Fax "Yo Recuerdo"

Artist: Fax
Album: Yo Recuerdo
Label: Static Discos
Release date: 13 May 2008
Genre: Electronic
Style: Ambient Techno/Downtempo/Shoegazing
RIYL: Farben, Murcof, Anders Ilar

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Tracklisting:
01. Intro
02. Cuarto Para Tres
03. Concreto
04. Cielo Rojo
05. Rota
06. Yo Recuerdo (I Remember)
07. Bosque
08. Tormenta De Arena
09. Millas
10. Cuarto Para Tres (Dance Mix)
Total running time: 51' 39"

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[Fax - Open MySpace page]

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[Fax - Live]

"Moments of heartbreak, the slow-burning return of memories and evenings spent all night wired seem to all appear and flow through Fax’s latest release Yo Recuerdo. Moving away ever so slightly from his earlier, darker recordings, Ruben Tamayo, who is Fax, reduces the beat ratio in favour warmly treated guitars and synth haze. Closely related to Fourtet’s “Rounds” of a few years back this album appears slow and sweet whilst washing in wonderful swathes of rounded, reverberating sound.

As mentioned above, the tracks feel like the hours just prior to and surrounding sunrise. The beats are soft and warm, like knocking blocks of wood together while the bass travels long and low beside. The album picks up the pace about half-way through on ‘Rota’, a thudding heart-beat around which a simple guitar line is allowed to flutter and slide. Its so rare to hear an electronica artist utilise this many guitars in their recordings and it seems that wherever they can be drawn out by the ear they shimmer and move lightly through and occasionally appearing at the fore as major motifs. The two vocal tracks ‘Yo Recuerdo’ and ‘Tormenta De Arena’ feature Uriel Villalobos of Mexican rock group Perdutto, and the Argentinean singer Florencia Ruiz respectively. Both tracks are given to the singers as dreamscapes almost, their voices being allowed to move through the songs in a similarly sleepy wandering way. Which is not to say they sound tired or pedestrian, its more like they’re running through their nostalgias in the hours before sleep, allowing Fax to create the mood and setting.

For all its night-time visions and breathy remembering the Yo Recuerdo is wonderfully bright as a release. Its soft and warm and light and airy and makes you want to quickly opt out of this interminable winter in search of some Mexican wonderland of warm, eternal dawn." [Cyclic Defrost]

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Atlas Sound "Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel"

Artist: Atlas Sound
Album: Let The Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel
Label: Kranky
Release date: 19 February 2008
Genre: Rock
Style: Experimental Rock/Shoegazing/Lo-Fi
RIYL: Excepter, My Bloody Valentine

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Tracklisting:
01. A Ghost Story
02. Recent Bedroom
03. River Card
04. Quarantined
05. On Guard
06. Winter Vacation
07. Cold As Ice
08. Scraping Past
09. Small Horror
10. Ready, Set, Glow
11. Bite Marks
12. After Class
13. Ativan
14. Let The Blind Lead Those Who See But Cannot Feel
Total running time: 50' 10"

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[Atlas Sound - Open MySpace Standalone Music Player]

"In his day job as front man of Deerhunter, Bradford Cox exhibits a plethora of musical psyches that make for the most flabbergasting of split personalities that one band can have when speaking of the structure variety each song contains. Even though their heady brew of ethos makes for some of the most impending of avant punk, Cox has stepped aside for a second and taken up the Atlas Sound moniker on what is an ostentatious pop sojourn into his creative aesthetic. In the end, saying that he merely pushes the envelope would be an understatement.

The album is a mostly disparate concoction of wheezing drum machines and crisp layers of cinematic modulations intertwined with Cox's lethargic melodies. Cold and sweet all at once while perched atop a reef of moody Krautrock, Let the Blind Lead has a progression that melts more than it floats.

