Drag City US Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Five years after the second life of Death was started with the release of their revelatory 1976 album, "For The Whole World To See", "III" slams the door on the vault with a powerful set of songs that bring equal amounts of rock and ethereal soul-searching, in high-fidelity, rich bottomed, studio-grade sound. Alongside songs from 1975, 1976 and 1980, "III" contains two songs from 1992, as the Hackney brothers reconvened nearly a decade after they'd stopped playing together. The album serves as a companion piece of sorts to the "A Band Called Death" documentary, tracking the band's movement from spiritual young rockers to older and wiser, bruised-but-undefeated brothers, in pure musical terms. David Hackney's visual representation of Death was a triangle, where "spiritual", "mental" and "physical" formed the three angles. With this in mind, "For The Whole World To See" is clearly the physical corner, with its undeniable proto-punk power; "Spiritual-Mental-Physical" explores the mental axis, with Death working through some of their influences including The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Who and even ELO in their practice space. "III" is the spiritual end of the portrait, bookended by the dreamlike rock visions of David Hackney that created and propelled the band called Death.

Review: There's something uniquely Japanese and slightly off-kilter about the pop-making prowess of Eiko Ishibashi, a singer-songwriter, improvisational drummer, pianist and all-round experimentalist that counts Editions Mego and Oren Ambarchi's Black Truffle as labels she has released on. She returns to Drag City, an all time Chicago label famous for records by Pavement and Stereolab to more recently music from Ty Segall and the all-talented John Mulaney. Ishibashi's music here, however, sways from heavy industrial beats to future, funky and avant pop numbers like "Iron Veil". It's a record that will take some getting used to but there's no denying you will get used to it too; if you can keep up with its modernity that comes from way out leftfield.