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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Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti "Worn Copy"

Artist: Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti
Album: Worn Copy
Label: Paw Tracks
Release date: 2005
Genre: Rock
Style: Psychedelic Rock/Lo-Fi/Experimental Rock
RIYL: Animal Collective, Panda Bear

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Tracklisting:
01. Trepanated Earth
02. Immune To Emotion
03. Jules Lost His Jewels
04. Artifact
05. Bloody! (Bagonia's)
06. Credit
07. Life in L.A.
08. The Drummer
09. Cable Access Follies
10. Creepshow
11. One On One
12. Oblivious Peninsula
13. Somewhere In Europe/Hotpink!
14. Thespian City
15. Crybaby
16. Foilly Foilbles/GOLD
17. Jagged Carnival Tours
Total running time: 76' 12"

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[Ariel Pink - Jagged Carnival Tours - Video Clip]

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[Ariel Pink - Thespian City - Live @ Tiny Creatures]

"Worn Copy deserves a place in a museum, stored in a vitrine and observed with hushed regard. It's indisputably a pure burst of unmatched, solitary creativity. The only question left is which one: the Folk Art Museum or the Museum of Television and Radio.

On the side of the short-wave buffs, Worn Copy is a premier example of the influence radio has had on American culture. The 75 minutes of song pastiche bear the influence of popular rock, dance, and soul from the latter half of the twentieth century, but not the clear sound of new vinyl on a hi-fi, or the blasting electricity of a live performance. This is an album written by someone whose primary source of music must have been a radio. The sounds phase in and out, their volumes changing as if the signal has briefly disappeared. The tones are fuzzy and muted, with the same lack of highs and lows that brought AM radio to its knees at the arrival of the sharper FM. Songs switch styles as abruptly as a listless hand surfing the stations.

The songwriter and musician, Ariel Pink, who created and recorded Worn Copy almost entirely on his own, mixes psychedelic '60s rock, '70s Californian jazz-funk, and '80s pop of Duran Duran and the Cars. These 8-track recordings can be both deceptively accomplished and then suddenly drop all pretense of technique, such as in the reverb-heavy "One on One", which feels like a meeting of the minds between the Velvet Underground and Jefferson Airplane.

Like most of us, Pink seems to have received the majority of his early exposure to popular music through radio, whether the faint sounds of college stations or the afternoon drive-time rock station. An impressive aspect of this influence is the incorporation into his songs of an essential element of commercial radio: the commercials. The track "Credit" turns a satirical commercial jingle into the song's core melodic hook, as inane and insanely unforgettable as any real one. "Cable Access Follies", a trashcan funk track with layered, bass vocals, emotionally glorifies the joys of cable TV.

His record might be a useful cultural artifact for the Smithsonian, but as an artist he clearly seems more comfortable in the realm of outsider artists rather than the gallery establishment. Pink seems almost begging to be labeled a "freak." The publicity photo that came with the CD showed Pink shirtless and strung out, his contorted face covered in what I have to assume is only stage blood. His combination of self- and mass-produced elements to create an original yet uncomfortably familiar final work makes for an easy fit with the outsider art of such visual artists as Henry Darger and Eugene Von Bruenchenheim. Like these solitary artists, Pink created hundreds of songs by himself. The lengthy Worn Copy is nothing compared to the potential magnum opus he might have arranged.

But Pink is not a freak. Outsider status is just like any other artistic authenticity debate -- cool, punk, and now freak are intangible labels that can really only be conferred posthumously. Pink is very much alive, and no longer a misunderstood loner. For one, he's enjoying some moderate recognition while still alive, something most outsider artists almost by definition never do. Darger and Bruenchenheim might never have been moved to create such vast collections of bizarre artwork if they had been given attention in their own time (Darger's drawings might easily have got him arrested, even). Like Devendra Banhart, another young singer crowned with the dubious appellation of "freak," a continuing, successful career as a musician almost instantly tarnishes the crown.

