Nancy Elizabeth - Battle & Victory

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Sello: Leaf
Estilo: Indie-Folk, Singer-Songwriter
Para fans de: Tunng, Marissa Nadler, Colleen, Efterklang

Tracklist
1. I’m Like The Paper
2. I Used To Try
3. Off With Your Axe
4. The Remote Past
5. Coriander
6. 8 Brown Legs
7. Electric
8. Hey Son
9. Weakened Bow
10. What Is Human
11. Lung
12. How Can I Stop?
13. Battle and Victory


With an intuitive understanding of melody and dynamics, Nancy Elizabeth brings a refreshingly Northern turn of phrase to her debut album, Battle and Victory. The Lancashire-born singer’s down-to-earth songs are brought to life by her warm and unaffected voice. Unpretentious but effortlessly ambitious, Nancy turns the retro, less-is-more aesthetic of the current acoustic revival on its head. Not content with writing and singing all the songs herself, the 23-year-old also plays most of the instruments, including guitar, khim, Indian harmonium, Appalachian dulcimer and bouzouki, amongst many others.

Prominently featured is a 22-string Celtic harp, which she first picked up a little over two years ago, after an inspirational chance meeting with a harp player at a Liverpool gallery. Not long afterwards she received a modest award from a music foundation, and within days had spent it all on the perfect instrument, which has become a cornerstone of her performances.

The album was recorded in a 17th Century white stone cottage in the remote Welsh countryside, and a village hall outside Manchester, resulting in an intimate, uncontrived gem of a record. Using a minimum of recording equipment, the heartfelt honesty of her songs is revealed, extending to grander, more complex arrangements when the occasion calls, and bringing in friends to add cello, horns and percussion. While her work is never in thrall to any particular artist or genre, Nancy’s music calls to mind aspects of artists as diverse as Nina Nastasia, The Incredible String Band, Radiohead, Jackie McShee, Mogwai, Talk Talk and Led Zeppelin.

Immersed in music from an early age (“music has always seemed more natural than talking,” she says), Nancy has been writing songs since she was 14, and has performed live for six years. In the last twelve months she has appeared at the Green Man Festival (where she will appear again this August) and played alongside A Hawk And A Hacksaw, Tunng and James Yorkston among others. She is currently putting together a small touring group to augment her already muchloved acoustic ‘one-girl-band’ shows which feature primarily acoustic guitar and her beloved harp.

Nancy’s debut EP, The Wheel Turning King, was released in 2006 by Manchester’s Timbreland Recordings, under her full name, Nancy Elizabeth Cunliffe (she recently dropped her family name, on the grounds that “no one beyond a two mile radius of Wigan can pronounce 'Cunliffe' properly”).

Preceding the album release will be two limited edition 7” singles, ‘Hey Son’ and ‘I Used To Try’, both with exclusive B-sides.

Kuupuu - Unilintu

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Sello: Dekorder
Estilo: Free-Folk, Avant-Folk, Psych-Folk, Drone
Para fans de: Islaja, Terracid, Thuja, Fursaxa, Kemialliset Ystävät

About half a year ago, in the exact same publication, I was raving about the first compilation LP of Kuupuu tracks that were reissued by the Dekorder label from Germany. “Unilintu” follows that compilation and revives some more (maybe even all) of the previously “lost” tracks by Jonna Karanka that she released on CD-Rs and one cassette. The 12 tracks on “Unilintu” are culled from the same releases as the ones on its predecessor “Yökehrä”. Judging from the info provided by the label, the tunes on “Unilintu” represent the more solemn side of Karanka´s output. While there is some truth to that, the overall innocence of her music evens out any uneasiness that could arise while listening to Kuupuu.

That said, pieces like “Myrskylaulu” which was taken from the most recent CD-R “Kulta Sulta” are pretty spooky. You hear some thunder in the background and Karanka´s double-tracked voice over a picked guitar melody, and the mood seems not as positive as on some of her other tracks. The same goes for the instantly following piano piece “Onnenkuelaa”. It´s a good thing that there are also tracks like the nature sound filled “Linnut”, the deeply meditative “Lintupolku” or the acapella track “Taivaankotiin” that are more soothing for the soul.

