Heavy on the Mellotron, fuzz tones, and paisley, The Black Hollies Softly Towards the Light has more psychedelic homage than a stack of Bomp! fanzines. You wouldn’t guess, then, that three out of four members of the band had toiled long and hard in the New Jersey post-hardcore outfit Rye Coalition. But that hoodie-to-turtleneck-and-sunglasses swap-out isn’t as awkward as it might seem.

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Moritz Von Oswald Trio: Vertical Ascent (Honest Jons Records)
Vertical Ascent may not have much in the way of melody, harmony, or even pre-composed structure, but in comparison to German electronic music producer Motitz Von Oswald’s other work, it might as well be “Turangalila.” During the ’90s Oswald and partner Mark Ernestus produced a series of pioneering minimal techno 12″s, first as Basic Channel then under the name Rhythm & Sound. Minimal may not even be a strong enough term for these–compositions like “Imprint” consisted of little more than muted bass thud and tape-delay hiss. Vertical Ascent, the debut full length record by the Moritz Von Oswald Trio, has a little more going on. But not much. The group–composed of Oswald, Sasu Ripatti (aka Vladislav Delay), and Max Loderbauer–is more live band than studio invention, using percussion, rhodes pianos, and a few effects to create subtly shifting rhythms and abstract textures in real time. Which shouldn’t imply that Vertical Ascent is some sort of googley-eyed Kraut-rock freak-out. The four compositions–referred to here as “Patterns”–still adhere to Rhythm & Sound’s rigorously restrained aesthetic. They don’t blast off, they glide gently and steadily. By using somewhat clunky lo-fi technology Oswald gave his older productions a warmth that, well, balanced out the German-ness of it all. And that warmth is all over Vertical Ascent. Although in this case the clunky technology is a living, breathing person.

Jim O’Rourke: I’m Happy, And I’m Singing, And A 1,2,3,4 (Expanded Edition)

From his collaborations with Sonic Youth, to his abstract guitar improvisations, to his seemingly bottomless catalog of drone compositions, Jim O’Rourke has made a lot of records. However, if one were to name the quintessential O’Rourke LP, it would have to be I’m Happy, I’m Singing, And A 1,2,3,4. Originally released in 2001 by the Austrian electronic label Mego, “I’m Happy” was O’Rourke’s attempt at solo laptop composition, using an array of max/msp patches to generate heavilly textured compositions in the style of Brian Eno’s Discreet Music. But every major O’Rourke calling card is here–from his preferred instruments (acoustic guitar and accordion), to influences, to the music concrete-style trickery (are those strings, or synthesizers, or both?) that he employed so effectively on earlier compositions like Tamper. But what’s most striking is O’Rourke’s use of melody.

Laptop music at the time–and especially among his peers on the Mego label–was an extremely noisy pursuit. At the time, to listen to a record by Pita, the alias of Mego founder Peter Rheberg, was like plugging a dial-up modem into a marshal stack and sticking your head in front of the speaker cone. On I’m Happy, And I’m Singing, And A 1,2,3,4, O’Rourke brought a more directly musical sensibility to laptop music–he swept out the noise, and instead, concentrated on manipulating simple and harmonious sounds.
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Black Dice: Repo (Paw Tracks)

You’ve heard Black Dice do shrieking hardcore-noise and you’ve heard them do meditative new-age bliss. Now, get ready for Black Dice’s hiphop record. Sort of. Nobody’s dropping any rhymes or boasts on Repo, the New York trio’s 7th album, but there’s lot of sampler twiddling. Had Boredoms crashed into J Dilla’s studio back when he was making Ruff Draft, they probably would have wound up with something not entirely unlike “Earnings Plus Interest”, which dribbles abstract noise hither-thither over a grainy break. Maybe it suffices to just say that Repo was made in the same spirit as an instrumental hiphop record. Diverse musical snippets and pop-culture references get mashed up and warped into unruly collages that bear little, if any, reference to the source material. “Glazin”, for instance, jams layers a choir of cartoon mumbles over a slice of slippery Caribbean rhythm. The effect is, in a word, weird. As if Fruit Loops commissioned Paper Rad to make a Toucan Sam commercial. It’s arty, for sure, but not without a sense of humor.

