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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.