★Drag City
Asleep On The Floodplain
Ben Chasny has spent many years at this point perfecting his very personal vision of the American landscape. With his early LPs he managed to grab a groundswell of support for his distinctly lo-fi recordings, and since hitting the Drag City label with the breathtaking 'School of Flower' he has managed to extend his vision to countless others. 'Asleep on the Floodplain' continues his exploration, and while it doesn't change up the formula too much (apart from the odd analogue synth blurt here and…
Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow
35 years have passed since Bill’s last new slab of vinyl was released. We bring you this set of gems from ‘78–’81. It’s bursting with a couple new tracks (with a few traded out from the ‘05 CD), a new sequence, new art, and expanded liner notes by the man himself.
Spiritual/Mental/Physical
‘Spiritual-Mental-Physical’ is a collection of wild early Death demos, presenting the three young Hackney brothers consolidating their powers as they embark on a trip into pure rock and roll music. The album comes with liner notes from Bobby Hackney Sr. explaining the genesis and meaning of the songs included.
False Flag
"When witch-gods collide, it might sound something like this. Six Organs of Admittance...Richard Bishop...Chris Corsano. Riders of the apocalypse, it's them vs. us. After absorbing their über-holy dynamo, you'll be prepared to join up with these wraiths, making it all of us against...well, whomever's fool enough to stand in our way. To evil! Rangda's been building up behind the scenes for some time now. As label mates and members of an exclusive mutual admiration society, Sir Rick …
Collected Works 1995-96
This excellent collection of Masaki Batoh's (founding member of Ghost) "A Ghost From The Darkened Sea" and "Kikaokubeshi" brings together two albums recorded and released in 1995 and 1996, during the final period of conceptualization for Ghost's "Lama Rabi Rabi" album. These two solo records allowed Batoh to explore musics and textures in an entirely free space from the already quite free (and rapidly morphing) Ghost. This is a solo record in a very complete sense: aco…
Too Long In This Condition
Young Scotsman Alasdair Roberts is an old hand at songcraft -- and not just his own, but the songs of the ancients, the near-ancients and their friends. Over the past decade that he's been singing music in his own name (after graduating from the Appendix Out youth brigade), he's made a habit out of recording songs of his own and traditional songs with an equal amount of investment and urgency. After all, it's all music, always deserving of everything we have to give. Following 2009's de…
Five American Portraits
“Ridges and creases / high on the middle forehead / The right temple near the eyebrow / A small ridge under the right eye / The right side of the tip of the nose / The opening of the right nostril / The middle lower lip / The inner ear of the right ear.” Can you tell who it is yet? It’s George W. Bush, of course, or at least part of his head, as seen (or rather heard) in the second of five “American portraits” in words and music by legendary experimental rock outfit the Red Krayola, in collabora…
III
Picking up the threads with ease, Espers III was intended to be an aural reversal of the layered sound of II. The goal was to record fewer tracks in order to achieve a stronger, more oxygenated sonic presence. Where II was almost claustrophobic in its density and darkness, III was envisaged as being somehow lighter, effervescent; perhaps even of a cheery disposition at times (whoa there! Don't go not breaking our heart, Espers). Under these auspices, recording started in late 2008 and spi…
Have One On Me
Destined to be one of the top album of the year, finally Joanna Newsom releases her first album since late 2006's Ys, making up for lost time with a disc for 2008, one for 2009 and one for today. Featuring Ryan Francesconi and Neal Morgan from Joanna's Ys Street Band, Have One On Me is an extravagantly packaged (and extravagantly nicely-priced) collection of fantastic new Joanna Newsom songs -- her most colorful record to date.
