‘Rat Columns’ is the new self-titled full-length cassette/CD from Rat Columns. Rat Columns is David West, with help from James Vinciguerra and others of both present and future prescience. Born of rural isolation, then uncultured in Perth, Australia. He now lives in San Francisco, California, USA. Eight songs of dark, ill-fitting pop wanderings and mangled noises.

Co-released by ROS Records and Grave New World.

http://soundcloud.com/ros-records/sets/rat-columns-rat-columns/

I've been on a bit a psychedelic music kick of late, ranging from the 60s garage-punk type through to the contemporary Not Not Fun label type, with spaced-out pitstops across the decades in between, so it's a good time for Magnetic Dimensions by Perth's Silver Bulletin to land on my review pile. The whole release has a certain amount of mystery around it. Until two days ago there was no Silver Bulletin website in existence and even now, with one up, I still can't quite work out the track titles. A Bandcamp page for the release contains only four tracks, with titles, while my CD copy indicates nine tracks, none of which come titled on the packaging or in i-Tunes or, from what I can find, anywhere on the 'net. Which has the combined effect of making me desperate to find out, searching the web fruitlessly for more info. What I can report is that Silver Bulletin is Grave New World head man Camryn Rothenbury. And this is his fourth release this year, most of which are now out of print.

Magnetic Dimensions is head music. It starts out with a track mildly reminiscent of Sun Araw with it's skeletal drum machine framework, deep dubby bass and guitar noodling though, thankfully, there is no reliance on blues clichés as there is with the Americans. As the disc progresses, we move through lots of hand percussion, some timid vocals which bring to mind 80s-era Flaming Lips and lots of guitars sounding like they've been recorded by just plugging the guitar into the desk with a kind of Neu!-ish effect. There's wonderful contrast between dry and reverbed sounds giving the recordings a a layered soundfield. Repetition is used to good effect, particularly on the seventh track, which wouldn't sound out of place with a Tom Waits vocal line over it's wooden percussion and vibrato guitar strums. Much of the psychedelia is of the pastoral variety, blissful rather than edgily paranoid. Though the odd track here and then ends in a chaos of delay feedback noise, just to keep you on your toes. Track eight applies mildly middle eastern acoustic guitar filigrees over heavily delayed percussion and gradually more bizarrely pitch-shifted vocal harmonies. Then the album finishes with eight minutes of piano glissando buried in echos of itself, obscuring movement in washes of spectral stasis.

According to the new website, there's only 70 copies of this. I've got one of them and won't be letting go, so there's not too many left. I'd highly recommend getting one.

*Adrian Elmer *

New digital EP ''Futureless Future'' available now from Bandcamp.

http://silverbulletin.bandcamp.com/

''Silver Bulletin’s acid-damaged philosophical introspections are repeated endlessly in discordant harmony until they achieve a sinister mantric power.'' - Foxy Digitalis

''Magnetic Dimensions seeks to explore the dualistic nature of the universe, simultaneously pushing outwards to the cosmic infinity and inwards to the heart of the enlightened soul.'' - SixThousand

''In plodding, simple compositions, this altar ego paints a doorway. His many voices float above layered guitar and mulled percussive spirits to form a melodic and eerie form of neo-folk.'' - Grave New World

''Performing only sporadically, and thereby making each appearance a remarkable and intriguing event... A world which gradually unfolds, imbued at times with a seeming old-world naïveté, and at others an unsettling darkness, a sense of being on the brink of the abyss, hideously aware that soon it will swallow you whole. The delivery is necessarily flawed, punctuated by dissonant resonances and bizarre interludes – the duality of charming folk and disintegrating despair, while at times disconcerting, makes for a truly fascinating and distinctive aesthetic.'' - Lyndon Blue

Love this shit and very excited to see them in Australia.

Someone bring that guy to Australia.

Got this:

and this:

last week in the mail. Both are fucking dope! Love this label.

Angel Olsen 12'' on the way - o YEAH. How good is mail order?

Thanks Adam! :D

We're now based in Melbourne. And we just made the website look realllllll ugly.

http://www.gravenewworld.net/

odd future wolf gang

HARD GAY TAXI DES WOOOOO!