For her fifth album, Marissa Nadler has started to let the light into her music. The reverb pedal has been left aside and her words have been put into stark relief by new instrumentation that gives her music a more country feel. This change in style has not diluted her vision; the move feels natural and sounds like it was meant to happen at some point in her career.

For their fourth album, Michael Begg and Deryk Thomas continue the development they began on 2009’s Black Hill album; deeply nocturnal, mournful and staggeringly beautiful music which takes in everything from the slow decay of time to post-colonial regret. This is undoubtedly their most superbly made and personal album to date.

Recorded live on a boat in 2008, this CD documents the first performance of Comus in over 30 years. Evidently whatever pact they made to make First Utterance had a retirement clause in it as the band sounds remarkably potent here. Had this been an archive recording from their creative zenith, I would have been impressed but bearing in mind this is the first time they had taken a stage together in over 30 years, this is phenomenal.

Obsessively edited and finalized over the past four years, this new side project of Whitehouse's William Bennett has certainly had its share of pre-release hype, and thankfully it exceeds the expectations I had for it. While there are a few similarities to his other work, there are also a great deal of differences to be heard, making it a distinctly different project.

Acid Mothers Temple have had their spot on Hawkwind's vacant space-rock throne pretty much locked down for years, but it increasingly looks like they are going to have to share it with White Hills.  This double album is an explosive and oft-angry monolith of hard rockin', in-the-red psych rock excess that is alternately exhausting and exhilarating.

Barn Owl has always been very open-minded in assimilating new influences and this latest EP finds them looking to Alice Coltrane and the more meditative side of the Krautrock canon for inspiration.  While there are some subtle resemblances to Popul Vuh at times, Shadowland still sounds very much like Barn Owl, seamlessly weaving these new threads into a very majestic, haunting, and coherent work.

The title of the third full-length album for this Swiss duo is an abbreviation for either organic or organism, and both are fitting descriptors for the music contained within. Across 11 pieces, Reto Mäder (guitars and electronics) and Fabio Costa (drums and electronics) and a few friends construct a sinister creature, living and breathing, but not of this world. With a strong pairing of chaotic experimentation with some more conventionally structured song-like works, it is a captivating and diverse record from beginning to end.

It is difficult to fathom that Robin Rimbaud’s Scanner project is nearing its 25th year, given the self-titled debut appeared in 1993. In that span of time he has become involved in a diverse array of artistic endeavors, from soundtracks to performance art, even to oblique pop music as a member of Githead, all of which stray far from his initial digital snooping and nod to the surveillance culture, which has only grown since. Conceptually, The Great Crater is a different beast entirely: a sonic examination of an odd phenomena occurring in Antarctica, and perfectly captures the wonder and potential dread of the event.

Seven years and three albums into the project, Gnawed’s Grant Richardson continues to release bleak, dissonant electronic music that is exceptionally nuanced and demonstrates not only his knack for antagonistic harshness, but also a penchant for expert sound design. Pestilence Beholden may not reinvent the wheel, but it does deliver nine pieces of moody, at times oppressive industrial noise that stays dynamic and ever changing throughout, and is an expert example of the style.

The three artists that make up this trio: electronics expert Alberto Boccardi, drummer/percussionist Paolo Mongardi, and double bass player Antonio Bertoni have performed alongside renowned artists such as Bill Laswell, Eraldo Bernocchi, Mika Vaino, and many others, but Litio is the first release that brings them together. That is not at all apparent, since the band’s work on this record is that of a well oiled machine, drawing from industrial, krautrock, and the avant garde, among other elements, resulting in a gripping, dark piece of taut rhythmic music.

The "subscription series" concept of releasing music always reminds me of the Vinyl on Demand label, which has been following this model for a while now, with apparently great success. Szczepanik's series of 3" discs, however, is a very different approach. Here it’s a series of handmade relics that further add to his intimate works that feel far more personal than other "series" releases.

As a member of Minamo, Keiichi Sugimoto is no stranger to weaving tapestries of hushed sounds that are as familiar as they are alien. On this album he expands his approach to include more use of accidental rhythms and erratic jittering sounds, focusing not just on tones, but rhythms and textures as well.

With an instrument lineup that includes Courtis on pizza tins and Menche on rocks and snow, I was expecting an odd album, and that’s exactly what I got. Odd, but under the careful processing and direction of Menche, a strong album that sounds a bit different than either of the artists’ usual works, in a good way.

This is a case in which I went into listening to the album with some trepidation. While I’m no stranger to extremely conceptual works, knowing that this was based upon heavily programmed graphic piano scores, and that also that it included a link to a downloadable "listener's guide," I was concerned it was going to be a matter of concept over enjoyment. Thankfully, that wasn't an issue at all.

These two albums mark the beginning of Analog Africa's new "Limited Dance Edition" series, veering away from compilations into reissues of long-deleted full albums by artists that played an integral role in shaping founder Samy Ben Redjeb's aesthetic. The endeavor is off to an excellent start, adding some strong rarities to the available oeuvre of one of the milieu's best-known bands and unearthing an absolutely killer effort from the amazing but seldom heard Rob.

There are a number of fine albums scattered throughout Warren DeFever's curious and eccentric discography, but my favorite work of his has always been the first few His Name is Alive albums. King of Sweet, now reissued, is a fake bootleg of sorts dating from that extremely fertile period.  While it contains obvious snatches of Home is in Your Head and some later work, everything has been recontextualized, repurposed, and abstracted to such a degree that it seems completely fresh and new.  The fact that a "lost" album from HNIA's golden years has finally resurfaced after nearly two decades is certainly cause for excitement, but the real revelation here is that it just might be DeFever's masterpiece.

This Will Destroy You's self-titled debut was a fantastic and satisfying collage of familiar sounds, but it didn't prepare me for the depth of their latest LP. While other instrumental rock bands seem to be writing shorter, more compact songs, TWDY is now airing it out in grandiose fashion.

 

The flood of unreleased Celer material seems to have subsided a bit in recent months, but a steady posthumous trickle of Dani Baquet-Long's solo recordings has now appeared in its wake.  To my ears, the aesthetic difference between Celer's drifting drone and Chubby Wolf is negligible at best, but Turkey Decoy reaffirms my belief that most of the best Celer-related material is reserved for their vinyl releases (of which this is one).  This easily stands among Dani's finest albums.

By my count, Rutger Zuydervelt has logged nearly 100 releases since Machinefabriek's inception in 2004, making it extremely easy for his best work to get missed or overlooked.  Fortunately, this one managed to catch my attention, as Davis's skwonking contrabass clarinet may very well be the perfect foil for Rutger's somber drones and crackles.  The likable first half of this improvised collaboration was recorded back when the duo first met in 2009 and has already been issued once as a limited 3" CDr, but the truly excellent second half came together more recently and makes its first appearance here.

By its very nature D.o.A. is probably the messiest and least cohesive of the TG catalog. Assembled from the same mix of live and studio performance recordings that made up Second Annual Report, there is just a greater amount of stylistic shifts here compared to its predecessor.  It was followed by 20 Jazz Funk Greats, which constitutes the first true "album" from TG. That disjointedness though is what always drew me into this album, making it among my favorites they ever recorded.