Play One Note

Forget the introductory throat-clearing: Sleep’s second album, Sleep’s Holy Mountain, is the undisputed pinnacle of a genre two decades old and counting.*  It’s a concise, digestible, addictive, stoned masterpiece of head-nodding riffage, mind-melting solos, and incantatory mysticism, all enveloped in gloriously pungent analog haze.  It follows the slow-is-heavy formula of ancestors Black Sabbath and Saint Vitus but adds a heavy element of droning glory.

Sleep’s Holy Mountain begins with ”Dragonaut,” an immediate highlight, easily one of the greatest metal songs ever recorded, and undoubtedly one of my 10 favorite songs of all time.  I know I exhale hyperbole here on Play One Note, but I’m being totally fucking serious.  It’s druggy, heavy, nimble, aggressive, mellow, diffused and deceptively suite-like.  It’s iconic.  Check the absolutely awesome, gloriously lo-fi music video:

Matt Pike losing his goddamn mind, Chris Haikus looking exactly like Curly, Al Cisneros making being a stoner somehow look totally cool:** Yes, this video kicks.

“Dragonaut” might be the best thing on Sleep’s Holy Mountain, but it’s by no means the only highlight.  To list them all would be to essentially present you with an annotated track list.  Here are a few moments, then: the unhinged, fast-forward solo two-thirds of the way through “The Druid,” the deliberate, one-note menace of the first 17 seconds of “Holy Mountain,” the creeping bluesiness of the expertly managed crescendo halfway into that same song, the fist-pumping optimism of the chorus on the anthemic “Aquarian,” the way “Inside the Sun” devolves from a stoned, bizarro version of punky thrash into a Leviathan monstrosity of brutal sludge, Haikus’s crashing, metronomic, and tinny cymbals throughout, Cisneros’s disembodied chanting, the seamless meshing of Pike’s high-wire shredding and Cisneros’s melodic bass playing on every second of every song, and the way the album sounds like it was recorded on a reel-to-reel that was then buried in moss and mud for a millenium.

After Sleep, Pike and Cisneros (with Haikus) went on to form High on Fire and Om, respectively.  Both bands are critically acclaimed, and Om nearly achieves the same greatness as Sleep.  But neither Cisneros nor Pike has since reached the bar first set by Sleep’s Holy Mountain 19 years ago.  That’s hardly a knock.  Indeed, with Sleep’s Holy Mountain, Sleep has constructed that exceedingly rare document, an album that manages to be representative and flawless all at once.  And perfection never strikes twice.

*Well, not undisputed, if we decide to include Sleep’s legendarily lost third album, Dopesmoker, a sort of stoner metal analog to Brian Wilson’s Smile.  Sleep coaxed the album out of the Weedian ether over a painstaking four-year period.  Record label red tape lead to multiple versions of varying officialdom which exist under different names (including 1999′s Jerusalem).  In its most Sleep-authorized, officially released version, it’s a 63-minute long seamless epic about…uh…well, weed.  Topic material aside, and flying in the face of stoner stereotypes, Dopesmoker is straight-up ambitious.  But at the end of the day, if I had to pick one to call the definitive document of the genre, it’s no contest.  Dopesmoker may be the apotheosis of stoner metal, but Sleep’s Holy Mountain is its essence.

**This is an incredible and underrated feat.  Watch this video and then try to tell me Al Cisneros is not a fucking awesome-looking dude.  You will fail.

Here we have Moscow, WV, a new, limpidly frigid, and unusually dynamic drone record by Berkeley-based duo Accentor.  There’s a crystalline grace and hugeness on display here, something that’s better appreciated by airing the music out and letting it get loud.  That’s right: Like most great works of ambient drone, Moscow, WV demands throaty speakers.  I found myself progressively turning the volume up while listening to it, the better to get enveloped by its intergalactic austerity.  It shifts tectonically between the quieter moments of drift on Michael Stearns’s Planetary Unfolding, Auburn Lull’s Alone I Admire, and William Fowler Collins’s Perdition Hill Radio.  To understate things a smidge, that’s pretty good company.

About those shifts: Like Auburn Lull’s aforementioned, turn-of-the-century masterpiece, Moscow, WV is often filled with brilliant light and airy space.  ”Winter in Moscow,” for example, basks in a frigid glare, a harshly bright cathedral of ice where frozen synths* trace the clean lines of a forbiddingly beautiful architecture with stark clarity.  At other points, however, things take a significantly darker turn, as on the queasy, foreboding ”Tomlinson Run,” which pulsates with blackened aggression.

