Chelsea Wolfe - Apokalypsis

1. Primal / Carnal
2. Mer
3. Tracks (Tall Bodies)
4. Demons
5. Movie Screen
6. The Wasteland
7. Moses
8. Friedrichshain
9. Pale On Pale
10.To The Forest, Towards The Sea

LA's Chelsea Wolfe hounds the Goth vibe into ever more enticing alleys with her followup to 'The Grime And The Glow'. Her 2nd album, 'Apokalypsis' opens with a feral snarl before 'Mer' exhibits a startling upgrade to her sound, from 8-track tape to full studio clarity. Fittingly, this is in keeping with the album's title, translating from Greek as both "apocalypse" and "revelation", as she unveils nine songs of doomy folk guitars, slow and bellicose drums and sorrowfully atmospheric synths creating the perfectly sepulchral backing for affected, moaning and ghosted vocals...www.boomkat.com

Vuk - The Plains

1.Flint in The Pines
2. The Arms of Spirits
3. Red-beard
4. Accidental Mermaid
5. Gramophone and Periscope
6. Barefoot in Arizona
7. Kiss The Assassin
8. All My Worries
9. The Plains

...Then comes Vuk, 27-year multi-instrumental Finnish-American Emily Cheeger, an ex-Dirty Projector (she sang on The Getty Address, did various singing percussion from 2002-2005), who currently plays a pump organ (and half a dozen instruments) while belting out vocals that can be beautifully fragile and beautifully taunting and, in general, always straight-up powerful.

Animal Collective - Animal Crack Box

A1. Jimmy Raven
A2. Ahhh Good Country
A3. Iko Ovo

A1 and A2 recorded live to MiniDisc 18 September 2000 at the Cooler, NYC by Avey/Panda. A3 recorded live to MiniDisc fall 2000 at N. 4th Practice Space, Brooklyn by Avey/Panda.

B1. Pumpkin Gets a Snakebite
B2. Pumpkin's Hallucination
B3. Pumpkin's Funeral

B1 and B3 recorded live to MiniDisc February 2001 at N. 4th Practice Space, Brooklyn by Avey/Panda/Geologist. B2 recorded live to MiniDisc 25 February 2001 at Mercury Lounge, NYC by Avey/Panda/Geologist.

C1. Jungle Heat
C2. Hey Friend
C3. De Soto De Son

C1 and C2 recorded live to MiniDisc winter early 2001 at 67 Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn by Avey/Panda. C3 recorded live to MiniDisc August 2000 at Mercury Lounge, NYC by Avey/Panda.

D1. Oh Sweet
D2. Young Prayer #2
D3. Do the Nurse

D1 partly recorded live to MiniDisc summer 2002 at N. 4th Practice Space, Brooklyn by Avey/Deakin and partly recorded live to MiniDisc 18 October 2002 at Warsaw, Brooklyn by Avey. D2 recorded live to MiniDisc fall 2002 at Bard College, NYC by Avey/Panda. D3 recorded live to MiniDisc 18 October 2002 at Warsaw, Brooklyn by Avey.

E1. Ice Cream Factory
E2. Hey Light
E3. Two Sails

E1 and E3 recorded live to MiniDisc March 2002 at Tonic, NYC by Avey/Panda/Geologist/Deakin. E2 recorded live to MiniDisc winter early 2002 at N. 4th Practice Space, Brooklyn by Avey/Panda/Geologist/Deakin.

F1. Don't Believe the Pilot
F2. Who Could Win a Rabbit
F3. Mouth Wooed Her
F4. Covered in Frogs
F5. We Tigers

F1 and F2 recorded live to MiniDisc July 2003 at New World Brewery, Tampa, FL by Avey/Panda. F3 recorded live to MiniDisc June 2003 at a house party in Brooklyn by Avey/Panda. F4 recorded live to MiniDisc sometime and somewhere in 2003 (recording details are lost) by Avey/Panda. F5 recorded live to MiniDisc October 2003 at Concorde 2, Brighton, UK by Avey/Panda.

After almost three years of planning Catsup Plate is proud to announce the release of Animal Crack Box, a three LP collection of Animal Collective recordings spanning the years 2000 through 2003. These songs were recorded live, at practice sessions and in other non-studio environs and most have never been released in any form whatsoever. And those that have been release sound so markedly different that long-time fans will not be disappointed.

