|_ /-\ 5 7 . |= /\/\

weekly listening for the week.

Here's me bringing the witchy woos for you

Neither my ipod nor my iphone are scrobbling. stupid itunes is having a mare coping with two pods at once. it was fine for a while, but is not fine now. whtvrs. Anyway >>>

01. Beach House - 36

02. Nudity - 35

03. Magic Wands - 31

04. Daywand - 27

05. Ty Segall - 21

06. A$AP Rocky - 18

06. Ty Segall & White Fence - 18

08. The Advisory Circle - 17

09. Cloud Nothings - 16

10. Black Bug - 15

1 – Never really got into Beach House before. I hear people say that Bloom is not as good as Teen Dream but I am liking Bloom and I never much felt like listening to Teen Dream. But that probably says more about me now than it does about Teen Dream then.

2 – Heavy Petting is the album. It's 8 tracks of heavy garage electronics and swooshy blurs and it hits hard. It's all nubile and exciteable and just like exciteable nubiles it's totally ephemeral so get it now while it's hot. Released on AMDISCS on cassette, but also name your price on their Bandcamp: http://nudity.bandcamp.com/

3 – I loved the ep they put out a few years ago and this is the long-overdue album. All it does it pack out the great ep tracks with underwhelming sugary chillwavey pop stuff. Bit pointless really, but nice enough to have in the background.

4 – I went to the label Vwyrd Wurd's Bandcamp to get some mossy naturalistic black metal in the form of Nocht The Only Gouls (which I did and it's genuinely forest-is-coming-alive-to-take-you creeped out and buzzing) but I also got the only other releases they have – two albums by weirdo-electronic-avant-pop solo producer Daywand – and they're great. 0 plays / 0 listeners on last.fm. He's got 1 now and you should make it many more (7?) http://vwyrdwurd.bandcamp.com

5 – Had a Ty Segall frenzy off the back of the White Fence collab.

6a – itunes started playing itself, played through this and Advisory Circle. I wasn't there to hear them.

6b – Outta sight garage psych that's got everything from sweet pop to electrical storms in its eight tracks. A whole lotta harmony, a whole lotta groove, this is how rock music should sound.

9 – This is also how rock music should sound.

10 – Five plays of the three track ep that came out last year. The manage to roll out an atmosphere of threatening murk in just a single minute, stretching out the dystopian gloom to an industrial strength two minutes on the title track. Not the ear shredding speed of the album from a couple of years ago – which was amazing – but something arrestingly defined all the same. http://soundcloud.com/hozac-records/black-bug-police-helicopter

TOTW:

Camp Newton by the Van Allen Belt, which I got off a Beko/Andrea records split from last year: Free d/l as always. It's also got some great tracks from Tropic of Cancer, Candy Claws, FNU Ronnies, Rape Faction and more.

<iframe width="400" height="100" style="position: relative; display: block; width: 400px; height: 100px;" src="http://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/v=2/track=4257354436/size=venti/bgcol=FFFFFF/linkcol=4285BB/" allowtransparency="true" frameborder="0"><a href="http://thevanallenbelt.bandcamp.com/track/camp-newton">Camp Newton by The Van Allen Belt</a></iframe>
 

DOWNLOAD: Tree of Sores - A Cry of Despair

Leeds based three-piece doom band Tree of Sores have their third release up on Bandcamp for name your price downloads or CD from Witch Hunter records. This one is a huge 28 minute piece with several sections that will hold your attention all the way. It has that epic feel of post-BM doomy bands like Ash Borer, Fell Voices, Agalloch and Conan, bringing sheet-noise walls of guitars with a bleakness befitting of their Northern locale. I was trying not to say Epic, but fuck it, it's impossible not to - the section from around 20 minutes builds up a wall of distortion over a pounding beat that pushes itself to collapse. Then you remember how you got there.  Like I said: Epic.  Most segments roll into each other - The bit around 6 minute sounds like rolling church bells, makes it feel as if you're in the presence of something. Which you are, and then they pull an awesomely heavy slow motion riff out of it. Other bits are introduced with a pause so I guess they could have cut it up into two or three tracks, but why break the momentum for tracklistings sake? 

