Efterklang - The LPs

Efterklang, a studio quintet and a live nonet (which includes the newly popular Peter Broderick) from Denmark, have been labeled as post-pop, but in an effort to avoid recently fashioned genre prefixes and suffixes I'm just going to say that they're a post-rock band who have an affinity to messing around with electronic and analog musical devices (such as sampling CD skipping sounds to create the beat for "Predator and Prey"). Both of their full length albums are very nice and apparently they have an album coming out some time in early 2009 (which is now I guess - Happy New Year).

Tripper [2004] - Download


Parades [2007] - Download

Grails - Doomsdayer's Holiday

Grails' 2004 album Redlight ruled in all possible ways. Their 2007 album Burning Off Impurities did not. They shifted from being a concise post-rock band to a psychedelic jam band that tossed in Eastern instrumentation all over the place. Short of assuming Grails went on a pilgrimage to India and met Ravi Shankar, I'll just say their musical direction changed. Doomsdayer's Holiday does something to reconcile those two worlds. The Eastern influences and jamminess are no longer endless and open-ended and as a result the songs have regained organization and arc. This album comes highly recommended for fans of post-rock, classic rock, or prog looking for something very different.

Doomsdayer's Holiday [2008] - Download - Review

Prime Meridian - Januaries: 2006-2008

Though this may be a little absurd and self-indulgent, I'm posting my own music. I've never really gotten a band together though I write music and sometimes record. My school has a part of the school year called Winter Study, where we only take one ungraded class. I always went out of my way to take classes that fed into recording. The EP I've posted here is a collection of songs I wrote for the various classes I took, the exception being the first track. The overall sound is very ambient though the final track really expands on "ambient" as a genre by have a much longer arc. I even used a click track. There is no review for this album so I'll provide some helpful (and once again, self-indulgent) liner notes for each track.

All songs were composed in Pro Tools using only the following gear: PRS Santana SE guitar, Line6 Pod Processor, Line6 Tonecore Pedal Echo Park.

1. "Rusting a Perfect Day." This track was written outside of the context of a class. I started messing around with different melodic techniques using features of the Echo Park pedal in F# minor and just started layering parts of different lengths that all ended up propelling the song towards its crescendo.

2. "Hexagrams" gets its name because it was done for the class "Math and Music." It uses serial tranformations of the unordered hexachord (01457) and was composed in a loose adaptation of the twelve tone tradition. The general sound of this chord, when treated as a pitch set that can be used in a scalar fashion, is a mix of phrygian and hexatonic giving the song its somewhat "exotic" melodic lines.

3. "Pearl Silos" was written for an independent study on electronic recording styles. A friend and I had written three hip hop / pop songs in Digital Performer and needed another track, so I offered to write another ambient one in the spirit of tracks 1-2. The result was a further refining of the ideas on the first two tracks. It benefits from having the through-composed layering of "Rusting..." with the disassociation from perfectly tonal practices of "Hexagrams," though the piece in indebted to E as a pitch-center, if not a tonal center.

4. "Odalisque" is more sprawling and was composed against a click track. It has a D/A modal flavor. The structure of the song is three-fold. First the song builts up its component parts in the spirit of post-rock. Then the tonality dissolves as the twelve-tone background ambience overtakes the tonal center (though the main repeated guitar remains), and finally the song returns to its post-rock self with a guitar solo in the spirit of "Muffin Man" by Frank Zappa that takes the song to its close.

Januaries: 2006-2008 [2008] - Download

Do Make Say Think - You, You're a History in Rust

Do Make Say Think's You, You're a History in Rust is one of those albums that missed my Top 15 of 2007 list purely by me being slow to the punch (sorry Ghostlimb). This is a gorgeous album that propels its post-rock songwriting with folk, indie, and alternative influences rather than baroque orchestration or grandiose theme and variation style builds. There is always the semblance of a melodic hook or a regularized chord progression underneath the complex, but grounded arrangements.

You, You're a History in Rust [2007] - Download - Review

Have a Nice Life - Deathconsciousness

Truly falling in love with an album usually happens once a year for me. My most recent heart-melting came at the hands of the shoegaze/post-rock/dark ambient/industrial band Have a Nice Life, who released their double-disc concept album last week. It came in a slim DVD case and had a 70+ page booklet explaining the life and writing of a near-mythical 13th century Italian writer and zealot, Antiochus. The music is absolutely stunning. Considering how DIY and heartfelt this release is, I hope everybody actually purchases it. It's only $11 for a very generous and complete package. Go to the label's website to put in an order.

Deathconsciousness [2008] - Review - Review
Disc One: The Plow That Broke the Plains - Download
Disc Two: The Future - Download

Team Sleep - Team Sleep

Team Sleep is the trip hop side project of Chino Moreno, singer of the Deftones. The music ranges from more traditional sounding rock in the style of the Deftones to more abstract electronic and drum and bass stuff as on the track "Staring at the Queen." I saw these guys live at Slims in San Francisco on December 16 and was particularly impressed by their drummer, Zac Hill, who is the active drummer in a lot of impressive Sacramento based bands, most notably Hella. Below is their only release. Their next album is in the works but has no official date to be recorded or released.

