Deathprod - Treetop Drive 2xLP (Smalltown Supersound)

Our Review:

Deathprod is the existentially bleak solo project of Helge Sten, who is also a key member of both Supersilent and Motorpsycho. In 2004, Rune Grammofon published a 4CD box-set compendium of Deathprod's work that was recorded between 1991 and 2000. Housed in an matte black box with a all black artwork and the sparest of text, this anthology presented itself as a semantic void, with nothing but the harrowing orchestrations of controlled noise and brooding atmosphere into Deathprod's oeuvre. This reissue campaign from Smalltown Supersound marks the first time any of these recordings have been on vinyl. Like before with the CD box-set, this too is enshrouded in matte black packaging.

Working with old magnetic tape recorders, hand made delay and sundry other electronic devices, Sten manipulates fragments of sound (e.g. a two note melodic interval or a final orchestral cadence) into brooding dark soundscapes, rich with overtones from feedback and often overlaid with guest performances from fellow Supersilent members. It is the very limitations of the equipment that Sten uses that become the sources for the beautiful timbres he produces: an over-saturated tape input, a primitive sampler that never reproduces the same note the same way twice or the uneven decay from primitive tape delays. Two tracks in particular from Treetop Drive deviate from this template through a six minute narration from American born Oslo resident Matt Burt and a couple tracks of an organ, vibes and drum trio not unlike Bo Hansson or a voodoo ensemble that David Lynch might incorporate into one his movies. More typical are tracks which blossom out from a single cell of an idea: one chord, or one blast of noise. At times Deathprod sounds almost like an attempt at recreating Thomas Koner's soundscapes using the audio palette of Maurizio Bianchi.

Diamanda Galas - All The Way LP (Intravenal Sound Operations)

Our Review:

Though Diamanda Galas' new record All the Way is a collection of standards, very few artists could make other people's songs sound so distinctly their own. Using only subdued piano and her expansive, enormous voice, Galas transforms songs popularized by Frank Sinatra and Johnny Paycheck (amongst others) into explorations of timbre and Gothic introspection. There are very few effects added to the piano or her voice post-production, Galas' uncanny vibrato and operatic growl carrying the listener through her longest notes, the occasional echo delay filling the space between words. Despite the difficulty of sometimes understanding the exact words Galas sings, the narratives are instead told through her vocal delivery–the songs' predictable emotional cliches shattered and remolded. Two tracks off All the Way were recorded live, a fact that makes the performances that much more unbelievably stunning. 

Much attention and praise over the decades has rightly been given to Galas' unmistakable voice, but her virtuosic piano playing is almost equally as impressive. Possibly influenced by the jagged-but-fluid style of Thelonious Monk (whose "Round Midnight" is found on All the Way), Galas knows when to lay back, when to bring the hammer down, and when to explode. Moments of dissonant darkness are complimented by gentle touches of feathery jazz chords, which might evolve into something akin to the blues. Especially on "Round Midnight" and "O Death," Galas floats and crashes through motifs, alluding to the listener's sonic expectations before completely destroying them. Her first new record in almost ten years, All the Way is not to be missed by die-hard fans or those new to Diamanda Galas.

Eno Moebius Roedelius - After The Heat LP (Bureau B)

Our Review:

The combination of Brian Eno and Cluster proved to be a golden match. The sounds they delicately created together have been echoed again and again in the three decades since their collaborations. A feeling of both effortlessness and a total awareness of the space and sounds they were building radiates throughout the recording. You can hear the tinkering hands of Moebius and Roedelius giving elements of warped spaced out bliss. Eno approaching the songs in a magic space somewhere between Before And After Science and Another Green World. When his vocals appear they just begin to melt and dissolve into your ears. For sure the best backwards vocal delivery we've ever heard can be found on the track "Tzima N'arki". There is such a sublime feeling of melting on this record. These three knew how to meld warmth with an motherly feeling that takes you into golden horizons, mesmerizing twilight and an afterglow that you just want to surrender yourself to.

Coil - The New Backwards LP (Important)

Our Review:

With the release of Backwards in 2015, an important piece of the Coil legacy has been uncovered. That album and those sessions were created by John Balance and Peter Christopherson with Danny Hyde and Drew McDowell in the early '90s for a planned release on Trent Reznor's Nothing Records. Those sessions remained the stuff of legend with tracks appearing in live sets and infiltrating the shadow corners of the internet as horribly lossy recordings. Coil kept shelving all of the Backwards sessions up until Balance died in an alcohol related accident in 2004. In the following years, Christopherson revisited the Backwards sessions, to deliver The New Backwards album along with The Ape Of Naples which included material from the Backwards session as well as tracks dating much earlier. Looking at both The New Backwards and Backwards, many of the same tracks are present but often in radically different forms; and there are a couple of tracks that are unique to each set of recordings. The alchemy of Coil was both a blessing and a curse. Their constant experimentation and radical deconstruction of their own tracks provide an amazingly diverse set of ideas from these electronic geniuses; but the Backwards and New Backwards sessions show that Coil may not have ever agreed on what a definitive version may be on that material. Nonetheless, The New Backwards is an essential recording in the Coil's legendary body of work.

Ego Summit - The Room Isn't Big Enough LP (540)

Our Review:

One of our all-time favorite Columbus, Ohio records, The Room Isn't Big Enough is the perfect entry point (or end-point for that matter) to the ramshackle scene revolving around Used Kids Records in 1990's. With five of the city's finest musical poets in tow – Ron House (Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments), Jim Shepard (V-3), Don Howland (Bassholes), Mike Rep and Tommy Jay – Ego Summit commenced, producing a bounty of raw nuggets greater than the sum of its parts. Though each members' outlet at the time leaned rock/punk, this LP plays like a psychedelic hootenanny – from the brown acid spiking House's "Beyond the Laws of Man" to Shepard's epic comedown "We Got It All." An essential document from the godfathers of lo-fi. Highest recommendation!

Country Teasers - The Empire Strikes Back LP (In the Red)

Our Review:

Country Teasers always sound as though someone roused them from a snoresome liquored slumber, thrust some instruments and a microphone in their hands and hollered "Play!" Seriously we'd bet they could drink The Pogues under the table. Their music never fails to be incoherent (yet somehow clearly foul mouthed) and rambling, with parts that don't quite fit together. The drum beats stumble along. The electric guitars strain against the urge to fall horribly out of tune. The ridiculously distorted speak-sing-yer-heart-right-outta-pitch style vocals will have you jumping from bummer to bellylaugh and back again (much like those of Shane MacGowan of the abovementioned Pogues). They even provide an occasional play-by-play commentary. At one point in the seventh tune you can hear "bring the drums in again." As this album progresses though it's like the booze wears off a bit and a sober gloom emerges around the fourth tune. Then it's like they consumed some other chemical along with a revitalizing shot of whisky that sends them shambling into some other strange carnival tent. For folks who like their garage music to be extra loosey goosey.

Burial - Untrue 2xLP (Hyperdub)

Our Review:

Record of the year, 2007. As far as some of us are concerned, there's no question. Burial's first album was an eponymous release on Kode 9's Hyperdub imprint and really came out of nowhere. Here was this amalgamation of British dance tropes (e.g. dubstep, 2-step garage, darkcore drum & bass, etc.) into a magnificent exercise in mood engineering. Even though an urban malaise echoes through the whollop bass-bin rattle of most dubstep, that first Burial record mined a melancholy whose dramatic power has never been heard in dubstep, and rarely matched even by such downbeat experts as Massive Attack, Boards of Canada, Slowdive, or even Joy Division. So with his second album Untrue, the aesthetic framework for Burial remains intact; yet the anonymous figure behind Burial has admitted that he was seeking a "downcast euphoria." You know what, he fucking nailed it. All of the sounds retain the first album's urban dourness reverberating through each electron and washed drone. The hovering basslines which once stalked the darkest of jungle's rhythms are ghostly presences flickering around Burial's atypical drum programming, which by his own admission is done by hand without the aid of a sequencer. The clipped, 2-step breakbeats always appear as the cocking of a gun; but it doesn't seem like Burial is taking aim at his audience. Rather, it's metaphor for the cold, inhumane existence in the grimy parts of London, where violence is just another thing to shrug at and move beyond. All of these sounds are clearly present in Burial's debut album, but the "euphoric" part of Untrue's intention is found in Burial's use of voice. Taking a cappella tunes sung by his friends (sometimes, left as a voice mail on his cellphone), Burial has crafted an eerie cast of disembodied vocals, twisted into cybernetic R&B croons, all clipped and compressed in the same manner as his pistol-whipped snare cracks. It's as if the human voice alone can transcend the dire circumstances of our earthly confines, even when the songs reflected broken dreams and a dwindling hope. Burial seeks out the fleeting moments of beauty and raw emotion, codifying it through his impeccable craft on this very impressive and soon to be iconic recording. If you're not hearing it from us, you'll hear from somebody else: Burial's Untrue is the best record of 2007.

Cocteau Twins - Blue Bell Knoll LP (4AD)

Our Review:

Cocteau Twins' music creates the same bittersweet comfort as a feather stalk poking out of your pillow, candied anise, a scratchy wool sweater or the smell of your mother's hair. From any era, their sound is quite unmistakable. Their guitars issue luminous wires of platinum that reflect the singular sound of Elizabeth Fraser's vocals. Her vocals are unique, not only because of their their crystal clarity, but her lyrical style that drifts between glossolalia, a baby's earliest utterances and some elfin prayer. Blue Bell Knoll is by no means a departure from previous albums. Their career never involved any sharp turns, but rather a refinement of a sound. What's unique about Blue Bell Knoll is that previous albums were usually fairly dark, lit by dusk or moonlight whereas Blue Bell Knoll exists in a strange sort of joyous, daylight melancholy. The kind of joy that is so overwhelming that it spills into other emotions and brings tears to your eyes.

