We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves - John Maus

This LP was the first to get dissed on my blog, I think on the second post ever. Here's what I said:

Who cares?

John Maus (he is Chapterhouse to Ariel Pink’s MBV)

Anyway since deciding to listen to Screen Memories by John Maus out of the blue last year I've had a change of heart. Dismissing him as a z-grade Ariel Pink back in 2011 wasn't really fair was it? I mean he was Pink's band mate, collaborator and friend. It was a bit like saying Hugo Race was a bit Bad Seeds-y, hell yeah he was because he was part of the fucking original band. So I had to buy We Must Become The Pitiless Censors of Ourselves again this year and well I love it. It's now giving Rustie and Adele a run for their money as quite possibly my favourite record of 2011. Been diggin last year's Addendum and 2017's Screen Memories too. Now there's some more catching up to do.

Does this also mean a reappraisal of Chapterhouse is in order?

How about this below anthem? Believer gives me the pure pop goose bumps. It's amazing that I could disregard an LP that has now had such an emotional impact on me.

Quiet Evenings - Transcending Spheres

After that previous post about Not Not Fun I had a chuckle to myself and thought 'What am I going to do next check out the new releases on Digitalis or Hooker Vision?' These labels covered the scene(s) of many names hypnagogia, glow fi, tropical, neo-kosmiche, altered zones, nu age noise etc. I had a little look on the intewebs only to find Hooker Vision ceased operations in 2014 and Digitalis seems to have perhaps closed its doors around the same time. So I won't be doing a post featuring 2017 releases from those labels. Maybe I need to check out Gift Tapes, Pizza Night, Taped Sounds, Olde English Spelling Bee or Catholic Tapes. Those labels probably don't exist either. I reckon 6 years is the perfect amount of time for a label to exist anyway. Don't hang around too long to become boring. Imagine if Flying Nun or Ghostbox halted after that amount of time, they would have been perfect.

From the ye olde Hooker Vision blog

Anyway I did discover an old album by Quiet Evenings from 2011. Quiet Evenings contain the husband and wife team, Grant and Rachael Evans, who also ran the Hooker Vision label. Rachael's other musical project is the fab Motion Sickness Of Time Travel and her husband was in Nova Scotian Arms, Crippling and a whole bunch of others. Transcending Spheres turns out to be a lost classic that funnily wasn't released on any of the aforementioned labels. It's here at bandcamp though. Synths drift and hover, beats remain discreet and guitars even appear amongst the narcotic glaze. It's dark, it's haunting and it's sublime.