I haven't had this much of a hard-on over an album since Colder's Heat. Marry Me Tonight (actually from 2009) is an almost purely emotional experience, with nine songs that in various levels combine ominous and chugging bass lines, creepy guitar (imagine that sound Wire toyed with on "Single KO"), a cold 808-supplied rhythm, a particularly endearing crudeness, and perverse lyrics with a disaffected delivery. This is a wet dream of a teenager overpowered by his or her hormones with enough pent up angst to send most adults into therapy.
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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Akron's one-man debut nods to influences such as Delia Derbyshire and Joe Meek but cannot begin to approach the originality or spirit of experiment of those legends. Yet the best of these pieces are odd exotic bleeping echoes which did transport me to other worlds, just perhaps not the ones intended.
This is the final chapter of this colorfully named and eternally shifting Seattle collective's Totem trilogy and it is confounding and inspired in equal doses.  Characteristically, the band still sounds like some kind of weird psychedelic cult, but the fictitious cult in question seems to shift in both disposition and temporal/geographic location a bit more dramatically than they have in the past, which makes for a rather strange and disorienting listening experience.  At least it is confusing for the right reasons though, as Totem 3's problems stem primarily from sheer over-ambition: there is literally no one on earth that could successfully and seamlessly combine influences as disparate as metaphysical philosophy, John Carpenter, Indian cinema, and Taureg blues.
This CD reissue of an instantly sold-out LP on Poon Village from earlier this year is certainly eclectic, but is also unexpectedly intimate and straightforward as well.  More importantly, it offers one of the most inspired Beach Boys covers that I have ever heard, as well as some truly ambitious and creative album art.
Considering that both sides of this brief single are sourced from recordings of cymbals, I couldn't help but feel a bit of parallel with early Organum, at least in concept. The actual music though is something entirely unique, and is two different takes on the same source.
As a sporadic consumer of López's work, this album had a decidedly different feel than what I was expecting. I usually associate his name with cold, sterile digital sounds that occasionally veer into difficult territory, but always are worth the effort. Here, the work is much more organic and natural feeling, unsurprising given that it's based on field recordings of rivers in Argentina and Paraguay.
Even though its wrapped in a brightly colored, almost prog rock album cover of nymphs and mermaids, the music is the polar opposite: ritualistic improvised rhythms, clanging metal and tons of effects, all of which conveys an odd mix of sleaze and evil.
This album somehow earned a reputation for being one of Christina Carter's best despite being limited to a cassette-only edition of just 200 copies. Released during a fertile 2008 that also saw the release of Original Darkness on Kranky, and initially mistitled Texas Working Blues, this Blackest Rainbow re-release shines the spotlight on one of Christina's most direct, layered, and memorable albums.
Liturgy's music is a full-on sensory assault, at once controlled and chaotic, meditative and brutal, that demands you immerse yourself fully and pay attention. This is not background listening of any sort, nor easy listening—just an hour of damn good metal.
Emeralds guitarist Mark McGuire has been releasing his solo recordings on small-run CD-R and cassette pressings since 2007. This double-disc retrospective collects 20 of his best recordings over the years as selected by McGuire and Peter Rehberg—consider it McGuire's greatest hits.
