Traffic Sound were a Peruvian rock band that was active from 1967-1972. Their 1968 debut album, A Bailar Go Go consisted of covers of popular psychedelic songs from acts like Cream, The Doors, Jimi Hendrix,…etc., and in 1969, they released their sophomore album, Virgin, which feature material penned entirely by the band for the first time. It was also the first album where they attempted to incorporate Latin music into their psychedelia, largely influenced by the success of Santana. The wistful psych-folk title song gets Virgin off to a promising start, but after that the album is a bit of a bore. Sure, Traffic Sound mixed psychedelia and Latin music, which sounds really enticing on paper, but their songs aren’t very imaginative by either genre’s standards. The reality is that Virgin is made up of garden variety Woodstock-era West Coast soft-psych period trappings dressed up with some mild Latin elements. Worse, the band invests heavily in early progressive-rock arrangements that place too much emphasis on long-winded instrumental passages and not enough on meaningful songwriting.

La Barra De Chocolate (or The Chocolate Bar) were an Argentinean rock band, led by Pajarito Zaguri (of Los Beatniks and Los Naufragos), who recorded an album and a few stray singles in 1969 and 1970, all of which are collected on this disc. The group played garage and psychedelic rock, but they didn’t have the songs, talent, attitude or production to make the album something worth listening to over forty years later. For some overzealous 60′s collectors this album might be a lost gem of the Argentinean rock underground, but all I can hear are flat vocals, boring solos, and muddy sound.

Self-titled albums usually happen early in a band’s career and are meant to signify an album that is definitive of the band’s sound. Well, Australian rock’n'roll institution You Am I turn that stereotype completely on its head, releasing their self-titled album over two decades after forming, and slapping it on an album that is probably the least indicative of what the band is all about. It’s also probably their weakest album to date. I hate to point a finger at a specific person, but what the hell was producer Greg Wales thinking when he decided to give the band a clean production that makes them sound slick and smooth? You Am I are a band whose strengths come from ragged edges and “perfect imperfections”, just like their biggest influences, Big Star and The Replacements; yet Wales produced the album like he was working with Coldplay. His heavy hand is everywhere you look, bathing Tim Rogers’ brilliant voice in unnecessary layers of reverb, and adding other post-production distractions as if he was getting paid per extraneous sound. It’s too bad because, from a songwriting standpoint, the band are still at the top of their game, and Tim Rogers’ voice and lyrics are never anything less than fascinating (especially on “Shuck”). If only they could have been committed to tape by a producer who could just stay the hell out of the band’s way and let the songs speak for themselves. If you don’t already know You Am I, I highly recommend you buy their brilliant #4 Record or Hi-Fi Way, and all their others. Just save this semi-flop for last.

I was somewhat dismissive of the first two Disappears records (see for yourself here: http://midnighttosix.wordpress.com/category/review-archive/disappears/), but then I suddenly “got it”. What I originally thought was monochromatic and minimalist because of rudimentary skills, I came to see as being done on purpose to create a singularly dark and hypnotic mood, and the more I listened, the more I grew to love that mood. Pre Language, the band’s third album in three years, is their first recorded with Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth as their full-time drummer. Shelley, who first toured with the band in 2011 before entering the studio with them, is an invaluable pick-up as his drumming allows for a few new shades to come into the band’s palette, and he forms an air-tight rhythm section with bassist Damon Carruesco that favors groove and repetition over noodling, recalling great less-is-more combos like Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit from Can or Peter Hook and Stephen Morris from Joy Division. Vocalist Brian Case (who also plays in The Ponys – due for a new album sometime soon) sings like the offspring of Thurston Moore and John Lydon (not Johnny Rotten – there’s a difference), and what his voice lacks in range it makes up for in detached “cool”, adding a spooky vibe to the slow-drip of “Minor Patterns” (my favorite song of Pre Language) and riding the waves of shoegaze squall on “Hibernation Sickness” to perfection. It may not be a huge hit outside of certain circles, but for those in the know Pre Language is the first album in 2012 worth getting excited about.

This is the second archival live Plimsouls set from Alive Records, following 2010′s Live! Beg, Borrow & Steal. If you’re worried that having two live albums from the same band might be redundant, rest assured that both albums are worth owning, with just five songs in common from the setlist. Beach Town Confidential has the better sound of the two, with a thick and meaty bottom end that might even make you forget that it’s a live recording. It comes from a 1983 date in Huntington Beach’s Golden Bear club, and you can hear just how good the band had become at working a crowd into a frenzy with their hard-driving rock’n'roll. They play their big hit “A Million Miles Away”, which is a great song, but I’m just as enthralled with “Who’s Gonna Break The Ice?”, which sounds like Cheap Trick trading in stadiums for small clubs, and their thumping covers of The Creation’s “Making Time” and “Price Of Love”, originally by The Everly Brothers (a big influence). This is fun and catchy music, made with classic pop song-craft and live-wire energy. Perhaps the best compliment I can give the album is that it makes me wish I was there, beer in hand, to see it in person.

If you’re like me and bands like Neu!, Suicide, Spacemen 3, The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Brian Jonestown Massacre really get your mouth watering, then meet your newest obsession: The Dead Skeletons. The first thing you should know about this Icelandic group is that they don’t act like a group at all, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Jón Sæmundur seems to be the only constant musician on Dead Magick, and to the best of my knowledge they don’t do any live performance. Instead they get the word out via the internet, with an especially strong presence on YouTube, where they have videos for all twelve songs on the album. That they’ve gone through such tremendous efforts to present their songs visually makes a lot of sense given the cinematic quality of their music. These aren’t catchy songs and they don’t subscribe to pop sensibilities. They’re long (average song-length is six minutes), with an almost minimalist sense of repetition. They recall the bands listed above but with a heavy set of decidedly Eastern sensibilities in both the melodic motifs and the lyrics, which are more like mantras than traditional rock fare (a song called “Om Mani Peme Hung” actually is a Tibetan mantra). It’s heady dead-serious stuff, but it’s also completely fascinating to listen to. My favorite songs to get lost in are the brilliant eight-minute opener “Dead Mantra” with its endlessly repeated incantations (see the video below), “When The Sun Comes Up” which shows they’ve paid especially close attention to their Brian Jonestown Massacre records (Anton Newcombe is a close friend of the band and Dead Magick was put out on his A Records label), and a psychotic death march called “Yama”. Those are the highlights, but Dead Magick should really be experienced as a whole to get the full mesmeric effect. I can’t wait to hear where they go from here.

The entire album can be streamed for free at: http://stream.apolloaudio.com/Dead-Skeletons-Dead-Magick/