Bill Direen & the Builders, Divine Comedia (side A)

Bill Direen is one of the less-remembered figures from the early-80s in New Zealand. While Flying Nun reissued his early work on CD, the original vinyl seems to have been self-released on his South Indies label.  And while his music is lo-fi and generally catchy, it borrows from slightly different influences than seems typical of the early Flying Nun releases.  Direen introduced more confusion by varying the name on his releases (the identities Bilders, Builders, and Bill Direen all seem to have been used), and through extreme stylistic diversity.  The 1988 compilation Divine Comedia assembles songs that he originally released between 1981 and 1987.  The compilation kicks off with 1985's "Black Doors", which vaguely resembles the Minutemen, then leaps to a stripped-down acoustic song, "Clifford Flat".  Both songs execute their styles well, but, apart from Direen's recognizable voice, it's hard to find much in common.  The third song, "Do the Alligator", falls closer to the proto-indie style that is usually associated with Flying Nun.  Perhaps the most amazing part is that these three dissimilar tracks all originally appeared on the same LP, 1985's CoNCH3.  This incongruous approach continues through the rest of the album.  Divine Comedia assembles a set of great tracks from an overlooked songwriter, but listening to it definitely gives little insight into the creative vision of an artist who makes frequent stylistic leaps.  The cheap photograph and design of the cover also fail to give any insight into this oddly-arranged compilation.

The Bats, Free All the Monsters (side A)

All Bats albums will naturally be compared against 1987's Daddy's Highway, which is generally considered their best.  Like that album 2011's Free All the Monsters captures many of the band's best qualities.  It manages to focus on their simple, strummy songs without seeming too same-y.  Tempos and arrangements vary just enough to stay interesting, without relying on production tricks or complex arrangements that distract from the band.  The recording is simple in the style of Daddy's Highway, even when noting that I prefer that album's analog primitivism to the limitations of the cheap digital system used here.  The melodies here are generally a bit subtler than "North by North" or "Block of Wood", but the songwriting is impressively consistent and memorable.  There are even qualities of Free All the Monsters that display impressive, if still subtle, growth over 25 years — Kaye Woodward's backing vocals and Malcolm Grant's drumming feel impressively confident and self-assured, without having changed at all in style.  The cover photo immediately illustrates the comfortable confines of the Seacliff Asylum where the album was made, without feeling at all heavy-handed or distracting.

Acid Birds, Acid Birds III (side A)

Acid Birds is the trio of Andrew Barker and Charles Waters of Gold Sparkle with Jaime Fennelly of Mind Over Mirrors, and 2011's Acid Birds III is entitled to appropriately reflect its place in their discography.  Reflecting the two approaches of the members, Acid Birds move between a dronier, electronic style and a percussion-forward aesthetic that borrows loosely from jazz traditions.  "Red Beak, Yellow Eye", the long track on side A, alternates between the two styles, with sharp turns that indicate a compositional hand driving its improvisational elements.  The album begins with the drums, especially the resonant kick, very far in the foreground.  The two tracks on side B are neatly divided, with a shorter and somewhat drone-based electronic piece followed by a longer, groovier track with live drums.  While the performances mesh nicely, the sonic elements sometimes seem to have come from different recordings, with the organic instruments recorded in an open room and the electronics preserving all of the brittleness of a direct feed.  The intricate and colorful cover painting hints, to me, that a psychedelic and perhaps droning album would be inside, only a few shades removed from the actual contents of Acid Birds III.

Mecca Normal, Flood Plain (side A)

My favorite Mecca Normal album is 1992's Dovetail, because it perfectly captures the duo's live dynamic.  The awkwardly structured songs perfectly pair David Lester's cutting guitar with Jean Smith's narrative vocal tales.  For such an abstractly conceived group, the songs on Dovetail are surprisingly consistent in style and approach.  A year later, 1993's Flood Plain finds the duo expanding its stylistic reach.  For example, "Current of Agreement" layers many of Smith's voice, rich with reverb, on top of a folkier sound — it resembles Linda Perhacs as much as Mecca Normal.  At another extreme, Smith adds guitar to the dense and distorted soundfield of "Greater Beauty", which pulls it vaguely in the direction of Charalambides.  At other times, songs begin to pull more toward pop forms.  Flood Plain continues to employ the raw and vaguely primitive sonic approach of earlier Mecca Normal albums, with thick midrange and little content in either frequency extreme.  I have trouble reconciling Jean Smith's gray cover painting of a bird and flowers with the music contained here, but the blocky font used for the band name feels perfect.

Country Joe & the Fish, Electric Music for the Mind and Body (side A)

Country Joe may be best remembered for his solo acoustic rendition of "I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag" at Woodstock.  Compared against this unintended iconic event, Country Joe & the Fish's early band albums surprise with their garage rock qualities.  While the group never veers into the heavier side of 60s garage, much of 1967's Electric Music for the Mind and Body resembles Dylan-esque groups like the Hombres, who are traditionally grouped in the garage genre.  The loud and brittle electric organs, which were obviously recorded direct, may be the loudest thing in the mix, and their timbre gives the music an edge of immediacy.  The drums, on the other hand, fall clumsily behind the beat and are placed low in the mix — this quality pulls the group closer to the experimental folk groups of New York like the Fugs and the Godz.  The crisp electric guitars and tight vocal harmonies, on the other hand, reflect professionalism and talent that's somewhat incongruous with these other elements.  The songwriting is also more complex and skillful than most garage or folk-rock groups of the time employed.  The mixes are surprisingly thin and bright for their era, and the cover design associates the group more closely with a mainstream psychedelic rock idiom than the music contained inside.

Alastair Galbraith, Morse (side A)

It's easy to group Alastair Galbraith's solo songwriter albums of the 90s under a simple description of "introspective', and their are a lot of similarities between these albums.  Listening back to his first solo album (not counting 1990's never-reissued Hurry on Down cassette), 1991's Morse often conveys emotions more overtly and directly than the albums, like Talisman and Mirrorwork, that followed it.  Drums make an occasional appearance, and many of the electric guitars are often distorted, but the most frequent source of Morse's emotional accessibility is the rhythm guitars, which explicitly welcome the listener with energy and structure.  Galbraith's lead vocals reference his background in Plagal Grind, with a rock-like expressive style that would appear less frequently on his later albums.  Galbraith's melodies on Morse are quite pretty too — despite the rough recordings and odd arrangements, an accessible side peaks through.  The cover's blurry photo of the simple recording setup emphasizes Morse's raw and lo-fi side, which may have felt appropriate at the time, but 20+ years later, the image feels more jarring than the music inside.

Don Cherry, Complete Communion (side A)

While there was a several year break between Don Cherry's work in Ornette's quartet and his first solo record as a leader, the stylistic evolution is gradual and subtle.  With 1966's Complete Communion, Cherry's melodies and compositional explorations pick up where Ornette's quartets left off, complete with Ed Blackwell on drums.  The biggest structural difference is that while discrete tracks are identified on the record, they flow into each other to create sidelong pieces with continuity between movements.  The other big leap from Ornette's work is the introduction of Gato Barbieri on tenor — where Ornette's alto playing could grow shrill and slightly harsh, Barbieri employs a much smoother sound to soften the entire sound of the quartet.  After Complete Communion, Cherry developed a more personal compositional style, beginning with this album's successor, Symphony for Improvisers.  The glossy paper used for my recent reissue copy does not flatter the packaging design as much as the original matte outside, but the mastering of the vinyl sounds surprisingly impressive.

White Fence, White Fence & Family / Perfume vol. 1 (side A)

White Fence's Tim Presley balances the slick commercialism of current indie rock with the awkward reclusive record-nerd persona at the heart of his indie precursors.  Where his last few releases had been gradually emphasizing the slicker and more commercial sides, 2012's White Fence & Family / Perfume vol. 1 moves more to the older indie side of Presley's work.  It is not quite as diverse as his 2010 self-titled debut, but it's more consistently noisier and rougher than even White Fence.  Parts of Family / Perfume vol. 1 seem to be playing too slowly, but the record definitely sounded wrong at 45.  While some digital effects peek out on vocals, the sound bears a recognizable similarity to Bevis Frond.  Where Nick Salomon seemed to be trying to make competent recordings and mostly attained his lo-fi character out of necessity, Presley strives purposefully for a lo-fi sound, and even willfully exaggerates it.  The mastering job here seems to have mostly stayed out of the way, and to have preserved the varying colors of Presley's odd palette.  The clean, geometric design on the cover gives little hint of the dirt found inside.

The Terminals, Touch (side A)

New Zealand's Terminals' first EP and album emphasized their 60s garage influences with a more melodic approach.  1992's Touch brought line-up changes that moved the band into a darker, heavier space.  The more chaotic influence of Pere Ubu became more obvious, and Peter Stapleton's work with brooding, introspective groups like Flies Inside the Sun and Dadamah might also have affected the group's direction.  Brian Crook, from the Renderers and Scorched Earth Policy, joined on second guitar, and brought a powerful interplay with Stephen Cogle.  Touch captures an incredibly powerful band combining rock, post-punk, and a trace of noise into a distinctive sound.  The songwriting, singing (mostly Cogle, with a few songs by Crook), and playing are consistently remarkable throughout Touch.  The sound quality is never pristine and I always wish for more high-end air, but it sounds good enough to capture the band's magic, and it never gets in the way.  Kim Pieters's cover painting perfectly reflects the group's beauty and also its dark energy.

The Trypes, Music for Neighbors (side A)

The 2012 reissue Music for Neighbors combines the Trypes 1984 EP The Explorers Hold with unreleased earlier recordings and a compilation track.  The Trypes are remembered for their connections to the Feelies and their associates (like Yung Wu and the Willies).  Where many of these bands clearly played rock music, the Trypes stretched much further away.  Historical antecedents might include things like the United States of America album, Cale / Riley Church of Anthrax, or God Bless the Red Crayola.  All of these artists, like the Trypes, took a rigorously intellectual look at what it meant to play rock music, but it's hard to know if the Trypes had encountered any of these albums.  They covered the Beatles and the liner notes namedrop the Velvet Underground, whose weirder late-era moments like "Ocean" and "Murder Mystery" do feel like influences here.  The Trypes' shambling primitivism would grow fashionable with the increasing popularity of indie rock, but few bands have brought it so little of rock's primal energy — Trypes songs float more than propel.  The reissue sounds impressively clean given the source material, but the frequency distribution sits heavily in the high-mids.  It might reflect their love of the Beatles, who used a similar balance (and a cover of "Love You To" is included here), but it strikes me as sonically surprising.  The beautiful packaging features letterpressed text on thick cardboard, a photo (which I'm assuming is actually a collage) attached to the front cover, and a nice booklet with old photos and new writing.

