RACCOO-OO-OON - BEHOLD SECRET KINGDOM REVIEWS AQUARIUS Here at AQ, we're well acquainted with multiple 'o's. Most often used in reviews of ultra doom records, you know Moss, Monarch, Asunder, Catacombs, Celestiial, Bunkur, and usually used to denote -more- doom. The slower and the filthier, the sludgier and the more buzzing and trudging, the more 'o's. So describing a band as doooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom is not at all unheard of around here. But we rarely see multiple 'o's anywhere else. So what's the deal with Raccoo-oo-oon? What are all of those extra 'o's for? Do they mean anything? And what about the hyphens? What the heck are they all about? Is that how you pronounce the band name, ra coo OO oon. 4 syllables. Or just the more traditional two, as in the middle 'oo' is silent? No matter how you interpret the 'o's and hyphens, it's strange and unusual and not a little bit confusing. Which pretty much perfectly captures the essence of these guys' sound. A dizzying collision of free rock splatter, jazzy skronk, stumbling outsider folk, and full on noise. What makes Raccoo-oo-oon special is the fact that they somehow manage to sound like all of those things at once. An ultra dense blitzkrieg of sounds, that impossibly manages to be heavy and free, skronky and melodic, spastic and pretty all at the same time. We've listed a few other releases from these guys, a clutch of lps and a cd, all of which kicked our asses big time, but as much as we dug those discs, Behold Secret Kingdom trumps them all. Songs, sound, it's all so much more focused, the melodies are catchier, the blown out blasts are even more caustic and abrasive, the vocals are much more 'present', a strange sort of howled primitive wail, the guitars are heavier, more dense, the rhythms, groovier, a surprising amount of 'swing' for a noiserock combo. With Behold Secret Kingdom, Raccoo-oo-oon have sort of emerged as super distinctive noisemakers, in a scene rife with same sounding combos, these guys don't really sound like anybody else. Right out of the gate, the sound is a wall of thick guitars, swirling and keening, loads of buzz and squealing feedback, the drums a dense tribal blow out, the vocals drifting over the top, some strange invocation. It's equal parts krautrock, noiserock, and post rock, all smeared and tangled into a glorious blast of super fresh, garage-y psychedelic free rock whatthefuck. The next track veers into some angular synth drenched new wave noisiness, with squiggly synths, droning high end guitars, thick buzz swaths of sound, relentless, almost funky drumming, and moaning atonal speaking-in-tongues vocals. As hard as it might be to imagine, it sounds a bit like some impossible mash up of Crash Worship, Excepter and Faust, but with some weird new wave-y sheen. The songs are definitely rhythm based, the propulsive drumming guiding everything, the vocals sort of trailing after the drums, the guitars, at once riffing and defining the shape of the songs, but at the same time drifting and swirling totally free, unmoored from any sort of traditional song-based structure and wrapped around the jams like thick tangled ropes of sound. There is occasional sax, which is where a lot of the skronk element comes from, but even sans sax, the songs retain a bit of skronkiness, angular and atonal as often as warm and melodic (maybe more often in fact. Occasionally, the band -really- let loose, the guitars erupt in acidic squalls, the drums splattery and abstract, everything spinning wildly, the result a huge dense cloud of super distorted psychrock freakout. And just as often, they lock into some strangely new wavey garage rock stomp, like a less misanthropic, more groovy and druggy Brainbombs, and as if that weren't confusing enough, they also often just let loose and engage in endless dopesick jamming space rockery, a roiling blown out FX drenched space rock pound, relentless and so goddamn good. And like we mentioned before, the magic here is that Raccoo-oo-oon don't just switch gears from space rock to weird free rock jam and back, all of those different sonic sides bleed into each other, and all over each other, one at a time but then ALL AT ONCE, a slithering, shimmering, constantly shifting, shape changing organic sound sprawl that is as amazing to hear as it is difficult to describe. And if we were in fact, to apply the same sort of rules regarding the extra 'o's, to these guys, that we do in our doom reviews, then we might as well begin calling these guys Raccoo-oo-oooo-oo-ooooooo-oo-o-o-o-ooo-oo-oooo-ooo-oo-oo-oo-ooooooo-oon. Fuck yeah. BOOMKAT These guys are great, but I can never get past the fact that when I say Raccoo-oo-oon in my head I think of the wolf from ageing TV series 'The Box of Delights' (if there was one, if not just ignore me) howling at the moon. I'm pretty sure that this was the band's intention, I mean they make psych-folk-freak-weird-America-something and you know, those guys are 'proper mental'. Well despite all this, 'Behold Secret Kingdom', the band's first official cd album after a whole bunch of really quite incredible limited releases, is a real honest revelation. Taking cues from their extensive previous work, the