Colleen - Everyone Alive Wants Answers

Released: June 30th, 2003

Label: Leaf (U.K.)

Format: Limited Edition Vinyl (1,500 copies)

Track listing:

1 - Everyone Alive Wants Answers (3:32)

2 - Ritournelle (3:09)

3 - Carry-Cot (1:54)

4 - Your Heart On Your Sleeve (2:47)

5 - Goodbye Sunshine (2:49)

6 - One Night And It's Gone (3:43)

7 - Long Live Mice In The Metro (2:51)

8 - I Was Deep In A Dream And I Didn't Know It (2:56)

9 - Babies (3:34)

10 - Sometimes On A Happy Cloud (1:56)

11 - A Swimming Pool Down The Railway Track (4:15)

12 - In The Train With No Lights (2:15)

13 - Nice And Simple (4:21)

Album Download Link

MySpace

Last.fm

Website

Obligatory YouTube Clip

Notes: This album holds a very special place with me, if anything it's because while listening to it about two months ago I realized I loved my girlfriend Kate.

"It seems a shame to tarnish the delicate perfection of Colleen's music with words - this is music that needs to be listened to late at night, free of everyday distractions. You'll find yourself entranced by these 13 mesmerising spider's webs of sound that sound like they've been beamed in from another place, another time.

Colleen's simple but effortlessly charming music is one of magical details - naïve instrumentals filled with warmth, melody and soul, played on a broken music box, a glockenspiel or a guitar, phasing in and out, on the verge of collapse. Above all, this is wonderfully human...

Everyone Alive Wants Answers is the haunting work of 26-year-old Parisienne Cecile Schott. Her debut album release, she has previously released a gem of a 7" single (Babies) on the up-and-coming Active Suspension label, which brought her to the attention of The Leaf Label. This release follows naturally in the footsteps of the label's work with Susumu Yokota.

Cecile's live performance is a ramshackle experience, utilising any number of unexpected found instruments, playful and melancholic in equal measure.

Another girl, another planet."

-Unknown Leaf

Emeralds - What Happened

Released: January 27th, 2009
Label: No Fun (Ann Arbor, Michigan)


Tracklisting:
1 - Alive In The Sea of Information (8:02)
2 - Damaged Kids (15:01)
3 - Up In The Air (4:02)
4 - Living Room (16:43)
5 - Disappearing Ink (13:32)


Album Download Link


Notes: If you download this, please listen to it all the way through, as it's not an album to pick certain tracks, or songs, out of a bunch.


"Cleveland has gone from cesspool to rock ‘n’ roll's enshriner back to cesspool in no-time flat. Once the crown jewel of Lake Erie, the city and suburban streets of Northern Ohio had more to look forward to than a glass pyramid, the Dog Pound, American Splendor, and LeBron James. But Cleveland, like many U.S. cities, has fallen back on hard times due to a dragging economy, job scarcity, and subpar education.


Out of this anguish, however, Cleveland's music scene seems especially resilient. Peter Laughner may not be king anymore, but the younger generation's underground can take pride in the wealth of eclectic musicians the city continues to harbor. Chief among them are John Elliott, Steve Hauschildt, and Mark McGuire -- collectively known as Emeralds. While the band's moniker may not reflect the group's many influences and unparalleled risks, the Cleveland trio and their like-minded brethren are molding the city's ups and downs in their own images.


What Happened captures Emeralds -- whose members released solo cassettes, CD-Rs, and LPs throughout 2008 to complement full-band releases -- continuing to stake out their own aesthetic territory. Warping the electronic sounds of the ’70s and ’80s, Emeralds recontextualize the dated space-age technology of synths with a sound that matches the dark pall hanging over all of us. Despite its futuristic tones, however, What Happened is more like an oasis from dirt devils and rising tides than a soundtrack to 1984.


The five tracks that comprise What Happened exist in a plane rarely touched since the days of synth's rise. Gone are the pop pretenses, favoring not all-out experimentation (like Jessica Rylan), but limit-testing drone and synth-based melody. Having a background in the sometimes harsh but never boring noise scene keeps What Happened from tailspinning into laziness. Yet the album never mutilates itself to entertain its creators. The joy Emeralds find within each of their musical creations -- be it together or apart -- is in the creation itself. Each tune is built brick by symmetrical brick; yet what's significant isn't how the songs are built, but from which materials they are built.


Indeed, like Christo, Picasso, or Dali sublimating anxiety into art, Emeralds are less concerned with reconstructing the Cleveland of old as they are with providing new colors and forms with which to critique. In this time of stretched money and global crises, we would do well to emulate Emerald's desire for a new direction."


