Current 93 - Thunder Perfect Mind (1992)

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For fans of: Swans, Comus, Six Organs Of Admittance

It's both creepy and thoroughly interesting, part pastoral folk, part abstract experiment. The lyrical themes are far-reaching, and the music is subtly psychedelic, with chimes and flutes. Even though it doesn't grab me as quickly as a lot of music does, it excells at being transportive. - Matthew Foster

"Of course, the music on Thunder Perfect Mind is nothing less than essential, the first entry in David Tibet's masterful three-album run that also included the classics Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre and All The Pretty Little Horses. With TPM, David Tibet created his first highly personal tour de force, a sprawling double album that finally gelled all of Tibet's myriad influences - esoteric, lyrical and musical - and represented the very culmination of his promising, though uneven early career. Thunder Perfect Mind is that rare class of albums where every track is a highlight - the crisp medieval balladry and bizarre Gnostic cosmology that comprise "The Descent of Long Satan and Babylon," the melancholic funeral dirge of "A Song for Douglas After He's Dead," the atmospheric gloom of "A Sadness Song" and the swirling, spectral psychedelia of "All The Stars Are Dead Now." The collaborations on TPM are among Current 93's finest: Jhon Balance's vocals on "Rosy Star Tears From Heaven" pushes the track into the kind of Satanic fury previously only heard on Comus' First Utterance, and Bevis Frond's Nick Salomon contributes an electrifying third-eye guitar track to the side-long prophetic Blakean hallucinations of "Hitler as Kalki (SDM)." David Tibet and producer Steven Stapleton transform holophonic krautrocker Sand's skeletal "When The May Rain Comes" into a masterpiece of phased Euro-folk, evoking the wet cobblestones of a half-remembered old-world Berlin." - Jonathan Dean

Oneida - Happy New Year (2006)

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For fans of: Fly Pan Am, Liars, Six Organs of Admittance

Oneida are a band that have always been on the fringe of my attention, with sometimes captivating, but sometimes alienating noisey indie rock. With this one, I don't feel too detached from the music, and can really sink into the kroutrock-like grooves and enjoy what's here. They use a wide range of instruments, and successfully create a wide range of styles, from folk to blues, though always with a noisey, pschedelic, but also laid-back feel. You can tell that they're not using a million dollar studio, but it doesn't seem to hold them back at all, incorporating a bunch of electronics and effects. - Matthew Foster

"Reflecting the cyclical nature of earth and life itself, Oneida's eighth full-length album, Happy New Year, presents ideas of death and rebirth, and the continuity, and yet tenuousness, of existence. It's a poetic work of circling guitars and melodic phrases and vocal lines repeating and layered like monastic chants. The opener, "Distress," is comprised of a four-line phrase about the fleeting nature of beauty ("So fades the lovely blooming flower/Frail, smiling solace of an hour/So soon our transient comfort flies/And pleasure only blooms to die"), with modal harmonies and haunting, sparse background music, while the dark musings of "The Misfit" explore the notion of evil and perfidiousness, referencing perhaps the character in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." But the band isn't trying to present an image of hopelessness, of a hell, or even a limbo from which you can never escape. Rather, they seem to be exploring the realm of purgatory, where, though it may require a great deal of time and sacrifice, there is hope of redemption. Both "Up with People" and "History's Great Navigator's" offer suggestions for improvement ("Open your eyes, the things you see/Are determined by the height of the ground you seize" and "Cross your heart, hope to die/Calm your voice, set your eye/Turn your back and go," respectively) as the band grooves along with quick drums and purposeful noise; it's all very much planned, controlled, with Oneida, acting as Virgil, guiding listeners along. Though the screeches and rumblings that occur in some of the songs (though as an album, Happy New Year is much less hard than what the band has previously produced) may occasionally seem arbitrary, in fact everything is very tightly contained. The idea of messiness is only put there to add effect, not because Oneida are losing control of their message and their statement. The record may not promise happiness or salvation, but it does propose ideas that can be contemplated in the time between the winding melodies and riffs, and perhaps one day, we too, like the Pilgrim, can continue on alone." - AMG