Loud Sun - Sea Grave (2017)

Loud Sun's Andrew Jansen and I have something in common: we both recently moved away from the west coast.

Making a new home for ourselves defines chapters in our lives. Death and birth. There are the big things we leave behind, like friends, which me mourn the loss of most immediately. And as time progresses, a deeper nostalgia for lost things awakens: yawning and stretching into fringe details, we begin missing the way the air felt in the morning, the sounds of a Baptist church choir practicing on Wednesday nights, the smells of nearby restaurants.

This melancholia can quickly become morose, especially if one allows the dust to settle.

Sea Grave is the second release from Jansen's Loud Sun project, and it feels like a love letter to the west coast in a lot of ways. Jansen is a keen student of mellow, sun-bleached, shimmering pop with wisps of psychedelia, though his bio suggests he may actually be a student of the natural sciences. Perhaps that's why he seems so adept at combining the feel of a place with his music.

From beginning to end, Sea Grave is a beautiful record, and you can purchase a cassette tape through his Bandcamp page. For myself, having moved from a more ideal scenario to a less ideal scenario, the music here feels penetrating and concise... an ode to a memory. The impeccable song "Teen Pyramids" has become my anthem of the autumn.



Link to Loud Sun Bandcamp page for Sea Grave, 10 songs:

Loud Sun - Sea Grave

No Babies - S/T (2011)

Life throws curve balls, there's no doubt about that. There's no sense in trying to brace yourself for this beforehand, however, just be on the look out and take things as they come. Without getting into specifics (because you come here to find out about music and not be burdened with someone else's dirty laundry) let's just say the irony of studying a chapter on muscle contractions the same week a good friend has an unexpected grand mal seizure in your living room... that's an irony of life you can not only keep but you can shove it far up your ass.

Seizures aren't even train-wreck-level of interesting to watch, just plain fucking scary. Though, as it turns out, relatively harmless (refrain from putting something in between their teeth! See a doctor!)

Read more about seizures here.

So, in these times, I turn to chaotic music to give my inner chaos a sounding board by which it may have a partner to dance with. 

Thank you, Oakland's No Babies. 

Noisy, disarticulated skronk. A perfect soundtrack for the moments when you get cut off in traffic by some shitmonger driving a hummer with a license plate that reads "Free Tibet". When the universe throws shit into the fan you innocently used to cool yourself from the heat of the daily grind. The bee in your beer. The ice in your underwear. You get what I'm saying? Ugh, I need to sleep. If there are bedbugs in your sheets, No Babies are the perfect lullaby.

10 songs, name your price.

No Babies - S/T

Six Organs of Admittance - The Lost Electric Six Organs (2013)

I have been a huge fan of Six Organs of Admittance and Comets on Fire since my Santa Cruz days in the early 2000s. They were sage patriarchs of the psychedelic music scene in the city, and would go on to being internationally recognized powerhouses by the middle of said decade. Craig and I talked at length in the second episode of our podcast about the Comets on Fire house show we witnessed and the effect it had on our relationship with music.

Thankfully, someone is keeping the Comets on Fire flame alive, and it just so happens to be their frontman, Ethan Miller. Miller has been busy with Howlin' Rain, but managed to find time to start up a proper label (Silver Currents) to release rare live and studio recordings he has been involved with over the years. Rather than simply plopping down a few mp3s, Ethan is doing things right by releasing physical, handmade CDs and cassettes.

One of the standout releases thus far is The Lost Electric Six Organs record. I remember speaking with Ben Chasny briefly after a show in 2003, and he mentioned that he had recorded a whole set of tunes for his Six Organs project while working with his new band, Comets on Fire. Sadly, these recordings were never released/completed. Miller writes that "Chasny even designed a record cover for the LP release of this album but at some point it fell from his grace or just fell to the back of the burner and then off the stove completely, I'm not sure which."

Thankfully, these three tracks have been unearthed and given the proper release thanks to Miller. I have the cassette version myself, and you can see how these recordings offer a different perspective on psychedelia than Chasny was employing in his Six Organs project at the time. He would reunite with his Comets brethren to record Ascent, but this tape is the only recorded version of these songs, and an excellent window into two band's at the height of their creativity.

Get it here:
Six Organs of Admittance  - The Lost Electric Six Organs (2013)