Motion Sickness of Time Travel's Rachel Evans is having a very Emeralds-esque year, unleashing an impressive slew of excellent (and generally pretty limited) releases under a variety of guises. This particular one is her first full-length collaboration with her husband, Nova Scotian Arms' Grant Evans, and it unexpectedly avoids using her characteristic reverb-heavy vocals much at all.  That seems like it should be a significant handicap, but it apparently wasn't, as Grant and Rachel have created a beautifully melancholy and subtly psychedelic ambient opus.
Give us an hour, we'll give you music to remember. This week we bring you an episode with brand new music from Softcult, Jim Rafferty, karen vogt, Ex-Easter Island Head, Jon Collin, James Devane, Garth Erasmus, Gary Wilson, and K. Freund, plus some music from the archives from Goldblum, Rachel Goswell, Roy Montgomery. Rubber ducks and a live duck photo from Matthew in the UK. Get involved: subscribe, review, rate, share with your friends, send images!
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After several years of limited-release, home-recorded solo recordings, Sean Ragon's fascinating neo-folk/post-punk project has finally made its formal debut as an actual band.  While deeply flawed at times, its unusual amalgamation of paganism, acoustic instrumentation, raw power, and wild-eyed intensity can be quite electrifying when it hits the mark.
According to major news stations, approximately 3% of America's population was convinced the rapture might occur on May 21, 2011, due to the prophecy of a Christian evangelist, radio personality, and madman. A day later, and the apocalypse hasn't come—surprise!—which means you still have a chance to hear Bill Callahan's latest, aptly-named album before the world actually ends.
In a recent interview, Kyle Bobby Dunn told Fracture Compound that he heard "the truth" in his favorite music, a truth that he associates with the "brutal honest beauty" of certain classical compositions. Kyle doesn't spell out what he thinks the truth is, but I suspect that Ways of Meaning provides a clue.
Cécile Schott has long been my absolute favorite kind of artist: the kind who thoughtfully and quietly pieces together wonderfully distinctive albums and tends to only surface when she has something new and intriguing to say. As a result, being a Colleen fan has been a deliciously unpredictable slow-motion rollercoaster that has taken some expectation-subverting turns over the years: most artists who come right out of the gate with a sublime and timeless masterpiece like Everyone Alive Wants Answers would just keep revisiting that success with diminishing returns, but Schott has tirelessly kept moving forward with each new album. That evolution reached a crescendo of sorts with 2015 vocal-centric Captain of None, shedding a lot of artifice to reveal a more intimate and direct incarnation of Colleen. In some ways, this latest album continues that trajectory, but it also finds Schott setting her viola da gamba aside for a synthesizer. Admittedly, I tend to shake my head sadly whenever someone makes a synth album these days, but Schott has managed to bend those electronics to her will rather than falling under their spell like so many others.
Among the most diverse entries in their catalog, Nada! is the sound of two very different individuals creating one distinct album. With the departure of Tony Wakeford, the band pretty much dropped the electric post-punk sound that characterized the earliest singles. What remains is about half acoustic ballads, and half gothic synth pop, but somehow feels like a coherent whole, and for me remains one of their best albums ever.
Whenever a new vinyl release by Andrew Chalk surfaces, several things are fairly certain: it will be a beautiful object, it will be expensive, and it will be worth it.  Packaging-wise, Violin by Night hits impressive new heights in both lavishness and mystery.  The corresponding songs, on the other hand, are atypically brief and melodic, often more closely resembling a damaged Romantic classical recording than anything drone-like.
This is the latest EP by Jakob Battick’s group combines folk and psychedelic experimentation with slow motion arrangements; the group wear their influences on their sleeves but manage to distinguish themselves from their musical ancestors and their peers through their mixing of styles. Bloodworm Songs is by no means perfect (the recording quality is distinctly low fidelity and the more experimental segments are rather tame) but there is certainly diamonds hidden amidst the rough.
The album opens with the title track, a long piece brooding with psychological horror. Panning back and forth with ominous repetition it digs into me, beneath the surface, and I want to shed my skin. Oppressive and claustrophobic I clamor for air. This song feels like the moment of anxiety just before a peak experience. Once the summit of the mountain is reached however, the exultation and triumph incumbent upon a job well done kicks in and the rest of the album is crisp, vast, stretching without pause from horizon to horizon, clear as the hoarfrost on the arctic tundra.
