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youbet

Compare & Despair

Ba Da Bing!

The thirteen songs on youbet’s debut hit like relentless bursts of color. Musically adventurous and lyrically intimate, writer Nick Llobet’s vocals lilt, hiss and command attention. His vision is fully formed on Compare & Despair, driven by equal parts humor and melancholy. Its bright, shocking cover art depicts a cast of psychotropic cartoon characters, each representing a different song.  Raised in Davie, Florida, by his Cuban immigrant father and first-generation Italian American mother who divorced, Llobet sensed chaos lurking around every corner. youbet’s sound captures that disorder, a backwards world where the adults act like children and kids are on their own to maintain any semblance of order. Compare & Despair sounds like returning to your hometown to rewrite the narrative of your youth with attitude and a confetti cannon. Recently arriving in New York, Llobet discovered music as a creative and therapeutic outlet. He began writing obsessively. “It’s my way of getting lost,” says Llobet. Depositing what he made on a Bandcamp page, the result was an assortment of disparate ingredients: the sound of his laugh tape-sped to surreality, a birthday song about carnitas for his step mother, fuzzed-out rockers that snuff out before they seem to begin. And then there were these beautiful, complete compositions that recalled the ingenious simplicity of Big Star or Elliott Smith. His page caught the attention of Ava Luna drummer and engineer Julian Fader (Frankie Cosmos, Mr. Twin Sister), who shared it with collaborator Katie Von Schleicher. Katie contacted Llobet, offering to...

Frances, Aoife Nessa

Land Of No Junction

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***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received a 7.7 rating from Pitchfork.  On the eponymously titled final song of her debut album Land Of No Junction, Irish songwriter Aoife Nessa Frances sings “Take me to the land of no junction / Before it fades away / Where the roads can never cross / But go their own way.” This search, indeed the heart of the album, recalls journeys towards an ever shifting centre—a centre that cannot hold—with maps that are constantly being rewritten. She writes: “The album title is a result of a mishearing. Cian Nugent (Aoife’s musical collaborator and co-producer) was telling me about childhood trips he made to Llandudno in Wales, passing through a station called Llandudno Junction… Land Of No Junction later became a place in itself. A liminal space—a dark vast landscape to visit in dreams… A place of waiting where I could sit with uncertainty and accept it. Rejecting the distinct and welcoming the uncertain and the unknown.” The album is shot through with this sense of mystery—an ambiguity and disorientation that illuminates songs with smokey luminescence. Yet, through the haze, everything comes down to what, where and who one is. With Land Of No Junction, she has built a universe full of intimacy and depth, with lyrics written through a process of free thought writing. It lends the record fluidity, each song in dialogue with the next not only through language, but the way each musical choice complements or threads into another: “I would write...

Crook, Brian W/the Renderers

This World Just Eats Me Up Alive

Ba Da Bing!

While recording a group of songs that would end up being part of This World Just Eats Me Up Alive, Brian Crook took a break outside with his bandmates. A small girl nearby ran up to a woman saying “Mommy, mommy! There’s a vampire here!” The mother asked how the girl knew it was a vampire, and the girl said, “He talks like this,” and proceeded to do a growling impression of a New Zealand accent. At the time, Brian was in a dark suit and had super long hair, and was playing badminton….  Crook’s new solo album comprises eight years of recording, so perhaps his undead appearance is not surprising; it comprises a span of inspiration that seems almost vampiric, with themes suggested by Greek mythology, a favorite 1960s author, to the abstract electronics of Aphex Twin and Arca as influences. The album came together in parts, slowly assembled with various contributors and recording locations, the earliest trace having lyrical origins from 1991, and was done during during sessions for The Terminals, Crook’s other band (you can also add NZ legends Scorched Earth Policy and Flies Inside The Sun to that list). A near decade provides a lot of material for reflective songwriting. In Crook’s revelations about life in New Zealand and his tenebrous lyrical style there is more than a touch of comedy, albeit of a blackly humorous, “South Island New Zealand” nature. The lyrics and music come from a similar place as New Zealand painters Bill...

Cross Record

Cross Record

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“What is your wish? What do you expect?” Cross Record’s self-titled third album begins with Emily Cross’s disembodied voice intoning from an otherworldly vacuum. In the three years since her last album, Cross has divorced, quit drinking, become a death doula, started the observational podcast What I’m Looking At, and toured and recorded with Sub Pop’s Loma, the trio she formed with Dan Duszynski on drums and Jonathan Meiburg (Shearwater) on guitar / vocals. On Cross Record, she guides the listener like a sonic Virgil, delivering a textured soundscape of meditative curiosity, akin to Low’s Double Negative, Broadcast’s The Noise Made By People and Radiohead’s Kid A. The record’s themes of departure and separation were inspired by changes Cross made in her career. After years of work as a nanny and in customer service, she recently embarked on studies to become a death doula. Similar to the services provided by birth doulas, a death doula helps clients navigate decisions and hardships at the end of life. In her new role, she created a three hour ceremony called a Living Funeral, which guides participants through the rituals of their own deaths. Her work in helping others face their greatest fears inhabits the same space as her art, which has always explored the metaphysical in the everyday. The eerie experience of listening to this record and the unsettling sense of songs slipping from coherent grasp share these same sensibilities. The oddness of these songs is nonetheless honest and truthful, and to understand...

Arc Iris

Friends & Lovers

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Coming off tour dates for their 2018 release, Icon of Ego, Arc Iris present a good-natured sampling of what Summer exactly means to them. Like many, the band approach it as a time for the lovably familiar. Friends and Lovers takes some well-trodden classics and displays them like never before. These cubist reimaginings of songs by Led Zeppelin, Leonard Cohen and Elton "Rocketman" John will both comfort your sense of familiarity while simultaneously plunging you down the rabbit hole. While Foggy Lullaby, their tribute to Joni Mitchell's Blue, worshipped at the feet of the songwriter, these tracks embrace the spontaneity of fun that is like putting on a familiar outfit as a Halloween costume. Always one conceptual step ahead, the band offers an original song on Friends and Lovers as well, a track conceived to live amongst these familiar songs cast askew, pulled from existence to act like it's just another track we'd find playing on the radio between the legends. Let the sun shine!

