Long May You Run

sparse elegant simmering shimmering mournful blues hymns to heartbreak and healing. This is the soundtrack to dreams and sleepless mourning. This is the sound of hearts breaking, and painfully mending. Hushed, intimate, and immediate; the guitars breathe and the vocals moan. In a similar opened vein to Smog or Red House Painters, this is music for late-night introspection, or to carry a sliver of twilight with you throughout your day. This record sounds like grieving, like subdued passion boiling over in a quiet intensity. Deadly beautiful and captivating, Tillman is the needle in the long-playing grooves of my brain. I have listened to this record a dozen times in the last 2 days.

Long May Your Run, J. Tillman (2006)

Cave - Psychic Psummer (Important, 2009)

At their best, Chicago's Cave boil down familiar but disparate branches of psychedelic rock into a sludgy yet nimble whole. Their first album approached different modes like a kid in a candy store, dipping into heavy riffs, hypnotic repetition, and howling noise, but it sprinted and lagged, never pacing itself as expertly as the band does now. Psychic Psummer is comparatively a less-immediate listen, but it is a deeper and ultimately more rewarding one. It's less of a wrecking ball and more of an assured roll, tumbling like an enormous slow-moving boulder through the band's diverse brand of burly and blissed-out space-rock.

As a mostly-instrumental album, there's a lot of tension and release in these songs, as well as healthy doses of repetition. But Cave continually toy with and subvert these familiar methods in ways that are as cathartic as they are clever. Opener "Gamm" bores through space with its reverberating vocals and windmill guitar strums, veering between explosiveness and a quieter, tenser lockstep martial beat, before ending on a lower-tempo sigh of relief. "Made in Malaysia" is a faster and more surprising follow-up, with a frantic Morse-code keyboard pattern that the band follows in vicious syncopation before bowing into some monstrous circular riffs. There's still a drifting chill-down moment, as with many Cave songs, but it's with a more nervous pulse, pushed by the occasional vocal provocation.

The loping beat, skittering percussion, and robot keyboards of "Encino Men" sounds as good-naturedly goofy as that the name evokes. The moments of release here and throughout the record are muscular without being obvious, and with vintage organ and guitar tones as dry as the band's mouths after some bong-delivered inspiration. Speaking of which, "High, I Am" ironically winds up a bit more straightforward than most of Psychic Psummer. Its groove is solid and taut and driven by domineering bass and toms, and squirts of keyboard and percussive weirdness make it sound like an underwater level of any 16-bit video game.

The band plays themselves out with placid Moog tone and loose drumming of "Machines and Muscles", ending in a simple, satisfying denouement. The album doesn’t out-freak their peers, but nor does it mean to; Psychic Psummer takes the creative restlessness of the band's debut a step further into something much more linear, and rides the line between the studious and the sublime like an act that’s been around much longer than a couple years. It takes an immense amount of structuring and sweat on their end for you to drift away on yours, and the result is so seamless they make it look easy. -from Pitchfork.com

This has been one of my favorite acquisitions lately, a truly heady slice of psych rock, suckled on the nectar of psych-heroes that have come before, grown strong, confident, adaptable. A real beast! I hear strains of Krautrock (Can, Neu!, etc.), mainly in the hypnotic repetetive motor-beat; hear a touch of Suicide, in their overdriven garage synths; can see a flash of Lightning Bolt in their spastic breakdowns and monotonous pummeling; can watch the graceful sway of Tortoise in their jazzy syncopation. Psychic Psummer is well versed in Minimalist theory, letting the parts grow and swell over time, yet it remains driving and focused.
The performances are inspired, their musical tastes are well-developed, the album is short and sweet and will leave you gasping for more. In short, this album fucking rock. This is a band on the rise, one to watch out for. Get this now! and let it be the soundtrack to yr evolution.

Psychic Psummer

*now the link's really fixed, i swear!

Disparate Listening

These are just a couple of things that have grabbed my attention lately. When something makes my ears perk up, when i think 'i need to hear that again', that is how i seperate the signal from noise. So its all kind of random, and are certainly not the only albums that have stood my hair on end and set my neurons on fire, just a small representation.

Some more down 'n out country folk music, this one being recorded in Tucson, Az. Subsequently, tumbleweeds of harmonica, mandolin, accordion, trumpet, and pedal steel breeze across this album, framing its miniature stories of dashed hopes, daily life, triumphs and tragedies. Principle song-writer Willy Vlautin seems like a decent guy in a despicable world, with the creative prowess to capture those details. What sets this apart from other, more stale, musicians in the singer/songwriter stable is the crystal clear production, brimming with mood and ambience, as seen in the ominous pulse of 'El Tiradito'. Sounding sometimes like Calexico or Giant Sand, (Howe Gelb provides some sounds), and sometimes like the hushed solo work of Mark Kozelek, this album stirs yr thoughts, stimulates yr brain, and begs to be listened to again and again.
Richmond Fontaine - Thirteen Cities

