THE VELVET UNDERGROUND - The Complete Matrix Tapes (4CD)

"The first song on the Matrix Tapes is a languid, 13-plus-minute-long version of 'Waiting for the Man,' complete with a whistling break and two previously unreleased verses, seemingly made up on the spot. But what makes this collection essential is the cohesion of the band and the setlists: the shows find the Velvets at their absolute peak as a live unit, with Reed and Sterling Morrison's guitars—the former raucous and unhinged, the latter pristine and precise—meshing with an almost subconscious cohesion. The 42-track set finds the band cruising through some 22 different songs sprawling across their entire career: 'Sweet Jane' is rendered in versions much calmer than the familiar recording on Loaded, forceful on the first round (and with yet another unreleased verse), gentle on the second. Doug Yule introduces a loping melodic bassline into 'Heroin' (first night, second set) before moving over to organ. But most of all, the clarity of the sound—which is drastically improved from the Live 1969 album, where several of these songs were first released, and The Quine Tapes collection, which is rough-quality audience recordings of songs from the same set of shows—makes it feel as if the band is performing right in front of you." - Billboard

FUZZ - II

"Fuzz, the aptly named 'side project' Segall formed in 2011 with high school friends Charlie Moothart and Chad Ubovich, is not the product of a short attention span. The band's self-titled 2013 debut found them playing the role of music historians as much as musicians, calling forth the ghosts of metal past and trying their flowing robes on for size. Sabbath is the most glaring reference point, but the boys also did their homework on Hendrix, King Crimson, and deeper cuts like The Groundhogs. Basically, if it was British and heavy as hell, it found its way into Fuzz's collective conscious.

The fact that Segall plays drums instead of a beat-up Fender is already enough to distinguish Fuzz from his other work, but zeroing in on proto-metal has led to some of the most thoughtful (though still undeniably visceral) music of his prolific career. The second album from the California-bred group is meatier than its predecessor in every conceivable way, starting with the guitars, which have been pushed forward to the front of the mix in such a way that nearly relegates Segall's shrieking vocals to the role of wallpaper. Riffs are ultimately the fuel that powers the record's engine, a six-cylinder relic from the 1960s, and guitarist Moothart reigns as the MVP in spite of his drummer's more considerable star power." - Consequence of Sound

DOUG HREAM BLUNT - My Name Is Doug Hream Blunt: Featuring The Hit "Gentle Persuasion"

"Doug Hream Blunt is now in his 60s. In the past few years he has recovered from a stroke and, judging by the promo materials made available by Luaka Bop, which has compiled his slim works for re-release, seems pleased to be appreciated. In the late '80s he self-released (and self-distributed to local San Francisco record stores) one album and a subsequent EP of nagging, synthetic jams, inflected with '60s rhythms, wheezing vibes, a little funk and the kind of frazzled, insalubrious charm that now plays very well. [...] Genre was never a concern of the idiosyncratic funkateer. On this earwormy compilation you can hear that he has a voice naturally suited to soul, but his rhythms are insistent and regular, while his solos are free and wild. He's a Fly Guy; he wants to 'fall into a groove/And then move,' an accurate description of the modus operandi of these catchy, bleary tunes." - The Guardian

HELEN - The Original Faces

"Over the course of her nearly decade-long career as Grouper, Liz Harris has become a master of all things overcast. Her ambient compositions and waterlogged ballads are like fogged-up windows—bleary enough to indicate the bleakness inside, but only its vaguest outlines. There's suggestion of something heartbreaking, but its true shape remains occluded, unobtainable, and all the more moving for such an approach. With Helen, her occasional 'pop' band, she's occasionally parted those clouds, peeled back the layers of reverb to reveal the bruised heart at the center of those songs." - SPIN

SLIM TWIG - Thank You For Stickin' With Twig

"After producing two albums for U.S. Girls (U.S. Girls on Kraak in 2011, Gem in 2012), and scoring two films (Sight Unseen & We Come As Friends (winner of a Special Jury Award at Sundance, among numerous other accolades), Twig found himself in 2013 at a creative impasse re: his own songwriting. He had been through full band incarnations live and on record. They featured a cast of Toronto heavies (members of Zacht Automaat, etc...). He briefly performed Slim Twig sets as a duo, featuring multimedia artist and musician, Meg Remy (U.S. Girls). They performed sets that combined versions of Twig’s released songs with freely structured improvisations, samples, and brightly melodic synth textures. Something in this combination of the pop-minded and the cerebrally-produced has rubbed off on the recordings found on Twig’s latest.