She Keeps Bees

Kinship

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A meditative and endlessly turning clutch of songs, She Keeps Bees’ Kinship reasserts the band’s elegant power in a stream of loss and regeneration. Death, birth, both personal and in reflection of Earth itself emerge through Jessica Larrabee’s focused, empowered voice. With Larrabee and Andy LaPlant’s first album in four years, She Keeps Bees peels away their distorted guitars and fills the void with hypnotic organ, keyboards, strings, a tight bed of drum grooves, and a direct lyricism full of with wisdom and intention. This is an album that radiates its messages with deft knowledge and immeasurable strength. Since 2014’s acclaimed Eight Houses, Larrabee cared for and lost her father before moving upstate with LaPlant to a New York cottage with a plan to start their own family. In this new, solitary and natural environment, they wrote and recorded this album over five months, joined by friends Kevin Sullivan (Last Good Tooth) on bass, Penn Sultan (Last Good Tooth) for guitar, and Eric Maltz, who lent strings, synthesizers and piano. Kinship addresses chaos by pointing beyond it, to the order that exists outside one’s reach. As the duo settle upstate and begin planting roots for their future life together, She Keeps Bees have taken the long view and written odes to the irrevocable primacy of Nature.

Kilgour, Hamish

Franklestein

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The Finklestein Universe expands! Upon releasing Finklestein last year, a theme album about a fictitious kingdom, Hamish Kilgour simultaneously put out Funklestein which saw two side-long tracks that delved deeper into Kilgour’s fairytale world. Now, the fairytale grows even more nuaced, as Ba Da Bing presents Franklestein—a series of radical remixes which use the Finklestein sessions as a starting point but, being “frank,” are new compositions. Each track is an orchestra in a teacup, sounding like the best Velvet Underground boots suffused with dance beats, allowing unexpected room for autoharp, vibraphone and glockenspiel.

Kilgour, Hamish

Funk/fink R'mxs

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A companion release to Franklestein, Hamish Kilgour’s ten-inch single is ready to bust onto damaged dance floors around the world! Two tracks originally conceived during the Finklestein sessions get their full due, with vibraphone, wistful saxophone and a driving beat that colors the fairytale setting Kilgour originally conceived for his 2018 release, Finklestein. “M’Open” sets a groove and rides it like a evening on the town, while “M’Close” reveals the dark underbellies said evening on the town could reveal.

Lady Lamb

Even in the Tremor

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***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received a 7.1 rating from Pitchfork.  Even in the Tremor marks Aly Spaltro aka Lady Lamb’s latest full-length album following 2015’s After and it’s a remarkable achievement because, among other things, it’s the first time in her career that Spaltro is singing explicitly about herself. “I’ve never let myself be this exposed before,” she says, “but this whole album is about facing who you are and fighting your way toward self-acceptance.” Between confessing a tantrum in a batting cage (“Little Flaws”), telling the story of her parent’s kiddie-pool baptism (“Young Disciple”) and singing openly about untangling her girlfriend’s wet hair (“Deep Love”), this album is deeply rooted in the people and places, extraordinary and mundane, that have shaped Spaltro into the self-determining artist she is today. It took Spaltro almost a year to find the right co-producer. She initially attempted to make the record with an esteemed producer as she’d been advised but after being told that her arrangements needed rewriting by various veterans in the industry, Spaltro bravely changed direction and found a champion of her vision in Erin Tonkon, a less established producer whose six years working with Tony Visconti and later, David Bowie on his Grammy-winning Blackstar, made her more than qualified for the role.  Benjamin Lazar Davis (Cuddle Magic, Kimbra, Okkervil River) played bass and piano and synthesizer. Jeremy Gustin (David Byrne, Albert Hammond Jr., Rubble Bucket) played drums. The group recorded at Figure 8 Studios in Brooklyn, New York. “It’s taken...

Tiny Ruins

Olympic Girls

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***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received a 7.4 rating from Pitchfork.  A rare blend of eloquent lyrical craft and explorative musicianship, the songs of Tiny Ruins are etched into the memories of crowds and critics worldwide. Traversing influences that cross genre and era, the artistry of Hollie Fullbrook and her band spans delicate folk, lustrous dream pop and ebullient psychedelia. Building on the sparse arrangements and “a novelist’s eye for detail” (Uncut) cultivated over the past several years, the group’s greatly anticipated third album Olympic Girls is replete with vital lyricism and galvanizing rhythms. Sparkling electric guitar jangles pull against the unique thrum of Fullbrook’s acoustic as the cryptic poetry she is known for rings out.Hollie Fullbrook is no stranger to acclaim. Debut album Some Were Meant For Sea (2011) saw her name on billboards, playlists and blogs worldwide. The album’s clutch of “gorgeous vignettes” (BBC) put the artist on the map. Second album Brightly Painted One earned more accolades, championed by The New York Times, NPR and David Lynch, and winning Best Alternative Album at the New Zealand Music Awards in 2014. “An album of quiet, devastating beauty,” wrote Pop Matters. The album saw Fullbrook join forces with producer Tom Healy, whom, alongside long-time tour-mate bassist Cass Basil and drummer Alex Freer, Fullbrook has worked and toured with ever since. While spanning continents, the band won fans in critics, crowds and became a sought after collaborator. A New York recording session culminated in the EP Hurtling Through (2015) with...

