National / World

 
Mirrors For Psychic Warfare – Self-Titled (Neurot Recordings)
The five songs lurch and pulsate across a desolate landscape with an almost curious obsessiveness. While Mirrors For Psychic Warfare may remind some of the best work on the classic Cold Meat Industry label, there is enough familiar Kelly/Parker-isms scattered throughout to keep the album stimulating. It is a work with more in common with a fever or a fitful wraith than a record. – Earsplit PR
 
Bob Mould – Patch the Sky (Merge Records)
I’ve had a solid stretch of hard emotional times, and thanks for the condolences in advance. I don’t want to go into the details—more death, relationships ending, life getting shorter—because they’re already in the songs. Just listen and see if you can fit yourself into my stories. The words make you remember. The music makes you forget. Patch The Sky is also the catchiest one – Bob Mould
 

Mogwai – Atomic (Rock Action)

“The Atomic soundtrack is one of the most intense and fulfilling projects we’ve taken on as a band. Ever since we went to Hiroshima to play and visited the peace park this has been a subject very close to us. The end results, both the film score and the record are pieces I’m extremely proud of.” – Stuart Braithwaite

Tortoise – The Catastrophist (Thrill Jockey)
The album features vocals from Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley (on “Yonder Blue”) and U.S. Maple/Dead Rider’s Todd Rittmann (on a cover of David Essex’s “Rock On”). A press release explains that the album’s initial inspiration came after they received a commission from the City of Chicago in 2010. The band were asked to create music “rooted in its ties to the area’s noted jazz and improvised music communities.” They performed some “loose themes” live and eventually turned them into something “orchestrated and complex” for the album –  Pitchfork

Animal Collective – Painting With (Domino)
AC’s first record since 2012’s Centipede HZ – heavily influenced by early Beatles, early Ramones, and dinosaurs
 
 
 
 

Local / Boston / New England

 
Skyjelly 
Skyjelly (A fourpiece of Skyjelly Jones, Scott ‘Sheik’ Levesque, Dave Melanson, and Eric Hudson) got a new tape on the way!
A deft mix of ambient tones, psychedelic whims, and shoegaze melodies, ‘Skyjelly & SUN’ marks the debut release for the band, and it’s a glistening four track shimmer of what they can likely produce. A spiraling descent into scratched guitar riffs and avant-garde vocals that fade and flow without care of direction.  Anthem Review
 

Anda Volley – 5 for 5 Series EP (Silber Records)
This yet untiled EP will be the first collaboration between Boston indie-electro rocker. improv groove & noise artist / pancake master Anda Volley and North Carolina label Silber Records run by Brian John Mitchell
Anda Volley is a singer-songwriter from Boston whose music has been compared to Mazzy Star, probably because most music critics are really lazy and like to compare female artists to other female artists without thinking too hard about what their music actually sounds like. To us, her music sounds like when you’re a little kid in the backseat driving to some relative’s house the day after Christmas and you’re looking up out the window and because you’re a little kid all you see are the bare-branched treetops and you know your relative’s house is going to smell like mildew and Band-Aids and you’d really rather be home playing all those new videogames Santa brought you. Yeah, it sounds something like that. – Weirdest Band in the World

Dyr Faser
Pronounced as “Deer Fah-zer”, DF is a project of Eric Boomhower (ex-Royal Wedding) who is sometimes joined by Thalia Zedek (Come, Live Skull) onstage.
DFs self-tilted is a fine slice of dark psychedelia in the vein of Spacemen 3 / Loop and the band’s upcoming tape on UK label Phase Velocity will provide a further showcase of Eric’s strengths as a songwriter

Dyr Faser are a duo (possibly containing indie rock legend Thalia Zedek) doing lush, simple, vulnerable music, with twin reverb guitars over casio drum machine beats and a bit of cheap organ, while the video projections on the musicians made it look and feel like we’re seeing early Pink Floyd / Velvet Underground… except those bands didn’t play in a weird gift shop! – The Noise Boston

Charcoal Sketches of the Invisible Man – humanbeyondrepair vol. 2
Upcoming sequel to last year’s vol. 1 from CSOIM – just one of nom plumes of Dorchester resident and Renaissance man Chris Bynes

 
The reason I created humanbeyondrepair was my way to try and get into the mind of people who have Asperger’s Syndrome. I was diagnosed with this since I was 3. Since then, I have been obsessed with music (mostly, listening to it), and wound up finding out through the internet that there are many artists from Gary Numan to Craig Nicholls to Ladyhawke who have Aspergers.

Walter Sickert & the Army of Broken Toys – Come Black Magic
3rd studio album from motley crue led by their cosmic ringleader Walter Sickert

Musically sophisticated and immensely talented, wildly unusual and diverse in material and presentation, a Dada-esque circuscarnival run amuck, and just plain good ‘not-always-so-clean’ fun