Like Disappears, New Orleans' Belong reside on the heavier end of Kranky's spectrum. Using guitars, drum machine and layered vocals, the duo throws up a wall of sound inspired by My Bloody Valentine, Daydream Nation-era Sonic Youth and even, faintly, The Jesus and Mary Chain. But there's a celestial cast to the music, suffused in cathedral reverb and powdered with dust motes, that's unique to Belong; the deep fuzz of "Keep Still" suggests they've spent just as much time listening to the ambient whorl of Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project.
Despite the title, there's nary a hint of rave in Tim Hecker's Ravedeath, 1972, another installment in the Montreal musician's impressive catalog of rapturous ambient music. Recorded in a Reykjavik church, the album is based on thrumming pipe organs that are layered and processed in Hecker's computer, resulting in an almost overwhelmingly rich sound. Iceland's Ben Frost provided recording assistance, but the music here is more meditative, and occasionally ecstatic, than Frost's own bleak, blackened isolationism. For fans of Stephan Mathieu and Peter Maxwell Davies, it's an ambient masterpiece.
Despite its self-effacing name, there's nothing restrained about this Chicago quartet. Controlled, yes: their garage rave-ups are held in check by the lockstep repetition and slowly surging energy of minimalist post punk. Wah-wah guitars lap against droning pedal tones, with sneering vocals -- "This is not a bastard song" -- suggesting The Stooges or the MC5 channeled through '80s punk. It's a far cry from Kranky's ambient releases, but it's also easy to hear how its psychedelic colors and fuzzy textures are cut from the same cloth.
Originally released on Stefan Nemeth's Mosz label in 2006, Pan American's For Waiting, For Chasing gets reissued by their longtime home, Kranky. It's timely: abandoning their dubby, post-rock foundations for crackling drones and incidental skitter, the band helped expose a vein of electro-acoustic experimentation that's still being mined today by all manner of ambient projects. In the vein of Oval, Supersilent, or Loscil, but with its own distinct sense of space and motion, it's sensual, engrossing stuff, as elegantly warped as driftwood.
Brian McBride is one half of Stars of the Lid, a group known for its glacially paced chamber music, pairing strings and electric guitars at a midpoint between Glenn Branca, Morton Feldman and Sigur Ros. He appears solo here with the soundtrack to The Vanishing of the Bees, a documentary about the mysterious, ongoing collapse of bee colonies around the world. His lush, stately compositions alternate between melancholy and something harder to name -- not so much pensive as dumbstruck by a scope that can only be called sublime. Surely, a fitting treatment of its theme.
On his third album, Portland, Ore.'s Benoit Pioulard (Thomas Meluch) continues to refine his idiosyncratic style, fusing field recordings and ambient atmospherics with acoustic guitars and folk-leaning vocals. Running through 14 songs in just 40 minutes, the album nevertheless feels unhurried, balancing textural sketches with fleshed-out songs like "Shouting Distance," "Tie" and "Ailleurs," whose aching hush recalls Jose Gonzalez and, more distantly, Nick Drake. A beautiful record, sometimes overwhelmingly so, Lasted is the best thing Pioulard has done, and a highlight in the Kranky catalog.
Boduf Songs' third album for Kranky has all the hallmarks of doom folk: quavering voice, lo-fi tape hush, down-tuned guitars and subtle electronic otherwordliness. "I Have Decided to Pass Through Matter" sounds like Nick Drake with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and there are echoes of Philip Jeck's ghostly turntablism, cross-cut with narcotic drum breaks and intimate vocal harmonies. "Decapitation Blues" goes from ambient bell tones into shoegaze metal, while "The Giant Umbilical Cord" is seven naked minutes of droning feedback, plucked harmonics and subliminal whisper, as stark as a frostbitten field.
The Kranky label is a steadfast purveyor of some of the finest ambient, electro-acoustic and post-rock out there. Now add cosmic disco to the list. The album's beatless intro (echoes of Oneohtrix Point Never's gleaming oscillator jams) doesn't prepare you for the astral boogie that follows. Half the album explores shimmering post-Italo that will appeal to fans of Lindstrom and Prins Thomas; the other is given over to analog fugues as lyrical as they are lysergic. It's proof that Krautrock never died -- like mold, it just gets more potent.
You wouldn't know that Scott Morgan is a video game sound designer from his music as Loscil. There's nary a shrill bleep or laser blast on Endless Fall, just slowly chiming chords and liquid drones. His fifth album incorporates acoustic elements more directly than his earlier work, with cello and piano lines ringing clearly through a fog of delay and reverb. But as the shuddering pulses throughout make clear, he hasn't lost his connection to the ambient dub techno of Basic Channel. Simply put, it's lovely, engrossing stuff.
In the tradition of Folke Rabe's What?! and Kevin Drumm's Imperial Horizon comes Greg Davis' breathtaking 2009 album Mutually Arising, a two-part, hour-long album that lives up to the track titles "Cosmic Mudra" and "Hall of Pure Bliss." Crafted principally from analog synths and effects pedals, its slow-burning thrum variously evokes pipe organs, overhead planes and third-gen tape dubs of Glenn Branca smothered with lead blankets, suggesting Richard Serra's monolithic forms filling Joseph Beuys' silent, felt-draped chambers. In the right frame of mind, it's bliss via IV drip.
Crossing up shoegazer noisy psyche with modern post-punk a la the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and even, at times, Black Dice, Deerhunter is anything but easy to nail down. Their second full length album since forming in 2001, Cryptograms alternates between weirdo psyche soundscapes, delicate indie pop and crooning, anthemic songs reminiscent of the Catherine Wheel and Ride. So there is either something for everybody or nothing for no one.
