Cloud Nothings

Turn On

Don't be fooled by the minimalist album art, there is a lot of scuzzy-hot goodness going on in this album. I could (and have) listen(ed) to "Hey Cool Kid" all the livelong day.

What are the lyrics??? What are they SAY-ing?? No one knows! But it sounds super rad, so who really cares anyway, right?

Window View

I couldn't have dreamed a more appropriate companion for the best song on Beach Fossil's forthcoming full-length than this vintage home video footage. It's got a late 70's Woody Allen-style romantic melancholy quality that makes your stomach and your heart seem a little further away from one another. Get the LP from Captured Tracks on May 25.

Beach Fossils // Window View from Wooden Lens on Vimeo.

Myspace // Last.fm

Green Bricks

Vacation Dad

VDLIVEIMPROVSHIT

Vacation Dad made a Soundcloud page and uploaded a 20-minute excerpt of a live improvised set. I asked him if I could split it up into separate tracks. He said yes. You can download it from the link above. Or download the whole thing in one track here. It's pretty killer either way.

There's also a sweet new song on his Soundcloud page called "ihopeyrfavoritecoloriseverywhere." He wrote it "for a girl" who is "the best." It reminds me of a melted fun-size candy bar and when you're done eating it you bite the wrapper and scrape the rest of the chocolate off with your teeth but your fingers get sticky anyway.

Myspace // Last.fm

Lush Cola

Lush Cola

Didn't know about Weed Diamond until a few days ago, so I was pleasantly surprised when Patient Sounds (same label that put out the M. Pyres and Smelly Magic cassettes last year) sent this little beauty over. Lush Cola is an old project of Weed Diamond's Tim Perry. The sparse, minimal arrangements often lean on his calm ghost harmonies and drum machine beats, occasionally joined by a guitar or bass that sounds like it's being played in the basement with the door ajar. Perfect music for driving at night down a road surrounded by forest but close enough to the city for you to be able to see a faint glow through the brush. Watch a cool video on Get Off The Coast, put together by Jheri Evans himself, and preorder the cassette from Patient Sounds below.

Myspace // Last.fm
Buy it!

Parallel Pyres

Parallel Pyres

Distorted drums and organ, sometimes looped and layered, with the occasional garbled vocal echo. Those are pretty much the only sounds heard on this self-titled release, but it's the kind of basic structure that can easily amount to more than the sum of its parts. Here, that means subverting pop and new wave in a way that's just as catchy as anything Wet Hair and Vacation Dad have done. Could totally be a cassette on Not Not Fun. Visit All, Everyone, United to watch a few music videos he made.

Myspace // Last.fm

Beach Fossils

SELF-TITLED FULL LENGTH

Click here for track 8, "Window View," if it's corrupted in the link above.

This is almost too good to be true -- at long last, the full-length debut of a band that I think about name-dropping roughly every three posts to describe another band has arrived. The album I haven't been able to stop anticipating since the first notes of "Daydream" licked my ears like a tide coming in and a foam seems to rise right out of where the sand meets the water and then you squint up and see orange and purple smudges just above the horizon and you remember sorbet Push-Up Pops with the Flintstones on the package and then you remember light refracting and how comforting the science behind sunsets is.

Wait, where was I? Oh yeah. One of the most deservedly buzzed-about bands last year, whose only other release to date is a 7" and whose hazy surf-pop gems have been slowly trickling one-by-one out of rifts between HTML codes since last summer, finally has something more substantial for hungry listeners to prematurely nibble on -- or swallow whole. This thing doesn't even have a release date, official artwork or a tracklisting yet (EDIT: nevermind, I numbered the tracks and posted a new link), but that doesn't matter -- like any other album this good, the music speaks for itself.

Thanks to the angels at Late For School for somehow getting their hands on this.

Myspace // Last.fm
Buy it!