Team Sleep (2005) - Download - Review

Burton Wagner - 21

November 25th has come and gone again, which means another album from Burton Wagner, the DIY post-rock artist who releases an album every year on his birthday, November 25. While his previous releases, In the Realms of the Unreal and A Sentinel's Eyes, have been concept-based, his new album 21, is much more song based. Each song is named after and composed for a day that occured over the past year. As a result there is a pretty wide variety of sounds and emotions that change from song to song. The album sounds like a mix of the post-rock of his previous releases but with more pop, alternative, and shoegaze thrown in. This album doesn't push any envelopes after a titanic release lke ASE but each song is beautiful and memorable. Review to come shortly.

21 (2007) - Download - Review

Grails - Redlight

Grails is a chameleon of an indie band. Their most recent two releases have been psychedelic and jam-based while their 2004 LP, Redlight is oddly taut post-rock with modal inflections. Just based on personal tastes I gravitate towards the tight, composed pieces rather than the expansive jams, but their discography is interesting nonetheless. Redlight has a few goofy tracks but some killer ones too. Overall this album is beautiful. I've been sort of vague about its merits so definitely check out the review for a more detailed look at what these guys sound like.

Redlight (2004) - Download - Review

Envy - Abyssal

This is the new EP from Japan's Envy. For the unitiated, imagine if it was still cool to like Explosions in the Sky and there were some Hydra Head Records influences. This particular release is short but sweet and follows in the footsteps of their last LP, Insomniac Doze, which used a lot more soft textures and major keys than their previous releases did.

Abyssal (2007) - Download

Kayo Dot - Discography

Yesterday's Toby Driver post sort of invtes me to complete his personal discography. I'll start by posting albums by Kayo Dot. Kayo Dot was formed as a reinterpretation of Driver's previous project, maudlin of the Well. He wanted to drop their metal name and reputation in favor of something new so he could pursue more abstruse and challenging musical territory. Kayo Dot plays unlike any band out there, yet is oddly palatable. They seamlessly combine elements of metal, jazz, post-rock, and modern classical. Their LPs are 5 tracks apiece but each lasts just over an hour ensuring expansive song structures that complement the surreal and engaging soundscape. Choirs of the Eye bears more of a resemblance to the material on maudlin of the Well and is more overtly metal and post-rock and was released on Tdazik. Dowsing Anemone With Copper Tongue is much more subtle and bizarre and was released on Robotic Empire.

Choirs of the Eye (2003) - Download - Review


Dowsing Anemone With Copper Tongue (2006) - Download - Review


Kayo Dot / Bloody Panda Split (2006) - Download

Jaga Jazzist - The Three LPs

Jaga Jazzist is a band from Norway with post-rock song structures but instrumentation and harmonies that draw mostly from the worlds of jazz and electronica. I first caught wind of them by sampling the beautiful track "Swedenborgske Rom" from What We Must. I was an immediate convert and listened to that one track probably 40 times in the first week I had it. Their other two albums are weirder and less aerial but have hundreds of interesting nooks and crannies to explore.

A Livingroom Hush (2001) - Download - Review


The Stix (2003) - Download - Review


What We Must (2005) - Download - Review

Thrice - The Alchemy Index: Volumes I & II - Fire & Water

Thrice has been my favorite band for quite a long time now. I first heard Identity Crisis and The Illusion of Safety in 2002 at the tender age of 15 going on 16. I have since had to anticipate three of their album releases. I picked up The Artist in the Ambulance in Alaska after having been on a month long camping / community service trip that left me out of touch with civilization. My reintroduction was via that album. Then, I snagged Vheissu off of a leak, which somewhat sated my need to hear the album as soon as possible. I ended up buying that album twice, once to get the vinyl of "The Weight of Glory" and another time to get the limited edition version. Now we come to The Alchemy Index. Anticipation has sucked. First of all they're cutting the release into two segments, further prolonging the painful wait. Also, Vagrant Records was very careful in making sure this thing didn't leak; the CDs given out on promo were copy protected. But I woke up today and found the whole album streaming on their myspace. It's pretty awesome. It's going to take some digestion time and it's the biggest departure for Thrice yet. Upon first listen though, it seems like a great album. I enthuse you to purchase the album. My pre-order should be arriving on Tuesday from MerchDirect along with a free t-shirt.

The Alchemy Index: Volumes I & II - Fire & Water (2007) - Download - Stream - Review


Get excited for the Earth and Air discs as well, which should be released in Spring 2008. They sound really good so far based off of teaser videos and live performances.

Air Sonnet


Untitled Air Disc Song


"Come All You Weary" (Earth Disc)

Gospel - The Moon Is a Dead World

Gospel is a band that surprised the hell out of me. I think I was linked to a song by another band back in the day because I remembered my first impression of Gospel was that they were turgid and bland. Nothing could be more unbefitting of Gospel's awesome mix of emo, post-rock, and prog. Imagine the towering scope of an album like As the Roots Undo by Circle Takes the Square without pretention or loftiness and an odd sense of rhythmic structures and a drummer that absolutely kills. There are even flourishes of keyboards and weird effects that aren't incongruous with the more emo songwriting. A really singular album that I'm sad I only got into about 3 weeks ago. They have since broken up and The Moon Is a Dead World is their sole LP.

The Moon Is a Dead World (2005) - Download - Review