Crispy Ambulance, Live on a Hot August Night (12" EP)

Neil Diamond jokes aside, 1981's Live on a Hot August Night is a studio recording, with one track on each side.  Side A begins sounding somewhat comparable to Joy Division, with a similarly dark and simplistic rendering of rock music.  Halfway through "The Presence", though, it takes a radical turn into ambient music, and sounds more like Harold Budd.  There are vague similarities in the palette, but it almost feels like two totally discrete tracks glued together.  "Concorde Square" on side B, changes less through the track, and falls somewhere in the middle.  Its structure is even simpler and more repetitive than the song part of "The Presence", and it's built on top of a cheap side-car drum machine — even the drums follow this weird-sounding rhythm.  Many effects that were then cutting-edge are audibly positioned, and often hard-panned, in the mix.  The 45 RPM record cut sounds quite good, especially the low and high frequencies.  The pattern of bright and blurry images, surrounded by simple type, on the front and back of the cover looks great.

Willem Breuker, Baal Brecht Breuker (side A)

1973's Baal Brecht Breuker documents Willem Breuker's collaboration with a theater group — he provided music for Bertolt Brecht's play Baal.  While the music clearly predates the more consistent style that he developed with his Kollektief only a few years later, it also often feels a bit too foreground to naturally fit a play.  The horn lines are often overtly melodic, and they also sometimes have a dance-y pulse.  On the album, at least, they're structured into pieces of several minute duration — it's unclear if these entire pieces were used for the play, or only excerpted.  In other places, the music breaks down to more incidental sections, with instruments like organ, mandolin, and glockenspiel moving to the foreground.  These parts feel more at home in a theatrical setting, and also even more atypical of Breuker's work.  The marquee talent in his surrounding cast is the surprising combination in the rhythm section:  Louis Andriessen, Maarten Altena, and Han Bennink.  The three talented musicians fit together nicely, despite their very different styles, and they form a solid underpinning for the rhythmic and vaguely jazzier sections.  The recording is oddly, and overly, bright and clear — it sounds more like it came from the late-70s.  The album originally came inside of a fitted sack, but when I acquired mine, it unfortunately lacked the sack and included only the standard sleeve from within.

Albert Ayler, Vibrations (side A)

Albert Ayler's quartet recordings from Copenhagen in September 1964, first released in 1965 as Ghosts, reappeared a decade later under the name Vibrations.  The recordings capture Ayler with perhaps his most famous group of sidemen:  Don Cherry, Sunny Murray, and Gary Peacock.  While it was recorded only a few months after the chaotic Spiritual Unity, Vibrations captures Ayler's transition toward his subtler and more complex work.  Sunny Murray's drumming often retains its unmitigated energy, and his snare drum can still leap out of the mix.  These driving performances are juxtaposed with more introspective compositions like "Ghosts", which foreshadow the layered counterpoint that would be Ayler's focus by 1966.  Cherry's distinctive voice stands out here — at times it almost seems out of place, but he also brings a bit of Ornette's influence into tracks like "Holy Spirit".  The mixes feature extreme panning, with Peacock's bass often illogically hard-panned.  A large painting of clouds fills most of the front cover, but it seems to have little relationship to Ayler's music here.

Ekkehard Ehlers & Paul Wirkus, Ballads (side A)

2009's Ballads consists of a series of short instrumental tracks.  The tracks are vaguely atmospheric, but the individual sounds and ideas evolve too quickly to be particularly ambient or droney — as a result, Ballads falls nicely outside of any obvious niche.  While there is a fairly uniform palette for the album, each track is differentiated by a slightly different set of sounds.  Each track evolves over its short duration, but there is little build or fade to identify a beginning or end.  Sounds featuring pulsing or tremolo are often in the foreground, with more sustained drones behind them in the mix.  The high-frequency spectrum is typically fully, but only momentary digital squiggles introduce any harshness or exaggeration.  Bass hits appear briefly in duration to add impact, and there is little midrange content, especially in the low-mids.  Most sounds lack identifiers as digital, analog, or acoustic in source, but double bass and clarinet players are credited in the sparse liner notes.  The shiny silver printing of the simple front cover image on thick cardboard looks particularly amazing.

Eric Chenaux, Guitar & Voice (side A)

The radically diverse sonic palette that Eric Chenaux creates with his guitar on 2012's Guitar & Voice reminds me of atmospheric innovators like Aidan Baker or Christopher Willits.  Where Baker and Willits focus on these atmospheres as the center of their compositions, for Chenaux, they're just one element.  Even on the instrumental tracks, the processed guitar sounds are juxtaposed with cleaner sounds playing more conventional harmonies and melodies.  Sometimes even the most textural and recognizably digital sounds pick up melodic bits before diving back into the background.  With the songs with vocals, the song-like qualities move even further into the foreground.  The vocal melodies float slowly without resolution, falling somewhere between Richard Youngs's song records and Low.  On Guitar & Voice, Chenaux deceptively combines divergent influences to create an odd and distinctive album.  The absolute simplicity of the cover is slightly jarring, but the poster insert is impressively crafted and looks great.  The distracting noises on the left speaker in some tracks seem to be a problem with the vinyl pressing, and likely not one that is limited to my copy.

Lou Reed, Berlin (side A)

1973's Berlin sounds almost like a rock record.  Punchy drums underlie the songs, most of which follow conventional rock structures.  Lou Reed's familiar voice fills a role similar to the one it took on Transformer.  The bass and electric guitar fill fairly typical roles.  In other ways, Berlin could not resemble rock music less.  While the drums often offer propulsion, the rest of the instruments seem to be falling off of them without an effort to keep up.  The very start of the album is an odd recording which gives no hint of the more conventional music that will follow.  Strange folk instruments like dulcimers turn up, but their performance does not reference rock's folk roots — instead, they sound like a missing overdub extracted inappropriately from Pet Sounds.  The resulting juxtapositions are disorienting and confusing.  Everything is well recorded and tastefully mixed, and the cover design looks appropriately like an artist's imitation of an idiomatic rock album cover.

Alec K. Redfearn & The Seizures, Exterminating Angel (side A)

I've been a long-time fan of accordionist Alec K. Redfearn's primary group, The Eyesores.  That group stands out in part for its subtle, intricate arrangements.  With his smaller ensemble Alec K. Redfearn & the Seizures, Redfearn's songwriting still appropriates elements from both prog-rock (and the artier side of the Rock In Opposition crowd) and Eastern European folk music.  The Seizures music begins to head toward song structures — the intricate arrangements have been removed and the vocals reside more in the foreground as a result.  The songs are built more around the vocal melodies, and the instrumental sections feel more like rock solos.  At times the Seizures also employ a heaviness that's generally missing from the Eyesores.  Redfearn has purposely abandoned some of his greatest strengths as a composer — it feels like he's exploring new ideas and having fun doing so.  On some songs he even drops his trademark accordion to play ukulele instead.  2009's Exterminating Angel is an interesting aside for an incredibly talented musician, and it's still an impressive showing of his talents (and those of the rhythm section backing him, too).  Sonically, it's a bit raw and plain sounding, which neither captures all of the magical details of the playing nor gets in the way of the band's talent.  The mastering job brings the high frequencies of the metal percussion a bit too far to the foreground.  The intricate and foreboding cover image would fit more with a contemporary free noise album than the more structured rock songs contained here.

Bird Show Band, Bird Show Band (side A)

On 2010's Bird Show Band, Ben Vida takes a break from his solo electronic work as Bird Show to team up with a large group of Chicago improv collaborators.  Most of the album finds Vida in a quintet with two Tortoise drummers (Dan Bitney and John Herndon) and two members of the city's broad jazz community (Josh Abrams on bass and Jim Baker on synthesizer).  Where Tortoise hint at their love of fusion-era Miles Davis, here that influence is front and center.  With synthesizers floating over two groove-oriented drummers and Abrams's repetitive basslines, the most obvious antecedent is Herbie Hancock's Sextant.  The sound of Bird Show Band is neither as sterile as Tortoise nor as classic as Sextant — the recordings are slightly lo-fi but mostly somewhat plain.  The high synth frequencies and low tones of the upright bass give a bit of a modern and scooped sound, and the drums are a bit too murky to really flesh out the midrange.  Two tunes with Vida solo feel a bit closer to his other albums, and a bit out of place when surrounded by the more flowing ensemble pieces.  The front cover is simple with a lot of text — it does not quite mesh with the more classic style captured here.

Paul McCartney, McCartney (side A)

The amazing thing on hearing 1970's McCartney is how small it sounds.  The sound of the record presages indie rock, with a smallness that reminds me, a little bit, of Before Hollywood or Colossal Youth.  The drums especially fall into the mix with very little impact.  While it all sounds appropriately small, it's also beautifully mixed across the instrumental palette and frequency spectrum.  Where McCartney's understated song structures and clumsy lyrical turns can feel out of place when juxtaposed with bombast (as on "Live and Let Die", most notably), the same qualities feel organic in the context of this simple record.  The musicianship is consistently great, and the melodies are well-crafted.  The humble front cover image perfectly fits McCartney's simple beauty.

Duncan Browne, Give Me Take You (side A)

At some point, 1968's Give Me Take You moved from forgotten folk oddity to coveted collector item, and it's also a memorable oddity.  Moving past Browne's exaggerated lyrical themes (most memorably "Dwarf in a Tree"), the songs are well-written, with beautiful melodies and some lyrical subtlety inside of the stylized themes.  Browne sings in a tenor both rich and airy, and his acoustic guitar playing exhibits both detail and taste.  The scooped frequency response, even of old pressings, hints at more modern recordings, though it's not as exaggerated as many modern releases.  While Browne's voice is thinned some, it often provides the only low-mid content — the emphasis on sibilance created by this equalization would benefit from de-essing.  The bass sits mostly in low-frequencies with little harmonic content.  Some songs are very sparse, others have subtle string and keyboard arrangements, and others are layered with surprisingly odd, and very psychedelic, string parts.  The cover design emphasizes the fairy-tale quality of the lyrics.

