Hillstomp is a duo out of Portland, Oregon making raw, passionate, exuberant music. They’ve been known to cover songs by Muddy Waters, R. L. Burnside, and Rainey Burnette; their slide-guitar and homemade percussion certainly betray a debt to past masters from Mississippi, Texas, and Chicago.
Adult.: Why Bother?
Why Bother? (Thrill Jockey) is reminiscent of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, in which Catherine Deneuve’s quick trip from ennui to psychosis is documented to dreary-yet-exhilarating effect. Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus, otherwise known as Adult., festoon their new CD with horror’s trappings.
Jesse Malin
“I just let it all puke out of me,” says the thick-accented, New York-based rock veteran Jesse Malin on his songwriting procedure for his latest release, Glitter In The Gutter (Adeline/EastWest).
nEuROTIC
In recent years, erotica has slunk into ever-more-acceptable territory. At some point, it reached the coffee-table stage and big, glossy books with pictures of artfully shadowed buttocks became popular fare in many a living room. nEuROTIC is not one of those books.
In 1995, a growing indie record label from Wilmington, Delaware released The Birth of Graffiti
The Birth of Graffiti is filled with photographs of graffiti from 1970s New York. Graffiti groupies will probably recognize Jon Naar’s name—he published a much sought-after and now out-of-print book called The Faith of Graffiti in 1974.
Comic Abstraction: Image Breaking, Image Making
“Animation and cartoons are part of our global contemporary culture,” Arturo Herrera says in an interview from the book Comic Abstraction: Image Breaking, Image Making. “Their simplified forms and friendly colors are precise and carefully orchestrated to make an immediate impact.”
Earth: Hibernaculum/Within the Drone, CD/DVD
In 2005, Dylan Carlson returned to the helm of Earth to release Hex: Or Printing In the Infernal Method, an album that subverted everything fans had come to expect of the intense drone group. Swapping ear-drum-thrashing feedback for cleaner pitches and vaguely country overtones, Carlson’s leviathan repetitions took on an emotion-stirring dimension that could be difficult to extrude from earlier, less focused albums.
The Book of Knots: Traineater
Coming as the second in a three-release series from The Book of Knots, a conglomeration of seasoned avant-garde veterans Matthias Bossi (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Skeleton Key), Joel Hamilton (Battle of Mice), Tony Maimone (Pere Ubu, They Might Be Giants), and Carla Kihlstedt (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Tin Hat Trio), Traineater acts as a tribute to the American rust belt and the mining and steel cities laid within that have been neglected since the Industrial Revolution.
