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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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While Jenks Miller has his hand in a multitude of Chapel Hill bands, his Tony Iommi meets Tony Conrad metal project Horseback has received the most notoriety as of late. However, on this collaboration with the relatively new drone composer Nicholas Szczpanik, there isn't a riff to be found. Instead the two weave together seamlessly expansive ranges of tonal and textural sound into an album that travels through the darkness and into the light multiple times.
Now somewhere in the realms of prog/psych/metal/whatever, at one point Norway's Motopsycho were among the crop of potential "next big things" in a post-Nirvana world, creating music that wasn't far removed from the "alternative" scene that would soon be exploited and plundered to give us the likes of Nickleback and the existence of "nu-metal". Even then, however, there was a streak of weirdness that the band would later tap into more deeply, and on the double CD/triple LP Timothy's Monster, the band perfectly balanced catchy rock with bizarre outbursts. Long a cult favorite, this set reproduces the original album in its entirety (the US and UK versions edited the longer pieces to make it fit on a single disc), with an unreleased "first draft" of the album, and a disc full of outtakes/B-sides. It’s a lot to digest, but even for the casual fan, it's a strong set.
This hypnotic listening experience is as pleasantly soporific and gently gritty as if Mazzy Star had been produced by Alex Chilton.
Before Sublime Frequencies began their plunge into the gritty and forgotten corners of global music, there was Pat Conte, a curmudgeonly postal employee and WFMU DJ from Long Island with a basement full of 78s. In the '90s, he curated an impressive series of rather unusual compilations named after an enigmatic and semi-legendary collection of photographs published in the 1930s. This is the second volume in the well-deserved vinyl reissue of the series and it is everything I could hope for: an achievement made even more remarkable by the fact that Conte had never traveled further than Canada when it was originally issued.
When it was first released in 1959, Alan Lomax described this album as "the wistful and tender magic of the young girl that is beyond art." Obviously, Lomax was a bit impartial since they had just completed an exhaustive song-collecting journey through the American South together, but it is impossible to think of a more apt description. Collins' appeal has always been the unwavering simplicity and purity that she brings to the well-worn songs that she loves, traits that are just as timeless and trend-proof as any traditional melody. Sweet England is not the crowning achievement of Shirley's influential discography, but its reissue makes its clear that her vision was firmly in place from the very beginning and that the passage of five decades has done little to blunt its impact.
In 2005 Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom released Days of Mars, a suite of sprawling, futuristic soundscapes played on Gavin Russom’s home-built synthesizers and recorded live onto tape. While sparsely praised at the time, the album has held up remarkably well, enough so that DFA decided to press a single of a previously unreleased track culled from those sessions.
Adam Forkner’s second album for Kranky sees him further developing his already exquisite sound. Each of the four pieces on this album float in a way that lives up to the album’s title: thick cumulous clouds threatening to rain. The dreamy compositions are low key but utterly bewitching; the sinuous synth rhythms and ephemeral, indistinct vocals create a womb-like feeling of comfort. As such, New Clouds has been good these last few weeks for helping me forget a lot of tension.
Steven R. Smith is one of the most fascinating guitarists and writers this country has. Along with talents like Glenn Jones, Jack Rose, and Ben Chasny, he has composed a remarkable and singular body of work grounded in the history and spirit of America (guts and all). After nearly 15 years and well over 30 albums Smith has composed one of his best records yet, one that approaches the greatness of Tableland. Economical and sharply focused, Cities plays out like the soundtrack to humanity's slow and sad funeral.
This download-only single combines a pair of Herb Diamante collaborations, the first with Sun City Girls and the second with the lesser known Diatric Puds. Neither song is particularly impressive, mainly due to the vocals but there is a quirkiness present that does make these two songs strangely attractive.
There has certainly been a flood of excellent African and Latin compilations released over the last few years, but Soundway seems to have outdone themselves (and everyone else) with this one. This is some of the hottest, wildest, and most unrelentingly rhythmic music ever set to wax.
