ve cozied up with the full release, this thing bubbling in the shadow of its opening track and single, the question gets more complicated: Could any album stand a comparative chance against a first peek so good, so sexy and sinister, so mind-bogglingly instant?

This one does. Mostly.

But understand that Giza, as a whole, isn’t “Chains.” The Gatekeeper duo may carry whispers of their Italo-cum-John Carpenter vibe from start to finish, but it undulates in a subtle, almost circular way. This is an album as much about pacing as composition; strip it of its context and you’ve stripped it of itself.

Take it as one piece, however, and Giza is a sight to see. “Serpent” and its murky confusion, the menacing fire of “Giza” slamming all uncontrollable into the “Mirage” fray, ominous chants punctuating the fog of it. It’s a terrifying beauty, death and light at once. And if it lags a little near the end, momentarily out-paces itself—well, even that isn’t without effect. The slow burn, the noise and haze and throb, only emphasizes the opening single more: a hellbound monster slowly tearing itself to shreds. Come for “Chains.” Come back for the rest.

Welcome everyone to Press Start! And a goddamn great holiday season to you. Happy fucking Christmas. I hope all is going well. It’s Christmas Eve, which means several things. First off, Uncle Teddy is praying at the altar that his nieces stop looking so good to him. Secondly, the roads are packed with belligerence and commerce. And thirdly, no one is surfing the fat pipes of the internet. If you work this through, you’ll realize what I’m doing: making an excuse of a column this afternoon. Five things that happened in gaming this week? Sure there’s probably a laundry list. But you’re probably getting fucked up on eggnog and delicious nougats.

Christmas is always a magical period for me. As my parents watched me grow up, they realized that I was never going to grow up and go to Harvard. Or really, even grow up. So as I’ve aged but not grown, I’ve worn my semen stained Biohzard t-shirt and my smiles to every Christmas morning, anticipating one thing: video games. Video games! Every fucking year. I’m twenty-seven, and I can’t recall a time when there wasn’t a game I asked for Jolly Saint Nick to bring me. How about you guys? Do you rock stockings stuffed with mad plumbers, angry gorillas, chicks in hot-ass battle armor? I imagine tomorrow will be quite the same. My eyes glazed over from lasagna and thirty-nine candy canes. Fucked up on sugar and holding a controller of some a sort. And I don’t want it any other way.

So go on, get the fuck out of here. Leave this column. Go find someone to hug. If you can’t find anyone, there’s countless virtual options for your love. Kiss your girlfriend, kiss your boyfriend, kiss your guildmate. It don’t matter. Have a great Christmas, let’s just call this installment a wash and I’ll meet you back here next week.

You know exactly how this game works. Don’t EVEN try to front like you don’t know. Even if you’re a sweet, lovely, loving young lady…you know how this works. In fact, you might even be more familiar with these here rules than we dudes are. The List. The Significant Other Legal Lay List. You know I wouldn’t even trip….it could be both ours.

That’s right: I am invoking Friday. For some reason.

The rules are the same as what you’d expect. Except I am modifying them slightly so as to a) remain an upstanding citizen, and b) put the following in context.

These lists have become some quite fun for me. But! But, I worry: I don’t want you (or me) to expect a music- or movies-related post each week. I want to be mad unpredictable with this shit, dog. And since I regularly type at you about toys and space (ha!) and other shit here, I need to make sure that I can mix things up without getting, like, way redundant way redundant. So. So we’re gonna try this one. My Top 5: Celebrity Dream Lays.

A few more things, however. Do you see that space right up there? The one between ‘Dream Lays’ and ‘A few more things…’? Yeah, that is a pixelated representation of the hourlong break I just took to talk to Mrs. Hateball about the birth plan for our baby. Motherfuckin’ House Hunters INTERNATIONAL is on my plasma right now, son. This shit is so domesticated and so happily married that, well, it’s sickening. I got the idea for this post this morning and then proceeded to stare into space for the next two hours. Only after calling Mrs. Hateball and asking ‘Um, who is on my legal-lay list?’ was I reminded of everybody but Scarlet Jo and Tina Hendo. So yeah.

What that means…and what keeps this game MAD classy, is that these women have to be celebrities. They cannot be porn stars or swimsuit models—they have to be people my wife (or your significant other, in your case) would recognize. Incidentally, they also cannot work at the sandwich shop down the street, which I have discovered the hard and disappointing way.

So heeeeeeerrrrre wego.

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What are labels if not curators?

