As we head into the 4th of July weekend with firecrackers in one hand and a frosty six-pack in the other, the eMusic staff thought we’d help soundtrack your next barbecue by offering some of our favorite reissues and best-of compilations — revolutionary records, if you will — for just $4.99 or less. As the old adage goes, there’s something for everyone here, from the minor-keyed moodiness of Joy Division, the Smiths and the Cure to the sucker-punch riffs of the Stooges, Black Sabbath and Pantera.

Tom Waits and Aphex Twin even emerged from hiding to share a pair of old fan favorites.

Let’s get into it then, shall we?

The only thing better than a metal band is a metal band with a sense of humor. Enter Mastodon and a gaggle of pissed-off puppets.

Backstory: Since their inception, the group has gradually drawn out the artier inclinations that were always at the center of their storming songs. Though not everyone agrees with me, I thought 2009′s Crack the Skye was a high-water mark, a representation of what the band could do when they were firing on all cylinders. Like a lot of people, I’m hotly anticipating The Hunter, the follow-up to Skye the group are now writing and recording (and apparently blessing with song titles like — I’m not kidding — “The Octopus Has No Friends”).

To satisfy any impatience, the group has contributed an outtake from Crack the Skye, called “Deathbound,” to the recently-revived Adult Swim Singles Club. You can watch the Muppetastic video for the song above. You will never watch Fraggle Rock the same way again.

Outside Santos Party House on Wednesday, New York City was suffering through yet another night of bitter winds, frigid temperatures and blinding sheets of snow. Inside the venue there was a different kind of storm brewing — this one not without its own sudden gusts and furious squalls.

That bluster and howl came courtesy of the Georgia quintet Kylesa, a hard rock band that’s lately showing an increasing restlessness with the conventions of hard rock. Last year they released Spiral Shadow, a record that owes just as much to hardcore and vintage emo as it does heavy metal. The group gets its tension from the interplay between its two vocalists — Laura Pleasants and Philip Cope, both of whom also play guitar — and its momentum from two drummers, Carl McGinley and Eric Hernandez, who play simultaneously. On Shadow they put that velocity in the service of songs that often feel like odd, ancient runes: crooked in structure, and seeming to portend ominous things. It’s music that proves it’s possible to increase in texture and shade without sacrificing muscle.

But what struck most about the show on Wednesday was group’s great debt to psychedelia. Looking perfectly unwashed, and illuminated by a series of odd, disorienting lighting filters, the group could have served as the stage band for a Christian film from the late ’60s meant to illustrate the link between drugs and rock & roll. The influence was more palpable in the music, too: the instrumental passages grew longer; Pleasants repeatedly teased elegant leads and ornamented the moodier portions of “Drop Out” with a series of hypnotic patterns. With her ghostly wail and far-off gaze, Pleasants at times suggested Jefferson Airplane‘s Grace Slick. In the group’s thundering songs, she plays the role of the siren, suckering sailors to the other side of the sea only to wallop them once they get there.

It fell to Cope, then, to be the leviathan. His voice is coarse and thuggish and equally effective at all volumes. On “Distance Closing In,” he murmured the verses softly while Pleasants applied her blue-black howl to the chorus. The dynamic between the two is not dissimilar to the one shared by Frank Black and Kim Deal in the Pixies: he screams the nightmares of the subconscious she offsets them with refrains that, though melodic, are no less unsettling.

Wednesday’s show also called attention to how meticulously constructed the group’s songs can be. “Tired Climb,” Spiral Shadow‘s dizzying opener, is built from no fewer than four distinct sections, but the group executed each of them perfectly, shifting hard from hammering verses to stunned, lurching finale. It felt less like a song than four small acts in the same play.

Less successful was Shadow centerpiece “Don’t Look Back.” Triumphant on record, it felt strangely inert at Santos, less rallying cry than disjointed mantra. It’s possible, having reached the end of the night, the band had burned through all available reserves of energy. Or maybe they just realized, each of them at the same time, what it was going to be like to load up a van in a New York snowstorm.

I’m not gonna lie, I have been looking forward to this day for almost a year: Relapse Records returns to eMusic!

