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Albums I Like But You've Probably Never Heard

Kent - Isola

“Anchored by a churning bass not dissimilar to that on Cure tracks such as “Fascination Street” or latter-day Smashing Pumpkins’ records, Kent add a wash of fuzzed guitars to mid-tempo songs about longing. The atmosphere of Isola is rather like Radiohead without the prog-rock trappings of OK Computer.”

The Mint Chicks - Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No!

Ultimately, Crazy? Yes! Dumb? No! smacks of contained energy. Considering their live shows have seen band members hang from ceilings and chainsaws destroy sets, I can’t imagine how the reined-in vocals of songs like You’re Just As Confused As I Am and Sleeping During the Day fit in. But the pop element is not entirely unwelcome, and it is artfully juxtaposed with The Mint Chicks’ heavier roots on Don’t Turn Me On To Turn On Me.

Fujiya & Miyagi - Transparent Things

And the comparisons spiral from there, now with respect to not only instrumental parts, but also the album as a whole. Critics and publicists quickly refer to luminary Krautrock acts Can and Neu! while the more casual observer considers artists such as Boards of Canada, a more tame MSTRKRFT, and numerous artists on DFA Records, for instance Hot Chip and the Juan Maclean. Despite so many related acts, Fujiya and Miyagi manage to separate themselves from the pack. The band owes much of that feat to their bold willingness to test people’s expectations.

Secret Machines - Now Here is Nowhere

The first thing you notice is the rhythm section: large, lumbering drums and hydraulic bass flexes on the nine-minute “First Wave Intact”, the lead-off track on The Secret Machines’ awkwardly titled debut album, Now Here Is Nowhere. The rhythms are military-precise, locked-in and steady, but they’re less heavy metal than Heavy Metal: The band sounds as though they’re scoring an intergalactic space battle, or perhaps something more terrestrial, like the lurching onslaught of a thousand warbeasts.

Angel’in Heavy Syrup - III

A shimmeringly lovely piece of Japanese neo-psychedelia, the third album by the all-female quartet Angel’in Heavy Syrup is as delicate and insubstantial as music can get before it tips over into formless ambient waves of sound. Although these lengthy pieces have extended instrumental passages, all of the music sounds composed in a traditional sense. There’s little if any improvisation here. The 11-minute opening track, “Breath of Life,” is like classic Can in its organic-feeling ebb and flow, before it finally explodes into an almost Hendrix-like solo by lead guitarist Mine Nakao toward the end.

Spod - Eternal Championz

Overall this is music that you’d have to be on drugs at a festival to tolerate, and even then it would probably seem like an opportune moment to seek out the toilets. File under ‘Ephemera’, alongside Har Mar Superstar, Peaches, and Electric Six. (well I like it!)

Blonde Redhead - Misery is a Butterfly

There’s something decadent about the album’s layers of sound, and its wide scope paradoxically makes it one of Blonde Redhead’s most insular albums; indeed, the indulgent isolation that permeates Misery Is a Butterfly makes it akin to Suede’s Dog Man Star and Goldfrapp’s Felt Mountain, in mood if not exactly in sound. The Blonde Redhead of old returns, somewhat, on more high-strung songs like “Falling Man” and “Maddening Cloud,” both of which add some much-needed urgency to the album’s mannered heartache.

Boris - Heavy Rocks

Heavy Rocks could also contend for an album WHOLLY compromised of uncompromising and unrelenting SICK ROCK… an actualization that hasn’t been quite realized since Blue Cheer and Black Sabbath. Boris are the only operation that hold an honors PhD in noisy-doom-rock-n-roll, specializing in a type of razor sharp delivery and execution, while simultaneously paying ode to the sweet leaf. And due to the prominent, hyper-detailed fixation on the latter—well, dudes, hate to break it to you—they’re probably not even stoned.

Elefant - Sunlight Makes me Paranoid

You know it’s happened to you. A few too many drinks at the bar and the beer goggles magically appear on your face, and you wake in bed next to god-knows-who. What you didn’t know is that this once happened to the The Strokes and Interpol, and nine months later they had a bouncing baby Elefant.

Explosions in the Sky - The Earth is not a Cold Dead Place

This is truly beautiful. Explosions in the Sky is a four-piece (two guitars, bass, and drums) that gets lumped into the post-rock category, but they dramatically surpass the standards generally set for the idiom. They do the episodic build-build-build-climax-repeat formula like, say, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, but this music achieves something very different. The music is sparse and minimal with a genuine emotive power. The sparseness is present in the textural thinness (only four instrumentalists, remember), with guitars generally playing starry arpeggios with an empathetic rhythmic backing. With so much breathing room, the music fills the pockets of space left by bare instrumentation with simple emotional resonance that might not have prevailed with denser arrangements. The music is minimal not because it is in repetitive stasis, but because the song construction focuses on a collegial series of sounds development rather than linear evolutions.