Once upon a time in Los Angeles. Once upon a time in London. Once upon a time in Seattle, Detroit, Nashville, New York. Pick any city, any year, and once upon a time, a group of people congregated there to say: “Let’s make this music available.” They did it over coffee and cigarettes, or steak and martinis. They did it from dorm rooms and conference halls, drafty studio apartments in the worst parts of town. They did it for love, money, fame, sex. Boredom. Whatever the circumstances: they did it.

And the drive to do it better has bolstered music for decades. If one label shifts too far from “we love this thing” to “this thing sells”—if the system goes all blurry and corruptible, as systems sometimes do—another group in another city is ready to pick up the slack. For every new guard, the vision becomes the work, whether they’ve uncovered a thriving genre or perfected new modes of discovery and distribution. And the brightest among them hone that vision hard. They find their niche and slide, uncompromising, into it.

What are labels if not curators? They’re money makers, deal shakers, marketing machines. And maybe the three labels that tied for our best of 2010 did those things too, but they’re collectors first. Mini-museums of sound and love and so many things, however disparate, that make their vision their vision.

Once upon a time in Houston. Once upon a time in Ann Arbor and London. Ladies and gentleman, allow us to present Disaro, Ghostly International and Night Slugs, our labels of the year.

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Disaro Records

Robert Disaro of Disaro Records

Described by the Bloglin’s own Nattymari as “harbingers ov Thee Hexan Dance Music,” this Houston-rooted, now Los Angeles-based label was 2010’s dark-as-midnight heartbeat. Co-founders Robert Disaro and Owleyes not only issued some of the year’s most captivating releases—GR†LLGR†LL, Mater Suspiria Vision, the fucked-up alt-punk of Ðose—but also helped further legitimize the CDr as a truly viable (and seriously cost-effective) option.

Whether or not the format lives to thrive another year is anyone’s guess (the label will reportedly focus primarily on vinyl starting next year), but for 2010, the medium was Disaro’s message: the best of the creeped-out best, meticulously curated and released efficiently enough to stack ‘em one right after the other. And effectively, the Disaro catalogue like SST before it is something you order from unconditionally; if their name’s on an album, you can bet it’s bone-chillingly great.

Disaro Myspace | Disaro Facebook | Disaro Tumblr | Disaro Twitter

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Ghostly International

Sam Valenti IV, CEO and founder of Ghostly International

Matthew Dear. Gold Panda. Mux Mool. School of Seven Bells. Ghostly International dominated the Bloglin’s Best of Lists for good reason: though the Ann Arbor label’s been unearthing among the most innovative electronic and ambient artists for over a decade, 2010 saw them hit a stride like never before.

Co-founders Dear and Samuel Valenti IV consistently breach the barriers of genre and form in unprecedented ways, pushing forward not merely the Ghostly sound but its artistic vision as well; the label’s visual artists are just as recognizable as their sonic ones. Plus, 2010 heralded the online launch of Ghostly Discovery, a Pandora-like application that uses your mood, tempo and style preferences to find the perfect Ghostly track for any given moment. So chalk it up to innovation, label maturity, purity of vision, artist development—but whatever Ghostly’s doing, they’re doing it exactly right.

Ghostly Website | Ghostly Myspace | Ghostly Facebook | Ghostly Twitter

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Night Slugs

Bok Bok and L-Vis 1990 of Night Slugs

We’d be remiss (read: total jerks) if we didn’t give our own friends a shout-out. But we’re not doing so just because we’re friends; Night Slugs took dance music wherever the hell they wanted in 201o, and they deserve this honor. The L-Vis 1990 and Bok Bok-run label totally killed it with releases from the likes of Kingdom, Girl Unit and Egyptrixx (as well as Lil Silva, Velour, Mosca,  plus L-Vis 1990, and Bok Bok themselves). Each one was essential.

They even put together an amazing Keep Watch mix for us. Deep jams and dubstep, all cut-up and stitched back together, that just off-center feeling that’s quickly become a Night Slugs signature. If you weren’t following their releases this year, you must’ve truly been lost on the dance floor. But fear not—their just released Night Slugs Allstars Vol. 1 will catch you up quick. Can’t wait to see what they unleash in 2011.