Relapse is one of my favorite labels running, and in the first batch we’ve got the cream of their recent crop. I’m going to run down a few of my musts, and any other fans, please add to the comments!

Baroness, Blue Record: Even if you don’t like metal, you will like this album. I promise. This was one of my favorite albums of last year — the musicianship on this record is jaw-dropping. The riffs! The drumming! The whiplash time signatures! I reviewed it, and in that review I say:

Baroness’s roots are in hardcore, not prog, so The Blue Record‘s grand ambitions are leavened with a healthy punk snarl. They’re self-confessed metal outsiders — as is producer John Congleton, whose resume includes St. Vincent‘s Actor as well as albums by the Mountain Goats and Okkervil River. Don’t think Armored Saint, think Hot Snakes with more compositional flair. The songs are packed with an astonishing level of detail: hairpin turns, methodically arranged subsections, surgically precise tempo changes and guitar leads that require an almost supernatural dexterity (How many 32nd notes can two men play?) Witness the apocalyptically named “A Horse Called Golgotha,” how it goes from blistering riffage to hammering punk rock to full-gallop hard rock — all within the first minute. Jaw-dropping dynamo “Jake Leg” is composed of no fewer than four distinct passages, but it moves so quickly and so fluidly its complexity almost escapes perception. Its single central riff — a call-and-response between Baizley and the group’s other guitarist, Peter Adams — corkscrews its way angrily up the song’s center, sounding nastier every time it appears — at different tempos, in different key signatures, with different effects. Baroness pulls off a cunning feat, reverse-engineering hardcore and gilding its raw brutality with alarmingly elegant guitar solos.

More Relapse picks after the jump!

Coalesce, Ox: Long-running hardcore band Coalesce returns with Ox, a record that’s as bracing and vital as any in their catalog. Ox is non-stop, man, hammering percussion, full-throated vocals and split-second songs that bottle up and explode like shaken soda pop.

Dillinger Escape Plan, Calculating Infinity: Breakthrough album from now-legendary technical-metallers — this is the one that earned them their rep, and just a few seconds makes it clear why. Light-speed playing, full-on fury. A must.

Howl, Full of Hell: This is a recent Relapse release, but I rep hard for it. Hear me out: this is practically a shoegaze record. The guitars on that first song sound like they were lifted from Starflyer 59′s Americana or something. But then that demonic vocalist comes in and the whole thing takes a long black dive into the abyss. It’s some kind of weird hybrid of stoner metal and black metal — everything is superfuckingslow and menacing. On my list of favorite records of 2010.

Mastodon, Leviathan: Breakthrough album from metal gods — one of their early experiments with a concept record, this one loosely based on Moby Dick. A new metal classic.

Pig Destroyer, Phantom Limb: YESSSS. This record is psychotic. The songs are about 90 seconds long, super intense grind metal, lots of flailing and shrieking. This is an adrenaline shot to the heart.

Tombs, Winter Hours: Brutal slab of metal from promising Brooklyn band. This is only their 2nd record, but Tombs are off to a great start. Roaring and cataclysmic with deep long nods toward hardcore. There are moments that you can hear a Dischord influence, which is fine by me.

Black Anvil, Time Insults the Mind: Black Anvil are a New York band playing Scandinavian black metal. Fairly straightforward in execution, but black metal fans should love.

Minsk, With Echoes in the Movement of Stone: I got way into Minsk’s first record; this one is slightly less technical but still super ominous. Minsk like long, atmospheric songs — Tool isn’t too far a jumping-off point, but that comparison tends to give people the heebie-jeebies. Long, loping, art metal. Maybe a bit of Danzig in here, too? But like if Danzig went to art school. Did Danzig go to art school? Anyway.

Neurosis, A Sun That Never Sets: This seems to be a fairly divisive Neurosis record among fans, but I like it just fine.

Brutal Truth, Evolution Through Revolution: Grindcore pioneers on another fine outing.

Brian Poeshn, Fart and Weiner Jokes: And why not close it all down with some comedy? Poeshn is metal’s court jester, and his latest is a light remedy to all of Relapse’s awesome darkness.

