K. LEIMER - A Period Of Review: Original Recordings 1975-1983

Whether conjuring up electronic art-rock atmospheres à la Cluster & Eno or sample-laced, funkily abstract workouts in the vein of Material and My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, K. Leimer's output has been impressively constant (he continues to self-release in the same manner in which all these tracks were originally made available, via his Palace Of Lights imprint) but little-known up to now, making this RVNG set (an archival sequel of sorts to the label's 2012 Sensations' Fix collection Music Is Painting In The Air) all the more appreciated.

"The tape-manipulated serenity Leimer experienced with Cluster II was a key revelation. Leimer realized the potential to compose with minimal training and scoured pawnshops for cheap instruments and recording equipment to transpose his wayward musical instincts. Leimer’s sound palette and composition soon refined and heightened with the accessibility of dynamic equipment such as the Micromoog and TEAC multi-track tape machines." - RVNG

LEWIS - L'Amour

Just over two years after Weird Canada's Aaron Levin first posted about this peculiar, gently creepy record, Light In The Attic have finally reissued it, out now on CD with a vinyl edition soon to follow on July 8th. Anyone looking for some whispered new-age L.A. loner synth-folk to file near (but not too near) their Jandek and Arthur Russell records should look no further.

"In 1983, a man named Lewis recorded an album named L'Amour, which was released on the unknown label R.A.W. And that’s about all we know..The ingredients are simple: smooth synthesizers, feather-light piano, ethereal, occasionally inaudible vocals and the gentle plucking of acoustic guitars, but the effects are arresting...L'Amour is a true discovery of the blog age, uncovered in an Edmonton flea-market by collector Jon Murphy, passed on to private press fanatic Aaron Levin, shared on the internet and speculated over by lovers of curious LPs. There’s almost no information about Lewis or the album on the internet...Lewis remains a ghost, a total mystery, but the music will be heard." - Light In The Attic

INVENTIONS - S/T

Meditative washes of guitar, electronic treatments, samples, stripped-back beats and the occasional vocal mark this debut full-length collaboration between Eluvium and guitarist Mark T. Smith of Explosions In The Sky.

"Inventions is the new band formed by longtime friends, tourmates, and labelmates Matthew Cooper of Eluvium, and Mark T. Smith of Explosions In The Sky. It began in earnest in 2013 when Cooper invited Smith to collaborate on a song for Eluvium's otherworldly double album, Nightmare Ending. The track, 'Envenom Mettle,' was a standout on an album full of them, and just like that a longstanding friendship blossomed into a full-fledged creative partnership. There are plenty of talking points here: the fact that Cooper hasn't been in a 'band' of any sort since he was a teenager; no member of Explosions In The Sky has released an album outside of the context of EITS since their inception in the late '90s; and, of course, this is a dream duo for anyone familiar with the unparalleled emotional resonance of Cooper and Smith's respective day jobs." - Temporary Residence

MILES DAVIS - Miles At The Fillmore - Miles Davis 1970: The Bootleg Series Vol. 3

Yet more archival riches arrive via Sony Legacy's Bootleg Series, this time focusing on the complete recordings (four CDs worth!) of Miles' four-night June 1970 residency at New York's Fillmore East (as previously excerpted from/edited together by Teo Macero on Miles Davis At Fillmore), along with bonus tracks recorded in April of that same year at San Francisco's Fillmore West, totalling 135 minutes of music up to now unreleased.

"By the time Bitches Brew was released in April, 1970—and despite receiving a 5-star review in Downbeat—trumpeter Miles Davis was already under fire from mainstream jazz critics as having 'sold out,' despite the densely constructed, improvisationally unfettered music being as unapproachable to an audience looking for accessible music as anything he'd done with his increasingly liberated second great quintet of the 1960s. Sure, there were rock rhythms and, perhaps more disturbingly to the delicate ears of its detractors, rock energy and volume, but if anyone was thinking 'sellout,' it certainly wasn't Columbia Records, who had no idea what to do with side-long improvisational excursions, pasted together in collage-like fashion by Davis' longtime producer, Teo Macero.