Edibles

Super Space/Mind Peace

This is a cassette that was released on Not Not Fun. This means you should download it. I'm pretty sure it sold out in a matter of days. This means it is awesome. It sounds like Ducktails but better, or Sun Araw in small doses. Swamp guitar slithers and crescent moon bass grooves cradle the carved-out flesh of a mango peel.

Myspace // Last.fm

Caboladies

Earth Canal (2008)


Crowded Out Memory (2009)


Kind Glaze (2010)

RIYL: Black Dice around 2003, Emeralds, Dolphins Into The Future, Oneohtrix Point Never

Myspace // Last.fm

Hooray!

Mixtape Memories

Swell stripped-down solo shoegaze. Reminds me of Atlas Sound, but the more songwriter-y stuff. And not as emotionally draining. Carefree, but still kinda heartbreaking. There's intimate lo-fi noise-pop hooks and a definite Underwater Peoples Records feel. Way better than the generic exclamation of his namesake may imply.

You can download another couple of EPs on his myspace, while you're at it.

Myspace // Last.fm

Pill Wonder

Jungle/Surf

Myspace // Last.fm
Buy it!

Perfect tropical lo-fi noise-pop. This 8-song EP is criminally short at only 18 minutes, but accomplishes enough in that time to compel you to listen repeatedly. Reminds me of No Age but more chill, or the Ruby Suns but more playful, or Islands but more noisy and good in general. This is poised to be the soundtrack to anyone's early summer.

Horsepital

All Stills

If that link doesn't work, try this one.


Horsepital (now known as Gem Jones) reminds me of a stop-motion animated adaptation of The Little Prince that I watched with my 3rd grade class in the library and it scared the shit out of me. This cassette is not that creepy, but it does recall the image of a clay doll catapulted through space and all the planets have faces and some of them might be smiling. And then the clay doll lands on a swamp planet that smells like Jolly Ranchers and joins the slimy fluorescent natives for a game of ping-pong.

You'll dig this if you like Ducktails, Wet Hair, Emeralds, Big Spider's Back.

Myspace // Last.fm

Vacation Dad

Vacation Dad EP

Post-noise side project from the drummer of Farms, a band I just fell in love with even though I still haven't found anything besides the songs on their myspace.

This EP is rife with jagged guitars colliding delays and looping into sunrise mirrors and fuzzy jumbles of jungle feathers tickling your bare feet but actually you are in a suburban backyard playing in the sand that spilled out of your sandbox and maybe five years later you're on your back looking at some vast blue expanse and your little brother pours a handful of it in your eye and it stings but you were supposed to be watching him anyway. Those clouds were totally distracting.

My point is, pay attention to this. It floats in an as-yet-undefined space between High Wolf and Ecstatic Sunshine and Peaking Lights and Julian Lynch and you'll love it, I know you will.

Myspace // Last.fm

Midlake

The Acts of Men

Has been on repeat since I downloaded it.

I maintain that fleet foxes wanna be midlake, couldn't be this awesome if they tried, should keep their day jobs, have lamer cover art and beards, etc etc etc etc

Big Spider's Back : Warped

Warped

don't dismiss this as ac fandom.

there's good stuff here.

it's spectacular, especially given that it's only one guy.

perfect machine is amazing.

give this a chance to grow on you.

because it will.

guaranteed.

Myspace

M. Pyres (Pt. 2)

Yay, finally got around to posting this! You may recall M. Pyres from the post I made about Cast Off / Cold Months. Pretty awesome ambient/post-rock album. The following albums stray far from that -- but not too far. All three are totes srsly recommended. Apart The Echo is kinda like Meneguar and Wavves or No Age or some other lo-fi punk/noise band but really into 90's indie rock and still with the ambient ideas floating around. & New Past Tense, which hasn't been released yet, is like a cross between Apart The Echo and Cast Off / Cold Months, integrating the post-rock ideas into the noisier punk songs. Consider Me, Ghost is a collection of their early demos, but almost all of it is as good as the newer stuff. Get into it, dudes.


