The Lemon Fog - The Psychedelic Sound of Summer with The London Fog The Lemon Fog were the house band of a club in Houston called The Living Eye. The club's owner was instrumental in getting their demos to Orbit Records and getting
them into the studio. In their tenure at The Living Eye the band opened for The Electric Prunes, The Moving Sidewalks, The 13th Floor Elevators, Question Mark and the Mysterians, and Fever Tree whose song "San Francisco Girls" was written by Lemon Fog's principle songwriter Ted Eubanks. The band performed a few times on local television but despite cultivating a spacey, interesting psychedelic sound, the singles never caught on and after the band members graduated from high school they went their separate ways leaving these nuggets to rest in Texas psych lore. Now they've been resurrected from their slumber and sound as fresh as anything from the region and period. Download: [MP3] The Lemon Fog - Lemon Fog Support the artist, buy it HERE

Slug Guts

Its no secret that we've got a bit of a fondness for Aussie rock around here and only adding to this obsession is the biting new album from Slug Guts. Playin' in Time With the Deadbeat is a more frantic, cacophonous affair than their previous Sacred Bones release, which is honestly saying something. After spending a year dealing with court, death, rehab, mental institutions and incessant touring it feels like this album is warranted though. The band sticks with its thunderous pummel and low-slung twang that forces post-punk impulses through an oil slick filter of gnarled hate and bile. It’s a record befitting the oncoming predictions of doom and the most far-flung apocalypse visions. Come said apocalypse, from the ashes, Slug Guts will undoubtedly be the house band at the watering hole in the rubble. They play like they have nothing left to lose and swing wildly at all who approach. Definitely an essential 2012 pickup.

Download:
[MP3] Slug Guts - Adult Living

Support the artist. Buy it: HERE

	Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Faceless Kiss / Blut Mond 7" Root Strata honcho Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has been carving out the ether for some time now and quite a few of his releases have shown up here as a result. The latest hazed concoction comes via Emerald
Cocoon and the two tracks perfectly capture Jefre's blistered sun approach to sonics. The a-side is a fuzz scorched swirl of echo and light and its strains the limits of whatever medium is trying to contain it. The flip is as calm as the a-side is relentlessly incandescent. The track is full of night echoes and synth float, providing a calm respite to the opener. This kind of duality is just what we've come to expect and love from Cantu-Ledesma's work and it’s worth seeking out as soon as possible. Listen: Support the artist, buy it HERE

Acid Mothers Temple

It doesn't seem improbable that Acid Mother's Temple has created an album in tribute to Miles Davis' electric psych period. What does feel improbable though is that it took them this long to do it. Son of a Bitches Brew is a frothing, mutating jazz odyssey that pushes further than the band has previously into the boundaries of jazz with a fairly serious nod to its namesake. This one sees the ranks swell with new and familiar faces; Tsuyama Atsushi replaces Wayne Shorter on soprano saxophone and fan favorite Cotton Casino rejoins the fold on keys or, uh "space whisper" as it would be listed in the credits. There's a mountain of AMT out there and it’s hard to sift through the essentials and the excessive but this one ranks right up there near the top. The band was born to explore this terrain and they give their subject its due praise.

Download:
[MP3] Acid Mothers Temple - Theme From Violence Jack Johnson

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Flowers

We here at RSTB are always fans of pushing the physical envelope, from vinyl to tapes its fun to have something to spin the spools or knock the needle onto. San Diego's Bleeding gold has taken the to have an to hold aesthetic up a notch with 6.7" plexiglass lathe cut for their latest signing Flowers. Unfortunately the laborious process meant the run was a scant 30 that's just run out prior to this post but the music's still available digitally. The trio mixes the ramshackle sonics of Young Marble Giants and Las Malas Amistades with wide-eyed ambitions of 80's girl groups like The Primitives and Shop Assistants. Its a charming first shot from a band that with time could nudge up the fidelity and twist a few ears with their sunny swing. Pick up the digital below or hit eBay quick to snap up one of those coveted physical lathe cuts.

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Sam Flax Video

Up above is the found footage heavy video for the psych-glam cut "Fire Doesn't Burn Itself" from RSTB 2012 fave Sam Flax. The album is set for a vinyl issue on Burger in the U.S. and The Sounds of Sweet Nothing in the UK on September 17th. Be sure to pick it up!

