Mooncake - Lagrange Points (V2)

Mooncake.

Ever since I heard GY!BE's Skinny Fists a couple years ago I've been fascinated with post-rock. If you saw the post I made about Sky Flying By a couple days ago, you might know that post-rock has genuinely shaped my taste as I've grown outwards towards more and more bands, constantly looking for new music and experiencing new emotions.

I remember it was raining, I remember I was walking home from school, and I remember this music.

The rest is blurry, but I remember seeing everything differently than I had before, like the ground and the buildings and the cars came alive, and like the sky was pouring this music down on me in conjunction with the rain.

It felt like the rain was speaking to me.

That's the power of this album.

If you like post-rock at all, there's a good chance that you'll enjoy this. If you like crescendo laden, spacey-yet-focused guitarwork and plenty of cello, then maybe you have a shot at enjoying this music the way I do.

Rain In The Ashtray

Download it here.
Buy it here.

Sweet Trip - You Will Never Know Why (FLAC)

The difference between Sweet Trip's Velocity:Design:Comfort and You Will Never Know Why is reflected in the time between the two releases. Velocity:Design:Comfort, released in 2003, seems like a breakbeat mish-mash of weird noises and fuzz, with the occasional vocal interjection or chord change. You Will Never Know Why, released in 2009, is different entirely.

Sweet Trip's third release, and their first in 6 years, puts them strongly in the growing litany of artists combining shoegaze/dream pop and the new 8-bit/electronica trends from 2008 and 2009. Similar to artists like The Depreciation Guild and Maddest Kings Alive, Sweet Trip use dream pop vocals with the textural manipulations of shoegaze, while relying strongly on low-bit synthesizers and drum machines. The simplicity of the synthesizers heavily compliments the guitar lines and interplay between Sweet Trip's vocalists, Roby Burgos and Valerie Cooper, the latter of which could be compared to Régine Chassagne of Arcade Fire, or Bliss Blood of Pain Teens and The Angels of Light.

What's so attractive about You Will Never Know Why is how thoroughly it fleshes out Roby Burgos' imagination; a staggering array of different patches and melodies, arranged for maximum effect, often juxtaposed directly to the quirky cynicism of Sweet Trip's lyrics. "You will drift away / and I would mind / Here's to you," Valerie sings, against an increasingly swaying chorus of guitars and synthesizers. The beauty of each line and note is amplified by the way in which the two compliment each other, and the way in which the interplay between the male and female vocals is manipulated. The complexity of each of these interactions gives You Will Never Know Why an enormous density and replay value; almost a year after picking this album up, I'm still finding new things to like about it.

Get it in FLAC here.

Ameris - Chapter 1 (192)

So one day I happened to somehow stumble upon this, a 6 track demo for a band called Ameris.

The past decade has killed the credibility of the lo-fi sound of cheap homemade recordings. It has taken a lot blunt hits to its once pure face thanks to plenty of bands that have been using it to try and make themselves sound more honest or more authentic or less like the arrogant perfectionists they’ll portray themselves to be(while they really aren’t perfectionists at all, they’re actually just genuinely incompetent). This isn’t me saying that the lo-fi compressed sound should be only kept for those that really have no other option than to go for the cheaply produced album, but I’m saying that making your album in a compressed tape recorder/home recording format doesn’t make you authentic. At one point it may have seemed like it did, but that was because the bands that used it WERE the real thing, they meant what they said, they weren’t playing to appeal- they were just playing.

In this same spectrum is where Ameris lies, playing just for playing. There is something special though that the murky production has on emotive hardcore, like in Sunny Day Real Estate’s debut album Diary, (where the production, while not being in any way low quality was still closer to the lo-fi sound of Pavement’s Debut than it was of a clear cut “I know exactly what is going on” recording) the slight darkness on the recordings make the songs stand out so that it’s not a single instrument that hits the listener, but the entirety of what’s going on- the intensity of what’s around them. In the same way, Ameris’ sound is only further intensified by the mixing, the vocals taking the entire lead throughout this six track EP and leaving the instruments to provide more of the scenery than an event. The band obviously gets a lot of its influence from SDRE though, taking the same feeling of Diary and pushing it with the modern emotive hardcore method.

The EP’s best characteristic and what gives it its entire personality is the piano used in the songs because there’s nothing that really sets contrast to the moods given than the sound that the clear, barely audible (but still there) piano keys hitting down on sweet higher notes as the distorted guitar riffs away, and the drums stick to their crashes.