I had their self-titled ep in my end of year list last year and this is probably better. The artwork is nice and they've got a cool logo too, designed by Black Uroborus 

Fetch, Doomhounds

Pin your colours to the Mast.fm

Weekly listening for my stats fans,

CTTTDRTHEAP

01. Cloud Nothings – 66
02. Turbowolf – 45
03. The New Pornographers – 43
04. Danny Brown - 38
05. Run DMT - 33             
06. The Men – 26
07. Hear Hums – 23
08. Errors – 20
09. Annapurna Illusion – 16
10.  Pop. 1280 – 15

1 – I finally got this album after seeing it in these last.fm charts so much over the last month. It’s really great.  Love the way the songs build and layer up rhythm and melody adding twists over really short times, sounds really fun to play, his vocals are ridiculously harsh but controlled and I like a lot of the lyrics.  Very good well done.

2 – What I just wrote for Cloud Nothings holds true for Turbowolf too, but it‘s a different kind of rock musics.

3 – Been playing Twin Cinema a lot after Andrzej reminded me of them in that thread I did t’other day. I had indeed forgotten just how great it is.

4 – One of the albums that would have been in my top 50 of 20-11 had I heard it in time.  The production is brilliant, and his character is so well defined, slightly out-of step with anything else I have heard (which isn’t that much tbh, but I get the sense that his self-deprecation is pretty uncommon)

5 – Pretty much addicted to DMT, it’s official.  361 plays this year.

6 – I’m really not sure how much I am enjoying Open Your Heart.  It’s nowhere near as exciting as Leave Home and the songs all seem a bit simpler. I liked the unpredictability of Leave Home, and the distortion, it made it all a lot more dangerous. 

7 – Drone, tribal beats, heady temperatures.

8 – Getting into this now.

9 – Been spending a lot of time at the top of Everest with Max.

10 – Gnarly & ghastly.

TOTW:

The last.fm Laugh

weekly stats time!  woo.

not very big numbers this week

01. Pond - 50

02. Nite Jewel - 43

03. Tako Tomago - 33

04. Orcas – 27
05. Errors - 25

06. Perfume Genius - 24

07. Patrice & Friends - 22

08. A Winged Victory For The Sullen - 21

09. Northward - 20

09. Cough Cool – 20
09. Deekie - 20

1 - Side project from guitarist & drummer of Tame Impala. It's not all great, or even good, but what I like, I like a hell of a lot.
2 – This is really lovely bejewelled (natch) pop music. So much sleeker and sexier than her last album.
3 – This guy sent me his album for the blog. Will be writing it up very soon, it's pretty excellent psychedelic electronic Brainfeeder kind of stuff
4 -
5 – Finally got this after my thread asking for fun clean upbeat music. It's not really that upbeat though, it's a bit too serious and sombre to really fit the remit of what I wanted in that thread – beyond that, it's great. Error's pulse beats hard.
6 & 9b appearing again proving I am nothing if not a habitual listener.

7 – This was another thing I picked up from my fun/upbeat thread. And this is exactly what I wanted! One of the kinds of things I wanted anyway. One of the tracks really reminds me of Wookie. Fun times. Juke party music I can blast. Get some footwork in.
8 – Going to see them in April at the Erased Tapes night at Brighton festival. Cannot wait, it;s going to be incredible.
9 – brilliant little 4-track ep of Eastern European styled cold northern darkness
9c – Another blog entry to come – second full ep from this London based rural-psych-drone duo. A tiny bit like Golau Glau, a tiny bit like Boards of Canada – but neither of those entirely helpful.

DOWNLOAD: A Place To Bury Strangers - So Far Away (School of Seven Bells Remix)

School of Seven Bells have taken the lead track from the slightly streamlined new incarnation of A Place To Bury Strangers' Onwards To The Wall EP and given it an even sleeker, smoother, dreamier edge.  Pulling the track closer to their own version of shoegaze, blurring out the focus to a matte finish, setting the action a little ways back in the distance and dropping it into a echo chamber, works nicely, the finished piece turning out to be more satisfying than anything from SoSB own new album.  I guess they work best with ballsier source material.  Maybe APTBS could return the favour by detonating a piece off Ghostory




Here's the original to compare and contrast:

NEW TRACK: Broda - 'Track Two'

Portugese tropical electronics outfit Gala Drop have collaborated with Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance / Comets on Fire/ 200 Years on a project called Broda, self-released on 12" on 30th March.  This track is the preview and it's a sprawling psychedelic jam beamed straight back from the perfumed gardens of the 60's, the smoke-muted irridescence and serpentine twists of the guitar lines recalling the sounds of White Noise, Fifty Foot Hose, Kaleidoscope and all those other freaky heads who plugged themselves into new dimensions.

