Animal.Calls

A quick shot of springtime freshness for your ears.
& like the cherry blossoms,
or late night dancefloor friends,
this week’s releases are gone before you even say hi.

If you are Brooklyn Based,
please note the show list.
Springtime clusters are budding.
Hard to choose on every night of the week.
I’ll be back in the city Thusday night,
for the JOMF show,
then gone again but back on Monday.

Short list,
everything is recommended.

Greet the sound.

+++++ Shows +++++

Got a show? Email me.

Here’s what’s happening over the next week:

+++++ MUSIC +++++

	Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. - Recurring Dream And Apocalypse Of Darkness [Important, 2008]
	Recurring Dream And Apocalypse Of Darkness is the by far the heaviest Acid Mothers Temple record yet. So heavy, in fact, that Kawabata Makoto jokingly said “the album is really heavy, maybe a bit like Sunn o))). Hahahaha”
	AFCGT - CD-R [Fire Breathing Turtle, 2008]
	Holy shit, this is fucking great! And who would have ever thought that the A Frames and the Climax Golden Twins would make a record together? And who would have imagined that it would be this fucking awesome? It’s all superlatives and all expletives in describing the first collaborative production from AFCGT. The A Frames had managed to raise some eyebrows here through their post-punk appropriations of early Wire and early Fall, but the vocals had always been something of a miss for them especially on the last Sub Pop album. But in working with the AQ-endorsed Climax Golden Twins who are a band accustomed to delivering exemplary instrumentals from literally every corner of the avant-rock landscape, the A Frames have the permission to shut the hell up and let the Climax Golden Twins dump the fucking kitchen sink all over A Frames rhythmic swagger. The album opens with a tumultuous blast of glue-huffing noise-rock, sort of like a fistfight between the Butthole Surfers and the Sun City Girls. Soon after, a series of bad-ass Birthday Party / Oxbow swamp rock riffs explode with spindly space-age gamelan leads; elsewhere, the No Wave ghosts of R.L. Crutchfield-era DNA emerge with of jagged chops across the guitar pick-ups, bloodied fingers and all. Fuck, it all sounds fucking great!
	Breeders - Mountain Battles [4AD, 2008]
	Kim Deal of the Breeders and Pixies has a distinctively spartan bass style, never playing a single unnecessary note. She’s no less economical with her songwriting: Mountain Battles, only the Breeders’ fourth album in 20 years, runs to just 36 minutes. Deal’s bass is one of the most comforting sounds in rock, her tender, bruised-violet voice being another, and hearing her again is like meeting a good friend after a long hiatus. Despite the triumphant surge of opening track Overglazed - Deal crying “I can feel it!”, drums crashing around her - this is an often melancholic record that meanders in rewardingly odd directions: the dub-like clatter of Istanbul, the eerie mountain music of Here No More, songs delivered in Spanish and German. It sinks its hooks into you slowly - but they stay sunk.
	Charalambides - Rose Thron [Klang, 2008]
	Long-, long-, long-, loooooong-awaited and singular entry in the Charalambides discography; one of those “does it really exist?” items that’s finally seeing daylight, or moonlight. A stark, unsettling and beautiful slice of duo Charlambides invocation/incantation, taken from the period between Jason Bill and Heather Leigh Murray’s tenures with the band and featuring extraordinary chord organ and vocal work from Christina and some signature lap steel mastery from Tom. Fans of the band’s most recent, more song-based work will find this relevatory, long-time listeners will say “ahhhh” and settle in for the flight.Also Available: Charalambides + Pocahaunted - Bored Fortress Split [Not Not Fun, 2008]
	Emeralds - Bullshit Boring Drone Band [American Tapes, 2006]
	The title takes a stab at what Emeralds do, but while the trio are wont to use drone as a main ingredient in their work, the end effect is something that’s richer than a superficial perusal might indicate. Emeralds specialize in a manner of atmospheric conjuring that draws no lines between the beautiful and the ugly, often relying on a dose of the latter to create the former.Also Available: Emeralds - Laying Under Leaves [Wagon, 2006]
	Jay Reatard - See-Saw [Matador, 2008]
	His garage/punk sound expertly mixes aggression and melody, in which jagged time slips from comfort to nightmare, all in pop song format. It only took one listen to his solo debut for me to realize that this guy, who has been making records since he was 15, has definitely got this whole music thing figured out. The main draw for me is that it has a sense of immediacy and honesty that you don’t seem to hear much of these days. Whatever it is, he just needs to keep on doing it.
	Mi Ami - African Rhythms 12” [White Denim, 2008]
	Two members of D.C.’s splattery early-’00s Black Eyes—bassist Jacob Long (apparently/sadly minus his sax, but sometimes with a keyboard as well as bass) and guitarist Daniel Martin-McCormick—moved to San Francisco a few years ago and formed Mi Ami with De-e-e-troit Techno Murder City refugee and drummer Damon Palermo. Mi Ami acknowledge the influence of dub, techno and Afrobeat, but their somewhat downplayed jazz studies (like, in school, even!) also pertain. Mainly in a Miles way: just as Miles Davis’s late ’60s-to-early-’70s recordings often put bass, drums, guitar and keyboards up front, with Miles’s trumpet gradually turning background into foreground, and/or compulsively tweaking a sense of deep focus, so Martin-McCormick’s never still, but small (as filtered) voice chatters and wails behind the (rest of) the rhythm section, also shadowing his stuttery guitar, which sometimes rises into crisis (as does the voice, more often), before either or both crash-land on the one, which is always making short, sharp phrases amidst the mists of granulated notes in the music pump.
	Spiritualized - London Sessions [iTunes, 2008]
	This is an acoustic EP version of their new album.  Heartbreaking.
	Steve Hauschildt - The Summit [Wagon, 2008]
	Steve Hauschildt is a member of the Emeralds trio, and his solo disc The Summit is a revelation in that as a solo act he sounds a lot like a full-band Emeralds recording - while I listen I’m kinda forgetting what it is the other two guys might do. A somewhat long album, about 60 minutes of music, 9 tracks in the 5-7 minute range, with some of the deep and soft non-noise drone approaches that Emeralds perfects, but also with a lot of other progressive approaches - maybe like early Genesis instrumentals on 16RPM?
	Thurston Moore - Sensitive-Lethal [No Fun, 2008]
	Sensitive/Lethal is Thurston Moore in deep basement cosmosis. Investigations into acoustic guitar as noise instrument as well as noise/amp discussion for a hopeful and bright blackness. Childhood dreams of noise essayed with photos of unsuspecting innocents running from noise weirdo (front cover) and texas blues albino drug zap (johnny winter – still alive and well detail – back cover). This is the story told in drone meditation and sweet slice.