It has been several years since the last Windy & Carl album, but thankfully they are back and just as reliably excellent as ever.  Maybe even more so, as several of these songs easily stand with the duo's finest work.  Some long-term fans may be a little disappointed that they don't indulge their song-like or epic-length tendencies much this time around, but I doubt it: We Will Always Be largely sticks to what they do best  (beautifully glacial and glistening guitar) and does it warmly and purposefully.
I had a very hard time understanding the disproportionate amount of excitement surrounding last year's Pass Me By and We Stay Together EPs, but I have since come around a bit: there are definitely a couple of areas in which Stott truly excels.  In many respects, Luxury Problems essentially picks up exactly where those releases left off, but there is one massive curve-ball: the addition of vocalist Alison Skidmore.  That particular innovation turns out to be a mixed success, but overall the highlights are both more impressive and more frequent this time around.
On their latest, George & Caplin use electronics and guitars to create a lush yet unobtrusive album with few hard edges. Alternating between instrumental and vocal tracks, the songs have buoyant moments of familiarity, like fleeting fragments of a dream upon waking.
Brazzaville's latest work is an album of immediately accessible pop songs with little or no envelope pushing or edginess. Although they are not particularly groundbreaking, many of these songs are pleasurable just for the simple fact that they're so well done. While the album is a little broad for my taste, I still have to respect the high level of polish and craft at work here.
Furnished Rooms is an album of elegant chamber pop by a trio who use stringed instruments, an accordion, voices, and subtle electronics to create music that sounds refined yet contemporary. The group’s methodology is fairly uniform throughout, but they use it to their advantage in the creation of a unique sound.
Based on percussion sounds, rather than rhythm, Neon Tempal (solo project of Pascal Nichols) uses hefty regions of space and silence to blatantly flout solo percussion clichés.
Often an excuse for elongated sessions of masturbatory ecstatica, thee-way distorted guitar jams seldom really work beyond initial listens. Thankfully Basalt Fingers manage to sidestep a seemingly endless stroke session with each of its three participants working an as effective hydra-like, many headed unit. With Ben Chasny (Six Organs), Elisa Ambrogio (Magik Markers), and Brian Sullivan (Mouthus) each being renowned for their sideways takes on guitar playing, these two tracks get progressively more gorgeous with every listen.
There is a great deal of experimentation in these short tracks—though only an EP in length, and also available on 10" vinyl—that, unlike a lot of experimental electronic recordings, make it more of a relaxing listen rather than a protracted endurance test or an exercise requiring the full attention and focus of the listener.
This was easily one of the most striking and visceral albums that I encountered last year, but it has somehow remained mostly under the radar.  Cold Pin is the end-product of a two-year labor of love, as Keszler leads an excellent ensemble in a very unique collaboration with a huge string installation that he built in a large dome in Boston (the Cyclorama).  It's an amazing and unusual performance, but the installation itself could probably have a very successful career as a solo artist: few things sound better than giant strings being scraped at by small motors in a cavernous room with great acoustics.
Heralding another spurt of activity, this legendary duo has reissued a pair of two long out of print albums from the late 1990s with two added discs of unreleased material. I’ve always found the two previously released albums, When Pornography is No Longer Enough and The Victim as Beauty, amongst the most unhinged and violent power electronics recordings ever, and they’ve lost none of their De Sadeian intensity since release.