Circle - Miljard 3xLP (Hydra Head)

Our Review:

Delicate? Calm? Circle? Yes. If you're expecting the NWOFHM (New Wave Of Finnish Heavy Metal) stylings of Tulikoria or Sunrise, or the motorik krautrock of Alotus or Guillotine, or the heavy prog of Prospekt, or the spacey jazzy dubbiness of Pori, or all of the above; well that's NOT exactly what you get with Miljard. There's really no comparisons this time to Neu!, Can, Tortoise, or Hawkwind, let alone Judas Priest! Instead we'll mention Thuja, The Necks, Morton Feldman, Bohren und Der Club Of Gore, Philip Jeck, 3/4hadbeeneliminated. It's still definitely Circle. It's just that, as their own website put it, "rocking has been traded for some quiet reading on the couch at home". And boy is this hauntingly atmospheric, instrumental music perfect for such activity.

Miljard requires more than one LP, because this music is so spacious and expansive, a slow-moving stream, or the ripples in a pond. The pond, perhaps, frozen in the Finnish winter, in a twilight landscape softened with snow. The first track "Parmalee" is a twenty minute piece that sets the relaxed and gorgeous tone of this record. Meandering, pretty piano, reminding us of Rob Reger's playing in Thuja, quietly joined by abstract electronics and guitar. Circle's usual repetition and pulses are still there, at about 11 minutes the pulse becomes more noticable. This is a fantastic record, and there's still five sides to go!! The next track, "B.F.F." is slightly more uptempo, but still has the classical vibe from the piano. And then another twenty-minute cut "Duunila" emerges as a whispery dark drone, hushed with some sparse clatter and gentle bass notes. Sheer beauty. And on it goes, all the way through to the gauzey, vaguely gamelan-like 20 minute "Viitane" which occupies the sixth side, nearly two hours all told of amazing music, the soundtrack to a limpid dream from which we'd never hope to wake.

Geez, what can't they do? Recommended, people!!!

Browning Mummery - Obiter Scripta LP (Tesco Archaic Documents)

Our Review:

One of the more obscure projects to come from the Australian noise / post-punk underground, Browning Mummery is the work of Brisbane's Andrew Lonsdale, who still appears to be operating under this moniker in this day and age. His bleak sound-designs from anxious electronics and nightmarish atmospheres still seem to be at the core of his work, and interest in his work certainly sparked around the archives that Vinyl On Demand uncovered for their Magnetophonics - Australian Underground Music 1978-1984 7LP boxset. But his 1984 production Obiter Scripta stands as his strongest body of work. A monstrous chunk of industrial torpor underpinned with environmental tactility and appropriations of monastic chant, Lonsdale's harrowing recordings looked toward the death obsessed program that came through Cold Meat Industries nearly a decade later thanks to Brighter Death Now and Raison D'Etre. Tense rattling of synth-born arpeggiation and the slow-motion rhythmic crawl reflected the panzer electronic strategies of SPK and Maurizio Bianchi, yet there's no real preparation for the violent scream-against-the-sky vocals that are howled on "Disintegration Of Personality." While the album has been reissued a few times since the original release, this edition marks the first pressing on vinyl. Limited to 250 copies.

Coil - The Ape Of Naples 2xLP (Important)

Our Review:

The Ape Of Naples marks the end of an era for Coil, as the grand finale to a tumultuous career of psychotropic electronica, siddereal ambience, and post-industrial occultations. In November 2004, John Balance died as the result of an alcohol related accident. In the intervening months, his partner – both creatively and romantically – Peter Christopherson resurrected many of the tracks from the ill-fated Backwards sessions as well as unreleased recordings that date back to the beginning of Coil in 1982. It should be noted that Christopherson did not intend The Ape Of Naples to be lumped in with the Stolen and Contaminated series of rare and unreleased material; rather, he shaped the album to reflect his grief and melancholy.

The Backwards sessions were originally commissioned as a follow up to their seminal oblique dance album Love's Secret Domain, which emerged out of Coil's obsession with British acid house and rave culture. In fact, Trent Reznor had brought Coil to his New Orleans studio to record much of those sessions in hopes of releasing the album on his Nothing imprint. Unfortunately, more than a decade went by with only false starts and creative dead ends; and Backwards didn't emerge until 2015 well after Christopherson had passed away. While it's not all that clear if The Ape Of Naples is the album that Coil envisioned when they were making Backwards, The Ape Of Naples stands as a mighty triumph in the Coil pantheon of releases, ranking up there with Horse Rotorvator and the aforementioned Love's Secret Domain.

What's so striking about The Ape Of Naples, especially in light of their recent albums of temporal minimalism, is their return to the song structure, and how John Balance could deliver his beautiful howlings with all of the poetry of Jean Genet. Throughout the album, Christopherson scores elegaic arrangements with an urgent interlocking for marimba and vibraphone, whose gasping repetition serves as a thematic link between all of the material both old and new. The album also features devilish marches of electronic arpeggiation laced with distant throbbing rhythms and Balance's omnipresent vocals, typified by such tracks as "Heaven's Blade" and the reprise of "Teenage Lightning" – one of the highlight tracks from LSD. A tragically beautiful album through and through.

Broadcast - The Future Crayon 2xLP (Warp)

Our Review:

Like a big ol' box of Crayolas, The Future Crayon is a collection of Broadcast rarities, an absolute delight from start to finish! The eighteen tracks are compiled from singles, EPs, and compilations dating back to 1998. They effectively remind us that while this UK band is perhaps best known for their plush synth-driven pop, their musical spectrum stretches far beyond that into jazz, space age, exotica, krautrock, prog, and the science fair even! Needless to say, your ears will surely find that they're so much more delicious than those waxy coloring implements. They're more like the aural equivalent of a fifty scoop sundae – towering in dream pop yumminess comprised of soft creamy sherbet (Trish Keenan vocals! sigh!), occasional bloops of marshmallow cream and hot fudge (their analog synthesizers!), a sprinkling of nuts and sugary bits (the snappy often jazzy percussion as well as those synths again!). It's all perfectly summed up in the album's sixteenth and seventeenth numbers "Minus Two" and "Violent Playground", both taken from their 2003 EP Pendulum. Fantastic! Yes, recommended!

Antena - Camino Del Sol 2xLP (Numero Group)

Our Review:

A very welcomed reissue of this wonderful, incredibly obscure band's music from 1982. Although it's called Camino Del Sol (the title of their 5-song mini-LP debut), this expanded 2xLP reissue includes lots of other material (compilation tracks and the like) as well as an additional three bonus tracks, swelling the total song count to sixteen swoonsome delights!

Back in the day, when he first heard Antena's breezy Brazillian tropicalia styled tunes crafted with unexpected instrumentation (early puttering drum machines and analog synthesizers), former British music journalist / Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant tagged them "electro-sambam" and the label suits them well; they even do a spaced-out, jazzy version of "Girl From Ipanema" (renamed "Boy From Ipanema" and produced by John Foxx). Imagine if seminal electro-punk duo Suicide were suddenly magically transformed into a light, airy female-sung group, and you'd have a pretty accurate picture of Antena's sound. Blending genres and instrumentations way ahead of the pack, the stylish trio can easily be seen as a French precursor to such groups as Stereolab. You can also hear where young Brit upstarts Electrelane probably got ample birdlike vocal inspiration on the song "To Climb The Cliff." Fans of the Gilberto family (Joao, Astrud and Bebel) will surely also want to check out Antena too. Really, this album sounds perfectly fresh today.

All The Madmen - Early Tape Recordings LP (Vinyl On Demand)

Our Review:

The moment the needle hit this record in the shop, nearly every customer wanted, no, needed to know what it was. The incredible cover of Alice Cooper's "School's Out" could cover the price of admission to this under-the-radar jammer, but this thing is chock full of icy synth and primitive drum machine. The songs are cold yet catchy and the vocals are delivered in a deadpan monotone. Essential for fans of the early work of Fad Gadget, John Foxx, Thomas Leer, The Normal, John Bender. This platter compiles multiple versions of "Living Is A Nightmare," "Superior Life," "My Head Is In A Different Place," and "Repetition," amongst other great tracks. Another shining example that V.O.D. really knows how to unearth some of the finest synth and industrial gems from the '70s and '80s.

A Frames - 2 LP (S-S)

Our Review:

Heads up for another wallop of very angular bare-bones post punk. Yes, A Frames wear their love of early 80s Wire, The Fall and/or Gang Of Four prominently on their sleeves, and they capture the sound and energy very well. Although you might guess their hometown to be San Diego or Providence where many like-minded bands are based, this trio is in fact from Seattle, WA. Deep, deadpan vocals much like those of Nick Forte (Rorschach, Computer Cougar, Beautiful Skin) brood and proclaim while the very front'n'center chunky, choppy guitars jab and saw atop the simmering rhythm section. At times in their music as well as their lyrics and song titles ("Ionic," "Archaeology," "Modula," etc), they bring science, sci-fi and rock together – also calling to mind the less surfy, more art-damaged side of Man Or Astro-Man?.

Biosphere - Shenzhou 3xLP (Biophon)

Our Review:

Biosphere - the project of Norwegian Geir Jensen - has always stood out amongst the practitioners of ambient-electronica by never allowing his music to comfortably fall into the regions of aural wallpaper. His first two albums Microgravity and Patashnik would probably transcend their status as minor classics in their thoughtful recomibinations of techno propulsion and ambient utopianism, if it weren't for the ill-advised (though fashionable at the time) use of extra-terrestrial imagery.

At the height of the ambient-techno phenomenon in 1995 or so, Levi's licensed a Biosphere track off of Patashnik for a jeans commercial, which had the same steroid-injected effect on Biosphere's sales as those of Spiritualized, Trio and Nick Drake with their use in Volkswagen adverts. Wisely, Jensen took the money and ran from commercial success. He has since declared his permanent base of operations to be Tromso, Norway, located some 400 miles north of the Arctic Circle and began working at the time with the reknowned Touch label. Both decisions have resulted in a profound maturation of the Biosphere sound.