Leonard Cohen, Songs of Leonard Cohen (side A)

It's easy to take 1966's Songs of Leonard Cohen for granted — it's an incredibly canonical and beloved album.  Many songs are beloved and well-crafted, including lyrics surprisingly dark for their time.  The album also captures an amazing recording of the nylon-string guitar and Cohen's voice, with a dark and flattering frequency balance.  John Simon's arrangements are tasteful and subtle, nicely complementing Cohen's great performances without distracting from them.  While the cover design features a prominent photo of Cohen's face, the blurry and strangely-cropped image becomes a flattering part of the design.  Whenever I hear "Suzanne", I appreciate that New Zealand primitivists The Garbage And The Flowers took their name from the lyrics.

The Terminals, Little Things (side A)

1995's Little Things marks the apex of the Terminals' mature work.  The group evolved out of theearly-80s New Zealand band the Victor Dimisich Band, whose recordings were fortunately reissued on CD in the late-90s.  Singer/guitarist Stephen Cogle and drummer/lyricist Peter Stapleton formed the Terminals in the late-80s, and their early releases moved in more of a garage rock direction.  With 1992's Touch, guitarist Brian Crook of the Renderers introduced a noisier and more chaotic element that pulled the Terminals closer to Pere Ubu and Roxy Music.  Through their whole career, Cogle's deadpan vocals reference Joy Division and other vaguely goth-leaning post-punk bands.  Stapleton's simplistic drumming recalls the Velvet Underground.  The Terminals are more than the sum of these influences, and through Little Things they combine careful songwriting with a powerful roar.  The recording captures the power of the band riding in crests over an appropriately understated drum kit, and it's slightly primitive quality flatters the music, and especially the singing, without standing out.  The layered typewritten text on the cover is a beautiful design — it hints at the music's darkness and subtlety without relying on reference in its appearance.

Dog Faced Hermans, Mental Blocks for All Ages (side A)

Dog Faced Hermans' first two albums placed them in a more overt punk tradition, with similarities to contemporaries like Bogshed and the Shrubs.  With 1991's Mental Blocks for All Ages, they leapt toward the artier style for which they're best remembered.  The parts no longer fit together neatly in their song structures — instead a more shifting approach allowed parts to move between each other in a field.  The resultant tracks still have elements of song structure, but the individual parts fight the overarching structure as much as they help to define it.  Each musician's playing is neatly defined and uses repetition within its own logic.  While the timbres retain the distortion and impact of punk rock, they use these qualities as much for reference as to create a sense of power or propulsion.  The relatively primitive recording quality manages to capture both the bristling energy and the more diffuse traits of the music.  The simple cover image emphasizes Dog Faced Hermans' punk rock roots more than the abstraction that they began to explore here.

Gumpert / Sommer Duo plus Manfred Hering, The Old Song (side A)

The piano / sax / drums trio format had grown popular in free jazz and related improv circuits in the early-70s.  Von Schlippenbach Trio's Pakistani Pomade dates from 1972, and the Cecil Taylor Unit's freeblowing Akisakila came a year later.  Also in 1973, the Gumpert / Sommer duo teamed with alto saxist Manfred Hering for this record.  While its format and dynamic intensity rivals that of its contemporaries, the musicianship on The Old Song has a very different feel.  Günter "Baby" Sommer's drumming relies less on creating a sense of flowing movement, and more on the gestures of which it is composed.  While the structures rely on pattern and even rhythm, the purpose of these patterns is never to create feelings of propulsion or movement — they exist more as a reference to this form than as an underlying pulse.  Sommer's piano playing is also a bit out of place in a free context — even more than Irene Schweizer, he often employs a lyrical and almost romantic vocabulary evocative of Martial Solal.  Perhaps because he's a guest and not a regular group member, Hering seems to follow the other players more often than he pulls in a third direction.  The trio generally do manage to pull their seemingly incongruous styles into logical collaborations, often with one personality driving.  The lo-fi nature of the recordings is emphasized when Sommer's playing grows loud, as it tends to drown the entire group in the distortion that its volume introduces.  The austerity of the front cover is beautiful and uninviting.

Sparks, Kimono My House (side A)

With 1974's Kimono My House, Sparks refined the eccentric glam style for which they're remembered.  The Beatles influences of their debut are gone, and they've emphasized their exaggerated songwriting, which relies heavily on Russell Mael's impressive falsetto register.  The funny lyrics on songs like "Thank God it's Not Christmas" and "This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us" come to the foreground when sung in this unusual register, but never to a point where it distracts from the rock impulses.  The technical sound of Kimono My House has an odd bit of sheen.  While the drums especially have plenty of impact and the frequency distribution is appropriate and even (some songs are only slightly bass-light), the album almost seems to have a weird scrim over it, and it's hard to tell the technical source.  It almost foreshadows the SSL bus compressor sound that became popular in the 90s.  While the front cover image is iconic, I particularly envy the Maels' fantastic wardrobe on the back cover image.

Eyeless in Gaza, Photographs as Memories (side A)

1981's Photographs as Memories sounds amazingly tiny and bright.  The guitar falls into a narrow range, without high or low-mid frequencies audible — it presents a sonic wash, without much attack, presence, or definition.  The primitive drum machines are not high up in the mix, and their limited inherent punch is de-emphasized.  The keyboard does cut through with a fuller frequency response, with really present highs on some songs that are emphasized in mastering.  They never sound shrill, but they sometimes leap out as the loudest thing in the mix.  Martyn Bates's vocals occupy a narrow space as well, and they're typically kept low in the mix.  Most songs here follow a simple verse-chorus structure, drawn neatly from a pop tradition, only without the prominent vocal melodies.  Occasionally, as on "John of Patmos" at the end of side A, the palette and structure move in a somewhat more abstract direction.  These moments hint at the freer experiments of a year later, when Eyeless in Gaza made Pale Hands I Love So Well.  The blurry cover image, bright yellow border, and hand-drawn font reflect the era and style of the music perfectly, and present an iconic design to match the perfectly stylized album.

Six Finger Satellite, Paranormalized (side A)

1996's Paranormalized adds a bit of clarity and a more diverse sound palette to its predecessor Severe Exposure.  Where Severe Exposure was pretty consistently heavy and dark, Paranormalized includes some more spacious songs like "Coke and Mirrors" and "Perico".  Synthesizers are a bit more prominent here, with less focus on the consistently dense guitar.  The sound, while still lo-fi and often weirdly distorted, lacks the consistently muffled feel that gave Severe Exposure its odd sonic character.  The song structures have also grown a bit more complex, with dynamic break-downs sometimes happening mid-song.  Paranormalized remains a weird-sounding and fairly lo-fi excursion, with a very good mastering job preserving some clarity.  I do wish there were more low-end on the bass guitars and synthesizers, but I can't tell if this was a mixing or mastering decision.  The crazily-colorized four-headed band on the cover fits the music perfectly, capturing both its beauty and its grotesqueness.

Islaja, Keraaminen Pää (side A)

Islaja's 2007 Ulual YYY has always impressed me — it's primitive and stripped-down, but also focused and impressively distinctive.  By 2010's Keraaminen Pää, she's self-consciously matured into a less distinctive artist.  While the album retains her sparse approach, the exposed and bare qualities of Islaja's early albums are gone.  While hardly as bombastic as, for example, Björk, who might be an obvious comparison, Islaja uses much bigger sounds here, and her vocals project with more confidence and power.  It's unclear whether she's seeking a broader audience, or whether the naïve qualities that I valued were unintentional on Ulual YYY.  No matter the cause, I appreciated the tiny austerity of her early work, and the more ambitious sounds here feel like a departure.  Islaja's still an impressively talented songwriter and arranger, and Keraaminen Pää successfully captures some of that magic.  The gestures in which her talent is wrapped feel a lot more purposeful and a lot less exposed than in her earlier work, and that transformation sometimes distracts me from the magic that's still here.  The cover image has also moved away from a rustic appearance and feels more stylish — it matches the contents perfectly.

Kinks, Face to Face (side A)

The Kinks' creative evolution in the mid-to-late 60s was linear and easy to trace.  1965's Kinda Kinks brought a lot more focus on subtlety in songwriting, with songs like "Something Better Beginning" and "Nothing in this World can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout that Girl".  By 1967, with Something Else by the Kinks, the group's songwriting and arranging maturity was in full display with "Waterloo Sunset".  1966's Face to Face continues the gradual transition and maturity between the two.  Hints of the arrangement magic turn up — they'd be fully realized a year later.  Some of the earlier, simpler charms are here too, like "Sunny Afternoon".  The recording sound seems surprisingly primitive, but I think that's because I have a weird Spanish copy that must have been mastered poorly.  The crazy cartoon cover is iconic — it looks more like a movie poster from this era than an album cover, and the album is certainly more conventional than the cover would indicate.

Jon Mueller, Alphabet of Movements (side A)

2011's Alphabet of Movements consists of two side-long pieces.  The pieces follow a similar form, and each might be drawn from the same process.  On each piece, a fast rhythm of a very consistent sound establishes itself — judging from the track titles, side A was created with a snare drum and side B with small gongs.  Once this pattern has established itself, with both the sound's attack, and the interference created from overtones, a second sound is introduced.  The new sound is a processed, evolving electronic sound, which has enough in common with the underlying pattern that it might in some way be derived from the acoustic sound.  This electronic sound slowly builds in volume and complexity until it has completely overtaken the original acoustic impulse.  After it has clearly established itself as the defining idea, the electronic sound begins a long, gentle fade, which ends with only the acoustic sound remaining.  The recording captures this process organically, with the details preserved in a natural balance, and the mastering preserves the excellent sound quality.  The packaging features nice reverse-stock paper, with scribbled notes covering the front (and center stickers too), and then a sparse design on the back with relevant text in tiny print.

Basement 5, 1965 — 1980 (side A)

For a band as heavily informed by dub as the Basement 5, it's surprising how bright their album sounds.  The prominent instrument on 1965 — 1980 is clearly the chiming rhythm guitar, with the bass playing a secondary role.  The bass also sounds surprisingly thin and clear.  Martin Hannett and Chris Nagle brought some of their Joy Division sonic formula here — the sound emphasizes the punk energy of the group but diminishes the reggae roots that distinguish the group.  While the vocals follow the album's bright sound, the accented English (and song with lyrics about immigration) help to clarify the Basement 5's identity.  Accompanying the three members pictured on the back is established punk session drummer Richard Dudanski, who sounds consistently great here.  1965 —1980 has an iconic logo embossed on the cover, a nice printed inner sleeve, and, enclosed, a primitive but glossy collage-image poster.