But thankfully, the late '60s and early -to-mid-'70s was a time when the emergence of FM radio stations and open-minded music fans made the kind of music Davis and others in his circle made not just accepted, but massively successful...By the time Bitches Brew was released, Shorter was gone, replaced by Steve Grossman; Keith Jarrett was added to the keyboard mix, playing organ and the occasional tambourine; and percussionist/vocalist/flautist Airto Moreira was recruited to turn Davis' touring quintet into the septet heard on all but three tracks of Miles At The Fillmore, another archival release that demonstrates how the trumpeter may well have been absorbing the music of Jimi Hendrix, Sly & The Family Stone and James Brown, but what was coming from his pen and horn was something else entirely." - All About Jazz

MARK McGUIRE - Along The Way

Combining his needly, shimmering, Gottsching-like leads with a slew of other instrumentation that's more layered, nuanced and detailed than previous efforts, Along The Way's continuous suite, while more of an expansion of his palette than an outright departure, somehow simultaneously sounds both more mature and more lighthearted than anything we were expecting to hear on this first for Dead Oceans by the former Emeralds guitarist.

"The first sounds we hear on Along The Way are strummed acoustic guitars, and we hear more of them throughout, but this isn’t a guitar record. Instead, McGuire piles on the layers: Guitars, synths, mandolins, drum machines, sighed vocals, sounds that could be any of those things but could also be bird noises or whatever. It’s a mellow, contemplative, staring-longingly-through-your-window-on-a-sunny-day kind of record, and it’s way too aggressively pleasant for anyone to seriously call it “drone.” When the drum programming clicks in, you could almost be listening to pastoral ambient techno, except that the focus is never really on the beat, or on anything else for that matter. The parts with vocals (processed, flat, multi-tracked, conversational, often wordless) can sound a bit like solo Panda Bear. Other times, it’s like the score to Friday Night Lights if Peter Berg had been into Fennesz instead of Explosions In The Sky. And because it sounds like all these things while simultaneously sounding like none of them, Along The Way practically feels like its own genre of music, a new hybrid that calls out for a name like Balearic Blues or Astral Noodle or Ambient Sunburst Glop, or maybe even something that isn’t terrible." - Stereogum

ACTRESS - Ghettoville

Darren Cunningham's fourth (and possibly last, at least under this alias) finds him returning to his own Werkdiscs imprint (now P&D'd by Ninja Tune), and on more than one occasion here coming back to the sluggish slow-jam edit approach of his initially-incognito Thriller project with Lukid from going on five years ago now.

"Although it kicks off with the merciless industrial grind and pulverizing bass hits of seven-minute monstrosity 'Forgiven,' Ghettoville concludes much less predictably with 'Rule,' a beguiling fragment of sampled rap put on loop. In some ways, this is a representative moment: consider the repetitiveness that's less like a techno track and more like a hardware malfunction, or the cruelty of cutting the final loop off mid-word. But it’s still a shocking shift in tone from the aggressively soulless machine sounds of 'Forgiven,' a tonal shift that Actress has been subtly working toward for most of Ghettoville's second half via the (relatively, tentatively) warm, human feel of the record's three best tracks, 'Gaze,' 'Rap,' and 'Don't.'" - Pretty Much Amazing

KRONOS QUARTET Plays Music By BRYCE DESSNER - Aheym

Classical music doesn't get much play time in our shop, but every once in a while it'll find its way into the queue. When we played this latest Kronos Quartet release a while ago, it generated a flurry of interest from the handful of customers in the shop at the time. Perhaps more in-store play of classical music is in the offing?

"Aheym, Dessner's collaboration with contemporary-classical hip-uncle figures the Kronos Quartet, is the result of a working relationship that dates back a few years. Three of its four pieces were written specifically for Kronos, and the title track has been a fixture of their concerts for a few years now. 'Aheym' begins with all four members digging into their strings and producing hard, sinewy sforzandos, or sudden, violent accents, before subsiding quickly into an agitated, seething hum. The cello plays lopsided arpeggios, each one nervously edging forward, while pizzicato prickles tension higher. It is fierce, vivid music." - Pitchfork

VA - I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age Music In America 1950-1990

With such labels as EM, Numero and RVNG/FRKWYS having already issued solo and collaborative material (both old and new) from Iasos and Laraaji (both featured herein), and the post-noise/nu-new-age/neo-kosmische tape-trading heyday just having passed, what better time than now to honour the roots, peak and decline of this most earnestly transcendental (and unabashedly tacky) of American private-press scenes?

