Carpeaux – Black Magic

With the godly Carpeaux, I ensured him that I would review his album a while back so here it is:

If anyone were to listen to this album on their first take they would wonder if there was a story book meant for this epic tale.  At the same time the guitars have the feel and the sounds from a lot of early Hendrix recordings of Black Magic with some wild flaying around.  But at the same time it’s got this nice math rock you would hear out of Tool or Muse (which I’m sure he hates both groups).  Overall the album has got a single trance like feel running through the entire album.  Almost would be perfect album to listen to drunk in a dark room so then your imagination could build up and listen in depth to the album.  The Vocals are dark deep and meaningful but too deep for me.

Best track on the album:

Gilgamesh, fifth king of Uruk: Such a powerful creation that needs to be listened to either live or at 100db minimum.  With a power swinging bass line and a flaying guitar, vocals that come from the deep depths of the sea, only a king could deny his rights into a kingdom of soloist’s with this track.

Download the album for free through this link     http://carpeaux.bandcamp.com/album/black-magic

Rekapper Overall Rating: 9.876/10

The Blackhole Scouts – With the coming of bravery…

Fun stuff with plenty of distorted guitars playing catchy riffs with either nonsense-sounding or tongue-in-cheek lyrics about stuff like wanting to have a dog and buying one, suburbia kids stuff, just look at the album cover. Entertaining Rock n Roll. They part ways with that for a moment with a bit of spoken vocals in Acclimate and it gets grungier by the next track, Pathways.

Everything is standard home-recorded indie rock stuff, with guitar solos and all, your local punk influenced band. If that’s what you like, have some of it, it’s free.

-Carpeaux

Underneath the Stars – Lucid EP

Feels like ambient, but always changing. There is a little bit of sampled spoken vocals, but mostly instrumental. Pretty stuff, messing around with synths, you know the type. Shows good taste and effort. The “shoegaze” shows in some tracks, but mostly as a “feeling”. Sometimes a laid-back guitar shows up, and they are always very pretty, but it’s mostly synth music, specially because that is where the constant changes are coming from, the guitar parts repeat a lot. Nice sense of dynamics also, always coming up or down, but tied together – most frequently by the guitar. Very well recorded and produced, It doesn’t sound amateuristic at all.

Very relaxing, fans of ambient music will like this.

-Carpeaux

This is a bit exotic and different. The vocals are spoken and the lyrics are insane, sometimes about philosophy or just analyzing relationships, emotions etc. in a bit of a crazy manner. In general, everything here is a bit fixed-idea crazy. The music itself goes on and on but doesn’t get boring because it’s so strange and fitting to the vocals that you get hooked.

Dude sounds like a lady. The singer is not the blonde on the cover, that’s his ex-girlfriend. Sounding like a girl is probably bad for him, but isn’t really bad for the music. Knowing it’s a dude adds to the Woody Allen-esque feel that you are listening to a strange guy going on and on about stuff he’s probably the only one who cares about (see “On Subjectivity”).

Most spoken vocal music has a bit of theatrics to it, but there’s a different drama on this one, like the singer is annoyed by something and still has to keep on singing because it is his last chance to. Than out of the blue, again, on “On Subjectivity”, he starts to scream at you about something you never did and you don’t fully understand. Others feel like he is telling you something intimate that you should keep a secret, like “Security Windows”. Since he isn’t talking to anyone other than you, you feel in on the drama and compelled to tell him something, maybe “calm down man, have a cigar”.

Now back to the music. I’ve read him say he didn’t really know how to play the bunch of instrument he used, but kind of managed to join the sounds together to turn into actual music. This is not ipsis litteris, I don’t really remember exactly what he did say. So, considering that, it’s kind of impressive and makes sense once you listen to the music. Dis-considering that, just for the hell of it, it sounds like a surrealist experiment. Some of the songs end up sounding a little bit the same, but there are plenty of build-ups, dramatic stops and little bits of decoration to make the music always pretty and interesting.

He is apparently recording a new album with professional musicians. I’ll surely be interested in listening to that, this is some of the most distinctive music I have found in this here web. Good luck with whatever kind of success this kind of music can achieve man!

-Carpeaux