Track Listing: This Is Your Year, Slip, 12 April, Understanding Our Razing, Under, Forever Setting Sun, The Anchor In Your Sky, The Way Out Is Through.

A deft excursion into the realm of ineffable tenderness. Hopeful escapism... soul balm. Hypnotic, dreamy moods. Nicely wrought minimalist songs. The basic acoustic or electric guitar strumming seems somehow integral and necessary, with emotional import and subtle touches. Some tracks are more electronic, but still quite spare in arrangement. Overall, a fine effort that succeeds in its intent of making the rude world fall away.

For more info, visit the artist’s website or his MySpace page.

Track Listing: Birth (of a Monster), Monster, Contact, Confession, Invincible, King of my World, The One You Love, Standalone, Three, Kill Site, F.I.S.T., Pieces of Eight, Sharp Dressed Man.

If you are familiar with this band (how many movie/tv soundtracks have they been featured on?) then you know what to expect. Thundering industrial grooves are augmented by guitar shredding and twisted, insistent male vocals, but there is also crossing into ethereal, ambient territory with a number of danceable mixes.

The lyrical substance may reveal discontent with our nasty little world, but there is a higher spirit at work within the bleak terrestrial landscapes; one that fairly revels in being this damned good at what it does. The album concludes with an interesting take on ZZ Top’s Sharp Dressed Man.

For more info visit the band website or their MySpace page.

Track Listing: Glass, In Love With The Fall, Scar, Monster, God Hater, Just Like You, Photosensitive, Festering, If Everything Was Green, Romantisistic, My Friend The Ghoul.

A Christian band that is neither lame nor late for the party, as too many such bands seem to be. This group roams their own aesthetic turf, rather than borrowing whatever flavors are current in the secular world and converting them for church use. The sound is something like psychedelic metal blended with European art rock... featuring both male and female vocals.

The band’s label exists as a part of Jesus People USA/Chicago, and has much to do with providing shelter and solace for the homeless, crazy, poor, or otherwise downtrodden members of our society; thus their lyric content has more to do with circumstantial realities than evangelism or preaching.

For more info visit the band website or their MySpace page.

Track Listing: dial 888, Any Other Day, In The Same Place, underground there are machines, Different One, Night To Day, n2d dub, Does It Matter, Any Wonder, RHFD, Treasure, How Do You Know That, Nexus Thirteen, Different Two.

It feels a little strange to be reviewing an album that may not exist any longer... at least as far as being sold anywhere I search. It is barely even mentioned at the Moodorgan site, except to note that their current release contains some tracks from this one. But that seems to be a major aspect of the Moodorgan process, which is a kinetic, multimedia, ongoing live event iconoclasm featuring visual art and dance as well as a soundtrack, which is what the music is about.

To quote from their manifesto:
We embrace the process and consider the artifact unimportant or irrelevant. We consider recorded information, binary digits, to be like tap water: useful, even essential, but of little economic worth. True value is in live performance: unique, transient experience.

As you can see, they are not at all about commercial release CDs and the rock star game. As denizens of the Los Angeles area goth/industrial underworld, they seem to involve themselves primarily with the presentation of various live performance events.

As for the (often quite beautiful) music, it is comprised of both instrumental bits and something like songs... if only for the inclusion of vocals. A number of tracks are incomplete fragments. I assume they are pieces of something larger that would happen in a live setting. The influence of the steampunk cultural vision is evident in antiquarian mechanical noises and steam engine-ish whooshes and puffs. The vocals often entail a dreamy contrast to the instrumental parts, and the whole effect transports the listener into a kind of H.G. Wells/Jules Verne universe of fantastical imagination and machinery. It is as if this album is an artifact from another dimension; a time capsule intended to inform anyone discovering it of another, finer realm.

I can’t help but wonder if this group has a presence in Second Life, where a steampunk SIM is currently on the rise. I imagine sailing lavender skies in an immense steam-powered rigid airship, surveying the far away earth with its network of railways and roads and tiny, antlike people.

For more info, visit the group website or their MySpage page.

Track Listing: Kissed Me, Revolutionary Rock ‘N’ Roll, Pretty Boy Game, Gripped with that Leg, Elliott’s Song, Beautiful Life, Sausage Fingers, I Want, Mountains and Tumult, Amphetamine Dream.

Aside from the sometimes-a-little-too-obvious influence of Cocteau Twins’ Liz Fraser (this album was even produced by Robin Guthrie), it is not easy to define this LA singer, Annie Barker. Her MySpace site defines her as shoegazer pop, but I can’t agree. To me she seems more like a darkwave impelled new weird artist, and that genre itself is difficult to describe. Since these artists are characterized by strong individuality and diversity and there is no universal sound they all aspire to, just the overpowering sense that they are a new breed of hipster who represent what is culturally significant and now.

That said, the most salient features of Ms. Barker’s art are very strong songwriting and impeccable control over her considerable vocal skills. And this is her debut?

For more info, visit her website or her MySpace page

Track Listing: Damned for Eternity, Theatre des Vampires, Daylight Belonging, Delicious Agony of Love, A Life in the Night, The Crypt of Despair, Stakes and Garlics, Lustful Bites in the Dark, Sanctuary of Blood, Bloodsucker, La Valse des Vampires.

Highly polished, mostly instrumental sountracks by Spanish electronic composer, Salva Moreno. What vocals there are consist of choral effects or spooky whispers and cries that exist as an aspect of the instrumental arrangement. My guess, though I could be wrong, is that this guy emerged from that incredible array of 90s “internet composers”, who put online a lot of electronic music created on everything from ancient patchbay analog synths to tiny MIDI-only keyboards to typed in CSound scores (sort of like an audio version of HTML, using a CSound interpreter rather than a browser to realize the coding; pro and/or university composer stuff that does anything from space music based on fractals to realistic symphony orchestras).

Some of these people went on to released CDs of their music, and Moreno has several of those to his credit. He seems to be about depicting fantasy, fairytale, and mythology through layered electronic composition.

For more info visit his nicely done website or his MySpace page.