Thank You For Stickin' With Twig is to date the most sonically immersive album in Twig’s discography. Where some records have focused explicitly on sample-based songwriting, while others have been completely live-recorded, the new album arrives at a perfectly produced fusion of fidelities. It hovers, glamorously caught between a cloud of obscurant, half-speed tape hiss, and the most stoned Jeff Lynne production you’ve ever heard. Twig flirts here with a variety of vibes, most often opting for a three dimensional approach whereby a warped tape aura is overlaid with colourful, laser-cut keyboard and guitar melodies. A fetishization of analogue texture is married to a digital approach. All the while, we find Twig irreverently raiding classic rock of its symbolism, sexuality, and social ambition for ulterior subversions. In this respect, TYFSWT's closest cousin may be Royal Trux's Accelerator." - DFA Records

BLANK REALM - Illegals In Heaven

"Illegals in Heaven lives between past and present fun. Blank Realm's fourth LP, it's impulsive yet nostalgic—it's pulling on your shoes and running across fields when you were a kid, running into green and more green, unashamedly free.

The Australian band channel this feeling of reflective escapism from fizzy opener 'No Views'. The over-arching impulsiveness of the album is captured in its eminently shoutable chorus: 'I've got no views on it, it's just something that I did.' 'Just do it,' it seems to whisper. Lead single 'River Of Longing' speaks only in the most hopeful of terms. 'Meet me on the other side/and we'll make up for stolen time,' chant sibling singers Daniel and Sarah, arms outstretched—'won't you take me by the hand?' It bubbles over with an unbridled, youthful charm." - Crack Magazine

DRINKS - Hermits On Holiday

"Cate Le Bon wrote some of my favorite words of 2013 on her album Mug Museum. White Fence is the swirly psych music of Tim Presley. Cate and Tim are friends—Cate played guitar on a tour with White Fence—and so now there's this: DRINKS.

DRINKS has an album coming August 21, and the title track is called 'Hermits On Holiday.' The percussion is a machine at the start, the guitar distinctly Cate, as is that thickly Welsh voice. Tim plays bass on this song, though he told me on the phone that they swap instruments a lot on the album. When that bass kicks in, so does White Fence drummer Nick Murray and the song's lockstep rhythm loosens up, as if it's had a drink. The easy joy and silliness here make me look forward to hearing the full album, Hermits On Holiday." - Bob Boilen, NPR

VA - Kollektion 4: Bureau B compiled by Richard Fearless

"I always listen out for music with a sense a space, where compositions are stripped down to the barest components while retaining the power to conjure emotion. It's for this reason that I'm so drawn to dub, techno and German avant-garde minimalist music. To me the bands and labels in the Bureau B archive, current and past, were looking to distant lands, their own 'Neuland,' whether in the future with bands like YOU and Riechmann, or from a more remote past, like medieval folk band Ougenweide. They were creating something radical and experimental, something that didn't draw on the same rhythm and blues, Anglo-American rock that was saturating the airwaves at the time. They were pioneers in every sense of the word. With all due respect for the music that forged these paths, it was on hearing the mental guitar on Faust's 'Herbstimmung' that I knew to look not only at the so-called golden years of this era, but to look at what these artists were doing later, as well as the new bands that were emerging from those schools. Artists who are still creating, still innovating. I hope you enjoy the journey." - Richard Fearless for Bureau B