Labradford, E Luxo So (side A)

The more ambient music evolves in digital and primitive directions, the more distinctive 1999's E Luxo So sounds.  The palette, which ranges from a string quartet and a piano to what sounds like a digital sampler, always has a lush, rich quality, full of dark low-mids.  The piano sound is especially haunting and beautiful, and the electric guitar and organs also contribute to the classic tone of the recording.  Some pieces still feature Labradford's characteristic Morricone-tinged guitar lines, but the parts that emphasize piano and strings sound more like a late-80s Roedelius album.  While the tonality and arrangements hint at the new-age side of Roedelius, E Luxo So avoids even the hints of cliché that could turn up on his piano albums.  The blurry black and white image on reverse stock paper looks great and fits the music perfectly.

Chuck Berry, The Great Twenty-Eight (side A)

The Great Twenty-Eight collects most of Chuck Berry's hits between 1955 ("Maybellene") and 1965 ("I want to be Your Driver", which is less memorable to me than 1964's "No Particular Place to Go").  It does omit "You Never Can Tell", which is apparently perceived as more of a hit today, thanks to its prominent movie soundtrack placement, than it was in 1984 when this compilation was assembled.  My biggest surprise on listening was the diversity of arrangements.  For example, there are no cymbals on "Memphis", while the guitar solos are illogically loud in "Carol".  The liner notes also surprised me, as I had not realized that Willie Dixon played bass on many of these tracks, or that Jerome Green contributed maracas on "Maybellene".  Berry's tenor sounds rich and beautiful on most tracks, though there is occasionally weird mix EQ, as on "Back in the USA".  I have a 1987 copy, with ugly packaging, apart from the large, impressive picture of Berry in the studio inside the gatefold.  The mastering job wisely preserves the dynamics, even unusual ones like "Carol", but the emphasized treble brings unflattering focus to the hi-hats and cymbals.

Negativland, Escape from Noise (side A)

1987's Escape from Noise captures a wide cross-section of Negativland's conceptual palette.  The group is obviously known for its creative use of appropriation, and tracks like "Sycamore" and "Yellow Black and Rectangular" emphasize this aspect of their work.  Where these tracks bring the appropriated elements to the foreground, other tracks like the notorious "Christianity is Stupid" juxtapose it against a vaguely "industrial" beat that resembled fashionable dance music in 1987.  It's not clear if Negativland enjoyed such hits or mocked them, or perhaps if they thought appropriating a vaguely then-commercial might help them reach an audience.  No matter their motivation, the palette of beats sounds somewhat dated today, and makes their whole approach feel slightly confusing.  Alongside the direct appropriation are songs with more subtle commentary on brands and advertising, like "Nesbitt's Lime Soda Song" and "The Playboy Channel" — alongside the commentary on brand comes a playful questioning of taboos.  There are also purely playful moments like "Car Bomb", which emphasize that even the group's most scathing commentary was meant with purposeful levity.  The sound quality is diverse, which is unsurprising given the range of approaches here — I do wish the mastering job brought things a bit more together, but perhaps that was not the group's intention of the absurd diversity of material.  The front cover, full of text and with an upside-down image, hints well at the chaotic range of the music, and the zine-like insert provides a nice contextual overview of the group's work at the time.

Dyani / Temiz / Feza, Music for Xaba (side A)

In some ways Music for Xaba logically follows the second half of Don Cherry's 1971 LP Orient.  A year after working with Cherry, Johnny Dyani and percussionist Okay Temiz teamed with Dyani's former collaborator from The Blue Notes, trumpeter Mongezi Feza.  While Music for Xaba was recorded only a year after Orient, the change in trumpeter led to a very distinctive change.  Where Cherry was clearly the leader, driving the music and mixed the loudest on record, Feza (who may be best-remembered for his collaboration with Robert Wyatt on "Sonia") falls more into the ensemble here.  He often plays percussion in extended sections that focus heavily on groove and place Temiz into the foreground.  Even when Feza switches back to his natural trumpet, he's not leading here on melodies like "Sonia" — the ensemble feel is really central here.  Music for Xaba was originally released in 1973, but the US reissue did not come until 3 years later (and Volume 2 was not reissued in the US until 1979).  The cover photo of the trio wearing overcoats in a snowy field is amazing, and the simple live recording captures the magic of this group's collaboration.

Hudson-Styrene, A Monster and the Devil (side A)

While the Styrenes released their first single in 1975 ("Drano in Your Veins") and a collection of their early singles in 1982 (Girl Crazy), it took them 14 years to make an album that was not a singles compilation.  1989's A Monster and the Devil marks, in many ways, a departure from their earlier work.  Vocalist Mike Hudson of the Pagans is a new collaborator in the group's shifting line-up, and he receives equal billing to the rest of the band.  The songs are built around his deadpan narrative style, with his storytelling placed in the foreground.  Side A contains a series of short songs, while side B is filled with one long tale, "Jetsam".  Hudson wrote all of the lyrics that he recites except in "Opus 12", where he and the group rework an old Styrenes tune from Girl Crazy.  His voice is equalized drastically, and the timbre hints at the sound of an old phone.  His stories are equally drastic, full of dark, somber events and personalities — many seem to have roots in his personal experience.  The group here combines electric and acoustic instrumentation, with founder Paul Marotta's piano (which sounds like an electric) prominently placed in the foreground.  The line drawings on the cover, by John Morton of the Electric Eels, fit nicely with the dark and brooding content of Hudson's tales.  These songs were also reissued with similar material on the CD All the Wrong People are Dying in 1998.

Black Motor, Black Motor (side A)

Black Motor hail from Finland, and this self-titled 2007 LP is their debut.  They can loosely be described as a free-jazz trio, with saxist Sami Sippola splitting time between tenor and alto in their sax / bass / drum configuration.  Black Motor feels less chaotic and more compositional than ESP-style energy jazz from the 60s, but swinging and jazzier than more FMP's more improv-centric albums of the 80s.  Four of the five tracks even have a composition credit assigned solely to bassist Ville Rauhala.  The recording is even more lo-fi and dirty than most old ESP releases.  The loudest things are clearly the hi-hat and ride cymbals, with the rest of the kit sounding murky and the kick drum getting slightly lost.  The saxophone is roughly even with the drums, but lacks body and distorts a bit.  The upright bass is a bit too quiet also.  The nice black-and-white photo on the front cover gives no stylistic hints about the music by Black Motor.

Trummors, Over and Around the Clove (side A)

I've always enjoyed Trummors's live performances because of their timeless songwriting.  Their songs nicely reference '70s country-tinged folk-rock without ever seeming derivative or dated, and they live nicely in a classic tradition.  On 2012's Over and Around the Clove, the songs are presented with strong vocal and instrumental performances that help their subtle details shine through.  Marc Orleans, who sometimes accompanies the band live, shares the dobro and pedal steel accompaniment here with Chris Zaloom, and Dave Lerner adds bass overdubs on a few songs that show off his amazing talents there.  The recordings, and to a lesser extent the arrangements, reflect the duo's roots in '90s indie rock — the sounds hint at lo-fi, and there are some creative, untraditional mix and reverb decisions.  A part of me wishes the record sounded more like a reissue, and in other ways I like how the approach emphasizes Trummors's distinctive personality — it's nice to feel like a living band and not a stylized exercise.  The beautiful, handmade packaging is particularly remarkable, fitting the band perfectly without feeling referential.

Ken Lauber, Ken Lauber (side A)

Ken Lauber's second album, from 1971, follows a similar formula to his 1969 debut, Contemplation (View).  He's again teamed up with professional session musicians to perform his well-crafted songs, and his slightly innocent and awkward vocal style remains out of place against such a polished backdrop.  The songs themselves still feature hints of narrative in their lyrics, which are placed in a traditional pop structure.  While the Dylan reference remains obvious, the LA session players here, including Larry Carlton, take a more conservative and commercial approach than the Dylan associates on Contemplation (View).  Joe Osborn is the most interesting player, and the increasing prominence of funk bass shows up at times in his playing, in a way that reminds me of parts of Colin Blunstone's One Year.  The songwriting on Ken Lauber also fears a bit more forced the second time around, without the weird highlights like "Undertow".  Even song titles like "I've been a Fool" and "Follow the Wind" hint that Lauber's playing it a bit straighter here.  The recording (by Dave Hassinger, once known for his disagreement with the Grateful Dead and for hiring session players on Electric Prunes record) and cover design also feel appropriate for a commercial songwriter record of 1971.  Lauber's songwriting talent and personality still peek through in places, but Ken Lauber has fewer of the magical moments that differentiate Contemplation (View).

White Fence, Is Growing Faith (side A)

White Fence borrows from the 60s by way of lo-fi revivalists like Guided by Voices, Strapping Fieldhands, and Bevis Frond.  Tim Presley and his collaborators replace these groups' outsider personae with a hip and very friendly façade.  Where Presley's 2010 debut featured more diverse digressions, 2011's White Fence is Growing Faith focuses more consistently on this core approach.  The resulting songs (if not the sonic palette) are a bit more refined and well-crafted — I miss some of the sloppiness, but at times the craftsmanship flatters his songwriting ideas.  Growing Faith is not completely uniform, fortunately, with asides into everything from a dense psychedelic swirl to literate Dylan-esque moments.  The sound is purposely lo-fi, in a stylized and modern manner — its excessive brightness makes me miss the four-track murk of some of Presley's precursors.  The cover painting is purposely unreferential, which I find surprising as White Fence's music is so referential.

Son of Earth, Improvements (side A)

Son of Earth have been a band for many years before 2009's Improvements — early releases include a 2001 CD-R and 2002's split LP with Double Leopards.  While their early work relied more on a drone-based palette, the pieces on Improvements often utilize more pointillistic sounds.  The album is split into six pieces, each feels like an improvisation around a consistent palette and theme.  One unusual track, for example, relies heavily on incomprehensible vocal noises more reminiscent of Berio than Jaap Blonk.  The resulting album crosses the most outside folk-psych groups like Lauhkeat Lampaat and The Hunter Gracchus with the minimalist, AMM-inspired improvisations typically found on Erstwhile releases.  The mastering job manages to both preserve too much murkiness and emphasize overly bright treble.  The cover images, and additional ones inside the booklet, reference Tony Martin's projections, which feels appropriate as he's worked with everyone from Morton Subotnick to 60s psychedelic bands — the inclusion of their photo inside of the abstract front cover feels stylistically incongruous.  The obi strip around the packaging is a nice touch.

