Following quickly on from last year’s …Sun, Broken…, Mugstar have extended the formula that blew me away on that previous album and have made an impossibly shimmering, psychedelic and, most importantly, rocking album. Lime may not rewrite the history of rock music but it does act like the fruit it is named after, it cuts through the senses in a most pleasant fashion.

Heavy on percussion, the group have honed their rhythmic edge into a surgical knife. Stark, effective bass lines (sometimes just two notes) complete the rhythmic picture, adding a muscle to the rigid bones of the drumming. There is a vaguely ritualistic feeling to the music, for example on "Starts/Ends," where the percussion dances around itself to create a cathartic and engaging sound. Gavin Duffy’s immediate bass playing drags the music from this weirdly transcendent place back to the dance floor.

Few artists can boast debut albums as stunning as this one, making its reissue after nearly three decades of unavailability something of a major event.  Originally recorded in 1983, the Soul Possession sessions assembled a murderer's row of talented collaborators such as Crass and UK dub heavyweight Adrian Sherwood to back young Annie Anxiety's animated and unseemly tales from the dark side.  Rightfully considered an underground classic, this album captures a rare "super group" in which everyone involved was at the top of their game, giving birth to something truly disturbing and visionary.

Much like the roster of labels like Raster-Noton or Touch, Cristal work with a type of noise that is very different to the Merzbows and Whitehouses of this world. Instead of bludgeoning the listener with volume, these guys focus on the textures of the sound and keep the dynamics intact. The music on this album is like a macro photograph of a small but intricate piece of machinery covered in dust; there is a lot of detail but on a much smaller scale.

Miami's Harry Pussy combined the raw, undisciplined approach of old school punk rock, the atonal harshness of noise, and the micro-track lengths of classic grindcore into a muddy mess of distortion and chaos. An early precursor to the noise/rock vibe Wolf Eyes has been pushing, HP stayed more in the realms of dirty punk rock rather than the more electronic inspired work of the Michigan Boys, with the exception of the dirty analog synth of "MS20", which apes any noise band at their own game.

Rather than simply drawing elements from 20th century synthesizer music, Reinhardt instead recreates it with a sense of modernity and development that is not simply a nostalgic collection of tracks, but a disc that fully reproduces the sound and sensation of the avant garde pieces, soundtracks, and pop songs that classic analog synthesizers ended up pushing their way into.

Richter displays a hitherto unsuspected sense of humor in composing music for ring tones. This is an intriguing concept, with an apt title and short pieces that prove surprisingly wide ranging and affecting. The only flaw is that if my phone sounded this good I would be loath to interrupt any of these tracks to answer it.

With mainstay Vincent De Roguin absent and Stephen O'Malley exercising sharp restraint, Æthenor have released their best album and maybe one of the best live recordings I have ever heard. Assembled from three shows recorded in Oslo, Norway during 2010, En Form For Blå captures Æthenor improvising a loose electric sound bound expertly together by the talents of percussionist Steve Noble and one-half of the Ulver crew. Together they create a surprisingly intelligible sound, which betrays its impromptu origin.

Although they appeared on a variety of compilations in the early 1980s, including the legendary Rising from the Red Sands, Pseudocode mostly remained unknown, putting out their own cassettes and the occasional odd 7", but never reaching the same levels of notoriety that contemporaries in the early industrial underground enjoyed. Nearly 30 years later, some of these earliest recordings have been issued, for the first time, in a deluxe double LP package.

Recorded together using similar techniques, but vastly different source materials, these two releases feel like different parts of the same whole, with both of them emphasizing Mathieu's balancing of texture and melody, to excellent effect, through the use of processed, pre-recorded compositions.

I don't understand how Erik Carlson has managed to stay so woefully underappreciated and low-profile for so long, as he has a very distinctive and appealing aesthetic.  Also, he has recently been largely infallible quality-wise. That hot streak continues here: wisely sticking closely to the sound he intermittently perfected with 2009's excellent Charmed Birds Against Sorcery, Carlson has delivered yet another impressive album of spidery, shimmering beauty.  It could benefit from a bit more bite though.

This album is very deceptively packaged and presented, but in the best way possible: the tame cover art and the word "folk" did nothing at all to prepare me for the extremely fun and quirky pseudo-surf gems within.  Of course, many of these pieces were originally folk songs, but they have been so jazzed-up with kitschy organs and twangy, tremelo-happy guitars as to make that term a wildly misleading understatement. Curator Stuart Ellis has assembled an improbable monster of a compilation.

Perhaps uniquely, Basil Kirchin’s appreciators include Broadcast, Coil, Sean Connery, Elizabeth Taylor, Brian Eno, and Nurse With Wound. Included here is music from his first film score Primitive London (1965) and the gangland movie The Freelance (1971). Kirchin was a pioneering twentieth-century master of texture and mood. His inventive, multifaceted music still sounds light yet off-kilter, eerie yet peaceful, both futuristic and nostalgic.

