Capsule Xmas Party:
PELICAN
MISTRESS

UNA CORDAA triumphant return for our Capsule Xmas party with live sets from Pelican, Mistress + Una Corda, not to mention, treats and stuff.

Unhindered by the impositions of the vocal yoke, Chicago instro-sorcerers Pelican transcend the limits of time and space to expound upon the stunning finesse and painstaking subtlety with which they command their already indelible sonic signature. Restoring instrumental composition to its former glory is no insignificant task, and to do so with such remarkable authority and presence is a testament to the sheer will and unmitigated talent of Pelican’s membership. Levying cinematic melody upon glacial heaviness, they achieve the sort of inevitability usually reserved for weather systems and natural disasters. Channeling the seasonal progressions of various far-flung landscapes, the sounds of Pelican are easily adaptable to both the active and passive listening experience, but their harmonic minutiae are best appreciated in a high-volume stereophonic headphone scenario. Successor to the critically acclaimed Untitled EP, Pelican’s debut full-length is a cyclical riptide of major-chord mastery and low-end triumph against which one can only abdicate any and all tendencies to resist total immersion.

HELLA
CALVADOS BEAM TRIO


MILLS & BOON

This complicated, spastic, adrenaline-infused rock is something
bigger than just the two of them.”  Thrasher Magazine

Hella are the one and only groundbreaking rock super-duo from Sacramento,
California, also known as freaked & fabled guitarist Spencer
Seim and celebrated & worshiped drummer Zach Hill.
http://www.hellaband.com/

THE FUCKING CHAMPS
EXPLODER

NOG

Have you heard of them? This two guitar, one drummer,
instrumental band is insane. The Champs are heirs to a long lineage
beginning with Thin Lizzy and ending on the divergent ground of
Carcass, Pussy Galore and Kraftwerk. Hailing from San Francisco,
the sole aim of the “Kings of the Insanity Sound” is to set the
audience soaring high on the wings of sorrow.

Featuring former members of The Nation of Ulysses, Hydrox, the
Young Ginns, Taildragger, and The Event.
http://www.thefuckingchamps.com/

In a musical era dominated by manufactured pop/metal and bleeding-heart
emo depressives, Exploder enter the foray to bring melodic brutally
heavy metal to the masses and inject some much needed rock ‘n roll
spirit back to the dancefloors.

Hailing from the spiritual home of UK rock – Birmingham – Mick Kenney
(Anaal Nathrakh, Mistress), Dirty Von Donovan (Mistress, Katastrophy
Wife), Scotty ‘Too Hotty’ Proper and Blazing Barm got together in
summer of 2004 with the intention of creating a new metal band blending
a modern huge and heavy sound with classic old-school rock melodic
sensibilities.
  http://www.myspace.com/explodingmetal

Birmingham based techno metallers Bede and Baul form the duo that is
NOG. Playing extreme downtuned technical instrumental metal inspired by
bands such as Meshuggah, Cynic, Dillinger Escape Plan and Phil Collins,
NOG aim to completely crush your face in with extreme metal power. Or
at the very least confuse you a bit.

THE LOCUST
YEAR FUTURE
400 BLOWS

The Locust’s beauty has always come in finesse and intricacy. Thirty
seconds of pitiless hurricane squall. Epic, labyrinthine guitar licks
deconstructed, flipped ass-backwards, and compressed into
two-second-long baby snake squiggles. Dainty ticka-ticka-tickas of
hummingbird cymbal taps, followed by 80 hammer smacks squeezed into a
heartbeat. But just as America has changed since The Locust hatched
back in ‘95, so it goes with their sound. The band’s 2003 Anti- debut,
Plague Soundscapes, took its half-minute killzaps and added a gurgling,
hissing swamp of electronics. And their new one, Ipecac’s Safety
Second, Body Last (produced by Alex Newport) goes even further.
It is a single 10 minute, 11 second track divided into four movements,
like classical music (though classical as composed by serial
murder-junkie Ed Gein in cahoots with The Residents.) It begins in a
hellbroth of twitchy nerves par for the course of the band’s older
stuff. But suddenly it stops and you’re dropped into a tossing,
churning primordial sea of ominous splerrks, oscillating blits, and
liquidic rrerks sputtered out of Joey Karam’s keyboard—before the
vocals and Gabe Serbian’s drums come on again… only this time slow.
Pained. Agonized. Like a woolly mammoth caught knee-deep in a tar pit.
From there, the track moves through a miniseries of stages: slow and
sludgy to the fastest, herkiest jerkiest splatters you’ve ever heard;
JP’s bass making spacebrain noises; keyboards sputtering like blood
spurting and sloshing out of bullet-holes; guitars revving like
chainsaws or e-bowing themselves into the gorgeous, ear-massaging sound
of a mosquito’s lost cell-phone ringing at the bottom of lake
WhatTheFucki.
The lyrics flay through a surrealistic landscape touching down on man’s
need to compartmentalize his culture, gun-happy Americans, with a whole
host of characters showing up—fools, barbarians, troglodytes, sonic
cannibals. “Which one are you?” the record asks. “Whose side you on?”
But what does the music itself say? “The electromagnetic force has
something to say, not 100% sure what it is yet,” says Bobby. “But until
then, we (as a band) are going to allow for as many oscillators,
potentiometers, jagged tempo and note changes as it takes to allow its
message to be heard. 