The Who, Live at Leeds (side A)

The Who's prowess as a live band in 1970 remains legendary — judging from Live at Leeds, this reputation was well-deserved.  While their studio albums beginning with The Who Sell Out used some production tricks, the band is presented here as it performed live, and it's really remarkable.  All 3 musicians are constantly playing interesting parts, without distracting from the song.  Whether a 50s rock cover or a medley of Who originals, the material stays in the foreground.  Pete Townshend's guitar playing is especially humble, with an almost punk-like simplicity.  Daltrey's lead vocals are consistently compelling, and Townshend hits his notes on the harmonies.  The sound quality for such an early live recording is impressive, with all of the band's power preserved, though I'd have preferred a bit less creative use of the pan knob.  The iconic front cover is tasteful in its simplicity, but I can't discern what's happening in the insert poster photograph — only Keith Moon is anywhere near an instrument!

Pink Fairies, Never Never Land (side A)

The Pink Fairies 1971 debut Never Never Land is remembered as a heavy rock classic, thanks to the opening track and single "Do it" and the involvement of Twink (John Alder).  The album is not really as heavy as its reputation.  Paul Rudolph's guitar playing is overwhelmingly powerful, but even when drums and percussion team up, the rest of the band still feels like it's trying to catch up.  While the songwriting can fall a bit short in craftsmanship, it has charm and character to spare, which in many ways makes up for any limitations.  The sound is generally murky and raw — Never Never Land was lo-fi before that approach had come into vogue.  The extra-glossy paper used for the cover flatters the cartoon images on both sides.

Joan of Arc, Life Like (side A)

While the sequencing of Joan of Arc albums rarely follows a logical or narrative flow, 2011's Life Like chooses an especially confusing path.  The album opener, "I Saw the Messed Blinds of My Generation", is the longest and most abstract song on the album, with many jarring interruptions against the intricate and heavy musicianship which runs through it.  It's the type of songs that bands usually introduce after an album has established flow and momentum.  At the top of the album, it definitely does emphasize Life Like's sharp break from the prettier songs that were prominent on Flowers and Boo! Human.  Most of the other songs, while retaining this aggressiveness, follow more conventional structures built around vocal melodies.  A prominent exception is "Life Force", which interrupts the end of side A with a short, fairly rough acoustic interlude — it feels like a sketch when surrounded by such purposeful playing, and it too falls in an unexpected point in the middle of the sequence.  The album comes with a booklet of collages on thick, nice paper.  While the swirly cyan vinyl looks great, I'm guessing its poor quality causes the audible high-end breakup.

David Bedford, Instructions for Angels (side A)

The track titles of 1977's Instructions for the Angels introduce the album as a continuous suite.  It begins with an introduction of a theme, followed by a series of variations, and ending with a finale.  Side A follows this concept closely.  The opening theme is introduced with rich, trebly keyboard sounds accompanied by small percussion.  The variations that continue through side A maintain both the textural palette and the tonal center.  New melodies are introduced and the keyboard sounds vary, but the music follows a neat path without sharp turns.  Side B, however, adds several surprising turns that do not mesh neatly with the continuous suite concept.  Mike Ratledge's keybaord at the start of the side, while it sonically meshes with Bedford's underlying palette, plays far busier parts than the slowly-evolving music that preceded it.  It's then replaced by Mike Oldfield's guitar, which brings the only overt attack on the album, and also a more distorted timbre than any of the keyboards utilized.  Finally, a symphonic track builds slowly from silence, and has a much darker frequency balance than the electronic sounds that preceded it.  It has harmonic similarities with the rest of the album, but is both sonically and dynamically very incongruous, especially for a track listed as a finale — this title does not imply its wild departure.  The references to Kenneth Patchen in the liner notes are nice, but their relationship to the music is unclear.  The outer packaging looks like a generic new age record without any hint at Bedford's distinctive compositional style or accomplishments.

The Millennium, Begin (side A)

1968's Begin receives reverence in some sunshine-pop circles.  The Millennium's all-star cast contributes to the album's esteem.  Leader Curt Boettcher worked with everyone from Chad & Jeremy to the Byrds.  Gary Usher, who collaborated with Boettcher on those records and also wrote hits for the Beach Boys, is credited as executive producer.  Keith Olsen remains active as a record producer.  The oddest connection of all might be the rhythm section from garage legends the Music Machine.  This super-group of minor celebrities has made a tasteful, very well-crafted album.  The melodies and arrangements, to my ears, all feel a bit too methodically crafted.  Begin feels like a perfect album in a genre where human imperfections are an important quality.  Boettcher's lead vocals tastefully fit the sunshine pop genre and effectively deliver the songs, but, with the vocals in front here, he's not a magical performer carrying the music.  My reissue LP, while pressed on super-thick vinyl, is mastered with harsh high end and inadequate midrange.  The album cover, oddly, looks more like a 90s lo-fi album than a 60s pop classic.

Steve Lacy & Evan Parker, Chirps (side A)

1985's Chirps captures an duo concert with these two legendary reed players.  Parker plays only soprano sax here, and he achieves a slightly brassier soprano tone than Lacy's recognizable thin and pure sound.  Side A contains one long improvisation, while side B is divided between two shorter tracks.  The concert begins with Lacy playing slowly-evolving lines in the style of his 80s solo albums, like Hocus Pocus and Only Monk, and Parker follows along.  At some point on side A, Parker introduces a harsh, distorted tone, which overloads the recording system, and Lacy follows him.  It's a palette that Lacy had rarely used for nearly a decade.  On side B, the saxists achieve a more balanced dialog, with short, interweaving lines and percussive sounds alongside some flowing, complex lines.  The recording emphasizes the thinness of the soprano sax, except in the places where the system seems to distort from the loud overblowing.  The optical illusion on the cover is funny, but has little relevance to this music, or possibly any music.

Charles de Goal, Algorythmes (side A)

The first confusion about Charles de Goal is that, according to Discogs at least, it's a band with 4 members.  On their cover of Bowie's "Hang on to Yourself", where Bowie sang, "We're the Spiders from Mars," the vocalist sings "I'm Charles de Goal," so I always had assumed there was a person who assumed this identity.  Their debut Algorythmes dates from 1980, and the clever title is a cross between the French words for "algorithm" and "rhythm".  The music in some ways resembles a happier take on Grauzone or early Cabaret Voltaire.  There are short songs, usually with many analog effects and a propulsive rhythm.  Charles de Goal tend to reference older rock music more than those bands — there's a live drummer whose timing sometimes drifts, and guitars sometimes have little processing.  The Bowie cover also pulls Algorythmes back toward early-70s rock.  The mixes or mastering have an odd presence peak that lead to certain synthesizer lines jumping far out in front, but the sound generally preserves its clarity through the layers of extreme effects.  The simple, patterned cover design is both mesmerizing and off-putting.

Fire Engines, Aufgeladen und Bereit fur Action und Spass (side A)

Fire Engines are remembered for having placed particular emphasis on dance rhythms within their guitar-focused post-punk approach.  While dance music tends to boost low frequencies to draw attention to its pulse, 1981's Aufgeladen und Bereit fur Action und Spass has almost now bass in its mixes.  The electric guitars, which are the focus of the mix, are equalized to be incredibly thin and bright.  While the absence of cymbals leaves space at the top, the snare is also unnaturally bright, and it would sit above the mix if not for all of the other odd qualities.  The bass lacks low end, but it also lacks articulation at the top, and it sits in a narrow frequency band of its own.  The occasional use of synthetic strings feels a bit out of place for such a primitive album, and draws it more toward commercial new wave of its era.  Some songs are instrumental, and the vocals are not a featured element when they do appear — they add more rhythmic and structural content than melodic focus.  The bright-pink background of the cover seems to hint at a more delicate style, but the spartan layout and blurry photo leave the design more open-ended and confusing, which feels appropriate for this idiosyncratic album.

Air, Open Air Suit (side A)

Air's records are remarkably stylistically consistent, and 1978's Open Air Suit is no exception.  The liner notes discuss a compositional strategy involving a suit and cards, but it's hard to tell how literally these comments should be taken.  The pieces weave between jazzy propulsion, spacier slow sections, and subtle textural playing — all three styles are executed tastefully and effectively.  The distinguishing trait of Open Air Suit is the foreground placement of Steve McCall's amazing drumming.  He's compressed, bright, and always at the front of the mixes.  The snare cracks as if on a rock album, and the high-frequency EQ boost on the cymbals leaps inappropriately out of the mix.  His playing, fortunately, is great, and far more sympathetic to the rest of the trio (Henry Threadgill on reeds and Fred Hopkins on bass) than its technical placement.  The less said about the front cover image, the better.

The Jimmy Giuffre 3, Thesis (side A)

1962's Free Fall is generally considered Giuffre's canonical accomplishment of genre-defying innovation.  It's only fair to compare 1961's Thesis, which immediately preceded Free Fall, against it.  The two records are in many ways remarkably similar, with Giuffre, Paul Bley, and Steve Swallow stretching jazz to illogical conclusions.  The drummerless trio here also uses hints of jazz harmonic content and notions of improvisation to explore its distinctive musical vision.  While Thesis never explodes frenetically, it has moments of energetic playing that exceed anything found on Free Fall.  There are also surprising moments of extended technique here, with hissing clarinets and and clanking bass sounds.  Thesis is natural sounding and incredibly dynamic—it was hard to hear the quiet parts over the air conditioner without the loud parts blaring at a volume annoying to my neighbors.  The muted olive green cover and simple font only delicately stretch the idiom of a jazz record cover of this era, with only an understated hint of the innovation found within.  The 1992 reissue mix sounds a lot worse.  It sacrifices the period sound to emphasize high-end detail and a bit of fast compression—while it is in some places nice to hear new details of these amazing players' performances, it's far more distracting to hear such an unrepresentative mix.

In Camera, Fin (12" EP)

In Camera's song structures reflect the segmented compositional style of their era.  Instead of verses and choruses, parts repeat even numbers of times and change in neat succession.  Only the instrumentation follows rock conventions.  The A side of Fin is a long, slowly-evolving instrumental, while the B side features two shorter songs with vocals.  The sound of 1982's Fin emphasizes mid-range, with a lot of beater in the prominent kick drum and a very bright bass sound.  The BBC sessions otherwise sound fairly straightforward, though there is an odd acoustic strumming noise at the end, perhaps the inside of the piano strummed, with reverb added.  The black-and-white cover photo is beautiful but gives few hints about the record's contents, and it's printed on nice reverse-stock paper.