It was early in their set at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple Tuesday night, and Abbath Doom Occulta, guitarist and primary vocalist for the Norwegian black metal band Immortal, was feeling charitable. “If any of you wandered in here and are wondering who the fuck we are,” he growled, “we are Immortal, the Sons of Northern Darkness!”

The scenario he described — that someone would have somehow stumbled upon an out-of-the-way Masonic temple, paid the $45 cover charge and then been confused by the band they discovered on stage — was ludicrous. But, in a way, it gets to the heart of what Immortal does best: leavening breakneck, bloodshot, pit-of-hell metal with just a dash of ridiculousness. The group, along with Mayhem and Emperor, were at the forefront of the early ’90s Norwegian black metal movement, an uprising that left in its wake a long trail of burned churches and dead bodies. That they self-identify as the ‘Sons of Northern Darkness’ is telling: where many of their black metal peers continue explore themes that are situated decidedly south of heaven, Immortal are a proud product of their environment. In Immortal songs, the apocalypse comes not as a result of a grand Satanic uprising, but as the result of natural disasters summoned by an overtaxed earth.

Indeed, their show often felt very much like that apocalypse. Immortal play fast and brutal music, and the guitars often sounded more like a cloud of hornets than actual instruments. Opening with the title track from their blistering and underrated new album All Shall Fall, the group delivered a harrowing set comprised mainly of violent, blitzkreig riffing. Though black metal is not typically a genre that prizes innovation (after one particularly furious number Abbath boasted, “That was new shit, but it sounds like old shit to me”), Immortal have figured out ways to nudge the genre forward ever so slightly: Abbath occasionally broke free of the chordal clusterbombing to peel of long, loopy solos, and he varied the tone and pitch of his growling in ways that approximated actual singing. During “Pure Holocaust,” the group turned their guitars into jackhammers, spitting out a series of impossibly compact and angry chords. “Battles in the North” was another grinding nightmare, Abbath mostly barking his lyrics as the guitars corkscrewed nastily behind him. This, of course, is the thrill of metal shows: pure visceral experience, endless thrills piled one atop the other, the sonic equivalent of an out-of-control rollercoaster.

And lurking behind it all was just the vaguest whiff of camp. Midway through the show, Abbath strode out to the center of the stage and employed exaggerated hand gestures to regulate the volume of the audience’s cheers. It’s a time-tested and utterly cliche concert technique and, for a brief moment, it seemed to close the gap between the show at the Masonic Temple and, say, a Bon Jovi concert.

If Bon Jovi wore corpsepaint and chainmail and sang about the apocalypse, that is.

We got this a month ago, but I am somehow just getting around to listening to it now and, oh my god, the new Sigh record is throwing me into all kinds of ridiculous, excited spasms.

I mean, good god, where the hell do I even start with this thing? By saying it just knocked Beach House out of my personal “Best of the Year So Far” top slot? By talking about how every time I play it I need to physically calm myself down, because I am overcome by how completely fucking awesome it is? By talking about how I am a hairsbreadth away from physically forcing people to sit and listen to this with me? How I may have actually just done that to a fellow eMusic employee?

OK, lemme start over:

Sigh are a Japanese metal band who skew theatrical. How theatrical? Every song is fully orchestrated — not just strings, man, oboes, trumpets, flutes. You thought you knew bombast? Friend, you do not know bombast until you listen to Sigh. “The Soul Grave” opens with an organ flourish, then divebombs into rotary-saw black metal riffs before, good god, a full-on orchestral fanfare kicks in, sounding like a Dead Pirate’s Imperial March — stern, determined, swooping upward and downward while vocalist Mirai Kawashima does the full-on black metal demonic growl over top. There are two songs with “Funeral” in the title — “The Red Funeral” is the lemmings-marching-toward-the-cliff soldier death dance, complete with processional snare while “The Summer Funeral,” belying the sunniness of the title, creeps and crawls, stomping horns crashing down like anvils and, two minutes in, a Hitchcock-movie piano arrives to signal the beginning of your end. It’s like, say you went to high school in hell, and it was time for your Spring Concert — this is what you’d be playing.

