I cannot pretend to keep up with Andrew Liles' overwhelmingly voluminous solo output, but I pounced on this album, as it seemed significant that the generally dormant United Dairies label had reawakened to bestow its imprimatur upon this opus.  Happily, my instincts proved to be unerring (as usual).  United Dairies is the perfect home for an album as aberrant as this one: while Steven Stapleton has described it as "a masterpiece of modern contemporary composition" and Liles ostensibly drew his inspiration from the '50s and '60s avant-garde, The Power Elite more accurately sounds like a prolonged nightmare taking place inside the rusted machinery of a clock tower.  This is easily one of the year's strangest and most adventurous albums.
Birmingham’s Pram are the rare band that can cause me to simultaneously think conflicting thoughts like "it is absolutely criminal that this band was never as big as Stereolab" and "it is abundantly clear why this band never quite managed to transcend cult status."  In any case, they were unquestionably one of the more idiosyncratic, inspired, and polarizing bands of the '90s, though they finally managed to achieve some widespread success in the early 2000s.  In fact, Helium was recently hailed by FACT as one of the greatest post-rock albums of all-time, while an article on The Quietus proposed The Stars Are So Big as the best album of the '90s.  Appropriately, those first two Pram albums (originally released on Too Pure) have now gotten well-deserved vinyl reissues from Medical Records.  At the risk of sounding reductionist, both of these albums fall into Pram's Krautrock-influenced phase, preceding their (also reductionist) aesthetic swing into more exotica-influenced territory.  Describing Pram as "Krautrock-influenced" does not even remotely begin to capture how bizarre, artfully deranged, and fun some of these songs are though.
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On their third album, Trembling Bells explore traditional folk themes such as boozing, loneliness, landscape, mystical creatures and regret, with more modern and eclectic sounds. Their joyous approach to playing and singing is hypnotic and passionate with enough humor and raw edges to steer well clear of being over-sentimental.
On last year's excellent Fountain, Grody divided his time between nods to droning contemporary ambient and more traditional acoustic guitar fare.  This time around, the focus is much heavier on his more rustic, Takoma-influenced leanings, which yields mixed results.  On one hand, these songs are more distinctive and anachronistic, but their languid pace and comparative lack of hooks blunts their impact a bit. In Search of Light still boasts some wonderful songs though–they're just a bit more sparingly distributed than they were on its predecessor.
This stripped-down 20-minute EP captures Blackshaw back near the top of his game, finding the perfect synergy between his talents as a steel-string virtuoso and his ambitions as a more varied composer.  While the overall feeling of these two pieces is languorous, melancholy, and impressionistic, the crisp sound and complex and inventive arrangements imbue them with a surprising amount of dazzle and immediacy.  James makes a virtue of brevity, as Holly is a complete, undiluted, and consistently strong effort.
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