With a sly folk swagger and gravely chops to match the masters, Seth Augustus has created an album somewhere between the laid back ramblings of Tom Waits and the kooky vocals of Captain Beefheart. Opening with “To The Pouring Rain”, Augustus’s dust-bowl folk styling is fit for a wanderer or vagabond from near a century ago.
Such artists seem to have little in common with modern times; instead, they transfer the listener to another point in time. You can hear it not only in the make-up of …

Listening to The Mantles, I am having a difficult time discerning anything truly unique about this group’s sound. They fit the standard mold of a 60s garage-pop-influenced artist swung into modern times and set to 2009’s favorite: lo-fi fuzzed-out distortion. That in itself isn’t uncommon given the decades-old influence. Their melodies are a standard sort of catchy, not too hook-ridden yet not overly complacent.

“Time Concerns” is filled with echoing guitars that swirl and ring through the atmosphere while dreamy vocals create an aura-like melody. Not quite pop, not quite rock, but some concoction containing incremental elements of both, Collider’s first single off their upcoming Big Bang Machine (slated for release the last day of 2009) is, on one hand, a throwback to the shoegaze of the 90s, and on the other a portrayal to the post-shoegaze of today. Closing in on dream-pop, Collider finds many of the sub-genre’s sensibilities but expands …

San Francisco garage-noise-pop outfit Railcars dropped their new record yesterday, a mystical collective of ferocious bouts of electro noise dubbed Cathedral With No Eyes. You may remember Railcards from our debut/premiere of “Passion Of St. Edmund (Rebirth)”, or maybe even our premature review of Cathedral With No Eyes from a month and a half ago. Frontman Aria Jalali takes noise and throws it through a lollipop dreamboat; its almost unbelievably upbeat pop nature is something that simply must be heard.

Longtime FensePost favorites, Eux Autres release their new EP today. Strangled Days finds the brother/sister pop duo straying slightly from their French roots, but it’s still the same great pop we always loved from these guys. Heather and Nicholas Larimer have since expanded to a trio, having added Yoshi Nakamoto (Aislers Set & Still Flyin’) on drums in 2008. Strangled Days was recorded by Jason Quever (Papercuts) and can be found as a 10″ EP on Where It’s At Is Where You Are Records.

Fingerprints are an interesting thing. They’re a hard thing to lose, and even harder to identify without the proper know-how. In a way, they’re symbolic of the influences that inspire musicians, and Railcars is no different. Their latest, Cathedral With No Eyes has the undeniable fingerprints of Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart in both the eccentric noise instrumentation and the vocal shouts.

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My FensePost inbox is out of control. Recently, it topped 500 messages, most of which I had yet to read. Thanks to a bit more free time of late, I am finally beginning to tackle this mass o’ crap and get some shit done. One item that surprisingly slipped through the cracks was the video for “Anne Boleyn” by French-pop Portlanders Eux Autres (MySpace).