Night Slugs Website | Night Slugs Myspace | Night Slugs Facebook | Night Slugs Twitter

Ghostface Killah - Apollo Kids (2010) [Def Jam] // Grade: B+

Aging in rap is a problem that has yet to be sufficiently figured out. By the time most popular rappers hit 35 or so, they get put out to pasture in one of three ways. If they’re bankable enough they get shuffled off to the old folks home of rap – shitty acting careers (LL Cool J). If they’re particularly curmudgeonly they settle comfortably into their high-waisted grandpa pants and favorite rocking chair while they scream about how the kids are fucking up everything for everyone (KRS-ONE). Lastly, if they don’t have a large enough personae or fanbase they just disappear completely into the ether of irrelevance (Kool Moe Dee). This makes sense in a way because rap is both a young man’s game and highly competitive, but where as rock music and sports (both young mens’ games) tend to celebrate their veterans – rap disposes of them with little to no fanfare. Ghostface, now at the ripe old age of forty and on his ninth solo album, has found a way to avoid any of those possibilities – that’s by becoming your slightly crazy uncle.

While your father has to directly deal with your fuckups and tries to maintain at least a faint appearance of being a reputable member of society – your crazy uncle doesn’t give a fuck. He was the dude who would showed up sporadically and bought you nunchucks and fireworks on the low. He was the one who told you what really goes on in the backroom at a strip club. The benefit of playing the crazy uncle role, is that Ghostface can both be an older dude with knowledge for younger cats while talking about shooting dudes in the face and Slow Jam Dick in the same breath.

He really stepped into that role wholeheartedly with The Pretty Toney Album, a record that, at it’s best, sounds like someone just left The Quiet Storm playing while Ghostface scream rapped about pussy and his youth dealing drugs from a comfy chair in a far corner of the room. While The Pretty Toney Album was Ghost in repose orating from his fave chair – maybe a couple drinks into the night of a family reunion – and Ghostdini: Wizard of Poetry was Ghost delivering a raw and explicit (yet wistful) run through of the birds and the bees through a thick haze of blunt smoke. Apollo Kids finds Tony Starks wildly animated and in your face, aggresively drunk off of Patron as he weaves tales of criminology and loose women. He raps with the kind of shaky, unpredictable energy that makes you uncomfortably come to the realization that your uncle may have at some point killed someone.

Apollo Kids has the same 60s and 70s soul sampling production Ghost has always used, but this time around the production leans more heavily on what sounds like Blacksploitation chase sequence cues than Stylistics ballads about lost love. That’s to say there’s lots of horns and wah pedal, but the compositions are more open and moody. “Superstar” exemplifies this perfectly; here Ghostface is spitting big game with “I might smack the shit out of you” energy in the way only he can. He lets loose with lines like “chain swings down to my torn meniscus” before bringing on a revitalized Busta Rhymes to finish off the track. “Drama” has a more suspenseful and slower track but Ghostface approaches it in classic form – by laying down dense, detail oriented, food referencing storytelling. Over the chorusless beat he slowly gets more and more agitated over his extended verse as he lays out a tale of setting up a dude to get got. The surprise on this track though comes in the form of a guest spot from The Game, who over the sparse track reminds you of the days when people were really excited to hear verses from this dude. Maybe it’s the fact that The Game’s voice is just lower and gruffer than Ghost’s and Joell Ortiz (who proceed him), but for the first time in a long while he comes across with all the gravitas that his earlier rhymes promised. For once he sounds like the cold-blooded gangster he’s been telling us he is. Also, shoutout to The Game for referencing Raekwon and Rachel Ray in the same breath, that’d be a very special night on The Food Network brought to you by Pyrex.

While this album takes it name from Supreme Clientele era Ghostface output it doesn’t really ever go back to the free association, rapping into an ice cream cone while wearing a fencing mask madness of that album. Instead, Apollo Kids is more of a tour around all the post Pretty Toney styles Ghost has experimented with.  “Handcuffin Them Hoes” and “How You Like Me Baby” could’ve easily been on Wizard of Poetry with their grown man take on RnB.  “2getha Baby” brings back the smooth talking; Quiet Storm Ghost of Pretty Toney, while “Troublemakers”, a posse cut featuring Raekwon, Method Man and Redman is the grimy sort of crime tale that could’ve easily been on Fishscale. At this point in his career Ghostface’s output isn’t really measured in good or bad – it’s all good. It’s just an issue of which Ghostface you’re looking for, while his last album ostracized some fans by staying squarely in his RnB mode this album tries to cover all the facets of his modern style. In doing that we get a more impactful album, because with Ghostdini being all over the place comes an extra degree of his power. While another artist making a similar album might come across as scatter brained and unfocused, the bit of schizophrenia suits Ghost’s manic delivery.  If we want nothing else from crazy old uncle Ghost, we want him to go from telling us about the birth of Hip Hop to extolling the virtue of cheating on women to dropping stories of robbery in nine minutes flat. That sort of unfiltered, free associative, questionable advice is exactly the type of thing you turn to elder statesmen in Hip Hop for.

