This psychedelic instrumental rock album epitomizes an emotional sojourn into an atmospheric soundscape, which is populated with a collection of guitars and horns plus a few sliverings of eclectic instrumentation. You get a great feeling of warmth and darkness coming through, with plenty of Greek musical influences.
Thom Yorke – Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes
Thom Yorke continues his long romantic break with genre-less electronica. This album is boorish, predictable and miserable. Whilst there is a raw and earthy quality to it, it rarely veers away from his previous back catalog, offering very little excitement to the listener.
Angelo De Augustine – Spirals Of Silence
This little gift-wrapped indie-folk record has a real endearing charm and character to it. It’s rare that you hear something with such a brilliantly understated raw aesthetic, bringing together a warmth of lo-fi wonder and adventure with the delicate vocal whispers.
Clara Engel – Ashes & Tangerines
This record features sparse instrumental shells that gradually and majestically cracking open to reveal a powerful, emotional and stirring haunt of a voice. There are great dynamic changes in atmosphere, again encapsulated by the amazing vocals, enabling the backing instrumentation to shake and quiver with fear.
Pisces – Pisces
This is a breathy, layered, and atmospheric folk lament, spun in a hypnotic web by a deeply enchanting and somewhat child-like voice. The patches of darkness are occasionally blotted with sparse interchanges, creating a dense and minimal duality. An immersive and reverberating listen.
VICTOR & The Rain Dog – VICTOR & The Rain Dog
This band engulfs you with icy twinges of blues, rock and latin that solidify into a impenetrable backbone of music originality. There’s a real intense menace to the guitar rhythms entangling amongst the distinctive vocals. They also have stomping tunes to back up their stylistic choices. A fascinating accomplishment.
Detachments – Detachments LP
OK this isn’t a new album (January 2011) but it has such a joyous, infectious quality to it that I couldn’t help reviewing it. The rhythmic synth syncopation that dances between the melody and beat is brooding and intensely effective. Most importantly you have great tunes which seem beamed straight from the dark, inner city underbelly.
Bern Griner – Less Then Two Minutes
What I love about this album is it’s value of simplicity over complexity. All the songs are less than two minutes, and that urgency to create an abundance of colour and life into vignettes of experimental music is impressive. Such an odd collection of jazz, folk, electronic and rock influences make this album destined for cult obscurity.
Opaline – Shade Virtual
This album re-examines the platform of ambient music, composed largely with blurry, dazed pads nestling under blip-blop synthesized reverberations. There is a calmness in it’s sonic air but there’s also an added drizzle of sinister intent. This isn’t the most distinctive music landscape you’ll hear, but it has a certain allure and appeal you just can’t explain.
The Simonsound – Welcome to Mars music
Here’s a bizarre, surreal spew of experimental music that quite frankly has to be heard to be believed. There are decorations and inflections of dissonant, backwards-looped synthesizers meandering through a mish-mash of sci-fi peculiarities. It’s impenetrable and otherworldly.
