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.