The Birthday Party, The Bad Seed (12" EP)

1983's The Bad Seed EP leaps out of speakers with its remarkable sound — I'm sure the 45 RPM cut helps.  The huge kick drum sets the tone of the EP, both in Mick Harvey's steady playing and in its punchy, consistent sound.  All of the drums sound a bit flat, with sustained impact and little attack, and the bass and guitar follow a similar envelope.  The bass equalization focuses on a narrow, low frequency, which leaves room for the kick drum to cover so much tonal range, and the explosive cymbals shatter the top frequencies with a slight distortion that's never harsh.  Roland S Howard's inventive guitar playing bears some resemblance to Keith Levene's work on Metal Box only a few years earlier, but its far from identical or overtly derivative.  Finally, the fairly thin vocal sound sits over the top without being loud in the mix, and it helps to hold the material together.  The iconic cover design, with bold, smeary colors surrounding the band members' photos, perfectly captures the energy of the music.

TV Ghost, TV Ghost (side A)

TV Ghost, the group's 2007 self-titled debut, recalls strange mid-90s rock bands who extended the grass-roots ethos of indie-rock after its initial impulse began to move in a more commercial direction.  The punkish aggression, awkward songwriting, and and primitive recordings reference bands like Splotch and Fat Day, though it's unclear if there was any direct influence from such obscure albums.  Where mid-90s indie bands made murky recordings, TV Ghost is harsh and bright, sometimes oppressively so.  The album's lo-fi qualities are derived from distortion and excess, not from sounds buried and obscured — this change relates to the evolution of cheap recording from cassette 4-track to computer software.  The mastering makes no effort to bring emphasis to what little low-end is present, and a very loud vinyl pressing is possible as a result.  The bright, chaotic cover art also does not reference the simplistic black-and-white designs of TV Ghost's mid-90s forebears.

Small Faces, There are but Four Small Faces (side A)

Small Faces' releases from 1967 are confusing to keep track of — From the Beginning collects early singles on Decca, Small Faces was the first UK album on Immediate, and the US release There are But Four Small Faces includes some different songs from the eponymous UK LP.  Notably, the UK version omits the hit singles "Here Come the Nice" and "Itchycoo Park", which appear on the US LP.  Rather absurd lyrics about drugs have not diminished these songs' lasting appeal, and the rest of the album matches their impact.  The band's obvious punch is dulled a bit by the recording of Kenney Jones's drums, which muffles a bit of their energy — with Ogden's Nut Gone Flake, a year later, the recording had caught up more with his powerful sound.  The creative solution of adding flange to color his tom part on "Itchycoo Park" has influenced mixing for decades since.  Steve Marriott's lead vocals sound particularly rich and great here, with the recording capturing his amazing talents.  The front cover photo and the band's amazing outfits in the picture are amazing and timeless — I particularly envy the floral blazer.

Caboladies, Caboladies (side A)

Caboladies' self-titled 2010 LP collects tracks from CD-Rs and cassettes released in 2007 and 2008.  While the group is now a duo, these recordings from their formative years featured a third member, Ben Zoeller.  The album contains 5 pieces.  I assume that they're improvised, as each track explores a fairly uniform palette, without any sense of purposeful movement or evolution.  The synthesizers make a set of sounds until they stop.  While this approach borrows from contemporary groups like Wolf Eyes (whose Robert Beatty provided the cover design), the palette references 80s industrial-tinged analog synth music within Caboladies' more contemporary approach.  All of the sounds are very bright and present with almost no low-end, but fortunately also with little harshness.  Beatty's cover design, which is reproduced on a nice, glossy insert, reminds me of the packaging favored by groups like Lightning Bolt and Wolf Eyes—while it looks great, it does not reflect any of Caboladies' creative differentiation.

The Beatles, Help! (side A)

Canonical albums like 1965's Help! are always the hardest to write about.  By the time of Help!, the Beatles songwriting had moved clearly away from its simple, high-energy roots and into the more subtle and beautiful style of the group's most canonical era.  The ending cover of Larry Williams's "Dizzy Miss Lizzie" may be the Beatles' final early-rock reference.  Many songs go at a slower tempo, and "Yesterday" introduces the use of a string quartet.  While George Harrison's "I Need You" features one of the less-remembered melodies, its odd guitar arrangement presages the careful studio arrangements that would follow in 1966.  While the sound of Help! is already bright and present, my mid-90s vinyl reissue adds a bit of harshness in the treble frequencies and does not quite capture the balances correctly.  The cover image and font remain, of course, timeless.

Terry Riley, A Rainbow in Curved Air (side A)

A lazy mental association with 1971's A Rainbow in Curved Air would emphasize analog synthesizer arpeggios that rise and fall.  Synthesized arpeggios definitely appear frequently, though many of them are set at such a fast pace as to de-emphasize the pattern of notes created and instead sound almost like a chord.  What surprised me, on a fresh listen, was the linear evolution of "A Rainbow in Curved Air", with frequent breaks from this memorable stereotype.  Some parts break down to a more rhythmic and almost noise-oriented palette.  Sounds and parts rise and fall and change.  Side B's "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band" relies more on shifts in simple drones without even the arpeggios that I expected from Riley. 1971 falls just after rock music's obsession with hard-panning, but it's used a lot here, including a delay which causes a sound to alternate speakers in time.  The sound of the album is bright and modern, almost excessively so, but the cover image is distinctly not modern, and instead feels overtly dated.

Evan Parker & Barry Guy, Incision (side A)

Parker and Guy feel permanently bound in my mind from their long-running trio with Paul Lytton.  It's hard to picture a time in 1981 that predates this trio's existence.  Their collaboration on Incision is so intuitive, they feel like they've already been working regularly for a long time.  Within each of the 6 pieces the palette in use evolves, and the two instruments always seem to be drawing from the same textural range without ever overlapping or resorting to imitation.  Even Guy's arco bowing emerges sustaining, slowly-warping calls from Parker's saxophone.  While both players sometimes hint at a jazz vocabulary, the improvisations here consistently explore fluttery textures rather than a more accessible set of referents.  The sound of both instruments is fairly thin and bright—this is especially noticeable with Guy's bass lacking body.  His playing so emphasizes the subtle sounds created by his left hand that this odd sonic choice does mesh with and flatter his style.  The generic cover painting does not reflect the distinctiveness of the music contained here, but it is great to see photos of Parker and Guy at such a young age on the back cover.

Tomutonttu, Tomutonttu (side A)

Tomutonttu is a solo project of Kemialliset Ystävät leader Jan Anderzen, and 2007's Tomutonttu is his second album under this name.  Anderzen layers simplistic loops to create an atmospheric space.  Most tracks have a vague sense of pulse without any drive or rhythm, and the results often remind me of odd 80s music like the two albums from Woo or Jad Fair's Best Wishes.  Where these 80s referents tend to sound murky, Tomutonttu sounds overly bright, with a modern mastering job that emphasizes the slight harshness in the treble.  There are occasional moments of chaos, often with strange mouth and vocal noises interrupting their flow.  Some tracks also move more into a propulsive and vaguely rhythmic direction, with a bit more coherence and drive than is typical here.  The amazing packaging features bright and bold designs on both the cover and the printed inner sleeve.

Tim Hodgkinson / Ken Hyder, Shams (side A)

Hodgkinson is of course the better-known half of this duo, from his work with groups like Henry Cow, the Work, and Konk Pak.  He's joined on 1986's Shams by the less-known Scottish percussionist Ken Hyder.  Hodgkinson works here in two areas typical of his playing—some parts feature clusters of tonally close notes on the clarinet, played in rapid succession.  Other sections find him exploring textures that intersect closely with Hyder's percussion palette.  Hyder uses a fairly conventional set of sounds from his drums, but his playing explores space with little attention to rhythm or meter.  The trashy and primitive live recording can make his kit sound strange at times on the record—it seems to color Hodgkinson's sounds less, perhaps because of the wide dynamics of a drum kit.  The cover image is tasteful and appropriate but not particularly special.

Wipers, Over the Edge (side A)

1983's Over the Edge is as powerful as its reputation would suggest.  Some of the subtle diversity is more surprising.  Some songs, like the openers "Over the Edge" and "Doom Town" rely purely on power.  The guitars and vocals are harsh, bright and in-your-face, and the band plays with abandon.  By the end of side A, "Romeo" has softened, just a bit—the less-menacing vocals recall Lou Reed's narrative style, the guitars sound a bit less harsh, and the pace has even dropped slightly.  No matter the style, the Wipers' delivery is impressively consistent, and the impact never drops.  The sound's harshness is far more listenable than the digital harshness of so many of today's lo-fi recordings.  The cover is simple and iconic, with the surprising color choice of pink drawing attention and leaping out.

Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Admonishing the Bishops (10" EP)

1993's Admonishing the Bishops is the Thinking Fellers most consistently extroverted rock release.  Where the group often includes weird asides and sound collages between songs, this 10" features only four somewhat-conventional songs.  The songs still capture much of the Fellers' weirdness, with deadpan vocals, strangely-processed guitars, and many structural surprises in what first appear to be pop songs.  While the band often grew frustrated with the challenging of capturing their incredibly dynamic arrangements on record, the guitars here nicely leap out of the mix as the songs build.  And the recordings are an interesting balance of studio clarity with some primitive sounds, especially in the vocals.  The 10" format provides a perfect length to encapsulate one side of the group's multi-faceted personality and approach.

The Fall, Live at the Witch Trials (side A)

I find it impressive that with the Fall's 1979 debut Live at the Witch Trials, the group had already established so much of its lasting identity.  While Marc Riley only played bass on the first album before moving to guitar and then leaving the group, his pulsing, repetitive basslines foreshadowed those of his successors.  Smith's dead-pan, semi-narrative vocal style has changed little in the 30+ years since the group's debut.  Drummer Karl Burns also left after Witch Trials, but returned in 1982 to double drum on the Fall's most beloved albums, and his drumming here also provides an obvious foundation for the group's future style.  Only Martin Bramah's scratchy, no wave-y guitar style would not last—future albums feature more tonal and less textural playing.  While Fall albums always sound purposely lo-fi, weird, and primitive, the mixes of Live at the Witch Trials rank among their worst, with drums especially sounding compressed and lifeless.  The red packaging of my domestic copy looks worse than the UK original, and, while I like "Various Times", I also miss having "Mother-Sister!".

