Zach Condon has been hailed as a genius and practically drooled upon since Gulag Orkestar was released. He deserves it in part, any 19 year old musician with this kind of talent deserves to be recognized for his achievements. With A Hawk and a Hacksaw in tow, Condon has written one of the most attractive, if flawed, pop records of 2006.
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A man of extremes, Kirkegaard’s last Touch record was noisescapes recorded in the Earth’s crust. Four Rooms is a record of silent feedback, silence played back into more silence, in four rooms in Chernobyl, Ukraine.
Even though this second album from the trio of Jennifer and Laura Rogers and bassist Miyuki Furtado doesn’t cover a lot of new territory, they still manage to get a lot of mileage out of their material with an album of energetic, anthemic rock songs.
Evocations of past albums litter this new EP. Plangent piano sonatas filled one album, alchemic wisps of water in air another, and submarine drones a third. When I Live by the Garden is not simply an omnibus compilation of past works, but rather a recombination of efforts showing how past works were not simply stand-alone products but all part of a larger concept.
Frequent collaborators Tom de Geeter, aka Siaz, and Marcus Graap team up again for their first album as Zucchini Drive. Assisted by a different producer on every track and a revolving door of musicians, this smorgasbord of talent concocts hip hop cuisine that’s uniformly good but rarely excellent.
I expected more from an album that not only advertises sexuality, but also has referential song titles like "Tubular Belles" and "Moi Non Plus." Netherlands-based Trespassers W talk a lot about sex, use plenty of risque language to describe sex toys and sexual acts alike, but none of it sounds very arousing.
Flowing Seasons is the solo debut from Luca Di Mira of Italy’s Giardini di Miro. At times orchestral, beat-driven, or ambient, the emphasis is on lush beauty, a quality these mellow songs rarely lack.
Ielasi’s eponymous second Häpna release doesn’t come as the refining or summarizing work one might expect from the prolific artist and collaborator. Despite being his most technologically demanding work yet, its compositions are more linear and inviting than ever before, and sonically the record is beautifully, meticulously meshed.
This 'album' crams 13 songs into the shortest long player since the early days of Napalm Death. Each track is a blistering blast of heavy metal mayhem for the sampler generation, and a salute to short attention spans.
