While it definitely boasted some of the year's best cover art (I am a sucker for shadowy figures wielding curved blades), Implode's 2011 Kranky debut (Black Earth) occupied a fairly unappealing niche for me, offering up a lot of bleak, slow-motion shoegaze with too much processing and too few hooks.  Two years later, Recurring Dream offers more great cover art and more brooding effects pedal abuse, but the band have definitely grown quite a bit better at what they do.  It is still a bit of a slog to make it through the entire album, but the handful of highlights are great enough to make it worth the effort.
Hotter than July. This week's episode has plenty of fresh new music by Marie Davidson, Kim Gordon, Mabe Fratti, Guided By Voices, Holy Tongue meets Shackleton, Softcult, Terence Fixmer, Alan Licht, pigbaby, and Eiko Ishibashi, plus some vault goodies from Bombay S Jayashri and Pete Namlook & Richie Hawtin. Solstice moon in West Midlands, UK photo by James. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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In a very real sense, The Watchers is an endearing improbable album that captures a magical and ephemeral union between two like-minded virtuosos playing together for the first time.  The catch, unfortunately, is that the magic was something of a closed-loop: while the two musicians flowed together as seamlessly and intuitively as old friends, the end product basically sounds like a rough sketch for an unfinished James Blackshaw album (albeit one where Blackshaw himself is often perversely relegated to the background).
This single is a particularly divergent release in a career where divergence is rapidly becoming the norm, combining (arguably) the least Om-like song in their entire discography with Al Cisneros' recent fascination with dub reggae.  I expected the result to sound a lot like Al's solo dub debut from last year ("Dismas"), but this is something completely new altogether.  The reason for that is that Cisneros handed over the controls to seasoned British roots duo Alpha & Omega.  The piece is likable in its own way (once I got past reeling from my subverted expectations), but I suspect many Om fans will find that this detour is not for them.
German artist Marsen Jules has been working in sparse, subtle worlds of ambient sound for over a decade, and this single song album follows that template. Living up to its title, throughout the 47 minutes there is a constant change of light and dark, hues and saturations that never stay still.
As half of the black metal influenced duo Menace Ruine, Geneviève Beaulieu gives the project its unique sound via her distinct, idiosyncratic voice that alternates between dramatic and understated. On the debut of her side project Preterite (with multi instrumentalist James Hamilton), the metal is scaled back and the more folk elements are pushed forward, but in a way that defies expectations based on that simple description.
The second solo single from Sleep/Om’s Al Cisneros continues from where its predecessor left off. Unfortunately, this means there has been little progression in this new creative approach for Cisneros. With any luck, these tracks will eventually turn into fully-fledged works as the music is nice but, for now at least, it is of curiosity value rather than an essential work from a man who has made an awful lot of essential records.
I think it is finally safe to say that I do not understand Dominick Fernow at all, as I am completely mystified as to: 1.) why this was released as a Prurient album, and 2.) how it somehow managed to avoid release for two long years (given Fernow's singularly relentless release schedule). Although it was recorded at the same time as 2011's  excellent (but polarizing) Bermuda Drain, Through the Window dispenses with noise almost entirely to indulge a somewhat misguided fascination with house techno.  The result is undeniably more accessible than everything else recorded under the Prurient banner, but accessibility is not what I am generally hoping for with Prurient and these songs are significantly less compelling than Fernow's other dance flirtations with Cold Cave and Vatican Shadow.
Benoit Pioulard's latest release makes a subdued, melancholy journey through watery pop. Peerless at his best moments, Hymnal is very nearly nothing but, showcasing a keenness for murky left-field songwriting that ought to go nowhere. Yet it all feels very direct and focused, very familial. Thomas Meluch probes discomfort, harmony, and unique production techniques to assemble music which flows naturally even if it takes no easy path to be heard.
On this dense little 7" from the Norwegian quintet of guitar, bass, drums, synth and tuba, one half of the improvisations make for a slow burning pandemonium, while the other removes all barriers and just freaks out, with both songs excelling in their attempts. It is sloppy, noisy, and insane, which is the best possible outcome for this sort of work.
Nostalgia, and catering to it, can be a dangerous thing. There are of course exceptions, such as the recent Swans tours and albums and Wire's own reappearance in the early part of the 2000s, but too often it is fraught with artists clinging shamefully to old glories with little artistic merit. Which is one of the things that makes this ostensibly new Wire album somewhat hard to peg down. Building upon material that was previously performed live, but overall unfinished from the post-154, pre-first breakup era, Change Becomes Us builds itself upon these and puts a Bruce Gilbert-less sheen to everything, with mixed results.