Ethiopian, Everything Crash (side A)

Leonard Dillon was half of the vocal reggae duo Ethiopians.  5 years after Steven Taylor's death, he made his first solo record as Ethiopian, 1980's Everything Crash, working with Coxsone Dodd from Studio One.  I'm not so familiar with Ethiopians, but their music from what I have heard seems to have been a bit higher energy.  The tempos on Everything Crash are a bit slower, and the feel of the album is darker.  Dillon's amazing singing shines in this setting, with a series of beautiful vocal takes.  Many songs are melodic and memorable, including at least one recut of Ethiopians' "Everything Crash".  The opener "When Will be the End" also particularly stands out.  The sound of the record is present with punchy dub bass, but the midrange feels a bit weak and does not flatter Dillon's beautiful voice.  The stylized cover design stretches the Studio One style into a slightly darker terrain.

Parasites of the Western World, Parasites of the Western World (side A)

The Parasites of the Western World's self-titled 1978 debut obviously dates from a time when small-town US bands borrowed from a huge range of influences without a hint of self-consciousness.  Parts of this album have the aggressiveness of Chrome, with heavily distorted guitars, shout-y vocals, and driving beats.  Other songs sound like instrumental versions of 70s AM synth-pop.  This extreme juxtaposition reminds me a bit of Gary Wilson, though the album also seems to presage Bobb Trimble's more seamless assimilation of radio-friendly and jarring ideas.  The recording is generally competent, though it's hard to guess how the record was made—no credits indicate whether the group recorded themselves or went to a studio.  The 2010 reissue's mastering leaves the songs sounding extremely different from one another, which is likely true to the original creation, if it's also somewhat jarring to experience.  The packaging comes with nice posters and inserts.

Ty Segall & White Fence, Hair (side A)

White Fence's 2010 self-titled debut impressed me enough that I've continued to follow his work.  Hair, which is my first exposure to Ty Segall, still captures Tim Presley's songwriting and arranging talent, but it lacks some of the ambition that made the debut special.  Presley's songwriting voice is obvious here—references to the psychedelic 60s are filtered through a more contemporary lo-fi aesthetic.  Where artists like Brother JT or Strapping Fieldhands emphasized their outsider, record-collector personae, Presley and Segall ooze fashion and slickness.  Hair loses the broad palette and range of ideas that made White Fence special—the weaker points even sound alike and interchangeable.  Some songs combine a slack aesthetic with a keen attention to detail that makes them special, but at other times the slacker persona grows overwhelming, as if they rushed to finish the album and get on tour.  The packaging captures the record's personality perfectly, to a point where it feels obsessively stylized.  The lo-fi sound quality has charms, but in some ways it can also sound bad—a professional mastering job did nothing to tame the out-of-control treble.

M.L.A. 'Blek', Blek (side A)

1981's Blek features an interesting line-up with 3 brass players plus Fred Van Hove's piano.  All four have excellent facial hair in the back cover photo.  The most surprising thing about Blek is that it still dates from an era when Radu Malfatti played audible notes on the trombone and not just pointillistic, minimal textures.  The improvisations here are incredibly diverse—each short track has a coherent idea and palette.  At its least interesting times, Blek sounds like a lot of other improv records from this era, with an emphasis on call-and-response.  Other parts sound very contemporary, with van Hove creating textures inside the piano that pull the music far from tonal references.  The piano is recorded with more space and less presence than the horns—it almost sounds like it's on a different record.  The understated cover drawing is both beautiful and appropriate.

Cleared, Breaking Day (side A)

The most surprising thing about 2012's Breaking Day is how much its personality reminds me of Holger Hiller.  He's hardly an obvious influence to reference, so I have no idea if it's on purpose.  The compositions here generally rest on a foundation of a looped drum beat—the sounds have a distinctive metallic quality that seems to come from a cheap looper pedal.  The patterns are plodding, vaguely heavy, and simple rhythmically.  Some tracks have a low-frequency drum wildly exaggerated in the loop.  Over top of these patterns are often a field of textural sounds that makes for an engaging foreground.  Sometimes there is a distorted, rock-like guitar riff that replaces the textures with a simple, vaguely melodic pattern.  For me, the textural concepts feel far more distinctive than the distorted guitar melody.  Apart from the weird metallic sheen on the drums, everything here sounds a bit compressed, the high frequencies can be slightly brittle, and the midrange frequencies are a bit scooped.  The photos on both the cover and the inner fold are particularly beautiful, and the super-thick cardboard used for the gatefold is impressively glossy on both sides.

Tim Hecker, Atlas (10" EP)

2006's Atlas is a great distillation of Hecker's approach and palette.  He nicely juxtaposes fully blown-out and distorted sounds with prettier and more natural sounds.  Even in the dynamically static sections of the two pieces (one per side), there is a lot of subtle movement.  Each piece includes unexpected and drastic dynamic shifts.  A particular highlight is in "Atlas Two", when the piece moves from full and loud to a much quieter volume—the sound surprisingly transforms from a prettier palette to a very harsh, if still quiet, timbre in the foreground.  The component sounds are consistently compressed, so that dynamics shifts are radical when sounds enter, exit, or change drastically.  The frequency distribution emphasizes high end a bit heavily, with the mid-range scooped to give this space.  The bright colors of the packaging have a very different character from the narrow palette of the music inside.

Sack und Blumm, kind kind (side A)

Sack und Blumm were a duo of German musicians who worked on the remote periphery of minimal techno.  Their music involves looped patterns that create a sense of rhythm.  On kind kind, the patterns never create a sense of a beat, so much as a feeling of constant movement.  Many of the component sounds are recognizably organic, like fret buzz or an mbira melody.  They're recorded in a dry, rigidly-compressed manner that almost makes them sound electronic.  The frequency distribution is a bit bright and modern sounding, but the low-end is not at all pronounced.  Some tracks feature deeper sounds like bass notes on the mbira, while others are fully missing low-end.  This sonic spectrum removes any hint of techno from kind kind.  The sparse, hand-drawn design on the packaging reflects the handmade sounds, not the processes used to assemble them into repeating structures.

Nico, The End (side A)

While there was a 4 year lapse between 1970's Desertshore and 1974's The End, the two albums feel stylistically contiguous.  Both feature Nico's slow, sparse songs gently arranged by John Cale.  Some songs are built around Nico's voice and droning harmonium, while others feature a slightly more propulsive structure from Cale's piano.  Brian Eno and Phil Manzanera, who both played on Cale's album Fear at roughly the same time, both contribute layers and textures.  Nico's sad, haunting voice remains the focus, and the music barely hints at her past involvement with rock music.  The End includes covers of both the Doors' "The End" and the traditional German song "Das Lied dr Deutschen".  John Wood's engineering captures Nico's voice beautifully, and his mixes flatter the arrangements perfectly.  The blurry front cover image reflects Nico's musical personality, though the film metaphor in the layout feels far more clichéd than anything else about the album.

Anatomy of Habit, Anatomy of Habit (side A)

Anatomy of Habit's self-titled 2011 debut consists of two side-long tracks.  While the gradually-evolving builds and fades of these extended structures give a modern context that references bands like Godspeed You Black Emperor, the group's sonic palette draws from an older set of influences.  An obvious comparison to the well-executed, precise pounding might be the Birthday Party.  Blake Edwards's metallic percussion setup evokes obvious comparisons to Z'ev or Neubaten.  While Mark Solotroff presents a strong visual presence at their live shows, his consistently flat, off-key vocals reference later-80s, overtly goth styles that are less my taste than the instrumental parts alongside them.  The recordings have trouble capturing some of the harsh high-end, especially in the metal percussion, but they smoothly reflect the broad dynamic range of the evolving tracks.  The impressive packaging includes a simple die-cut cover through which a printed inner sleeve peeks through.

Art Bears, Hopes and Fears (side A)

Talented artists often try to show off their proficiency, and records that seem rough or primitive often are a result of naïveté.  As much as the Art Bears' talent is obvious on Hopes and Fears, they also made choices to conceal their talent, and other decisions that seem unflattering on the surface.  While even commercial records in 1978 did not sound as cartoon-like and huge as today's hits, Hopes and Fears often sounds particularly tiny and unimposing.  At the rare moments when rock-like textures do appear, it becomes obvious that the the restraint of most sounds was achieved very purposefully.  The songs themselves are often awkwardly constructed, with few hooks of any kind to draw in the listeners attention.  Vocal melodies are often arch and complicated, and sometimes subtle textural sections omit even these.  In his book File Under Popular, Chris Cutler emphasizes how political content should be coupled with a related form, rather than placed in a more palatable context, and the rich lyrics on Hopes and Fears follow his preferred approach.  The beautiful front and back cover are more approachable than most of the album's contents, but the inside of the gatefold, which is simple, raw, and handwritten, contrasts with these images.

The Eternals, Rawar Style (side A)

With Rawar Style, the Eternals found their creative voice.  The initial 12"s featured disparate stylized tracks, and the self-titled debut from 2000 took a step back, closer to Trenchmouth's punk rock.  With 2004's Rawar Style, Damon Locks and Wayne Montana pulled their influences together into a more coherent work.  Isaac Hayes-informed soul, Gang of Four post-punk, and bits of modern techno and dance music all manage to coexist in the same song.  Looped samples reference unknown musical styles, basslines provide a propulsive groove, and drums interweave with electronic rhythms.  Short, abstract tracks still coexist alongside structured and catchy songs, but the two styles borrow from a similar palette and flow logically together.  The sounds manage to somehow combine stark modernity with a cheaper lo-fi aesthetic, so that Rawar Style has a sonic character of its own.  While I wish the mastering job was a bit less scooped in the mids, it never sounds shrill or exaggerated.  Damon Locks''s collage on the front cover somehow looks both chaotic and simple at the same time—it's less referential than the music inside, but just as broad in its approach.

David Bedford, Star's End (side A)

1974's Star's End contains one continuous, 45 minute piece, that is divided in the middle between the two album sides.  The piece consists of a series of swells with quiet sections between them.  The palette of sounds does not emphasize an intricate or subtle set of textures, but at the same time, the piece focuses more on the shifting groups of sound than on tonality.  Sounds with tonal notes are used to create a shifting field, which draws attention to the dynamic shifts over time.  The piece is performed by a symphony orchestra augmented by Mike Oldfield and Chris Cutler.  Bedford seems to exploit Oldfield's personality as a guitarist more than Cutler's idiosyncratic approach to percussion.  Both soloists are featured prominently in the mix, with a more rock-like recording approach used to emphasize their contributions.  The packaging of my US copy is non-descript, but the original UK album had a more interesting cover image.