It's an attractive package on the most base level. The liner notes claim, "Desire is the root of all suffering," and the artwork depicts a woman, possibly a prostitute, in some form of bondage. Paired with the rather bleak photographs of nondescript locales, the entire album screams before it ever begins playing.  This stuff is vile: the album is dirty, absolutely filthy, and exciting.

The first offering in four years from folk-rockjourneyman David Berman could easily have become a messy affair. Afteryears of booze, drugs, depression, and more booze, it seemed Berman waspoised to make the all important recovery record.  It's a familiar one—it reeks of sorrow, redemption, and rehab—but Bermanknows he’s better than that, and as a result he’s peppered the newSilver Jews record with strange but brilliantly told tales of boozers,black Santa Clauses, and airport bartenders.

While their debut album was equal parts all-out guitar assault and plaintive resignation, Explosions in the Sky plumbs the depths of their oeuvre by digging within on their second record, even in its first moments. The quietly played notes that begin the first track eventually join with a heartbeat of percussion that builds into a carefully blended swell where all instruments feel like they're being played with someone's life on the line. When it all finally combusts, it's not at all like before: it's better.

Kranky
Tom and Christina Carter's work as Charalambides improves with everyrelease, and now with the addition of Heather Leigh Murray —Christina's bandmate in Scorces — on pedal steel and vocals, they are aforce to be reckoned with. Kranky is generously reissuing severalCharalambides releases that were never widely available. Unknown Spinwas originally released on the band's own label in a CD-R pressing of300. With this particular reissue, Kranky is righting a colossal wrong:that this music was relatively unavailable for so long. These songs area real step forward for the band, as they work more into each other'spatterns, with the expansive nature of the music benefitting from anodd start/stop quality that intensifies the whole album's aura. Theopening track, also the title track, is thirty whole minutes ofminimalist joy, haunting in its need to take so long to build. Littlepieces of music are repeated, but spaced out in an almost mind-alteringpace. Eventually all parts join together, build, soar, and chill to thebone. With not a track under eight minutes, and given their history,this track sets the tone for the whole release. The songs approach purebeauty here and there, but is is the final track, "Skin of Rivers,"that pulls it all together. With Heather and Christina's dueling vocalsand little else until about five minutes in, there is a pure fear andisolation in place that just decimates. It's probably the bestCharalambides track ever, and the album as a whole is quite anaccomplishment. With more to come from Kranky, perhaps this fineensemble will finally get the respect they deserve.

samples:

• Unknown Spin
• Voice Within
• Magnolia

Somewhere there exists a Metal Valhalla, an otherworldly paradise where all of the head-banging Vikings, beer-swilling Satanists, fist-pumping Klingons and face-painted Odinists are slam-dancing under the dark crimson moonlight to the pure amplified glory of the heaviest sounds in the Universe. For all we know, this Guitar Nirvana might be completely out of reach of mere mortals, at least in this lifetime, but that doesn't stop people from trying time and again to invoke it right here on Earth.

Antifrost
The world of drones is necessarily deceptive. The successful drone isalways an illusion—you wind up being drawn into a special perceptualstate that I call the zone,believing that you're listening to a complex world of fractionaldetail, motion, drama and beauty while it's perfectly obvious to thecasual observer outside the zone that it's just a bunch of tones, quitepossibly rather unpleasant ones. The conjuror illusionist's skills canbe explained, understood and taught but the inner workings of theconvincing drone illusion are, to me at least, very mysterious. Thesame mystery is at the heart of minimalism—it's unbelievably easy to bea minimalist but very few have made good minimalist art and I doubtthat anyone can explain the key ingredient. This is my excuse for notbeing sure what it is that doesn't quite work about Texturizer.Everything is lovely in theory, Coti K. provides slow mellow electronictones and noises and Nikos Veliotis plays bowed harmonics and othercello sounds on top of that. But somehow it doesn't quite gel anddoesn't get me into the zone. The electronic part itself is hard tofault; it has nicely unstable resonances that sound like they mightcome from feedback loops fed with ambient sounds, perhaps street noise.The cello part is perhaps the issue. My all time favorite musicalinstrument is the cello and I love what its overtones can do but here Idon't get the sense of a cohesive effect playing. Live improvised droneplaying (I presume is what's happening here) involves a generativeprocess of discovering the perfect sonority and then working it,holding it, keeping it and moving it around. There should be a balancebetween the freedom of the autonomous discovered sound to behave underits own volition and the control of the musician. Too much control andall we hear is the performer, too little and the sound's lack ofintrinsic aesthetics will show through. Veliotis is tending to theformer. It's as though he never quite finds his perfect sonority,passing over several good opportunities and dwelling on inadequate oneson a trajectory of his own that also fails to make sense as a celloimprovisation. As wallpaper Texturizer is entirely functional—areally rather enjoyable and unimposing accompaniment to ones work. Butclose listening reveals the absence of illusion. 

samples:

• .a
• .b
• .c