For his first widely distributed solo release, psych-metal/alt-country guitarist Jenks Miller (Horseback, Mount Moriah) delivers a dusty slab of improvised and loosely structured country-blues Americana.

Seattle’s Week of Wonders is probably the most un-Seattle band you’ll ever hear.

The frigid tundra of Northeastern China seems an unlikely place for a swampy punk band, yet the UK ex-pat led GuiGuiSuiSui & The Electric Shadows are just that.

The music of Weed gives the mind and soul wings, as if you were soaring high above the glaciers and mountains.. a real triumph and excellent addition to the renaissance of Canadian DIY music.

There is magic at work here, a very organic kind that transcends the wood, steel and electricity of the instruments. The guitar, the drums, they are more lightening rods for the spirit world than mere instruments.

Mystery is a limitation in the Callahan universe, illumination a deeper quality, even when the answers it provides aren’t very straightforward.

For their third release, Los Angeles-based Blue delivers thirty and a half minutes of lo-fi harsh noise reminiscent of Japanese greats Aube and mid-80s Merzbow.

Exploring negative emotions is probably an extremely unpleasant experience for most people, but for Manos Michaelides, aka Athens, Greece’s Ego Death, it provides catharsis.

With a sound recalling Merzbow‘s early tape-loop driven cassette releases, C.C.C.C.‘s Hiroshi Hasegawa brings us into an electric forest of live wires and motherboards.

One of the most straightforward sequels a great album ever had.

With its second LP Razed to the Ground, Fort Worth’s Pinkish Black continues forging its distinctive alloy for synthesizer-based rock.

Imagine hiking in the Himalayas, rounding a corner and discovering the alien spaceship responsible for the world’s religion and technology.

Originally released as an extremely limited cassette in 1990, Independence Day quickly became a seminal release and template for the American oi scene.

Both of these potent slices of instrumental soul are available on Menahan Street Band’s full-length LP The Crossing, but there’s something so right about playing them as a well-matched pair on a 45 r.p.m. single.

King Krule is the stage name of Archy Marshall, a British guitarist and singer. 6 Feet Beneath The Moon is his first LP. His voice erases a decade and a half of mopey indie rock and drops you off somewhere else, some street corner that you don’t even recognize.

Hope for the return of the MGM musical, immediately dashed by her rarity.

The NYC power trio finds new interstellar paths to explore – paths that traverse only one light year, instead of a dozen.

Feet planted firmly in a base of shoegaze, the vocals are appropriately muted and understated and the guitars in a layered, fuzzy sheen.

MFP continue in the Beantown tradition, adding their name to the list of hardcore greats.

In an inhospitable country, she’s scaled family life and music to a size that might allow them to endure.

Got the 7” blues? Pick this up for an instant cure-all and a pick-me-up that’ll last as long as the damn record plays!

What do you get when you put Will Johnson, David Bazan, and brothers Matt and Bubba Kadane in a recording studio?

From the bustling Shanghai underground music scene comes Naohai, a Chinese trio whose dreamy, emotional music nods heavily to American indie rock.

Seattle-based indie-poppers tease the ears of listeners with a quick two-song blast of pop!

Connecticut is known more for spawning The Carpenters and Moby than UK-fueled goth rock, but in the mid-80s, The Dispossessed, from Hartford, made their mark with their own vision of dreamy death rock.

Seattle-based band The Moondoggies return with one of the finest musical experiences of 2013.

While spacerock typically conjures the vast openness of interstellar space, Brooklyn’s Oceanographer nods more to the unknown territory of the deep sea.

Through the use of blips, beeps, tones and squelch, Hoofus weaves soundscapes of crashed cyberpunk epics, nightmarish video games from 15 years ago and post-krautrock electronic melodies.

Kilfoyle doesn’t so much pay tribute to the failing upper class as simply make observations, letting the listener draw his/her own conclusions.

Straight outta Beaumont, Texas, comes Purple, with a lopsided grin, brass knuckles on fists and a cool debut LP called (409).

It’s rare for a band that’s been on hiatus for over 25 years to come back and do anything worthwhile.

There is something instantly familiar and appealing about Chicago’s brightest new band, Bare Mutants, the prom band you’ve always wanted.

As such, there are six tracks, five of them shimmering, psychedelic pop that sounds like a lost time capsule from the mid to late ’60s.

Minutemen vs. Gaytheist: a contest centuries in the making!

If your world isn’t this band’s, then it can shut up for 20 minutes.

You can revel in the shimmering guitars and the wall of feedback driving such lovely tunes as “Stay With Me”, bliss out to the piano driven “You” or let your mind wander with the beautiful ambience in “Not There”.

Univox are a brilliant quartet of players who have always provided creative, complex and challenging music while never compromising the baseline of total abandon and rock and roll.

Roger Eno’s latest—and a second collaboration with the group Plumbline—is a fine (if not unsurprising) collection of ambient compositions and gentle melodies.

Four songs clock in at slightly over six minutes – you know what you’re in for.

Queens, NY’s Endangered Feces return with another furious blast of melodic hardcore that celebrates the virtues of excessive booze and poop.

Eddie Spaghetti offers up his first-ever solo album of all-original material, and though it’s a fun ride, underneath the sexy cover art, you’ll hear some of his deepest, most introspective—and best—songwriting to date.

Through death, divorce, and illness, they’ve managed to pull off something that is beautiful yet challenging. It unveils itself over time and reveals many-hued layers of complexity, yet it can also be boiled down to simple melodies.

Scout Niblett’s latest release is a journey into heartbreak, anger, jealousy, desire, and revenge—resulting in one of the darkest albums released this year.

You know that feeling when you hear a band for the first time and it’s everything you’ve been looking for without realizing it?

Like contemporaries The Will and Brainbombs, The Terrors have tapped into a unique style of horrifying rock, something that doesn’t rely on makeup or dark Ramones riffs.

Electronica composer Mark van Hoen returns with the first new Locust album in twelve years, and it continues the exotic experimentalist group’s legacy.

Nearly 30 years after its last record, new wave/new romantic pioneer Visage returns to the racks with a brand-new album.