Play One Note

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.

There are times, when suffering from the jagged angularity of your day-to-day, when you need enforced limbo, a sort of pleasant mental suspension and insulation from the unexpected, the harsh, and the real.  Blondes, with their Touched EP, provide that perfect humid, mathematical immersion needed to achieve a happy internal stasis.

The five tracks that make up Touched all consist of variations on that easy-breezy Balearic drift that took peaceful hipsters by storm in 2007.  It’s all mellow synth washes, earnest, buried melodies, and charmingly lo-fi beats on the slow side of mid-tempo.  It’s house music for a humid summer’s night: leached of all drama, devoid of urgency, languid, and warm.

You can point to all manner of contemporary referents, because this Balearic/chillwave sound is definitely a “thing,” but I’m not going to do that because a) I don’t have the sort of complete or even particularly well-informed knowledge of that scene to feel like I can pick influences w/o consulting Wikipedia and Pitchfork and Grooveshark and making guesses, and b) the much more interesting (at least from my perspective) reference point is Manuel Göttsching’s guitar geometries from the late 70s and early 80s.

To tell the Göttsching story the right way would involve a serious digressionary swerve, so I’m gonna just avoid that tarpit and say that he was an ex-Krautrock psych lord who moved away from the acid-drenched, mind-melting experiments of his youth in Ash Ra Tempel toward a progressively more ordered, elevated, and clear-eyed approach, one embodied by albums such as Ashra’s* 1976 album New Age of Earth and epitomized by Göttsching’s own brilliant 1984 effort E2-E4.

E2-E4 is a true rarity, an electronic album that’s over 25 years old and doesn’t sound dated.  It’s a masterpiece of repetition, all fractal guitar figures and stately rhythms and luscious layers of synth.  It’s nearly an hour long, and it’s endlessly engrossing.

Enough about that, though.  (Actually, not enough about that.  I should probably write about E2-E4 soon.)  Blondes continues that aesthetic tradition set forth by Göttsching, and they do it proud.  Even if Touched doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done before, it’s still more than worth spending an hour drifting in its hypnotic, amniotic warmth.

*Yes, that’s a name change.  Sometimes you just gotta reinvent.

Okay, I’ve had enough of this shit.

Before I begin, a bit of throat-clearing.  First, a confession: I haven’t heard Kanye West’s newest OMG GREATEST ALBUM OF ALL TIME, and I doubt I’ll be seeking it out anytime soon.  That’s got nothing to do with Kanye West and everything to do with the fact that I almost never listen to rap anymore (and when I do, it’s usually of the mid-90s New York hardcore variety, or else denizens and fellow travelers of the Stone’s Throw stable).

So I don’t listen to rap much now, but there was a time period, somewhere between 2005 and 2007, where I probably listened to rap as much as or more than any other genre of music.  And I can say that, even if Kanye West’s ego got so big that he exploded and he rained chunks across half the states of Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana after he released 2005′s Late Registration, or else released Master P-quality platters of crap yearly for the next 20 years, he still would have gone down as one of the best rap producers of the 2000s, and been a well-appreciated, if underrated, lyricist to boot solely based on the dizzying heights his first two records reached.  Graduation was a thick, luscious icing on that already pretty perfect cake, and if 808s and Heartbreak was a bit curious, it was, at least, an incredibly audacious move, a noble and well-intentioned and bold attempt.

Second, the timing of my missive might seem somewhat odd.  Why this, why now, over a year after West committed his ultimate act of depravity (mentioned below, and yes, that sardonic clanging you hear is the Three-Alarm Sarcasm Alert), and given the admission that I probably won’t listen to the recently released My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy?  The answer is simple: Scrolling though the K’s of my mp3 collection, I saw my neglected copy of The College Dropout and smiled.  And then I thought about it.  And then I frowned.  Yeah, not very poetic, but that’s what happened.