Party Trash - Rabid

Party Trash - Rage

Steven Battles – Gotta Go Through the Darkness (Party Trash Remix)

Party Trash - Diamond

Party Trash – Beast

I’m a big fan of these guys. They’re making some of the prettiest Drone and Post-Rock around. “Logic Control/Space Junk” is off their Black Hole/Hi Five cassette on France’s Atelier Ciseaux from earlier in the year. CVLTS will also be releasing a split 7-inch with yours truly next year! I’m really looking forward to that.

I hope you guys got your boner shorts on cause you’ll definitely need some extra room down south to enjoy today’s Store Spotting of the sexiest video game nerd you’ll ever meet, Alexandra aka Sim Wise. Alex is a resident Front Magazine model but she’s also their in house video game editor. We’re not gonna lie, we have to start our day off with a daily does of Front Mag girls and we’ve been patiently awaiting their own sexy calendar to cozy up next our  2011 calendar shot by Ellen Stagg.

Alex was on vacation in New York and dropped by the shop and our offices for a visit. Alex came with her friend Raquel, a dominatrix, to tell us all about their recent holiday party which included Bert and Ernie masks and other assorted hi-jinx.

Sim also was pretty excited about her cover shoot for the infamous Bizarre Magazine. Bizarre has been known to be one of the most foul and raunchy magazine to hit the stands worldwide. I always have to catch myself when going though London airports early morning , from checking it out along side Front as I seem to always be in proximity of young kids and families.

Anyway, Alex is no stranger to posing half-naked or fully naked in a variety of men’s magzines. This saucy red head was has even been in Playboy and was Playboy’s UK Cyber Girl of the Year back in 2006! Head after the break for some photos to, uh, familiarize yourself (yeah that’s it) with the lovely Alexandra Sim-Wise.

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Disaro Records - Isvolt (2010) [Robot Elephant] // Grade: B

How does one legitimize a Bastard music?  As a signifier, the term “Witch House” seems to elicit more confusion and hatred than any other of the new genre tags out there.  There’s good reason for this: as far as the music goes, most of the wounds it incurs are self inflicted.  With the exception of a shared love for dark imagery and cryptoquixotic titles, the sound of this “genre” seems nearly impossible to identify.

With this in mind, Robot Elephant’s retrospective of the Disaro catalog, ISVOLT, acts quite well as a label compilation. It fails, however, in giving the casual listener a benchmark on what exactly it means to be “Witch House.”  With his dual citizenship in both the Screw capital of the world (Houston, TX) and a huge minimal synth/industrial town (Los Angeles, CA) Robert Disaro deserves recognition as being one of the few that molded the dark sounds of dragged up EBM and New Wave in the early days (what was it? 2008).

His roster of artists were definitely the soundtrack for the crop of animal tranquilized trailer park dwellers that decided to download their own bootlegged Ableton and start making sound of their own. With seminal artists like Mater Suspiria Vison, //TENSE// and Modern Witch, as a label, Disaro is quite possibly unchallenged as the harbingers ov Thee Hexan Danse Musik.

What is strange though, is how none of this sounds ANYTHING like what one hears today if they decide to dig this scene. Most of the music presented sounds like really good industrial coldwave.  Perhaps it is slurred and slowed a bit, but in today’s arena it sounds rather tame.  What stands out, though, are the seeds of what is happening now. In retrospect, the amateurish 808 beats and near death tempos obscured by low bitrates and tape hiss seem more important than the music itself.  Everything on this compilation sounds joylessly unpolished (and that is a GOOD thing.)

I said recently on Facebook that I hope more kids want to make music like Yes I Smoke Crack than King Night and I meant it.  Let’s hope that Witch House remains, not a genre… but a meme.

I mean…I don’t even know where to start with this thing. Apparently in the 90′s Saddam Hussein decided he had to up his evil ante, and what’s more weird/perverse than etching a major religious text in blood? Etching a major religious text in your own blood of course! On fucking purpose! The thing is even called the Blood Qu’ran. That’s it’s actual name. If the dude hadn’t been such an evil little shitstain of a human I would almost say this was a badass decision on his part.

It took two years and 27 litres of blood to complete this pseudo-grimoire. I’m no doctor, but I’m pretty sure that’s just a fuckload of hemoglobin. Not to mix my religious references, but the mere existence of this must’ve broken one of the seven seals right? I wonder if there’s some sort of cottage industry for this sort of thing. Can I get The Empire Strikes Back script in my blood? I was considering The Dark Knight Returns, but that seems a little- wait for it- draining.