Dead C

Rare Ravers

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Disguised as the meandering outpourings of vacant thought and activity dialed simultaneously from zero and ten. Formed in the cauldron of a fevered mistake resolute. Surrounded by ignorance, dis-interest, and the attention of the carefully self-selected. Recorded and burned through a thousand galaxies of dust and doubt and endless infinite wonder, transforming both time and space. Forever exiled to the very bottom of the world to reflect on the struggling desperate pile above. Recognizing any contribution as miniscule and insignificant when placed within the greatness of the other, the dominant insolent preening satisfied, continually shouting the pre-eminence of the first world order. The latest by The Dead C—Rare Ravers: it’s a long player.

Tiny Hazard

The Long Way

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Tiny Hazard return with The Long Way, the first release since their 2017 debut LP, Greyland. That album, assembled over an extended period during which they refined their maximalist pop, was an ambitious, nuanced affair that critics described as “a gift that keeps on giving,” lauding the band for having “pulled off the feat of bottling chaos.” For The Long Way, Tiny Hazard reaches a clearing. After completing a tour, the band retreated to a barn in Vermont's Green Mountains for a week of recording. There they found the ideal setting in which to capture singer/composer Alena Spanger’s songs, which had sprung from a renewed focus on subtlety and space. Surrounded by wooded trails and meadows, the band absorbed their environment. Lush arrangements of blanketing keyboards and intricate guitar lines circle and support Spanger’s voice. The vocals on “Don’t Worry” were recorded as a spontaneous stream-of-consciousness at 3am during what Spanger describes as an “insomnia experiment.” Her tracks weren’t meant to be final, but the band opted to keep them; the dreamy, lethargic quality evokes the disoriented daze of the song's ambivalent reassurances. This open-minded spirit was also key to the writing process: though untrained on guitar, Spanger followed her intuition, writing “I’m Not Scared” with the instrument. Back in New York, that spontaneity gave way to a meticulous attention to detail; guitarist Ryan Weiner mixed the EP, carefully sculpting the sounds and finding an alchemy between their earthy origins and ethereal intimations. Employing a change of pace and a...

Porras, Jon

Voices Of The Air

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One of the most incisive comments on how best to appreciate art came from the Indian musician Gita Sarabhai. In a recorded conversation with John Cage, Sarabhai described art’s effect as serving “to sober and quiet the mind, thus rendering it susceptible to divine influences.” Some of the best exploratory music incorporates this approach, and Jon Porras adopted it as a conceptual foundation for his new album, Voices Of The Air. The sounds Porras creates intend to provoke contemplativeness beyond expressing a concrete idea. As half of the duo Barn Owl, Porras composed intricate dual guitar improvisations that would shift and shimmer through multiple mutations within any singular piece. At the same time, his voyages into minimalism were served by Elm, his solo act. His focus has now shifted from guitar to synthesizer, narrowing in on the intersections between sound and neurology. Taking the Yamaha DX7 as his main instrument for this solo work, Porras read and incorporated John Chowning’s frequency modulation synthesis, the result being a nuanced and multidimensional sound with endless possibilties. Porras stacked, arranged and adjusted these sounds through digital synthesis and effects. “The process felt like mixing paint to get the right color and texture, then laying down a brushstroke, each day returning to the canvas to build on something I left there from the day before,” says Porras. Voices Of The Air broadcasts these intricate balances of sounds that slowly set together, creating an album of delicacy and power.

Arc Iris

Icon Of Ego

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This fall, Arc Iris releases Icon Of Ego, its third groundbreaking album, as a trio that packs the heft of a far bigger band with fully realized sonic and visual intensity. On this latest album, vocalist / guitarist Jocie Adams, keyboardist / sample artist Zach Tenorio-Miller and drummer Ray Belli have crafted a vividly expressionistic new album that reflects both the group’s protean talents as well as its journey of survival. After its self-named 2014 debut on the ANTI- label, Arc Iris achieved critical acclaim, along with tours with St. Vincent and Jeff Tweedy and festivals like Bonnaroo followed. Within two years, the band self-released Moon Saloon in the US while British independent record label Bella Union released the album in Europe. Tours supporting Kimbra, Gene Ween, and a complete re-imagination of Joni Mitchell’s Blue performed at Washington’s Kennedy Center followed, which added to a growing, international fan base that has remained dedicated throughout. Icon of Ego finds a stronger, more experienced band. Recording at Providence’s Columbus Theater, home to silent movies and vaudeville during the ’20s, the band has evolved into a concentrated pop-prog explosion, mixing styles with disparate elements that captivate and surprise. With heavy synthesizer work by Tenorio and Adams, and seemingly impossible transitions executed effortlessly by Belli, the songs here carry a thick, analog electronic sound that harks back to the ’70s. Presiding over these are Adams’ powerful vocals that house the energy under pop forms.

Davachi, Sarah

Gave In Rest

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***BACK IN STOCK ON LP!!!  Received a 7.7 rating from Pitchfork.  Sarah Davachi has quickly risen in prominence since her first release five years ago, and Gave In Rest represents her highest artistic achievement. By infusing her compositional style within a predilection for medieval and Renaissance music, Davachi unearths a new realm of musical reverence, creating works both contemplative and beatific, eerie yet essentially human. Gave In Rest is a modern reading of early music, reforming sacred and secular sentiments to fit her purview and provide an exciting new way to hear the sounds that exist around us.  Between January and September of 2017, Sarah Davachi lived in flux; storing her belongings in Vancouver, she spent the summer in Europe, occasionally performing in churches and lapidariums and seeking respite from her transitional state while surrounded by such storied history. This latest album echoes that emotional state of solitude and ephemerality, reaching towards familiar musical landscapes but from oblique perspectives. “I named each track after a particular time of day as a way of expressing my experiencing different moments of quietude, how morning and night are both independent and interconnected entities in this regard,” she says. Her titles evoke canonical phrases referring to morning or evening prayers, as well as Latin and German phrasings for metaphors about the time of day. “From my perspective, there is a lot of loneliness on this record, and I think it is as much about beginnings as endings,” she continues. “In a way,...