NOVELLA - Land

"Novella's formation was the result of an instant spark—guitarist Hollie Warren, guitarist Sophy Hollington, and bassist Suki Sou met through mutual friends in Brighton in 2010, where they quickly realized that they shared a common love for '60s counterculture and bands like Black Sabbath, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and Pale Saints. The addition of drummer Iain Laws in 2011 and keyboardist Isabel Spurgeon in 2014 solidified the group into a propulsive engine, capable of welding woozy, cosmic psychedelia to sustained squalls of flanged-out, far-out dream pop. Novella's debut album Land is a controlled blast of mainlined electricity, a tempest of relentless groove and crystalline vocals that is at once the vicious edge and the calm eye of the storm." - Captured Tracks

THEE OH SEES - Mutilator Defeated At Last

"Thee Oh Sees have released a new album, and it's called Mutilator Defeated At Last. It is their ninth album (and fourteenth overall, if you count the albums they recorded under different variations of their name), a number that's high enough to project its own self-assuredness, conviction, and the deep stench of some folks who know what they're doing. The opening song is 'Web.' It is very, very good. Breaking it open spills out the language of Thee Oh Sees.

If this first song is your first song to hear from Thee Oh Sees, the 'WOO!' lets you know that you’re invited.

If the 'WOO!' doesn’t say all that needs to be said in the language of invitation, I don't know what will. And you might have to settle for just the 'WOO!'—because the delay on the vocals is mixed pretty high, and it's hard to understand the lyrics. I think something about Saturday. Who cares, we're already in it. We're already on board." - The Talkhouse 

UNKNOWN MORTAL ORCHESTRA - Multi-Love

"There are plenty of albums about heartbreak, but not so many about polyamorous relationships in which a third party leaves both you and your wife confused and heartbroken. Ruban Nielson might have tangled his emotions beyond repair during the making of his band's third album, but you can't deny the subject matter is compelling. 'Multi-love has got me on my knee/We were one, then become three,' he sings on the title track, adding: 'It's not that this song's about her/All songs are about her.' The Auckland/Portland band’s multi-love is multi-coloured, too, taking soul music as its template but splashing the canvas with futurist synths and trippy vocal effects." - The Guardian

JACCO GARDNER - Hypnophobia

"To call Jacco Gardner a daydreamer may not be as farfetched as he’d have you believe. Its meaning may refer to a fear of sleep, but with Hypnophobia, the brand new album from 'baroque pop' prince and Dutch producer/multi-instrumentalist Gardner, he's all set to cast a majestic and vibrant psychedelic spell that will hypnotise listeners at the point dreams and reality meet.

'I came up with the title 'Hypnophobia' while falling asleep and part of my brain just didn’t turn off,' explains Gardner. 'I often have trouble letting go of reality, even though I prefer the world in my dreams... Hypnophobia comes from a place where fears, darkness and creativity collide, like a slightly scary lucid dream. Fearing a loss of control definitely plays a big part of it.'" - Polyvinyl

WEED - Running Back

"Weed's songs sound like layered linen. Instrumental fragments are fragile and wispy on their own, but stacked together, these small pieces create an impressive textural whole. Weed call Vancouver home, and despite being a city with as many scenes stacked within it as there are layers of molten haze on their album, Weed sound distinctly Pacific Northwestern. That is not to say that Weed's new album recalls Sub Pop's early empire; it's more of a reference to the softened gloom found on the album. This is a record that all at once sounds like rain on Sundays, trying to drive home in a late-night downpour, and the moment when the sun slowly creeps out from behind the clouds to breathe some sort of life into a soggy day. There's hope to be found in this dour, silty mud." - Stereogum

"The band with the most unfriendly U.S. border-crossing name in the world are back with a new full-length. Weed formed in 2010 with the chance meeting of Will Anderson and Kevin Doherty at a clothing-optional beach in Vancouver that I can only assume was Wreck. Hugo Noriega joined later, and the band has gone through 'a million drummers' since. Now they’ve signed to Lefse and are starting to garner some serious attention, thanks in part to the well-honed skills of Jordan Koop of the Noise Floor.