Sometimes, the hugeness of atmosphere, so evident on “Winter in Moscow,” approaches the oppressive, as on “High School Sweetheart’s Baby.”   At points like these, the coldness and dryness of sound becomes vacuum-like and hermetic.  Elsewhere, drones painstakingly swell from barely-there wisps of aural spacedust into temporally and spatially immersive primordial stews reminiscent of the late, great Celer, like on “Winter in Moscow II.”  There’s a forboding maximalism to these minimal drones, and a stargazing feel of neck-craning wonder as well.

Moscow, WV is the first installment of a year-long series of monthly album releases.  Apparently, one of the upcoming records is, in the words of Jacob, an Accentor member, “an album of Appalachian noise-folk recorded using only a Nintendo DS.”  Yes, please!  You can stream Moscow, WV for free at Accentor’s Bandcamp, or you can download it for whatever you wish to pay.   Think about the latter option, because Accentor is donating all proceeds made from Moscow, WV for the next month to the American Red Cross to help victims of the Midwestern tornado tragedy.**   Accentor: Doing beautiful things with beautiful music.

*Or what sounds like synths to these poor, untrained ears, as Accentor apparently made this record using primarily electric viola and vocoder.  Good luck teasing apart and categorizing these icy, wefted tendrils of sound.

**This being relayed to me one week ago from today, so more like three weeks.

Now, I understand that Shuttle 358 isn’t drone music by any traditionally prescribed definitions of the term, but bear with me here.  If we’re going to agree that drone music uses a minimal palette (even if that palette is sometimes subsequently applied in maximal ways), Shuttle 358′s Understanding Wildlife, producer Dan Abrams’s 2002 album, ably fits that bill.  And while there’s less of an emphasis on sustaining tones, Shuttle 358 certainly exemplifies the powers of repetition and mood exploration that most drone exhibits.

Shuttle 358, and Understanding Wildlife in particular, comes from that moment around the turn of the century where electronic genres like clicks & cuts/glitch and microhouse made music from an ever-shrinking library of sonic possibilities.  This music was less about breadth and more about depth—depth of sound and of orthodoxy.  Orthodoxy, in the form of paring down and stripping away whenever possible, is important here: Clicks & cuts,* like several other highly specialized subgenres, was always more about experimentation than visceral connection.  I mean “experimentation” the literal sense of testing, too, not just its typical musical meaning (which is, I think, supposed to mean “strange”).  Sometimes these tests would yield engaging work, as is the case with Vladislav Delay’s fascinating output.  By and large, though, clicks & cuts was music to be thought about more than it was to be felt.**

So out of that knotty paragraph, we’ve yielded this: Clicks is cold music, and Shuttle 358 is clicks-oriented.  Instead of sounding dry, distant, and clinical, however, Understanding Wildlife sounds intimate, warm, and vital.

It’s immediately telling that the first song on Understanding Wildlife, the finely gorgeous “Finch,” begins with what sounds like a synthesized harp voice.  It’s a rich, warm, golden tone at odds with the eviscerated sine waves you might typically expect from an album like this.  Indeed, though Shuttle 358 certainly incorporates elements of clicks & cuts, they’re not the central focus of the album.  Instead, they become a foundation upon which a subtly shifting set of soothing, low-profile tones are built.  It’s a simple formula, repeated time and again, but the collective effect is the evocation of supreme peace, a temporal suspension, an immersion into dark, warm waters.

Understanding Wildlife turns restraint, normally a distancing attribute, into an intimate one.  The effect is at once very quiet and very close.  You want to lean into this album, to envelop yourself in its unassuming world of small and unexpected beauty.

*The name comes from a series of compilations curated and released by the German record label Mille Plateaux.  Clicks & cuts takes the disorienting abstraction of glitch to its minimal extreme, all sterilized high pings, metallic scrapes, and subaquatic bass detonations.

**Apologies if I offend anyone who really bawls out to those Mille Plateaux comps.  I’d love to hear your perspective on mine.  I just don’t really get a deep upswell of emotion when I listen to Farben or early Pole (which is admittedly extremely rarely, if ever), and I suspect that that’s not the point.