Iowa City based free spirits have upped the production values and attempted to move their sound on into brave new locations, and what's more they've succeeded admirably. Sounding something like Sunburned Hand of the Man on a steady diet of classic metal and then recorded next to Camp Crystal Lake just as Jason pokes his head up at the end of the first film (whoops did I spoil it for you? Deckard's a replicant too...) this is a blood-drenched assault for the ears. In fact it makes me want to go skinny dipping with men, something I can't say for every record since I'm not usually that way inclined, it's just got an innate power that makes you want to buck the trend, do something different, drink iced tea - you know what I'm talking about. It's not even that the record is particularly zany, in fact this is so way more coherent than most of the 'free' dross we get rolling through the door it's almost a pop record in comparison, but there's such a wilful punk spirit that the whole thing becomes lost in a sludge of tar and alcohol. I guess 'Behold Secret Kingdom' has everything I love about experimental rock right now - great songs, a kind of Krautrock glint, loads of seriously f*cked up synthesizer sounds, mangled guitars and a coherence that allows you to listen to the album from beginning to end without cursing David Keenan for ever coining the phrase 'New Weird America'. This is modern psychedelic rock, and for newbies or seasoned old pros like I keep telling myself I'm not, this should be a knee trembling full-on experience - just keep it in mind that you shouldn't go walking in the woods on your own. Saying that you'll 'be back in a minute' is almost asking to be murdered, trust me, I've seen the movies. So, so good - buy it. ROCK-A-ROLLA #9 The first proper full-length for Iowas's Raccoo-oo-oon following a spate of limited CD-Rs, cassettes and vinyl and the recent reissue of Is Night People (see issue 8), Behold Secret Kingdom does what the band have always threatened to do: go all-out nuts. From the opening moments of 'Black Branches', you know you're in for something altogether different here, a free-rock exploration where the dirge is upped substantially and full-frontal luncay is exposed in all it's ugly glory. After this, things get much, much stranger, and any expectation goes flying out the window. Comparsions to a much heavier Animal Collective may be useful, but then only as a genereal reference point. Much like the band name, this is a product of demented minds, but those that still have a shred of sanity left to produce something as intriguing as Behold Secret Kingdom. Twisted free-rawk of the highest order. - John S. VITAL WEEKLY #577 After the full blown introduction to the musical world of Raccoo-oo-oon, after having missed out on all the limited releases they also produce (CDR, tapes, vinyl), 'Behold Secret Kingdom' is the second encounter with this free form rock band. I must admit I don't hear that much difference between this newly recorded release, and the previous one heard here, 'Is Night People': raw, intense playing in a rock/punk context, quite untamed, but in general not always well spend on me. I do like rock music, well sometimes, and I do like punk, well that too sometimes. Quite powerful, but perhaps you need to be younger than I am to fully grasp this power. (FdW) THE WIRE #281 Raccoo-oo-oon hail from Iowa City, and their distorted bass rumble and devolved, loose-limbed guitar frittering hints at a familiarity with the noise rock excavacations of US Maple and the more wayward parts of Mercury Rev's Boces. These strangulated, jabbering workouts and energetic meanderings have serious density but are also surprisingly nimble and sometimes elusive. Cleaner sounding guitar patterns emerge out of the tangle of percussion and brass before being swallowed up again, as if the detail is less important here than the big, abstract picture. 20 JAZZ FUNK GREATEST HITS / MIRROR BLANKET FEATURE And jump from that hole under a rock, climb a tree in three fast leaps and hide under the cover of leaves, which the sunrays penetrate like the shards of an organic estroboscope, catch your breath and blend with the green, sense the stupid campers approaching down below, leaving a stinking path, making loud noises which pierce your highly developed sense of hearing, ululate intermitently to keep the rest of the pack informed about the activities of tonight's dinner while scratching lazily the mighty eternal wood with wicked claws which will soon pierce soft pink fatty flesh, these humans are but walking corpses which shall soon disappear devoured by a forest they shouldn't have dared treading. Racoo-oo-oon slayed it mighty in their Psykick Dancehall gig at the Hope last week, it's a shame the sound limiter wastedevice didn't let them go as loud as they were itching to, still their mighty bear tap-tap-tap-BANGING percussive psychedelic stomp, criss crossed with bristling white owls of noise and swirling analogue melodies filled the black space surrounding us with furious winds from a hidden place of raw power. This is from their Behold Secret Kingdom demo. Call that thing that steps in at min. 3.04 of Mirror Blanket 'bassline' if you fucking dare.