Aquarelle – Within / Without (Students Of Decay)

 
This is Aquarelle’s (aka Ryan Potts) first full length in two years, although he kept us tided over with that Alex Cobb split and a new track on my free 5 year anniversary comp You’re All The Fucking Best, so while there hasn’t been a total lack of His Majesty’s drones, there certainly hasn’t been anything like this. August Undone is pure brilliance. Take all your other lush records and melt ’em away because this is the only one you’ll ever need, this is the most blissful fucking thing I’ve ever heard, a massively dense wall of heavenly sound that’s somehow still soft & weightless, an ever-shifting crystal fog that overwhelms you but gives you moments of transcendent clarity, a thousand layers of everything, guitars, banjos, reeds, pianos, all in their unadorned perfection and processed to the stars and back, bombastic muffled percussion, endless loops of dream pop rhythms, taking your breath away every second of its all-too-short life, with unexpected explosions that will send you reeling into a euphoric coma sounding like in Sunshine when he’s inside the sun as he reignites it with his Manhattan-sized bomb, absolute fucking beauty, a cacophonic symphony of your unconscious ideals realized, that feeling of blood rushing to your head in sheer exuberance, this is the sound of Potts making a perfect goddamn record. Vinyl comes out mid-July but digital is out right now in all the usual places, so go forth and make your life brighter.

Sequences – I (Total Black)

 
This dude is supremely excellent and decently prolific, so it’s kind of surprising that I haven’t written him up before. Sequences is just one guy from Belgium who works a mysterious dark drone magic, and Transient Form is his most recent tape put out by Total Black last month, two side long pieces of haunted & harrowing minimal blackness, deep amp exploding bass that sounds like the edge of a black hole, the thunder of the Four Horsemen pouring down a crumbling cliffside, the transcendent buy cialis with discover card nothing of space blotting out your entire existence, dense soaring drones shifting time to a separate reality, a bit of static crackle closing the A side and some creeped out tape concrète opening the B side, this is an incredible slab of abyssal drone, not to be missed, only 50 copies made up, so hop to it and thank me later.

Update: just got word from Sequences that the tape is sold out. You might find it at some distros but you can definitely snag the digital version.

Troller – Winter (Holodeck / Light Lodge / Living Tapes)

 
Ok, first of all, that album art is totally bitchin but not at all an accurate representation of the music, or at least, not your first reaction to it. This isn’t psych, garage, metal, or whatever. Not at all. Second of all, I’ve been jamming this 100% for many months now, since Holodeck & Light Lodge released the vinyl (Living Tapes originally released the tape back in ’11) but for some terrible reason I never found myself compelled to write it up on AGB. This is hands down one of my favorite fucking records I found this year and the non-metal album I’ve listened to most. I honestly can’t get enough of this. It’s some strange & beautiful drone/pop/darkwave hybrid with the deepest buzzing bass lines, catchy as fuck synth melodies, and haunted Cocteau Twinsy vocals that soar through the midnight fog, totally unintelligible and perfectly melodramatic, this is graveyard hallucination pop that takes your emotions on a joyride right off a fucking cliff, interspersed with short droned windswept drifts to catch your breath in between the suffocatingly thick goth anthems, I could cry every time this lady epically yells (yup) at the peak of Mount Pop on “Winter,” goddamn this album is pure bittersweet darkpop perfection, I can’t even fucking handle it, I love it, I think I’m gonna marry it.

Benjamin Finger – Consonance Of Fear (Time Released Sound)

 
Incredible new somber piano out of Norway from Benjamin Finger, this is a truly special record, carving a nook in the solo piano realm with field recordings of half forgotten memories, a familiar stranger who walked by, birds chirping outside your window last spring while you fluttered around the house, the voices of childhood friends, smothered fireworks acting as vinyl crackle, all hidden in the background of Finger’s eulogistic meditative piano, twinkling a bright & eerie melody, looped into your consciousness, finding a perfect balance between serene & melancholic, not straying too far into euphoric or depressive but still evoking both, this is a beautifully intimate record that will score your noir past and your peaceful tea time, this dude couldn’t have made a better record, and you have the option of copping the ultra deluxe version of this which comes with a skeletal bird mobile made from antique piano parts that lives in a huge collaged chocolate box adorned with more piano parts and contains even more piano pieces inside. So fucking over the top, so fucking cool. Only 70 of those are available, so if that’s your thing, ya best get on it.