I’ve really really really really really been digging 936, the new Peaking Lights album.  To describe an album as a “stew” is such a shitty music crit cliche but I’m fighting a strong urge to employ it to describe this record.  Because, really, that’s what 936 is, a steaming, humid pot of stick-to-your-ribs ingredients simmered long and slow until everything blends together into something appetizing, inviting, and of a piece.  And yeah, it’s fucking delicious and it tastes better the next day.  What about it?

About those ingredients: There’s dubby production (and I mean dubby as in, echoing guitar stabs, rivers of deep, burbling bass, and cavernous expanses of dark, sultry space, not dubby as in “reverb”), muffled and clattering percussion like a robotic drumkit breaking down, perfectly artless female coos, spiraling and arcing sound effects without origin, and trebly wefting keyboards.  On 936, Peaking Lights combine carefully measured, varying quantities of each of these and make some seriously circular and ever-deepening musical hypnosis.  This album is one of the more engrossing, replayable things I’ve heard come out in quite a while.

Though 936 is Peaking Lights’s best foray into immersive psychedelic wormhole-construction, it’s not their first.  Their previous album, 2009′s Imaginary Falcons, was a nearly great record that fell just short in a couple areas.  For one, the rich, syrupy low-end that keeps nearly every song on 936 anchored in the sublime is nowhere to be found, and it’s sorely missed.  Instead of riding supple, sweltering grooves, songs (tracks?) on Imaginary Falcons float in a helium’d aether.  They’re incredibly, almost disorientingly trippy.  And as much as I’m into disorientingly trippy, the bass backbone on 936 is welcome.  The results range from the simply addictive (as on “All the Sun that Shines” to the positively time-warping (which the transformative “Birds of Paradise Dub Version” most certainly is).

Peaking Lights has also shown an increased interest in actual legitimate songwriting on 936.  Though it’s obvious that the duo is still totally in love with getting lost in the aural possibilities available to them, it’s no longer enough for them to suture a handful of otherworldly sonic elements together and let it ride for a few minutes (not that that approach is necessarily bad).  No, now melodies (or at least grooves) are of preeminent importance, with assorted intergalactic and subterranean sounds providing (welcome) filligree.  That means we get songs (songs!) like the gorgeously sweet and totally unexpected “Key Sparrow,” an adorably lilting melody that is at once soaring and small-screen, bleary and sparkling.

I’ll be honest: “Key Sparrow” is, really, the whole reason why I wanted to write this thing.  It’s new love and dreaming and nostalgia and warmth and flitting surges of hope and sadness wrapped into a perfect four-minute package.  I don’t think I’ve been as desperately in love with a song all year.  It’s beautiful and small and it secrets away an infinitude of fine-grained emotions in it.

Love it:

No more Austin Psych Fest reviews because I only went the first day.*  Let’s change it up!  Here we have the Serpentine EP by Austin-based minimalist psych duo Moa Moa.  Man, am I on top of my shit—they released their EP on Bandcamp yesterday!  I’m so good.  I’m the next Anderson Cooper.  Plop me in a warzone and watch me be dreamy.

Sorry, I’m sick and loopy on meds.

Anyway, Moa Moa burns through a surprisingly eclectic array of druggy, distended psychedelic moods across Serpentine’s six brief tracks, ranging from “Charlie,” a blessedly trashy and hard-charging slice of  garage punk, to “Seachild,” a scraping, seesawing dirge.  The EP’s closing song, “Morning/Onfire,” is particularly impressive, opening with an eerie flute-and-drum drone reminiscent of Fursaxa before abruptly veering into a sweet acoustic duet recalling Sleepy Sun’s more bucolic moments.  Yum.

Ryan and Leah—Moa Moa’s principals—treat negative space with respect, letting each dissipated note and wasted boy/girl harmony stretch out into tiny infinities.  Despite this, they manage to do a lot with very little, repeatedly combining the same ingredients—cavernous effects, a hollowed-out and tinny guitar tone, and some supremely seductive singing—into diverse and delicious psychedelic confections.

Serpentine is a quick, sweet hit, and I hope to hear Moa Moa stretch out onstage in Austin sometime soon.  You can listen to the EP here.

*More on that later, perhaps.  Perhaps not.  In case I never get to it, I’ll just say there needed to be more Moa Moas roaming around and fewer Places to Bury Strangers there.