Shenzhou is the third Biosphere record for Touch (now reissued through Jensen's Biophon imprint) and continues to describe aural environments that are at once decidedly Arctic, yet wholly inviting and warm. Jensen has drawn a very direct line on this album back to impressionist composer Claude Debussy by basing this album on some very old vinyl recordings of various Debussy pieces. The surface noise crackle may parallel that of the Touch productions from turntablist Philip Jeck, but Shenzhou doesn't extend the comparison beyond their similar source materials. This is distinctly a Biosphere album filled with synaesthetic driftings, subtle rhythmic pulsations and hypnotic loopings, all culled from the muted instrumentation of those Debussy compositions. Biosphere has yet again succeeded in crafting an exceptionally poetic album that is as accessible as it is subtly expressive. Recommended.

Einsturzende Neubauten - Zeichnungen Des Patienten O.T. (Drawings Of O.T.) LP (Potomak)

Our Review:

A brilliant reissue from the seminal German industrial ensemble Einsturzende Neubauten. This album represented the first full realization of the Neubauten project, with F.M. Einheit and Marc Chung (both hailing from the underappreciated post-punk ensemble Abwarts) joining the trio of Blixa Bargeld, Alexander Hacke, and N.U. Unruh. The O.T. from the title of this record references Oswald Tschirtner, a resident of psychiatric hospital for artists, where the patient created these compulsive drawings out of the unkempt visions in his head. Such is the way the Neubauten seeks to employ sound on this record: cracked, naive and dangerous. Found objects, stolen radio transmissions, repurposed machinery and lots of metal bashing appear in this album, inspired as much by musique concrete juxtaposition as by punk fury. The desolate drone-centric piece "Armenia" and the propulsive "Vandium I-Ching" represent two of the extremes found on this ever-impressive album.

Armour Group - Purge LP (Trait)

Our Review:

Taking their name from track by Genocide Organ, Armour Group is a potent, industrial-noise proposition with its roots harkening to the Tesco Organisation aesthetic for an overload of bad vibes through brooding, bleached electronics. The Group is based out of Melbourne, Australia and is comprised of Harriet Morgan (aka Military Position) and Luke Holland (who runs Trapdoor Tapes). Their solo projects rank as very impressive entries in the grizzled history of power electronics and death industrial, with their collaboration being no exception.

The sexual politics of Armour Group make them unique, as the vocal duties are traded off between both partners even as the content as with most power electronics is shrouded in form-destruction noise, distortion and various effects. In this alternation between the male and the female perspectives on the mirrored violence within society, their ferocious co-habition presents itself as a unified front, standing against the agents of subjugation, betrayal and unrest.

Purge is the band's first major work, encapsulating these ideas within a sonic bombshell of hammered electronic rhythm, dead-line tones and barked vocalization. Their Australian origins are also heard in the hyper obscure VHS only horror references, positing themselves as snippets of salacious evidence from a troubling crime of passion. The blasted nihilism of this monumental album finds parallels with early Whitehouse, Atrax Morgue, Anenzephalia and Intrinsic Action.

Limited to 250 copies.

Vikki Jackman, Andrew Chalk & Jean-Noel Rebilly - A Paper Doll's Whisper Of Spring LP (Faraway Press)

Our Review:

The arrival of anything that Andrew Chalk touches is a cause for celebration here, and here we have this LP entitled A Paper Doll's Whisper Of Spring. A tiny edition of these recordings appeared and disappeared on CDR back in 2012, with the occasional duo of Vikki Jackman and Andrew Chalk working here with the hitherto unknown to us Jean-Noel Rebilly. The Jackman and Chalk aesthetic of wintry pastoral piano clusters swelling with beautifully rendered gossamer clouds of impressionism, haze, fog, smoke and whatnot remain intact, so what Rebilly is contributing is not all that clear. But given how good Jackman and Chalk work together, why mess things up? At times, it appears that the three are in fact working as a trio, with Jackman sitting behind the keys and with Chalk and Rebilly taking up possibly guitar and bass. There sounds are so ephemeral and so seamlessly integrated into the languid tones and suspended drones out of Jackman's piano that it's hard to really tell. Synths, koto and possibly flutes also get wrapped up in the mirage-like sonic miasma that Chalk weaves from his source materials. That of course is the magic of Andrew Chalk, his ability to render the drone musical, and blur all sounds into time-lapsed experiences of forgotten memories, haunted films, and half-remembered dreams. Beautiful stuff as always and again, as with all Chalk releases, immaculately packaged. Limited to 400 copies.

Tarab - An Incomplete Yet Fixed Idea LP (Aposiopese)

Our Review:

"Careful arrangements of sonic rubbish." That's one hell of a great artist's statement, courtesy of Eamon Sprod (aka Tarab). Over the past decade, this Australian sound-artist has quietly produced some of the finer examples of composition through field recording. His work is a far cry from the pleasantries of a soft ambient whoosh set as the backdrop to various birdsongs plopped willy-nilly for the listener to identify. There's always the threat of psychological, psychic and existential violence lurking throughout Sprod's work. When the insect chorales push through to the foreground, it's symbolic of pestilence, disease, blight and the simple fact that much in the outback can fucking kill you. It's easy to tap into the ultra-violent, post-apocalyptic, doomsayer and/or isolationist scenarios mapped out elsewhere through the Australian psyche (e.g. Mad Max, Chopper, On The Beach, Bad Boy Bubby, etc.), and Sprod carves out his own niche in digging through the hinterlands of urban neglect, locating meaning of psychogeographical import (or the lack there of) within a recontextualized sound object. Since his debut Surfacedrift back in 2004, Sprod's work has steadily exhibited a maturation in conceptualization and aesthetic complexity, leading to his first piece of vinyl as An Incomplete Yet Fixed Idea.

He eschews any notation as to the sources of these sounds on An Incomplete Yet Fixed Idea, but their meaning is clear. This environment is a hostile one. Torn metal and shattered concrete rupture in tandem with stinging buzzes and noxious industrial vibration throughout the album that takes its composition cues from the G*Park, Dave Phillips and Francisco Meirino as well as Luc Ferrari and Michel Chion. Brilliant work as always, from Tarab.

Wire - Silver / Lead LP (Pinkflag)

Our Review:

It's been exacty 40 years since Wire – using the nimble, austere lines of the now-canonical Pink Flag – completely redrew the musical map. To celebrate, the band have released a new album that sounds nothing like their debut, and yet everything like Wire.

Their 15th full-length, Silver/Lead is the latest in a busy and compelling run by the most recent incarnation of the band, now four albums deep with guitarist Matthew Simms, who stepped in following the 2006 departure of founding guitarist Bruce Gilbert. The album offers much of Wire at its singular best – combustible vectors of melody and velocity – but with tracks landing in the three- to four-minute range, the album allows the mature Wire to expand both in space and time, across gnarled bursts of brittle glam, lush keyboard vistas and, throughout, a rich ecosystem of guitars. Throughout, Colin Newman's sparklingly detailed production stays on the moody and slightly fucked side of the psychedelic, a color wheel of processed vocals, flanged drums and textural electronic whorls.

As Wire enter their improbable fifth decade, Silver/Lead serves up a puckish cross-section of their storied history and a map of brand new territory by one of contemporary music's most adventurous outfits.

Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky LP (Young God)

Our Review:

Michael Gira has made his point that Swans has been reactivated, and that this is not a reunion. The distinction may be important to Gira, but it's pretty clear that he doesn't want the world to think he's jumping on the bandwagon of every cool band from the '80s and '90s getting back together again. But the fact remains that Swans dissolved back in 1997, and Gira took some of the Swans musicians at that time to form his grizzled folk ensemble Angels Of Light. Given the acoustic songs that Gira would sometimes wrangle as a counterpoint to Swans' signature brutality, the transition for Gira from Swans into Angels was a logical one. Over time, Angels developed into a lush ensemble with twinkling psychedelic aspects of a bright baroque aesthetic never revealed in the harrowing, abject tracks from Swans.

In early 2009, Gira embarked on a solo tour, showcasing a bunch of new material that seemed to be harkening back to the sound and fury of Swans, in spite of their minimalist presentation through just acoustic guitar and voice. On more than one occasion Gira quipped that he was thinking of making another Swans record. And that brings us to My Father Will Guide Me, ushered forth by a squadron of atonal guitars and lumbering percussive crashes. The album really does sound like it could have been produced in 1999, right after Soundtracks For The Blind, which was thought to be the final studio record for Swans. Sure, there's no Jarboe (for the obvious reasons that they part ways in their personal relationship), but Gira did recruit guitarist Norman Westberg to return to the fold. He was responsible for the guitar sound for the band from Filth up through White Light From The Mouth Of Infinity. That buzzsaw rasp which Westberg produced is very present in Swans resurrection, cutting through the thug-fist basslines and lockstep drum rolls. The sound of Swans is very much intact, but Gira's songwriting has constantly grown, with his booming voice still wailing doom and gloom through the lens of an American apocalypticist. Devendra Banhart also makes a guest appearance on a track equally noted for its discordantly brash trombones and trumpets with their resembles to dive-bombing arcs. If only every band that got back together could make a record with this much intensity, drama and power.

