1. Top albums: The closing disc to Richard Skelton’s 20-disc collection *SKURA comprises seven previously unreleased tracks, across 57 minutes recorded under four of his seven concurrent projects. There are few surprises here, yet when we’re speaking of a composer of Skelton’s caliber, that is good news.
2. Top albums: William Ryan Fritch will release his sophomore Vieo Abiungo album on August 30. Expect a bit of a departure from the first (“a kind of imagined Africa together with equally chimerical folk and art musics”). The new tender is christened And The World Is Still Yawning, a sort of two-camera view of the human condition. Watch the promo video for more:
3. Top tracks: Barn Owl’s Lost In The Glare is set to drop on September 13. The midsection of the album is “The Darkest Night Since 1683,” which is Mayan Apocalypse big, scabrous as a jaguar’s tooth, and, yes, as dark as tribal pitch. The Wikipedia backgrounder for the year 1683 doesn’t turn up any obvious answers regarding the song title.
4. Top tracks: We’re still spazzing out to the last two minutes of “Parson Brown,” from the February 2011 Hey Rosetta! album Seeds. The first three minutes ain’t half-bad either: wilting violins, tin-can balladry, and baton-in-hand melodrama. But the coda rocks, simply put, and there aren’t enough chiropractors in Halifax to treat all the whiplash. Guitar cacophony, drum battery, string torture, and the soaringest of vocal airlifts set the stage for whatever the hell that is that happens in the last 15 seconds of the piece. Great stuff.
