HOWLING HEX - EARTH JUNK

its taken me a few months to properly digest, but i LOVE this. all vox, electronics, and gtrs. awesome bizarre twisty songs, not a whole lot of truxxy guitars, and when theyre there, theyre subordinate to this consistent rhodes/b3 pulse, which goes between terry riley and circus organ. i know that sounds awful, but its a wonderful record. the eleanor whitmore-sung songs are straight-up beautiful, too.

haha this is one of those bands I always forget to pay attention to. I need to pick this up!

seriously

yeah i've only heard this once but it was unexpectedly awesome. it almost sounded YMGish at times. ordered it will digest later.

the eleanor whitmore-sung songs are straight-up beautiful, too.

yeah! i can't remember which one's my favourite, maybe it's no good reason. the girl-sung hex stuff's always been amazing - breakaway, de colores, the first half of you can't beat tomorrow backing vox etc.

for what it’s worth, the whole lp, the palette of sounds i guess, really reminds me of the new popo record. more straightahead than earth junk but really sweet in parts, i think you'd like, 69.

new hex lp april-ish on a little british label too.

agreed about howling hex female vox! it is a little bit LOL that all the female vox are basically 180° from jennifer herrema's...

whoa whoa that is so rad about the golden lab LP!

i remember before earth junk they hadn't put out an lp for like however long, and it was really upsetting that they'd broken the three a year thing. i wonder whether it'll be with the full group, or whether it'll be something that somehow didn't fit with drag city. hmm.

XI was just like a year-and-a-half ago! and so good!

finding legible, sensical bits of the howling hex blog is like picking nice stones out of a lake but this is pretty great

love that blog

in theory

ha ha

it turned out last week that rx conor is just a howling hex fan - i thought he was a theater fire guy. maybe the one with the big hair. i like neil's graphs.

Out July 2009

The Howling Hex Rogue Moon LP Ltd to 500 copies

Our love of Neil Hagerty's work goes back to around 1993, when we first discovered the Cats and Dogs LP by his former group Royal Trux. The formation of The Howling Hex in the wake of that band's upsetting dissolution was something that Royal Trux fans approached cautiously, simply because the latter had seemed...well...just so impenetrable, so infallible, so indestructible. But we were wrong to show such fear, because, year-after-year, The Howling Hex have provided us with some of the most outlandish, twisted and bizarre rock records around. (Some say 'better than Royal Trux', as if that's a healthy way of thinking...) They have taken slight deviations from well-trodden paths as well as seeking out completely new musical territories and it's usually a safe bet that the latest HHX record will sound nothing like the last. In this case, we're not sure, because we haven't heard the master yet. But it's ready. The album is 12 songs long (four penned by Hagerty) and is en route to GLR HQ as we type. We can hardly wait.

Pre-order yours here

i kinda thought a hex lp on golden lab would be like a contractual loophole noise record, but the idea that it's twelve songs long, four songs by hagerty makes it seem more like a XI style pop thing. pretty excited.

I will be honest. I only chose to review this album because of the band's awesome name. I assumed that The Howling Hex would be either a heavy metal group or an Evanescence knockoff. As it turns out, I was wrong to make assumptions and having to listen to Earth Junk was my punishment.

Space junk refers to the bits of spacecraft debris that orbits Earth, so I guess Earth junk (the title of The Howling Hex's latest musical effort) would be chunks of trash from Earth. Never has a record been more accurately named. Earth Junk is just that, a collection of random bits of blah. The melodies are forgettable and the vocals jump between being unimpressive and annoying. Most of the songs are done in the style of psychedelic rock, a genre best left in the late-1960s.

Sadly, the lyrics to the songs are nowhere near deep enough to make up for either of the aforementioned problems. The best example of the lacking lyrics is in the first song, "Big Chief Big Wheel," where the main verse seems to be, "Ram-a-tam-tama. La-la-la-la-la." If a singer has to resort to "la-la-la-la-la," then you know the album won't be blowing your mind any time soon. Some of the tracks do not feature many, if any, lyrics. An electric guitar and what sounds like circus music are used in the place of words, and the combination is grating and off-putting.

The one bright spot on the album are the vocals of Eleanor Whitmore. Whitmore's voice has a very Lisa Loeb-esque quality to it, and if she had been used on every track, then Earth Junk might have gone from being blah to being brilliant.

plugged-in?

here

particularly great in light of the bold mission statement header and ensuing comments

lolz

http://howlinghex.com/diary/1057/notability-requirements-met

I always confuse this band with Burial Hex

that's a great blog entry. way 2 go hagz.

God damn Neil Hagerty is in the best bands.

i was toying with bumping a hex thread after jamming all night fox for a week. everytime i play it i can't believe that activity risks wasn't a single. i can not live in a universe where it would not have been number one, like on a forty five with now we're gonna sing on the flip.

new one out soon apparently apparently?

I'm kind of a Royal Trux stan and I'm a little pissed that I didn't get around to listening to this band until, like, yesterday. One of those "I've-wasted-so-much-time!" moments.

Anticipating new one if that's indeed the case.

My only real complaint about the Howling Hex is that Hagerty is just too damn prolific these days. I haven't had enough of an opportunity to properly digest the last couple of records. But then, that's hardly a complaint.

that blog post rules

I have XI and I don't really get it but it's probably great, huh. I listen to Royal Trux like every day now, maybe it'll make more sense to me.

anyone ever read the guy's books? A friend of mine (an ancient ilx poster called Clay (not the current Clay))said he had some great, insightful essay on hotrod culture.

These little promo clips are the weirdest things

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHxO9N7uzz0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6Ybaa-nffo

Ok not to pitchfork-bitch, but their review of this wasn't much better than the one quoted above, whatever whatever, I just wanna link this bit which got a good laugh out of me:

The back of the album artwork shows a photograph of Hagerty's face, beside which the track listing is split in two, possibly suggesting that the album is open to being seen in two parts.

HMMMMM why would they do thaaat?????