Robedoor - Pacific Drift 7" (2010)


Way too much is made these days of looking back, memory, social network fantasias. What a bummer, cause reality s a bad experience and 2012 is on deck; we deserve whatever we get. Evolve or erode, dudes. LA visigoths Robedoor slip into another sinkhole of voidist shadow-rock with Pacific Drift, three new tracks recorded across the last greylight winter. The A side stirs into a jazzy apocalypto depression with flute-keys and an overdriven OM groove that spirals in a web of distortion before drifting out to sea/silence. The flip finds a pair of deeply mutated RBDR genetic codes, one a mantric death-punk protest song cloaked in smoke and speed, the other a 3 AM slow-motion soul implosion set to upright piano, descending bass, tear garden guitar, and acid rain. The coast is a ghost, the city seethes.

Smog - A Hit 7" (1993)


The closest thing to a lo-fi national anthem you're ever likely to hear, Bill Callahan succinctly distills the sum totality of the home-recording aesthetic into one side of a 7" single with "A Hit." Singing, "It's not gonna be a hit, so why bother with it?/Just lay it down and forget about it," he captures both the limitless creative freedom and severely limited commercial prospects that shape the fortunes of the four-track recluse. Complete with trudging, crunchy melody suggesting a T. Rex B-side played back through a blown amp, like the very best of Callahan's songs it's both hilarious and heartbreaking, universal and self-obsessed all at the same time. The flip, "Wine-Stained Lips," only suffers by comparison, but judged on its own terms it's a lovely, if fractured, acoustic meditation on that most elusive of moments -- the night before.

-Jason Ankeny, All Music