brainwashed

New music is due from Tom Carter and Pat Murano, Bloodgroup, Guido, Felix Kubin, while old music is due from Brett Smiley, The Durutti Column, Ascension, and King Tubby.

While I have admittedly become a fairly serious Legendary Pink Dots fan again over the last few years, I am still far from obsessive and their voluminous 2013 output was just way too much for me to keep up with.  Consequently, I thought it was probably safe to let this limited, tour-only "sister album" to The Gethsemane Option slip by me.  I was wrong, of course (and I should know better by now).  While Code Noir is not nearly as ambitious or epic as Gethsemane, it happily avoids almost all of the indulgences and excesses that plagued its sister and is much better (and more listenable) for it.

A six year absence means nothing to Melt-Banana. Fetch is a minor refinement of past efforts in the band's 20 year career, unraveling over a bevy of short, aggressive songs to reveal itself as either an irreverently noisy pop album, or an intermittently poppy noise rock album, depending on your point of view. They have a knack for straddling the fence between kitsch and the vaguely obscene, and that grey area has never seemed so lived-in and comfortable as on their newest work.

Vitiello and Berg have collaborated before on 2009's The Gorilla Variations.  Like that work, the two improvise together, Vitiello primarily on guitar and Berg on clarinet and vocals.  However, due to heavy amounts of processing and editing, only a ghost of untreated instruments shine through, resulting in an album rife with sadness and longing, but never in an overly bleak or depressing way.

The Stranger’s second album sounds very different from his 2008 release Bleaklow. Whereas that debut was doused with a sense of trekking over ancient stones and moors of Northern England, this record feels much more interior, claustrophobic and urban. The rhythms boom and snake through a threatening, shattered, dystopia like rats crawling through pipes beneath a recently evacuated building.

While Richard Skelton has long been one of my favorite artists, he has not released anything new in a while that has captivated me quite like he did the first time that I heard him.  That is not to say that he has experienced any sort of creative decline or anything, but he is definitely an artist who tends do one specific thing brilliantly, which regrettably tends to yield diminishing returns with increased familiarity.  With this follow-up to their Wolf Notes collaboration, however, Skelton and Autumn Richardson alchemically transform some of their previous recordings into something quite new and unexpected.

Phill Niblock is an artist that, despite his penchant of expansive, subtle and nuanced recordings, always seems to make every release an epic one.  His fifth album for the label (hence the title) is yet again another double disc one that holds only five compositions.  Although it takes a conceptually similar approach to those albums, namely Niblock's use of layered instrument drones with microtonal adjustments to pitch, it still has a different feel when placed alongside his other releases.

Chondritic Sound label head Greh Holger initially began work as a harsh noise artist, but like many in that field, his tastes and art has changed and evolved, and on this pair of new releases that is completely evident.  With both his synth pop project Pure Ground becoming a tighter band and his solo noise guise Hive Mind displaying even greater compositional tactics, he is definitely at the top of his game.

Kid606 has never quite fit into a particular narrative as an artist, which I have always felt was the strongest attribute to surviving as an electronic producer in the flooded market of similarly supertalented electronic producers. Equally brooding, romantic, humored, and flat-out destructive, Miguel De Pedro makes no effort to coordinate releases, or to eschew the fleeting moods and odd moments that fill any life of a grown adult and derive inspiration from any and all of them. Happiness is another one of his “heart on sleeve” albums, full of airy downtempo compositions similar to P.S. I Love You or Resilience, which means that fans of the softer end of his catalog will probably love it and fans of hyperactive scene destroying genius nonsense (myself included) will mostly only tolerate it.

An album presented in two distinct movements, one on each side of the LP, Olivia Block's latest work at first seems like two diametrically opposed pieces, but are thematically, if not evidently from the sound, tied to one another.  Based partially on the idea of presentation, both in the form of musical performance and in the sociological perception of the self, Karren has conceptual depth, but is captivating even stripped of that fact.