Kilgour, Hamish

Finklestein

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The Clean member Hamish Kilgour’s second-ever solo album, Finklestein, flips the singer / guitarist / drummer’s path taken on All Of It And Nothing. Having previously gone for intimate, minimalistic performances, this album displays a chock-full production quality akin to a fairytale. It’s a fitting change, seeing as the songs are based around a children’s story Kilgour conceived for his son about a kingdom that invents a way of dealing with their depleting gold resources. The songs include organ, saxophone, pedal steel, piano, vibraphone, harmonica, even footsteps (Kilgour is renowned for his stepping), most of it performed by him and his producer / collaborator Gary Olsen at Olsen’s studio, Marlborough Farms, in Brooklyn. Originally conceived as being a children’s book as well as album, it rides roughshod through this fairytale world with grace. Finklestein took a year to record, as Kilgour’s involvement with a large part of the Brooklyn music scene, as well as dates with recent New Zealand Music Hall of Fame inductees The Clean, split his time. His songs benefit from this elongated recording period, as each track creates its own space within the album’s world, mixing instruments and melodies in a rainbow of ways. Yet it’s Kilgour’s songwriting sensibilities that hold the album together, his charismatic and loose arrangements within a congenial environment of musical play.

ANMLPLNET

Fall Asleep

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Nobody is more surprised about having created a full ANMLPLNET album than the group itself: Slothrust leader Leah Wellbaum and drummer / singer Mickey Vershbow. The two met while they were both immersed in the Boston music scene, and then went on to pursue separate musical careers on opposite coasts. Their debut album Fall Asleep truly displays their magnetic musical bond, even while withstanding physical distance and hectic schedules. The band was formed originally on a number of rules, including writing lyrics that are antonymic translations (meaning nouns, adjectives and verbs were replaced with their antonyms) and playing songs straight through as one giant piece, no breaks. The band seeks to create dream-like soundscapes, both epochal in scope and melodic. Their goal is to explore the space between songwriting and improvisation, and the result is an uncontrived melding of their personal styles and technical mastery of their instruments. Wellbaum and Vershbow basically plan, dig, then embark on a fresh road towards rock brilliance.

Hawthonn

Red Goddess (Of This Men Shall Know Nothing)

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The music of Hawthonn is dense and atmospheric, but not inaccessible. Experimental electronic techniques fuse with doom-laden organ riffs, crystalline piano, elemental drones and haunting vocals. Largely guided by their own unconscious muse, the band’s chief inspirations lie outside of music, in Romantic poetry, dreams and reveries, esoteric symbolism, the history of magic and witchcraft, folklore and the English landscape.  Hawthonn is Leeds-based duo Layla Legard and Phil Legard. Having previously collaborated in music, as well as text and photography, they officially formed in 2014 to deepen their uniquely imaginative approach to music-making. Often developing from obsessive explorations of a particular theme, their work precipitates dreams and imaginative journeys, which inform the direction of their music. Their earliest music explored the afterlife mythos of Coil’s Jhonn Balance through the image of the Hawthorn tree and Cumbrian landscape where his ashes were scattered. Their approach draws lyricism from the psychoacoustic phenomena of “phantom words”—sonic textures translated from geographical space into droning sound spectra, and verbalized dream imagery.  The prime symbol of Red Goddess (Of This Men Shall Know Nothing), is mugwort. An herb associated with dreaming, travel and menstruation, mugwort particularly favors edgelands: those abandoned, untended places, part man-made, part rural, where nature begins to reclaim what humanity has left behind. The music here unfolds a mandala of symbolism from these liminal spaces, drawn from a web of fascinations which unfolded during the recording process.

Von Schleicher, Katie

Glad To Be Here

Ba Da Bing!

Katie Von Schleicher follows up her 2017 album Shitty Hits with Glad To Be Here, available digitally and as a 7" on May 4th just in time for her upcoming US and European tours. Produced & engineered by Von Schleicher, Glad To Be Here incorporates the warmth and saturation of Bleaksploitation and Shitty Hits, while nodding towards what's next.  "On a break from touring this winter I went back to my childhood home in Maryland. I built a fire, set up my gold drum kit, saw a ton of stars and felt  smushed by silence. It was lonely, so I made these songs. 'Glad to Be Here' is where I find myself right now. 'Party Dawn' is tied to Maryland, to a dear friend and our adolescence," says Von Schleicher. Bringing the songs back to New York, she finalized them with collaborator Adam Brisbin (Sam Evian, Jolie Holland, Buck Meek) and mixed them with Julian Fader (Ava Luna, Frankie Cosmos, Nadine, Palehound). UK import. Limited to 20 US copies.

Wooing

Daydream Time Machine Ep

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Fresh NYC trio Wooing present their debut EP, Daydream Time Machine. Fronted by multi-instrumentalist Rachel Trachtenburg—a performer in the New York music scene since she was nine years old—Wooing offer hauntingly beautiful vocals backed by echoing guitars. The lead single, “In Colour", displays the vintage influences that come into play: the urgency of underground 90s rock (i.e. Sonic Youth, Helium, Breeders) meets the psychedelic Syd Barrett sounds of the 60s.   Trachtenburg started at age six playing as the drummer in her family’s Seattle-born group, The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, who played Conan and drew the attention of Rolling Stone, NPR and Spin. Trachtenburg went on to perform in Supercute! and The Prettiots. Wooing, comprised of Trachtenburg (vocals), JR Thomason (guitar) and Rosie Slater (drums), have existed for just over a year. Trachtenburg and Thomason met while performing with disaster master R. Stevie Moore, while Trachtenburg and Slater had previously toured together in Supercute!.   On their three-song EP Daydream Time Machine, produced by Bryce Goggin (Pavement, The Apples In Stereo), Wooing cover a wide scope of material. Inspired by a documentary on LSD experiments performed on housewives in the 1950s, Trachtenburg wrote the lead single, “In Colour”, in which she beautifully croons a direct quote from the film: “I wish I could talk in technicolor.” The video, directed by John Zhao, encompasses the vintage aesthetics of the track accompanied by gorgeous, dream-like visuals. The band’s reveries, however, aren’t always sweet; “Tear World” comments on our species’ abusive...