This is something good, and something you’ll rarely find in this day, a band taking what’s been beaten to death and bringing it back to life, all while it’s still being beaten.

Download here.
Support Ameris at their MySpace.

Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse - Dark Night Of The Soul (320)

You might know of Danger Mouse and his hit-or-miss works already, especially his Gnarls Barkley work. I actually hadn't heard anything by him other than Gnarls Barkley until this year when I got his largely forgettable Broken Bells album. Anyway, I first heard about this collab album on my local NPR station sometime early this year; they had both Danger Mouse and David Lynch on talking about the work they did together and how this album was one of the most fun things Lynch has ever done. Naturally, being an avid fan of the movies Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive, I jumped out of my seat when I heard David was venturing into music as well. He actually sings on two of the songs (Dark Night Of The Soul and Star Eyes), one of which is in my personal opinion the best song on the entire album.

Now, the thing about this is, I know next to nothing about Sparklehorse. His Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot album is wonderful, but for some reason I have neither heard much else by him, or anything even about him, so to those who are avid fans of his, I apologize for the lack of emphasis whatsoever on this artist.

So anyway, after that, I looked up some information on the album, and from there it was bliss. I learned that Wayne Coyne and the Flaming Lips, Julian Casablancas, Black Francis, Iggy Pop, James Mercer, Vic Chesnutt and more all helped out on this solid release. Needless to say, I was ecstatic by this point.

So, I wound up buying this album after I downloaded it because it has become one of my favorite collab albums of all time. Just about every song is rock solid, and Little Girl has become one of my favorite songs of 2009. The cool thing is, the whole album has a tone and style to it, and I am finding it hard to describe it. I suppose it's a dark, eccentric and almost antique sounding, but there aren't words to describe it exactly. Let's say you find yourself in a broken down city and you walk into a small pawn shop filled with odd and creepy things. This album would definitely be in there somewhere, on a small end table covered in cobwebs.

To be frank, you can't go wrong with this album, so check it out. Grab it here and buy it here.

And if you also happen to be a fan of Lynch like I am, have a gander at the Official Website for the album, as he worked on the visuals for both the album and the site.

The Jesus and Mary Chain - Psychocandy (FLAC)

The Jesus and Mary Chain's debut album, Psychocandy, remastered in FLAC. Adding pop melodies and monotone vocals, the Reids single-handedly (or double-handedly; think about it) reinvented rock music. With searing guitar textures and feedbacking, intuitive melodies and economic drumming, The Jesus and Mary Chain created a behemoth combination of two already enormous '80s music scenes: first wave noise rock, with its experimentalisms and extensive collages of fuzzed-up guitars, and Smiths-esque jangly pop, with its easily digestible sensibilities and bread-and-butter formatting. What came out of this was something completely unique, something like an unstable element, shedding noise and radiation in its wake, searching for that pop sound but falling just short, warped and disfigured.

Get it in FLAC here.

Woods - Songs of Shame (V0)

Sort of like Les Rallizes Dénudés if they made folk music. Warm and fuzzy, organic and communal. Woods isn't a jam band but they do have a habit of going off on long, psychedelic tangents. Perhaps they should consider expanding their instrumental repertoire beyond the typical folk rock inventory, but the intimacy of those small interactions is just as satisfying.

Doing fine,
Under a setting sun.

Kayo Dot - Choirs of the Eye (V0)

Our eyelashes weaken with a weight that is sweet and fine,
And this feels like frogs and spiders in the sweet outside.
Tell me why world, unfathomable and good,
The beauty of everything is infinite and cruel.

An airplane, a puppet, an orange, a spoon,
A window, and outside
Stars and the moon.

Few artists are more musically, lyrically and instrumentally gifted than Toby Driver. Choirs of the Eye, Kayo Dot's debut album, is so incredibly diverse that it is a world unto its own. Each instrument, each word and note plays its own role; the phrasing is perfect, better even for its juxtapositions between brutality and serenity. What is so stunning about Kayo Dot is that, beneath each layer of incredible instrumentals, there is an even more incredible layer of meaning in Toby's lyrics. His words are profound, enchanting and mystical, whispering and seeking. Behind sensations of soaring, of crushing, of searching, there is always the reminder that these sounds are coming from someone, from something organic. Clear classical influences reveal themselves only to be swept away by contemporary rehashings, by innovation and reinvention. Each moment of Choirs of the Eye is just as compelling as the last, and each song ends so perfectly that you can't help but want to listen again.

Download.