Is it Thursday already? Well, let’s keep the Holy Rollin’!
Five Great Albums from the Last Five Years Nobody Cares About.
The Forms Icarus – This New York three-piece jangles and bumps along on their debut, a record so fine I can hardly stand it. Guitars chime, the drums rattle, and vocals patch the cracks nicely. Think of some sort of strange hybrid of Jawbox and Mineral with absolutely no idea how to use a metronome. The off-kilter timings never seem forced, though, and throughout the entire disc, the band is nothing short of amazingly sincere and completely on-point. There is virtually no information available on The Forms, but whatever, the music totally speaks for the otherwise silent band members.
Behold…the Arctopus Nano-Nucleonic Cyborg Summoning – A better name would have been Sweet Christ, My Head is About to Explode! These guys are the epitome of metal guitar shredders. Nine songs, all about 8 minutes long, and ALL SOLOING! Completely intense metal-jazz soloing, to boot. Like if John Coltrane lived in Eddie Van Halen’s hands, but they were both really into Maiden and Dillinger Escape Plan and were always hanging out with Cliff Burton.
Clor Clor – Clor was a dense pop (or perhaps even math-pop) band from England that was equal parts Devo and Gary Numan…which is geek speak for awesome. On this, their only album, they jerk and bounce around like they’ve had their umpteenth Red Bull while drum machines, analog keyboards, live drums, a half dozen guitars, and that funky ball of space nipples from The Mighty Boosh seriously get down.
Centaur In Streams – Hum Vocalist/Guitarist Matt Talbot teams up with Derek Niedringhaus of Castor to breathe some life back into the space/shoegaze rock genre. Essentially picking up where Hum’s You’d Prefer an Astronaut left off, Centaur craft beautifully rich and fulfilling textured indie rock. Equally perfect for mid-summer afternoon dozing or driving a flaming car into a canyon.
HiM Many in High Places are not Well – Not to be confused with the Finnish glam-goth band that shares the same name, HiM is the brainchild of former Codeine/June of 44 drummer Doug Scharin. Surrounding himself with the best and the brightest from Chicago’s avant music scene, Scharin and Co. create some of the best thought-out and most interesting modern jazz and dub music going on today. On this, the collective’s fourth album, the dub-meets-jazz recipe is fully realized and the group operates with prowess of the jazz legends they emulate.
mlktst
Apr 6, 2007 -
I kind of cared about the Clor album… and from what I was able to track down HiM sounds interesting.
Question though, in the future when you make lists like this do you think you could also list a track for each album along the lines of “if I only had one track to play off this album to convince someone it was worth getting?”
Not sure if that made sense, how about maybe just list what you think the best track is? It’s hard with some albums, but for those of us trying to download this stuff to check it out it’d sure make life a lot easier.
Just a thought… feel free to ignore it.
paveovertahoe
Apr 6, 2007 -
That’s an excellent suggestion. I wish I had thought of that. Consider it done.
Anonymous
Apr 14, 2007 -
That’s great that you mentioned the Forms. I’ve seen them live 4 or 5 times in NYC and they absolutely blew the doors off the place every time. They are, in my opinion, the greatest not-very-well known band out there and they are all really cool dudes as well. They should be releasing their second album pretty soon, and they’ve mentioned wanting to put together a tour out in this direction. If you might want to book them, just write to forms@theforms.org .
-JF