Deep Frosty

Blues Band

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Deep Frosty bandleader Steve Ruecker is a legend to some, a much loved participant in the California rock scene who often hosts barnburning jams at his house in Encinitas. Enlisting Ben Flashman from Los Angeles and Utrillo Kushner from Oakland (Noel Von Harmonson and Ben Chasny guest) of Comets on Fire, Blues Band could be 2017's great rock record. Guitar progressions undergo a classic Quicksilver treatment, as Ruecker's sincere, Roky-esque vocals make testament to the plight of the indigenous, the horror of modern times, and the hopeless beauty of heartbreak. The band’s pure enthusiasm coupled with a distaste for complacency seeps through like blood on fabric, making Blues Band a raw and rocking joy to hear.

Baird, Laura

I Wish I Were A Sparrow

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With a musical timeline dating back to her early childhood, Laura Baird is an exceptionally talented multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter, best known for her projects with her sister, Meg, as The Baird Sisters, and guitarist Glenn Jones. Baird’s own sound stems from the Appalachian folk tradition, and she connects to it via family lineage—her great-great uncle I.G. Greer’s folk recordings for the Library of Congress are a large influence. Also woven in are classical composers like Bach and Satie, and modern day musicians such as Opal and Yo La Tengo. With this debut solo album, I Wish I Were A Sparrow, Baird plays odes to the traditions from which she learned, combining Appalachian balladry and the roughness of old field recordings, but there is also a dose of dreaminess and solitude that captures sleepy central New Jersey. This is where she departs from tradition, leaving the communal origins of folk music to capture the singular self. The lyrics also present an amalgam of old and new, with half of the songs, including “Dreadful Wind and Rain” and “Pretty Polly,” being passed down from the folk tradition, and the other half, including “Wind Wind “and “Love Song From The Earth To The Moon,” coming from Baird’s own hand. While the most salient part of her previous Baird Sisters project was the melding of familial voices and various instruments, Baird’s solo effort is centered around the combination of her virtuosic banjo playing and prominent but airy vocals.

Secret Pyramid

Two Shadows Collide

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Amir Abbey follows up Secret Pyramid’s previous album, Movements of Night, with Two Shadows Collide, an even deeper exploration of the sounds between consciousness and transcendence. Carefully built and fluidly performed, the record expands Abbey’s relationship with modern composition and abstract songcraft. Cosmic awe fuels exploratory immensity, basking in a dreamlike presence. These works move slowly, like shifting and morphing monoliths. Ligeti’s string works, combined with field recordings, inspire “Possession,” while the Badalamenti-esque “In Wind” pays cinematic homage to the Pacific Northwest. The singular ondes Martenot floats and glides through several tracks, including the hazy and beautiful title track. Each song’s main inspiration comes from the notion behind the album title, the intersection and attraction of forces and worlds, clashing of sounds, and the dualities within our lives. Such a meditative release built upon conflict is ironic, but therein lies the perfect way to listen.

Von Schleicher, Katie

Shitty Hits

Ba Da Bing!

***CHECK STOCK!!!  Received a 7.1 rating from Pitchfork.  Katie Von Schleicher’s Bleaksploitation was an accident, years in the making. While interning at Ba Da Bing Records, owner Ben Goldberg offered to release a cassette of anything of hers, demos or a live performance, but she took it a bit more seriously than Goldberg intended. The result was her first self-produced and engineered effort, a strange, hazy, pop-laden tape. Doing her own press under a pseudonym and referring to it as an “album,” it garnered enough attention for it to be released on vinyl in Spring 2016. On her debut full-length, Von Schleicher strikes again on the magic that comes from her warped and uncompromising sound. Shitty Hits channels the bright, sunny radio burners of the 1970s, songs you drive to, carefree, and songs you can cry to. From start to finish, this album confronts isolation and powerlessness—it doesn’t tackle grandiosity, but mediocrity: the struggle of being deeply flawed and unmistakably human.

Nance, David

Negative Boogie

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David Nance, Omaha veteran of warble and hiss, returns with Negative Boogie, his new concoction of chug, throb and greasy swagger. On this album, Nance trades in his beaten up Tascam 488 for the bullet-proof, glass walls of A.R.C. Studios. What exactly is the negative boogie? Well, it’s a bit like Canned Heat but with Pere Ubu’s queasy rhythms and someone playing five finger fillet with Swell Maps. Ensconced in his ivory tower and soundproof rooms, Nance reached for unlikely weapons to tear down his own lofty experiment. He had his pick of rare guitars, cowbells, steel drums, vintage amps, Crazy Horse microphones, mellotron, and the restless but indefatigable rhythm section of Kevin Donahue and Tom May. They started at sunrise and recorded fifteen songs by midnight. Maybe it’s his Midwestern work ethic, maybe he’s a sonic cheapskate. Maybe it’s just the sound of negative boogie. These songs stab and flow into one other like a perfectly orchestrated classic. They are drenched with Nance’s most biting and comic lyrics to date, peaking on “D.L.A.T.U.M.F. Blues (Don’t Look At This Ugly Mother Fucker Blues)”. And ripping through the entire thing is the cracked power he yanks out of the guitar, a veritable The Good, The Bad And The Ugly of riffage. This is a departure for Nance. It’s bigger and grander but it’s far from easy music. It’s his Plastic Ono Band, his For Your Pleasure, his fever dream of Rocket from the Tombs. But this of course is only a...

