Tom Carter made a revealing statement in his Eye interview, claiming that Charalambides has always been a fairly direct band. Whether they sound mysterious or not, returning to their material with this in mind has been an eye opener. On Charalambides' latest record, the band sounds more confident than ever, directing their energy into a powerful piece of musicianship, passion, and vision. and also recording what happens to be their best album to date.
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David Goodman was the bassist in the Boston band Lockgroove who was taken over and replaced by Dave Doom, traversed the northeast, gathering sounds and, unlike every academic sound gathering world traveler, has woven a fun and diverse pop/post-pop album instead of some boring bit of stuffy nonsense. Munchy the Bear is one of the most fresh and original debut albums I've ever heard.
Jonas Munk is a talented musician, producer, and texturalist. As Manual, his recordings are warm, the guitar hums are deep, and the sounds of waves and wind chimes are dreamy and picturesque like a summer day on the beach with the hot sun beating down and a cool, cleansing sea breeze gently passing through. All it needs, however is a hook.
Electro-acoustic ventures will either sound warm, welcoming, and exciting from the start or they will be colder and less appealing. Cold, approximated experiments often yield the latter for me, drawing more yawns than squeals of excitement. Gregg Kowalsky's effort is a balance between auditory masturbation and consistent hammering; if the music doesn't yield to his desires, Kowalsky just tries to pound it into happy submission.
With this release, the Numero Group has managed to achieve perfection. The music consists of 14 songs by as many artists, all folky females, whose homemade records were so limited that it’s a miracle that somebody was able to compile this many gems in one place. The crowning achievement for Numero is that they finally included in their deluxe booklet a page devoted to each artist with an accompanying image.
Deep City was birthed in academia, with its founders being various teachers and administrators in the Miami-Dade public school system. Like a number of record labels, Deep City had a house band, who would back various singers and soloists. For their house band, the Deep City crew had the brilliant idea to use Florida A&M University’s pep band!
After almost two years and another incarnation of the band, the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. returns with a tour and a new album. I was wary upon hearing of the reformation if only because the group had showed signs of fatigue since the departure of Cotton Casino. However, it seems that the time off has served them well. Not only is this album a welcome return to form, but also some of the tracks exceed this incarnation’s past accomplishments, rivaling their past output with stylistic variations that haven’t been heard in years.
As the sticker on the cover warns, this version of Acid Mothers Temple is neither The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. nor The Cosmic Inferno. In fact, this is the first Acid Mothers Temple album without the group’s founder Kawabata Makoto in the line-up. Rather, this is a new band altogether formed by Magic Aum Gigi, who has appeared on a few previous Acid Mothers albums, and includes two other musicians to complete the “punk blues” trio. I was particularly interested in what a non-Makoto Acid Mothers album would sound like, and ultimately learned how much his presence adds.
Sounding like a rock band that wants to score the next David Lynch movie, Orbit Service craft a handful of songs that start promisingly, but only lead to disappointment. The marriage of science fiction, psychedelic drugs, and grim detective story that composes most Songs of Eta Carinae is bled dry of any tension and meaning half through the record and by then the music has become an endurance test instead of an entertaining listen.
As well as being one of the best looking pieces of picture disc vinyl I think I’ve ever seen this is a record thick with atmosphere. Matt 'MV' Valentine and his collaborators melt distinct moods into strands for a journey that goes from hash den to wasteland. This is the best thing Valentine and his regular collaborator Erika Elder have ever put their names to.