The fact is, despite the critical gushing and soaring album sales, Kanye West is routinely lambasted and ridiculed by those who “know better,” those who don’t “get” the hype, and, perhaps most importantly, those who find West actively odious and repellent.  The list of unforgivable strikes against Kanye West’s meteorically arced career is long.  They include various acts of extreme vanity, (apparently) unfounded outspokenness, (apparently) misdirected self-confidence, and general assholery.  We can all agree on this.  We can also all agree that West’s greatest sin to date appears to be his interruption of Taylor Swift’s bland and trite and manufactured acceptance speech during the 2009 MTV VMAs.  Sure, interrupting anyone is rude (it’s certainly a pet peeve of mine), and it’s easy to feel bad for Swift, who is excellent at playing the down-home country girl, but forgive me for being a cold-hearted cynic if I’m not even remotely moved.

Let me be clear: I haven’t seen the video that Taylor Swift won a completely empty and worthless VMA for, but I can assure you it sucked the suck of 10,000 Dyson vacuums hooked up to one another Human Centipede-style and retooled to inhale the souls of anyone with a shred of taste.  How can I be so confident?  Two reasons.  First, because Taylor Swift is a farce, a talentless pretty face coasting off the fact that she allegedly writes her own (dreadful) songs.*  To trash her seems utterly redundant, an act akin to informing someone of the shittiness of a pile of shit.  Second, MTV is emphatically not an accurate arbiter of what is good, art-wise, and really has no business doling out awards anyway, at least not ones that anybody with a modicum of critical awareness should care about.  If you honestly feel that a VMA signifies anything other than the current and projected future monetary value of a star, well, you and I likely don’t see eye-to-eye on an impressively wide range of topics.

Now, I have seen the video West announced his preference for when he interrupted “poor” old Taylor Swift (the aw-shucks 21-year-old country girl, incidentally, made $18 million in 2009, the year West was just oh-so-rude to her), and it, too, is a shitstorm of appalling proportions.  I can’t back West there.  Plus, the case can be made that since West supported, as an alternative to Swift’s video, a video in the same realm of shittiness, he shouldn’t be lauded for it on the grounds of enforcing better taste.  Very well.  However, the VMAs, as previously mentioned, are a complete joke, and I heartily applaud anyone who manages to crap on it in any way.  Here’s to you, Mr. West.

Regardless, humility is hardly a criteria for public perception of greatness, as legendary world-class assholes like Michael Jordan, Roman Polanski, Keith Richards, or, on a more underground scale, Damon Che of Don Caballero or Mark E. Smith of the Fall, can freely attest.  (Polanski raped a child and still gets more slack cut for his auteurish ass than Kanye West!  Forced sodomy of a 13-year-old?  But he makes great movies!  Churlishness on Twitter?  Lynch the overconfident angry black man!†)

If Kanye seems more outspoken then the aforementioned critical darlings, that’s because everyone’s more outspoken today.  West, like any celebrity so inclined, has a staggering array of options to broadcast his opinions that were utterly unavailable just ten years ago.  Jordan didn’t have Twitter or the 24-hour news cycle or an attendant blogosphere to oversaturate the market with his image.  A parade of Nike ads, as ubiquitous as they seemed at the time, cannot hope to compete with the information overload smorgasbord West’s got at his disposal.  Anyway, rap, since its literal inception as a recorded medium in “Rapper’s Delight,” has been preoccupied with boasts and brashness.  Pride and confidence and swagger and self-centeredness are ingrained in hip-hop’s very DNA, and West is simply continuing that trend.

Enough with ego.  Though I’m almost certain that’s why the majority of West’s detractors despise him so, I believe that topic’s been parsed enough.  It may be that you just don’t, you know, like his music.  And that’s fine!  My question to you is, what contemporary rapper/producer of his stature is better?  Who crafts lyrics as incisive (when he’s not being lazy) or clever or humorous and assembles beats as ambitious and daring and dynamic and writes pop hooks engaging enough to entrance millions?  I’m curious, because I can’t think of any.  I can think of artists who embody the first two (the RZA, Madlib, MF Doom, Pimp C (RIP)), some who embody the last two (Just Blaze, Swizz Beatz, maybe?), one who does the first and last (OutKast), and a handful who do any one of those (except the second) better than West.  But nobody fulfills all three.  It just doesn’t happen.