Talsounds

Love Sick

Ba Da Bing!

Natalie Chami’s project TALsounds documents solo sessions of improvised synthesis and live-looped vocal performances, presented to the listener as discrete takes without overdubs. The decisions made in her atmospheric sketches—the onset of a quivering vocal melody, the echoing turn of a delay knob—flash across as seismic ripples within a network of standing sounds. Love Sick, her first vinyl release, follows a series of full length tapes on labels like Hausu Mountain (run by Chami’s bandmates in free music trio Good Willsmith), Patient Sounds, and Moog’s own physical imprint. While these releases showcased Chami’s looser improvisations, drifting off into extended states of narcosis and looping architectures, this release distills her tactics of spontaneous composition into her most concise song cycle to date. Chami’s vocal performances are her most frank mode of address: fragments of discernible lyrics smear into melismatic melody lines and loop back around, intertwining into complex harmonies with her wordless vocalizations. Her vocal style, informed as much by her classical voice and opera training as by a lifetime of immersion in Björk, Portishead, Aaliyah, and Sade, blends a hands-on process of technical self-accompaniment with moments of diaristic intimacy. When her lyrics emerge in flashes of legibility, they draw out a fascination, or maybe a preoccupation, with the control that raw emotions have over mind and body. A remarkable anomaly in an era of bedroom producers and laptop-abetted pop projects, Chami sculpts dense fields of sound in live takes and channels improvised vocal performances into emotional frameworks that betray no...

Terminals

Antiseptic

Ba Da Bing!

The Terminals are the best rock band New Zealand has ever produced. Period. There’s heavy competition, but believe it. No group has lasted over three decades and maintained such intensity, structure and mood better than the core team of Steven Cogle and Peter Stapleton. Cogle’s voice is a quavering incantation of deep spell-casting, throwing more dirt onto already gritty guitar squalls. Stapleton’s rhythm section propels songs through lightning charges of tempo and energy. Age has only embedded the band’s mastery of deep sonic realms. The ten years between their last album, Last Days of the Sun, and the release of Antiseptic whip by in a flash when these records are played next to each other—they never disappoint, they never relent. This latest album does mark some changes, however. Longtime guitarist Brian Crook now lives in the California desert, so Nicole Moffat has replaced him, providing violin and vocals. Mick El Borado thickens the atmosphere with his improvisational keyboard playing. A group that has stayed together so long knows instinctively where a song can go, although it is often the maverick pieces—ones that at first don’t seem to belong—that end up on the records. Their work together has become only more sagacious, and The Terminals don’t waste an intended or improvised note. This is a peerless rock album—think of another group who’ve stayed as heavy, as broke, and consistent for this long.

Tiny Vipers

Laughter

Ba Da Bing!

Since the release of her sophomore album Life On Earth, Seattle-based musician Jesy Fortino has become a civil engineer. While studying at University of Washington to pursue a wholly new life direction, she wrote and recorded Tiny Viper’s Laughter. Although it seems like a deviation from the singer-songwriter albums Fortino released on Sub Pop, it continues early works such as Empire Prism, and later instrumentals such as her 2015 contribution to the Ambience series (Box Bedroom Rebels) and her collaborations with Rafael Anton Irisarri and Liz Harris (Mirroring / Grouper). Though previous works like Hands Across the Void and Life On Earth are collections of songs, just underneath their façade simmers a raw emotional expression that goes beyond words. Laughter is the result of experiments deconstructing pop tropes. Fortino takes inspiration from early electronic pioneers like Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh, as well as the raw experimentation of ’80s proto-industrial tape culture. Additionally, she carries the seemingly disparate influences of Slava Tsukerman’s Liquid Sky soundtrack and Meredith Monk’s exercise in turning the human voice into a spectral instrument. The apprehension that comes along with attempting something new and challenging is captured in the fragile structure of these compositions, which threaten to fall apart almost as soon as they come together.

Colossal Yes

Exposed Prehistorics

Ba Da Bing!

*** Those who heard Colossal Yes' 2015's Surrounded by Progress, a tribute to Brutalism, won't be surprised by the synth-heavy styles found on Exposed Prehistorics. Those of you who didn't hear the last CY release, well, surprise! Exposed Prehistorics further's Utrillo Kushner's sonic exploration of the less humane art of the 20th Century. What at first sounds like a confabulated sci fi soundtrack reveals deeper meaning upon repeated listening, as notions of fascistic aesthetics, steely electronic glares and unforgiving chord changes form the basis for music you would hear as you helplessly watch others marching by.

Dorji, Tashi & Frank Meadows

Number Six Is Sacred

Ba Da Bing!

Initially issued a few years ago in a quantity even smaller than this pressing (250), Number Six Is Sacred quickly rose like cream to the top of the Tashi Dorji Discography of Dynamic Holyshitedness. Frank Meadows bass playing, and acute recording techniques, perfectly compment Dorji's disjunctive improvisation style.   "Number Six is Sacred was recorded in late 2013 at The University of North Carolina-Asheville, where Tashi and I were both studying at the time. I was in the Recording Program, initially but was taking several courses with Tashi exploring improvisation academically. I set up the microphones and just let it roll in the tiny school studio without another engineer present.  This record has some of my first, and proudest moments as an improvisor. Tashi and I had at that point started to collaborate frequently, and were trying to be more than just a string duo. We wanted to embody the physical facts of our instruments, as they same time as we forgot them. I stand by this release forever for its simplicity, and the comraderie that went into that evening. " Frank Meadows  "They choose to focus on the materiality of their instruments, pushing their personal, idiosyncratic tendencies into an objectification of the potential freedoms accessible through a focused, instrumental process." -Tiny Mix Tapes

Grant, Jenn

Paradise

Ba Da Bing!