"Ever marvel at how much experimental indie music these days sounds like Enya? This smart, trippy, well-annotated archaeological dig helps explain why, connecting the dots between psychedelia, electronic music, yoga soundtracks, drone art and Muzak, showing how musicians questing for enlightenment through sound birthed a mainstream market niche, and then a hipster touchstone. Inspiring stuff." - Rolling Stone

"Though most new age music has rightfully been associated with the cynical postmodern business of sonic backdrop music of the 1980s, '90s, and early 21st century, it was originally an outgrowth of the spiritual adventurousness of the 20th, particularly during the late '60s and '70s. Light In The Attic presents the first overview of the genre from the private-press side—in other words, its most authentic expression, since the vast majority of the records surveyed here were released by artists who had no regard for economic remuneration. This set collects 20 tracks from both well-known and hopelessly obscure musicians and places them in an historical and qualitative context which focuses on musical adventure and/or spiritual intention—most of what's here was released long before the genre became an industry. This is the music of the true believers." - Allmusic

ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER - R Plus Seven

Landing somewhere between the chopped-up samples of 2011's Replica and MIDI-synth simulacra of the sort that James Ferraro mischievously dropped with that same year's Far Side Virtual, Daniel Lopatin's first album for Warp alternately scrambles and soothes, with most of its ten tracks flitting from glossy hyperactivity to meditative, minimal nu-new age.

"Aesthetically, Lopatin's palette for R Plus Seven consists of familiar tropes: its 10 tracks are full of brash and staccato timbres, constructed upon repetitive, nonsensical, and dislocated samples, as if fast-forwarded through. He appears curiously preoccupied by reinventing only the most piercing of preset instruments. There are liberal helpings of dyspeptic cheesiness, and his MIDI-patch choirs put the 'phony' back in polyphony. But unlike Lopatin's preceding releases, a complex compositional strategy is afoot here. There is almost no formless wandering, and the album feels far more like a carefully constructed and well-paced narrative than a slapdash assembly of half-baked ideas." - The Quietus

"Lopatin is a composer who is primarily interested in the possibilities of splicing together synthetic instruments, subliminal frequencies, and the inherent uncanniness of everyday sounds. He's less interested in guiding his alien orchestras to a finessed crescendo than he is prone to hard cutting each melodic phrase, scrambling and twisting each rhythmic pattern, and running every chance of emotional catharsis into a strategically placed oblivion...The most commonly used sound across R Plus Seven is the human voice. It rampantly appears—singing, hiccuping, speaking, gasping, groaning, etc.—in all 10 of the tracks, but not a single syllable or vocal tone is 'real,' so to speak. Whether sampled or synthesized, every voice—which, it should be noted, is the most organic musical instrument there is—was altered or constructed in some digital fashion, never once performed or recorded 'live' for these compositions. There's something subtly dissociative about listening to appropriated voices for nearly an hour, and Oneohtrix Point Never knows it." - XLR8R

DAWN OF MIDI - Dysnomia

The most recent album in Thirsty Ear's Blue Series that's seemingly come out of nowhere to surprise and impress us (the last such instance perhaps being last year's Shipp/Spaceman/Noble/Coxon Black Music Disaster session), Dysnomia is a continuous suite of clicking, pulsing, well-honed electronic minimalist jazz, but minus the actual electronics, and in so reducing basically throwing down the gauntlet at likeminded, longer-standing acts from the rock side of the spectrum such as Battles (to give a listen, stream the entire album via the band's SoundCloud page).

"There's been plenty of jazz groups that tried to reach out to the rock kids in recent years—The Bad Plus and Brad Mehldau (both trios, incidentally) have shown up on the radar with covers of indie-rock songs, though the covers feel more like like a bait-and-switch operation to get a wayward rockist into their more straight-ahead jazz charts. Unlike those groups, Dawn of MIDI aren’t interested in coddling the uninitiated into the world of trading fours and Dmaj11 chords. On Dysnomia, they more interested in, or rather wholly focused on, rhythm. It's a new bridge out of traditional jazz to the rest of the world, and it's built with obsessive precision...It sounds close to an acoustic Beak> session playing a Steve Reich composition, though even closer to something totally unprecedented." - Pitchfork

PRINCE NIFTY - Pity Slash Love

A key yet underheralded contributor to many great things about Toronto's local independent music scene(s), from Double Double Land, 6 Nassau, and sound design for the plays of Alex Wolfson to Blocks Recording Club, sporadic live techno supergroup of sorts New Feelings, and Les Mouches/the Owen Pallett band, Matt "Prince Nifty" Smith finally officially follows up 2007's A Sparrow! A Sparrow! with an inimitable blend of guitar pop, R&B-savvy vocal stacking and manic Shangaan/Footwork-like electronic dance touches.

