Nico - The Marble Index

I'd put off listening to Nico's solo stuff because I always thought (and still do) that the tracks featuring her on The Velvet Underground & Nico were the weakest on the album. Now I regret it. This is some of the most downright morbid, evil, depressing, abrasive, and nightmarish shit ever recorded.

dloda

Jacques Brel - Brel (Les Marquises)

Jacques Brel's 1977 comeback and final album is an amazing one. His compositions are more varied here than any prior release, ranging from somber ballads to sarcastic psychedelic pop. His vocals are as incredible as ever, which is shocking considering he recorded this album with only one lung. His prose is still top notch, I just wish I knew the French language myself so I wouldn't have to rely on shaky English translations which probably are missing a lot lost in translation.

orly

The Lounge Lizards - No Pain For Cakes

A "fake jazz" combo featuring actor John Lurie (Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law) on Saxophone, Marc Ribot (Tom Waits, Elvis Costello) on guitar, among other prominent jazz instrumentalists. No Pain for Cakes draws on influences from punk and no wave to create a listenable avant-garde jazz album.

DL

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

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

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

The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble - Here Be Dragons

Album's a pretty awes fusion of jazz, electronica, and dark ambient. That should be all you need to know because there's no way a fusion of those genres could not be fantastic.

jus chill bro

Secret Chiefs 3 - Book Of Horizons

This is a project headed by Trey Spruance (ex-Mr. Bungle) that is probably better than Mr. Bungle all-around :X This album combines Morricone-esque movie soundtracky stuff with a variety of genres, including classical, electronica, Middle-Eastern folk, grind, surf, doom, and rockabilly, and each genre is done in top form. Where this differs from Mr. Bungle is that most of this is instrumental (some grushin' vox on the grind tracks) and the genre-meshing is done more smoothly than Bungle's.

here