Third hard to find album from this reknowned NY trio (featuring Samara Lubelski, Theo Angell and Dan Brown) who channel the palm prints of Angus MacLise and Terry Jennings into whole new vectors of tone, colour and zig-zag shape. On Siltbreeze.

Debut album from this Louisville big band that features Kris Abplanalp of Valley Of Ashes/Virgin Eye alongside Aaron Rosenblum of Son Of Earth, bassist David Sauter, guitarist/organist Lowe Sutherland, Rawsenio aka The Raw Thug on percussion, synth, electronics and violin, Dominic Cipolla on drums and Steve Good on reeds. The instrumental tracks pitch Silence-scale dirge muscle and a nodding backwoods psych style that slouches through constellations of string huzz with alla the anti-gravity grace of late Tower Recordings or Fairport Convention circa "A Sailor's Life" with a touch of the Palace Brothers/Dirty Three swamp style while the vocal/song pieces sound more like the kind of hysterical glam thud of UK festival satellites like Alex Harvey, T. Rex and Edgar Broughton, albeit executed with a post-Rock mindset.

Italian free music trio that combines overblown reed firepower with punk primitive energy assassination, hysterical vocals, manipulated tapes and some beautifully sleazy No Wave raunch appeal. Pretty much explodes the territory that would divide Harry Pussy and James Chance & The Contortions.

Limited two-track 7” in a run of 400 copies from this great band who manage to combine an almost classic 60s/70s rock/cowpunk delivery with a barbarous destructo edge, powerful vox and a recording aesthetic that would blow up the backline altogether, leaving a guitar banging a bunch of chords lifted straight from The Birthday Party and played early Rough Trade-style. A side is the raunch, the flip is more hypnotic and minimal. Both rule.

Debut Siltbreeze album (their second long-player to date) from this San Francisco-based avant-garage group. Hank IV play desperate man-style punk in the vein of Minute To Pray-era Flesheaters. Throw in some of the sociopathic scorch of The Pagans and touches of earlier Siltbreeze satellites like Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments and you got a great pro-rock primitive, one that combines accelerated jams with gut-busting vocals and the kinda furious delivery that makes it sound totally non-contemporary.

Debut LP from this group after a buncha collectable 7s. The sound here is less overtly DIY than their early sides might suggest, with an uncanny feel for rock-form freedom that at points sounds as lubricated as Dez Cadena-era Black Flag if they hadda been shooting for a more specifically post-Beefheart freak aspect. The whole group have a lolloping, crude desert feel that combines garage gasoline and feral/sophisto Trout Mask smarts like no one this side of The Flesheaters, even as they reduce the pugilistic hardcore of that group to monosyllabic extended single chord jams and choruses of leary tongue. I mean, it’s still possible to hear alla the UK DIY influence that scarred their singles but there’s something more classic USA garage wipe-out to this album that makes it sound even meatier and worthy of repeat spins.

“Sensacao Do Principio is the third release proper from Tropa Macaca and their first with an American label. Their previous efforts on Ruby Red and Qbico were magnificent (though hard to find) efforts of blotted, aural sci-fi codifications somewhere between Anar Band and Blues Control. The two-track full-length continues their foray into post-psychedelic instrumental morphine, where Moolah's LP and Pink Floyd's "Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict" function as templates for the greater good. In other words, you gotta hear if for yourself.” – Tom Lax.

Thrilling document of the more radically deconstructive side of the Butte County Free Music Society (whose Induced Musical Spasticity box set is a mandatory purchase), with a bunch of sound actions drawn from 1984-1986. Brent Lewis Ensemble come across like a darker, more occult Glands Of External Secretion, combining the goof-off Scientific American appeal of the early LAFMS broadcasts with outer space shortwave and electro-acoustic group actions that would conjure the ghosts of Taj Mahal Travellers and The Skaters. Another fantastic trawl through an alternate 1980s: “As part of the 25th anniversary of the Butte County Free Music Society, "Three Christs Of Ypsilanti" follows "Induced Musical Spasticity" 4xLP (BUFMS, 2009) and roughly coincides with "The Bren’t Lewiis Ensemble’s At the North Pole, Easter Day, 1982" (upcoming on What The...?) and, if the master tapes rescue succeeds, the soundtrack to "Esther’s Brother Is Missing by Maria Estevez". Recording and performing primarily in the mid- to late 1980s, with sporadic efforts in the early 1990s, this barely organized enclave based in rural Northern California ingests and disgorges outsider free music à la Smegma and other bent LAFMS trippers, the UK’s A Band, 5 Starcle Men, and the sort of visionaries currently promoted by labels such as Chocolate Monk, Destijl, and Ultra Eczema. Members of the Brent Lewis Ensemble later migrated to Vomit Launch, Glands of External Secretion, The Idiot, Needles, Serious Prblmz, and Bananafish magazine. Each side of "Three Christs Of Ypsilanti" is dominated by tracks whose lengths meander into double digits. On Side A, “Take It Out and Kill It” is a murky glance at mortification via caninicide, with its ancillary fleas, cockroaches, and especially worms. This is the only large group recording on the album, and as such whirls around in conflicting directions in a manner that one backwater critic long ago described as “schizophrenic muzak.” A completely different version of this track was previously released on the Maggie Is a Dot cassette in 1984. On Side B, “Dark Surprise,” a 1986 recording from the crossroads of DIY autism and darkened psychedelia, is previously unreleased (the first playback of the master tape didn’t happen until 2008). In contrast to the group’s usual embrace of any and all kitchen sinks at hand, the recording was made solely with electric guitars, voice, and prerecorded audio frottage. Book-ending both sides are shorter tracks (average length: two minutes); these four excerpts from an after-hours, no-audience guerilla action were recorded in a multistory, split-level university student union, using hurled cafeteria cutlery, defective boomboxes and answering machines blaring prerecorded tape, the public piano, and a variety of unidentified flailing objects. All were previously released on the "Mary Jane" cassette in 1983. '[As] secretive as a posse’ve Masons bidding in a goat auction … a weird, befuddlin storm comin’ outta the night … tryin’ to charm you into the muddy arms of the undertow' — Roland Woodbe, Siltblog