Overall, it´s impossible to say that either “Yökehrä” or “Unilintu” is the better of the two releases. Both LPs taken together can definitely considered classic releases from the Finnish underground that seems to have slown down a bit regarding the speed with which releases had been put out in 2005 and the first half of 2006. While listening to “Unilintu”, it becomes more and more obvious that those lo-fi CD-Rs and the cassette with Kuupuu tracks just had to be saved from being forgotten. The only thing that´s missing now is new material by Kuupuu. 9/10 -- Stephan Bauer (20 February, 2007)

A Perfect Friend - A Perfect Friend

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Sello: Still
Estilo: Folktronica, Indie Pop

Meeting A PERFECT FRIEND is a full introspection into dream lights and slowcore shadows. The decision of pushing play has to be done while knowing you have to fully jump from A to Z in a world of beauty created by these two overtalented Sweds. CJ LARSGARDEN and THOMAS DENVER JONSSON'S music could be ranked among the quiter moments of SIGUR ROS, the icy electronics of RADIOHEAD and the lyrism of JOHANN JOHANNSSON. It is more a story to live on its own than an family album, with its own personnal way to evolve, seduce and choke our hearts. A PERFECT FRIEND will release their selftitled debut album on Belgian label STILLL this summer in Europe/US/Japan/China.

Their homespun mix of electronica, indie, post-rock and folk is a secret ready to be revealed. APF is mainly a recording project, but will do shows as well. The album was recorded early summer 2006, partly inside the studio, partly outside on numerous field recording excursions. The result is eight songs, from psychedelic folk tunes to deep suggestive electronica, a 45 minute indietronic experience. Sweet pop melodies, purring cats, quacking ducks, glockenspiel and finger picked guitar are streaming through warm layers of organic and electronic sounds. After the recordings, Thomas and C-J has been busy with different projects but has also been collecting ideas for new APF activities. A new APF album will be recorded during 2007.
-- Dot.se

Castanets - In The Vines

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Sello: Asthmatic Kitty
Estilo: Indie Folk, Indie Rock
Para fans de: Vetiver, Akron/Family, Devedra Banhart, Califone, Six Organs Of Admittance, Espers...

Tracklist
1. Rain Will Come
2. This Is The Early Game
3. Westbound, Blue
4. Strong Animal
5. Sway
6. The Fields Crack
7. Three Months Paid
8. The Night Is When You Can Not See
9. Sounded Like a Train, Wasn't a Train
10. And The Swimming

THE STORY
Ray Raposa of Castanets had almost finished his follow-up to First Light's Freeze (2005) when three men in strange masks mugged him at gunpoint in front of his home in Bedstuy, Brooklyn. Stealing Raposa's rent money, iPod and security, the three thieves climaxed a year of depression and nomadic, nocturnal dislocation. Not long after the mugging, Raposa completed In The Vines.

If the Castanets' debut, Cathedral (2004) was a road narrative and First Light's Freeze a malaise of longing, In The Vines is an attempt to reconcile the fear of the spaces between the journeys. Says Raposa, "There is a definite rootlessness. Not so much pursuit as just waking up somewhere else, then somewhere else again. I have had to halt production and/or writing and/or thinking about this album repeatedly due to actual, incapacitating depressions. Totally crippling. The bad kind. Off of the road, it's been a pretty bad year."

Appropriately, the album he was struggling to complete is based on a Hindu fable about being trapped in an inescapable fate, with death and the limitations of our physical lives closing in from all corners. The story is half of the inspiration for In The Vines. The other half is the wandering that's typified most of Raposa's life. From years on the road faking Greyhound passes, to moving to the Virgin Islands as a parentless teenaged professional surfer, to keeping tabs on expatriate journalist parents (father residing in Saudi Arabia and mother in Mexico), Raposa's life has been one of back seats and rest stops. In the fable story, "The Well of Life", a giant net stretched out by a giant woman surrounds a Brahman lost in the forest. The frantic Brahman runs in circles attempting to escape until he falls halfway down a pit and is entangled in vines. He discovers some bee hives halfway between the flesh-hungry six-faced elephant at the top of the pit and the waiting serpent at the bottom. As bees buzz around the Brahman and rats gnaw at the vines holding him up, all he can do is gorge on the sweet honey.

