Did you forget me? I had (a thankfully pretty minor case of) covid this week, so there wasn’t much to do but sit around and get stoned, which led me to revisiting some of Gorilla Vs. Bear’s old AOTY lists. The GvB peeps specialize in indie stoner music, and I found a familiar name I hadn’t thought about in a while – Pure X! The dudes from Austin have 4 full-length albums, with 2014’s Angel – their first and only LP on Fat Possum – being my favorite. This week we say RIP Gary Wright, whose iconic 70s soft-pop smash “Dream Weaver” is echoed here in “Fly Away with Me Woman” – silky smooth! It’s ..read more

As a high schooler reading Kurt Cobain’s Journals, I found out about one of his favorite bands, Young Marble Giants. YMG had only one album, 1980’s Colossal Youth: a genre-defying collection of bare-bones tracks. As a teenager, I didn’t understand it, and it wouldn’t make sense to me for years. When it finally clicked, it became something of a revelation. Young Marble Giants singer Alison Statton led the band Weekend somewhat immediately after Colossal Youth. Other than her, Weekend shares no members with YMG, but their spirit of minimalism is intact on The ’81 Demos, a collection of tracks r ..read more

As a relatively recent inductee into the cult of Deadheads, I’ve been listening to a lot of music that puts electric guitar front-and-center. This includes, outside the Dead, some smoking blues albums and a good dose of Hendrix, but something in my memory must have compelled me to revisit Felt’s debut. I’m glad I did. Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty isn’t as emo as its cover art would suggest, but it isn’t not lonely. To that end, the reclusive atmosphere gives the lead guitar plenty of room to breathe. I realized the guitar melodies in “Birdman” were still wired in my brain from my hazy coll ..read more

I’ve not delved into much music by the British band Flying Saucer Attack, but I tend to trust anything released by Kranky, the superb American label that delivered masterpieces by Stars of the Lid, Labradford, Windy & Carl and so on. Clear Horizon was the collaborative project of Flying Saucer Attack’s David Pearce and Kranky recording artist Jessica Bailiff. By all accounts, the artists created the project by sending each other tapes across the Atlantic in the early 2000s, without recording in the same room. For me, this is one of those albums where the first track is the best. “Watching ..read more

If you love the 4AD sound anywhere near as much as I do, then you truly cannot go wrong with This Mortal Coil. Essentially the label’s in-house cover band, TMC formed in 1983 under the aegis of label president Ivo Watts-Russell (the namesake of Cocteau Twins’ classic “Ivo”). One of their first songs as This Mortal Coil (and still their most popular) was the Cocteau’s (or 2/3, Liz Fraser and Robin Guthrie) take on Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren”. Its popularity is really a no-brainer – a straight-up gorgeous track with one of the inimitable Fraser’s all-time vocal performances, “Siren” was u ..read more

It’s no big secret that Cocteau Twins are my favorite band, and this has been the case since high school. They have had their share of imitators, contemporaries and comrades over the years, but one album that really struck me in my initial obsessive Cocteau phase was Idylls. The comparisons are too easy: the phaser guitar, the female glossolalia, the drum machines. I’d venture to say it’s less varied than even the simplest Cocteau efforts, and that I think helped me sink into it back then. Like many teens I smoked a lot of pot and that is the prime association here. I think more than any Coct ..read more