Now, if you don’t like rap, that’s okay, too.  I can totally see why you’d dislike—even hate!—Kanye West’s music.  After all, he makes rap, and you hate rap.  I can also see why you would hate Off the Wall if you hated pop, or Sleep’s Holy Mountain if you hated stoner metal, or In the Court of the Crimson King if you hated prog rock.  But to have an agenda against any of the artists who made those classic albums specifically because of the genre they inhabit that you dislike generally seems like an unusual misdirection of emotion.

In sum, forgive the man his indiscretions.  He’s hardly the worst offender out there, and chances are you’ve forgiven worse.  The fact that he happens to make some truly transcendant music (listen to the albums, people, not just whatever singles you happen to come across) is a big fucking cherry on top.

I rest my case by leaving you with these:

“Spaceship,” off of The College Dropout:

“Heard ‘Em Say,” off of Late Registration:

“Amazing,” off of 808s and Heartbreak:

Happy New Year, y’all.

*Please don’t think I’m suggesting Swift doesn’t pen her own material.  However, with today’s ubiquitous and hologrammed enterainments, I think we can all agree more elaborate lies have been successfully passed off.

†I’m going to leave this well alone, but I definitely deleted a passage ruminating on this topic a bit, one in which I focused on West’s famous (and laudable, and courageous, and accurate) assertion that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” on live TV.  When was the last time any other rapper (or pop star) who had the ear of the nation said anything so brave and controversial and meaningful?  Ten years?  Twenty?

2010 WAS GREAT!  2011 WILL BE BETTER.  FORMAT CHANGE: FROM NOW ON ALL I’M GOING TO WRITE ABOUT IS MUDVAYNE OVER AND OVER AND OVER IN ALL CAPS.  SOUND GOOD?  WOOOOOOO LET’S GO

Our latest entry in faerie-and-druid New Weird America folk comes from Come, Arrow, Come!, the debut album by sister-sister duo Festival.  It fits right in with Language of Stone’s other artists, which include Greg Weeks, Sharon Van Etten, Mountain Home, and Orion Rigel Dommisse, and it bears the hallmarks of a host of other albums in the genre regrettably known as “freak-folk.”  Those hallmarks, of course, being deconstructive studio experimentation (a la Sparklehorse) applied to pre-rock American and British folk traditions—or at least the idea of American and British folk traditions.

A bit of critical griping and clarification: As much as I loathe the “freak-folk” genre categorization,* yeah, I suppose it designated a moment, one that I felt a deep affinity to.  The output of music categorized as such in that 2004-2008 era was, to me, as rich, fascinating, and affecting as any in recent times, perhaps second only to the post-rock movement of the early- to mid-90s.  Bands and songwriters as diverse as the Tower Recordings, Nic Castro, Six Organs of Admittance, Charalambides, the Skygreen Leopards, and Sunburned Hand of the Man all released classics of the style.  I count their efforts as some of my favorite records of all time.

Festival’s Come, Arrow, Come! is not at the level of a Dark Noontide, a Galaxies’ Incredible Sensual Transmission Field of the Tower Recordings, or a Headdress, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t enjoyable in its own right.  When listening to it, there’s a bit of a sense that the Powell sisters are doing a bit of opportunistic scene piggybacking, taking tried-and-true elements from other, greater New Weird America albums and suturing them together.  Though that really sounds rather damning, trust me, it’s not.  Festival, generally, does a superb job of blending together their influences and presenting something that’s very well-crafted, if not particularly original.  When at their strongest, as they frequently are on Come, Arrow, Come!, Festival can put together some of the most eerie, doomy free folk around.