Heavy stuff, yes, but it isn't all peril, and darkness. The songs are sung with such intimacy and earnestness that In The Vines "sways" somewhere between the serpent, elephant, bees and rats, the honey representing a strange sense of hope and delight in the brief moments of beauty that sustain our lives.

THE SOUND
There is community within the music of Castanets, one that keeps Raposa safe and sane while dangling in the pit. In this instance we have near-shipwreck-mate Jana Hunter, Nonhorse (Vanishing Voice), Rafter Roberts, Nathan Delffs (Shaky Hands), Viking Moses, and Matthew Houck (Phosphorescent). Recently the live Castanets' community has included such folks as good friend and labelmate Sufjan Stevens, Nick Delffs (Shaky Hands), Rob Lowe (Lichens) and Annie Clark (St. Vincent).

This ever shifting cast makes it is necessary to drop preconceived notions about "bands" and "singer-songwriters" when approaching the Castanets. Castanets is always a "we," no matter if Raposa plays alone or with dozens. This collaborative effort spawns a paradoxical sound indebted to both AM Gold and the idiosyncratic fringes of music theory. He mines both to reveal treasures. The template may be country music, but the collective energy conjures up elements of noise, free jazz, black metal and electronic abstractions. "Following up a Kitty Wells cassette in the van with a Brotzmann disc or a Lichens disc or Hot 97” says Raposa.

The album is a snapshot of an extended period of intense work, devoid of live audience but blessed by the detritus of players, city, country, ghost audiences, and improvisations of water, smoke and night. Raposa is the curator of his own art, seeking out potential collaborations to infuse the situation with multiple colors, subdue his ego-rule, and unearth the song's own personality. Raposa plays music with folks as an extension of enjoying and eating the honey.

Spokane - Little Hours

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Sello: Jagjaguwar
Estilo: Slowcore, Sadcore, Indie-rock
Para fans de: Ida, Low, Gregor Samsa, Early Day Miners

Tracklist
Singing
Minor Careers
If There Is Hope, It Lies In The Proles
Thankless Marriage
Building
Middle School
Addendum
These Things
Leases & Promises
Tell Me

Little Hours is the patient sheen of stillness after a short, violent burst of intention. The lingering, resonant decay of a nail being hammered into wood. A piano laden marriage of small hopes and quiet violence.

In Church Hill, a borough of Richmond, Virginia, there is a small yellow cottage. Next to the cottage is an austere replica of a mid-nineteenth century, white Federal period house. The members of Spokane hand built the structure over the course of 2006 while recording and revising their first new album in four years, Little Hours. The record is both a document of and an aural parallel to that difficult, meticulous process. In the emotional vein of folk singer Jackson C. Frank with the textural emaciation of composers Zbigniew Preisner and Morton Feldman, the songs themselves are hinged on concepts of failure and stillborn ideas, on the conflicted process of building or birthing a cerebral image into the world. There are the echoes of insistent cats running through the skeletal frame of the house, pillaged, infant birds in their mouths, left half-dead at the foot of the hole where the stair would be. The brutal gutting of the earth to build a foundation wall of concrete and brick, by sheer will and intent and arrogance. There is the crude muscling of lifted walls that block out the sun and obscure the trees. And the thought of future inhabitants, laughing and arguing and sitting, each alone, the ghosts of these songs wilting and remnant in the air.

Little Hours is packaged in a vinyl sleeve with both record and CD inside, 50 of which are handmade and numbered. It features the core ensemble of 2003's Measurement, which MOJO magazine called "a uniquely enthralling treasure", along with contributions from members of Brooklyn's orchestral, minimalist band Gregor Samsa.

