With Mathew Sweet's third release for Kranky, he secures himself as the arch-mage of death soaked acoustica. Again employing mostly his guitar and breathy vocal, while momentarily reaching for further instrumentation, this album is less hidden-away sounding than previous Boduf Songs recordings. It is, however, still imbued with inimitable sense of intimateness, darkness, and magic.

Eschewing any species of frills or frippery, the simple card and paper-fastener packaging encasing this latest entry from Machinefabriek in Staalplaat's Mort Aux Vaches series resolutely reflects the aesthetic of Dutch musician Rutger Zuydervelt. Although sparse is the operative word here, Zuydervelt's lean compositions and quiet tiny sounds, carefully sculpted around deep spaces, are nevertheless harmonically and richly complex, ranging from fragile gossamer tones to deeply sweeping friezes. Moreover, the music is warmly inviting and enticing, indeed inviting and enticing one to explore a strange and slightly surreal world.

Apparently they do make them like this anymore. A mere 38 years after it was begun; Fotheringay's second album is released. Another chance to hear the voice of Sandy Denny, famously described as like 'a clean glass in a sink full of dirty dishes.'

It’s refreshing to hear an album of sonic abstraction that falls into neither of the following categories:  minimalist drone, harsh noise, or crossover into other electronic realms.  Not that there is anything wrong with those at all, I enjoy many works that fall into those aforementioned categories.  But works like this collaboration between the Illusion of Safety member and long time sound artist and master for hire Dimuzio are fascinating in that they are focused only on the nuanced textures of sound.

From the band's name, I was expecting something more along the lines of pretentious 1970s prog rock, but this most definitely is not the case.  While a rather short album, the three expansive tracks that comprise it encompass a vast variety of sounds and styles that create an ethnographic, soundtrack experience unlike many others.

It angers me that Some Bizzare Stevø has treated one of the best releases of the 1980s with such utter negligence, issuing versions like this with embarassing mistakes on tracklisting, indexing errors, chintzy packaging, and dreadful artwork recreation. I encourage nobody to buy this shitty reissue and I hearby challenge Stevø to recall these copies at once and put out a fucking proper release of this classic once and for all.

Out of my latest order of three releases from Faraway Press, the current CD from this infrequent Mirror collaborator and often overlooked co-conspirator of Faraway Press (alongside Andrew Chalk) has been by far the most rewarding. On this, her second solo release, she has consciously let go of the single-piece-per-side mold and created a decidedly not-drone album.

Sublime Frequencies presents a CD reissue of a limited edition vinyl by this Tuareg rock group featuring the enigmatic guitar hero Bibi Ahmed. The group brings to its hybrid of roots rock, Afrobeat and plugged-in fuzz rock a political urgency, the music having its origin as a political weapon used to communicate from Libyan refugee camps within the Republic of Niger in the 1980s and '90s.

Most attendees at a Suicide concert these days would claim to respect the "work" of the streetwise electronic innovators—provided that said "work" consists of their confrontational eponymous debut and, possibly, their glorious Ric Ocasek helmed sophomore album.  I, on the other hand, am a Suicide fan, one who eagerly pounces on the members' infrequent solo albums with the same vigor as I did the reissues of their underrated third and fourth records.  Simply receiving a copy of this release in the mail was a perverse joy unto itself.

I relish the opportunity to expose our readership to new independent music on a regular basis. For this writer, it is the ultimate high to help lift from obscurity a worthy band that lacks the marketing muscle of a major label machine, and, like a crusty hygiene-deficient junkie, I am instinctively trying to score the next great fix, regularly on the lookout for such opportunities. That dutiful yet addictive sentimentality is precisely how I got conned into trying this band, lured by the unfulfilled promise of moderately morose music akin to those early Factory Records artists that LTM Recordings has such a veiny hard-on for.

Girls Against Boys frontman Scott McCloud's half-whispered, cigarette burnt vocals on this, his telling solo debut, channel the scuzzy street-level vibe of that seminal Touch & Go band, leavened by the sagacious musings of an unblushing, unpretentious gutter poet. For this fan, these wizened, largely acoustic ditties frequently spark thoughts along the lines of "Gee, these sure would make some great GVSB songs."

Although his reputation as the “screaming philosopher” precedes him, this vastly insufficient nickname does nothing to convey the power and skill of Tomokawa’s singing and songwriting. While the gasping, almost convulsive delivery of some of his lines does of course lend credence to this moniker, everyone seems to overlook his earthy, troubadour voice that carries most of the songs. Backed by a band who seem comfortable playing in a traditional Spanish style (with an Eastern European twist), this album shows Tomokawa at an ever higher peak than usual.

Charlie Looker has issued every rock band in existence a very serious challenge: write music as inventive and natural as the stuff on Secular Works or get the hell off the stage. I'm certain that this album spells the end for nearly every math-rock band in existence.

Techno godfather Juan Atkins' finest productions lie more than a decade behind him, his post-millennial output utterly unmemorable by contrast. When Timbaland and Missy Elliott appropriated wholesale and slightly repurposed Cybotron's "Clear" a few years back for the "Lose Control" single, the succeeding and lingering stench of musical necrophilia made the Detroit legend's faded glory all the more uncomfortably evident. Moderately diverse and unsurprisingly enjoyable given the contributors, this remix collection dusts off yet another Atkins oldie for another nine rounds.

The brainchild of Uppsala, Sweden's M. Zetterberg, exemplifies the typical expansiveness, vastness of scale, and sheer coldness of most Scandinavian dark ambient/industrial output. Zetterberg, although in many ways staying within the somewhat narrow confines of the genre, also strays out of it occasionally, sometimes springing a surprise or two along the way. While Core won’t win any marks for originality, it is at the very least above average and steps outside of convention on one or two occasions to make it untypical of many entries in the field.

Antenne is Kim G. Hansen, formerly of Institute for the Criminally Insane, with vocals from Marie-Louise Munck. Together, they use electronics, acoustic guitar, and voice to make music of strange and delicate beauty. These are moody pieces for a rainy day, strong in execution if lacking in variety.

On Ladyhawk's second album, their spirited rock songs are decent but fairly ordinary. They bring plenty of angst and passion to the material but don't do enough to develop these impulses. Too frequently their arrangements play it safe, as if they're trying to refine the same song over and over rather than challenging themselves to break new ground.

This week’s release from the prolific duo is actually the reissue of a 2006 CDR-only release of live material that truly demonstrates how proficient the band is in a live setting, with a four song set that could easily be mistaken for a tightly constructed studio album, and two additional live pieces that differ somewhat in feel, but are still of the same high quality.

When the tracks that make up the first half of this EP were first released about a year ago on a split 12” with Eluvium, it represented a somewhat drastic change from what Jesu had been doing up to that point.  All the way through Conqueror, there had been a definite concession to shoegaze pop, but still enshrouded with the monolith riffs that established Godflesh as a force to be reckoned with prior.  But here was a mostly electronic, very calm and almost pure pop record that, in hindsight, heralded more recent works (the split with Envy, parts of Pale Sketches).  And now these tracks are available on CD with two alternate versions that represent a very different take on the original material.

Nobody has ever been able to explain to me just how we went from the awesome diversity and promiscuous intermingling of '90s alternative music to the present day's drab dichotomy of wussy hipster twee and cathartic yet indigestible metal. Specifically, I lament the loss of that seemingly dying animal known as noise rock, its Amphetamine Reptile and Touch & Go fueled heyday woefully behind us. Yet thankfully there are more than a few pilgrims to the jizz-soaked shrine to The Jesus Lizard, the obsidian monolith of The Melvins, and the crumbling temple of Girls Against Boys.