	Kim Fowley - Outrageous Kim Fowley is nothing if not a notorious figure of the 60's and 70's rock scene. Anyone who can connect dots between Zappa, The Runaways and The Soft Machine deserves to be recognized and though his solo records never received the
acclaim of those he penned songs for (The Byrds, Beach Boys, Them, Cat Stevens) his 1970 album Outrageous is a ramshackle classic that's deservingly back on vinyl. The album, which sees Fowley backed by various members of Steppenwolf, is a punk-blues ripper that swerves wildly between Doors-ian decadent shambles and Stooges self-destruction. Fowley's personality drives the album and it’s bigger than the grooves can hope to contain. Underneath the fray of his sputters, screams and soft moans is a gasoline powered blues turbine that matches many of the more well known and more critically acclaimed albums of its time. Download: [MP3] Kim Fowley - Animal Man Support the artist, buy it HERE

Thousand Foot Whale Claw

Austin's Thousand Foot Whale Claw build a case for heavy subsonics on their vinyl debut Dope Moons Volume One for Monofonus Press. The album, whose titles are all aptly named after moons, builds slow and heavy out of the murky ether. Opener "Deimos" sets the tone with a slow crawl to the surface, spreading out like a slow motion storm system and looming twice as tall. The middle moons seem to have more spirit, wrapping the heavy tones of "Phobos" and "Ganymede" in pulsating Krautrock waves and synth stabs before icing things down again with the sonic murk of "Veritas." It's an excellent balance between weight and movement and the title leaves high hopes for a "Volume Two" somewhere down the line. This one's limited like all MP releases so best to grab one now.

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	Ether Island - Season of Risk Running a site for the better part of a decade leaves more than a few instances of "what happened to that band? I loved them." The feeling that a well-deserved voice had gone silent over time. The answer doesn't always come back so loudly as it
has in the case of Ether Island. The ranks of the band count Corinne Sweeny and Jeremiah Cowlin among their members, two individuals who held down time in the terribly under appreciated Mythical Beast. The two not only dropped off of the musical grid, they've done their best to leave the physical one as well, taking up residence in Coyote, NM and perfecting their apocalyptic doom stance in more fitting surroundings. The three tracks on display here prove that the band has been hiding plenty of talent from the world in the intervening years, vibrating with a cinder scratched hunger and a desperate solitude that hits like an aftershock. Hopefully it won't be another few years before an album emerges but for now this is more than enough to slake our thirst for remnants of the Beast. Listen: Support the artist, buy it HERE

Outer Space

Its fitting that Spectrum Spools should finally have an Outer Space record on its roster, given that label curator John Elliott is behind the knobs of the extraterrestrial moniker. Unlike Emeralds or even Mist, Outer Space has always felt the most abstract and purely sound obsessed output from Elliott. Akashic Record (Events: 1986-1990) pulses and flutters as Outer Space has in the past, echoing its namesake with an otherworldly twinkle and the immersive float of sensory deprivation. Recorded over the course of a year, not culled from his past as the title might imply, the record pulls in some heavyweight contributors including Philip Whiteside (of Wavehead) and Drew Mcdowall (past Coil member) and Jeff Hatfield (of Fragments). For all the synth geeks out there, the label and membership alone should let them know what they might be in for but its some of Elliott's most untethered work yet and some of his best. It builds in a slow sculpting arc like pixels arranging themselves on an amber hued monitor into the shape of something wholly new and, while incalculably complex, so incredibly rudimentary.

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The Slaves

The Slaves' Spirts of the Sun is a hard album to take in pieces. It’s a layered mass of sound that pairs the beautifully serene, choral vocals of the duo with a looming undercurrent of doom and shoegaze foam that threatens to consume it at each available instance. The songs bleed. They bleed into each other. They bleed noise and they bleed a consuming sadness, like audible tears for an unmarked grave. It seems impossible that the weight of the music recorded by Barbara Kinzle and Birch Cooper could be contained within the twelve inches of this record. It feels like the thing should drop from your hands from the sheer impact of amplifier drone that's contained in its grooves. The comparisons have, and will continue to be made to Grouper, Sunn o))) and My Bloody Valentine and if you like any or all of those three you'll be perfectly at home here, but The Slaves manage to take those touchstones and make them into their own religious vibration, a hymn to the rumble of tectonic plates and a chorus to the expanse of sky. It’s definitely a record that needs to be on your listening pile for 2012.

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	Evol - Evol Gear Fab uncovered an acetate of this gorgeous lost album from West Viginia's Evol and tracked down guitarist Jeff Hanichen to put this back into it proper place in the 60's rock lexicon. The band wavers between Buffalo Springfield, Byrds
and Grass Roots and its filled with plenty of strum and multi-part harmonies. The band were courted by a Nashville label at the time and given access to Nugget Studios in Goodletsville where they recorded the bulk of this s/t affair. At the time nothing was released from the session, no singles and no albums. The band wasn't even aware that the final album was mixed down until contacted for the reissue. Gear Fab proves that with a little digging there are still plenty of great, unheralded releases out there yet to be uncovered. Download: [MP3] Evol - Unlucky Guy Support the artist, buy it HERE

