Carol Kleyn "Love Has Made Me Stronger"

(Drag City) This reissue of an obscure 70s album of California ethereal-enchantment music mixes a bunch of myth metaphors. She's playing harp like an angel, but her voice and songwriting isn't exactly heavenly. She's hypnotizing like a sea siren, but she doesn't seem to be menacing or dangerous. She's in touch with nature and earth like a nymph, but she has human frailty. She seems to be a hippie and a singer-songwriter BUT SHE'S HAULING HARP! Did I mention this is primarily a harp album? This is basically more flower-powered and cloud-dwelling than any of her contemporaries because she has committed herself to this medieval music making machine without a hint of Renaissance Faire aesthetic. Oh...I could have said earlier that her music is harp-y, but she's too pretty to be a harpy.

Matt Sweeney & Bonnie "Prince" Billy "Must Be Blind"

(Drag City) They have moved so much further in quiet, jarring, songwriting awesomeness since they were Superwolf last decade that they should retroactively re-name that record "Superteenwolf."

Grrrl Friend "Happening Now"

(Gnar) Made my loins go "grrr!"

The Mediums "Shiny Void Blues"

(EVP/ITC) Should be called the Extra Larges because these heaping helpings of trashed-out, garage-rock infected, classic rock riffage are MASSIVE!

Bonnie "Prince" Billy "There is No God" b/w "God Is Love"

(Drag City) Best Country Gospel record to ever utilize the lyric "that which puts mouth on cock and vagina." Or at least in the top 3.

Apache Dropout "Shot Down" b/w "Sister Burnout"

 (Trouble in Mind) Not at all patchy, this is one of the most solid slabs of psyche/Spaghetti Western/trash rock/doom pop/art explosion/teen dance band on bad acid/lyncanthropic/boogie/1960s-2060s fuzz-plosion music I've heard is the last thousand years. Best thing to come out of Indiana since the hot comb.

Alex Cuervo "Two Broken Fingers ep

(Trouble in Mind) Deep, dark, frug-able groovy cuts that sound like the top act in a Haunted House Battle of the Bands won a few hours of recording time. Or sold their souls in exchange for it. Seriously, this record is so good it is worth soul-selling.

Que Suerte # Fantasma

(www.olafladousse.com) This is the ghost issue of this spookily beautiful international avant garde pantomime comix compilation and if you love comix or make comix you NEED to contact Olaf and find our how to get a copy of this fly Spanish concoction.

Jeffrey Novak "Back at the Bottom" ep

 (Trouble in Mind) Manages to be simultaneously seductively poppy and creepily weird. I spent high school praying for/preying on girls who could be seduced despite my creepy weirdness, so to me this is a platter that matters!

Don Fleming "4"

(Instant Mayhem) Leave it to this Gumball-head to try to steal Beyonce's thunder by giving his new record the same name as her new record. But the jokes on Fleming, if he thought he could fool Ms. Knowles' fans by predicting that her album was going to contain discombobulating audio nightmare music with grating, strange vocals and freaked out guitar amblings by R. Stevie Moore, Kim Gordon, and Julie Cafritz then he was totally wrong! About the guitar stuff by Moore, Gordon and Cafritz, everything else perfectly describes both Fleming's and Beyonce's 4-players.