It’s pompous and puff-chested and a tiny bit ridiculous — but ridiculous in the best way possible. It’s forward-thinking and inventive and surprising, and there hasn’t been a second over the last 24 hours I haven’t felt like listening to it. And if all that’s not enough, I quote the following bit of trivia from Sputnik Music’s 5-star review of the record:

Scenes from Hell continues the band’s enigmatic nature with the addition of Dr. Mikannibal. A real life Ph.D currently working at the US National Laboratory, Dr. Mikannibal is also known for her propensity on the (alto) saxophone, her bellowing growl and her peculiar habits, which include recording topless and casually dining on everything from bull penis to cockroaches.

Download now, thank me later.

What is the proper speed for heavy metal? Is it always fast and treacherous? Must is always raze and pillage? Can’t a group just chill out for a few minutes?

These were the questions posed by Nadja, the Canadian metal duo of Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff, over the course of a restrained, frequently mesmerizing show at Brooklyn’s Union Pool last night.

To be fair, Nadja were never anyone’s idea of a conventional metal band. Their numerous full-lengths (they’ve released three so far this year) are comprised mostly of 17- and 18-minute drones, as unsettling as they are insistently shapeless. This year’s splendid When I See the Sun Always Shines on TV, one of their more conventional outings, is a covers record that manages to make Elliott Smith‘s “Needle in the Hay” sound like a Satanic doxology.

What Nadja does well is distill metal to a few distinct components. Last night’s show began with tiny yelps of sound, a few stray, gleaming pinpricks that the duo gradually spun into an expansive constellation. The first half of the night was given over to experimenting. Baker and Buckareff constructed winding passages of sound, finding new ways to connect and to layer endless, whistling tones. It wasn’t until the final segment that the volume came up and the group began ladling thick, tarry riffs over thudding, dead-eyed drum-machine percussion. And while the duo is hardly charismatic – Buckareff played the entire show with her back to the audience – there is a kind of surrender that comes after about 30 minutes of being submerged in their strange, surging drones. To put it another way: Nadja doesn’t command attention so much as lull into zombielike submission.

What was particularly fascinating on Saturday was the way Baker and Buckareff treated feedback like an instrument: most of their compositions were crafted from high, wailing pitches, captured and looped over and over. Baker – who sang on just two songs, and even then only briefly – spent as much time crouched over an effects board as he did tending to his instruments. And rather than pluck individual notes, Buckareff played her bass with a bow, undercutting the hellish shrieks of feedback with a continual, ominous moan.

The show’s best moments came when Baker allowed himself to step out from the din and peel off what, in Nadja’s universe, passes for a solo. Long, slow and anguished, the pealing high-notes could hardly be mistaken for guitar virtuosity, and yet they possessed a kind of tragic beauty — a wounded bird doing a few sad final circles before its inevitable plunge to the earth.

If last night’s performance failed to deliver the kind of chest-collapsing impact their records promise, it wasn’t the band’s fault. They had apparently, via excessive, thundering volume, blown out one of their amplifiers the night before.

If that’s not metal, what is?

Finally! An avalanche of new releases today, the first real bounty in what looks to be an extremely exciting autumn. I’m gonna do my best to cover all of them in this post, but I’ll undoubtedly miss a few, so please point out my oversights in the comments! I’m going to break these out into sections today for easier viewing:

The Old Reliables

Arctic Monkeys, Humbug: I’ve really been looking forward to this one. I saw the band at two different festivals this summer, and both times they favored material from this record — which sounds darker and more menacing than previous efforts. Credit at least some of that to Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, who produced half the tracks. eMusic’s Matt Fritch sez:

Arctic Monkeys seriously dig Queens of the Stone Age, and Humbug is an aural postcard from Homme’s Joshua Tree studio: the queasy guitar bends on “Potion Approaching” are directly descended from the Queens’ “3′s And 7′s,” and the military-march rhythms and squonking, brutish guitars make “Pretty Visitors” sound like a spooky outtake from Lullabies To Paralyze. The best tracks here, however, borrow only as much as they need from Homme — a mosquito-buzz guitar solo on “Crying Lightning,” for example, or the hallucinogenic power-ballad vibe of “Fire and the Thud” — without surrendering their British passports. And the charm of the band remains with the forked-tongue wit of Turner, who’s part hopeless romantic and part wolf at the door.