http://www.thelocust.com/

For further info on Year Future + 400 Blows check
http://www.goldstandardlabs.com

MONO (TOKYO)
D. LOUIS BAKER
THE ARM

Tokyo, Japan’s Mono are a peculiar group. While most bands offer
up their sincerest and most genuine recordings in their infancy and
spend the rest of their careers trying desperately to rediscover
their youthful energy, Mono’s trajectory has been quite the
opposite.

Their early recordings are a visceral homage to their past and
present heroes — the documents of a band boasting an impressive
symphony of sound in spite of their relatively small line-up. These
days, they have become one of the most passionately aggressive rock
bands of the last decade, executing their soaring crescendos,
titanic sheets of distortion and dark melodies with the delicacy
and precision of a folded paper crane.

http://www.age.vu/~sound/mono/e_index.html

D.Louis Baker has been in bands such as Solway Fifth & deadsunrising. Now
teamed up with members of The Starries, Mills & Boon & deadsunrising he has
turned to a more pop sound with mostly piano lead, full band songs. Expect
sing-alongs, dance-alongs and smiles all around. Sample some material at
www.dlouisbaker.com

KHANATE
MISTRESS
HADDONFIELD ILLINOIS

Like a cement mixer slowly filling the room as you read this web page, KHANATE belches
another discharge of lung stopping power. Not happy music, but TOTAL music. Even more
sparse than their first record on Southern Lord,
this boils doom down to the individual atoms. Slow and deliberate, it
paints the room the room in coal dust choking all in its path.
Necessary and essential for those picking up the pieces from similarly
minded projects from sludge captains like the MELVINS, EARTH and BORIS.
Buy this and live forever with the knowledge of the gods!

Its been said about KHANATE before that “slow is the new loud” (Julian
Cope actually). This being true, Khanate’s sound is a deafening roar. A
small nuclear bomb in the swimming pool as you sip an ice tea. Take the
brutal slow dynamics of EYEHATEGOD or EARTH and add a chilly macabre
menace and then you have a good start on where this record will leave
you. Members in the band are in bands such as BURNING WITCH, SUNN
O)))), ATOMSMASHER, SCORN, OLD and BLIND IDIOT GOD.

for more info check out southern lord
http://www.southernlord.com/

Formed in Birmingham during 1999, MISTRESS have released two albums to date  “Mistress” and “The Chronovisor”  to rave reviews and have gigged with the likes of NAPALM DEATH, MAYHEM, ELECTRIC WIZARD, BOLT THROWER and EXTREME NOISE TERROR. Their hard-to-pin-down sound comes across as a sickening sludge/grind/doom hybrid, reminsicent of the early U.K. grind scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s, and has been described as “a vile musical bastard, a bilious, screaming, snot-faced sludge orphan with all the taste and decorum of a sexual encounter in Wormwood Scrubbs.” Haddonsfield Illinois – Goblin influenced 70’s horror film music, slowed right down, giving it a very doomy feel (all done on synths and a bass guitar) – complete with dialogue samples from such films. Esquilax side project
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CAPRICORNS
BARONESS
GODDAM OX

Straddling the fence between aggressive sludge and technical
fireworks, Baroness is carving out their own unique plot in the
ever-cramped world of underground metal. If these guys aren’t on
your radar yet you need to rectify that little oversight quickly.

www.yourbaroness.com/

www.c-a-p-r-i-c-o-r-n-s.com/
The
London, England based behemoth known as Capricorns was formed by four
men in the latter half of 2003 currently or previously involved in
projects as disparate as Iron Monkey, Orange Goblin, Bridge and Tunnel,
The Dukes of Nothing…the list goes on.