Untitled (3rd Album)
VINYL FORMAT. Reissued! Rising from the silence, shaking the muck of level-Z rock and roll detritus from their feet, Royal Trux returned to action in October of 1992 with an untitled album, their third. It had been two years since they'd vanished into the negative zone with Twin Infinitives, an ultimate left-turn that appeared to have no endgame. For Untitled, Royal Trux strung together eight pieces of varying vintage that clearly communicated their rock and roll desires with the most direct app…
Return to Form
Sometimes the best gigs are the happy accidents-- stumbling on an unknown band, or being convinced to see an artist by a friend only to become a convert yourself. That's how I was introduced to Major Stars: Hijacked, dragged to a tiny Baltimore bar where the band was headlining. And then, boom: Wayne Rogers launched into the first of many acid-rock solos and full-front assaults. I was awestruck in a way you assume people felt when first seeing, say, session guitarist Pete Cosey (best known for …
Introducing
The Drag City / Galactic Zoo team delve deeply into the recesses of private press obscurity once again, further revealing the underbelly of American music's recorded history - this time the little known songwriter Ryan Trevor is in the spotlight, who released just one incredibly rare, homespun LP (this one, if you're wondering) which surfaced originally in 1977. Not much is known about Trevor, though the guys at Drag City bill him as a "loner genius", whose work is to be filed somewhere between …
The Wyrd Meme
A quartet of new songs from the ever-wonderful Alasdair Roberts - a follow-up to his long-player Spoils, released earlier in the year. The tone is carefully poised between staunchly traditional folk values and more modern arrangement styles; though Roberts' fingerpicking and unaffected delivery are faithful to the genre's purist leanings, there's nothing conventional about the songs' segmented structures or the often very minimalist arrangements. It's quite strange to hear such a seemingly old-f…
Spoils
For this latest album Caledonian folk impresario Alasdair Roberts teams up with expected collaborators like Alex Neilson (whose drumming and percussion work has illuminated many a free-folk record over recent years, a few of which Roberts has been involved with) and more unusual contributors such as Niko-Matti Ahti of Fonal's Kiila. Perhaps more than ever, Roberts' music invites comparisons to Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, traveling sufficiently far from the trad songwriting fold to be thought of as 'a…
No Earthly Man
Updating canonical Scottish folk tunes is a rather unfashionable niche, placing these songs within the context of modern/alternative rock is an even tougher chore, but it's one that Scottish neo-traditionalist Alasdair Roberts approaches with pluck and somber intensity. Previously with the band Appendix Out, No Earthly Man is Roberts' third album as a solo artist and it is undoubtedly his most difficult to approach. His previous album, Farewell Sorrow, was a collection of joyful, filigreed songs…
Musical Paintings Vol 1
"A unique collaboration between a musician and a painter: Sean O'Hagan/The High Llamas and Jean Pierre Muller. The Musical Painting can be described as a large picture composed of wooden shapes that fit into one another. It produces its own soundtrack but with a distinctive novelty - it is the viewer who, by playing with the moveable parts of the painting, is in fact the conductor of the piece. This unique fusion between vision and sound is the fruit of the collaboration between Sean O'Hagan's '…
Empty The Sun
BOOK + CD: A novel by Joseph Mattson featuring music by SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE. Available in First Trade Paperback Edition with CD soundtrack and as a limited edition vinyl LP soundtrack with Large Format Book. “Here I was, doing ninety on the Santa Monica Freeway with a quart of whiskey shoved into my crotch and my dead neighbor in the trunk. It had come time to leave Los Angeles.” Thus begins the pre-apocalyptic, cross-country race with death to bury the murdered past in Joseph Mattson’s Emp…
Mister Lonely
By J. Spaceman (Spacemen 3, Spiritualized) and Sun City Girls. Music from a film by Harmony Korine. The tracklisting mixes up Spaceman's and Sun City Girls' contributions with bits and pieces of film dialogue.
Sun Awakens
Ben Chasny has busied himself releasing a solid run of outsider folk records for some time now; ‘The Sun Awakens’ is his eighth full-length outing and thankfully it shows no signs of Chasny letting his quality control wane. As he explored on his last Drag City release ‘School of the Flower’, Chasny has again employed a handful of collaborators to fill-out his unique sound with percussion and odd instruments – yet this doesn’t distil the fact that the record is totally his own. "The Sun Awakens" …
Seconds
"The music business is full of funny stories and some of them aren't that funny at all. Take Gary Higgins. In the early 70s, he made a great record, the culmination of years of listening and playing and work. Then he went to jail for marijuana possession, a short stint, but still, the kind of crime that's almost not a crime these days. The record came out but without him to promote it, almost nobody heard it, until 2005: Red Hash, Higgins' megaobscure psychedelic folk-rock masterpiece is reissue…