The Clean, Mister Pop: Any new record from the Clean — Kiwipop originators and indie-pop giants — is cause for celebration, but even moreso when the record is as great as this one. Mister Pop finds the Clean moving even further away from their (forever ago) post-punk rattling, settling into a gorgeous, deampop haze. eMusic’s Douglas Wolk writes:

Listening to a Clean album can be like watching one of Michael Apted’s “Seven Up” movies: the band has effectively grown up together on record. With Mister Pop, they’ve settled comfortably into their late 40s and early 50s — a little slower than they once were, a little more relaxed, but also more willing to mess with their formulae. lyrics are almost always secondary on Clean albums, and melody is generally beside the point unless Scott is singing (“Asleep in the Tunnel” is his showcase here). The band is all about deep exploration of grooves and textures in as simple a pop-song context as they can work up.

Polvo, In Prism: One of my favorite bands returns after a seemingly interminable hiatus with a record that finds them sharper and stronger than ever. The first song is classic Polvo, and they just keep delivering the skewed hits from there on out. eMusic’s Sam Adams sez:

Math-rock progenitors Polvo’s first album in 12 years does better than pick up where they left off. Rather than try and recapture past glories, the reconstituted four-piece — original members Dave Brylawski, Ash Bowie and Steve Popson, plus new drummer Brian Quast — have recorded the most solid, coherent and tuneful album in their history. That’s not to say they’ve abandoned their trademark off-kilter meters and propulsive stop-starts, but the underlying complexities are combined with the immediate satisfaction of a straight-ahead rock record.

Rodrigo y Gabriela, 11:11: Brand new outing from celebrated guitarists find their virtuoso playing still fully intact. eMusic’s Richard Gehr sez:

On their second album, fans will discover that the duo’s musical infatuations extend beyond the oeuvres of Metallica and Led Zeppelin and into the realms of jazz, tango, new age, Middle Eastern and the classical music of Europe and the Americas — but always with a rocking Latin tinge.

Damon and Naomi, The SubPop Years: Compilation of slow, sad songs from ex-Galaxie 500 members (though at this point, it’s ridiculous to refer to them that way). eMusic’s Michaelangelo Matos sez:

The Sub Pop Years doesn’t necessarily call up its specific era: these songs exist out of time, just the way Damon & Naomi wanted it. Both Krukowski and Yang sing long, hazy, drifting vocal lines; even when things get loud, the arc remains smooth and a hair unsettling.

Amy Millan, Masters of the Burial: New solo record from Stars’ Amy Millan skews country-folk, placing Millan’s gorgeous alto at the center of some plaintive acoustic guitars and weeping pedal steel. Sounds lovely!

L.S.U., Bring it Down Now: “Hits” compilation from 90s California post-punk band gathers up some true chestnuts from the group’s catalog while overlooking quite a few essentials (probably due to rights issues). L.S.U. (aka LifeSavers Underground) were operating at their peak in the early 90s, and Bring It Down Now gathers up the best tracks from their impossible-to-find Grape Prophet album and balances them with rarities, live and unreleased tracks. Kind of a hodgepodge, but worth it for “Ellis in the Orchard,” “English Interpreter of English” and the unfortunately-titled (sigh) “Funky Space Cat.”

Marc Almond, Orpheus in Exile: The Songs of Vadim Kozin: Whoah. This is some serious Jacques Brel-style shit. Almond goes cabaret — full pomp and camp in the best senses of both terms. Well worth sampling.

Andrew WK, 55 Cadillac: This appears to be a concept record of instrumental piano music about cars. Seriously. I don’t know what to make of this, but God Bless Andrew WK for following his own warped muse.

