David Berman and company's latest album retains the witty lyrics and tongue-in-cheek humor from previous efforts and continues the slow gravitation toward sunnier themes. While it doesn't have the immediate impact of its predecessor Tanglewood Numbers, its subtle charms ultimately bring it near that album's achievements.

This noise rock trio from Providence, Rhode Island, uses massive amounts of distortion over meaty bass, bruising drums, guttural screams, and squealing electronics to make sludgy music fit for exorcisms. Vicious slabs of aggression make this a visceral yet surprisingly enjoyable album.

Our somewhat semi-regular feature covering the newest dance singles goes full-length this week, reviewing new albums by Hercules and Love Affair, Syclops, Girl Talk and Ladytron.

Oddly enough only intended for the Japanese market, any fan of either of the projects included here should either be praying for a local label to distribute this, or just go the import route, because both are at the top of their game here.  Envy continues their shoegaze influenced post rock sound, while Jesu adopts the more electronic side to his sound that was, coincidentally enough, last featured this well on the split with another TRL act, Eluvium.

Paul Dickow's beat-less excursions share much with his more rhythmic compositions, but unfettered by time signatures his music sounds all the more exotic and mercurial.

It’s good to hear that some folks who are doing the whole "drone metal" thing are remembering where the roots of the sound are, as opposed to simply trying to ape the "big names" of the scene. This relatively new Greek band definitely wears their influence on their sleeves, creating this homage to the Church of Black Sabbath and the holy scripture of Earth’s 2.

On this album, Steven Wilson uses sounds made from Steve Hubback's metal sculptures to make underwater music. Presented in a lavish package that includes a DVD-Audio disc along with a standard CD, a perfect-bound book with photographs, and a sturdy slipcase, it's without a doubt a beautiful artifact. It is a shame, then, that these two tracks don't quite live up to their presentation.

Prolific artists Andrew Liles and Daniel Menche combine forces to tackle the subject of flies. Divided into four tracks named for the stages of a fly's life cycle, Liles and Menche blend their talents in a heady mix of drones and subtle textures, with vaguely melodic underpinnings. The album has enough unpredictability to make it both mystifying and alluring while still playing to the artists' respective strengths.

DJ Spooky's brand of audio-collage transcends his labors as archaeologist and cuckoo. With dozens of sound sources including Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Raymond Scott, Sun Ra, and Morton Subotnick, this companion to his Sound Unbound book balances theory with swinging music.

At one time, California pop-punk band The Mae Shi sold mixtape CD-Rs of their chopped-up favorite songs at gigs. They have certainly progressed from those days, and HLLLYH is their fourth album to date. Here, they shower us with their brand of rapid bounce-along pop-punk, full of catchy melodic hooks and string-breaking guitar riffs, in a concerted effort to bounce, grin, and charm their chaotic way into our hearts.

Jérôme Chassagnard is one half of French electronic/ambient act Ab Ovo, along with Régis Baillet. As a solo act, though, he has released two previous albums on Ant-Zen, 2005's Empreintes and last year's Mouvements. His latest, (f)light, highlights his eclectic mix of styles and influences, from ambient to electronica, and from hip-hop to drum n bass. This third album, this time on the German Hymen label, underscores Chassagnard's ability to blend all these disparate styles together into one seamless and effortlessly soaring whole.

Usually I’d imagine something coming out on the Hanson label to be a bit more obtuse and rough than what is presented on this album.  Instead of leaning to the noiser end of the spectrum, the two side-long tracks here instead define themselves via classic analog synth drone that is so thick and sustained that it almost becomes tangible, yet never mundane.

The content of this CD was a surprise. From the sleeve art, the record label and the picture of the band on the back, I was expecting harsh noise. Instead my ears were greeted with the most wonderful electronic murmurs. The two pieces here set my mind adrift on an ocean of warm synthesiser undercurrents and waves of gentle guitar. The feelings this music elicits bring to mind the sheer beauty of Stars of the Lid but with a stronger, denser sound.

Fluorescent Grey's second full-length creates beat-driven collages out of electronics and found sounds. Each of the nine tracks has a distinct theme and methodology. Yet despite the variety of styles found here, I still found this album to be missing something vital.

Aaron Martin uses a mind-boggling number of instruments and objects both exotic and traditional on his latest album of introspective instrumentals. Because of the vast array of tools at his disposal, no two tracks sound alike. What unites them is the fact that almost every song is made of delicate, airy passages that refuse to be grounded.

The Baltimore-based duo of Jane & Josh came together as Abiku like some unstoppable galactic collision. Their brand of short, sharp, raw, and unpolished explosions of punk noisiness, interspersed with a few longer expositions and more experimental drone-style pieces, is in itself a kind of joyful collision: a place where keyboards, guitars, and rhythm machines smash together faster and more powerfully than sub-atomic particles in an accelerator. Their latest series of detonations, the two-part CD set of Right and Left, showered me with all kinds of radiative shrapnel, at times threatening to melt my ears and at other times soothing the heat inflicted by the wounds.

This is only the third album in eleven years from Austin's Experimental Aircraft, after 1999’s self titled debut on Sleepy Bunny (and which was subsequently re-released a year later by Devil in the Woods Records) and Love for the Last Time (Rollerderby) in 2002. Here, once again, the Texas quartet engineer a collection of hazy and melodically high flying, brightly-lit guitar-based indie-rock songs, aided and lifted in the main by Rachel Staggs’ (Eau Claire, Static Silence) warm yet slightly distant voice (but which is yet shot through with a steely strength even so) which floats serenely above a landscape of strong noisy reverb-soaked guitar lines backed by a dependably solid rhythm section.

Another month and yet another release from Anthony Mangicapra, this time a perfect little EP of unsettling ambiences. Together, the three sinister sounding pieces on this release are a slight change of course for his Hoor-Paar-Kraat endeavour. There is less emphasis on collage work and more on developing potent drones and this approach has seriously paid off.

21 year old Olafur Arnalds wrote some of this debut when he was 15. His controlled pieces for piano, strings, and occasional electronics will have fans of Max Richter and Johann Johannsson as happy as dreaming dogs having their bellies tickled.

Released in both CD and 12” vinyl formats, with five bonus cuts on the CD, Dream Island Laughing Language has a happy homemade intensity blending sounds gleaned from natural instruments such as bells, bowls, flutes, mini- dulcimer, mbira, hands, rubber bands and...rocks, as well as those derived from cassettes and computers.