Swans - Filth LP (Young God)

Our Review:

Filth. An aptly named album for a time and a place and a band. Swans' first full album came out in 1983 from the gritty underbelly of New York City, before Guiliani has kicked out all the freaks, criminals and artists. The sound of Swans engorged the primal violence and psychological dread that had been first broadcast under the banner of No Wave a few years earlier. Led by the tyrannical Michael Gira, who probably only learned how to crack a smile some 15 years after the inception of Swans, barked and grunted lyrics which might be easier read as agitprop slogans, decrying the perceived imbalances of power through sex, money, depravity and (later) religion. He controlled and commanded his band to perform pummeling excesses of rhythmic brutality with lurching basslines and atonal splashes of guitar shards forming the barest sense of what could pass for a melody. At the time of Filth, Gira had two thugs - Roli Mosimann and Jonathan Kane - behind drum kits, augmenting their panzerkorps marches with bloodyknuckled sheets of metal tossed into that engine at unpredictable moments and angles. For all of the furious muscularity and self-inflicted violence of Filth, Swans could color their claustrophobic slabs of sound with empathizing spells of existential misery. "Power For Power" is probably the best example of this, with guitarist Normal Westberg (the longest standing member of Swans aside from Gira) chopping the melody that could very be knocking on the door of The Stooges' raga-dirge "We Will Fall". It should also be noted that John Gossard swiped the title "Weakling" for his cult black metal band, and like Gira, used the term not to self-identify but as a damning epithet. The song itself is a depressive trudge of basslines alternating with dissonant guitars, shoved along by a strangely spry rhythm from one of the drummers.

Filth still stands as one of the great achievements of an already highly acclaimed band. It's never been an easy listen, and never will be.

Survive - s/t LP (Holodeck)

Our Review:

Here's the much needed reissue of the eponymous Survive LP, first published in 2013 and before the Austin outfit had an inkling they would be making such a big splash with the Stranger Things soundtrack. Survive mines a brooding alien proggy sound that comes close to early Cluster, Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler through synth-heavy arpeggiations, skittery beats and ghostly melodies with killer hooks. It's an awesome record that shows the fledgling sound of this evolving outfit still more fully realized then most veteran practitioners.

Tim Hecker - Mirages 2xLP (Kranky)

Our Review:

Yet another gorgeous missive from the ether, courtesy of Tim Hecker. Lost transmissions from another world. Dark ambience pregnant with the possibilities of wide eyed discovery and fleeting glimpses into the beyond. Fuzzy and scratchy and indistinct. Gorgeously haunting soundscapes crafted from the sounds often discarded by "more discerning" musicians, fuzz, amp buzz, distortion, record static, radio interference all lending the proceedings a foggy, dreamlike hue. This is the sound of dreams. Fuzzy melodies drift through the grey skies like ribbons loosed from their moorings and left to twist lazily in the breeze. Occasionally storm clouds gather, unleashing squalls of crumbling digital decay, obscuring the afternoon tranquility with a fine layer of dusty crackle. An absolutely stunning world of sound.

Tim Hecker - Harmony In Ultraviolet 2xLP (Kranky)

Our Review:

Imagine the most beautiful music in the world. Then with an old thrift store camera, take a super grainy snapshot of that music. Fold up the photo and place it in an envelope and mail it to an address that no longer exists. 20 years later, happen upon an old abandoned post office, and discover that letter unopened, but browned with age, remove the photo and place it in your pocket. Lose those pants on a camping trip, only to discover them the next summer, all wadded up in a corner, sprinkled with a years worth of dust and cobwebs. Wash the pants, and only afterwards discover the photo. Prop in up in the window of the cabin to dry, where it sits soaking up the sun for the whole summer. Right before you leave, grab the photo of the most beautiful music in the world and place it in your book to mark your place. Place the book back on your shelf and forget all about it. Move several times over the course of the next several years, finally unpacking a dusty old trunk filled with books. Leaf through several of them, when suddenly the most beautiful music in the world flutters to the floor, dusty and tattered, worn and nearly transparent. Finally, tear it up into tiny pieces and drop them one by one into the speaker of an antique victrola, wind it up and what comes out will be Tim Hecker's Harmony In Ultraviolet.

There's something so pure and organic about the way Hecker composes and creates, how he deftly assembles and degrades his sounds and songs and melodies. Managing to sound modern but antiquated at the same time, viewing the world through sleep filled eyes, everything soft and fuzzy, sometimes intense and ominous, sometimes even dark and downright scary, but always suffused with a shimmering radiant warmth, making all of his sounds glow from within. Each song a weather worn snapshot, frayed and dusty, comfortable and lived in sounding. It's a music that requires close listening, a subtly immersive sound. Once inside it, once the sound is all around you, only then can you pick out all of the details and hear the hidden melodies. Only then can you let go and get completely lost in Hecker's gorgeous world of mysterious sound. Some of the most beautiful music in the world indeed.

The Proletariat - Soma Holiday LP (S-S)

Our Review:

Born out of Boston's infamous early-1980s hardcore punk scene, The Proletariat's Soma Holiday has much more in common with art-punk agitators like Wire and Gang Of Four than Gang Green and The Freeze, focusing on musical and political smarts rather than chaotic speed and violence. Richard Brown's vocals are more protest chant than punk bark, concise and razor-sharp critiques of America's busted promises, most notably via political, military and economic havoc. Frank Michael's guitarwork borders on the avant-garde by hardcore punk's standards, with the band forging deliberate, adventurous songs that don't rely on flexing or speed to get their urgent message across. Hardcore's anger and power are still entirely evident in their attack, however, making Soma Holiday one of the era's most essential debuts. A timely reissue from S-S Records.

Tommy Jay - Tommy Jay's Tall Tales Of Trauma 2xLP (Assophon)

Our Review:

Tommy Jay's Tall Tales of Trauma, originally released in a small cassette run in 1986, is perhaps the most understated mini-masterpiece to wiggle out from under the Columbus-underground rock. Jay was (still is) most closely associated with Mike "Rep" Hummel – the duo have been recording together since the early '70s and have collaborated in such groups as Ego Summit, True Believers and Mike Rep and the Quotas – even as his Tall Tales have long solidified his standing in Ohio D.I.Y. history. Rep once tagged him the "Pavorotti of Punk."

With one foot in the dusted glitter of the Ziggy/Lou/Iggy era and another experimenting with rural folk and lite-psychedelia, Jay's approach to songwriting is refreshingly timeless. Rooted in the craft of the classics (covers of Joni Mitchell, Neil Young the Dead and the Velvets are all here), the tunes on Tall Tales of Trauma feature acoustic strum, cheap synths, flute and fuzz leads, all punctuated by Jay's tender warble that steers his ship like a captain through rough seas.

Jay's magnum opus was first resurrected a decade ago by now-defunct Columbus Discount Records and is now back in print in an expanded double-LP edition by Assophon Records. Tall Tales of Trauma is every bit as good as the more celebrated records from the tail end of the Acid Archives era even as it remains buried in obscurity outside of Central Ohio. Hopefully this reissue allows for a few more fans to jump on board.

Various - Choubi Choubi! Folk And Pop Sounds From Iraq Volume 1 2xLP+7" (Sublime Frequencies)

Our Review:

Originally released way back in 2005, the first volume of Choubi Choubi!, a collection of folk and pop music from Iraq, remains one of everybody's favorite Sublime Frequencies releases. All of these tracks were made almost entirely during the reign of Saddam Hussein, which might have you envisioning the typical Middle Eastern story, of people forced to make music in secret, fearing for their lives and their livelihoods. But strangely, as we mentioned in our review of the first Choubi Choubi! release, Hussein was in fact an avid supporter of the arts, starting cultural centers for both art and music throughout Iraq. Sadly, performers, artists and musicians who were not commercially successful were deemed to be of a lower class. The idea of Choubi - an Iraqi style of music that features rapid fire beats, buzzing oud melodies and wild fiddle playing - was considered by most to be a province of the seedier side of Iraq, dingy nightclubs, prostitutes, criminals, etc. In fact, many female performers would wear masks to hide their identities. While the music was encouraged by the government, music by its very nature is rebellious. So this music of the people had a power that made Choubi essentially the 'national dance of Iraq.' As the liner notes explain, even with Choubi's stigma and reputation, Choubi is the music of choice at parties and weddings with people whipping out their best Choubi moves.

With the songs culled from the same era and time period, sonically, it's more of what we loved about the first one - wild, chaotic beats, flurries of percussion, super passionate vocals, dramatic and intense, lots of strings, the oud playing distorted and truly psychedelic. These recordings are lo-fi, in-the-red, far out tracks with the drums and rhythms slathered in cool primitive FX, reverb and delay. While some of the tracks are freaked out and energetic, others are moody and minor key. Some have an almost Bollywood vibe. Others still others sound almost liturgical, while others are distorted and buzzy and hypnotic. Really all of the tracks here incredible.

The story of the music and the musicians in Iraq at the time is super fascinating, and is gone into in more detail in the liner notes by Sublime Frequencies' Mark Gergis. Those extensive liner notes are accompanied by tons of awesome photos, as well as notes on each track, all on a super heavy full color gatefold sleeve.

Various - Choubi Choubi! Folk And Pop Sounds From Iraq Volume 2 2xLP (Sublime Frequencies)

Our Review:

Just when you thought you'd heard everything, in comes Sublime Frequencies to fill in the gaps you never thought existed. How many cds of Iraqi pop do you have in your collection? Until now we certainly didn't have any, let alone anything remotely traditional from Iraq. For a country that's so important to our war mongering presidential administration it's perhaps a little surprising that more interest hasn't been piqued about the culture of Iraq. But then again, everyone but W seems to understand that the real reasons for plundering this nation wasn't to "liberate" anyone. In fact, W would probably rather that no one even pay attention to any of this music, which has the awkward fortune to have been produced almost entirely (with the exception of three early 70's tracks) during the reign of Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime (tracks here range from 1980 on up to 2002.). In spite of his - well deserved - reputation as a cruel dictator, he was also an avid supporter of both education and the arts - such are the complexities of life W would rather not acknowledge – and for better or worse, kept the fabricated nation state as stable as it has ever been. Hussein promoted secular arts and music, starting cultural centers for both, and even dubbed singers the "eighth division" of the armed forces (his nation had seven military divisions) - not to paint too rosy a picture of Donald Rumsfeld's former pal and business partner, who was also a sadistic tyrant after all. Compiled by Mark Gergis, Choubi Choubi! is a collection years in the making. Gergis scoured the earth for the source material on this disc, travelling through Syria, Europe and the Iraqi neighborhoods of Detroit, Michigan. The anthology starts off with a folk rock track from '70s Socialist singer Ja'afar Hassan, a song that could easily compete with the best psych tracks on Hava Narghile or Turkish Delights for the crown of Middle Eastern psych champ. But if you're expecting another psych compilation, you're going to be disappointed as Choubi Choubi! is much more than that, way more. Most of the recordings on the album have no western instruments on them, nor hardly any western influence. These tracks rock out much harder with no electric instruments, but with huge string sections, pounding drums, and monstrous oud playing. Maybe it's also the super bluesy sounding (to the western ear) melodies, it's no wonder that it sounds so fresh and familiar to us. It really is weird, when I (Byram) first listened to this record I could have sworn there were more songs with electric guitars on it, but there aren't that many. It just sounds so fucking heavy, and rocks so hard that I remembered it as being a "rock" record. Really, really, really fucking great.