Horsebladder

Horsebladder's Elaine Khan charmed RSTB with her Night People tape out late last year and with a whisper she's released a proper follow-up in the form of the creeping, haunted Not I'll Not. The album is more vocal heavy than the previous work, which reminded us a bit of Julianna Barwick's cyclical incantations. Here she's replaced some of the innocent atmospheres with much starker, foreboding ones. The album feels trapped between planes of existence, and not always comfortably. It’s an ethereal, growling specter that claws when provoked. Its the sound of a force unsettled and Kahn uses an arsenal of drums, keys, rattles and her own gorgeous/frightening howl to pass the feeling onto any listeners close enough to absorb it.

Download:
[MP3] Horsebladder - Fountains

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The Advisory Circle / Belbury Poly - Study Series 08: Inervisions Jim Jupp's Belbury Poly charmed us earlier this year with his lush, faded Kodachrome pop masterpiece The Belbury Tales. Now the Ghost Box label honcho hooks up with The Advisory Circle for a double shot

of kaleidoscopic instrumental goodness. Belbury turns in a track that's big on pastoral charm and 70's children's programming soundtrack flair. It’s a breezy and sweet addendum to the already stellar pop nugget he unleashed on the world earlier in the year. Meanwhile, The Advisory Circle's Jon Brooks heats his side up with a transition from English folk trappings into John Carpenter/Goblin 70's horror soundtrack territory with a bit of a dance edge. Definitely a great pairing as only Ghost Box can seem to dream up. Download: [MP3] The Advisory Circle - Wildspot Support the artist. Buy it HERE

Cosmonauts

Cali psych wranglers Cosmonauts have been riding under the wire for a few years now and their sophomore album packs just as much carburetor chug and rumble as their first. If You Wanna Die Then I Wanna Die is coated in a thick layer of MC5 fallout and Oh Sees styled, reverb drenched psychedelic scrawl. I had the pleasure of catching these guys at SXSW and, though the room was hot and under-filled, they still unleashed a blistering set of garage stompers that seem to have made their way through to the album's core. Burger never ceases to fete out the best nuggets of the West Coast and this on can take its place on the shelf next to the rest of their stellar roster.

Download:
[MP3] Cosmonauts - Emerald Green

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Parquet Courts

Despite residing in New York, I don't always go nuts for a ton of NYC bands, or at least they're usually fewer and farther between than one would expect. There's plenty to love around here to be sure though and lately Parquet Courts have perked ears at RSTB. Corralling the loose, cathartic proto-punk aesthetics of some Aussie favorites like Eddy Current Suppression Ring and running them through the rubbery bass spasms of post-punkers like The Fall or Wire, the band has a DIY spirit matched with a grin and grit that begs for sweaty warehouse pummeling and late night cigarette breaks. Couple that energy with a millennial slacker lyric hangover that feels weather worn before its time but decidedly indicative of their bodega hopping Brooklyn surroundings. Their last cassette went largely unheralded but look for the new LP, Light Up Gold to make a few more waves when its release in August by Dull Tools.

Download:
[MP3] Parquet Courts - Borrowed Time

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	Various - Buttons: Starter Kit Before they became primarily known for their groundbreaking and crate digging soul compilations, Numero Group put out the excellently encompassing Yellow Pills: Prefill compilation that pulled in some of the great power pop
singles that never got their due. Though they've returned briefly to the genre with the Titan label comp, they've never given it their comprehensive touch, until now. The newly minted Buttons series begins with Buttons: Starter Kit, a 2xLP set that puts many of the cuts (though sadly not all) from that 2xCD back on vinyl and in front of a whole new generation to appreciate them. The compilation is the start of a series that will break down power pop's lost gems by state and its quickly followed by the first region specific installment Buttons: From Champaign to Chicago which focuses on bands from Illinois. Those who've treasured the quality of songs included in the Yellow Pills compilation but always lamented not being able to throw it on the turntable now have plenty of reason to celebrate and naturally the sets come clad in Numero's extensive packaging. The only sad spot in this news is that the 2xLP comp seems to have omitted one of our faves, Colors' "Growing Up American". Ah well, you can't have it all. Still this is one that should be on the top of your "to buy" list when it drops on July 17th. Download: [MP3] Colors - Rave It Up Support the artist, buy it HERE

Gary War

Greg Dalton's already contributed to one of our favorite LP's of the year, the seemingly undersung Animal Husbandry by Human Teenager and his latest album under the Gary War name provides another great jolt of off-kilter pop for 2012. Probably one of the clearest, most fidelic versions of War's vision yet, Jared's Lot takes a few cues from the Human Animal collaboration and dives further into the dystopic, respirator-pop that marks the bulk of Gary War's catalog. Driven on a bed of neon beats, corroded and cracked by the acidic creep of keys and heatsick melt of Dalton's processed vocals, its clear that just as with Police Water this is a huffed gas vision of future pop that's as contortion inducing as it is disorienting. Nothing left to do but throw this on the turntable as loud as possible and sync up some simultaneous viewings of Blade Runner, Total Recall and The Fifth Element to compliment it.