Jenn Grant’s Paradise opens into an expanded realm never before explored by the songwriter. Following Compostela’s 2015 Juno nominations of Triple A Album Of The Year and Songwriter Of The Year, this latest adds to Grant’s usual insight and intimacy a whole new dimension of wisdom. Songs unfold gradually, guided by her nuanced and soulful voice, mining a deepened honesty that touches upon balladry, R&B and electronic music along the way. If her previous album was a window into an artist’s psyche, this one is a front row seat for the symphonic beauty and pain of life from the sage perspective of someone who has lived through both extremes. With her poetry firmly intact and a powerful lyricism honed over a decade, Grant takes new chances and explores new approaches on Paradise. She upends her entire songwriting approach, investing two years of crafting and shaping. “I wanted to explore new soundscapes,” she says, describing how piano was the primary songwriting instrument. “I also thought about my singing much more. For some of these new songs, I decided to approach singing more like a whisper, to get a feel for its softness.” Grant reaches a shared emotional experience with these songs, and this homemade album provides both melodic beauty and sonic diversity. What results is a talented, experienced musician employing all her abilities to lengths never before heard.

Tiny Hazard

Greyland

Ba Da Bing!

Greyland, Tiny Hazard’s debut, is a raw, jagged treasure— a testament to the group’s masterful intuition for pop songs in chaos. This jagged, unpredictable, celestial music is filled with terrestrial pain. The Brooklyn-based five piece, who formed when the group met at The New School, is anchored by the vocals of songwriter Alena Spanger. She recorded the vocals in the solitude of her bedroom, carving out a space that allowed her to explore the nuances of her voice. Her songwriting process began with gibberish and stream-of-consciousnessstyle thoughts sung over melodies, eschewing the clumsiness of real words in favor of tone or timbre. Then she focused on the language, a slow process, to “try and get it just right.” Trained in opera, Spanger prefers “voices that are not perfect,” and was moved to explore vocal possibilities when she heard Meredith Monk. Spanger plays keyboards, Ryan Weiner wields a guitar that is often sonically unrecognizable, while Ronald Stockwell’s drumming and Derek Leslie’s bass playing are painterly in softer moments, but drop unexpectedly into immense grooves, while Anthony Jillions colors Spanger’s vocals with synths and occasional effects. The album was produced by Jillions under the creative direction of the group, and recorded in studios and bedrooms, in an organic, all-hands-on-deck fashion. Each song is its own vivid capsule independent from the next, but they unite on Greyland to convey something viscerally human.

Gailes

Seventeen Words

Ba Da Bing!

While they’ve released records on their own, and even collaborated in the past (Orcas), Rafael Anton Irisarri and Benoit Pioulard have never made music quite like they do with Gailes. This is a pure winter doldrums soundtrack, when the stillness after a snowstorm ends elongates into deep contemplation. It’s not surprising that Seventeen Words was conceived, composed and recorded as the duo weathered a brutal winter squall, the remains of which can be viewed on the album’s artwork. This is bottomless music, minimal in sound yet majestic in presentation. Snow slows, time freezes. This is the world of Gailes, just a fragment of our own writ large for eternity.

Byrne, Julie

Not Even Happiness

Ba Da Bing!

***BACK IN STOCK!!!  Received an 8.3 Best New Music rating from Pitchfork.  Sometimes it can take years to find your calling. Not so for Julie Byrne, whose power of lyrical expression and musical nous seems inborn. Her second album, Not Even Happiness, has evolved at its own pace. It spans recollections of bustling roadside diners, the stars over the high desert, the aching weariness of change, the wildflowers of the California coast, and the irresolvable mysteries of love. Teaching herself guitar, having picked it up when her father became ill and could no longer play, Byrne also admits she can’t read music and doesn’t even listen to it all that much—her own vinyl was the first in her possession. “Without possessing the right words, I’d describe to [producer] Eric Littman (Phantom Posse) and Jake Falby (who contributed strings) the feeling I wanted a song to evoke, or I would take a shot at singing what was in my head. Though over all, their contributions to the record are entirely their own vision and their own power.” The follow-up to 2014’s critically lauded Rooms With Walls And Windows, this latest offers a bigger picture through a wider exploration of instruments and atmospherics, revealing an artist who has grown in confidence over time. Whether witnessing the Pacific Northwest for the first time (“Melting Grid”), the morning sky in the mountains of Boulder (“Natural Blue”), or a journey fragrant with rose water or reading Frank O’Hara aloud from the passenger seat...

Eye

Other Sky

Ba Da Bing!

Other Sky is Eye’s masterpiece. Recorded 12 years after their initial formation, the Dunedin trio of Peter Stapleton (The Terminals, The Pin Group, Flies Inside The Sun), Peter Porteous (Empirical) and Jon Chapman (Double Leopards, Rory Storm and the Invaders) have never sounded more on target and immense. Not that their past releases are anything shabby! With this record, there’s a distinct communication going on between the players as they freely explore the dregs and corners of what is arguably still considered rock music. Recorded at The Anteroom, an old Masonic lodge in Port Chalmers, it took a steady three years to cobble together. The five tracks here alternately strike with intensity and drift with menace, with Eye casting new lines of cohering musical language into a sea of babble. Be prepared to transcend.

Baird Sisters

Until You Find Your Green

Ba Da Bing!

