Caddywhompus - The Weight EP

(Chinquapin Records/Community Records, 2011)

Following up their incredible debut, Caddywhompus is back with The Weight, a hyper-kinetic whirlwind of awesomeness in the form of a tidy four song EP. Here is what you need to know about Caddywhompus: they’re awesome. Did I already mention that? The drumming’s ridiculous: tornado flurries pummeling the skins with alien precision. The guitaring’s equally ridiculous: manic shredding with a spoonful of feedback, the kind that’d blitz through a medium-sized paper company in five minutes (I hear IPS is planning on featuring The Weight on their website). And great, understated vocals. It’s the complete package. And, it’s free. Get swallowed up in this bliss-punk mini-epic, you won’t regret it.

Dth - Young Heart Sound (2011, Chinquapin Records)

You’re soaking in the substance of memory when listening to Young Heart Sound. It’s a big glass fishbowl of remembrance and, even more than soaking, you’re sinking down, calmly, through the years of fragmented memory, right into the fishy lungs of history, fluttering about in the liquid pulse of the stuff. –Or– Young Heart Sound is audio oxygen. Something you take in without a thought. Something you are sustained by. Something automatic. Something that you have known, perhaps unconsciously, since you were a child. A slow moving float of voices and subtly electric streams. –Or– Young Heart Sound is a surrealist home video where your mother, after she finds out that you’ve been out all night collecting leaves, begins to softly weep. She tries to hide it, but it’s no use, the tears float up through her fingers, eventually contacting the ceiling. You look out the window. You’re on the first floor and naturally the view is of the endless, arm-wrestling ocean lapping up against and salting the bricks. The bricks start to unbrick themselves from the house and to float away and you have the distinct feeling that the bricks are your history, so you go up into your room and bury yourself in the night's-worth of leaves you've collected, hiding from the deterioration of your past. You can't see the glass, but you know you are in the fishbowl. –Or– It will be ok. It will be ok.  Everything will be ok.

I Miss You // So Much // When I'm // Messed Up by chinquapinrecords

Chris Rehm - Worries, etc. (2011, Chinquapin Records)

RIYL = Tim Hecker, Belong, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma

Last year, Chris Rehm established himself as the new white noise with his gorgeous treatment of texture and volume on Salivary Stones. The spiritual descendent of Tim Hecker, Christian Fennesz and Belong, Rehm's vividly conceived sound sculptures managed to wow me in a way that few other noise/drone records have. Worries, etc. (his now 4th solo effort) is billed as the follow-up and companion piece to Salivary Stones; equally brief, the album's also equally impactful and soaringly beautiful.  In addition to Worries, etc. being a delicious, dense slab of ear candy, Rehm's sparsly placed vocals (gracing two tracks this time around) are absolutely divine additions to the mix.  The short, ghostly sad-folk reprieves nestle in seamlessly with the rest of the album and represent one of the reasons Rehm's work is so uniquely resonant in a sea of dronester wannbes. Stream or download Worries, etc. here.

"Worries" by Chris Rehm