The mixing skills from Brain Foote of label mates Nudge is spot on in how the assortment of vibraphones, African bells, glockenspiels, dulcimers and metallaphones are all but vaporized with the pulp set aside so that their sounds seep out like hissing gases of Eno druthers. One could say that it's holistic when listened to from beginning to end but not in a crunchy way. Never has an artist cut something with a catatonic vibe that is all so liberating, thanks in part to Cox's dulcet vocals and smelting polyrhythms, which mostly serve as the album's core of sluggish tempos. Since time immemorial the term "ocean floor droning" has been used to coin music similar to this but Atlas Sound is a close parallel to the Blade Runner soundtrack having the artiest of indie pop scissor hand treatment being performed on it at the bottom of the Mariana Trench." [URB]

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The Jesus And Mary Chain "Psychocandy"

Artist: The Jesus And Mary Chain
Album: Psychocandy
Label: Blanco Y Negro
Release date: February 1985
Genre: Rock
Style: Shoegazing, Indie Rock
RIYL: My Bloody Valentine, Ride

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Tracklisting:
01. Just Like Honey
02. The Living End
03. Taste The Floor
04. The Hardest Walk
05. Cut Dead
06. In A Hole
07. Taste Of Cindy
08. Some Candy Talking
09. Never Understand
10. Inside Me
11. Sowing Seeds
12. My Little Underground
13. You Trip Me Up
14. Something's Wrong
15. It's So Hard
Total running time: 42' 41"

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[The Jesus And Mary Chain - Open MySpace Standalone Music Player]

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[The Jesus And Mary Chain - Never Understand - Video Clip]

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[The Jesus And Mary Chain - Interview (1986) - French subtitles]

"The Jesus and Mary Chain is a riddle, a conundrum, a source of confusion and anxiety, a love-'em-or-hate-'em proposition. Obviously schooled in the aesthetics of noise and punk and simpleminded pop, the Jesus and Mary Chain is a perfect recombinant of every Edge City outlaw ethic ever espoused in rock.

With the willful and deliberate abandon of postpunk ghouls, they rape and pillage everything you've ever loved: the Phil Spector "Be My Baby" drum tat-too, the sweet abrasion of the Velvet Underground, the velocity and mangled pop of the Ramones, the black-leather sloganeering of Suicide, the lovable incompetence of Sixties garage bands, the shrill, screaming, grinding industrial pandemonium of SPK and Throbbing Gristle. The big question arises: Is the Jesus and Mary Chain the real thing, or is it a shrewd package job for critics and would-be iconoclasts?

The album title Psychocandy sums it up with alarming accuracy. This is the opposite of sugarcoating the pill; it's like wrapping sandpaper around a Tootsie Pop. The veneer is gritty and inedible, the next layer is hard and crunchy, the core is soft and chewy. These are kids after all, which just might be their saving grace. If indeed they are a superficial and diluted version of the most hard-core and dangerous elements in the rock lexicon, maybe they are too young to care.

For all its chain-saw screech and übermetallic badness, the Jesus and Mary Chain is a pop band with doo-doo-doos and la-la-las, simple melodies and full echoing production around Jim Reid's laconic Lou Reed-like monotone. William Reid's guitar parts blast shards of maniacal feedback across the underpinnings of Douglas Hart's bass lines. And in true Mo Tucker stand-up fashion, Bobby Gillespie keeps the beat uncomplicated and direct.

It's obvious to the point of inanity that the Velvet Underground is the pure and adult model for the self-consciously evil xerography of the Jesus and Mary Chain. Perhaps these are the days of whining neuroses and the function of the Jesus and Mary Chain is to make ruthless, gut-bending noise safe for the airwaves. But, then again, if they can actually get their holocaustic guitar squall on the radio, maybe they're doing us all some kind of public service." [source]

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Bitcrush "In Distance"

Artist: Bitcrush
Album: In Distance
Label: n5MD
Release date: 15 May 2006
Genre: Electronic
Style: Indietronica/Shoegazing/Ambient

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Tracklisting:
01. Post
02. Falling Inward
03. Colder
04. In Distance
05. Song For Three
06. Drop Entitled
07. And Triage
08. Every Ghost Has It's Spectre
09. The 2AM Edit
Total running time: 67' 57"