Worn Copy is a reissue of an older record, its material recorded in 2002 and 2003. His first record for Paw Tracks, The Doldrums, appeared last year but was recorded between 1999 and 2000. What can come next? The music of 1997 to 1998, or will Pink be able to return to his hermitage in California and, impervious to his recent shades of success and attention, create another epic ramble as compelling and singular as Worn Copy? I'm not sure what effect it might have on the man's sanity, but for the listener's sake I can't help but wish that he'd been left undiscovered for a few more years, able only to tune in to his own inner bandwidth for comfort." [PopMatters]

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Arcade Fire "Christmas Album"

Artist: Arcade Fire
Album: Christmas Album
Label: Unreleased
Recording date: 2002
Genre: Rock
Style: Lo-Fi/Indie Rock

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Tracklisting:
01. Chestnuts Roasting
02. Oh Holy Night
03. Jinglebell Rock
04. A Very Arcade Xmas
05. It Clouded Fully (Brendan)
06. The Spartans (Brendan)
07. In The Attic (Boston)
08. Asleep At The Wheel
09. Old Flame
10. Submarine
11. In The Backseat
12. Headlights
Total running time: 47' 35"

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[Arcade Fire - Laika - Video Clip]

"Arcade Fire's 2002 Christmas Album was recorded well before the band's first EP and the full length Funeral and never officially released. It was recorded at a party in Win and Régine's apartment, and Win claims that he is not singing in the recordings. Instead, his friends imitate his voice. Copies were distributed to friends and family of the band and some digital copies still circulate on file-sharing sites today.

The album features a quirky mix of holiday covers and early versions of original songs—some of which were later released as part of Arcade Fire EP and Funeral." [source]

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PJ Harvey "White Chalk"

Artist: PJ Harvey
Album: White Chalk
Label: Island
Release date: 24 September 2007
Genre: Rock
Style: Lo-Fi/Indie Rock

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Tracklisting:
01. The Devil
02. Dear Darkness
03. Grow Grow Grow
04. When Under Ether
05. White Chalk
06. Broken Harp
07. Silence
08. To Talk To You
09. The Piano
10. Before Departure
11. The Mountain
Total running time: 33' 53"

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[PJ Harvey - White Chalk - Live in Denmark]

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[PJ Harvey - Silence - Live in Denmark]

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[PJ Harvey - Interview excerpt]

"In the early Nineties, much to her consternation, PJ Harvey was acclaimed as Dorset's sole advocate of riot grrl, the short-lived feminist, feral niece of grunge. Such a take on Harvey was understandable: a fearless post-punk Patti Smith tutored in the blues, she wrote songs in which she pilloried her lover's failings ('You leave me dry,' ran 1993's 'Dry') and, typically, appeared on stage clad in Dr Martens, as if underscoring her uncompromising stance.

Since then Harvey has tried on a number of different guises, vividly aware of the perils of stasis. She has been an understated rock traditionalist (Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, which won the Mercury Music Prize in 2001) and, on 1995's To Bring You My Love tour, a catsuit-flaunting, heavily made-up female caricature, shocking those empowered by her previous reluctance to capitalise on her femininity.
Nothing Harvey has done in the past, however, can prepare you for her eighth album, White Chalk, whose cover is as singular as the tunes therein. Sat upright in a long white dress, hands resting on her lap, her anaemic features just about discernible, Harvey resembles a Victorian governess whose joyless gaze suggests she is no stranger to heartache. It's an impression lent further weight by the opener, 'The Devil', wherein she sings 'All of my being is now in pining' over a twinkling, ominous piano, her voice that of a schoolgirl mature beyond her years.

Stranger still than the girlish pitch that she adopts throughout - which, improbably, is incredibly affecting - is Harvey's decision to relinquish the guitar, the instrument on which she's relied for all these years. Pleasingly, however, her audacity pays off, chiefly since White Chalk's driving force, the piano, serves to underline the skeletal beauty of the songs, whether it's the cobwebbed gothic-folk of 'Dear Darkness' ('Dear darkness, I've been your friend for many years') or the dream-like 'To Talk to You'. Here, as if to emphasise the distance she has travelled since White Chalk's predecessor, Uh Huh Her, on which she screamed 'Who the fuck? Get your comb out of there' in the direction of a hapless hairdresser, Harvey converses with her late grandmother. 'Oh grandmother, how I miss you,' she mutters, softly, unable to hit the notes that lie just out of reach, mirroring a young Bjork too outre for the school choir.

This combination of innocence and gloom informs every second of White Chalk. Witness the title track, a paean to Dorset's hills, that while as lovely as anything in 'rock', concludes with Harvey whispering 'there's blood all on my hands'. Witness, too, the singer's tale of an unborn child, 'When Under Ether', a harrowing lullaby, and 'Broken Harp' which starts with a desperate admission ('Please don't reproach me for how empty my life has become') and ends, appropriately, with a cushioned sigh.

Perhaps her pain is all a pose, convincing though it is. Either way, of all Harvey's numerous personae this latest one, the friendless soul adrift in a cruel world, is the guise for which she has spent 15 years preparing. Next time around, who knows, she just might repeat herself." [source]

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