Black Dice: “Glazin”

I.U.D.: The Proper Sex (Social Registry)
I.U.D, the New York duo comprised of Gang Gang Dance’s Lizzi Bougatsos and Growing’s Sadie Laska, isn’t just assertive about female sexuality, it’s down right aggressive. The group’s first full-lenth, The Proper Sex, is sort of the all-girl avant-garde equivalent of 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be. The song titles alone–”Monk Hummer”, “Girls Just Wanna (Time to Have Sex)”–should be enough warning to keep the prudes from placing it on the turntable. But what can the rest of us expect? Well, a lot of moaning, for one thing. After that, a lot of noisy industrial samples, the savage battering of junkyard percussion, and a whole lot of other ugliness of the early-Boredoms variety. It’s all a little too confrontational to be called sensual, but kinky, for sure.

PJ Harvey & John Parish: A Woman a Man Walked By (Island)
Those waiting for PJ Harvey to drop her voice back to a low growl, pick up an electric guitar, and put the ethereal genius of ’07s White Chalk behind her, sorry, that might still be a few years away. A Woman a Man Walked By, Harvey’s latest collaboration with producer/musican/songwriter John Parish–coming ten-years after their first shared record Dance Hall at Louse Point–is decidedly high concept, which is to say, weird. Parish–who also helped produce White Chalk–provides the music here, ten tracks that veer from slanted Beefheartian-blues of “Pig Will Not”, to the ethereal folk of “Leaving California,” while Harvey sings, hollers, and groans. It’s theatrical, to say the least, and you don’t have to wait all the way until Harvey yelps the tongue-twister “Lilly-livered little parts”, during the title track, to figure that out. But Harvey and Parish’s show, gothy and freaky as it is, is a riveting one, full of strong songwriting and soft heartbreaking melodies.

Extra Golden: Thank You Very Quickly (Thrill Jockey)
Never mind the geographic difficulties that face Extra Golden, its members split between two countries and three cities (Washington, DC, Chicago, Illinois, and Nairobi, Kenya, to be specific). No, the group’s most vexing problem has simply been to prove that it’s a real band and not just a haphazard inter-continental jam session. Thank You Very Quickly should clear that matter up once and for all, though. It’s a tight collection of songs that, for the first time, manages to fuse the group’s wildly varied influences. Extra Golden has been trying to mingle genres since the get go, but the results were always a little iffy. Guitarist Alex Minoff’s attempts to pluck porn music-inspired riffs over Onwango Wuod Omari’s syncopations on Ok-Oyot System wound up sounding a bit little like East African elevator-jazz. On Thank You Very Quickly Minoff has better luck. His slide melodies and bluesy guitar tones meld perfectly into the songs repetitive vibe, giving “Anyango” a driving, psychedelic edge. Granted, given the band’s increased touring schedule, it’s probably easier for them to tell what works and what doesn’t. They’re no longer a group of guys sitting in a Nairobi bar trying to hash out songs on a deadline, they’re part of a band that’s three records into its career. All that experience pays off on Thank You Very Quickly. Extra Golden isn’t doing rock songs and it isn’t playing benga. These days Extra Golden has it’s own thing going on.

Thrill Jockey is currently streaming the entire record here.

Extra Golden: “Anyango”

Tim Hecker: An Imaginary Country (Kranky)
It’s easy to see why the music of Montreal-based Tim Hecker is often tagged as “ambient.” His swarming symphonies of manipulated samples and computer noise are certainly atmospheric enough to beg such a label, and yes, he was even featured on Kompakt’s annual Pop Ambient compilation in January. But this is ambient music that grabs the listener by the collar, demanding attention with compositions so massive, so overwhelming and thick with laptop wash that they border on the aggressive. Hecker’s new full-length, An Imaginary Country, offers more of the ghostly anthems he’s know for, though his approach this time is a bit more pronounced than in the past. The distant transistor crackle exhibited on 2003’s Radio Amor has come closer into range, and the distortion saturated refrains of 2006’s Harmony in Ultraviolet have progressed in clarity. The bass throbs and overloaded organ of “Sea of Pulses” even sound like a slow-motion version of Dan Deacon covering Terry Riley. Whether it’s background lush you’re seeking, or an active exercise in melodic deconstruction, An Imaginary Country comfortably satisfies both niches.