"Although Weed didn’t exactly 'run back' to release a follow up to 2013's Deserve, they did it patiently and perfectly. Plodding along, Running Back sees a band comfortably and confidently master a genre. Whether or not the album title refers to a quick jog along a golden beach or a sprint through the cool woods, or perhaps a return to form, they've nailed that melodic, fuzzy, emotional, grungy, shoegaze sound that everyone is wetting themselves over right now." - Beat Route

OS BRAZOES - S/T (1969)

"Rare and highly sought after in its original format, Os Brazoes' self-titled album was originally released on RGE Discos in 1969, a psychedelic masterpiece that fuses samba, R&B and rock'n'roll influences using fuzz guitars, synths, percussion, lush vocals and effects." - Mr. Bongo

"The group first made a name for itself as Gal Costa’s backing band, yet allegedly never recorded alongside her. After seeing the electrifying shows put on by the group, the RGE label soon signed the group to record a single album. Though the influences of Os Mutantes and other tropicália artists of the time are present, what is laid to tape sounds nothing like the group’s contemporaries. The gloss of lush horns and complex arrangements found on Veloso and Gil records from the same era is missing. Found in its place is a wall of fuzz spread across the majority of the songs provided by, simply, Roberto. Layered within is wah-wah-drenched rhythm guitar by Miguel, who later adopted the moniker Miguel de Deus, recording one solo album titled Black Soul Brothers and another as a member of Assim Assado." - Wax Poetics

ARTHUR - Dreams and Images

"If you had met Arthur Lee Harper in 1967, around the time he was writing his debut album, it probably wouldn’t have been too long before he introduced himself as a poet. That might seem strange, considering he did not actually publish poems. Instead, he played guitar and wrote songs—not verse set to music, but rhyming lyrics with verses and choruses, delicate melodies and Romantic imagery. He was then what we might call today a singer-songwriter, but the '60s being the '60s, Harper and his friends Stephen John Kalinich and Mark Lindsey Buckingham had grander ambitions than simply strumming pop tunes or providing entertainment. Poetry was an aspiration, a true calling, a means of peeling away the veneer of society and exposing some hard human truths both beautiful and revolting.

Before Harper signed with Lee Hazlewood’s LHI Records, he was living at the YMCA and sharing bags of potatoes with his friends. Dreams and Images, released under his first name to almost no fanfare, did not do much to change those conditions, and this reissue does not present it as a lost or unheralded classic. Instead, it's another piece of the LHI puzzle that Light in the Attic has been putting together for a few years now. In that regard, it's a revealing artifact of that scene, as well as a gentle statement of purpose by a struggling poet." - Pitchfork

VA - Native North America Vol. 1: Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966–1985

From the impressive range of styles, regions and eras covered (as well as the hours of research that undoubtedly went into this compilation) to the stunning layout and typesetting, Kevin Howes and co. have put together one awe-inspiring document!

"[Native North America]'s power stems from the convergence of familiar influences (Beatles, Stones, Dylan, especially Neil Young) with the traditions, languages and lyrical concerns of the Inuit, Métis and First Nations peoples. Apart from Buffy Sainte-Marie, the Saskatchewan-born, US-raised Cree singer who became a 1960s folk star, this strand of North American music has been almost entirely forgotten.

Bringing it to light was a Herculean task for Vancouver-based DJ and compiler Kevin Howes. He began collecting these records 15 years ago, rummaging through record stores, private libraries, dilapidated warehouses and neglected corners of radio station archives in order to find artists who were 'off the grid.'

'The thing that I found appalling and shocking was there was no information available,' he says. 'I’d find a record somewhere and Google the artist and I was shooting blanks. I had to go straight to the source to ask for context and the stories behind the music.'" - The Guardian

STEVE GUNN - Way Out Weather

We already loved his first set of vocal pop/rock tunes for Paradise Of Bachelors (last year's Time Off), but hadn't gotten around ('til right now) to mentioning this equally stealthily-subdued and subtle follow-up album, released last month and sure to make its way onto the lists of record-store staffers and music critics in the weeks ahead/as this year winds down.

"For years, Gunn never toured—for much of the ’00s, he jammed endlessly with pals and co-conspirators and studiously developed his guitar style, which is described reductively as folk but draws on a wide swath of music that includes blues, jazz, Indian classical, punk, and the Grateful Dead. He never wanted to be a traditional virtuoso who played wheedle-wheedle-whee-style solos. Rather, he’s a rhythmic player inclined to repetition and improvisation, more about appreciating forward motion than traveling to a specific destination.