This is one of my favourite pieces of retro psychedelia to come from the hands of Chasney, and no doubt it is because the steamy tribal kraut-rock rhythms of Gala Drop have given his playing a new kind of cosmic edge. 

REVIEW: Wyld Wyzrdz - Acceptance (Inner Islands)

Braden McKenna's solo neo-nu-age psych-folk project Wyld Wyzrdz new album is the first of the year on his own Inner Islands label (even though I reviewed the Ashan album first) and the final one for him in this guise. It picks up where he left off with last September's From A Stone, reflecting on the theme of acceptance, as the title suggests, built on a collection of soft drones, melodic hooks, vocal chants and moving percussion. Another heady tapestry of handbuilt sounds from McKenna's excellently expanding label.

Order for just $5 from their Bandcamp






 

Alongside this album comes a video titled ALL FIRE // ALL LIGHT directed by Lawrence Martinez, with its own website The Range of Light.  It's an evocative twelve minute collage of 16mm and Super 8 shot landscapes, interspersed with illustrations and fx with a soundtrack from Inner Islands artists Gkfoes Vjgoaf, Stag Hare and Wyld Wyzrdz.

VIDEO: Grimes - Oblivion

Brand new clip for my favourite track - currently, it changes every day - from the multicoloured kaleidoscope that is Grimes'Visions album. The combination of smooth doo-wop backing 'Wah-wah's' and contrasting anti-melody of that synthetic grinding sound are a good showcase for the way in which she throws her genres together with an almost haphazard mission, sometimes the idea never fully blooms, but othertimes the come off sounding unlike anything else, and that magical concoction would be this track.

last.fm one to post in this thread is a rotten egg!!!

This week's weekly listening - pretty much your favourite thing that I do.  I don't know what that says about me or you but I like it a lot all the same.

It's not going to be me, for once!

01. Perfume Genius - 77

02. Run DMT - 42

03. fauxmusica - 34

04. Honeycomb Bones - 30

05. Sacred Star - 23

06. Mogwai - 20

07. LIQUID SKULLS - 19

08. School of Seven Bells - 18

09. Cold Cave - 17

10. Fulang Chang & I - 16

1 – New album is utterly beautiful. Trying to define it into further words would be like pinning a butterfly to a cork board.

3 – Final album from 'Yorba Zergot''s Fauxmusica guise, before moving on to a a project with the Peach Tree called Sacred Star. Witch House as it was always meant to be – challenging, cryptic, subversive, uncompromising, unlistenable.

4 – New self-released ep from these upcoming garage rockers. More streamlined and cleaner than their last one, but still hairy and full-speed.

5 – see 3, but double its potency for the two-headed beast it is.

8 – Really not as good as Sean's review had me believe, which is a shame because I was with him all the way on his Blondes one. It's just too insubstantial. Indie disco shoegaze that's flighty and weightless instead of involving and ethereal.

10 – First new material in years from these guys who I played a lot in the early days of doing NFR. They've been working with One Unique Signal's Byron to get a sound similarly Telescopic to theirs, which is a very good thing.

DOWNLOAD: Ewan Limb - Ewan Limb

When I posted about this Russian bedroom producer's first tracks I got rained on with emails from people wanting to know more - but at the time there was no more to give.  Now Ewan Limb has put up a full album's worth of material; Nine tracks of dreamy bass heavy electronica that take in all kinds of influences but have the overarching feel of consistency and the artistry of someone finding their own way, all those dubstep squiggles and bottom end drops hooked up to shimmery chillwave heat-haze melodies, shivery cold IDM and jump cuts and glitches.  It's a wonderful album that can get filed alongside the Robel Synthesia releases I have been championing, though this has a much wider range of sounds involved.

There are several tracks here that have been getting a huge amount of deserved attention over on on his Soundcloud - the super chilled layers of Eye and the hypnotically deep Doppler Effect, the unfeasibly dense vibrating Origin, Train Station with its disorienting lurch and icy two-step percussion and the luxurious string embellished Mleko. All the tracks in between have their place in creating an overarching atmosphere, tying all the elements together into an evocatively cohesive whole that should be destined to soundtrack some epic comedowns and daybreaks across the world. Lovely stuff.