Considering they’ve collaborated ever since they were kids living under the same roof, The Baird Sisters arguably could have made an album like Until You Find Your Green years ago. They’ve released two live recordings (the first recorded by their dad) and made plenty of demos, but this marks the first time Laura and Meg Baird decided to write and record a full-length on their own terms. The songs, recorded in Laura’s house, have a familial intimacy joined by skillful depth, the ideal blend for a folk record, an equal mix of comfort and talent. Growing up surrounded by music, the sisters have traveled separate paths while remaining close. Laura studied piano and trombone in school and has collaborated with Glenn Jones on his recent releases. Meg has played in Espers, Watery Love, and currently drums/sings in Heron Oblivion. She’s also released a few solo albums on Drag City. Laura’s first solo record will be released by Ba Da Bing early next year. These recordings capture the complexity of seventies progressive folk rock, emphasizing acoustic instrumentation with a lack of self-consciousness that can only come from a private domestic environment. Meg plays guitar,Laura banjo, singing in harmony, and ornamenting their songs with flute, cello, fiddle, mandolin, upright bass, percussion and a cricket chorus. Until You Find Your Green’s songs seem traditional, but that’s deceptive, and they unfold in greater depths the deeper attention paid to them.

Dead C

Trouble

Ba Da Bing!

“There’s a reason why our relationship with The Dead C is Ba Da Bing’s longest running. It’s not because they are the hardest working band we’ve ever met. It’s not because they are the largest selling band we’ve ever released. It’s not because we’re inspired to support our local music scene. “Yes, there’s definitely a reason... please give me a minute... oh, ok, I got it (just put on this record). Like every time I hear their recordings, I’m reminded that they are one of the greatest rock bands to ever pick up a guitar and attempt to play it wrong. Listening to The Dead C causes me to think differently. It brings up emotions with which I’m otherwise un- familiar. It strikes to the essence of my being and reveals what otherwise remains hidden. I take solace in knowing that one out of every thirty of you reading this know exactly what I’m talking about. “On the spectrum of The Dead C’s sound output, Trouble could very well be seen as springing from the same realm as the massive “Driver UFO,” one of the band’s greatest tracks ever, off Harsh 70s Reality. There’s a youthful aggression here, a churning anger, deadened by pounding drone. Much like H70s, this record serves as a gateway drug— if you were ever looking for an album to play to a newbie curious about experimental rock, this would be it. The visceral strength of their per- formance trembles out of the speakers. The magnificence...

Chatwin, Ben

Heat & Entropy

Ba Da Bing!

Ben Chatwin begins his new album with an instrument you’d least expect—a dulcitone. Created in the late 19th century, the keyboard hits tuning forks with felt hammers, sounding like an ornate music box. It serves as the perfect lead in to Heat & Entropy, whose title refers to how introducing heat (energy) and entropy (chaos) into any given system can create life, exploring the blurring lines between man and machine. The first Chatwin album to be recorded domestically, Heat & Entropy starts a new chapter for the Queensferry, Scotland-based musician. Under the name Talvihorros, Chatwin is known for his innovative combination of electronic experimentation and modern classical composition. However, last year’s The Sleeper Awakes took a left turn and exchanged vanguard minimalism for enhanced melodics. Heat & Entropy delves further into this world. The result is an ornate exploration into future possibilities. On Heat & Entropy, Chatwin originally intended to use only strings, forcing him to explore lesser-known instruments. For “Standing Waves,” he attached pieces of metal, rubber and tape to the piano strings. “The Kraken” uses Terry Riley’s repetition as a starting point, but leads to distorted vocals and an intense, hammered dulcimer climax. “Euclidean Plane” incorporates a bowed mandolin and a three-stringed didley-bow, along with acoustic guitar and metallophone by Ben’s brother, Jordan Chatwin, who has had no formal training and learned guitar by ear, playing with unconventional tunings and chords. Despite the unique sounds and textures Chatwin found among the strings, the lure of electronics proved too...

Nance, David

More Than Enough

Ba Da Bing!

David Nance lives in a world where rock has been influenced as much by This Kind of Punishment and The Pin Group as by The Velvet Underground and The Rolling Stones. Omaha’s best-kept secret, up to now known primarily to DIY tape collectors and record club subscribers, Nance welcomes all with More Than Enough, his first full-band full-length, which follows the stellar but criminally under-heard 2013 Actor’s Diary LP on Grapefruit Records, as well as a string of limited-edition, over-modulatingly intense and emotionally destructive cassette releases. Recorded in Los Angeles, scrapped, then re-recorded after a move back to his Omaha hometown with his wife, More Than Enough sounds like the very last record to have undergone any process longer than a few hours of recording. It’s that immediate and on fire. The recipe: (a) get a shit-hot group of musicians; (b) cut songs down to their most “on” moments, or alternately let them ride a groove into the sun; (c) capture it all on actual tape. That’s the Nance approach, and it’s as much an ode to home-recorded brilliance as it is to whoop-ass inspiring rock. Nance will be touring this summer with Itasca, and later on with Simon Joyner and The Renderers. Blare on.

Cronin, Claire

Came Down A Storm

Ba Da Bing!

Came Down a Storm is an album that creates a world. Through Claire Cronin’s deep, intimate voice come songs of wreckage and redemption. A published poet and English Ph.D. student as well as a musician, Cronin uses images and symbols to craft songs that reach beyond the personal. She sings of death in a field, death at sea, dreams of dying, and a vision of a future where death is no longer allowed. Yet the music is not depressing; even in its darkest lines, these songs aim to float.  The album is a collaboration between Cronin and Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich, who met by chance at a Los Angeles show and began writing songs together long-distance. After sending recordings and ideas back and forth over email for a year, Cronin joined Dieterich at his house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to record Came Down a Storm. It was mixed with Jay Pellici at New, Improved Recordings in Oakland, California, where the full instrumentation was put in place. The album features Pellici and Chris Vatalaro on drums and Ezra Buchla and Heather Trost on strings. The spare, melancholy style of Cronin’s previous self-released work is evident in this album, but the music created with Dieterich takes Came Down a Storm beyond the folk genre. Cronin’s voice recalls Karen Dalton or Jason Molina in its sincerity and ache—plaintive and burnished with a kind of dark gold throughout. The instruments build around her singing: breaking to crescendos, driving emotional currents, or providing lively...