Hauschka, Snowflakes & Car Wrecks (side A)

In his project Hauschka, Vokler Bertelmänn approaches the prepared piano in a fairly novel context.  While the instrument is typically used in overtly jazz and classical contexts, Bertelmänn brings ambient and electronic influences to his pieces.  While the piano has been prepared, it is used here to play notes, and tonality of these pieces is consistently simple, at times recalling Eno's Ambient series in its narrow choice of notes.  The preparations are heard as the pieces build, in a style that borrows from contemporary electronic and techno music.  Subtly propulsive rhythms appear in most of the pieces, gradually adding drive using a repeating pattern.  The piano preparations often play a more prominent role through the build.  The music never approaches any real beat, but the driving movement recalls electronic artists even as it is created acoustically.  The recording also sounds modern and almost synthetic—heavy compression and limiting with fast attacks detach even the most organic piano sounds from their source of origin.  While artists like Sack & Blumm bring acoustic instruments into their arrangements, Hauschka is distinctive within the genre for working solely acoustically.  Several pieces on 2009's Snowflakes & Car Wrecks add sustaining string arrangements behind his now-recognizable approach to the piano.  The cover's simple geometric designs on reverse-stock paper fit Bertelmänn's melding of influences nicely.

The Red Krayola, Coconut Hotel (side A)

Coconut Hotel is of course a bit legendary—in 1967, it was too weird for International Artists, who were putting out plenty of weird records.  When it got reissued in 1995, the sources of the Red Krayola's inspiration were not exactly clear.  Coconut Hotel consists solely of abstract sounds, some in pointillistic arrangements and others more sustained.  Some sounds have a clear source of origin (including ones with titles like "Piano" and "Guitar") where others are harder to discern.  While the music has little to do with the group's rock background, it seems most logical to try to understand Coconut Hotel in this context.  As the Red Krayola collaborated with John Fahey at this time, they must have been aware of his tape-music experiments on Requia.  Founder Mayo Thompson seems unfavorably disposed to hippies, so its creation in the same year as Jefferson Airplane's sometimes-chaotic After Bathing at Baxter's might be coincidence.  An obvious reference point, with only tangential rock connections, AMM's first album came out a year earlier, but there's no way to know if it reached Texas.  Searching for references or influences proves difficult, and Coconut Hotel really can't be judged in any context but its own, which is how Thompson clearly intended it.  The blurry cover photo is funny.  To the extent that sound quality can be discerned on such an abstract release, the reissue seems to have been transferred respectfully.

Elklink, The Rise of Elklink (side A)

The 2010 reissue The Rise of Elklink adds a song to the original 1999 cassette.  The band consisted of Graham Lambkin from the Shadow Ring and Adris Hoyos from Harry Pussy.  The Rise of Elklink sounds like a cross between an Alga-Marghen sound-poetry LPs and Lindus-era Shadow Ring.  It's interesting that these recordings, which were made 3 years before Lindus, resemble it stylistically.  The primary sound source is heavily processed vocals, with occasional purely electronic sounds overdubbed to add color.  Occasional words interrupt the purely abstract vocal sounds, and these words often help to identify the distinct pieces.  For example, the title of opening track "Tension Tec" is audible at times.  The glossy cover is a startling pink color, with an unflattering photo of Lambkin in its center.  The recordings are raw, but at the same time they clearly capture the processed sounds—the mastering job for the vinyl reissue nicely emphasizes the clarity without drawing attention to itself.

Cristal, Re-Ups (side A)

2008's Re-Ups is an incredibly sparse, slight listen.  The simple textures exist often in isolation.  Sounds often evolve slowly over an extended period of time before being replaced.  Most of the sounds fall in the noise side of the palette, with little tonal information or reference, though a high-pitched tone does occasionally emerge.  These tones stand out from the midrange frequencies that the noisier sounds occupy.  While the palette and style remains relatively consistent, there are separate tracks spread across the two sides, with titles that are identified in black-on-black print inside the nice gatefold and also on the back of the obi-strip.  The music seems to have been carefully composed—while the palette resembles the quiet improvised music of recent years, the structure feels much more purposeful.  Labradford bassist Bobby Donne is a member of Cristal, but the music here is far more extreme in its austerity than even Labradford's quietest moments.

Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Dead Death, Death Dead (side A)

Apart from having a funny and creative name, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer don't particularly differentiate themselves from other noise bands of the mid-'00s.  Their heaviness reminds me of Sunn O))), as does their use of death metal-influenced fonts and a lot of black in the packaging.  The dark, layered drones with noise and vocals peeking out owe a debt to groups like Double Leopards and Yellow Swans, though Blue Sabbath Black Cheer are definitely more aggressive and willfully punishing than either.  The screaming hardcore-like vocals come to the foreground more than many of the group's contemporaries would have placed them.  While 2006's Dead Death, Death Dead does not feel particularly innovative for its era, it is tasteful and well-executed.  The bass-heavy mastering job is quite competent, if obviously stylized, and the black-on-black printing of the cover taxidermy photograph came out great.

Ash Ra Tempel, Join Inn (side A)

In 1973 when Ash Ra Tempel recorded Join Inn, founding member Klaus Schulze had re-joined the group.  Join Inn includes two side-long tracks that sound like two different bands.  Side B, "Jeseits" features Schulze on organ, and his personality comes to the foreground.  While Rosi Mueller contributes vocals here, they play a secondary role to the ongoing drones.  Surprisingly, Schulze drums on side A's "Freak'n'Roll".  Coupled with Göttsching's guitar, the extended instrumental borrows more actively from the palette and vocabulary of rock music.  The trashy-sounding drums provide propulsion that's unexpected for Schulze, and Göttsching's guitar weaves in and out of their rhythm.  The prominent dynamic shifts are preserved nicely and give the piece a sense of structure.  The mastering of my 1997 reissue is a bit treble-heavy and weak in midrange, but sounds good overall and captures the dynamics of "Freak'n'Roll" nicely.  The packaging looks good too, though I'm assuming the glossy cover is a departure from the original texture.

This Kind of Punishment, In the Same Room / 5 by 4 (sides C and D)

This double vinyl reissue, from 1993, combines the final two This Kind of Punishment releases.  1985's 5 by 4 was an EP, followed by the full-length In the Same Room in 1987.  5 by 4, which fills sides C and D at 45 RPM, is the group's most diverse and least representative work.  This Kind of Punishment focused on songs that coupled raw, slightly noisy arrangements with dark, post-punk melodies.  The music generally had a bit of a sad feel, especially from the Jefferies brothers' rich baritone vocals.  5 by 4 stretches the group's ideas out to extremes, as opposed to their usual experiments with combining them.  One song feels like recited poetry over a soundscape—it reminds me of the Shadow Ring's work a decade later.  The opening "Mr. Tic Toc" is far more aggressive than the group's usual fare, so it bears a closer resemblance to contemporaries like Australia's SPK.  Other songs feature more 60s informed melodies that Graham Jefferies relied on more when he started the Cakekitchen.  Little attention was paid to the mastering of these lo-fi recordings, so the track volumes vary drastically.  The packaging of the reissue is impressive, with a gatefold of really thick cardboard that's glossy on all sides (including the back that only faces the record).

The Temptations, Cloud Nine (side A)

I thoroughly enjoy the story of this record.  While, for example, the Monkees sought creative control to write their own songs, the Temptations merely asked Norman Whitfield to change the group's style.  Otis Williams apparently suggested Sly & the Family Stone as a reference, and Whitfield reluctantly came back with the classics "Cloud Nine" and "Runaway Child, Running Wild".  The story feels almost as implausible as the songs are memorable.  Side B of the album is unfortunately a last gasp at the old formula, and not a particularly effective one, especially with David Ruffin gone.  1969's Cloud Nine reflects a group in transition, but the startling arrangements hint at the lush psychedelic soul that would carry the Temptations for several years to follow.  Its cover design too feels a bit forced, with the group superimposed upon an oil projection reminiscent of rock bands' light shows, but it again hints at the distinctive fusion of styles that first appears here.

Sam Esh & Hard Black Thing, Montezuma Baby Duck (side A)

1994's Montezuma Baby Duck is divided into two very different sides, both of which spotlight the idiosyncratic personality of Sam Esh.  On side A, he plays in a shambling but plodding rock band, whose notable member is Columbus stalwart Mike "Rep" Hummel.  The only remote comparison for this quartet is Philemon Arthur & the Dung, who also play a vaguely blues/garage tinged mess, with simple songs that plod along until they stop.  Where Philemon Arthur seem to be singing in Swedish (or at least something that sounds a bit like it to my naïve ears), Sam Esh's lyrics distinctly reside in a language known only to him.  The trumpet differentiates the group's instrumentation from a typical rock ensemble, and the recording is generally clean—only the loud cymbal crashes red-line into transistor distortion.  Side B features Esh rambling solo through instrumental guitar passages and solo vocal/spoken word excursions.  While the liner notes claim to be part of a comedy album, his use of language remains as odd as in the rock songs.  The packaging of some copies, including mine, contains some handmade parts, like a glued-on photograph and hand-coloring on the insert.

Alex Neilson & Richard Youngs, Electric Lotus (side A)

While Richard Youngs's work is incredibly diverse, it tends to lean toward introspection and self-effacing tendencies.  The LP of 2007's Electric Lotus is extroverted and brash.  It feels almost like a sequel to Snyder and Thompson's 1973 classic Daily Dance, with heavy guitars and continuously propulsive drums.  The guitars infrequently form layers—it's hard to tell if overdubs were used, but my best guess is just a looping pedal.  Everything sounds primitive and clean, which is surprising when many of Youngs's albums draw attention to their lo-fi construction.  Side A features several shorter pieces, while one track fills all of side B.  The hastily drawn cartoon on the cover hints at the chaos inside, but in some ways it would fit better with one of Youngs's more primitive constructions.  The album came with a bonus CD of shakuhachi / drum duets, but I bought my copy used and it was missing the bonus disc.

The Godz, Contact High with the Godz (side A)

Not even Lester Bangs's effusive praise helps to provide a clear context for the Godz when they started in 1966.  Their acoustic music hints at folk, but folk tended to value professionalism and at least a bit of sterility.  The Godz brought the primitivism of punk rock, without the angst and energy.  Contact High with the Godz coincides with the Velvet Underground's earliest work—both groups were in New York but it's hard to know if they were aware of each other.  The Godz at times sang catchy, almost silly songs like "Lay in the Sun" and "Turn On", but these were juxtaposed against more abstract noise freak-outs that still rested on simple major-chord progressions.  By today's standards, this album, down to its lo-fi, if still quite great sounding simplicity, would make sense—in 1966, it must have fit a lot less.  The repeating and rotating cover image feels disorienting to stare at, and gives few hints to how to contextualize Contact High.