Throughout their career, Animal Collective has existed at the crossroads of uncompromising experimentalism, classic song structure and ecstatic expressionism -- a crossroads that this set further underscores. The songs veer from the early percussion/feedback wailings to the Campfire Songs style acoustica to wall of sound forest children vocal chanting. The sonics are rough in places as these were originally recorded more for reference than for an actual release, but the power of the songs and the band's uncompromising intensity are apparent all the way through. Fans of the band's recent work may be surprised by the cacophony at times, but peel away the layers of sound and the essential compositional and performative brilliance is staring you in the face.

Each record jacket is silkscreened in four overprinted colors and housed in a super sturdy four overprinted color silkscreened outer slipcase held together by a two color silkscreened "obi" strip. This thing is a 12 x 12 brick. The recording selections were overseen by Animal Collective themselves, who poured over hundreds of hours of tapes to come up with this tracklisting. The Hieronymus-Bosch-meets-the-early-Looney-Tunes-work-of-Max-Fleischer illustrations were drawn by Jon Vermilyea and the whole package was art directed and designed by Rob Carmichael.

This is a single edition of 1000 copies, with no digital or CD version planned...www.catsupplate.com

Current 93 - Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain

1. Invocation Of Almost
2. Poppyskins
3. On Docetic Mountain
4.26 April 2007
5. Aleph Is The Butterfly Net
6. Not Because The Fox Barks
7. UrShadow
8. As Real As Rainbows

Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain is the long-awaited new album from Current 93 and their first album in three years, following on from their double-platinum-selling album Black Ships Ate The Sky, and is released on David Tibet's new label Coptic Cat.
Aleph At Hallucinatory Mountain is the most unique, most unpredictable and most powerful album yet from Current 93. David has brought together an amazing and bizarre array of talents from artists as varied as Nurse With Wound's Stapleton and Liles, rock god phenomenon Andrew W.K., haunting chanteuse and composer Baby Dee, Grammy award-winning genius Rickie Lee Jones, the beautiful Hush Arbor's Keith Wood, world famous porn-star (and winner of the Best Three Way Sex Scene and Best Group Scene at the Adult Video Network awards) Sasha Grey, Pantaleimon's enchanted Andria Degens, guitar-hero James Blackshaw, Cyclobe and Coil's Ossian Brown, NYC legend Matt Sweeney (ZWAN, Neil Diamond, Superwolf), extraordinary percussionist supreme Alex Neilson (Red Krayola, Trembling Bells, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy), counter-culture guru William Breeze and heavenly cellist John Contreras (Marc Almond, Baby Dee) and created an album unlike any other ever. Ever!

Jeremy Jay - Love Everlasting EP

1 Love Everlasting
2 Lite Beam
3 Jet Stream
4 Love Everlasting (Winter Version)

It was winter outside and something was happening in the storybook world of Jeremy Jay’s psyche. While working on his upcoming full-length "Slow Dance" [KLP197] (to be released in spring ’09), there was an icicle-caked excitement that resulted in a snow-flurry of extra recordings. The cozy, insulated vibe of Olympia, Washington and Dub Narcotic Studio took hold and Jeremy, along with Ilya Malinksy (guitar), Nick Pahl (drums) and Derek James (bass) crafted "Love Everlasting" [KLP202] a separate 12"single...

Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca

1. Cannibal Resource

2. Temecula Sunrise
3. The Bride
4. Stillness Is the Move
5. Two Doves
6. Useful Chamber
7. No Intention
8. Remade Horizon
9. Fluorescent Half Dome

The last Dirty Projectors full-length, 2007's Rise Above, reimagined a Black Flag hardcore classic as an art-jazz cave painting, so these forever-fluctuating Brooklyn space cadets aren't exactly short on ambition. Since Rise Above, the band has locked down a reasonably stable core lineup and signed with Domino. But judging by the flurry of activity they've got coming up, the Dirty Projectors aren't quite ready to settle into any sort of regular record-tour-record-tour rhythm.

Now, the band has revealed the details of the Rise Above follow-up. Domino will release Bitte Orca, the band's fifth full-length, on June 9. The band recorded the album last year in Brooklyn and Portland, Oregon. Song titles on this thing are commendably weird: "Cannibal Resource", "Remade Horizon", "Fluorescent Half Dome". That's the album cover up there.

On April 21, Domino will release the album's first single, "Stillness Is the Move", on both 12" vinyl and digital download, and it'll include a couple of b-sides and a remix from Lucky Dragons, their peers in elusiveness. (The first single is not "Byond Uquafina", as previously reported.)

But those records are only part of the story, as we recently reported. This spring, the band will play a few American shows (including the Pitchfork/Windish Austin Bash) and then head over to the UK for a quick headlining tour. They've added two touring members to their lineup: bassist Nat Baldwin and singer Haley Dekle.