And their strongest definitely comes in a three-song stretch—”Zebulon,” “Bind Us All,” and “Return”—in the middle of the album, all of which explore the spookier, more unabashedly dramatic side of their sound.  ”Zebulon” begins the sequence with an arresting blend of ominous drones, the Powells’ clear, high voices, and a mincing melodic figure.  It leads into ”Bind Us All,” a breathtaking piece, the best thing on the album.  It’s a deliberate, percussive slow-burner that depends entirely on the impressive melodic dexterity of the Powells’ singing.  This brilliant run grows progressively more unsettling, culminating with the lengthy, cacophanous unraveling of “Return.”  The song begins with simple, earnest guitar figure and ghostly, lonesome vocals.  The effect is hypnotic, but instead of letting this play out, Festival opts to explode the song, unleashing a torrent of seesawing electric guitar squeals, dissonant caterwauls, and thundering percussion.  It’s surprisingly heavy stuff, completely brave and frankly uncalled-for, and suggests that Festival is actually serious about their mossy darkness, not simply aping for aping’s sake.

…And that’s precisely why the album ends on a rather disappointing note.  The remaining three songs, like the call-and-response sing-along stomper “Valentine,” follow safe hipster-pop tropes a little too closely for my blood.** I suppose I can see why Festival felt the need to lighten things up, but it would have been more daring and rewarding if they didn’t take the foot off the throat. It’s when Festival explores their Renfest roots that they seem strongest.

Overall, Come, Arrow, Come! is what it is, and that’s a sort of leavened, lightened version of Fern Knight.  Which is high praise, I hasten to add.  Sometimes you want your crown-of-daisies-wearing forest maidens to avoid full-on nightmare mode.  Festival does a great job of that.

*FUCK YOU, PITCHFORK.  FUCK YOU.

**With “Come Outside,” in particular, sounding like it was written and sung by a female Hamilton Leithauser doppelganger and fairly reeking of Williamsburg, making for a pretty deflating two-song conclusion to Come, Arrow, Come!

It’s a chill Friday.  I’m relaxing, trying out my new headphones, sitting in a ridiculously comfy ergonomic chair.  Sipping on tea.  Basically feeling transcendentally mellow.

It’s chill outside, as well.  I mean, chill for central Texas.  I biked home from work in 55-degree weather.  Yes, folks, there’s a nip in the air, and it’s times like these when we turn inward ever so slightly, finding enjoyment in our own quiet thoughts and maybe, just maybe, if we’re lucky, those of one we love.  Let’s face it, peeps: ‘Tis the season to get mellow and sexual.

Maybe I’m talking out of my ass.  I probably am.  And I’m okay with that.  The point I want to make, in typically elliptical and roundabout fashion, is that I’m listening to David Crosby‘s debut album, If I Could Only Remember My Name, and it fits these chill times like a warm, easily distractible glove.  This is easily the best thing David Crosby ever put out, and the best Crosby, Stills & Nash solo album by far.  It’s lightly druggy, abstract, introspective, and exquisitely calm and languid—perfect sweater weather music, perfect post-sex come-down music.

I’d give this album more words than this but I’d rather just let this particular album speak for itself.  Put it on and chill out.

I’ll get around to it, but permit me a brief and related digression: I recently saw Guided by Voices here in the lovely city of Austin.  The performance was excellent, about what you’d expect from Robert Pollard.  There were high kicks, microphone twirls (did I just make up a term there?  Microphone twirls?), and spectacular between-song banter.  There’s a reason Pollard has a live album consisting solely of his rambling observations, 2005′s Relaxation of the Asshole (to which I say, hurr).  There was also lots and lots of Pollard-centric beer guzzling, the upshot of which was the charismatic singer’s slurred demand for “Austin pussy” during GBV’s first encore.  A demand that, I’d like to point out, was met with throaty cheers by men and and tepid snorts by women.

Oh, and they played songs.  Great songs, in fact, largely culled from their classic, early-to-mid 90s lineup that featured Tobin Sprout’s George Harrison to Pollard’s Lennon/McCartney.  They played “hits” (which, by GBV’s standards, means “songs that more than 100 people have heard”) off of Alien Lanes and the untoppable Bee Thousand alongside phenomenal(ly) deep cuts off of Tonics & Twisted Chasers, Clown Prince of the Menthol Trailer, and I Am a Scientist.  Each EP rarity was prefaced with an announcement of its origins.