Kwaidan – Three Empty Rooms Of Light And Space: Ostension (Bathetic)

 
Kwaidan is quite the trio, with Land Of Decay bro Neil Jendon, Locrian dude André Foisy, and Mike Weis from Zelienople, brought together to make a glorious racket. After kicking things off with a killer self titled tape on Accidental Guest last year, these dudes are back with a proper full length on Bathetic conjuring a magnificent dark drone that blends noise, doom, and Americana to make an unbelievably fucking awesome sound, mystical & transformative, synths & guitars sweeping through a pre-cathartic explosion with slowly plodding drums, a sprawling loose atmosphere that’s tight as fuck, dudes working together so seamlessly, breathing occult jams that praise the permanent solar eclipse, clear black haze settled in a field, fireflies mingling with ash in the dusk, a doom that sheds its metal crust and is perfectly at home in the company of dusty acoustics & buzzing static, a homeless midnight wanderer that couldn’t sound any fucking better, and with the most perfect album title, these guys hit it out of the fucking park.

Èlg – Notringo Indigo (SDZ)

 
This dude Ghedalia Thazartès Laurent Gérard (thanks Ian!) (of Opéra Mort, Reines d’Angleterre, etc) is all over the place with his Èlg releases, jumbling genres like nothing, and La Chimie adds to the cacophony, bringing a sort of fucked up darkwave mixed with the occasional field recording, the album opens with a vomit inducing first track that’s got creepy found sounds including some dude sobbing while the electronics sound like boiling guts, so fucking wretched I can smell it. The rest of the record twists together a woozy mangled avant pop that ranges from burnt musique concrète to a more structured techno groove, spilling beats all over a bleak futuristic synth sprawl, nightmare ambient b/w Carpenter disco, and Thazartès freaking the fuck out in every track, singing with a mesmerizing atonal processed to hell & back slop of a rollercoaster, like Paul Reubens voicing the spaceship in Flight Of The Navigator, his vocals driving the record, definitely the most prominent and unsettling part, totally incomprehensible & fucked up, a mess on top of a mess but bound by the bizarre, hands down one of the weirdest records of the year, a winner for sure.

Svarte Greiner – Black Tie (Miasmah)

 
Erik K. Skodvin’s Svarte Greiner project gets creepier & creepier, this new LP on his own Miasmah label is some harrowing shit, two side long pieces of dark string drone perfect for tuxedoed occult rituals, comatose bass string plucks on top of haunted smears, hushed unintelligible clatter behind the scenes buy cialis new york adding to the mystery, black bliss, slowmo static fog rolling through valleys of bleak & bittersweet depression, murky & crystal clear, floating in the deep sea ink, a minimal motionless nightmare that you never wake from, perfectly exquisite in every way, only 500 each of LPs & CDs, so don’t snooze.

Millipede – Dungeon Dweller (self released)

 
Tennessee’s Joseph Davenport is back with a new Millipede record, this first since 2011’s Realms (although he did have a new piece on my free comp You’re All The Fucking Best) and it’s a fucking winner. This dude belts out the noisiest harsh bliss I’ve ever heard, sounding like he’s tossed a hundred guitars into a raging bonfire, caked in scorched & burnt feedback, with gauzy melodies climbing out from a pit of red hot embers, some blown out mixture of shoegaze, psych, drone folk, & space rock, taking all of those sounds and leaving them out to crust up in the desert sun, the core still peaking through the shell, and in fact the “lead” guitar is more noticeable than ever in The Lower World, nuzzling up to your ear drums while the caustic distortion bores through your skull, this is a masochistic record of pain & pleasure, the beauty buried deep in grit and wholly worth excavating, one of Millipede’s best, and exciting as hell because this the second part of a trilogy (Realms being the first), so we know there’s more destructive brilliance on the horizon.

Fabio Orsi & Pimmon – I Wish You Were In Yallingup (Home Normal)

 
Unbelievably amazing debut collaboration between these two drone gurus, the lushest heavy-hearted bliss I’ve heard all year, an ocean of sound growing larger every moment, lazer peepers floating in the glowing dusk like some extended post contact scene in The X-Files, wondering if what just happened really happened and relishing in the bewildering peace, subtle crackle from half memories, unmistakably gorgeous dreams of the Netherworld where emotions burrowed deep in your psyche are coaxed out by the bittersweet beauty, swirling & overwhelming, euphoric & cathartic, like being bathed in golden black rivers of transcendence, this is a perfect goddamn record that somehow tops both of the artists’ prior work, and painfully limited to 250 vinyl and 500 CDs, so do what you do best and add this masterpiece to your collection.