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This Week's Featured Downloads
We were just minutes away from sending out the newsletter when we received word that we landed an exclusive advance for the second full-length from Brooklyn indie-pop oddballs Flying. Their self-released EP as well as their proper debut full-length, Just-One-Second-Away-Broken-Eggshell, was quite loved by many of our customers and staff a few years back, all won over by the trio's off-the-cuff pop approach and their everything-but-the-kitchen-sink aesthetic. With lots of accordions, broken pianos, glockenspiels, and cascading acoustic guitars, in most other hands the outcome would either be un-listenable, pretentious, or both. None of Flying's spontaneous charms are lost here on Faces of the Night, however, and while there's still a "shambolic" factor involved, there's also more of an accessibility coming from them that we haven't heard before. Album opener "One-Eyed Son" seems to be one part breezy tropicalia and one part Elephant 6, with buzzing acoustic guitars, Jew's harp and a simple beat that falls over itself while accompanying the breathy bittersweet harmonies of Sara Magenheimer and Eliot Krimsky. Flying doesn't stick with one style too long, heading towards dreamy Beatles-esque psychedelia in "Cloud in Doubt" (an album highlight, with its gorgeous chorus of multi-tracked voices and Mellotron), twee-funk-meets-Beefheart ("Stains") and later taking us on a rollercoaster ride of carnival cluster-f**ck and pop minimalism during "Body Bent." Far from a predictable album, Faces of the Night will have you constantly guessing what's next, and you'll be humming at every turn. Gerald Hammill
Vizusa is the NYC-based project of Caitlin Cook and Calder Martin, two former members of experimental noise outfit Excepter. While it's evident that the husband-wife duo shares some of the aforementioned band's trademarks, here the common threads of improvised chaos, masturbatory experimentation, and authentic moodiness take a far different shape. The duo effortlessly entangles the bare bones of reverb-heavy vocals and snarling electric guitar to churn out exquisitely raw, heavy noise in a form that is less amorphous and more distinctly rock. Catchy, albeit incredibly dark guitar hooks underscore the majority of the album, with expansive stretches that propel forward with such grungy angst you'll find it nearly impossible to sit still at times. Songs are prone to evolve organically into new rhythms and contortions. You could sum Vizusa's music as hard, minimal, and addictively repetitive, but indulging in the full album will reveal a more complex, satisfying mix of styles. Though the record has an overwhelmingly tough feel (at rare intervals, even verging on metal before backtracking to psychedelic), Cook's airy recitations certainly build upon the spectral environment in which it was recorded. For the past two years, Vizusa have been living in Mathew Brady's old daguerreotype studio, in which grim, wiry American legends such as Abraham Lincoln and Edgar Allen Poe met to pose for the legendary photojournalist who spent ample time knee-deep in corpses on Civil War battlefields. All in all, one wishes Vizusa's eponymous album was longer, but the record provides a clipped hypnotic experience which will impel the listener to seek out live performances, where abundant repetition and schizophrenia can fully unfurl. A wide range of listeners will go ape for Vizusa, from fans of Earth and Southern Lord's heavy rockers to devotees of Magik Markers and the lo-fi Brooklyn underground. -Karen Soskin
I've often thought that mountain climbers must be amongst the most masochistic and selfish assholes on earth. Did you read that Into Thin Air book that was made into an IMAX movie about a disastrous Mt. Everest ascent in which a number of climbers died due to greed, glory hounding, and the inherent stupidity of attempting to stand on the highest spot in the entire world? What was wrong with those people and why did their families let them go in the first place? That cautionary tale hasn't seemed to stop anybody though, folks keep shelling out money year after year to climb the thing and they keep dying just the same. I guess that if it's that important to you though, then go on ahead. Now I don't know for sure if he's a masochist or an a**hole, but Geir Jenssen is a mountain climber, and in 2001 he completed an ascension of Cho Oyu in Tibet; at 8,201 meters tall, it's the world's sixth largest peak. Armed with a mini-disc recorder instead of an IMAX camera, he managed to create a highly intimate, personal, and listenable aural portrait of his trip. As much as I love, say, Chris Watson or Steven Feld, I often find these field recording albums to be more interesting in theory than in practice, but I was really surprised at how musical this CD ended up being and that it truly bore repeated listening. Perhaps it shouldn't be that surprising actually, as Jenssen is better known as the mastermind behind Norway's Biosphere, a popular and much lauded ambient act who have always been quite engaging. The twelve tracks are subtitled with descriptors that should give you some sense of what to expect; Crossing a Landslide Area, A Yak Caravan Is Coming, Birds Feeding on Biscuits, Himalayan Nightfall, etc. You also get some lovely impressions of what life as a Sherpa must be like day in and day out. Included is a ten page pamphlet with photographs from his trip, as well as entries from his travel diary that are occasionally rather harrowing, and which further confirm my mountain climber = insane masochist hunch. -Michael Klausman