Download for free from his Bandcamp now.

NEW TRACK: Wet Nuns - Throttle

It's a very rare occurence that will have me posting about an NME hype band, but the Leeds based heavy metal duo Wet Nuns, right from the name onwards, are doing everything with their simple dual set up of guitar and drums so perfectly it's like a little White Stripes revelation all over again.  Sort of.  And yes, this is pretty much true classic pure unadulterated Heavy Metal no matter how you want to spin it - On their previous single Heavens Below (still downloadable for free from their website, or jump to their Soundcloud) they sounded like a fire damaged Wolfmother dallying with the finest Devil's music in the form of Zepellin and Sabbath riffs and twists.  Their new free download single Throttle will be out on 5th March and it another mother crushing detonation of snarling unrestrained rock with an outstanding slo-motion grind-out to finish it off. The lead riff on this throbs white hot as much as summons the darkness. It's a wonderful sound that I cannot deny, especially as I seem to be in a big garage rock phase at the moment, so all gnarly guitars sound good to me.

They're playing the Green Door Store on the 24th Feb, and by all accounts their live show is some kind of carnage.

Stream Throttle on repeat from their Soundcloud until you can rest it in your digital lap in two weeks.




Here's the video. It's gory.

a last.fm thread

It's the weekly numbers round:

one of these bands spells their name in CAPS. Can you spot which one?

01. Hear Hums - 130

02. Lilacs & Champagne - 99

03. Ewan Limb – 52

04. Cough Cool - 27

05. The Obligatory Cripples - 24

06. Run DMT - 22

07. Message To Bears - 20

07. SAUNA YOUTH - 20

09. John Talabot - 19

10. The Caretaker - 18

10. Saltillo - 18

10. Mirroring - 18

1 – Awesome 'Sung Tongs' style tribal beat & drone pop album of hypnotic acoustics and wordless vocals. Download for name your price. Going to do a full review soon, but don't wait for that.

2 – Album came out on Mexican Summer last month. Totally incredible side project from two members of Grails, I'm surprised I have managed to listen to anything more than this this week. Instrumental 70's exotica soul soundtrack tape splicing set to hip-hop beat with sultry guitar lines shimmering all over it.

3 – Russian bedroom producer releases a full album of his bass heavy chillwave melody influenced dubstep electronica. Get it free from him HERE

4 – Hazy, slo motion lo-fi guitar jamz. Been playing some free d/l albums from their Bandcamp

5 – Polish garage rock band playing pretty hard, fast, loud and noisy. Pretty unsubtle, but pretty nice for it.

6 – Hallucinogenic h-pop (no it's not a dirty word, it's the bomb) from the sunny side of psych.

7 – Great sleeping music, played the Departures album a couple of times this week.

7b – Brighton based rock combo kicking some punk heavy jams.

9 – Still think this is a fresh, deep and affecting techno/house album. Might not have the most sophisticated or rich sound palette, but it's really well arranged and the sounds all suit their purpose. So yeah, great.

10a – bonus/out take Patience tracks for free from....where else: Bandcamp.  Get it before he takes them down, if you haven't already.

10b – Dark atmospheric dubby, heavy on the drum part of D&B influenced electronica with strings, Monocyte is a concept soundtrack to the comic book of the same name.

10c – Collaboration between grouper and Tiny Vipers – as dewy and mossy sounding as you'd anticipate. Reverent organic psychedelic ambience.

TOTW:

Anything off Lilacs & Champagne, obvs. But I'll go with the opener:

GIG PREVIEW: The Men, Hookworms & Sealings - Sunday 19th Feb.

...so that would be tomorrow night, Brighton town - Prince Albert.  Three bands of slightly different stripes all great enough to warrant a rare gig preview from me.

The Men, as you probably already know, play their record collection as if they invented it, kicking out MC5 jams, Spacemen 3 doped repetition, gnarly snarly attitude of The Stooges and a whole load of 90's sonic fuzz and fury fom Dinosaur Jr, Mudhoney and their like.  There's not a band quite like The Men around right now:




Hookworms are a  Leeds based trio playing a dark psych style of garage rock - loads of space, reverb, looping threads of riffs needling their way through time and space out to fizzing climaxes. Still a bit Spacemen, there's some Krauty Can influence rattling about inside the trippy frameworks of their tracks, and soem of the looser strung out Sun City Girls. 