While the original impetus never went much beyond “does it slay?” the
music has developed over the past two years into a heady mix of bone
crushing brutality and dark, subtle beauty that has won over fans of
the Heavy Arts nationwide.

A heap of successful shows with the likes of Melvins, Pelican, Jesu,
Unsane and Oxbow to name a few quickly led to last years self titled
debut ep which immediately received abundant praise from the record
buying public and critics across the globe.

Emboldened by the ep’s initial success and reeling from a creative
watershed period in the House of Capricorns (their leaky Walthamstow
rehearsal room) the time seemed right to broaden their palette and
knock out a full-length album.

Recorded in a former GDR radio broadcast centre in Berlin, ‘Ruder Forms
Survive’ sees Capricorns up the sonic ante whilst still maintaining a
deep love for the purity and tradition of The Riff.

A refreshing departure from the po-faced, go nowhere excesses of their
instru-metal contemporary’s Capricorns have somehow succeeded in
combining the Armageddon punk attitude of Amebix with a doomed out,
Ummagumma era Pink Floyd propelled by deepest swing this side of John
Bonham. The icing on this blackened cake is The First Broken Promise, a
unique collaboration with Oxbow singer and raconteur Eugene Robinson –
first attempted onstage earlier this year at the Sounds Of Excess
festival in Birmingham and now committed to infernal wax and guaranteed
to scare the shit out of you.

‘Ruder Forms Survive’ is High Brow for the Low Brow, sophisticated yet
never shying away from ham-fisted bombast because, after all, that is
what drew us all to Metal in the first place. 

SQUAREPUSHER
LUKE VIBERT
+ Rephlex records Djs

All enigma’s aside, the musical artist that is Squarepusher is actually
a guy from Chelmsford, England, named Tom Jenkinson. In the last 7 or 8
years, Jenkinson has made an enormous impact on electronic music. If
you look up Squarepusher in the dictionary you will find a definition
that says ‘someone who likes the ladies’ …. an apt description
perhaps for one of electronic musics weirdest exponents.

Squarepusher is a very prolific artist … one minute he’s managing to
squeeze Miles Davis-influenced jazz into drum-n-bass tracks, the next
he’s playing with reverb for hours, abandoning melody in favor of
trippy, dubby fusion. Squarepushers first few releases were on Spymania
and Rephlex. He was subsequently courted by R&S, Ninja Tune and
Warp before signing on the dotted line with Warp.

Squarepusher began his career with Warp with a single entitled ‘Vic
Acid’ single which was closely followed by the album ‘Hard Normal
Daddy’. Opening with ‘Cooper’s World’ the album showed that machines
could swing and that Tom could confidently take further musical risks
with his arrangements. ‘Chin Hippy’ on the other hand threw the
listener in at the deep end as an object example of technological
experimentalism. Harsh, cerebral, unique. Nevertheless ‘Hard Normal
Daddy’ wound up in end of year charts in magazines throughout the world
moving 75,000 copies in the

process. Incidentally all payments made by Warp were returned by Tom’s
accountant as they were out of date by the time he got around to paying
them in!

“Nothing is allowed time to settle and no idea outstays its welcome…
it takes at least four or five listens to absorb even the basic
structures of the record” was NME’s comment on the follow-up ‘Big
Loada’ release. By the time it was apparent that Squarepusher had very
much mastered his art so complex, wry, and exhilarating was the
mini-album. Tom describes

the musical process as “…pulling the music out of nowhere, not
thinking what you are doing.” “You have ideas, you get in the studio,
the ideas disappear and things start to flow,” he explains, “the songs
then exist in space somewhere between you and the machinery. When you
come out you have a souvenir of your time in this psychic space, a
space where

you are intuiting everything and not even worrying about things like chords and notes.”

To find out more check out more info on Squarepusher + Luke Vibert
http://www.warprecords.com/