Tim Hecker: “Sea of Pulses”

Kurt Vile: God Is Saying This To You… (Mexican Summer)
Believe it or not, ambient music and classic rock have at least one thing in common. Both of these genres are capable of tapping into the vastness and romance of the American landscape–you know, the fruited plain, the templed hills, the Jersey Shore. This basically makes Kurt Vile a prime candidate to play the Superbowl halftime show. His earnest Springsteen-esque songwriting and hazy lo-fi atmospheres make him a double threat in the Americana department. God is Saying This To You–which compiles 12 tracks from a tour-only EP along with a few new songs–finds Vile plucking spare and lonely acoustic guitar ballads through a bevy of cheapo guitar pedals. He’s rocked harder in his life–both on solo debut Constant Hitmaker and as a member of similar minded Philadelphia band The War on Drugs–but songs like “My Sympathy” and “My Best Friends (Don’t Pass This Way)” are steeped in bluesy nostalgia and subtle psychedelia. It’s a tiny batch of songs, built on minimal resources, but they sound huge.

Kurt Vile: “My Sympathy”

Black Lips : 200 Million Thousand (Vice)
The dumber Black Lips act, the better off they are. The closer the Atlanta-based garage rock quartet teeters towards total brain death, the more interesting their music becomes.
And by that virtue, Black Lips are in good shape these days. If the band was only huffing paint on ’07s Good Bad, Not Evil then on 200 Million Thousand, the band’s most recent record, they’re eating the desiccant packs out of the Slim Jim jar. Pure idiocy abounds. There’s the marble-mouthed surf rock of “Drugs”, or the lisping b-movie psychedelia of “Trapped in the Basement”—both of which are so sloppy, so half-baked, that you kind of have to admire the level of intoxication the band must have had to get to in order to a sufficiently shambolic take. There are, of course, some pretty good straightforward rock songs too (See “Short Fuse” and “Body Combat”). But any one of a hundred bands could have written those songs. The slurry Wu-Tang homage of “The Drop I Hold– where singer Cole Alexander rhymes “Vietnam” with “Black-Lips-dot-com in Islam”—takes a special kind of genius, if you would call it that. During an interview Nick Cave was once asked to comment on the cartoon rat that graced the cover of The Birthday Party’s Junkyard. “Good rock and roll has to know when to be stupid,” he said. On 200 Million Thousand, Black Lips know.

Black Lips: “Short Fuse”

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Mountains:Choral (Thrill Jockey)
Everything about Choral, the third full-length LP by Brooklyn duo Mountains, is relaxing. The water-noises, the accordions, the wind chimes. Everything. Fall asleep in a Sharper Image massage chair while listening to this record and you might wake up as Gary Zukav. Brendon Anderegg and Koen Holtkamp conjure billowing electro-acoustic drones from acoustic guitars, field recordings, and, very possibly, a few rain-sticks. Mountains never sound cold or mechanical, but natural–the group’s largely organic palate imbues the music with a warmth that eludes most contemporary laptop musicians/sound sculptors. Over the course of 12-minutes the title track slowly coalesces from the low hum of an accordion into a densely layered blur of electric pianos and chattering percussion. “Map Table” begins as a Fahey-esque guitar composition, but quickly evolves into an atmospheric haze of reverb that would make U2 producer/closet new age tinkerer Daniel Lanois pack up his lap-steel. Light an stick of Nag Champa and let Choral melt the knots out of your back. (Aaron Leitko)

Thrill Jockey is streaming the album in its entirety here.
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The Gris Gris: Live at the Creamery (Birdman)
On the scale of psychedelic emotions–running from mush-brained paranoia to lysergic elation–The Gris Gris placed itself squarely in the center of the dark side. Singer/guitarist Greg Ashley’s songs had more bad vibes than an Alister Crowley dream journal. The titles alone say it all: “Big Engine Nazi Kid Daydream”, “Skin Mass Cat”, “Down With Jesus.” Live at the Creamery, a posthumous release drawn from The Gris Gris’ final gigs effectively captures the band in full swing. Saxophones bleat, organs drone, and fuzz-guitars fart forth blues riffs as Ashley spits surrealist word-salad lyrics from underneath an asphyxiating wall of reverb. Who knows where they are now? Probably cloistered in a run down double-wide surrounded by ruined Virgin Mary statues. But Live at the Creamery is a serviceable monument to The Gris Gris’ enduring and alluring weirdness.

The Gris Gris: “Down With Jesus”