Xiu Xiu - Fabulous Muscles

I've been moping around with a hole in me. Something important has been missing for quite a long time. I haven't heard an album so complex, colorful, texturized, deep and unique that I actually enjoyed for months now. Something that I can listen to over and over and get something new out of it every time I experience it. Something that is before it's time. Last masterpiece of an album according to my criteria that I've found was Burial's Untrue, Gang Gang Dance's Saint Dymphna or Flying Lotus' Cosmogramma. It's been at least a year. So I've been looking for something to fill that void for about a month now.

Xiu Xiu's Fabulous Muscles is an old album, 6 years now, and it's better than it should be. Thats the problem with a lot of great albums. They're before their time. Kid A, Bitches Brew, Remain In Light... you know what I'm talking about.

The album is dark to say the least, but it's not depressing. There's so much emotion, and variety in the emotion. It's something I've never heard in music before. It drags you down to a dark places, makes you feel like you're all the way at the bottom, where there's no light. Then it takes you back up in a split second in a gust of alive emotion, only to drop you back on your face again. It's what I'd imagine The Cure's Disintegration to had sounded like by the kids in '89. It's raw, it's noisy and beautiful yet it's exceptionably coherent for such an experimental sound.

Man Man - Six Demon Bag

I’m not much of an Animal Collective fan anymore. There was a phase when I get together with friends and we’d indulge on hallucinogens while listening to Strawberry Jam. It’s a phase long gone now, just like the classic rock phase. It was good at the time, and played a large role in shaping my music tastes.

There’s been a lot of bands basing their sound off of Animal Collective lately. They take that wavy, dream, overly happy highly original sound and rehash it with out adding anything original to it (and if they do it’s no good). Then there is Man Man. Call them Animal Collectives evil brother.

Six Demon Bag is a stomper. It sounds like straight up Viking/Eastern European/Gypsy/Circus music all combined into one violent mess. It’s like a drunken Beirut on a coke binge singing war songs. It’s an album for steampunks. What I really enjoy about the album is how all the instruments that you will rarely ever hear anywhere else play such a huge role in the sound. Hell, I don’t even think there’s any guitar at all on the album. There’s a great sense of variety as well. You’d expect the sound to be gimmicky and get old after a song or two, but it’s not the case at all. You’ll be so intrigued and wanting more, curiously wondering what’s next. Such a fun band.

Pretty Lights - Spilling Over Every Side

This is part 2 of a 3 part series of EPs that Vincent Smith is putting out while on tour this year. The first one was excellent, and it's not like I had any hope for it after the terrible third album. I mean that this was bad. Once the popularity and festival fame hit, it went to his head and his music lost the 'soul' half of the sound, leaving nothing but glitchy electro, even going a little dubstep in some places... Anyone can make that, and it wasn't even good. So he came back strong stuffing the soul back into the sound on these EPs, bringing back that urban rainy night thing.

The six tracks on the EP are pretty long, seven minute average. Usually thats not a problem for a pretty lights song. Hell, Take Away The Sun is a solid ten minutes, and it's a great track. The difference now is that those tracks would travel, the song would progress and go somewhere, the tracks on the new EP are just too tedious. I guess it's just an EP so it's not a huge problem. But my biggest disappointment towards the new EP is that there's nothing that sounds like the unique Understand Me Now from part 1 of the EP series. I almost expected it lack anything like it, because it was just so incredibly good, his most soulful sound, no question.

The Flashbulb - Arboreal

Most great music demands patience. Granted, sitting down a devoting 70 minutes to listening to an album isn't an easy thing to do. But sometimes thats what needs to be done. A great album is a journey somewhere. And this album is a car ride right into an electrical storm. The Flashbulb is a IDM/Breakcore project that combines glitchy electronic percussion over beautiful lush soundscapes of orchestral music. It's like Squarepusher mixed with Thee Silver Mt. Zion.

Each track on the album is a completely separate part, unique from any other. When you listen to just one track, you feel like you were shown a glimpse into a new future world. But when song after song is played, you keep going further and deeper into this unknown future, and all you want to do is see more, and before you know it, seven tracks have pasted by. The sound is so atmospheric in a completely futuristic way that it really provokes your imagination. Once the album concludes, you're left wondering what you just saw. Its like seeing a really complex and intelligent movie, and you sit there trying to put everything together.