Meanwhile, Bang on a Can will premier a work from Dave Longstreth, the band's sole constant member, at New York's Kaufman Center on April 2, alongside a piece from Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo.

Longstreth isn't the only member of the band making music on the side. On May 5, Lovepump United will release Mind Raft, the first solo EP from band member Angel Deradoorian, who records as just Deeradorian.

And supposedly the band also has another full-length in the works. They still intend to release one more album on Dead Oceans, the label that released Rise Above, though God only knows how they'll find the time to finish the thing.

Also worth noting: "Knotty Pine", the band's collaboration with David Byrne, opens the massive double-CD charity comp Dark Was the Night, which we BNM'ed yesterday. It might be the best thing they've ever done, and it's getting us amped for Bitte Orca...www.pitchfork.com

Paavoharju - Laulu Laakson Kukista

1.Pimeankarkelo
2.Kevatrumpu
3.Tuoksu tarttuu meihin
4.Italialaisella laivalla
5.Alania
6.Uskallan
7.Ursulan uni
8.Kirkonvaki
9.Salainen huone
10.Tytto tanssii
11.Sumuvirsi
12. 11

For any band with the willingness or capability to write actual tunes, critics and fans are apt to see anything else-- interludes, instrumentals, experiments-- as a digression. I understand and partially accept that this is what you are choosing to do when you are not singing me a song. These are the aural equivalents of John Steinbeck's turtle, often treated with the indifference and puzzlement afforded the itinerant reptile in your average high school book report; folks were known to edit off the ambient bits of even Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, an album renowned for its meld of song and abstraction. Finnish collective Paavoharju are obstinate in their attempts to buck this trend, scattering Europop, pastel electronics, and woolen drones like a tossed deck of Bicycle playing cards. The greatest achievement of Paavoharju's Laulu Laakson Kukista, though, is not its dexterous balance of song and sound but the way it invests you as heavily in field recordings, dub workouts, and quasi-classical think pieces as in the band's foreign-language hookmaking.

Ostensibly a "songs" album, Laulu only gradually reveals their scarcity: count six using the standard "Could I maybe put this on a mixtape for my coworkers if, in fact, my coworkers were into entropic Nordic dance-pop?" benchmark. In place of half of a classic pop album, Laulu doesn't redefine out-music so much as find clever and inventive ways to incorporate it. Like its predecessor-- Paavoharju's 2005 debut Yhä Hämärää-- Laulu opens with "Pimeänkarkelo", a track that ceases to be an "intro" around the two minute mark and carries on for twice that anyway, ultimately serving as a palate cleanser for the surprisingly tart headrush of "Kevätrumpu". Kinetic synths and lovingly cheesed-out drums bleat and whir like dancin' music at a 1992 rollerblade disco. A stressed, sexed female voice coos and circles and punches like she's got Madonna's biceps but not those under-eye bags. And then...variations on a plinky piano melody in the form of "Tuoksu Tarttuu Meihin", which mulls and ponders amid a static curtain. When the band later remembers the melody on the album's two shortest tracks they feel less like interludes and more like rounding back to an earlier conversation after a thorough and fulfilling detour.

Downtempo dub. Song. Weird pastel electronica. Song. Laulu is structured much like Yhä Hämärää and the line between should be drawn using confidence, or perhaps perseverance. Mulish is too ugly a word for Laulu, whose compositions are stubbornly given room to flower and expand but are always appropriately reined; instead let's say that Paavoharju have a well-developed internal clock, or are otherwise familiar with "The Ugly Duckling". "Kirkonväki" outgrows its watery piano and malfunctioning click-track to blossom into a goth-rock prom, replete with organs in waltz-time stumble. "Uskallan" features a male lead so clear-throated and dramatic that the song sounds like one of the early 90s Latin-American hits that increasingly populate Chicago's jukeboxes. "Sumuvirsi", a rhythm-less, female-led hymn whose second-most prominent sound is a cackling raven, hues closest to the psych-folk traditional to Fonal's roster, but even it seems more theatrical and dramatic, like Paavoharju have been taking their cues both from Eleanoora Rosenholm and high-school drama productions.

The tiny honking synths that augment the rusty guitars of "Tyttö Tanssii" suggest a more literal reading of the Bicycle metaphor from above: a hill of two-wheelers, disheveled rubber, tassels, and bells. Laulu connotes this youth, motion, and playfulness in various states of repair and construction, and it does so by alternating well-formed, multi-faced pop songs with abstract head-scratchers, each component as warmly evocative and strangely necessary as the last...www.pitchfork.com