Hello, all!  Due to some last-minute heroics by my heroic friend Rachel, I was able to secure a free wristband for Austin Psych Fest 4.  And Lo! just like that, my weekend’s been transformed from a quietly productive one gardening, cooking, and reading to a loudly unproductive one watching stoned people melt other stoned peoples’ faces off with musical hypnosis.  I have to apologize to my collards, which will have to deal with looking like Swiss cheese for another week.

I only saw a couple bands last night, but here are My Thoughts, in descending order of coolness:

Crystal Stilts

As I pride myself on at least semi-outsiderness when it comes to new music, I’m depressed to even know the whole “Crystal is the new Wolf” meme.  But, dammit, it’s true.  And, just like bands with Wolf in their name, Crystal-themed bands usually suck.  But Crystal Stilts was actually pretty good, coming across like Disc 5 of the expanded Nuggets box set.  I mean that as a compliment.  There was one jam which was particularly hypnotic and dark and minor-key and transcendant that I found particularly “groovy.”  If I knew anything else about these guys, I’d even mention the name of the song that so impressed me.  Alas.

Atlas Sound

May I humbly admit surprise bordering on shock that I liked this?  I will admit that my musical obsessions lead, more often than I’d like, to knee-jerk elitism, and I’ll have to say that Atlas Sound was a victim of my tendency to make snap judgments of Pitchfork-approved acts.  To be fair, I think Deerhunter suuuuucks, so I was expecting this Bradford Cox’s solo thing to follow suit.  Wrong!  The loopy layery solo live thing has been done to death, for sure, but I’m a sucker for hypnotic repetition, and Cox served that up with aplomb.  I will be returning to this.

A Place to Bury Strangers

No.  Just…no.  Let me be clear: I love shoegaze.  I adore Slowdive and like My Bloody Valentine and Ride and Swervedriver.  I get it.  I don’t get the Jesus and Mary Chain, though, because it sounds painfully elementary to me in the way that traditionalist punk does, and really, a Place to Bury Strangers is just Jesus Mark II, except doomier (in a crappy, Joy Division-esque way, not an awesome, Om-esque way).  I guess I can see the psychedelic connection, in the sense that Strangers manipulates and explores sonic possibilities, but the shared means do not come from shared origins (post-punk vs. psych) or reach shared ends.  Thus, to me, the connection is spurious, and I can comfortably say that I was bewildered by their presence at Psych Fest, and that I thought they really just kinda sucked.  Thanks, but no, I will not be having seconds.  Boy, do I sound like a cantankerous asshole today.  Is my distaste for punk showing?

Some Dudes From Boston

I may or may not have made their origin up, but I attribute this band to being from Boston because the singer, at one point, repped the Celtics.  I don’t like the Celtics.

…aaaaaaaand that’s it!  I will now go back to listening to nothing but Labradford and Zelienople and South (the US (good) band, not the British (bad) band).  I may or may not post thoughts about today or tomorrow’s Psych Fest offerings.  But I can definitely say that I’ll be writing more about Labradford and/or Zelienople and/or South [US] really, really soon, because I’ve been really, really addicted.  Until then, ta!

Hey y’all.  I’m gonna try to see how this whole Grooveshark embedded playlist thing works/looks.  So here’s the deal.  If this turns out okay, you get a playlist of the phenomenal Zelienople album His/Hers.  If it doesn’t, well, nothing will happen.  Ready?  WOO!

Aaaaaaand that looks good to me! Well, I shan’t really write anything involved about this, but I’ll say that Zelienople is one of my latest obsessions, and His/Hers is one of their strongest albums. It’s got that Scum-era Bark Psychosis underwater contemplative chaos thing going on, which is a major plus in my book. But why should I prattle on about it? You can listen to it right here! Is music criticism dead? Was the preceding question so 2007? Yes and yes. Enjoy.

As you may or may not know, I’m an Austinite, and I have a blessedly typical, yet nevertheless awesome, SXSW experience to share with you.