Sealings are one of Brighton's loudest and volatile propositions, now pimped out with a live drummer their show are even more hi-octane takes on their hybridised rock/metal/punk noise.  Here's their brand new video for new track Out Cold

DOWNLOAD: The Caretaker - Bonus After Sebald tracks

The Caretaker has put up 9 bonus tracks which co-exist alongside his eerily wonderful Patience (After Sebald) album, for free download for a limited time.  Not sure when his going to close this down, so hurry over to his Bandcamp to get them.

"Extra tracks taken from the soundtrack of the Grant Gee film "Patience (After Sebald). The source material for 'Patience' was sourced from Franz Schubert's 1827 piece 'Winterreise' and subjected to his perplexing processes, smudging and rubbing isolated fragments into a dust-caked haze of plangent keys, strangely resolved loops and de-pitched vocals which recede from view as eerily as they appear."

VIDEO: Turbowolf - Let's Die

Brand new video for the new single from the finest rock band the UK currently owns - watch this and have Turbowolf own you right back. 

This is one of the most ferocious tracks from their album, and one of the finer examples of how they manage to cram so many great moments into such a short space of time - the burbling synth prologue to the slamming intro riff then BLAM into the meat of the piece, squiggly, squealing, imploding  guitar solo (how do they make that sound!?), heavyweight intense breakdown, instant classic lyrics, all blasting along with that unbridled sense of momentum that only the truest Rock can deliver - and it's called Let's Die!  It;s all about careening into oblivion and embracing every moment of it.

The video, directed by Casey & Ewan is a futuristic and thrownback as the music - 70's style stop motion animation, velvet shirts, Chris' absurd facial hair, all booted into the future with copulating Terminator robotics and chipboard bedsheets.  Sexy what?

There's no reason to to love the whole of this with the whole of your being.

The 14 track album is less than a fiver from iTunes, so go get. It wasn't in my Top 50 albums of 2011 for nothing.

NEW TRACK: Light Asylum - Shallow Tears

Finally, a new release!  Shallow Tears is the lead 12" single from Light Asylum's long-awaited, highly anticipated self-titled debut album, due out in May on Mexican Summer.  The two-track single comes on suitably fetishistic limited edition white vinyl.

Dancing over the grave of the not-even-dead-yet Grace Jones, with a vocal comparisons all too apparent to avoid a reference, Shannon Funchess and Bruno Coviello return with another visceral tear-streaked symphony to emotion-haunted back alleys and dry-ice cloaked dancefloors. It starts with a peal of thunder,as dramatic an entrance as they could make, then the drums start pounding. This music is something else out there on its own. Even without Funchess' remarkable intonations there's enough resonant affect being squeezed out of the synths that each time she really opens up her lungs it reaches right into your chest and crushes your heart.  A less coked-up Cold Cave in introspective sensitive mode, Shallow Tears rolls forward in stately fashion, blowing up into alternating surges of drum crescendos and vocal multitracking that freezes time and blows out way before your ready for the affair to be over.

The B-side, Genesis, is far more restrained, with a creeping paranoid melody line picking its way over a jittery drum track that slowly slides into a silvery vocodered vocal climax. A little bit HTRK, but again, an entity all of itself.  It's the perfect foil to the grander A-side, a flawless 12" dropping a twin assault deep into your sensual perception, and the ultimate teaser to the10 track album, due out soon.

Order now from Mexican Summer.

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REVIEW: Ourobonic Plague - Post Human Possibilities

New six-track release from the darkest corner of Australia, Ourobonic Plague follows up last year's GAAP ep with a longer stretch of industrial umbral imaginings.  The irony in titling this Post Human Possibilities is that the effect of this album is to suck away all the kinds of positive potentials the word Possibility might bring to mind. It's a grey aurad environment that is cast here, a shadowy landscape of futility, chaos, dread and paranoia. None of the songs titles suggest an album that would allow a slice of light in.