The Young Upstarts
Mayer Hawthorne, A Strange Arrangement: Justifiably-anticipated debut from R&B crooner Mayer Hawthorne — this record is terrific. Hawthorne’s voice is smooth and lovely, and his adoration for soul music bleeds through every note. eMusic’s Michaelangelo Matos sez:

A Strange Arrangement works because of the way Hawthorne lets little details pile up. The matching flute and xylophone that take the song to the fade of the album’s title cut, or the on-the-beat guitar chank of the molten-sounding slow-dance “Just Ain’t Gonna Work Out,” bespeak a lifetime of absorption in the sound of all kinds of vintage soul, and when Hawthorne sings in his natural tenor on “Maybe So, Maybe No” and “Let Me Know,” he sounds authoritative on his own terms.

The Depreciation Guild, In Her Gentle Jaws: Kurt, the drummer from the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, fronts The Depreciation Guild, a fantastic band that blends shoegazey guitars with heavy-lidded vocals and the occasional electronic rhythm. I am loving the samples – codeine pop at its finest. Shoegaze fans, dive in.

Taken By Trees, East of Eden: The second record from Taken By Trees is a globetrotting affair, taking Victoria Bergsman to Pakistan to incorporate some of the region’s singular sounds into her own wispy pop. eMusic’s Barry Walters sez:

For all its exoticism, East of Eden is never exhibitionistic: Bergsman rarely raises her voice. The songs seem to sing her — there’s a tangible sense that she’s being humbled. Amidst more picturesque local color than most globetrotters ever encounter, she contemplates the “Greyest Love of All.” The album’s most outgoing track is an unlikely cover — a joyous, untethered rendition of Animal Collective’s recent “My Girls” that sneaks in distant yet lovely falsetto sighs from that band’s Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox.

Vivian Girls, Everything Goes Wrong: Last year’s Big Buzz Band returns with a sophomore outing that finds them — thankfully! — not refining their sound even a smidge. eMusic’s Andrew Parks sez:

Album No. 2 is a collection of kiss-off cuts set to a pop-punk beat and violent bursts of distortion. Not to mention a seared solo or two, as the band lets a handful of tracks breathe long enough to pummel them back into submission. This is especially evident in “Survival,” “Tension” and “Out For the Sun,” songs that shed the Girls’ Wall of Sound tendencies for pure mud-slinging. And since everything is still treated with a ridiculous amount of reverb, you can be sure that those harmonies will echo in your head for days, right alongside some of their noisiest, gnarliest riffs yet.

Health, GET COLOR: Rowdy noisniks HEALTH return with another batch of whacked-out indie. eMusic’s Caitlin Dewey sez:

On Get Color, more so than on HEALTH, the group’s sonic slaughters actually feel like songs — songs with discernible melodies, verses and rhythms coated in a thin narcotic haze. Look no further than the first single, “Die Slow,” for evidence: after opening with a wall of guitar and an itchy succession of pixilated synths, the track slinks into a garish chorus, all spectral vocals and insistent electric swells. By the end, it’s become a writhing dance floor cacophony, buzzing and creaking with all the communal free energy that HEALTH failed to harness on their debut.

Eddy Current Suppression Ring, s/t: First album from trash-garage band Eddy Current Suppression Ring shows up, sure to please fans of scuzz-rock and leather jackets. Sounds great to these ears.

The Grates, Teeh Lost Hearts Won: Fun, spunky indie pop with big hooks and pouty female vocals. Skews a bit commercial, but the songs are solid and engaging and I can hear fans of 80s pop digging this.

BLK JKS, After Robots: Full-length debut from globetrotting, vowel-hating BLK JKS takes in a million different styles at once. eMusic’s Caitlin Dewey sez:

If After Robots were a world tour – and sometimes, it seems to be – there are few continents that BLK JKS wouldn’t visit at length. The group skews toward Afropop on tracks like “Molalatladi,” with its tribal chanting and dissenting polyrhythms; their rock instrumentation, moody vocals and ungodly guitar solos evidence an education in American prog. A Middle Eastern motif adorns “Banna Ba Modimo,” while shades of reggae and ska can be heard in the strangely sunny “Skeleton.” And the occasional use of brass, piano and acoustic guitar – as on the mournful “Standby” – suggest something of the blues.

Mi and L’Au, Good Morning Jokers: I had forgotten about this band! Hyperdelicate folk, gorgeous and aching vocals. This is real waking-the-witch stuff, and there’s an element of the mystic at work here that’s hard to deny. Outre and odd.

