Albums added since last update: 15,270

Clearly I did not follow my own advice.

Featured Releases

A Shoreline Dream, Coastal (4)

I’ve seen reviews for A Shoreline Dream that namecheck Brian Eno, Cranes, Godspeed You Black Emperor!, My Bloody Valentine, and Sigur Rós - good enough for me.

Aurah, Songs of the Alchemist (16)

Acoustic-tinged electronica (or vice versa) with occasional worldbeat influences (flamenco, North Africa) makes for pleasant diversions, if perhaps a little too midtempo. Inspired by Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist.” Try “Tangiers” and “Aceda.”

Blonde Redhead, 23 (10)

Why have I not been listening to them? Looks like I will need to track down their other 4AD releases, by which point they had evidently shed their indie-noise roots in favor of shimmering shoegaze balladry.

Brodsky Quartet, Shostakovich - Chamber Music (14) / Tchaikovsky & Britten - String Quartets (11)

Elvis Costello first came across Brodsky Quartet while they were performing the complete series of Shostakovich string quartets as a cycle. They were also going to his shows, as it turns out, and the eventual result was the stunning Juliet Letters album. I’ve previously only heard Brodsky in pop arrangements (their work with Björk, the aforementioned Juliet plus their Moodswings collaboration), so hearing them in a pure classical setting is actually a novelty.

Caribou, Andorra (9)

’60s harmonies and syrupy arrangements plus warbly electronics juice up chirpy ooh-ahh indie odes, like Air channeling early Syd Barrett.

Contagion, Infectant (11)

Reliable EBM, sounding like they haven’t changed a thing since I last heard them on Contagion PCB c. 1992 (for all the good and bad that suggests). With inspired track names like “Hate” and “Pain,” what you see is what you hear.

Esmerine, If Only A Sweet Surrender to the Nights to Come be True (8)

A faux chamber ensemble made up of members from Godspeed You Black Emperor! and A Silver Mt Zion. Without the climactic guitars of Godspeed!, Esmerine is more akin to the loveliness of Rachel’s with perhaps a touch of the martial Apocalyptica now and again.

Her Space Holiday, The Young Machines (10) / The Young Machines (Remixed) (10)

While the original album comes across as somewhat fey at times for self-absorbed gloom pop, the list of remixers involved on the companion album is nonetheless impressive: Stereolab, Album Leaf, Matmos and Dntel among others.

Jack Off Jill, Clear Hearts Grey Flowers (15)

Grrrl goth punk screamjoy! Last release for JOJ before Jessicka moved on to Scarling, who also just came out with their Crispin Glover EP (3).

Malicorne, Balançoire En Feu (10) / Pierre De Grenoble (12) / L’extraordinaire Tour (11) / En Public (8)

Progressive folk from Malicorne, France’s answer to bands like Steeleye Span. The Pierre De Grenoble release is from 1973, and technically predates the band as it was originally billed as just Gabriel and Marie Yacoub; it features a more traditional Celtic trad with acoustic instruments. The L’extraordinair Tour from 1978 (full title: “L’extraordinaire Tour De France D’adélard Rousseau, Dit Nivernais La Clef Des Coeurs, Compagnon Charpentier Du Devoir”) is a concept album of sorts about the eponymous guild craftsman’s travels about France, and features “La Conduite,” a dour marching song with the evocative march of boots created by punching into gravel. The live album En Public, also from 1978, mixes traditional album tracks, new material, and crowd-pleasing French-Canadian reels. More contemporary pop arrangements are evident on 1981’s Balançoire En Feu, to the horror of purists - “Vive la Lune” sounds like it comes from an ABBA-penned musical about lovesick werewolves.

Nina Nastasia & Jim White, You Follow Me (10)

More stripped gothic folk from Nina, with Dirty Three’s Jim White moving up to name credit and bringing the sound a bit closer to Dresden Dolls with his upfront drumwork. I’m still more partial to the quieter, more saloon balladry sound of The Blackened Air.

Nouvelle Vague f/ Julie Delpy, LaLaLa (1)

Synthpop connousieurs Nouvelle Vague. Julie Delpy. A song called “LaLaLa.” It sells itself.

Michael Nyman, Six Celan Songs (6/7) / Acts of Beauty, Exit No Exit (16) / Man and Boy - Dada (19) / Love Counts (17/21)

Several new Nyman compositions for voice: Six Celan Songs are works composed for Ute Lemper from Paul Celan’s poetry; missing last track. Acts of Beauty, per the label, “is a song cycle based on miscellaneous texts on beauty from a 1556 text of Vincenzo Cartari, which looks at the measurements of beauty by comparing buttocks to beauty in the urban environment as viewed by Kurt Scwitters and Dzuga Vertov to Martial’s Epigrams on another kind of sexual measurement: the weighing of penis” (ah, art). Exit No Exit was originally part of the cheekily-titled Beckham Crosses, Nyman Scores project for the 2002 World Cup, incorporating commentary similar to Steve Reich’s Different Trains, but now rewritten with a bass clarinet replacing the commentary to serve as a commission for the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company. Man and Boy - Dada is a chamber opera featuring, per the title, a Dada artist and a young boy who shares his obsession with collecting bus tickets. Love Counts is another opera, featuring the unlikely love story of a divorced math professor and an illiterate prize fighter; sadly, much of the first act is currently missing.