Survive - RR7349 12" (Relapse)

Our Review:

The Netflix sensation Stranger Things has been quite the cultural sensation for nostalgic horror laced with pre-adolescent psychological dread; and many folks had their ears piqued by the suitably John Carpenter-esque, synth-bourn soundtrack by two of the dudes from Survive. We've long championed Survive and all of the projects that various band members have done through the constellation on the Holodeck imprint. So, we're completely stoked that they've has achieved such notoriety for doing exactly what they want to do: making an awesome synth record. Just to be clear, RR7349 is not the soundtrack to Stranger Things, but it sure could be the imagined soundtrack to a hitherto unknown Philip K. Dick story. An entirely instrumental affair for multiple synths and percolating sequencer, RR7349 marvels in its sci-fi atmospherics and retro-futurist surfaces. Goblin, John Carpenter, Heldon, Oneohtrix Point Never and Conrad Schnitzler are all the obvious comparisons to Survive. Heavy, minor-key melodies from the band's array of analog synths grace much of Survive's arrangements, settled upon plodding rhythms. These tracks are hardly linear progressions, rocketing at times with huge majestic arcs of blossoming synth filagree and double-timed machined drums and others suspending in deep-space orbit devoid of gravity amidst a golden hued nebulae of electronic swoosh. Along with the Troller record Graphic, this is the best release to come from Holodeck crew.

Tim Presley - The Wink LP (Drag City)

Our Review:

Tim Presley has dropped the White Fence moniker, at least for the time being, and The Wink marks the first outing under his own name. Presley has started recording as White Fence in 2010, with those first albums exhibiting a penchant for breezy, unkempt melodies amidst blown-out psychedelia that looked back in equal parts to the Seeds and to shambolic facets to the Elephant 6 collective. With the last couple of White Fence records and certainly on the Drinks collaboration with Cate Le Bon, Presley contorted those melodies into mutant janglse afright with irregular signatures and Syd Barrett-esque eccentricities. For The Wink, Presley is working once again with Le Bon who has donned the cap as his producer. Her presence is noticable throughout this album as manifest in a carnivalesque art-pop restraint that was heard on her very impressive Crab Day album. Presley scribbles across his guitar in repeating phrases of angular, slightly atonal riffs, creating brash pointilist marks against his rollicking post-paisley-pop rhythms. These off-kilter arrangements snap with deconstructed post-punk crispness, contrasted by the rumpled elegance of his mercurial croon. In lesser hands, Presley's vocal affect would come across as dandy flippancy, but he what he compellingly produces throughout The Wink is a channelling of the quixotic charms of Kevin Ayers with the pop innovations of Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain and more than a few nods to the baroque weirdness from Human League's Phil Oakley. A cracked gem of a record!

Tomorrow The Rain Will Fall Upwards - Wreck His Days LP (Blackest Ever Black)

Our Review:

Nobody is claiming authorship as of yet to the amorphous construct that is Tomorrow The Rain Will Fall Upwards, even as a rotating cast of characters passes by. This mystery parallels the woozy, hauntological drippings of art-rock deconstruction found on this debut album, which follows a 10" that Blackest Ever Black released in the recent past but seems to have disappeared before anyone heard it. Wreck His Days manifests into this earthly plane through a plethora of shadowy electronic droning piled onto a classic electronics obliqueness that slips between the ghostliness of Demdike Stare and the feverish minimalism of Dome. Yeah, it makes perfect sense that something like this would materialize on Blackest Ever Black. Hypnotized, ASMR whisperings creep amidst the Reichian piano clusters and drum-machined sputterings of rhythm, only to get submerged in ominously industrial beacons of synthesized bellowings and sequenced basstone detonation. It’s rare when any of these tracks evolve into something that could resemble a song, as the fragment of a forgotten Les Baxter tune or the projection of a jazzy stand-up bass groove is all that Tomorrow The Rain Will Fall Upwards will provide in the prevalence of spookiness. Jonnine Standish of HTRK, Genevieve McGuckin of These Immortal Souls, and whole bunch of musicians who are hitherto unknown appear throughout. Murky is the mood to this exceptional outing found on Blackest Ever Black!

Roedelius - Durch Die Wuste LP (Bureau B)

Our Review:

Durch Die Wuste was the first solo outing by Hans-Joachim Roedelius of Cluster/Harmonia fame, originally out on 1978 on the always impeccable Sky label. Melding his tastes for classical composition, spaced out ambience and electronic rock possibilities, this album found Roedelius simmering in warm rolling waves that just invite you to get lost and daydream in their subtly hypnotic pull. What's most amazing and compelling about this album is how organic it all sounds. Years before folks were really getting a grasp of how to intertwine traditional instrumentation with electronics, Roedelius was doing it masterfully. We're also so taken by the divine percussive quality that rises to the surfaces on lots of the album, especially the record's last two songs where Roedelius manages to play the drums himself and creates an amazing orbital groove that we could listen to forever. Durch Die Wuste manages to combine both his more dark and outsider tendencies with his ability to create the ultimate in shimmering cosmic bliss. This clearly stands up against any of Cluster's breathtaking moments. Highly recommended!

Roedelius - Jardin Au Fou LP (Bureau B)

Our Review:

The pastoral half of Cluster explores his penchant for French romanticism in this dazzling suite of spacious baroque minimalism from 1979. Produced with the assistance of Peter Baumann, Roedelius broadens his focus as a traditional composer and displays ample musicianship with an eclectic array of instrumentation: flutes cellos, pianos and harpsichords, steering away from the abstracting qualities of the sequencers and processors normally employed in his main group. There's a carnivalesque playfulness to the tracks here, suggesting carousels and waltzes, penny arcades, and street performers, but with a refined restraint that evades schmaltz. Like the perfect accompaniment to a Resnais film, each piece is a delightful handmade miniature strung together in a labyrinthian web.

Raspberry Bulbs - Privacy LP (Blackest Ever Black)

Our Review:

Emaciated. Fractious. Toxic. Violent. Raspberry Bulbs is the blackened punk outfit that Marco del Rio conceived after dissolving the cult black metal duo Bone Awl in 2010 or thereabouts. The raw-nerve energy of Raspberry Bulbs is a continuation of Bone Awl's brand of D-beat primitivism, but with some downright catchy riffs and pop-hook chops replacing the black metal. Over three albums, Raspberry Bulbs has perfected that formula - one that could be cranked out on a single worn-torn guitar and knuckle-busting drum kit. Even as Raspberry Bulbs has swollen from a sole venture for del Rio to a formidable five-piece, the riffs have a crust-punk urgency that's completely in the moment and full of wild-eyed rage.

Raspberry Bulb's 2013 album Deformed Worship caught many people off guard, coming out on the boutique publishing house of paranoiac electronica, Blackest Ever Black. Despite the aesthetic differences, the malaise and the claustrophobia and the tension of Black Rain, Cut Hands and Raime find easy parallels in the jackbooted punk stomp of Raspberry Bulbs. It also makes a hell of a lot of sense that Dominic Fernow / Prurient released the first (and dare we say, slightly undercooked) first album from Raspberry Bulbs. So there's the connection for you. Privacy picks up right where Deformed Worship left off as an antisocial, bad-seed punk brother to Christian Death's Only Theatre Of Pain, starving the skeletal riffs into a acid batteries of ravenous angst and eschewing the goth miserablism in favor of a throat-ripped snarl. The guitars sound like they've been strung with razor wire and hot-wired into Crime's pawn shop amps. Raspberry Bulbs just sounds louder, snottier and meaner. Fucking awesome, we gotta say.

She Spread Sorrow - Mine LP (Cold Spring)

Our Review:

Alice Kundalini's She Spread Sorrow is one of several exemplary projects authored by women who radically engage the aesthetics from industrial culture. Puce Mary and Pharmakon may have achieved critical acclaim and wider recognition for their work; but other contemporary artists such as She Spread Sorrow, Sewer Goddess, Himukalt and Relay For Death count amongst the growing number of women who are composing with noise and power electronics, whose results are as interesting as (if not better than) their male colleagues. Mine is the second album for She Spread Sorrow, who retains the whispered vocal poetics that were present on the debut Rumspringa. Kundalini pushes her sibilant utterances to the foreground of the compositions that she stacks with strident electronics, power-drone aggression and chunks of metal scraped upon concrete and bone. The overblown amplification of the whisper harkens to the French duo Etant Donnes, with Kundalini's approach exaggerating the threat of seduction through her own perceptions and poetics on the nature of femininity. It is as if she gazes into a broken mirror, with her own body (which could be a surrogate extending to all women) as a site of cruelty, desire and disgust as viewed both from within and by the gaze of another. Kundalini's production stands solidly on death-industrial idioms from the likes of Anenzephalia, Puce Mary and Atrax Morgue, with belicose noise, anxiously claustrophobic gloom, and an obsessive discipline sweltering on this unblinking album. Limited to 300 copies.

Roy Montgomery - H: Bender LP (Grapefruit)

Standalone LP release. Read our review of the box set right here.

Roy Montgomery - R: Tropic Of Anodyne LP (Grapefruit)

Standalone LP release. Read our review of the box set right here.