Gunn also had to develop confidence as a vocalist—singing for people will always be more terrifying than playing guitar—though that initial tentativeness isn’t evident on Way Out Weather, his most straightforward and rock-oriented record. Gunn’s singing echoes his playing: It is relaxed and intimate, like a late-night conversation with a trusted confidant, and it gently draws you into the hypnotically beguiling songs." - Grantland

BUDOS BAND - Burnt Offering

The Budos Band have consistently produced retro grooves that could have been written in an earlier era (namely, that of the '60s/'70s). On this new outing, they let their hair grow out by adding some heavy fuzz to the mix. Like The Chamber Brothers said, my soul has been psychedelicized!

"Don't let that album cover and title fool you. The level of departure here is so slight that the boys could've gone ahead and just slapped a roman numeral four on there. The Budos Band's approach to instrumental funk/soul has always had a touch of the ominous. They reclaim the original grandeur of Beethoven's Fifth while fitting into the fun and frivolity of how the symphony has been fetishized over time. It's music for dancing, to be sure, but it contains a mood that sort of hovers over the revelry. It's looking down on itself from a great height. It isn't imbued with judgement, necessarily, but a grave sort of knowingness. It feels good in the crowd, bathed in darkness and strange lights. But something is moving us, and we are a little bit scared of the possession. Most dance music uses this feeling as a segue to release; Budos Band just lays in the pocket and glowers with a fierce but composed solemnity." - Tiny Mix Tapes

MONOMYTH - Saturnalia Regalia

Halifax’s cheeky woozesters Monomyth have been on our radar for a little while, thanks to some sweet cassette EPs and nationwide touring jaunts. They’ve released their first full-length Saturnalia Regalia as new signings to Mint Records (following the lead taken by fellow cool dudes Jay Arner and Tough Age), and have just announced a late summer tour through North America. All gangly riffs and reedy-voiced harmonies, get hip to Saturnalia's new Mint sound!

"Bred outside of Halifax and enduring their formative years well after that city was dubbed the 'Next Seattle,' some of the men in Monomyth might cut off their arms for My Bloody Valentine before being tagged Sloan fans. Thing is, Sloan once loved MBV so much, they aped their whole multilayered wash for a couple of years before the giant waves of sound pitched them dizzily onto video sets meant to resemble The Ed Sullivan Show. Seasoned ears will nonetheless hear shades of Sloan's Peppermint EP or the Super Friendz's Sticktoitiveness tape on this catchy record, but younger people will notice references to G-Unit's Tony Yayo on a song celebrating the swagger of Tupac Shakur ('Pac Ambition'). Killer songs about uncertain longing ('I want something else!,' one coda insists), four-track-era production values, swirly, cinnamon-y tones—it's all alluring, like a Beach Boys/Women mixtape." - Exclaim!

NAOMI PUNK - Television Man

While this second effort doesn't stray much from their already-impressive 2012 debut The Feeling, we're not complaining at all, happy to be bludgeoned again by another batch of slightly lopsided, aggressively indifferent Washington State sludge-pop.

"Television Man, the Pacific Northwest act’s follow-up to 2012's The Feeling, is musically disjointed, skittish and askew. The effect isn’t to dazzle with technicality or to confound with deliberate idiosyncrasies, but to take listeners on a circuitous ride to the song’s exalted musical peaks. It’s a ceaselessly forceful record, full of low-end blows that are felt more intensely due to the fact that the arrival schedule is so fickle. It’s also occasionally beautiful, namely when sustained vocal lines cascade across the syncopated bludgeoning of every crescendo." - Wondering Sound

"Most of Television's songs—and most of the songs on 2012's The Feeling, for that matter—are slow and grunge-like, anchored by vaguely radioactive-sounding guitars and vocals mumbled to the point of unintelligibility. They are heavy and romantic but sour end-to-end, the ballads of a teenage swamp thing preening in the dark. They're also unexpectedly pretty, filled with twists of melody and structure far more sophisticated than they need to be to fly in the realms of punk and underground rock." - Pitchfork