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“Cass McCombs works quietly. Over the course of three full-lengths and five years, McCombs has quickly slipped in and out of scenes, skipping from one major American city to the next like he owed stacks of cash in every one. He’s played with folk, grafting bedroom pop flourishes to sonic skeletons just strong enough to support them. He swam through 1980s Brit jangle and deep chasms of reverb. No matter how much mileage he accrued, one constant held firm: His lyrical shell games often kept listeners at arm’s length, regardless of how well-crafted and inviting his melodies were. McCombs’ songs were addictively opaque– easy to hear, tough to digest, and even more difficult to describe to your friends over beers.
…on Catacombs, his fourth full-length and most stripped-down effort to date, the singer-songwriter steps out from behind the curtain that’s cloaked his work in the past. And despite the sparser arrangements and increased focus on direct lyricism, it’s every bit as aurally hypnotic as his previous work. It seems like he realized there was someone he really did want to sing to. ” -p4k review
Philadelphia’s Dayve Hawk : Memory Cassette, Weird Tapes, or Memory Tapes
“… a record of achingly gorgeous dance-pop that captures both the joy of nostalgia and the melancholic sense that we’re grasping for good times increasingly out of reach…
Seek Magic is something of an inhabitable universe that proves there’s far more to Hawk’s sound than a way with reverb and passing familiarity with dance loops.” – p4k review
hazy, nostalgic, otherworldly, unsettling
…an album that shifts effortlessly between several styles and sounds while fitting together as a diverse but cohesive package. There is common theme running through Continent’s songs even if it is not easy to pinpoint or describe.
The Montreal native has been creating tracks since his pre-teens and has only begun to present his music publicly in the last couple of years. CFCF’s career began to take off with his contest winning remix of Crystal Castles “Air War” and has followed up with a chain reaction of official remixes for talents such as Sally Shapiro, The Presets, HEALTH, The Teenagers and Hearts Revolution among many others.
“The songs range from mid-tempo nu-disco to balearic, house to ambient. Often the basis of the atmosphere was culled from films by Werner Herzog, Michael Mann, David Lynch, and David Cronenberg as well as countless musical influences including Arthur Russell, Saint Etienne, and Tangerine Dream.” -pressrelease
The Fader Magazine said in a recent interview with CFCF, “Like many people his age, Silver obsesses over childhood ephemera. But rather than sate his yearnings with late night eBay binges on Ghostbusters memorabilia, he resurrects ’80s keys and synths, modifying them into a hybrid of sturdy structure mixed with vintage minor chord melody. “There’s definitely a feeling I try to capture,’ [Silver] says. ‘This feeling of the last day of school, or it could be a decade I didn’t even live in. It doesn’t have to be specific to me.’
forceful tribal drumming + end-of-days guitar shredding : huge walls of guitar-and-drum noise / scorched landscape / androgynous vocals / intricate synth patterns / brutal freakouts / / everything is fucked so it’s best we just rage until the sun comes up… post-apocalyptic nihilistic sound
“Brand new full length from Cleveland’s Emeralds recorded Aug-Sept 2008. Proper follow up to their debut LP ‘Solar Bridge’, ‘EMERALDS’ takes the thick drone sound of that LP and transforms it into an even more abstract and strange place. Visual music that lifts the listener up and transports them through tubes of sound occasionally to be swept into the opposite direction by an unexpected entrance into another world entirely. An intense journey that drops you off in a place just beyond death.”