-JSPICER Tiny Mix Tapes

Loscil - Endless Falls

Released: February 22nd, 2010
Label: Kranky (Chicago)


Track listing:
1 - Endless Falls (7:55)
2 - Estuarine (8:21)
3 - Shallow Water Blackout (7:07) 
4 - Dub For Cascadia (6:07)
5 - Fern And Robin (7:11)
6 - Lake Orchard (7:41)
7 - Showers Of Ink (8:44)
8 - The Making Of Grief Point (8:54)


Album Download Link

MySpace

Website

Last.fm

Notes: "Scott Morgan is one of those rare musicians who fully grasps the notion that it’s as much about what you don’t play as what you do. This is his fifth album as Loscil, which continues to plunder the same vein of chilly ambient electronica as his previous efforts. This is music designed to be played loud, preferably with ears hermetically sealed in high quality headphones, so listeners can really submerge themselves in all the subtle textures and nuances of Morgan’s recordings. Like much of Loscil’s output, it’s often difficult to detect a human hand at work on Endless Falls. This is the sound of isolated machine noise hollowed out and whittled down to its fragile essence, a set of songs left teetering on the brink of actually existing at all, a sort of ghostly paean to the beauty found on the cusp of complete silence.

The sounds on Endless Falls bleed into one another so naturally that it’s difficult to imagine this as a set of files on a hard drive that were plugged into a piece of sequencing software. It often feels like these tracks have developed a peculiar life of their own after being set in motion by Morgan, who hung around to capture what they would do while left to their own devices. This is music made with an innate understanding of the power of repetition and its ability to play tricks on the human mind. Many of the elliptical loops on tracks like ‘Estuarine’ and ‘Fern and Robin’ develop tiny counter-melodies within counter-melodies when experienced over a sustained period of time, with Morgan happy to secede control and completely remove himself from the process, letting the songs shape themselves.

Unusually for such an exercise, these tracks are emotionally redolent, often reaching down into a dark well of sadness and never returning. This isn’t simply a musical paradigm shift designed to take listeners to the verge of some noiseless paradise, it’s also filled with genuine feeling that unfurls in sludge-like slow motion. Morgan employs such touches with subtlety and grace, such as the sound of a distant organ player emerging from the murk of ‘Lake Orchard’, or the scrapes of cello that blister from the cocoon of glass-like patterns on the title track. Much of Endless Falls feels like a horrific life-changing event coming into focus at a distressingly torporific pace, with Loscil’s audience cast as uneasy bystanders, wanting to discover where this is all heading but afraid of what they’ll find when they get there.

Things do reach a climax, of sorts, with the standout closing track, ‘The Making of Grief Point’. Here, Morgan deploys vocals on one of his tracks for the first time, which come courtesy of Dan Bejar, with whom he works in the Vancouver band Destroyer. This is the final act of unsettling disorientation in an album full of obtuse left turns, with Morgan pulling just one more trick out of his bag by having Bejar recite a spoken word piece that easily stands alongside Slint’s canonical ‘Good Morning, Captain’ as a piece of affecting storytelling set to song. Bejar speaks in hushed tones as he hisses his thoughts on the music-making process, temporarily loosening the various narrative strands that listeners have weaved together for the rest of the album, but also maintaining that impermeable sense of unease that perforates every song.

Endless Falls is the most complete version of Morgan’s vision for Loscil to date. It’s an album that’s easy to get lost in after a few cursory wanders into the ether, where the amalgamation of barely-musical sounds sucks you in and seems to produce something different every time. It’s an album for anyone who has found music and beauty in the rhythmical clack of train wheels against tracks, in the low hum of a refrigerator, or the cyclical tap of the second hand on an old wristwatch. Morgan cleverly bookends the album with the noise of a rainstorm he recorded in his back yard, which ushers his listeners back into the real world at the close of ‘The Making of Grief Point’. It engenders a feeling not dissimilar to walking out of a movie into bright sunshine when you expected darkness, where all the ugliness of everyday life suddenly comes blaring into sharp focus, made all the more uneasy after being so utterly wrapped up in someone else’s art."

-Nick Neyland Drowned In Sound

Jónsi - Go (leak)

Released: Scheduled for April 6th, 2010

Label: XL Recordings (London)

Track listing:

1 - Go Do (4:41)
2 - Boy Lilikoi (4:27)
3 - Kolniður (3:56)
4 - Grow Till Tall (5:21)
5 - Animal Arithmetic (3:24)
6 - Tornado (4:15)
7 - Sinking Friendships (4:42)
8 - Around Us (5:18)
9 - Hengilas (4:14)


Album Download Link
MySpace (Jónsi & Alex)
MySpace (Sigur Ros)
Website
Last.fm


Notes: Since this album technically isn't out yet, and reviews are limited, I'll wait, no need to bore you with my words. For those that don't know, this is the solo album from Jón “Jónsi” Þór Birgisson, the guitarist/vocalist for Sigur Ros, who also has a release with his boyfriend Alex Somers under the moniker Jónsi & Alex.