Starfuckers - Sinistri 2xLP (Parachute)

Our Review:

Starfuckers' second full length from 1994 is a huge departure from the Pop/Williamson inspired guitar bombast of their debut, "Metallic Diseases." Though the record relies heavily on empty space and atmosphere there are hints to their previous incarnation. Amp noise and feedback play a huge part in the recording but in a subdued, almost delicate way. And while the minimal approach is the highlight of the album, the listener is treated to the surprisingly riff heavy, "Ordine Pubblico," that utilizes castanets to accentuate the main percussion rendering it some kind of bizarre flamenco. This is the closest to a rocker on the LP, but this is more an experimental record that utilizes rock instrumentation than the other way around. Oscillators, keys and other sinister sounds float in and out as do sporadic, disembodied vocals to create an unnerving tension. There are nods to Cage, Gruppo and other modern composers / improvisers but it also has just as much in common with Red Krayola, This Heat or US Maple.

Sonic Youth - Goodbye 20th Century 2xLP (SYR)

Our Review:

Sonic Youth and the usual suspects (cohorts Willy Winant, Jim O'Rourke, Christian Marclay, and others) team up to pay tribute to a variety of avant-garde 20th Century composers, performing works by the likes of Steve Reich, Cornelius Cardew, John Cage, Yoko Ono, James Tenney, Pauline Oliveros (who specifically wrote a piece for this), Takehisa Kosugi, George Maciunas, Christian Wolff and more. Yes, this is totally pretentious but the music ain't bad at all, lots of bowing, grating, droning, scraping, banging, screaming, etc.

Sun City Girls - Torch Of The Mystics LP (Abduction)

Our Review:

Originally recorded in 1988 during a time when the Bishop brothers and Charles Gocher had been making much more overtly subversive work. 1987's Horse Cock Phepner (an album that could use this reissue treatment, by the way) experimented with drug-addled spoken word, hypno-percussive vulgarity-ridden tributes to Nancy Reagan, and Urinals-esque minimalist noise-punk. This makes sense given the Bishop brothers' musical upbringing in the early '80s Arizona punk and hardcore world. But the recordings sessions that would become Torch of the Mystics had such a different result. Like we mentioned last week, due in large part to the success of labels like Bishop's Sublime Frequencies, in making the SCG's third world influences more familiar to us, this record does get the "most accessible" label, maybe even more than it seemed originally. It's still fantastically out-there, but yeah, compared to other Sun City Girls output before and after this record, this is downright radio friendly.

It's hard to talk about records that are this fantastic, we don't really have words that can do it justice. Right from the first snare crack of opener "Blue Mamba," it's impossible not to get sucked into another world. The first notes of the bass line immediately floor us, then the whole band comes in, with droll vocals not even really saying coherent words over some sort of desert-scorched melody, part Sahara and part Sonoran. "Tarmac 23" is up next, a total outsider improvised psych freak-out, the guitar line an off-kilter loop, Gocher's drumming managing to keep the whole thing together. "Esoterica Of Abyssynia" and "Space Prophet Dogon" are, of course, the masterpieces of this record. "Esoterica" has a twisting and looping guitar line like something John Fahey would play if he studied under the tutelage of Ravi Shankar, and also owned a distortion pedal. "Space Prophet Dogon" is one of those instances that makes us all go full Andee and say "perhaps THEE greatest song EVER!" Seriously, without trying to sound too over-the-top hyperbolic, "Space Prophet Dogon" (later covered by the Grails) is one of those songs that should be played at funerals. A spiritual, otherworldly lick with its roots somewhere in Egypt or maybe a Moroccan hash cafe, but in true Sun City Girls fashion, twisted and warped to their liking. The longest song on the record (a scant 7 minutes) with the last 2 and a half completely improvised, and perhaps the most beautiful part, a bleary-eyed psych trip. This record would be totally worth it if it just played this song 11 times, trust us. But there's so much more! "Cafe Batik," "The Flower," "Papa Legba," and "Burial In The Sky" all follow in the footsteps of "Tarmac 23," improvised, warped, outsider-jazz-raga-middle eastern psych-folk numbers with Gocher's percussive mastery and Alan Bishop's sung/shouted vocals taking front row. "The Shining Path" could be a lost track off a Morricone soundtrack, a whistle-and-acoustic guitar number with that catchy and haunting melody line sung over it. "Radar 1941" is like the Ventures on thorazine, a slowed down, chewed up and spit-out attempt at surfy skronk. Like a foreshadowing of his solo career, "The Vinegar Stroke" is a classic Sir Richard Bishop piece, a masterfully played acoustic guitar track that feels like it's pulling inspiration from 5 different musical styles at once.

In short, (ha!) Torch Of The Mystics is an album that is from both everywhere and nowhere. It constantly plays with things you've maybe heard, but can't quite recall. It's at once high and low brow, mimicking some criminally underheard guitarist in the Sahal, or a drunkard trying to recite the Rigveda from memory. The babbling of Charles and Alan are in either some unknown foreign language or complete gibberish, perhaps playing with some sort of postmodern idea of Western cultural appropriation and our often naive and hamfisted takes on "world" music, or maybe they were just high and fucking around.

An utter masterpiece, a no-brainer must-have piece of every music collection.

Loop - Heaven's End LP (Reactor)

Our Review:

Loop formed in the mid '80s around the axis of frontman Robert Hampson with drummer John Wills and bassist Neil MacKay, embracing a claustrophobic, black leather take on space rock powering through the motorik grooves of the Krautrock pioneers and the juggernaut riffs from the MC5 and the Stooges. Loop would find themselves embroiled in a rivalry with fellow British psyche-rock iconoclasts Spacemen 3. While the acrimony may have been hyped more than was truly present, Loop and Spacemen 3 did develop into much better bands perhaps through this rivalry while veering along different career paths. During the early days from both projects, the rhythm section locks into one hell of a memorable riff, punctuated by tremolo-delayed guitar squeals, whammy-bar bent melodies and snarled vocals of variable states of intelligibility. Buzz, noise, drugs, booze and black energy went into both, with Spacemen 3 steering towards a transcendent bliss and Loop plunging into the heart of darkness. Heaven's End is the debut for Loop and is the only album that closely shares a collective sensibility with Spacemen 3. The opening track "Soundhead" with its spirited psyche-noise grooves became an eponym for Loop die-hards, which is also the name of band's fanclub. "Straight To Your Heart" and the album's title tracks are quintessential Loop as Hampson alternates between vocals and his throttled, wah-wah guitar solos as Willis and MacKay propel through their cosmic machined space-rock heaviness. The album draws to a perfect end with a sample from 2001, A Space Odyssey of the computer Hal stating in monotone: "My mind is going." An absolutely essential album!

Lustmord - Dark Matter 2xLP (Hydra Head)

Our Review:

Brian "Lustmord" Williams began his musical career in the early '80s as a member of SPK, whose early Industrial albums set a very high standard for aggressive electronics, shock tactics and raw aggression. Williams really came into his own with the seminal 1990 album Heresy -- an overwhelmingly bleak album that fused the reverberations from catacombs with a spectral ambience whose influence can be felt from the acoustically inclined realms of sound art to the infernal expressionism of black metal. In 1994, Lustmord released another masterpiece in his catalogue of dark ambience in The Place Where The Black Stars. With Dark Matter, Williams returns to a similar source material that he employed in The Place Where The Black Stars. Taking poetic license from the astrophysical studies of black holes as well as from archaic solar cults, Williams has crafted an electronic album that is as nightmarishly bleak as it is Wagnerian in scope. Long passages of irradiated dark matter stream into eternal drones reflecting the vastness of empty space. Subdued half-melodies and siren-song chantings slowly churn into ever deepening rumbles and the blackest of ambient drift.

Dark Matter was released in 2016 on CD through Touch and reprised in 2017 with slightly different edits on the Hydra Head vinyl edition.

Judy Henske & Jerry Yester - Farewell Aldeberan LP (Omnivore)

Our Review:

One of the more amazing curios of the late sixties folk-rock era, this sole record by Judy Henske and Jerry Yester is a strange and heady amalgam of baroque pomp-rock, lilting folk-pop and experimental electronic weirdness. Henske is best known for a series of early folk-revival albums on Elektra, that featured her howling blues vocals and cabaret like wit. Yester, best known as a producer from an assorted array of folk and psychedelic bands including The Association, The Loving Spoonful, Tim Buckley (and more recently No Neck Blues Band!), made his debut as a musical artist and singer on this record. Originally released on Frank Zappa's Straight label, the album never did real well, but has always remained a cult treasure due to its genre-defying song styles and early psychedelic synthesizer experiments on the title track. Written in the voice of a dying star, Henske utilized an early vocoder device for the vocal tracks which also features Moogs and Theremins. Although it's the only track to feature that effect, it seems to fit right in with the rest, as no two songs are quite alike. That might make it a hit and miss listen for those craving consistency, but those who like the more unpredictable corners of sixties music, this cult gem is well worth it.

Pan Sonic - Atomin Paluu 2xLP (Blast First Petite)

Our Review:

The un-paralleled Pan Sonic called it quits in some 10 years ago; but the Finnish avant-techno duo of Mika Vainio and Ilpo Vaisanen had a bunch of unfinished recordings that Vainio repurposed for the soundtrack to Atomin Paluu. This Finnish documentary addressed the construction of the first nuclear power plant to be built in Russia since the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. The atom – its elemental components and its capacity for tremendous energy – are common themes within Pan Sonic's blistered electronica. Pan Sonic once again cracks open the atom in their electronic crucible, offering tremendous and dynamic results. Their swaggering breakbeat techno pocks the soundtrack, made toxic with x-ray traces of Vega / Rev strategies for synth-punk minimalism and punk muscularity. Between these boisterous rhythmic tracks, Pan Sonic construct sprawlingly expansive pieces for icy constellations of pure-tone generation and desolate dronings. Both Vainio and Vaisanen have enjoyed very impressive careers in the wake of Pan Sonic, it's a true blessing to have one more set of recordings from these mighty Finns.