"While we're on the subject of weird melodies, I'd like to introduce you to Prince Nifty. Experimental in nature, the vocals are free-flowing like Gregorian chant. Avant-garde artist Thomas 'THOMAS' Gill is one of the contributors to his latest, Pity Slash Love, most audible in the keyboards of the album's second track."- Ride the Tempo

BILL FRISELL - Silent Comedy / PAT METHENY - Tap: John Zorn's Book of Angels, Vol. 20

Two virtuoso guitar vets, both based in jazz but versed in many genres, take left turns this year for John Zorn's Tzadik label, with Frisell freely improvising and making full use of his looper and pedal board on Silent Comedy, while Metheny applies his bespoke Orchestrion setup to tunes from Zorn's songbook.

"For all the self-generated hype that Tzadik releases carry on their spine inserts, the one that accompanies Bill Frisell's Silent Comedy is pretty close to accurate. This really is the guitarist as you've never heard him before—at least on record. He's improvising live in a studio with no edits or overdubs. Some of the 11 pieces included here carry traces of his signature bell-like tone, but this is a very free recording. The set's longest cut, 'John Goldfarb, Please Come Home,' is a meld of spaced-out sonic effects, harmonic invention, skeletal phrasing, and aggressive skronk that moves from halting melody to pure dissonance." - Allmusic

"Guitarist Pat Metheny is revered for his bright, accessible modern jazz. Saxophonist and composer is associated with much knottier, often dissonant experiments. Metheny's new Tap: John Zorn's Book of Angels, Vol. 20 unites these two known opposites of instrumental music, and the result is often intensely visual. These Zorn compositions are part of a mammoth series of songs inspired by (and built around) the ancient scales of traditional Jewish music. Zorn started the project in the 1990s. It eventually ballooned to more than 500 tunes, the last 300 written in a three-month period. Metheny selected some of those for this album, and began recording them in his home studio between tours. He plays all of the instruments except drums, which are handled by his frequent collaborator Antonio Sanchez." - NPR

COLIN STETSON - New History Warfare, Vol. 3: To See More Light

With Bon Iver's Justin Vernon providing guest-vocal cameos (including "Brute"'s uncharacteristically heavy-metal 'Cookie Monster barking') on this follow-up for Constellation (replacing Laurie Anderson and My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden's contributions to Vol. 2), Stetson's multi-mic'ed roars and circular-breathed sax cycles continue to pummel with a delicate fierceness that's halfway between the dark ambience of Tim Hecker (whose work has likewise been mixed by Ben Frost) and the vein-busting baritone blowing of Mats Gustafsson.

"The physicality of Stetson's efforts is apparent here. The longest track at 15 minutes, 'To See More Light' is his crowning triumph. Stetson maintains the structure of the piece, building upon his circular breathing to create a hypnotic and trance-like state. About halfway through, he slows the proceedings to produce a heavier vocalization and thumping sound that crests into a zenith of growling energy." - All About Jazz

MOUNTAINS - Centralia

Brooklyn duo Mountains earn their name once again with this set of unmoving beauties. Seven slo-fi improvisations stretch over a luxurious 67 minutes populated by Mountains' characteristic blend of acoustic and electronic sounds perfect for the long-haul listener.

"If the likes of Pontiak and Barn Owl conjure scorched plains and endless prairies then labelmates Mountains—the chillaxed twosome of Koen Holtkamp and Brendon Anderegg—are charting boundless ocean depths. Centralia, their third full-length for Thrill Jockey, could easily soundtrack a deepwater Herzog-ian journey in some sort of chuntering submersible. The voyager will be greeted by shoals of goggle-eyed fish, waving fronds, elegant fan-like structures that breathe and eat through tubes and strange, lonely creatures clad in shimmering bioluminescence." - BBC

"Ears still virgin to the inspiring neo-psychedelia of Mountains will find a perfect place to begin exploring their discography with Centralia. While so much ambient- and drone-based experimental music is essentially meaningless, forgettable work that roughly replicates the same sonic recipe popularized by Brian Eno in the '70s, the distinctive melodies and forward-thinking-yet-beautiful experimentalism heard in Mountains' music put them in a league of their own." - Exclaim!

ANNETTE PEACOCK - I'm The One

Annette Peacock's 1972 solo debut was only previously reissued in 2010 as a limited edition self-released CD, so hats off to Future Days for following up their release of Bo Diddley's The Black Gladiator with this funk-rock oddity, one that's often akin to Betty Davis belting through an array of Moog filters!