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[Bitcrush - Open MySpace Standalone Music Player]

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[Bitcrush - Colder - Video Clip]

"Mike Cadoo has nurtured his own sound for many years, once a part of the now-defunct Gridlock duo, and expressing gritty drum'n bass under the Dryft moniker, his most personal work as Bitcrush is a defining sound that has now fully established itself on In Distance. An album that will certainly target a new group of fans to the label, In Distance's thick guitar riffs, scraping ambient infiltrations, processed lyrical whispers and live drums consistently evoke feelings of temptation, imagination and creative reflection. The electrical pulse of Enarc (Component Records) is not entirely stripped; on In Distance the melodies collide and fall against smooth compositional layering and gentle guitar moments brush against gritty beats that build and decompose often in the same track.

Shimmer & Fade, the MP3 release on en:peg, n5MD's digital division, displayed what would soon evolve into In Distance. Crashing vocals and deeply integrated emotions somehow intensify the listeners moods in any direction or path. "Post" opens up with a slow building guitar melody and a calming ambient current until the beats break out mid-way through and the lyrics "I can no longer follow, I can no longer do this anyway" casually repeat with amazing effect. "Falling Inward" comes very close to Ulrich Schnauss' uplifting mesh of percussion, ambience and continual growth within 9-minutes. It's a signature sound that elevates this album into a field that is not electronic at all but rather alive in its feeling and overall mood. The closure to "Falling Inward" is perhaps the most inspirational moment on the album --not as easy to describe with words, as it does with sound, but "Falling Inward" is an emotional journey that doesn't let go. "Colder" is yet another highlight on In Distance, the shortest track of the nine included herein --it glows like no other. The aged beat work and melodic push of this track is as captivating as gliding through a dream sequence that tugs at your heartstrings every mile of the way. The title track, "In Distance," has a more distinct pulse filled with traditional instrumentation and stretched vocals that appear ever so faintly as the chorus line unveils itself in full color. "Song for Three" has a similar feeling --slowly punctuating guitars drift amongst an all-consuming beat that holds your thoughts firmly until its release in the last few minutes. "Drop Entitled" will certainly appeal to indie fans and college radio DJ's --heavy guitars smashing against intense percussion and flowing ambient permutations; it begins to tear apart in its final moments leaving you to gently push repeat on your CD player without hesitation.

On the 11-minute "And Triage," one of the finest moments of In Distance, time means nothing at all in the big picture. Images of times gone by and memories left to grow are nurtured within this track. The first few minutes are slightly intensified --a casual beat patters against your heart until a climactic beginning opens at the center of it all. And just when you thought "And Triage" would slide away into your subconscious, it breaks down into severed elements of itself and begins to gradually take you under its wing three-quarters of the way through. And with a splash of amazing distortion, decay and utmost clarity "And Triage" lifts you into the stratosphere and simply lets go just as quickly. Not only a piece of this huge puzzle that is In Distance, "And Triage" is an entity like no other.

"Every Ghost has its Spectre" and the closing "The 2am Edit" are two gradual pieces of time that are augmented by pure ambient propulsion and sonic passages of human thought. "Every Ghost has its Spectre" speaks subliminally with its softly spoken vocals and casual stream of consciousness while "The 2am Edit" offers a 10-minute voyage of Orb styled ambiences and thought provoking movements in minimalism.

In Distance is Bitcrush's most personal piece of work. Capturing over an hours worth of gravitational elegance wrapped in shredded atmospheres and drenched guitar work, this is perhaps n5MD's most ambitious release and one that will certainly appeal to a larger crowd resting outside of the experimental electronic music sphere. The question remains, however, will this album ever be topped? It's a difficult thought to imagine, so we'll leave that with Bitcrush to decide. Prepare to go the distance and to come back again for yet another trip into an avalanche of audio beauty that is locked in distance." [source]

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