Apart The Echo -- Buy it!


& New Past Tense


Consider Me, Ghost (demos)

Myspace

Best Coast

Myspace

Remember Pocahaunted? How you couldn't go two months in 2008 without finding out they were releasing something new? And then it all stopped for some reason? And then Bethany started writing songs with a heavy 60's pop influence and recording them in the sunny California heat with the lo-fi haze of her former band? And how it was really awesome? I forgive you if your memory of this isn't as strong as mine, because for me it just happened yesterday.


Make You Mine 7"


Art Fag 7"

Thee Oh Sees

This is a band I have not been able to stop listening to lately. I'm pretty sure it started as a solo-side project of John Dwyer (Pink and Brown, Burmese, Coachwhips) and is now a 4-piece. They've also had a few name changes along the way. The sound is kinda low fi rockabilly but also lots of high energy fun stuff. Really fun to see live, definitely check em out if you get the chance. If you've never heard these guys before I'd say your best bet is to start with the album "Thee Hounds of Foggy Notion". It's an album of all live field recordings in lots of cool outdoor locations and it's compiled of songs that could be called their greatest hits of that era. Next, move on to one of their newer albums released in early 2009, titled "Help". Both of these albums are flawless, every track is a winner. And lastly, I'm giving you guys a link to check out their newest full releases and it's called Dog Poison.


Thee Hounds of Foggy Notion


Help


Dog Poison

9/17 Megapost

Sure, I'm late with some of these, but aren't they all good records? And doesn't that goodness last beyond the "discovery" stage? I'd like to think so.

I tried to make this a noise/electronic post, but Bibio offered me an opportunity to transition into a few links I've been meaning to post for a while. Enjoy.

Eric Copeland - Alien In A Garbage Dump - Full length! Not the vinyl-only EP that was released last year. This album is that EP and the recently released companion EP, Al Anon (also vinyl-only). Pretty amazing. Buy the CD from Paw Tracks, or the Al Anon twelve-inch from Catsup Plate (only 500 copies pressed!).

High Wolf - Animal Totem - Killer cassette released last year (?) on Not Not Fun Records. Tropical loop noise.

Bibio - Ambivalence Avenue - Folk and IDM? In the best way possible, this dude on Warp Records marries the two. I don't know why I'm suddenly name-dropping all these record labels.

Ganglians - Monster Head Room - Part of that whole "lo-fi" thing, but ultimately, the songwriting here makes you forget it was likely recorded in someone's basement. Kinda like Beach Boys, Fleet Foxes, Woods. Buy the CD from Woodsist.

Hermit Thrushes - Slight Fountain - Maybe I'm off my rocker here, but this band reminds me of, like, if maybe Cough-era Black Eyes (I've spent about 10 minutes trying to find a better band for this analogy, but nothing else works) was really tired, so they turned off the distortion and invited Phil Elverum over to sing a little, and then all of them realized that Joan of Arc was pretty good. Buy the CD here.

Segue

More to come? Depends on campus upload times.

Stag Hare - Black Medicine Music - dream psych jungle.
Volcano Choir - Unmap - i'm not a fan of Bon Iver. this, however, is sweet. <--(dead link)
Wet Hair - Glass Fountain - gurgle organ synth with drum and wild vox.
White Denim - Fits - summer funk. sleepy blues.
Why? - Eskimo Snow - more orchestral and melodic than prior ventures. my favorite why? album.
Circulatory System - Signal Morning - fuzzy psych-pop perfection.
Lightning Bolt - Earthly Delights - frantic drums, pummel bass, meganoise, melt your face.
Atlas Sound - Logos - you know.
Bygones - by- - Zach Hill + Nick Reinhart (Tera Melos) = Techthrashmathlove.
Cold Cave - Love Comes Close - dark synth electro from Wes Eisold.