The opening Her Reptile Dysfunction begins with unsettling reverberating tones and a keening sound that sneaks in under them only to grow into a wavering foreground sound that plays call and response with wordless feral utterings that crawl out from between them. Slowly the dull thump of a beat drags itself through the swampy textures to dominate the speakers, it's funereal procession harried by a rippling kick. 
By contrast, the following Lake Slasher is a far more sprightly piece, with melodic lines flickering between the branching synths like bats in the night forest, cycling round in rabidly fluttering patterns.  Return To The Lake plays on the effectiveness of adjusting the levels of disorientation around a minimal theme before the drag-crawling pitch-downed take on Nine Inch Nails that is Connection Failed preludes the huge end-piece of Washed Up On The Shore.  The album closes on this sixteen minute vista of bleakness that takes half its length to gradually evolve from a primordial state into an achingly paced tempo of dread pounding and haunted mechanics. The cover art being drawn into perspective fully with that blood red sun silhouetting a scene of deserted industry, abandoned, derelict and lifeless. The track rolls forward in waves of toxic drone, breaking on to a bed of gritty vibration like the yellowed waters of a poisoned lake, fizzing at acid charred rocks of its lifeless bank.

You can imagine a solitary figure staring hopelessly outwards, watching as a weak sun sinks below the horizon leaving them alone in an unforgiving darkness.

Order from the Twice Removed Bandcamp

Last of the FM heartbreakers

Stats time.  The thread is mine. 

01. John Talabot - 105

02. Ectoplasm Girls - 44

03. Turbowolf - 40

04. Run DMT - 33

05. Clams Casino - 32

06. Pop. 1280 - 30

07. Total Control - 27

07. SPACEGHOSTPURRP RVIDER KLVN - 27

09. Cobalt - 15

09. Lanterns On The Lake - 15

09. Wild Nothing - 15

1 – Deep-house techno noise

2 – Swedish sister noise
3 – Hairy Bristol noise
4 – Waking dream noise
5 – Untouchable intangible noise

6 – Grey dystopian noise

7a – Australian superband noise
7b – Can't crowbar Noise into here
9a – Relentlessly charred noise
9b – Pretty sleeptime anti-noise
9c – Habitual listening ends up in the top 10. noise..

totw:

Talabot brings the distortion
 

REVIEW: Ashan - To Return To (Inner Islands)

Sean 'Gkfoes Vjgoaf' Conrad's side project Ashan follows up last years single track Peace of Joy album with four long pieces of meditative acoustic trance. Ashan differs to the Gkfoes material in being less concerned with the physical realm, instead submitting itself to themes of love, peace, emotional tranquility and transcendence.  The album is inspired by the book Ashan: The Gentle Way, a spiritual tome about "The vibration of creation, of harmony, of unification, and of love."  No matter how cynically you want to view these themes, Conrad's embracing of this kind of flower power ideology is thoroughly sincere, as is the music he creates in thrall to it, and musically the resulting pieces probably work even better than the Gkfoes material because of it.  The vocals in this album bestow it with a greater sense of wonder, Conrad's partner Rosa Beach-Mason and Braden McKenna contribute additional chanting and campfire lullaby madrigals to the tracks. You can imagine this being performed in a circle, the three performers locked into each others eyes and deeper, lost in an infinitely stretching moment of communion.  There's a tangible resonance to the pieces that recalls Incredible String Band at their most spiritual, and these tracks sound like some of that band's finer, most elegantly concisely moments locked into spiralling patterns and repeated until trance state is achieved.

I don't really know who's making music of a similar style to this at the moment, maybe High Wolf at a push, but his is all tropical and steamy, this just goes for the soul and there's no one coming close to producing the effect that Conrad is capable of inducing. If you're in doubt as to what any of the above means, just get playing the stream below and realise I'm saying it's far out amazing.

Order the CD from the Inner Islands Bandcamp HERE

DOWNLOAD: Robel Synthesia - Midnight Polaroids

Another new ep/mini-album from Robel Synthesia, this one's concept simply being a silky glide through a night-time - maybe one of his, maybe several fleeting episodes stitched together, and the result is his strongest material yet.  As a general law of the world which I submit to, everything good happens after dark, and here on Midnight Polaroids nightfall has brought out Robel's punchiest beats coupled with his strongest hooks and sense of chiming melody to date. Across his three releases there has been a steady build of assurance and ability, experimenting with concepts and working out what he's doing with his craft and it's becoming a very interesting path to watch him follow.