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Hot Lunch - Killer Smile 7" West Coasters Hot Lunch wrap up the proto-metal power vibes on their latest 7" for the German imprint Who Can You Trust? Mixing an admitted love for 70's power trios and proto-punk stomp the band blisters like its '72 all over again and puts

forth some pretty accurate thrust. With an LP on the way recorded by Tim Green at Louder Studios and these two killer slabs of backward treading shredders its just as easy to see the link here to Left Coast guitar legions from Blue Cheer to Howlin' Rain (well the first album anyhow). Definitely peaked on this one and ready to see how that upcoming album lives up to these two nuggets. Listen: Support the artist. Buy it HERE

XYX

There are bands that are so chaotic and combustible that they burn themselves down before ever getting the praise they're sorely due. Monterey's XYX was just such a band. Their two singles both hit like a kick to the sternum with a mix of post-punk fury, tape-hiss grit and contortion inducing rhythms. The band recorded the songs for Teatro Negro over the course of the past three years. It was recorded, re-recorded, readied for LP, scrapped and resurrected by the good folks at Monofonus Press. The album showcases the duo's elastic growl and double foot pummel of sound that wrestles even the staunchest listener to the ground and takes a one last kick before it walks off into the night. A mixture of dizzying, experimental passages that erupt into fits of howl, clatter and fuzz bass; Teatro Negro is a force that could not die. The album burned too bright to be buried and no matter how many years it took to get to this moment I'm damn glad to see XYX's legacy finally locked to the grooves, waiting for the needle to drop.

Download:
[MP3] XYX - Simulador

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Painted Caves

We never cease to marvel at the enduring prolific nature of Barn Owl's two halves. After countless solo, joint and collaborative efforts Evan Caminiti has rechristened himself Painted Caves and taken a bit of the focus off of his guitar for the time being. That's not to say that the strings don't show up on Not Here Not There, his latest cassette for Dust Editions, they're just buried under a corroded hiss of synths and clouded light. The album is cavernous and methodically quiet, leaving the crescendo and expansive desert stretches of wrangled passion to rest for the moment. In its place is a creeping unease and warped hiss that comes on slow like a night spent snake bit in the New Mexico hills. Somehow the boys of the Barn Owl have always been able to bottle dread and Caminiti has uncapped a particularly smooth vintage of the substance here. Naturally, limited, and essential for all those Owl collectors out there.

Download:
[MP3] Painted Caves - Beginning and End Unclear

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	Buffalo - Volcanic Rock Australia's had its share of hard rock heroes but, despite some collector attention, Buffalo may not have properly gotten its due. Slotting themselves in amongst Vertigo's prog heavy lineup and taking the Sabbath route to molten riffs on their debut
Dead Forever...; the band hit a stride that fell like a rock hammer on their sophomore album. The record was raw and ragged and loud as hell, coupled with a bit of controversial cover art it should have been poised to propel the band into infamy during a year of hard rock kings. And at the time of its release the band was on an upward slant, though a few short years later, label disputes and quite a few band misgivings and exits would prove their undoing. Still this stands as one of Australia's unheralded rock classics even if it only got its proper due in its native borders. Download: [MP3] Buffalo - Sunrise (Come My Way) Support the artist, buy it HERE

Las Malas Amistades

Way back in 2006, when RSTB was just getting on its feet, we covered a group from Bogota, Columbia called Las Malas Amistades. Their first album was a crude bit of electronic and folk that felt played in the moment and, though very rough, had a huge amount of visceral impact. That impact hasn't left the band's music, though the playing has improved a fair bit on Maleza, their third album. The band often draws comparison's to Young Marble Giants and their blunt, no frills approach is certainly comparable but added to that cracked dry approach is a sweet underpinning of sad suadade street ballads that feel busked to passersby and caught on tape. Its a haunted break up album knocked out in a living room near an dusky auto parts yard in Bogota, mournful but with that intangible sweetness that can only be derived from never over-complicating maters. There's a raw nerve that's plucked with each guitar string and it’s hard to ignore the ache as each new track unfolds. Considerable time has passed since the band's sophomore album but it’s evident that that time has been spent wringing only the best songs from their repertoire, not the most painstakingly crafted but the most painstakingly derived.

Download:
[MP3] Las Malas Amistades - Mala Suerte

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