Magnolia Electric Co. - Sojourner Box Set

Descargar Nasville Moon
Descargar The Black Ram
Descargar Sun Session EP
Descargar Shohola

Sello: Secretly Canadian
Estilo: Alt-country, Indie-rock, Folk
Para fans de: Wilco, M. Ward, Bonnie Prince Billy, Okkervil River, Calexico, Smog, Damien Jurado

Disc 1: Nashville Moon

1 Lonesome Valley
2 Montgomery
3 Don't Fade on Me
4 Hammer Down
5 No Moon on the Water
6 Nashville Moon
7 What Comes After the Blues
8 Don't This Look Like the Dark
9 North Star
10 Bowery
11 Texas 71
12 Down the Wrong Road Both Ways

Disc 2: The Black Ram

1 In the Human World
2 The Black Ram
3 What's Broken Becomes Better
4 Will-O-The-Wisp
5 Kanawha
6 A Little at a Time
7 Blackbird
8 And the Moon Hits the Water
9 The Old Horizon

Disc 3: Sun Sessions

1 Talk to Me Devil, Again
2 Memphis Moon
3 Hold on Magnolia
4 Trouble in Mind

Disc 4: Shohola

1 Steady Now
2 Spanish Moon Fall & Rise
3 Night Country
4 Shiloh Temple Bell
5 The Spell
6 Take One Thing Along
7 The Lamb's Song
8 Roll the Wheel

Magnolia Electric Co.'s Sojourner is a kind of "love for the fans" offering. It comes encased in a wooden box, with a sliding top, with the band's logo imprinted on the front. Inside are four different CDs, containing four different sessions (and corresponding postcards), recorded in as many different places with four different lineups. There is also a short DVD documenting the band's 2005's Canadian tour in 2005, by Todd Chandler, Tim Sutton, and Ava Berfkovsky. There is a folded poster as well. Inside a small black velveteen pouch there is a pewter medallion with the band's logo engraved on it. It's a memento mori of a time spent traveling through these songs with the journeyman guide. It is limited to 5,000 copies and is available from the band's label, Secretly Canadian, for $37 postpaid. Some of the material on the four recorded discs -- three albums (entitled Nashville Moon, Shohola, and Black Ram) and an EP, Sun Session (recorded at Sun Studios in Memphis) -- has appeared elsewhere before. That said, many songs are here in very different incarnations, recorded, re-recorded, or demoed by Jason Molina himself. But this is no mere odds-and-sods collection. In fact, it feels like Molina must be exhausted, by being so prolific.

Fading Trails, released in September of 2006, contained nine of the songs from these different sessions, giving it its rather schizophrenic character. Nashville Moon was recorded with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in Chicago. It contains 12 cuts, and only "Lonesome Valley," "Montgomery," and "Don't Fade on Me" were included on Fading Trails. This is a full-band set, with Molina accompanied by six other musicians including Jason Evans Groth on lead guitar, Mark Rice on drums, Michael Kapinus on keyboards, Jonathan Cargill on backing vocals, Mike Brenner on lap steel, and bassist Pete Schreiner. Given its title, this is the most "country" set in the box. But Molina's country music is more haunted than hunted. Some of these tunes, like "Hammer Down" and "North Star," appeared on What Comes After the Blues but in radically different, stripped-down versions. They feel more like road songs performed in a smoky barroom than late-night back-porch confessionals. These full-on band treatments add heft and dimension, and underscore them somehow as "definitive."

The Sun Session EP, just over 15 minutes in length, was recorded in a single day while the group was on tour in 2006. The band received payment in studio hours from the venue that hosted them. "Memphis Moon" and "Talk to Me Devil Again" were issued on Fading Trails, but the other two tracks, "Hold on Magnolia" and the band's reading of the traditional "Trouble in Mind," are new. Shohola contains eight cuts with Molina accompanying himself on a guitar. Nothing more. It is the spookiest of the four recordings for sure. While the What Comes After the Blues album may have been spectral in its minimal approach, this set feels positively skeletal. Again, the hints were on Fading Trails in "Steady Now" and "Spanish Moon Fall and Rise," but they only lower the shroud. A slow, lonesome guitar frames Molina's sense of desolation in the lyrics of "Night Country" -- "I have to live this way/Be the builder of no house/Oh lone pine on the fading trails/I join you now/The night country comes...." This disc is only 25 minutes long, but any more would be oppressive.