Jim Haynes - Electrical Injuries LP (Aussenraum)

Our Review:

California sound artist Jim Haynes composes through variable degrees of acceleration and accretion, even as his research continues to ruminate on sonic decay. You gotta build something up, before you can tear it down. Electrical Injuries furthers Haynes' actionist tendencies as the density of noise waxes and wanes with a profound sense of urgency and tension. It makes for a powerful suite that amplifies the dynamics of musique concrete techniques through the aggressive volatility of industrial / noise culture. Ice is mentioned as a source material, but that's clearly not the only thing going on here. Given the title, electricity and the mishaps of hot-wiring circuits in proximity to human body (presumably his) allude to something Frankensteinian. One can discern an infernal distortion of radio-signals, the tickings of geiger counters, various motorized pistons firing and eerie pulsations from unknowably alien, electronic beacons. The clatter and grind of Electrical Injuries doesn't really align comfortably with the SPK / TG models of grim electronic sequencing, but there's more of a rhythmic spine than found in many of Haynes' contemporaries (i.e. Kevin Drumm, Francisco Meirino, S.E.T.I.). The opening salvo cycles through a shattering of glass with its correspondent frequencies glowing white hot with a corona of atonal harmonics, and Haynes reprises this compositional paroxysm at various points throughout the album. Sinews of disquieting drone and agitated texture connect these pinnacles of noise for a vibrant if at times hostile album. Highly recommended.

Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - On The Echoing Green LP (Mexican Summer)

Our Review:

Beginning with his overt homage to lovesliescrushing on the Love Is A Stream album from 2010, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has reinvented himself as a sonic confectioner of sugar-crush drone pop. One of the two piloting guitarists for the now defunct Tarentel, Cantu-Ledesma remains an intrepid experimentalist with style and form. This was certainly the case for Tarentel which traversed the avant-rock landscapes, first soaring through post-rock crescendos of radioluminescent guitar noise akin to Mogwai and Godspeed! You Black Emperor. As the band progressed, Cantu-Lesdema was encouraging the band to embrace digital trickery, tape manipulation, unconventional instrumentation and disjointed time signatures, cross-referencing the aesthetics of Fennesz, AMM and Talk Talk. This evolution continued into his solo work which really came into its own on that aforementioned 2010 record. On The Echoing Green once again shifts things but in a more subtle manner. Pre-fab drum machine rhythms gird the mostly-instrumental songs that cycle through wistfully melodic guitar lines and equally bucolic drifts of liquid ambience.

Grouper - The Man Who Died In His Boat LP (Kranky)

Our Review:

The tracks on The Man Who Died In His Boat were recorded during the same sessions as Dragging A Dead Deer, which has long been viewed as the watershed album for Grouper's transformation into an icon of DIY drone-rock etherealism. Not surprisingly, The Man Who Died In His Boat feels like a long lost twin. While she still employs the waves of foggy reverb and layered far away voices, there is a reappearance of fully formed songs and a sheen of less-filtered clarity. Both records are informed by key childhood memories, this one by a discovery with her father of beached sailboat and their speculation about the man who disappeared sailing it. The ocean roar, the swelling waves of reverberant sound and the far away sadness of acoustic sea shanties pour throughout the release creating a moving hypnotic spell which invariably holds us helpless in its grasp. Beautiful!

Grouper - Ruins (Artist Edition) LP+CD (Yellow Electric)

Our Review:

Piano and voice. That's what we encounter in the latest incantation from Liz Harris, once again recording as Grouper. Chillingly beautiful smears from dankly shoegazing guitars, loop-station electronics, mumbled vocals, and a near constant wash of stoned introspection were the common elements of those albums of hers that captured our imagination like Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill and AIA: Dream Loss. She's eschewed pretty much all of the gauzy blur and the narcotic diffusion that runs through all of her previous albums; but the delicacy of these songs on Ruins and beguiling poetry of sadness makes this very much another fantastic Grouper album.

Harris wrote all of the material for Ruins during a residency in Portugal back in 2011. There, she made full use of an upright piano, recording these songs onto a four-track with occasional overdubs, just for an additional layer voice here and there in order to harmonize with herself. Without all of the fuzz and drone, Harris' lyrics enjoy a bit more clarity, though she has long been one to slur the syllables into a cooing gasp of pitch-perfect intoxication. Her songs arpeggiate on simple piano chords evolving the minor key repetition into secretive, plaintive lullabies, slowly tapped out to match the torpor of her voice. The album is starkly naked in the emotional fragility of these arrangements, but Harris is very much in control of the poetics calmly painting her songs in a sonic palette of rainy-day blues and greys. It's much closer to the under appreciated Mirroring collaboration that hopefully wasn't just a one-off with Tiny Vipers' Jesy Fortino. Yes, another gem from the wintery soul of Liz Harris.

This version is the second pressing for Liz's self-released art edition, which comes housed in a handsome black on white silkscreened cover (opposite of the color scheme of the first pressing), but it still includes the bonus CD of a thunderstorm field recordings.

Hermann Nitsch - 25. Aktion (Wiederaufgefuhrt) LP (Cien Fuegos)

Our Review:

Perhaps the most well-known of Vienna's Aktionists, Hermann Nitsch has produced massive participatory performance art projects, almost all of which involve an excess of pig-blood being splattered amongst the rituals involving food, sex, wine, religious iconography and other primal forces of life. As gruesome as the images can appear of an animal being disemboweled above a bound participant (often a nude woman), Nitsch has always gleefully implored these as celebratory works. So much chaos, discord and violence (implied or otherwise) lends to considerable cognitive dissonance in his work. The same goes for musical compositions that would accompany his performances. Nitsch is well versed in the holy minimalists and Fluxus based strategies of sound production. Not surprisingly, he turns these forms of sustained atonality into grotesquely malformed constructs. 25.Aktion is emblematic of the softer Nitsch's compositional style. First produced back in 1968, this recording is a documentation of a reprised performance of this particular piece re-staged in 1982. He does employ the battery of trumpeters blaring away for as long as possible, but the dense swells of chaotic tumbling rhythms and crashing noise are replaced by the languid drones from a harmonium. Since the late '60s, Nistch reclaimed the wedding gift of a harmonium to his wife producing what at one time was thought to be a 40 volume set of hour-long recordings. Here on 25.Aktion, the sensual harmonic chorales from his sustained harmonium are featured quite prominently in his composition.

Jim Haynes - Flammable Materials From Foreign Lands LP (Elevator Bath)

Our Review:

For well over a decade now, the Californian noise/drone (de)composer Jim Haynes has pursued a single-minded research into the sound of decay. Shortwave radio transmissions and convulsive motors are a few of the sources that are modulated and amplified into his psychologically tense, hauntological recordings. His 2016 album Flammable Materials From Foreign Lands rises from the eruptive strategies found in John Duncan's extrapolations of empty radio signals with parallels to be found in the mutated electro-acoustic dynamics found in contemporaries like Kevin Drumm and G*Park. One of the foreign lands in question to this flammable album is Estonia where he rummaged through abandoned Soviet-era ruins and collected disquieting shortwave signals. The other land is California with its own darkened psyche they roils beneath the mythologies of eternal sunshine. It's not so much a dialect as an accretion of static, grit and phased electro-magnetic disturbances – amplifying the neurosis and anxiety from a slow poisoning through psychological and/or environmental means. The first side of the album is pocked with convulsive crescendos which aggressively shove through Haynes' accumulated materials. The tracks rise to a boiling point, snap at the excessive pressure and collapse into a hypnotic fog. The second side is a single-sided collage of deconstructed/disembodied voice. Haynes clips and chops the mellifluous voice of an Estonian radio host (perhaps Tallinn's answer to Terri Gross?) into elemental gasps and utterances that rhythmically tick against an unsettled minimalism built from long, thin-wire recordings. Here, the strange and unsettled composition of voice and drone hauntingly resembles Alan Lamb's telegraph recordings poured into the empty spaces of Robert Ashley's Automatic Writing.

Hiss Golden Messenger - Heart Like A Levee LP (Merge)

Our Review:

M.C. Taylor has quietly been one of the best songwriters America has had on offer for the better part of 2 decades, first with the criminally under-appreciated San Francisco concern, The Court & Spark – whose 4 albums are all worth seeking out and in toto should not cost the listener more than a couple hours wages to acquire – and, for the last 8 years under the name of Hiss Golden Messenger, a group he began with his Court & Spark compatriot, Scott Hirsch, but in which Taylor has been the only constant. With Heart Like A Levee Taylor continues to mine a vein of Americana previously hit by such prospectors as Dylan, Petty, Morrison, and The Dead, fortunately Taylor displays enough songwriting prowess and lyrical strength to still come up with gold.

Heart Like A Levee finds Taylor a fully matured songwriter and recording artist, much like, say, the 90s work of Dylan and Petty, as compared to the rawer work of their previous decades. This album is far more Wildflowers than Another Side Of Bob Dylan, with crisp, clean guitars, muted horns, and everything just so. For a more contemporary comparison, Hiss Golden Messenger's latest has a lot in common with Cass McCombs' latest, showing affection for the cleaner, more focused sounds of the 70s than the raw immature emotion of the 60s. None of this is to say the new record is overproduced, it is just impeccably produced, and should garner comparisons to everything from Tupelo Honey to Primrose Green. In fact, with his somewhat recent ascendancy into the indie-rock spotlight, one could reasonably lump Hiss Golden Messenger into the current wave of nouveau Americana songwriters such as Ryley Walker, and the like if it weren't for the fact that M.C. Taylor has been confidently navigating this sort of pastoral melancholy territory since those dudes were sneaking smokes out back of the auditorium between 5th and 6th period.