This reverential, real-time crate-digging is not uncommon for Guided by Voices, but they didn’t play anything off of my favorite release of theirs, 1993′s Static Airplane Jive.  Though their song catalog probably runs into the thousands, I had reasonable hopes they’d drag out a tune or two from the EP, simply because when I’d seen them before and they’d done so, playing the 51-second, loopy acoustic ballad “Hey Aardvark” (more on this later).  No luck this time, though.

The show did, however, impel me to revisit Static Airplane Jive, and my decade-old love for the relatively obscure little EP was rekindled. I still stand by my assertion that Static Airplane Jive is the greatest thing Guided by Voices ever laid to tape.

Bold, I know. But I’m one bold bro. From an exposure/historical significance perspective, Static Airplane Jive doesn’t hold a candle to Alien Lanes, let alone Bee Thousand.  However, taken as a document divorced from its context, Static Airplane Jive stands as Guided by Voices’s most powerful, clearly distilled statement.  Consisting of six incredibly brief songs (only one passes the three-minute mark, and only one more the two), Static Airplane Jive blasts through a surprisingly diverse array of genres in exhilarating fashion.  They run through anthemic, fist-pumping arena-pop (“Big School”), trippy, circular incantations (“Damn Good Mr. Jam”) and blistering psych-punk in various iterations (“Rubber Man,” “Glow Boy Butlers,” “Gelatin, Ice Cream, Plum”), all in under 11 minutes.  Every second is absolutely essential listening.  Nothing here is wasted.

Oh, and there’s also that aforementioned little acoustic ditty, “Hey Aardvark.”  I’ll be blunt, as I too infrequently am: The song is perfect, one of my 10 or 15 all-time favorites by any artist.  It’s simultaneously bittersweet, longing, and carefree, effortlessly folding each of those emotions into its brief, modest span.  It’s also sonically fascinating, featuring incredibly warmly recorded acoustic guitars and an in-the-red Pollard intoning sweetly simple, vaguely surreal lyrics, and bookended by subtle, difficult-to-place percussive touches.  Blah, blah, blah—it’s impossible to describe “Hey Aardvark” using the reverence it deserves.  You have to listen to it.  You just have to.

Now, Guided by Voices probably doesn’t fall into many personal definitions of what a psychedelic band sounds or behaves like,* especially today, with our glut of strung-out, droning star- and navel-gazers.  But that glosses over that weird little moment in the early-to-mid 90s where a handful of bands like Aspera Ad Astra, All Natural Lemon and Lime Flavors, the Strapping Fieldhands, and the Olivia Tremor Control fused Nuggets-era garage rock’s anthemic brevity with post-punk’s penchant for damaging and uglying up perfectly good pop songs.**  The music these bands made was alternately weird, catchy, unsettling, sugary, and strung-out.

Guided by Voices isn’t often thrown into that lot, I wouldn’t think, but a document like Static Airplane Jive makes a good case for doing so.  Brief, tinny, fractured, burnt pop.  Sounds about right.

*And yes, I’m getting sick of quibbling on my own damn blog, so maybe I’ll stop doing it soon, but here I go anyway.

**Succour: The Terrascope Benefit Album compiles a number of these bands (along with some others) to give an excellent snapshot of mid-90s out-psych in many of its iterations.

I don’t have much to say right now, except that By the Throat, the latest album by Austro-Icelandic soundscape genius Ben Frost, has blown my mind at work all week.  Instead of spending too much of your time describing what this roiling, aggro, drone-heavy, Tim Hecker-esque masterpiece of menace sounds like, I’ll just let the album art do all the talking.

That’s right: In this instance, at least, a picture’s worth a 700-word blog post, and this album cover looks exactly like how By the Throat sounds.  Which is to say, like a pack of wolves marauding across a floodlit snowdrift.

Which is to say, fucking badass.