The final album in the set -- or first depending on the way you decide to listen to them -- is Black Ram, another full ensemble set with David Lowery, Andrew Bird, Molly Blackbird, Rick Alverson, and Miguel Urbitzondo. It begins mournfully with the slow, meandering 4/4 of "In the Human World," but the mix swells even as the tempo continues to drag. The refrain empties out into a wave of Mellotron and harmonium, as guitars unwind. And just as it all becomes nearly full-bodied, the tune just ends. Each tune has a way of beginning with less than it closes. The title track commences as a mutant blues with tinny acoustic guitars, but almost as soon as Molina opens his mouth with his strange incantatory chant, referring to both a person and the person's reflection in the natural countryside, eerie sounds, electric guitars, and reverb envelope it. It's all so disembodied it can barely be called a song. Black Ram is the place where this collection should either begin or end. It doesn't belong in the middle because it's the most physical of the four discs, and because there's at least the determination to find resolve, even if it ends in a kind of lyrical, philosophical, and first-person failure. In other words, the same spirits who have dogged Molina on every previous recording are still here, shape-shifting to meet his every challenge. There's nothing left to do but welcome them in. Sojourner is an aptly titled monolith, one that invites fans of Magnolia Electric Co. with a "thank you for believing," even as it urges them to take in more of the picture than ever before.

White Rainbow - Prism Of Eternal Now

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Sello: Kranky
Estilo: Post-rock, Psychedelic, Experimental, Ambient
Para fans de: Yume Bitsu, Jackie-O-Motherfucker, Landing, Raccoo-oo-oon, Growing, Dirty Projectors, Windy & Carl

Tracklist:
1. Pulses
2. Middle
3. For Terry
4. Mystic Prism
5. April 25th 11:14PM
6. Warm Clicked Fruit
7. Guitars
8. Waves
9. Awakening

After years of outer space exploration in Yume Bitsu and Surface of Eceyon, as well as stints as a hired gun for a multitude of artists including Dirty Projectors, Jackie-O Motherfucker and Devendra Banhart, Adam Forkner decided to turn his focus inward and began to record solo material. And focus he did, working at a dizzying pace that culminated in the production of the 5CD/1DVD White Rainbow Box (2006 Marriage Records). The remarkable thing about that album was not that it was 4.5 hours long, but that the overwhelming majority of it was of extraordinary quality and not mere filler.

With the release of …Eternal Now, White Rainbow has surpassed typical solo project territory and is now a virtual elemental force. At a somewhat brief 71 minutes, his kranky debut pulses and flows with mantric chants, clattering percussions, sighing sustains and guitar leads unashamed of their scorching transcendence. He breathes new life into archaic sub-genres such as progrock, new age, and hippie folk incantations, while never stooping to the negative aspects of any of them, and at the same time remaining a step ahead of the technologically crippled and virtuosuo-less looper pedal scene. Prism of Eternal Now leaves behind the bounds of gravity for a free floating meditational headtrip of inner space exploration.

Note: the vinyl edition of ‘Prism..” is available via Marriage Records

context: White Rainbow is the solo moniker of Adam Forkner. He runs the Yarnlazer cd-r label with Honey Owens [Valet]. He works, lives and plays in Portland, Oregon, a small rural village near the bustling metropolis of Astoria.

track listing: 1. Pulses 2. Middle 3. For Terry 4. Mystic Prism 5. April 25th 11:14PM 6. Warm Clicked Fruit 7. Guitars 8. Waves 9. Awakening

quotes: "The real treasure in Adam Forkner's work is his innate ability to capture the perfect tone of sounds, whether it be a flanged guitar or an ancient drum machine." indieworkshop

