Ross - Sing, Guslar! - VINYL LP

Great art has always incubated in human isolation. Low Roar-the musical vision of Ryan Karazija-alchemizes those moments of solitude into an album of glacial modern pop anthems. As a songwriter, Karazija has always understood that far from being antithetical to universality, honoring your personal experiences as unflinchingly as you can, is intrinsic to it. It's a record about the sometimes uneasy relationship between physical and emotional distance. Ryan has made a habit of documenting his life in honest songs that can swell your spirit or break your heart at any time. This fourth album, ross., perfectly honors the core sonic ideals at the heart of Low Roar with expansive atmospherics and a soft neon pulse of electronic beats through which minimalist arrangements and acoustic textures move.

What makes a piece of music difficult? This album introduces a pair of riveting, technically ambitious, historically important, and never-before-recorded polyphonic masses of the fifteenth century, performed by an ensemble that has developed a new approach designed to honor the music's variety and unflagging intensity. Both works stand out for their notational complexity. They are also exceptional for the skill they demand of the performers we find hair-raising rhythms, intricate counterpoint, and long melodic phrases. Rather than mitigate these challenges with a large ensemble and a generous acoustic, this recording enhances them the performances are one-on-a-part, featuring energetic tempi, close miking, and minimal reverberation. This approach is unforgiving-but together with bright vowels and a flexible vocal technique, it has the benefit of allowing the music to come across with uncommon directness and clarity.

Like some kind of time-hopping wizard with preternatural melodic sensibilities, M Ross Perkins is back with his sophomore full-length, E Pluribus M Ross. The album, his first for Colemine/Karma Chief Records, is another masterclass in home recording with 12 shimmering slices of purely perfect psychedelic pop.Perkins fittingly had music journalists in a tizzy when he released his critically acclaimed self-titled full-length on Sofaburn Records in 2016. Record Collector called it Incha truly great album filled with late '60s and early '70s pop goodness,Inch while High Times praised it as Inchthe kind of good old-fashioned psychedelic-tinged rock & roll that the world could use right now.Inch Shindig upped the praise, calling Perkins' music Inchthe perfect percolated distillation of Nilsson and Emitt Rhodes, one minute SoCal harmony pop inspired by the Fabs' trippy era, the next Merseybeat, and often silly, but biographical, like Harry at his best.Inch The critics are right to praise the Ohio-based songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, who conjures up his distinctively imaginative recordings all alone in his home studio. However, one would be missing the point to simply portray Perkins as a man lost in the past. The music of this unique artist is undeniably steeped in the indelible melodic hooks and laidback rhythms of the psychedelic '60s, but he's no copycat.In describing Perkins, it's not wrong to namecheck Rhodes and Nilsson, but you have to expand that list of influences to include pop-rock visionaries like Brian Wilson, Colin Blunstone, and even John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Let's also throw in the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Kinks as well. Perkins clearly learned plenty of helpful tips from these and other legends that made the late 1960s and early 1970s such a magical musical time, but he has charted his own singular path from the past and back again.The wa