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Alva Noto - Xerrox Vol. 1

2007, raster-noton
Style: minimal, glitch, ambient

For some people, the making of this album will be more interesting than the final result. On this recording, Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) used sound sources from real life (advertisements, entertainment, elevator music, etc), and then used software that made many (degrading) copies of the sounds, like a VHS tape copied many times over, until the Nth generation copy-from-a-copy-from-etc sounds were completely unrecognizable from their source material.

The idea is neat, but from reading that description, you might expect to hear a varied (or, at…

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Caspian - The Four Trees

2007, Dopamine Records
Style: post-rock, post-rock, very post-rock

Post-rock may be the pizza of the music world - even when it's bad (or, at the very least, generic), it's still pretty good.

The Four Trees is the debut album from the Massachusetts based band Caspian. The group first gained attention with their first EP, which was well-received if criticized for being too similar to the music of Explosions in the Sky. The first few tracks on The Four Trees does little to give the listener the impression that things are…

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Grails - Burning Off Impurities

2007, Temporary Residence
Style: post-rock, psych rock

When Western bands play music with strong non-Western influences (I'm avoiding terms like "ethnic" and "world music" here), the results often fall into a few familiar tracks. There's the "Van Halen effect" (named after the many '80s hair metal bands that attempted to copy Van Halen but only cloned the surface elements, without truly understanding the substance of what they were imitating), where the artist only produces a shallow facsimile of the influences pulled from. Then there's the "oil and water effect", where the artist attempts…

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65daysofstatic - The Destruction Of Small Ideas

2007, Monotreme Records
Style: post-rock, math rock

65daysofstatic has until now been known for a blend of post-rock and dnb-style electronics. With The Destruction Of Small Ideas (dammit Last.fm, lowercase the "of"!), the electronics have largely faded into the background, and the intensity has been kicked up in its place. Many people use the word "bludgeon" to describe this album. Indeed, when 65daysofstatic launches into loud wall-of-sound sections, they are driven by rapid-fire drums that certainly suggest blunt force violence. Soft, whisper-like piano lines, sparse but beautiful strings, and strategically placed…

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Maserati - Inventions for the New Season

2007, Temporary Residence
Style: post-rock, neo-krautrock, space rock

Holy smokes!

I'm still reeling from listening to this album all day. Temporary Residence's site described the album as "a bloodshot, 3AM soundtrack to a Michael Mann movie that hasn't happened yet; a sweaty, delirious mix of mid-to-late 70s Pink Floyd, German psych-rock, Krautrock, and mid-80s action film scores."

It is all of those things, and yet none of them. All of these elements are in the mix, but nothing sounds distinctly derivative from any of it. It's a great fusion…

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Amon Tobin - Foley Room

2007, Ninja Tune
Style: IDM, dnb, downtempo

Fantastic, unusual, experimental release, and Amon Tobin's first true studio album in 5 years. This is very much a departure from his classic studio albums. More often, the album's tone is evocative of the Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory soundtrack, except without the restrictions that soundtrack pieces have to abide by. It's cut from a lot of field recordings and real instrumentation, including a track that incorporates the Kronos Quartet. It strays even further away from any dance roots present in previous Amon Tobin studio…

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Explosions in the Sky - All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone

2007, Temporary Residence
Style: post-rock

From the sound of the detractors, you'd think Explosions in the Sky is the new AC/DC, with a ton of same-sounding albums. This is, of course, only their 4th studio album (and you can pretty much forget the 1st one, a not-yet-ready-for-prime-time release that the band resisted reissuing until fan demand became too great to ignore). On the surface, this sounds very much like the past 3 albums, but to leave things at that is to make a very shallow comparison. The…

Circle (feat. Verde) - Tower: Circle sure releases a lot of albums. Counting Tyrant (released in 2006 in UK but 2007 in US), they're already up to 3 this year. Tower is very serene and laid back compared to the group's typical neo-Krautrock jams. This is very subdued and atmospheric, but with a steady yet soft fusion groove to keep things moving along. I saw it compared to early Weather Report and that's maybe not too far off the mark. Not a challenging listen but a nicely dreamlike one.