"Warm synths and reverbed-out layers of guitar pave a solid foundation for drum loops, vocal tracks, and various other instruments to weave in and out of at their own pace. Tinymixtapes

"Each movement of ambient sound and melodic drone becomes impossible to dissect. It becomes a part of your memories." Tinymixtapes

Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala

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Sello: Secretly Canadian
Estilo: Singer-Songwritter, Indie Pop
Para fans de: The Magnetic Fields, El Perro del Mar, Belle & Sebastian, Architecture In Helsinki, Suburban Kids With Biblical Names

Tracklist:
01 And I Remember Every Kiss
02 Sipping On the Sweet Nectar
03 The Opposite of Hallelujah
04 A Postcard to Nina
05 Into Eternity
06 I'm Leaving You Because I Don't Love You
07 If I Could Cry (It Would Feel Like This)
08 Your Arms Around Me
09 Shirin
10 It Was a Strange Time in My Life
11 Kanske Ar Jag Kar I Dig
12 Friday Night at the Drive-In Bingo

Jens Lekman opens Night Falls Over Kortedala with the sure step of an artist in complete command of his creative self. Imbued with epic grandeur, "And I Remember Every Kiss" fades in with a melancholy timpani roll, a stirring string section and Jens crooning with every wistful bone in his body. After the first verse, the strings passionately swell into a wall of sound and - with one gravity-defying pass-through - Jens delivers his death blow to cynicism by declaring, "And I would never kiss anyone / Who doesn't burn me like the sun / And I remember every kiss like my first kiss;" illustrating just why many consider him one of the most important of the hopeful broken hearts coming of age in contemporary music. Like a modern day Chet Baker, Jens absolutely loves to sing about heartache.

On "Sipping On The Sweet Nectar", Jens introduces a dance beat to his string, horn & croon combo. And it only gets bigger from there with the tableside backbeat of "Opposite of Hallelujah" to the live favorite "A Postcard To Nina", and the slender hooks of "I'm Leaving You Because I Don't Love You" to the Frankie Valli purity of "Shirin" - an epic ode to Jens' barber which is reminiscent of a Mexican folk ballad.

Jens arduously labored over the songs on Night Falls Over Kortedala over the last three years between relentless tours (which ranged from full blown 8-piece ensembles to just Jens alone with a ukelele at the mic). Kortedala refers to a neighborhood in Jens' hometown of Gothenburg, Sweden, where his studio Koredala Beauty Center is located. It also refers to a vague musical pop sound with hints of tropicalia that has been coming out of Gothenburg's clubs over the last few years. Having more in common with Paul Simon's Graceland, Jens' latest is a response to more than an engagement in today's Kortedala music of his Swedish peers. An exercise in insularity, Night Falls Over Kortedala has achieved its specific sound not from going out but from Jens staying in and coming to grips with the sounds he had in his head, or as he said, "from the sound of my own voice reverberating off my home's old '50s brick walls, from the ghosts of everyone who's lived here before me clapping along with their little ecto-plasm hands. My record basically never leaves the 30 square meters that I live on until the very last song when i takeÝa shortÝbus ride to the countryside in 'Friday Night at the Drive-in Bingo'."

Jens further elaborates on his home of Kortedala:
"What a depressing suburban hell this place is. Everyone goes to bed at nine, after that you can't see one single window lit up. You can walk for hours without meeting one single person. I used to like that, cause it meant I could go for endless walks and pretend the world was my own and I was the only one in it. But after a while I found out the hard way that there were others who couldn't sleep at night. On my way into town I got beat up and mugged one night three years ago. Since then it's happened so many times I've lost count. It's never been that bad, I've never ended up in the hospital or lost anything too valuable really. But it's the atmosphere and the small incidents that scare me. The guys who yell faggot at me when I pass their balcony, the nazis hanging out in a nearby open garage, the old men with their binoculars who sit in their windows looking for anything suspicious to report, the dead cats that show up on the lawn outside my kitchen, the knock on my window at 4 am this summer followed by a whispered 'when he opens you hit him in the head,' the neighbour I constantly find passed out in the staircase, the flicker of a million tv screens against the livingroom walls, the smoke from a million chainsmoking moms, the fact that the guy who lived in my apartment before me lay dead in the bathtub for three months before they found him. In Kortedala everyone's minding their own business. And I'm slowly turning into one of them so as soon as I've finished this record I will get the hell out of here."

