Jenny Hval takes a morbid pleasure in using her voice to provoke discomfort on her second full-length release. From the opening lyrics of the title track to the arcing croon of "The Seer," Innocence Is Kinky lives its title through a bravery bordering on refuge in audacity. It seems to be a defense based in false naïveté, where Hval's surrealistic persona adds a unique flourish to a collection of unabashedly smart and well constructed songs on gender and sexuality. As the record unfolds, this keen irreverence pays off. Innocence Is Kinky reveals itself as one of the better singer/songwriter albums of 2013, hiding a deeply powerful message under the false guise of shock.
Three new episodes for your listening enjoyment. After two weeks off, we are back with three brand new episodes: three hours / 36 tunes. Episode 697 features music from Beak>, Brothertiger, Kate Carr, Gnod, Taylor Deupree, FIN, Church Andrews & Matt Davies, Ortrotasce, Bill MacKay, Celer, Kaboom Karavan, and Ida. Episode 698 boasts a lineup of tracks from Susanna, Nonpareils, KMRU, A Place To Bury Strangers, final, Coti K., Dalton Alexander, Akio Suzuki, The Shadow Ring, Filther, Aaron Dilloway, and Ghost Dubs. Episode 699 is bursting at the seams with jams from Crash Course In Science, Chrystabell and David Lynch, Machinedrum, Ekin Fil, Finlay Shakespeare, Actress, Mercury Rev, Dave Brown / Jason Kahn, øjeRum, d'Eon, Jeremy Gignoux, and Shellac. Mountain photo taken in Japan by Chris. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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For its seventh and final volume, Sub Rosa’s mighty experimental music compilation has been expanded to a triple CD. At this point, I would have thought that all the good stuff would have been covered but label boss and Anthology curator Guy Marc Hinant has managed to uncover more startling curiosities from the last 150 years to make this series go out with a bang (and a drone and a blast of white hot feedback).
I have been casually following Benjamin Finger's career ever since being completely blindsided by his hallucinatory 2009 masterpiece Woods of Broccoli and I have found it quite perplexing to observe: Broccoli never got even a fraction of the acclaim it deserved and its beat-driven 2011 follow-up (For You, Sleepsleeper) seems to have completely disappeared without a trace.  In a perfect world, this latest effort would redress that inequity (Nerves is Finger's first release on a US label), but Benjamin's current aesthetic has taken quite a curious and challenging turn.
Daniel Crokaert’s Mystery Sea label challenges artists to produce music inspired by and infused with the 
The word "epic" has lost all meaning due to overuse and misapplication in popular culture. Thus when something fits the true definition of that word, such as Images of the Dream and Death, it almost seems pointless to use that as a descriptor. However, spread across three LPs and attempting to capture the never-ending struggle between the two opposing forces of good and evil, with often terrifying results, there is not a more apt term.
Even though 12k head Taylor Deupree has made it a point in recent years to focus on face-to-face collaborations (as opposed to file swapping), the two most recent products of this have their own distinct sense of isolation and loneliness to them. With Cameron Webb's Seaworthy, it is literal: the record perfectly captures the feeling of being alone in the woods with only an acoustic guitar present. With legendary artist Ryuichi Sakamoto, it is more of an implied, intimate and hushed loneliness via muted tones and extended ambience.
Troller's debut album is the perfect example of the imagery not matching the music. The late 1980s metal woman on the cover and script font screams some sort of early thrash revival, when the album contained is actually a lush, bleak piece of electronics heavy death rock from this Austin, Texas trio. The result is a disc that definitely feels rooted in that era of smeared mascara and smoke machines, but with a clearly modern day sensibility.
Splitting most of his time between his blackened southern rock behemoth Horseback and playing guitar for the alternative country Mount Moriah, Jenks Miller has not had much time to record true solo work. Spirit Signal is technically his third solo release, following Approaching the Invisible Mountain and the intentionally difficult Zen Automata Volume One, and is comparatively a more fleshed out album in the traditional sense, while still retaining a distinct stripped down, truly solo sound.
