A landmark recording in every way: the last recording of the ‘classic’ Jandek line-up of Sterling Smith, Richard Youngs and Alex Neilson and the first Corwood release to bear the 0800 catalogue number. Great cover art too that looks back to one of the most enigmatic Jandek cover shots, The Gone Wait, via a 60s/70s portal that finds its echo in a track titled “Gone Waiting”.  Sterling’s guitar has a hypnotic metallic resonance while Neilson gets more tangled up in elemental tones than actually driving the thing backwards or forwards. Youngs’ bass playing works as the centre of gravity between the two, triggering vertical ascensions from dense barbed wire tones and clipped chords. Sterling’s vocals are a little more declamatory and aura-less than on earlier live sets but this is a guitar record the whole way, with some of his wildest demolitions of the limits of six strings.

Warehouse find of the last ever original unplayed copies of this landmark double LP from the duo of Richard Youngs and Simon Wickham-Smith self-released in 1990. Coming out of an adolescence steeped in Industrial and experimental music, this was the duo’s first privately pressed album and it still stands as one of the key UK underground LPs. It was Lake that first brought them to the attention of Jimmy Johnson at Forced Exposure, specifically the wild early version of “Goat”. Extremely rare, never reissued on vinyl. A unique opportunity to score one of the rarest private press UK underground albums. 

A while back we asked Richard Youngs to record an album especially for Volcanic Tongue, bearing in mind VT’s nebulous but still somehow specific musical aesthetic. We didn’t hear anything for a while, until one day Richard turned up at VT HQ with a CD-R in his hand. I’ve recorded the perfect VT album, he said. We took it home and it damn near took our head off. He was right: Inceptor is the perfect Youngs album for VT. Imagine Richard’s feel for soaring Celtic melodies and spontaneous composition married to PSF-style guitar excess and you’re close to Inceptor’s brain-razzing appeal. Indeed, if Youngs hadda cut an album for PSF Inceptor would undoubtedly be it. Scored for vocals and overdriven electric guitar, Youngs tears raging, iconoclastic solos from the guitar, peaking in glorious folk melodies and clouds of thick overtone that at points sounds like a fleet of Aylerised berserkers playing bagpipes. He sings over the top in a style that reconciles the wordless chants of “Goat”-era Youngs/Wickham-Smith with the electric Albion stylings of his Jagjaguwar recordings. Possibly the wildest and most euphorically beautiful album of Richard’s career, Inceptor is a dazzling slab of peaking psychedelic rock and soaring folk-simple melodies. The LP comes in an edition of only 300 copies, with stunning individually silkscreened sleeves from Alan Sherry of Siwa and packaged in high quality Japanese plastic sleeves. Pretty much your dream Richard Youngs release. Highest possible recommendation!

Another major LP release from Richard Youngs, this time out with a series of vocal-led songs that take off on a blueprint of minimal, repetitive electro-metal with an insane bass-heavy bottom end. Some fantastic song-writing here, with Richard riding peak-after-peak of ascending, triumphal melodies while pugilistic drum machine lands doomy retorts and the massive bass stalks the shadow of the songs. “We Are The Messengers” is an instant classic, a mantric devotional/folk piece that works a circular vocal into a stirring lament while “Forever Hills Of Everyday” pushes the remit even further with fast, almost breakbeats pushing stationary bass shapes and wild, roaming fuzz guitar solos into the arc of single, soaring vocal lines. Hard to fully capture the odd, synthesised hard rock/progressive feel of the music but the pull between the electro/metal stylings and Richard’s obsessive and beautifully unadorned vocals makes for a truly magical side that once more sounds somehow completely singular and yet instantly recognisable. Edition of 500 copies. Highly recommended!

Totally mind-blowing new three-track EP, privately issued by Andrew Paine’s Sonic Oyster imprint that sees Youngs and Paine at some kind of high-energy peak, with a tribute to UK anarcho groups like Crass, Flux Of Pink Indians, Discharge et al cut with the aggressive a-formalism of Throbbing Gristle: the opening “Tomorrow’s Story” is hands-down the wildest vocal performance of Richard’s career, with a heady use of ring modulation coming over like a Dalek fronting Crass, with every line a negative statement, an absolute refusal. The music is amazing, with Paine holding down massively dunderhead one-note bass solos and punked electronics and as the EP unfolds the music becomes even more aggressive, with the closing “Wisdom” coming over like Discharge’s “State Violence State Control” as played by Tampax. Indeed, this is the crudest, wildest, nastiest refusenik Industrial punk of either players’ back catalogue, a stunning slab of righteously enraged avant-thug muscle that just keeps on keeping on. A non-stop addition to the VT turntable this week, in a run of only 250 copies of which 50 are part of an exclusive VT sub-edition personally autographed by both Youngs and Paine. Seriously, you need to hear this: highest possible recommendation!

Fantastic career-spanning collection from this UK improvising collective, taking in the ‘classic’ original line-up featuring Richard Youngs, Neil Campbell, Stream Angel and Sticky Foster, all previously unreleased live jams that move from Outside The Dream Syndicate-styled caveman string drones through single guitar note metal mantras, a great Richard Youngs-led song complete with Godz-play-Velvets backing track, scattershot conversations broadcast through droning tannoys... a great set that comes with a large fold-out insert that re-prints David Keenan’s in-depth history of The A Band originally commissioned by The Wire as part of their 30^th anniversary celebrations and only previously available online. Edition of 100 copies. Recommended!