A Few Noteworthy New Music Releases

2011 is shaping up to be another good year for music... I've already mentioned some earlier stuff from this year, but more keeps coming out!

The newest Lunar Dunes - Galaxsea - is out now, + like the previous From Above, this is a wonderful trip through spacetime. This is a sort-of side-project for some members of Cornershop + Transglobal Underground that I categorize as space rock; they sound like the lounge band on an retro-future orbiting space station... The atmospheric female vocalizations + wild, wide palette of instrumentation, along with the lightly-jazzy swing of many of the tracks, calls to mind a modern-day interpretation of Martin Denny or Arthur Lyman. Cannot recommend highly enough! Get this shit! Now!



 

The Atomic Bitchwax is back, this time with Local Fuzz, a release that's a single long (40+ minits) stoner-metal riff-festival. Props to the band for keeping the riffage interesting, too, cuz I don't recall any vocals at all. Maybe there were some, but the riffs were too big for my brain to process anything else...










 

White Hills have a new one coming down the pipe, H-p1. The first track, The Condition of Nothing, is available from Thrilljockey as an MP3 freebie. Space rock at its modern finest! Now, if they'll just reschedule a live show for Birmingham, AL, before too long...













 

Valleyland by Empire Express came out of left-field to smack me upside my head. Not a lot of really new ground covered here for fans of guitar-centric post-rock, but they've really nailed the blissful + majestic thing well, with arrangements that sweep nicely from delicate to epic + back again.












 

Eternal Tapestry's newest is Beyond the 4th Door; it's a trippy, serpentine bit of space rock, with the characteristic gyric song structures of the best recent raga-reminiscent rock.
















And a recent reissue of an overlookt 90s Nels Cline Trio rekkid - Silencer. Nels is, of course, in Wilco now; in the 90s, he hosted a New Music night for out + free jazz at the Alligator Lounge in Venice that was often amazing. His original compositions for this rekkid are excellent, as is the lead-off track, a reinterpretation of Gil Evans' Las Vegas Tango that starts out fairly straight before moving into some interesting + innovative reharmonizations...






And that's a few tasty + recent rekkids I've encountered... What'd I miss that I shouldn't've?