Joan La Barbara - Voice Is The Original Instrument LP (Arc Light Editions)

Our Review:

When it comes to extended vocal technique, La Barbara is the queen. Not only can she boast a lengthy career as one of the top vocal performers in the avant garde and a strong resume of academic compositions, but she's even got a film credit as the voice of one of the evil baby aliens in Alien Resurrection. How many performers of her stature in academia can claim to have voiced a slimy little puppet? Not many we'd guess. The set is divided up into an "Explorations" disc and "The Music" disc, and includes her entire 1976 self-released album Voice Is The Original Instrument. The "Explorations" half is all live, and/or real time, solo voice performances. None of them use any form of processing (digital or otherwise) of the voice and as such are not just intimate, but down right claustrophobic to listen to. Reactions here in the store (from customers and staff alike) range from extreme discomfort to uncontrolled mirth. Andee said that this was the kind of stuff he liked to do as a kid. La Barbara's vocalizations range from slow hooting glissandos like a breathing exercise gone awry to feral animal-esque growls. The second disc, while including much of the same vocal techniques as the first, contains La Barbara's studio works using multi-tracks to over lay multiple overdubbings of growls and such on tape. A definite must for fans of sound poetry.

Deathprod - Imaginary Songs From Tristan Da Cunha LP (Smalltown Supersound)

Our Review:

Deathprod is the existentially bleak solo project of Helge Sten, who is also a key member of both Supersilent and Motorpsycho. In 2004, Rune Grammofon published a 4CD box-set compendium of Deathprod's work that was recorded between 1991 and 2000. Housed in an matte black box with a all black artwork and the sparest of text, this anthology presented itself as a semantic void, with nothing but the harrowing orchestrations of controlled noise and brooding atmosphere into Deathprod's oeuvre. This reissue campaign from Smalltown Supersound marks the first time any of these recordings have been on vinyl. Like before with the CD box-set, this too is enshrouded in matte black packaging.

Working with old magnetic tape recorders, hand made delay and sundry other electronic devices, Sten manipulates fragments of sound (e.g. a two note melodic interval or a final orchestral cadence) into brooding dark soundscapes, rich with overtones from feedback and often overlaid with guest performances from fellow Supersilent members. It is the very limitations of the equipment that Sten uses that become the sources for the beautiful timbres he produces: an over-saturated tape input, a primitive sampler that never reproduces the same note the same way twice or the uneven decay from primitive tape delays. Typical are tracks which blossom out from a single cell of an idea: one chord, or one blast of noise. At times Deathprod sounds almost like an attempt at recreating Thomas Koner's soundscapes using the audio palette of Maurizio Bianchi.

On Imaginary Songs From Tristan Da Cunha, Sten went so far as to record tracks on a Nagra deck, transfer them to wax cylinders and then transfer them once more to digital media. The result are authentically old and decaying tracks which are hauntingly beautiful as well. Other tracks feature deteriorating blasts of what sounds almost like a fog horn progressively decaying into grinding metal; throbbing drones and eerie female chorus, taking cues from Ligeti's Lux Aeterna and building with layers of feedback into chilling washes of sound.

Fennesz - Venice 2xLP (Touch)

Our Review:

Christian Fennesz' 2001 album Endless Summer firmly established him as one of the electronic avant-garde's greats with his delirious balance of hotwired digital glitches and a nostalgic revisitation of summery pop sensibilities. The assimilation of overloaded digital filtering technologies and guitar driven song fragments has continued to be Fennesz' strongest asset through his celebrated arrangements for David Sylvian's 2003 Blemish album and a collaborative effort with Sparklehorse. According to Asphodel's Naut Humon, Venice was almost a doomed project, as Fennesz' hard drive crashed less than a month before he needed to deliver the record to Touch. With about a quarter of the album salvageable, he scrambled to reassemble the album from memory. While it's hard to say if this time constraint benefited or detracted from his process, the album itself is stunningly good. Just as Endless Summer channelled the acid fried spirit of Brian Wilson, Venice also finds itself an album with a muse: Kevin Shields. There have always been short-circuited elements of My Bloody Valentine shot from Fennesz' tricked out guitar sound, but Venice pushes Fennesz affection for shoegaze's bucolic atmospheres and sublime melodies to the forefront with marvelous results. Each song appears to be nerve-rattlingly familiar; yet just as Endless Summer invoked Brian Wilson without ever resorting to self-conscious quotation, each of his tracks glides along the same oceanic currents authored by Slowdive, AR Kane, Ride, Loveliescrushing and The Cocteau Twins. Again, no direct references can be heard in Venice, rather Fennesz taps directly into the hopelessly romantic sentimentality of shoegazing and replicates it perfectly behind a light dusting of digital pixels. Venice stood as one of the finest electronic albums of 2004; and it's still an excellent album a decade later, now fleshed out in its 10th Anniversary vinyl edition with two short bonus tracks of pastoral, pixelated blur, "The Future Will Be Different" and "Tree", presumably recorded at the same time.

DJ Shadow - Endtroducing 2xLP (Mo Wax)

Our Review:

One of our fave albums and all-time best sellers, Josh "DJ Shadow" Davis' seminal Endtroducing debut. DJ Shadow's masterpiece is a brillant example of hip hop DJ-as-composer, sample-based songwriting, a mostly instrumental suite of songs built entirely from sounds, hooks and grooves sourced from the depths of Shadow's extensive record collection. He didn't invent the idea, of course, but he did do it better than almost anyone before (or after!) him, garnering for himself worldwide fame and heaps of deserved critical praise. It's dark, dramatic, bright, hip-hop, soul, and jazz. It is very accessible. Shadow picked cool samples (like the peculiar Swedish '60s psych-folkster Pugh Rogefeldt or a super-early bombastic b-side from Giorgio Moroder) AND also turned these samples utterly into his own, new music. Music that's groovy and moody and challenging, never all that easy to figure out, and not at all about turntablist hi-jinx or trickery, just about careful listening and the love of all kinds of old LPs!! Cut Chemist, in the liner notes, is quoted as calling DJ Shadow "The King Of Digging" and vinyl collecting/crate digging for sure is celebrated by Endtroducing, from the famous cover shot of the racks in the vast Sacramento shop simply called Records to the grooves reborn within. As Shadow himself put it: "this album reflects a lifetime of vinyl culture". He never topped it and probably never will. Not that anyone else has either!

Death And Vanilla - To Where The Wild Things Are LP (Fire)

Our Review:

Death and Vanilla should hardly be a secret anymore, as the Swedish retro-futurist outfit has catapulted their low-key releases on Hands In The Dark to the seminal British independent imprint Fire Records. Seductive retro-art-pop of sci-fi dreaminess and bachelor pad slinkiness, that's the stuff of Death And Vanilla. Their soft-as-snow production has all of the feel of an all analog recording by the Silver Apples or the United States of America, with the ghostly vocals of Marleen Nilsson rippling through the echoplex and spring reverb before settling onto the tactile magnetic tape drawing magical daylight out of the arctic dark nights. To Where The Wild Things Are doesn't seem to have anything to do with the beloved Maurice Sendak book of a very similar name. Given how much control and precision they exact over their references, what else might the title refer to? The interwoven melodies and harmonies for Nilsson's voice, those analogue synths, and the bell-tone tremolo guitars latch onto a deluge of impeccably written drifting waltzes, motorik Kraut rhythms, and jaunty beat-pop grooves. We're not alone in seeing the obvious connection between Death And Vanilla and lamentably late Broadcast; and the Swedes are clearly channeling the ghosts of Broadcast in their studio sessions as seance, but there's much that Death And Vanilla brings to the table that's their own. One of the most charming pop records of 2015.

G.H. - Housebound Demigod 2xLP (Modern Love)

Our Review:

Gary Howell's Housebound Demigod marks his debut recording, though the British electronic musician has a wealth of recordings over the past decade or so in collaboration with Andy Stott and Miles Whittaker (best known as half of Demdike Stare). A murky spatialization of low-end theory carries from those known quantities of Stott and Whittaker into the black-hole gravitational pull imparted by Howell. The citations of black metal and concrete techno from the press release locate the album's existential bleak aspirations and hollowed-out nihilism. This album is undeniably heavy and brooding in atmosphere with the speed and velocity of black metal nowhere to be found. Howell's tarpit BPMs instead mirror the compositional elongation and bottomed-out frequencies that Sunn O))) delivered through guitar amps and monk robes. It makes for a devastating sound, one that has been rumored to deliberately include a location where the needle will jump. Admittedly, we are reviewing this via a digital files as the vinyl is sealed, and we can't substantiate that rumor. Deconstructed drum programming and highly reductivist vocal cut-ups intersperse between Howell's controlled frequency rumblings. Housebound Demigod is a noble piece of abstract electronica, recapitulating the slow crawl techno of Raime and the signal eradication program of Kevin Drumm's isolationist works.

Country Teasers - Secret Weapon Revealed At Last (aka Full Moon Empty Sports Bag) LP (In the Red)

Our Review:

This new Country Teasers album – also mysteriously known as Full Moon Empty Sportsbag – might not be everybody's cup of tea/moonshine/battery acid. There's barked, snarled, moaned and mumbled vocals not unlike what you might expect from your old cantankerous uncle after he's had a bit of a tipple. The music is made to match – ill-tempered, dissonant and trashy, and very high on treble. Garage-y organ drones hang ominously like rain-soaked bedsheets on a clothesline. Slack guitars skreee and hang loosely like the gristly remnants clinging to the bones of a bbq rib fest. Some folks thought this was Ween doing another hillbilly romp (check out "Please Stop Fucking Each Other" – no, they're not too concerned with pleasantries, are they?!). Bristlingly raw and ramshackle in both sound and visuals. You can see the magic marker inking fix-it job on the front cover as well as the pixelated and bled-through text on the back. This has drawn some very emphatically positive in-store responses (one customer said "I love this! it's a fucking mess!") as well as some incredibly icy ones. So consider yourself forewarned, this may put either a grumpy scowl or a gleeful grin on your face.