Call it whatever the fuck you want, but Siltbreeze has always been a Rock label. And this new album from Mount Carmel pretty much seals the deal, a set of greasy Southern rock/biker anthems that take off on the style of Endless Boogie but with a more primitive/authentic edge and some explosive Hendrix/Cream/Blue Cheer style soloing. The production is garage-perfect thanks to the presence of Mike Rep behind the desk. A timely reconnection to the source from SB.

New album from Kevin Failure aka Pink Reason is a blindsider: the whole thing kicks off with “Holding On”, a song that combines the kind of crude drum’n’bass breakbeat style of Derek Bailey’s notorious Guitar Drums N Bass recording with a vibe that reminds so heavily of Jim Shepard’s classic Picking Through The Wreckage With a Stick it’ll have you hallucinating Midwestern Industrial flatlands w/secret bunkers where the reels are always rolling. There’s still a nicely stoned Twisted Village feel to much of this – “I Just Leave” could almost have fallen off the back of Luxurious Bags’ amazing Frayed Knots – but it has a desperate edge and the kind of thick drug haze that should appeal to connoisseurs of the most fucked-up postcards from oblivion. Plus the guy has a feel for the sound of brokedown that could almost be The Shadow Ring. But it’s the raging “Sixteen Years” that’s the album’s highlight and just might be the most euphorically powerful slice of sociopathic garage this guy has ever penned. If you’ve never checked in before, believe me, now is the time. Can’t stop playing this. Just don’t mention Fat John! Comes with a download. Recommended.

Edition of 330 copies from this much-vaunted Philadelphia four-piece featuring Meg Baird of Espers on drums. However, this has about as much to do w/Espers proper as a studded codpiece, with an A side written by Richie Charles that comes over like a steamroller driven through Bloodstains Across Birmingham and a cover of Lou Reed’s “Leave Me Alone” on the flip that sounds like a Dictators rehearsal on downs. Classy sub-NY snot rock rendered with, uh, cyclopean grace.

Massively unlikely public service reissue of what was originally a very obscure cassette released on a made to order basis and only briefly available at gigs in 1983. Above Ground were a  phenomenal though short-lived group with tentacles deep in New Zealand’s Christchurch DIY scene in the early 80s and featured Bill Direen of Vacuum/Builders, Carol Direen, Maryrose Crook of Max Block/Renderers and Stuart Page of Axemen. The sound is the kind of dream excavation of proto-Velvet Underground garage cut up w/primitive smears of organ that situate it somewhere downwind of the Modern Lovers Cale demos and garage rockers like The Seeds and The Music Machine. But it’s all cut up with that amazing early NZ avant garage sound that inevitably gives the nod to The Fall and contemporary UK DIY while pushing the basic group format into various states of collapse, with staggering rhythms and obsessively circling guitars over ‘songs’ that confuse The Magic Band with The Shadow Ring. There’s a great mix of styles here, with looser live tracks combined with more hermetic home recorded experiments that really give you an idea of the breadth of influences and the degree of experimentation that went on in the early years of the Christchurch explosion. If you’re in any way tuned-in to the minutiae of this particular scene – and if you’re not, what the hell are you doing following VT? – then this is a necessary and fascinating piece of the puzzle that sits neatly alongside your Vacuum, Builders, Krytpton Ten, Pin Group, Scorched Earth Policy, Terminals and Victor Dimisich Band releases. Massive kudos to Siltbreeze for rescuing this gem. Comes with a free download too. Highly recommendced!