Brendan Masala's Albums Of 2013 (Top Ten, Hobourable Mention, and Another Fifteen Because Im Fickle)

Happy New Year! Well I guess this list is kinda redundant now, it being 2014 and all. But I had the list kinda written up, so it may as well be here. I won't bother with links and such - you can do that on your own - but rest assured, we have written about these albums, and you can hunt them down quite easily...

1. Bed Wettin' Bad Boys - Ready For Boredom

2. Batpiss - Nuclear Winter

3. Michael Beach - Golden Theft

4. The Spinning Rooms - Complicating Things

5. Oneohtrix Point Never - R Plus Seven

6. James X Boyd & the Boydoids - James X Boyd & the Boydoids/Super Low

7. Pissed Jeans - Honeys

8. Kwaidan - Make All The Hell Of Dark Metal Bright

9. Yes I'm Leaving - Mission Bulb

10. Running - Vaguely Ethnic

Honourable Mention - Ensemble Economique. Brian Pyle's myriad releases were all of a stellar standard this year, and I found it too difficult to settle on just one. You should hunt them all down though - the guy's stretchin the outer limits.

See also - 11. Thee Oh Sees (Floating Coffin); 12. Dollar Bar (Paddington Workers Club); 13. Barn Owl (V); 14. Shocked Minds (Shocked Minds); 15. Violent Soho (Hungry Ghost); 16. Hey Colossus (Cuckoo Live Life Like Cuckoo); 17. Surf City (We Knew It Was Not Going To Be Like This); 18. Ooga Boogas (Ooga Boogas); 19. Bone (For Want For Feeling); 20. Ovlov (AM); 21. Marnie Stern (The Chronicles of Marnia); 22. Cuntz (Solid Mates); 23. Transistors (Is This Anything?); 24. Popstrangers (Antipodes);  25. Wonderfuls (Salty Town)

Trolling A Good Holodeck House

Not one but two reissues from Austin, Texas' Holodeck are helping me get outta the fugue state I'm in after the excellent Sonic Masala show last night (thanks for coming along and supporting guys!). First up is Untitled, an LP of six untitled intricate drone machinations from trio Good Stuff House, featuring members of the excellent Kwaidan and Zelienople. It wavers between Western acoustic apocalypse, dystopian desolation and despair, and the haunting echos of a ghost town, all set to a gentle hum and ghostly murmur. Wind chimes and the echoes of a closing door in 'Untitled #2' are equally entrancing and perturbing, like an abandoned and dilapidated building smothered in sunlight, doors missing, cavernous darkness within.It disintegrates and regenerates, the acoustic guitar a forgotten echo of a pastoral farmer plucking before the sun died. Dark, evocative, excellent.

Then there is the self-titled Troller record. I have actually had a hold of this since February, and haven't found the right time to talk about it - until now. The goth drone trancers have carved out something so insidious and devious that it is difficult to succumb, because if you do you aren't waking from this nightmare. The cover alone makes this an impulse buy - seriously, look at it! - but the content is no laughing matter; this is the score to a bad trip, a lysergic fall down endless stairwells, a fever dream of ultra gloss, red neon windows and zero gravity, an aural Giallo for the space age. Seductively disturbing.


You can grab these albums here. My pick is Good Stuff House, but only because I'm scared what Troller is doing to me - long live the flesh.

29 Cool Coughs

Philly dude Cough Cool brought out 29 on Bathetic Records last month (who are amazing, and if you haven't bought either the Lee Noble records or the Kwaidan one yet then you are a dunce), and its a beguiling behemoth of a record. Dan Svizney has chosen to imbue his melted pop transgressions with mechanical digressions, drum loop syncopations and that iconic reverbed vocal hush this time around, and rather than sending it spiralling on some incidental tangent, has fortified the penchant for hazy, half-formed thoughts, irksome inertia and sunlight stealing through the curtains. It steers enough away from the much furrowed ground of beach pop and bedroom etchings, finding itself in some po-faced purgatory between the two, and he fidgets in the ethereal waiting room, itching to get back out into the real world yet unsure what he'll do when he get there. He isn't moping about though - tracks like 'Misfits 4x4' or 'Disclosure' offer a sense of insistence that life is uncertain, so get on with it. Others like 'Intro To Regret' has a little more snarl about it - an insolent reverie that still doesn't have the cajones to come out and rough it. Which is OK, because we're all having fun, and that's the point, right? Plus those guitar lines should be on repeat for days like this. 20s are the new 20s.

You can buy 29 here - it's a great little record.

Dwelling In Kwaidan's Bright Drone Metal

Back in 2011 I spoke about a band from Chicago called Locrian. I really dug their The Clearing release from 2011 - still do - but haven't really paid them much mind since. The excellent Bathetic Records have put forth some pretty bloody good releases of late (Lee Noble's Ruiner is also ace - more on that soon), and their latest presser is for the debut LP from Kwaidan, which features Locrian's Andre Foisy. Bathetic and Locrian dragged me in - but Make All The Hell Of Dark Metal Bright is darkly, seductively hypnotic by its own standards.

Firstly, check out the cover art - this is such a rad photo, I would be pressured to listen to this on the image alone. Foisy is joined by Mike Weis (Zelienople) and Neil Jendon, underscoring Kwaidan's penchant for insidious drone. Yet these elements still didn't prepare me for the dense atmospherics that Make All The Hell... unleashes. The pervading sense of oppressive anxieties that the percussive undercurrents push to the surface, an undulating presence intermingling with the slight electronics, percolating guitar and ghostly piano lines to create an ominous beauty - the fog rolling over mountain ranges, licking the heels of the forest floor, or linger in backwater streets as the light seeps up over the horizon.

Make All The Hell... contains all the elements that makes drone music an essential element of the musical landscape; underscore why drone is a necessary byproduct of psych musicality; and how the strained tensions of the loud/quiet dynamic can be endlessly utilised for maximum effect without falling into the familiar tropes that mediocre post-rock aficionados flock to. This is an incredible record.

You can pre-order Make All The Hell Of Dark Metal Bright here - it is quite brilliant.