Upon Reflection includes the complete recordings of Heron, a folk group that was formed in the suburbs of London in 1967. At the beginning of the '70s, they released two albums and a handful of singles on Dawn, a subsidiary of Pye that put out great records by Comus, Trader Horne, and Mike Cooper, who played slide guitar on some of Heron's songs. The group claimed the Incredible String Band as a major inspiration, but with the exception of a few old-timey numbers like a two-part cover of Woody Guthrie's "Sally Goodin," their songs sounded quite a bit more contemporary than the ISB's. Heron's three lead singers each wrote devastatingly great stripped-down acoustic pop songs. Because they felt uncomfortable in a studio setting, they made both of their albums outdoors using mobile recording equipment. You can literally hear birds chirping and wind blowing in the gaps between the songs, and the performances are incomparably relaxed and mellow. This two-disc anthology reveals Heron to've been one of the best and inexplicably least-known British folk bands of the early 1970s. -Rob Hatch-Miller
My absolute, unqualified, desert-island, all-time, hands-down, #1-favorite album, EVER! Television Personalities helped define England's D.I.Y. scene along with The Times and Swell Maps in 1978. Over their first three albums and seven singles, leader Dan Treacy made his mark as post-punk's heir-apparent to Ray Davies, specializing in wry observational vignettes ("Part-Time Punks"), fantastical psychedelic pastiches ("I Know Where Syd Barrett Lives"), and nudging art-school tomfoolery ("David Hockney's Diary," "Lichtenstein Painting"). Pop Goes Art! But ceaselessly simmering beneath the surface was an uncertain yet enormous human soul laid bare for all to tread upon. The Painted Word was recorded in 1982/1983, shelved indefinitely by Rough Trade (gotta make way for The Smiths!) and finally released to no acclaim whatsoever in 1985 by the tiny Illuminated label. Perhaps the only truly worthy bridge linking the dark majesty of Nick Drake's Pink Moon to the closely guarded ecstasy of Belle & Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister, this album remains a fascinating portrait of an artist whose grasp finally exceeds his reach, if only for the moment. A more magical hour I cannot imagine; from the opening clarion-call Byrdsian guitar arpeggios of "Stop and Smell the Roses" to the raga-pop of the title track, through mournful nostalgia and aching melancholy and meditations on love, optimism and regret -- before hurtling headlong into the psychotic freakout catharsis of the closing "Back to Vietnam." This ride, in my humble opinion, remains unrivaled. -Jeff Gibson
Among other no doubt important life lessons, what years of being a music nerd has taught me is that there's a great divide between the records that music critics love to spill too many positive adjectives over, and the records that one ends up playing the most in their daily lives. It's funny how a writer can twist and turn an album into fitting some sort of grand seminal artistic statement, and then rarely ever feel the need to listen to that album again. In this light, there are many other places in Ian Matthews' long and storied catalogue one could hit up before Journeys from Gospel Oak, but I haven't listened to, and dorked out on any of those records nearly as much. I can already see the whites of the eyes of all the folksters out there in Other Music Update Land turning red cause of this fact -- Ian Matthews was part of Fairport Convention for the "genre-defining" classic, What We Did on Our Holidays, his album with Plainsong, In Search Of Amelia Earhart, is yet another classic of the period which was even lucky enough to get recently reissued with a quote on the front sticker from, who else, Devendra. Hell, even Matthews' later solo outings, '73's Valley Hi and '74's Somedays You Eat the Bear and Somedays the Bear Eats You, are considered cornerstones of easy-goin' California-fried country folk pop, which is saying a lot since they were made by an Irishman. And yet in spite of such an accomplished resume, however slight or unassuming Journeys from Gospel Oak may seem, it has aged far better than anything else Matthews has made before or since.
Only fitting to its legacy, Journeys almost never came
out at all. In fact, back in '71, with two solo joints behind
him, Matthews was getting pretty burnt out on going it alone.
To add insult to injury, he wanted to start another band (Plainsong),
and was saving all his new original material for that project,
all the while, he still owed Vertigo a third solo record before
his contract was up. Begrudgingly, he pulled together a cast of
his musician friends, and somewhat spitefully cut a record of
mostly covers -- a record that Vertigo promptly, ironically sold
off leaving Journeys to lay dormant until Mooncrest put
it out in '74, three years after its completion. -Hartley Goldstein |
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