Michael Nyman, Nyman Brass (17) / The Piano Sings (16) / Greenaway Revisited (12/13)

Also added are several collections of various Nyman scores. Nyman Brass focuses, as you’d likely guess, on his brass ensemble work and features selections from the previously-unreleased The Ogre plus The Libertine (17) and The Draughtman’s Contract. The Piano Sings in turn draws together selections from, naturally, The Piano as well as other major films (The Claim, Gattaca, Wonderland) plus smaller works (The Diary of Anne Frank, End of the Affair, and Man with a Movie Camera) all rendered as minimal, solo piano recordings. Greenaway Revisited is the most conventional, gathering together well-known tracks from five Greenaway films, such as Prospero’s Books and Drowning by Numbers - although the one suite from The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is, again, missing - albeit in a new recording at Abbey Road Studios.

Robert, Princesse de rien (14)

Another discovery prompted by “that cover looks interesting,” the French chanteuse Robert provides breathy, seductive baroque pop with some Kate Bush trills, darkwave synths, and minimal string and harpsichord accents. Even the opening song title, “L’appel de la succube” (Call of the Succubus) oozes with appeal. (If translated blogs are to be believed, Robert is often compared to Mylène Farmer.)

Princesse de Rien is Robert’s second album; the first, Sine (18), is more straightforward beat-driven pop, and features a cover of Kraftwerk’s “Das Modell”, which is always welcome. The third, Celle Qui Tue (13), is more varied, and contains lyrics written by award-winning Belgian novelist Amélie Northond. Northond also published a companion romanticized biography of the singer called “The Book of Proper Names” (literally “Robert des noms propres”), related via the hardscrabble life of an orphan named Plectrude who yearns to study ballet. As often happens, she is orphaned when her mother kills her father after arguing over what to name their expected child - “Wanting to call your child Tanguy or Joëlle is to offer them a world of mediocrity, with its horizons already limited.” Eventually Plectrude grows up to become a singer named Robert, at which point she kills Amélie Northond, for as the latter writes on the back cover, “For a writer, there is no greater temptation than to write the biography of your own killer.” This is then reflected within the songs written for the album, whose title after all means “She who kills” - and upon closer inspection, you can discern that the cover’s winsome bride is in fact holding a rifle. To which all I can say is…Dieu merci pour les françaises!

Brian Setzer & The Nashvillains, Red Hot Live! (16)

Setzer returns to foot-tapping, crowd-clapping, piano-plinking rockabilly (with a cleverly named backing band) after a series of retro-swing outings with the Brian Setzer Orchestra. The set also resurrects some Stray Cats’ standards like “Stray Cat Strut” and “Rock This Town.” No doubts that the audience is having a ball, as the band resurrects the heyday of rock euphoria.

Yoko Ueno, e-mix (10)

Another of those “thought I’d never find” releases, a limited Japanese-only remix EP by singer Yoko Ueno, who I discovered through Hyperium’s Heavenly Voices series with her aching, voice-as-offering-to-the-heavens “Aoife” - quite possibly the last song I want to hear before I die. That track appears on her Voices (10) album, now also available - and you are getting a much better deal than what I had to pay!

Free Stuff

A lot of individual tracks off various albums, best just to check the listing.

various, African Roots (14)

various, Elektrotribe - elektronic shapes vol1 (6)

various, Funk/Soul Revival (9)

various, Keeper of the Secret - Dionysus Records Sampler (25)

various, Manifest Destiny (10)

various, Samba Jazz & Brazilian Groove (3)

Cover > Music

Nell, A Million Faces (12)

Sadly rather nondescript pop (a song called “Happy Song”?), but the cover is all sass!

Saddest Artist Name

Homeless Balloon

Don’t you just want to cry? (sniff)

See Also

Architecture in Helsinki, Places Like This (10)

Chandeen, A Taste Like Ginger (15)

Noel Coward, At Las Vegas (12)

Hecate vs Lustmord, Law of the Battle of Conquest (4)

Interpol, Say Hello to the Angels/NYC (3)

Pieter Nooten, Ourspace (10)

The first release by Nooten I’ve seen apart from the gorgeous 4AD joint release with Michael Brook, Sleeps With the Fishes (15). (OurSpace could be the inevitable sequel to MySpace, “a place for couples.”)

Ophelia Ragtime Orchestra, Classic Ragtime (15)

Rebecca Pidgeon, Learn to Pray (4)

Four mixes of single from 2005’s Tough on Crime by Mrs. David Mamet.

Pixies, Surfer Rosa (Remastered) (13)

While remastering may or may not have a great effect on a band that sounds like The Pixies, but hey, a chance for a better-sounding “Gigantic” and “Where Is My Mind” is always welcome.

Raison D’Etre, Enthralled by the Wind of Loneliness (7)

Still hoping for more dark ambient from Cold Meat Industry, particularly earlier Morthund.

Kate Ryan, Alive EP (5) / Je t’adore EP (6)

Salt Tank, Eugina (2) / White Island EP (4)

Elliott Smith, Needle In The Hay (3) / Speed Trials (3)

Tears for Fears, Secret World (12)

µ-Ziq, Duntisbourne Abbots Soulmate Devastation Technique (17)

various, Kids in the Hall - Brain Candy OST (17)

various, New Music Masters (6)

‘Modern classical’ works by contemporary composers like Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt, and Henryk Gorecki.

various, Surrealism Reviewed (15)

Audio snippets and lectures from Marchel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, and other surrealist contemporaries.

Value

Steve Roach, Fever Dreams III (9)

Second disc is a single 72-minute mix.

NotePods (1)

Audio summaries of classics, mostly Shakespeare at present. Not sure if they merit more than the podcasts I’m sure already exist.