Release of the Day: Billy Bao - Lagos Sessions

Conceptually staggering, Lagos Sessions, the newest opus from San Francisco provocateurs Billy Bao, is as massive as it is nuanced. Recorded in Lagos, Nigeria, home to the band’s vocalist and namesake, alongside a diverse cast of musicians, improvisers, and artists, Lagos Sessions presents the band at its most expansive and personal. Both digitally and physically, the new album is two LPs split into four sides, each lasting about fifteen minutes. At once monolithic and fractured, the four pieces capture the schizophrenic nature of being a displaced person trying to find something – anything – stable and comforting that, even if not a literal home, can at least have a home’s trappings.

Lagos Sessions is hard to even call an album. Oh, it’s certainly a record – two, in fact! But the term “album” makes it seem like a collection of songs, rather than a piece of auditory art. Where “album” is an appropriate signifier, and visual analog, for plenty of records, it doesn’t do justice to Lagos Sessions, which has more similarities in common with a megalithic painting than a series of laminated inserts in a binder.

It’s an exhilarating listen, sonically and thematically. Littered with field recordings, improvised jazz, noise, punk, and soul, Lagos Sessions is an exercise in amalgamation and collage. The frequent changes in tone, tempo, and texture are disorienting, at least at first, but eventually make themselves at home. For instance, side B begins with what most closely resembles a noise rock song before descending into a prolonged monologue on what it means to be Nigerian in 2015/2016. Abrasive sound makes way for education. Easy listening, this ain’t. Rewarding, necessary listening, this is.

Here's an example of the recording sessions. I couldn't find any of the music online other than this:

Release of the Day: Cherubs - 2 Ynfynyty

I was two years old when the first Cherubs record came out. At the time, my music taste was pretty underdeveloped, though I enjoyed Rafi's "Baby Beluga" and Joanie Bartels' Lullaby Magic. By the time their sophomore album Heroin Man came out, I had become a fan of Peter Cetera's solo work and audiobooks of Bible stories. Fast forward twenty-one years and Cherubs' fourth album 2 Ynfynyty is out, my favorite record so far of 2015 is by a band called Rectal Hygienics, and I've been living in and out of hotels and motels in the Miami-Dade metropolitan area. Things change.


Cherubs began as a noise rock band out of Austin, TX in the early 90s, before Rusted Shut but after Scratch Acid, sounding like a dying housecat trying to get away from a wayward kitchen knife atop a decaying construction site. Though the band was no stranger to switching up vocalists, the warbled, pained moans of Kevin Whitley are front and center on 2 Ynfynyty, bolstered by the familiar, heavy miasma of a finely-tuned filth-pumping engine. What surprises me the most is how clear everything sounds, but I shouldn't be surprised as it was produced by Mike McCarthy (dude produced Spoon & ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead) and mastered by Howie Weinberg (Slayer, Nirvana). There have been rumors about this record for a long time and now it's here for your streaming, buying, listening, whimpering-in-a-corner pleasure on Brutal Panda Records.

But why read what I have to say when you can stream it for free below?

Release of the day: Leather Slave - Leather Slave

The post on Permanent Records' website  quotes Julian Cope's review of the Brainbombs' record "Obey"  as being the same review of Leather Slave. It's funny, but it's totally true. Leather Slave are a sick, noise rock band from the battery acid and corrosion infested sewers of Los Angeles making filthy, deranged music. It does sound like Brainbombs a lot, and it features heavy riffing with fucked up lyrics and one of the most offensive album covers I've seen this side of Dawn of the Black Hearts.

Permanent really did a number on this package too. Oxblood wax on a 45 rpm 12". I played this the other night when I was going to bed and had nightmares. I am on a massive Boeing jet going to California, but almost immediately, it careens in the wind. A tumultuously dancing plummet, skitter scattering across low-gliding nimbi. Like a fan rattling before shuddering to a halt because the power went out. The plane crashes silently. The wreckage is quiet. I blink once. Twice. Blood leaks from my face. A femur crests from out of my thigh.

In real life, I wake with a lingering, dull pain. Safe for the time being.