I had just wrapped up an early evening which featured seeing my girlfriend’s friend’s band Other Lives* and was biking home past Cheer Up Charlie’s on 6th Street when I heard what I assumed was two bros engaging in a dueling synthesizer space-out.  It was very Emeralds-esque, and I had to circle back and see what the deal was.  As soon as I rounded the block, the wash of cascading hypnosis abruptly stopped and segued into a head-spinning finger-tapping frenzy.  Anticipation welled in my chest, and I got the feeling that something absolutely unexpectedly amazing was going on onstage.  I rounded into view and was confronted with the sight of a dude absolutely shredding onstage, flying solo.  Holy chops!  I stood outside the fence cordoning off the area and watched the guy just dominate his guitar for 20 minutes.  The guitarist’s face was pained, his posture contorted, as he finger-tapped blazingly intricate guitar fractals.  At some point, I caught my jaw just hanging open, and I laughed to myself in sheer glee.  Occasionally, I’d glance around, and everyone who was watching (probably about 40 in all) had the same ecstatic, engrossed gaze.  A handful of times I’d make eye contact with a fellow traveller and we’d exchange one of those holy-shit-are-you-seeing-what-I’m-seeing glances.  And yes, we’d all convey to each other, this is really happening.  Affirmation was all around.

And then, after about 20 minutes of dizzyingly unleashing a torrent of harmonics and overtones, the guitarist abruptly stopped.  There was a split second of silence before the audience erupted into a round of applause surprisingly enthusiastic for its modest size.  I walked straight up to the guy and gave him my typical dumbstruck intro:

“Hey, man, that was awesome.”

He seemed very generous and grateful, and told me his project was called Hubble—an apt name.  I left, absolutely addicted.

Once I got home, I spent an hour trying to find information on the guy.  As one might imagine, a really obscure act with a name as heavily trafficked as Hubble was kind of hard to come by online.  Determination conquers all, though, and I finally found Hubble’s casette online.  Click the living bejeezus out of that link!  CLICK IT AND LOVE IT.  I also found this excellent video of of Hubble performing on a Brooklyn rooftop.  Here it is:

A secondary takeaway from all this (the primary one being that Hubble is important and beautiful and transformative and that I was lucky to see him live): I have learned that Terroreyes.tv is a totally badass website.

Enjoy.

*I would like to go on record to state that Other Lives is an absolutely phenomenal band.  And don’t be suspicious: My judgment here is not clouded from relational duty or proximal taint.  Their newest album, Tamer Animals, is sad, beautiful, triumphant music.  Listen to them.

Before the Black Angels, there was Loop, and Heaven’s End was their Passover—a fuzzed-out, bump-and-grind swaggerfest of razor-wire guitars, drug-fueled paranoia, and addled sexual menace.

Loop got its start in London in 1986, where leader Robert Hampson allegedly learned four chords on a guitar and promptly began ripping off fellow travelers Spacemen 3.*  At least, that’s the prevailing idea.  And admittedly, Loop at times—okay, most of the time—does sound an awful lot like those late, great(er) purveyors of psychedelic sneer.  But Loop does Spacemen 3′s aggressive, addled hypnosis so damn well it’s hard for me to hold it against them.†

Take “Soundhead,” for example, which starts off the album with a lean, muscular rhythm section pounding out a deliciously repetitive riff, anchoring waves of hissy, trebly, wah’d-out guitars.  ”Soundhead” is, without qualification, an excellent song, all raw, druggy menace and sneering swagger, a nearly unrivaled opening salvo for any appropriately mean-spirited, drug-addled record.  Derivative, perhaps, but rock criticism’s age-old emphasis on originality loses much of its relevance when you’re restraining an overwhelming urge to do an embarrassingly nerdy fist-pump dance at your computer desk.  Like, ahem, this guy, right now.  I think it’s probably time to turn Heaven’s End down a little bit, here…

I digress.  ”Soundhead” isn’t the only highlight on Heaven’s End.  Many of Loop’s engrossingly circular riffs are bass-driven, with layers of noisy guitar wailing added for that particular mind-melting aggro-texture.  It’s a winning recipe, one that Loop exploits to particularly excellent effect on “Straight to Your Heart”:

Yum.  Worshippers at the Black Angels’ feet (and I include myself among that rapt throng) can be forgiven for assuming “Straight to Your Heart” is a lost, Directions to See a Ghost-era cut from Austin’s finest.