I've been listening to this for a couple of years, but sort of stumbled upon it again recently, and its stark beauty struck me in the throat, as it always does. This is a couple living in the woods of Finland, making music in a log cabin in the woods, and i will not begrudge them their idyllic eden. Their music comes from the womblike mind-meld possible from spending an incredible amount of time together. They really seem to live their art. I was reminded, hearing this again, of listening to this in the greyhound station in St. Louis; sitting on an old pew, thinking about carnivals. As soon, as i took off my headphones, i began having a conversation with some guy about working for the carnival, apparently he was on his way, in search of work. One of those miraculous coincidences possible, riding the Gdog. I also include this, in that i wrote a complete review recently, that i'm actually rather proud of, so i thought i'd point it out to y'all.
Mi and L'au - s/t Read Full Review

This is a solo joint from James Ferraro, half of the noise freaks The Skaters. This is some of the first of the new incarnation of cassette freak-out music, and i am utterly fond of what they're all doing. This record is a lovely chunk of heavenly harmonies, celestial chorus accompanied by Reichian marimba loops, going down smooth as chinese silk for the 35 minutes split across 2 sides. What actually made me want to put this up is it has the most seamless side-flip that i have ever heard, enough to make me do a double-take. This is eternal music, suitable for all-night looping, letting it coil up and down yr nervous system. James Ferraro is providing the soundtrack to a new new age movement, with band names like Nirvana, Pacific Temple Rat Band, on and on; exotic and transcendental, but also down and dirty, for all the kids on the dance-floor.
James Ferraro - Marble Surf

Stuff i've been listening to

Dark times lately. Been meaning to put something up here for a while, but my brain has turned this project into buillding the Cistine Chapel, like everything has to be 'inspired' or 'good' or 'legit'. Well, fuck it, i need to keep pushing the rock uphill, Sisyphus style. Here's some shit that i've been listening to lately, that is helping me to maintain my sanity. I've been nursing a broken heart, and have chosen to deluge myself in falling arpeggios of guitar chords. Losing myself in technicality, in one of the only damn things on this earth that has any prayer of making me feel any better. So here we go:

John Fahey. The man's influence is impossible to calculate. Patron saint of the American Primitive. Guardian of the curmudgeonly record-collectors. I have been losing myself in 'When the Spring Time Comes Again.' Almost everything he ever did is indispensable, so i have chosen The Legend of Blind Joe Death arbitrarily, maybe a good place to jump in, if you don't know 'im. get it pw: levente

Probably my favorite of those that have come in the wake of Saint Fahey, Jack Rose has mastered the Primitive styles, blues ragtime country etc., and runs it through an opium-hued lens, similar to Sir Richard Bishop. I had the good fortune to see him play in Louisville, KY last summer, his mastery of the six-string is jaw-dropping. His work with Pelt is bestial, as well. I love his guitar ragas, his rags are no slouch either. This is Kensington Blues. hear it

Chris Brokaw was the drummer for Codeine and guitar player for Boston-based Come. This is his second solo record, an all instrumental guitar album, mainly acoustic. It is more Celtic oriented than the previous two, but it shares their virtuosity and imagination. He strays from the pack with the title track 'Canaris', which is behemoth! Colossal feedback sculpture, clocking in at almost 18 minutes. Who needs drugs? check it

Weepy music, to rock yrself to sleep by. Hushed; intimate and immediate, velvet whispering in yr ear like the ghosts of lovers past. 'Ghosts and Lovers' is my favorite track, no pun intended, but its really a mood piece, an album's album, not really top-40 material, but it IS probably Marissa Nadler's best album, to date. feel it

When i can't handle being curled up in a little ball any longer, only pure undiluted rage will do! Get you off of the couch and out into the streets, throwing bricks and hurling invectives! This is probably my favorite Stoner record ever, but its so hard to pick just one! Hard hitting, hard drinking, hard riffing, rock yr fucking socks off, sometimes nothing else will do. Burn it

I can't stop listening to Tom Waits, i mean obsessively, all day every day. It is almost frightening. He makes me feel that it is okay to be a lovable misanthropic loser, to take comfort in my persona like a woolen sweater, or a beat up old fedora. This is one of his more recent joints, and has some of my favorites: the mysterious 'Alice', the maudlin 'Flower's Grave', the decadent Weimar cabaret of 'Kommienezuspadt', the burlesque of 'Table Top Joe', and the genuinely unsettling 'We're All Mad Here'. As i get older, i am learning to appreciate so many aspects and nuances of Mr. Wait's music, a discography that just keeps unfolding like a hallucinatory lotus, or a pack of Camel's. This music, and others like it, are showing me what it is to be Grown Up. Which is fucked, but unavoidable. Nursing a grown-up broken heart. Joy. Nurse It pw: www.pebl.pl
None of this music will probably make you feel any better, and most of it may be an out and out bummer, like many of my recent posts. And there's probably lots more what that comes from, as i peel back my skin to fill the void. So happy listening, hopefully i'll see you around.