Night Falls Over Kortedala features Jens friendlies Frida Hyvönen and El Perro Del Mar.

Grouper - Tried 7"

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Sello: Type
Estilo: Ambient, Drone, Experimental, Shoegaze
Para fans de: William Basinski, Lichens, Jessica Bailiff, Charalambides

Tracklist:
Tried
Everyone in turn

In a short space of time, Portland-based Liz Harris has become the name on the lips of the underground music world having captured hearts worldwide with her distinct blend of noise, ambience and a dream-pop sensibility. She submerges her songs in a shimmering haze of hiss, looping chorals and decomposed guitar feedback, but somewhere in there you can hear the ghosts of My Bloody Valentine or possibly Slowdive. This latest 7” takes her sound one step further still; ‘Tried’ is one of the most overtly dense pieces Harris has produced to date, but flip over to ‘Everyone in Turn’ and you are treated to simply vocals and piano, a piece of music which has to be one of the most affecting Grouper tracks to date. Sounding like a lost track from beneath a 1950s pier somewhere this affirms the reason why we’re all so obsessed with Liz Harris’ unique productions – they just sound like nothing else on earth.

Hrsta - Ghosts Will Come and Fill Our Eyes

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Sello: Constellation
Estilo: Post-rock, Experimental
Para fans de: HangedUp, Esmerine, Fly Pan Am, Set Fire To Flames, GY!BE, ASMZ

Tracklist:
1. Entre la mer et l'eau douce
2. Beau Village
3. The Orchard
4. Tomorrow Winter Comes
5. Haunted Pluckley
6. Hechicero del Bosque
7. Saturn Of Chagrin
8. Kotori

Hrsta (her-shta) is the brainchild of founding Godspeed You! Black Emperor guitarist Mike Moya, who is joined on this third album (the band's second on Constellation) by Brooke Crouser (Jackie-O Motherfucker) on organs, guitars and various effects. Brooke has emerged as the core second member of the band, joining Mike on live dates since 2006, and contributing to composition and arrangement on this new record. The ever-faithful rhythm section of bassist Harris Newman and drummer Eric Craven provide additional backbone on select songs.

Ghosts Will Come And Kiss Our Eyes is a collection of gently foreboding psych-folk, anchored as always by Mike's unique guitar sound and otherworldly, cracked vocals (think a sedated Daniel Johnson or Wayne Coyne). With Hammond and pump organs now featured prominently in the mix, much of the new material here sits on a thick, saturated foundation of shifting tones, drones and sustained chordings.

Alternating between vocal tunes and instrumentals, the album creaks and cascades through hazed visions of cataclysm and calm, worry and wonder. "Beau Village", a dirge-like, slow-motion sea-shanty, offers an unsettled promise of safe harbour - quickly undermined by "The Orchard", which conjures a hallucinatory confrontation amidst burning fields. "Haunted Pluckley" is a twangy, twilight lullaby (the album title is pulled from this track's lyric), "Hechicero Del Bosque" finds the full band building to a controlled climax, and a brilliant Bee Gees cover ("Holiday") closes the album. In between these singing songs are a clutch of gorgeous instrumentals forged from Mike and Brooke's guitar and organ interplay.

Superbly recorded by David Bryant (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Set Fire To Flames) at The Pines, his studio-cum-performance space near the old port in Montreal, Ghosts Will Come... brims with eerie atmosphere and intimate sonics, and is the most focussed Hrsta record to date.

Available on CD and 180gLP, as always in our cardstock packaging, with artwork featuring the photography of Lea Grahovac.
9. Holiday