And not everything sounds entirely Boom-and-Pierce-derived.  Loop seemed to be at once more experimental (such as on the title track, with its squalls of guitar and reversed cymbal smashing) and more song-oriented (as on “Head On,” which, if it wasn’t smothered in acid-drenched guitars, would sound positively poppy).  On Heaven’s End, Loop was already straying a bit from the template they lifted off of Spacemen 3, a trend they’d continue (hesitatingly) throughout their career.

Loop went on to record two more albums, one of which (1988′s Fade Out) I haven’t heard, and one of which (1990′s A Gilded Eternity) is fucking spectacular, before disbanding in 1991.  Hampson continued his Sonic Boom-aping by starting the experimental group Main, which ripped the buzzsaw distorted guitars out of Loop’s song structures and suspended them in murky, cavernous, cacophonous, dark ambient soundscapes.  Main was good, but not great (certainly no Experimental Audio Research, the drone project Boom dabbled in after Spacemen 3′s demise), and Heaven’s End remains one of the better “These guys should be paying royalties” albums out there.  It’s not original, but it sure does kick ass.

*Amusingly, Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3 has, on-record and with fangs bared, alleged Hampson of doing this very thing.  The quote was something like this: “Yeah, they really ripped us off!”  Who knew songwriters in the 80s psychedelic underground beefed so hard?

†There’s a bit of George Brigman’s Jungle Rot in the band’s swagger as well, but really, the two referents are the contemporary one (Spacemen 3) and the current one (the Black Angels).  Not bad bands to be sonically joined at the hip to, in my humble opinion.

In a perfect world, Th’ Faith Healers would be as popular as the Pixies.  Critics would gush about the noise-pop perfectionism of the band’s three Too Pure releases, Lido, Imaginary Friend, and L’.  Th’ Faith Healers would be millionaires, or at least hundreds-of-thousands-aires, and they’d go on world tours and tear up the festival circuit as headliners or near-headliners.  Girls would flip.

Alas.

At least we have what we have from them, and that’s three records of nearly peerless aggro drone-pop mastery.

Th’ Faith Healers were part of that mid-90s Too Pure stable that included such lush and luscious bands as Laika, Mouse on Mars, Stereolab, Seefeel, Rothko, and Pram, among others.*  Most of those bands were known for introspection, atmosphere, and texture.  Th’ Faith Healers were one of the few bands that broke that unity of sound, emphasizing concrete crunch over abstracted abstraction, and they arguably did so more than any other labelmate.**

Though I alluded to the Pixies, and though there’s an obvious and undeniable affinity, there’s more to Th’ Faith Healers than aggressive, quirky pop.  The squalls of noise, despite being resolutely lo-fi, are much more abrasive than anything you’re likely to find on anything Black Francis has had a hand in.  The songs themselves owe much more to the chugging, hypnotic repetition of Krautrock than the two-minute sugarbursts the Pixies excelled at.  Perhaps most notably, the sense of bouncy, in-your-face fun that characterizes the Pixies has been swapped out for a foreboding weirdness.  All these changes, I should note, are to the vast betterment of Th’ Faith Healers.

Imaginary Friend is sequenced carefully.  Th’ Faith Healers start off with a muscular brand of amphetamine-fueled pop and then methodically eviscerate it, stretching it out and making it progressively moodier.  Opener “Sparklingly Chime,” with its chunky bassline, spoken vocals, and wailing guitar lead, could conceivably be the quirkiest song on, say, a Breeders record.  Somehow, though, I don’t think anyone is going to mistake the menacing, propulsive, seven-minute-plus “The People,” complete with cathartic caterwauls of noise and murmured falsetto, with “Mr. Grieves.”  (Guess which song I prefer?)  And Black Francis at his absolute ballsiest would have been terrified of the half-hour Kraut-punk jam “Everything, All At Once Forever/Run Out Groove,” which is sort of like the 90s version of “This Dust Makes That Mud”—unapologetically indulgent, meandering, and positively hypnotic.

Though Th’ Faith Healers were, sonically, a bit out of place in comparison with their contemporaries on Too Pure, they really did share a number of aesthetic sensibilities with their labelmates, including a fascination with the possibilities of sound and an emphasis on nontraditional song structure.  Imaginary Friend, in all its threatening, noisy glory, is a testament to that, a nocturnal, creepy, joyfully menacing piece of work.

*Christ almighty!  Every time I look at the Too Pure roster, I get chills.  Too Pure is, pound for pound, my favorite record label.

**Though McClusky comes close.