Format: lp

The Cherry Blossoms - Mystery Meet ()

LP Edition of 400 Includes Download and Insert. $20 Vinylization of an insane and legendary CDR that Nashville’s Cherry Blossoms collective issued when they did a 2007 tour of Upper and Lower Rangoon with Josephine Foster as a special guest member.  The Cherry Blossoms are a musical entity not easily described, but I feel as though their essential whatsis was grasped by Michael Hurley. We were talking a few weeks ago and when the Blossoms were mentioned, Mike said, “Oh Yeah. I remember the last time I played a gig with those guys. Their van pulled up, and each of them got out, already playing an instrument and singing, and each of them was doing a different song.” And so… Read more »

Leaf Peepers - Lunchtime For Birdy ()

LP edition of 200 / Numbered / includes a download code slip with LP. Loose Leaf covers and back Risograph Printed at Looky Here in Greenfield MA. OUT OF PRINT Bandcamp  First graspable release by Leaf Peepers, a Massachusetts duo comprised of Turner Falls’ Omeed Goodzari and Worcester’s Nick Bisceglia. Omeed is well-known hereabouts as member of Donkey No No, and also for his solo recordings, which include the superb Zoltar Hid All the Locks/Minnows LP (FTR 349). Nick has recorded with his band Husks, and has also participated on sessions by Wendy Eisenberg and Chris Weisman among others. In fact, the both of them helped out on Chris’s last album, Romantics, Be that as it may, the sound of… Read more »

Ryan Power - Mind The Neighbors ()

LP Edition of 250 OUT OF PRINT BANDCAMP Music doesn’t have to be self-expression, but for Ryan Power that’s the only way it can be. Every note, melody, turn of phrase, and point of view in Power’s carefully-crafted songs is intravenously infused with his particular way of moving through the world. It’s a curious, probing, never-satisfied mode; he’s always searching for the perfect combination of chords, the most precise arrangement of words, the most complete capturing of a mood. As one song on his eighth album Mind the Neighbors puts it, his songs are “dreams on the run”–part of an exhilarating chase for elusive ideals. That chase leads to some wonderfully weird discoveries. On the wind-blown “The Slime,” sweetened tones… Read more »

iji - ST ()

LP edition of 500.   Stereogum Video Premiere     Something To Say (Official Video) $20 Graded On A Curve  iji (pronounced “ee-hee”) is songwriter Zach Burba’s tenured, transcendental pop coalition. Bred in Phoenix and fully flowered in Seattle, iji has been touring the American underground for 14 years, releasing a countless number of beloved LPs and tapes and pressing pause only for Zach to join the roving swarms of friends like Mega Bog, Dear Nora, and Clyde Peterson, whose Torrey Pines film featured a live touring soundtrack by Zach and others. iji, their self-titled 11th release, is a crucial wander through a gummy jungle that thrums with living things. Sounds plink, waft, and effervesce in friendly color changes, energetic yet gentle in expressions of patient-hearted pop. On first listen, it is easy… Read more »

Million Brazilians - Urban Fossickated Octave ()

LP edition of 250. OUT OF PRINT Beautiful new LP (the seventh, I believe), from this wonderfully abstract outfit, who were birthed in the shadow of Smegma (Portland, OR), but have since relocated to Maine.  The foundational members of the band are Grant Corum (keyboards, vocals, tin whistle, vocals) and Suzanne Stone (alto sax, khene, vocals). For this album, recorded by Big Blood’s Caleb Mulkerin, they are joined by Caleb himself (tape loops & treatments) and Tom Kovacevic (piano & synth), both of whom played together back in Cerberus Shoals. The quartet is hot. Even when it’s a trio.  The music has a blocked-out and dreamy quality, with jazzoid touches and perhaps less of an ethnographic quality than some of… Read more »

Eugene Chadbourne - Solo Guitar Volume 4 1/3 ()

LP Edition of 400 $19 Eugene Chadbourne is one of the great guitar players of the modern era. When he began recording in Canada in 1975, his music was a unique syncretic formulation of elements known and unknown. While its most obvious component was free improvisation in a style then most widely associated with English and European players, Chadbourne’s vision also contained elements of jazz, country, folk, blues, psychedelic and international sounds, referencing these threads in ways so diverse and intensely personalized it would take scholars decades to decode them. Volume 4-1/3 is the last of four Feeding Tube LPs in this series, documenting some of the music Dr. Chadbourne created in the years he lived in Canada, avoiding the shadow… Read more »

Liz Durette - Delight ()

LP Edition of 250 OUT OF PRINT A very whacked new outing from Baltimore keyboard genius Liz Durette. Her earlier albums had a certain avant jazz approach, tempered perhaps by certain new music proclivities. And while I do not doubt she still has the chops for such things, Delight is a horse of an entirely different color. What’s here was all done on keyboards, but at times it sounds like insane calliope music for wicked children with a taste for that old waltz beat. The whole first side could be the soundtrack for a surreal film about dead Viennese courtiers high-stepping their way around the Bardo as though it were a hedge maze. The more I listen to the record,… Read more »

Eddie Flowers & the Wax-Lip-Swamp-Dub - ST ()

LP Edition of 300 Includes Download Code with LP. OUT OF PRINT Bandcamp The Sound Projector Review Eddie Flowers is a legend of the American rock sub-underground. Starting as an Alabama-bound fanzine scribe back in the early ’70s, Eddie drifted to Bloomington to lend his presence to the Gizmos in the days before “punk” was codified. Next, he turned up in L.A., where he founded the legendary acid squawlers, Crawlspace.  Crawlspace was a thoroughly nuts collection of loosely rotating heads, who existed from 1985 into the new century. They played few actual “shows,” but still managing to churn out endless documents of their music making. Still, Crawlspace’s few vinyl offerings are exquisitely fucked, and include some of the first heavy… Read more »

Big Blood - Radio Valkyrie

Big Blood - Radio Valkyrie 1905 – 1917 ( / )

Big Blood “Radio Valkyrie 1905 – 1917” 2xlp Everything Is Improving OUT OF PRINT This is only the second proper full-length LP by this Portland Maine-based duo, although there are vast arrays of CDRS and split releases littering their wake. After spending time with both the cosmically-shifting Cerberus Shoals and the folkily psychedelic Fire on Fire, Caleb Mukerin and Colleen Kinsella decided to opt for something more personal and hermetic. Thus, we have Big Blood. The band’s multi-phasic discography has thus far reminded people of everything from the Parson Sound to Opal to Portishead at different moments, yet none of these thumbnails comes close to capturing the elegant mystery of their essence. Sometime electric guitar lines weevil hauntingly in the… Read more »

Waterless Hills - The Great Mountain ()

LP Co-Release with Cardinal Fuzz $21 Beautifully wandering debut LP by this Manchester-based instrumental project. C Joynes on guitar, DBH on violin, Gavin Clarke on bass and Andrew Cheetham on drums map out a gorgeously spacious psych landscape. They have a wonderful 8” lathe from the same session, but The Great Mountain allows them enough room to breathe through each others’ sound-holes like one big organic blob. There are curlicues of pure cheeb smoke billowing out of their collective engine at certain moments, and whisps of pure West Country prog rurality at others. But the overall effect is transfixing. Great song titles, great vibe, what more could one ask? -Byron Coley, 2020