Phill Niblock is an artist that, despite his penchant of expansive, subtle and nuanced recordings, always seems to make every release an epic one. His fifth album for the label (hence the title) is yet again another double disc one that holds only five compositions. Although it takes a conceptually similar approach to those albums, namely Niblock's use of layered instrument drones with microtonal adjustments to pitch, it still has a different feel when placed alongside his other releases.
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Vitiello and Berg have collaborated before on 2009's The Gorilla Variations. Like that work, the two improvise together, Vitiello primarily on guitar and Berg on clarinet and vocals. However, due to heavy amounts of processing and editing, only a ghost of untreated instruments shine through, resulting in an album rife with sadness and longing, but never in an overly bleak or depressing way.
The Stranger’s second album sounds very different from his 2008 release Bleaklow. Whereas that debut was doused with a sense of trekking over ancient stones and moors of Northern England, this record feels much more interior, claustrophobic and urban. The rhythms boom and snake through a threatening, shattered, dystopia like rats crawling through pipes beneath a recently evacuated building.
An entire album's worth of field recordings can be a daunting proposition. As an added instrument, they often are mixed into other albums all the time to great effect, but the idea of a full album of nothing else can be intimidating, unless it involves Chris Watson.  However, this five artist/one track performance works splendidly, emphasizing the varying elements of the genre and staying compelling throughout its nearly 18 minute duration.
A six year absence means nothing to Melt-Banana. Fetch is a minor refinement of past efforts in the band's 20 year career, unraveling over a bevy of short, aggressive songs to reveal itself as either an irreverently noisy pop album, or an intermittently poppy noise rock album, depending on your point of view. They have a knack for straddling the fence between kitsch and the vaguely obscene, and that grey area has never seemed so lived-in and comfortable as on their newest work.
Kid606 has never quite fit into a particular narrative as an artist, which I have always felt was the strongest attribute to surviving as an electronic producer in the flooded market of similarly supertalented electronic producers. Equally brooding, romantic, humored, and flat-out destructive, Miguel De Pedro makes no effort to coordinate releases, or to eschew the fleeting moods and odd moments that fill any life of a grown adult and derive inspiration from any and all of them. Happiness is another one of his "heart on sleeve" albums, full of airy downtempo compositions similar to P.S. I Love You or Resilience, which means that fans of the softer end of his catalog will probably love it and fans of hyperactive scene destroying genius nonsense (myself included) will mostly only tolerate it.
Mixing a fistful of covers with the band’s own original songs, this compilation shows the group at the peak of its messy adolescent period (which they fortunately never grew out of). Everything that made The Cramps one of the most perfect rock groups of all time is here; they were primitive, sexy and gloriously out of time with everyone but themselves. Their music penetrates my brain like a bolt of electricity from Dr. Frankenstein’s lab and I don’t think these songs have ever sounded any better.