"The album’s wide range of vocal emotions and diverse sonic palette (featuring Robert Moog’s early modular synthesizers, which the singer actually transmitted her voice through to wild effect) places it firmly at the forefront of the pop avant-garde. Originally released by RCA Victor in 1972 to widespread critical acclaim, I'm The One found itself amongst good company. Both Lou Reed and David Bowie had recently signed to the label—Bowie in particular was enamored with Annette—and artists ranging from ex-husband and jazz great Paul Bley, along with notable Brazilian percussionists Airto Moreira and Dom Um Romao, guested on the album itself. Writing and arranging I'm The One’s nine passionate tracks—bar a unique cover of Elvis Presley’s 'Love Me Tender'—the disc grooves easily from free jazz freak-outs and rough and rugged blues-funk to gently pulsing synthesized bliss." - Light In The Attic

ACTRESS - R.I.P

Darren Cunningham's third full-length (and second for Honest Jon's) sees his approach stay static-ridden and sidechain-prone, sinking into deeper, darker ambience than on previous efforts despite intermittent resurfacing into beat-based technoid territory.

"R.I.P is, without question, far removed from the twisted techno jams that comprise 2010's Splazsh and Actress' debut album, Hazyville, but the genre's influence is nonetheless dominant. Instead of blatantly nodding to the great Detroit veterans or, say, the German minimalists, however, Cunningham inverts techno and dives further into its deep cavern of possibilities than ever before. Only after he's reached the tunnel's end does the producer return, emerging with a sound that favors visceral textures and supernatural moods over outright rhythms and melodies." - XLR8R

"R.I.P increasingly floats free of mind/body exigencies to create a record—closer in spirit to 'sound art' than anything you might hear in a club—that revels in a sublime sense of unearthliness, from 'Ascending''s inverted beats and cloud-mist textures to 'Marble Plexus,' which sounds like god's own techno party heard through a wall, and on to sulphur-reeking cuts like the excellent 'Shadow From Tartarus' and 'Tree Of Knowledge.' The whole thing glows like freshly mangled spaceship parts found in the desert at night." - The Stool Pigeon

ERIC CHENAUX - Guitar & Voice

Eric's first truly solo record for Constellation alternates between woozily interwoven nylon-string/fuzz/wah songbook balladeering and equally-affecting hardanger-style bowed instrumentals, making for maybe his best set yet.

"In between vocal lines, an acoustic guitar weaves a cussed path, snarling through a wah-wah pedal...An interesting example of a performer getting more experimental and simultaneously more studio-savvy, Chenaux has produced his best work yet." - The Wire

"After five LPs and a decade of working with acts like Sandro Perri, Ryan Driver, Drumheller and Michelle McAdorey, he has made Guitar & Voice, which is just that, just those perfect things, guitar and voice—coaxed & shattered & sublimated & splintered & mirrored & burned to ash...This is unquestionably one of the best albums of 2012." - Said The Gramophone

KRONOS QUARTET - Music of Vladimir Martynov

Be sure not to miss the Kronos Quartet playing with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Saturday, March 3, 2012 as part of the New Creations Festival. They'll be playing a specially-commissioned piece by Canadian composer Derek Charke. That piece isn't on their latest album, which instead features the work of Vladimir Martynov (whose opening piece The Beatitudes is especially sublime).

"In 1979, Vladimir Martynov entered the Spiritual Academy at the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, where he worked on preserving and restoring traditional Russian Orthodox chant. He returned to composition in the 1990s with a new style that combined the traditions of American minimalism with the repetitive chant of Russian Orthodoxy. As Greg Dubinsky writes in the liner notes, Martynov explores the 'perspective of the Orthodox Church’s hermetic, ascetic tradition of insight and ecstasy achieved through ceaseless prayer. His goal is to create a music that maintains this pose of enraptured contemplation for as long as possible.'" - Nonesuch

"Martynov's commissioned compositions include a re-scoring of his 1998 work The Beatitudes, Schubert-Quintet (Unfinished), and Der Abschied. Schubert-Quintet (Unfinished) is influenced by Schubert's String Quartet in C Major, and allows Kronos Quartet to reunite with former cellist Joan Jeanrenaud. In it, Martynov goes backwards in time, meeting Schubert and then extending his thought into a modern composition that highlights the power found in the interaction of two cellos. Der Abschied is a tribute to Martynov's father, and the piece replicates his father's difficult final breaths through its use of repetition." - The Violin Shop

THE CARETAKER - Patience (After Sebald)

This newest release on James Leyland Kirby's History Always Favours The Winners imprint has him once again donning his Caretaker guise, and these detourned piano pieces are a classical gas (or maybe more of a gauze, come to think of it—click here to sample this album's outtakes, the supplemental mini-album Extra Patience).

