With a more than slight line up change (the swapping of their current drummer for their old drummer and the addition of the inimitable Joe Preston on bass), Athens’ finest are back with a new album. Although not their strongest to date, they continue to walk a unique path in the world of metal with perhaps only the Melvins meeting them at the odd intersection.

The first solo full-length from Parts & Labor singer Dan Friel is filled with electronic pop instrumentals built around distorted beats and blistering melodies. Concise and catchy, it is hard not to get swept away by the enthusiasm and energy flowing from these boisterous tracks.

As the world of Current 93 is in the midst of rumblings announcing the forthcoming album Anok Pe: Aleph at Hallucinatory Mountain, this new CDEP was released at recent shows, both a stopgap and a preview of future iterations. The good news for those who weren't bowled over by Black Ships Ate the Sky is that Birth Canal Blues is quite different indeed, and represents a new direction for David Tibet and company.

The first proper Nurse With Wound full-length to come along in quite a while is an album-length exploration of the exotica, kitschy swing and cutout-bin jazz genres that have long been an audio fetish for Steven Stapleton. On paper, the idea sounds great. In practice, Huffin' Rag Blues is sometimes interesting, sometimes laborious, and for a longtime Nurse With Wound fan such as me, largely a disappointment.

Mogwai's re-mastered debut is an intoxicating mix of repetition, slowly emerging tunes, and violent crescendos. When we add in their use of conversational voices, dark humor, and a penchant for anonymity they resemble (at the risk of sacrilege) early-mid period Pink Floyd.

Windy Weber (of Windy & Carl) tried to release her latest recording on Kranky before releasing it through Blue Flea and Kenedik, but the folks over at Kranky rejected it because it sounded like the sort of thing Nurse with Wound fans would enjoy. This is a crushing and feverish record miles away from Weber's previous work. With Warren Defever helping out, I Hate People sounds absolutely hostile and is one of the darkest things I've heard this year.

It’s cliché to say, but realistically, the idea of paying taxes to a government and how said money becomes allocated is a definite part of the human condition in most societies.  Nations have been built, nations have crumbled, revolutions have been sparked, all based on the people paying their government to do things that they may absolutely not support.  It is no surprise then that when Aranos takes on this all too familiar topic he does so at a roots level that eschews his sonic manipulations for a set of folk protest songs.

Diametrically opposite of the other recent Aranos album, Tax, here is a sprawling 65-minute track of studio processing and electronics wizardry.  Different by no means inferior, however, and I would characterize this as a more complex work that has many layers to examine.

In 1971, members of UK group Mighty Baby and a few Californian friends made visits to Fez and Meknes that left a profound and lasting impression. Converting to Sufism upon their return to London, they recorded and released an album as The Habibiyya, or the followers of spiritual teacher Muhammad ibn al-Habib. The resulting music disarms expectation with its reverence, beauty, and sincerity.

For Sublime Frequencies' latest musical tour, Geoff Hawryluk and Alan Bishop set their sights on Myanmar, formerly known as Burma. As highlighted in recent new stories about their flooding disaster, Myanmar's government keeps a pretty tight grip on what comes into and leaves the country. With that in mind, I was surprised at how much Western influence is discernible on some of the selections here.

Peter Broderick joins the cast of young contemporary multi-instrumentalists who create evocative classically-tinged minimal music with his debut full-length on Type. Delivered is score music for any day.

Nina Kernicke is not a composer concerned with bombast. Her already developed (and superb) atmospheres and sinuous melodies are joined on her first full-length by a newly acquired sense of patience and interconnectedness. One song at a time, Kernicke assembles a thriller of a record that triumphs because of its unhurried development and thickly amassed tension.

Following last year's interstellar transmissions as part of the collaborative duo Echospace, the venerated American techno producer touches down on Planet Earth, immersing himself in eerily lush soundscapes inspired by cityscapes and punctuated by steady rhythms.  Simultaneously expansive and claustrophobic, his latest captures the duality of the modern metropolis and conveys its essence over ten absolutely gorgeous compositions.

Whoever decided not to run a limited reissue of this album on 8-Track should be flogged to death by hot chicks in hot pants using hot fuzzy dice. Jade Stone's 1977 self-release looks like it was born in a bargain bin but sounds well weird. It's hard to decide if it's a minor classic or obnoxious nonsense.

Besides running the prolific Crouton label, Jason Mueller has also been extremely busy working on his own music this year (this is his eighth release on Table of the Elements this year, that says quite a bit!).  This collaborative release with Jason Kahn shows both artists heavily affecting their percussion far beyond what it originally sounded like, in addition to a bit of cassette tape and analog synth.

Given that the band has maintained a staunchly absurdist and secretive presence online, matched with the typically useless but nonetheless entertaining blurb on the Load Records website, it's hard to know anything about these guys other than a: they obviously have a sense of humor and b: they also love loud noisy rhythms.

There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that had not Death In June come along way back in the '80s, then today's martial/neo-folk scene would never have existed, spawning as it has numerous similar-sounding acts since that time; the same could probably be said of Boyd Rice in the 'industrial' scene, both as himself and NON. Plowing much the same furrow then it was perhaps inevitable that these two would eventually collaborate and indeed this they did back in 1996 along with John Murphy and others, recording as Scorpion Wind—and back then this album was released with the title Heaven Sent. Now, 12 years later, NERUS, the American division of the New European Recordings label, has seen fit to re-issue a remastered and renamed version of the album.

As part of Tzadik's ongoing Composer series, this album highlights the many sides to Maja Ratkje's approach to sound. Ranging from her vocal work to her manipulation of recorded sound and all the way up (or down depending on your views) to her writing for other musicians. The versatility and flair she employs throughout this album, and indeed her career, is staggering. Even within a piece she shows more originality than many composers in a lifetime.

The span of this Irish composer's recorded works encompasses 30 odd years, having released something on the order of 25 albums (including an LP, Rapid Eye Movements, on Steven Stapleton's United Dairies in 1981), in addition to creating scores of commissioned works for theater (Doyle is a co-founder, along with Olwen Fouere, of the Operating Theatre group) and others. The Ninth Set is the third and final volume in his major work Passades, which Doyle worked on between the years 2002 and 2007, composed as an accompaniment to a wordless Operating Theatre production with the music performing the role of the text.

The Cryptic Corporation continues its reissue campaign on Mute records with two classic releases from the late '70s. Not only that but Ralph have also released a compilation of outtakes from the group's "storyteller" output. Needless to say, the Mute reissues are absolutely essential (and they are beautiful in the hardback book format that is now standard for Residents releases on Mute) and the Ralph compilation is great but maybe not as much interest to casual Residents fans.