This new release has more of a hypnogogic pop bent to it, along the lines of James Ferraro's recent Far Side Virtual, the playful melodies fizz with the effervescence of bright-lit daytime TV themes, blurred into life through a semi-conscious state of recollection - in Ferraro's case it's pretty much conjured from his own warped mind, but here's the a definite sense of inebriation and narcotic intervention serving as the dividing line between what is real and what is illusionary here. Robel doesn't go so far as to create an alternate world-view with his work, he is more concerned with documenting and reflecting his realities, as with his previous album Neon Island which which his musical analysis of his obsession with the sun. 


Streetlamp Waves starts the ep off on a hyper note, late sinking into the slow cool of Polaroids, Light Echoes and Taxi Colours both take the dreaminess of his previous eps and let the moon cast them in silvery relief, collecting the giddy expectations as an evening begins, the social carousing of the night club and introverted back-seat taxi ride home in the form of glittery amphetamine beats, Ativan coded synths and dopamine rousing drones.

VIDEO: Halls - Lifeblood

This video is directed by illustrator Ben Symonds, using footage from the BBC's Planet Earth and Frozen Planet - beating them to the punch of using the music over their footage he's used their footage under Halls' glacially evocative electronics. Lifeblood is the second track on the beautiful Halls' new Fragile EP available as a download and 12" vinyl from the label Sound of Sweet Nothing.

NEW TRACK: Voltage Black - Glass Graphic (Zen Mix)

London based producer Voltage Black has just thrown up another track to complement his increasingly great catalogue.  He's been steadily releasing one a month for the last year and his production skills are developing tangibly with each piece, last month's heavily vocalled Blackbirds, and the older Hashiriya showing dramatically different sides of his skills to this new one.  All his pieces play with a certain take on an epic structure, building towards expansive climaxes, the density of the production expanding as the track progresses dropping bass and beats patterns with palpable thrust and sense of chaos.  This is surely one of his heaviest.

Last fm to Brooklyn

This week's heavy listening double post off of DiS

There's a new 1 month chart available. Woo stats fans!



WEEK

01. Pop. 1280 - 63
02. Turbowolf - 42
03. Letherette - 28
04. Total Control - 26
04. Screen Vinyl Image - 26
06. Clair Cassis - 24
07. Ectoplasm Girls - 22
08. Everyone to the Anderson - 21
08. Ashan - 21
10. Pete and the Pirates - 18
10. Julianna Barwick - 18
10. Run DMT - 18

01 – Dirgy post-punk b-movie horrorcore dystopia on Sacred Bones. I'm have a biased predisposition to love anything off that label, but the reason is it just keeps turning out to be good.  This week’s highest entry makes my top ten of the month too.

02 – Constant in-car rotation for the greatest British rock band alive. Even my 3 year old gets it. Asks for all the songs they say “Hey”, shouts along with “Seven severed heads”.

03 – Electro fetishised soul. Just got the second ep, so I’ve been playing both a bit.

04a – Can’t stop playing Henge Beat. Half the songs sound like different bands (which reminds me, I need to get the new Balaclavas album)

04b – Got a little bit of filler (or maybe I’m just not a fan of the slower stuff) , but the wall-of-noise shoegaze stuff  is almost overwhelming.  Not quite A Place to Bury Strangers, but it’s a slightly sleeker thing.

06 – Had a luxurious velveteen black metal moment

07 – TxN is fantastic!  Swedish girl/girl spacious, surreal industrial noise minimalism littered with hooks and beats.

08a – More heavy in-car rotation playing the ...Inside A Horse album.  I need to put their earlier eps on my ipod.  Looking forward to this band blowing up as big as an angular post-rock hardcore band can.

08b – Different project from Gkfoes Vjgoaf’s Sean Conrad that plugs into the same rural acoustic nu-age psychedelic hypnotics. New album on Inner Islands is four tracks of deep and heavy lucid jam.

10a – Got One Thousand Pictures too late for it to make my end of year list, which I think it would have.

10b – The Magic Place.

10c – Still marvelling at this summery acid psych even while it snows outside.




MONTH:

01. Run DMT - 186
02. Pete and the Pirates - 121
03. Total Control - 116
04. Colin Stetson - 107
05. Turbowolf - 106
06. Matthewdavid - 90
07. Screen Vinyl Image - 87
08. David Thomas Broughton - 78
09. Cold Cave - 68
10. Pop. 1280 - 63

TOTW – Ectoplasm Girls – Sexodrone (or anything off TxN really)