tropical, psychedelic, falsetto, lo-fi, experimental-pop, fuzzy folk, organ/synth drones, the psych guitars, wobbly electronics
“As a member of Ducktails, one would no doubt expect a rather wave washed approach to pop to seep into Julian Lynch’s solo work. As such Orange You Glad does trade in a certain gasoline haze that seems to coat much of the Duck’s work as well but Lynch sways further from the sunny veneer of coastal jams that flow from Mondanile’s guitar. Instead Lynch replaces the rays of euphoria with a calm melancholy overcast that feels as comforting as days spent watching rain on window panes from the dry comfort of a favorite chair. Softly psychedelic and bringing a subtle edge of comfort to the lo-fi landscape, Lynch’s songs hit like a feathered hammer just when you need it. Though barbs and edges of gritty guitar occasionally sneak their way through the one cushioning constant is Julian’s honey and heat voice that brings sweet relief every time. A welcome addition to the gauzy stable of summer records piling up on the tails of ’09.” -ravensingstheblues.blogspot.com
“On first listen, we assumed Phaseone was ensconced in L.A.’s hyper muggy beatfreak scene with dudes like Nosaj Thing, The Gaslamp Killer and Flying Lotus. But he’s actually from St. Louis, sharing little with those guys but a proclivity to making music that sounds like gumball asteroids falling from the sky. Lefse Records, the upstart imprint whose free compilation we shared a few weeks ago, is giving away his debut album Thanks But No Thanks; we’re passing it on because we think it’s excellent. You know those time lapse shots in Planet Earth where fungus grows out of stuff in a disturbingly beautiful way? This is like that happening in your head for forty minutes.” – rcrdlbl.com
“catchy and poppy math rock / Hangin’ Nothin’ But Our Hands Down is a parallel universe of film noir, circuses, and vaudeville shows. It’s a soap opera for the intelligent ear. Each song has a charm and mystery of its own, embodied in catchy lyrics, foot tapping drums, quirky riffs, stumbling bass lines and spazzing vocals. Harnessed with interesting time signatures and engaging shifts in tempo, the album has variety and vigor. / A picture painted in paranoia, and manic ups and downs, the third song “Lots of Brass” is one of my favorites. Bass and drums drive the Nurses sound, and bellow strongly in this song. “Wait for a Safe Sign” is an engaging and experimental journey with a strong vocal hook. Each song is a single in itself, but the album as a whole is most impressive. A beautiful piece of work for a first attempt.” -absolutepunk.net (rating:91%)
” anachronistic horror-show pop… combination of glitzy cabaret theatrics with a Middle American upbringing… set of eccentricities to justify an otherwise grandiose, ambitious sound… vaudevillian/sharp-edged rock sensibility/minor-key riffs/Southern Gothic macabre acoustic closer” -p4k-isms
“Portland’s Nurses are what I’d like to call pop rock mavericks (not the Palin kind though). Why? Well their debut LP Apple’s Acre has all the makings of a great pop record – innovative lyrics, melody, and of course the hooks and catchiness. But instead of putting these songs together with the standard instruments and ideas, they traverse every road, genre, mood, world, night, day, life, and death to arrive at their new form of stunning pop rock.” / “…tends to lean towards the rustic dance around the yard folk pop tribal explosion of a sound.” – Pastaprima.net
riyl: Blood Brothers / Q&NotU / Maps&Atlases / Young Coyotes / Moros Eros / Oh No Oh My
u guys wanna get high and listen to a sick tribal drumming group from baltimore? this is a recent question i find hard to say no to… i’ve been hooked on these guys for a ‘go-to’, trance-out, herbally-enhanced jamband ever since i saw them open for dan deacon… i was determined to crack into this bands’ genius, and knew it would be equally heady/psychedelic/revolutionary since they were dan deacons’ supporting ensemble/tourmates… anyways, it rules and has infinite replay value… they remind me of yeasayer -vocals, +drone… sort of eastern swirly psych-grooves that shake and shift and mutate to the collective’s improvisational whims… it has the power to mesmerize/sedate/hypnotize… perfect for reading/dreaming/beinghi/replacingsilence/…
” You’ve heard this one before: A group of young (and more than likely college-educated) white people get together, pile instruments in a heap, and share a one-track mind to home, sweet, Om. Teeth Mountain’s mixed-bag lineup doesn’t re-invent the drum circle, but its members–listed as Andrew Burt, Andrew Bernstein, Greg Fox, Greg St. Pierre, Max Eisenberg, Max Eilbacher, Kate Levitt, Grace Bedwell, and Owen Gardner here, not all of whom played on the recording–do it with a sincere appreciation for the woollier end of late-’60s radicalism. Think long-robed cults coming for your children…
…this LP bristles with the meandering abandon of fretful discovery… Teeth Mountain navigates a rhythmic journey through steady-pounding floor toms, space-travel cello drones, and some cosmic-dust dashes of guitars or woodwinds or noisemakers or some other hand-powered sound source. “Black Jerusalem” and “Keinsein” vibrate with reeds ghosts and goblins floating through the background, while “Soft Beast” sounds inspired from any moment off that levitating Velvet Underground bootleg 1966, the one that’s nothing but two side-long instrumental slabs…
…the ‘doing it because it feels good right now’ vibe may be what makes Teeth Mountain such a woozy intoxicant. This is the sort of music that makes people reach for words such as “tribal,” “primitive,” and whatever so-called “exotic” world music is in fashion that hour, but Teeth Mountain couldn’t be more urban and Western if it was making hip-hop. Amorphous, wordless instrumental stew is the basic stock for group disquietude. And while the Baltimore zeitgeist right now may have not formally organized Ausser-Parlamentarische Opposition arm just yet– something about Teeth Mountain’s out-of-body aspirations reek of shared disillusionment, and once the many brains camping out on this mountain begin to see where they want to take their mettle, once they decide to trade the skinny jeans for the leather jacket and start designing guerrilla insignias, watch out. ” -BaltimoreCityPaper
Some People Ride the Wave 