"Leyland Kirby's most recent effort, much like, but unique from, those released previously, exists as a faded daguerreotype of passing time and time passed. Commissioned as the score for Grant Gee's most recent film  [of the same name], it's an amorphous miasma of echoing antiquity, evoking a time prior to the advent of colour film as a crackling grey scale roll." - Exclaim!

"James Kirby's discography as The Caretaker is essentially variations on a theme, but you never quite know what you're going to get out of him. This time around, Kirby has chosen recordings of Franz Schubert works circa 1927 and repurposed them via his usual mix of gentle processing and decay, but here the lines are blurred more than ever between artifacts of age and purposeful manipulation." - Resident Advisor

SANDRO PERRI - Impossible Spaces

So, we really like Sandro Perri around these parts.

His last full length, Tiny Mirrors, was our shop's fave record of 2007. And though it's not here on our website for reference, I believe the previous year's top record was the self-titled effort by Glissandro 70, a side project of Perri's alongside one Craig Dunsmuir...who kinda, sorta, umm...works here at Soundscapes.

If you still believe by this point that we're capable of any objectivity at all, then I would like to say this: not only do I predict that our 2011 staff poll will find Perri's latest once again on top of our year-end list, but I think he absolutely deserves the accolade...and should get the same praise elsewhere. That's because Impossible Spaces is more than just the best thing this local uber-talent has done (whether under his own name or his also-exceptional aquatic ambient guise, Polmo Polpo). It's an album that stacks up beautifully against anything released this year. It is, as a colleague of mine opined earlier, "a game changer."

But first, a little word about nepotism. No one likes it, am I right? Except that whether you're a CEO or a convenience store clerk, I'd wager we're all guilty of it at some point. Because whether it's landing someone a cushy new job or a jumbo Squishee for the price of a small, who doesn't love the feeling that comes with abusing power to favour one's friends? It's kind of innate—true objectivity just doesn't happen to be something we humans do all that well.

But, there's also a check against that kind of apparently unbridled favouritism. The truth is, that feeling of wanting to be the one to draw attention to our overlooked peers—to be deemed forward-thinking tastemakers and benevolent benefactors of a local scene—that good feeling is a transient one. It rapes and pillages and plunders and then quickly moves on. That's why so many artists (especially local ones) are built up and torn down so quickly. It's not about loving them, it's about loving the feeling that being the first to tell others about them brings us.

Familiarity and community alone does not breed loyalty. Loyalty requires more. In music, it ultimately asks that the local artist is capable of moving us in the same lasting and surprising ways that any other musician or group does. And that is what Sandro delivers to us, his very appreciative fans. He's one of a kind, baby.

Without a eye to any trend, Perri has very quietly amassed a discography of very human music. It makes sense that the first Polmo Polpo full-length was called The Science of Breath. Despite many changes in approach, his music has remained organic and instinctive in its movements. Like a creature growing and evolving before us, each new record has found ways to absorb and adjust past lessons into new patterns and expressions, each set both more efficient and more complex that what preceded it.

Consequently, Impossible Spaces is the greatest example yet of this career evolution. At seven songs, it is brief. And yet with several tracks reaching over seven minutes, nothing about the record is linear or overly direct. It contains immediate hooks (like the killer guitar bends of "Wolfman" or the gentle title mantra of "Changes"), but also is full of arrangements so subtly nuanced that they continue to be mysterious after dozens of listens. Perhaps most importantly, despite any number of touchstones (from Arthur Russell and The Sea and Cake to Van Morrison and Brian Eno), it sounds like absolutely no one else. Sure, if you're looking for it, you'll hear funk, blue-eyed soul, ambient soundscapes, folk-jazz, electronic, and psych-pop all cozying up together. But if you really listen, you'll hear an absurdly smart and humble musician following his own cues without shame or pride. And then you'll realize just how rare an experience that is.

Sandro Perri may come into our shop sometimes, and that's certainly endearing to us. But the reason we really love him—and why we'll continue to love him even if Impossible Spaces gets feted above and beyond our wildest hopes—is because he's the bloody best at what he does. He's the only guy who does what he does. And if you've ever needed a reason to check him out, it's this: this album is listen-to-it-for-the-rest-of-your-life good; it's Astral Weeks good.

And yes, we're biased. But for once, it doesn't matter.