Barn Owl - Bridge To The Clouds

Psychedelic folk/drone, sort of like Christian Fennesz meets Six Organs of Admittance. Also, badass slide-guitar interludes.

Brownload

Nature and Organisation - Beauty Reaps The Blood Of Solitude

Oh look another David Tibet and Douglas Pearce collaboration album OH WAIT there's also that guy from Nurse With Wound and some chick from Strawberry Switchblade and also there's some guy that actually started/writes for the project but I mean who cares about him when there's Douglas Pearce and David Tibet involved. Also, this is actually fantastic.


nature n shit

Bark Psychosis - ///Codename: Dustsucker

Bark Psychosis is the only band that I can think of that sounds like post-rock in the vein of Talk Talk's Laughing Stock. Jazzy, shoegazey, THE WORKS. So basically they don't sound like post-rock. Anybody who's already familiar with Bark Psychosis has probably heard/heard of their landmark album Hex, but fuk dat shit this is way better.

shlop

Iron Monkey - Iron Monkey

Grushn sludge for fans of Noothgrush, Grief, Eyehategod, etc. The riffs are crushing/groovin in a perfectly headbangin way, not a retarded slamdethgroovez way. Vox are probably the best I've heard in the genre.

riffs

Tomahawk - Anonymous

Anonymous flew relatively under the radar when it came out back in '07 and it's not really hard to see why. It does appear to be just another release from just another Mike Patton project, and a Mike Patton project that has already put out two pretty fucking terrible albums at that. But really this sounds nothing like those albums in both literal sound and quality. They ditch the lame alt. rock sound (+Patton vox to try to make it interesting) for a more, shall we say, Mike Patton sound. And it's the best thing they could've done. This album sounds more akin to say California-era Bungle than anything Patton's done since, except scratch the beach-y themes and replace them with Native American folk foundations. Catchy, evil, diverse, everything you'd expect from a Patton project (as cliche as that sounds). Some songs have kind of an industrial tinge, some have a Beach Boys-ish sound. Hell, "Red Fox" sounds like Massive Attack at their darkest wearing headdresses and dancing around a totem.

chakahahakahaka

Clann Zu - Rua

Another album that I always forget about for long periods of time, give it another spin, and then wonder how I forgot about it. Outstanding Australian band that meshes electronica, trip-hop, folk, and post-rock into a nice progressive rock package. Oh yeah and the vocalist has some fuckin pipes.

rawk

Nest - Retold

Beautiful ambient piano compositions from Otto Totland of Deaf Center and some other guy that I haven't heard of. It's kind of like the Fennesz + Sakamoto collaboration album, except whereas that one was made up of ambient electronics with piano improv over them, this album is moreso melancholy piano compositions in the vein of Erik Satie or Clint Mansell with ambient textures layered over them. It makes for a perfect rainy day album.

get chillin

Epic45 - Against The Pull Of Autumn

Epic45 is a couple of English dudes who like to run around in fields and play post-rockish shoegaze. I originally wrote this off as generic basement-recorded delay guitar twiddly twiddly but these guys capture the home-recorded sound like no one else. It has that nostalgic quality to it that's always strange coming from music to which you have no sentimental attachment.

prty

Sadistic Intent - Ancient Black Earth

Only the best old school death metal album everr. Elements of thrash and black metal combine with yer grampa's death metal to stomp puppies. Lookin for yer riff fix? We got riffs out the fuckin wazoo rite here.

urghhh

Morton Feldman - Rothko Chapel

Rothko Chapel is probably American composer Morton Feldman's most well-known and finest work. In its five movements, Feldman creates an astoundingly haunting, surreal atmosphere from scatterbrained (probably just beyond my comprehension) dissonant composition and arrangement. Oh yeah, and Why Patterns? is on here but I ain't even heared it. It's probably good. I might listen to it some day when I have no access to last.fm cause how am I supposed to get scrobbles when im listenin to a 30 min track how bout fuck that shit radiohead and thrice would never be pushed outta my charts

feldsgoodman

Frontier Ruckus - The Orion Songbook

My personal favorite album of 2008 and probably the most frustratingly overlooked album that I've ever come across. How a band of this caliber can exist and still have "banjo" as a major tag on last.fm is beyond me. Frontier Ruckus are a quartet?quintet?sextet? that hail from Detroit, but play on the premise that they're from the town of Orion, Michigan, a town of frontman Matthew Milia's own making that, judging by this soundtrack, exists in an eternal autumn dusk constructed of timeless memories. The band's bluegrass-tinged folk sound serves as the perfect vehicle for Milia's emotional songwriting. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that his lyrics are better than anything written in the past five years at least. Whatever mood the lyrics are trying to striving for the band matches with pinpoint precision. I can't say enough good things about this.

oreeyun

edit - I think this link has an EP along with it but one of the songs is corrupted so disregard it anyway.

Mississippi John Hurt - Avalon Blues: The Complete 1928 Okeh Recordings

I wish Mississippi John Hurt was my gramps. He shredded mad shreds, wrote catchy tunes, and got the blues like nobody. Enjoy some old-timey fuzzy delta blues.

Ain't no tellin.

Khanate - Khanate

Some of the heaviest and most downright evil sludge out there. Intense vox, filthy riffs, nigga what u want

silence while I strip...
..BONES

Jacques Brel - Ces gens-là

Jacques Brel is labeled "chanson," which, according to wikipedia, is a "lyric-driven French song," which sounds pretty fuckin vague to me, especially when anything from chanting a poem in a monotone voice to an opera suite can be considered "chanson." Whatever. This is a brilliant fusion of jazz and European pop arrangements with one of the best vocal performances I've ever heard. Brel ranges from angry shouts to stuttered phrases to operatic vibrato to slurping noises to idk what. Basically, Brel was doing Mike Patton before Mike Patton was born. I highly recommend hittin up his performance of the title track live. He's quite the performer. Also, Scott Walker is known to cover Brel tunes quite a bit.

oui

Chico Buarque - Construção

Dark, brooding, sinister, and sometimes hellish... Brazilian bossa nova/samba/stuff. Buarque's arrangements are complex to the point that some say it's overarranged, but I think the balance of discomforting disonnance with catchy underlying pop melodies is pretty damn near perfect. His lyrics match the mood, most being highly political in their condemnation of the then violent military dictatorship that presided over Brazil. I think in one song he wrote (that isn't on this album unfortunately) he references a man who was tortured to death by the government by having his mouth glued to the exhaust pipe of a running Jeep. Pretty cool. Just sayin.

Deus Lhe Pague

Souled American - Frozen

Time to pull a really vague and probably inaccurate comparison out of my asshole. Imagine the slowest Red House Painters song slowed down even more by tenfold, then stripped of everything except a few guitar tracks and vocals, creating a barren, lonely soundscape perfect for a long midnight drive on the plains.

freezd

Dale Cooper Quartet & The Dictaphones - Parole de Navarre

For some reason I thought this was boring when I got this several months ago. I donno what I was thinking because this is so good. Beautiful jazz-influenced drone that sometimes sounds Bohren-esque but more relaxing and varied than brooding and sinister.

mmm