Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest

The year 2009 has been a year where once “experimental” artists have made “pop-friendly” or “accessible” records. Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion is their most accessible record to date, and Dirty Projectors have proven that they can write pop songs (see new single “Stillness is the Move”), while formerly “pop” oriented bands have created their most inaccessible and alienating records. (The Decemberists I’m looking at you.) Following the shift from experimental to “pop,” “Everybody’s Favorite New York Band,” Grizzly Bear, has made their most accomplished record to date: Veckatimest.
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Phoenix – Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix

Phoenix happily abandon any sense that a band should strive for much of anything, and this strikes me as very rock ‘n roll. Their back catalogue is to date littered with fantastic songs and one undeniable full-length in It’s Never Been Like That (2006); a record where, rather than trudge some overfamiliar warpath into esoteric third-album experimental territory, they instead put up their hands, feigned indifference and slunk into retreat. Phoenix decided to retreat. Where did they retreat? Into Phoenix. Phoenix is Phoenix and Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix is nothing but the most Phoenix-like Phoenix album. This makes it the best Phoenix album.
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Sunn o))) – Monoliths and Dimensions

Imagine if someone put a microphone to rows of ocean waves battering a rocky shore and then ran the result through distortion pedals and a wall of eight-foot amplifiers. Like that. At one point I wondered if city ordinance allowed for volume this high: My skin vibrated over my bones, the ground rumbled underfoot, my eardrums shook as people around me, evidently familiar with the ritual, began inserting ear plugs. Penetrating guitar chords pounded for fifteen, twenty minutes at a time, with majestic, just-perceptible songs buried in the distortion. When the fog momentarily cleared, a tiny Japanese woman was playing the guitar.
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Black Moth Super Rainbow – Eating Us

Reviewing a Black Moth Super Rainbow record is ultimately kind of a ridiculous proposition. After all, this is a band that essentially puts out the same record over and over, release after release (Pitchfork, in fact, leveled this very criticism at the band in a recent review). In the hands of many bands, this would most definitely be a bad thing…but criticisms like that just don’t work here. So, the news is: this is more of the same.

And I, for one, certainly couldn’t be happier.

The same overloaded analog drum machine rhythm tracks, vocodered references to flowers, sunshine, and summer, and mellotron flute sounds abound. New textures like soft-synth strings, banjos, cleaner acoustic guitars, and producer Dave Fridmann’s staples (such as big, overloaded drum sounds) certainly tweak the traditional BMSR listening experience, but overall the production is not a significant departure from previous releases.
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