AIDS Wolf, Dustin’ Off the Sphynz: Maybe my least-favorite band name of all time. This is one for the noise fans — wild-eyed, manic, skewed, wound-up anti-pop, yelping vocals and all-over-the-place rhythms. The sound of an epileptic fit.

Bipolar Bear, Harlem Pripyat: The name is a pun that’s been done to death, but the dark, doomy songs on this record more than compensate for a little jokery. Lo-fi disasterpop, reminiscent at times of Ikara Colt with more dead-eyed, droney vocals.

Big Beats for Dancing Feet
Various Artists, Sensacional Soul, Vol 2: More excellent Latin Soul and R&B from the VampiSoul label, bright horn charts and swift kicking rhythms, perfect for a late-night dance party. Add VampiSoul to your list of labels to watch. Nearly everything they put out is excellent, and this comp is no exception.

Nicolay, City of Lights Vol. 2: Shibuya: Acclaimed R&B and hip-hop producer Nicolay unveils an album-length tribute to Japan. This one takes a bit to get into — it’s heavy on skittering, jazzy organ runs and chintzy percussion, but somehow Nicolay manages to make it work. An interesting oddity.

Aaron LaCrate, Club Kids: DJ mix from Aaron LaCrate blends elements of favela hip-hop and vocals from what sound to these ears like 7th graders. Light and fun if not necessarily essential.

Singles and EPs
Girls, “Lust for Life”: Second single from upcoming Girls album finds these onetime eMusic Selecters blazing through an irresistible bit of pouty pop with their usual ragged charm.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heat, “Come Saturday”: Well, of course! This year’s breakout band delivers their latest single, with a B-Side that shows they haven’t lost any of their charm or skill. We loves ya, Alex.

Headlights, “Get Going”: I probably don’t need to restate how much I love Headlights. I have seen this band somewhere in the neighborhood of 6 – 7 times now, and they get stronger and tighter and more charming with each go-round. Their next record, Wildlife, will be out October 6, and this beautiful, bright advance single gives a great indication of what you’re in for — more hyperdelicate, hyper-hooky pop sure to warm your heart and lift your spirits. And lemme just get it out of my system: I LOVE THIS BAND.

Bei Bei and Shawn Lee, Songs from Beauty and the Beats: Well, this sounds promising. Shawn Lee (whose music I’ve done a 180 on ever since he ditched the kitsch in favor of smoky soul) teams with vocalist Bei Bei for a few tracks of smoky, sinister soul. I am assuming this is from an upcoming record, one I am now officially amped to hear.

Brown Recluse, The Soft Skin: Slumberland’s reign continues with this EP from Philly’s Brown Recluse (formerly The Brown Recluse Sings). Light, lovely jangle-pop, almost-country, with the kind of retiring twee vocals Slumberland is known for. Sarah Records fans, prick up thine ears.

Amusement Parks on Fire, Young Fight: Five new songs from APOF that skew kinda shoegazey, cacophonous guitars and dreamy, pie-eyed vocals. Reminds me of the 90s, in ways I like.

Other Music for Uplifting Gormanizers:
Various Artists, Highlife Time: Excellent collection of African highlife from the can’t-miss VampiSoul label. Fans of those Nigeria Special comps, this is for you: big, bright, buoyant Afropop, the sound of prolonged jubilation. Excellent!

Gnaw Their Tongues, All the Dread Magnificence of Perversity: Total horror-noise sub-music, the sound of panic, over and over and over. This is dread-rock, totally ominous and creepy — the sound of walking around an abandoned house at midnight and hearing the floorboards creak three feet behind you.

Nudge, As Good As Gone: New, moody band on kranky favors mist-like, foggy soundscapes with gothy female vocals. Sounds lovely and entrancing in the usual kranky way.

Various Artists, Southern Lord: The fine folks at the excellent Southern Lord label have put together a killer label sampler, one that allows a quick look into all of their blackened corners.

Various Artists, Twin Peaks: Falling: Four remixes of the Twin Peaks theme. Sadly, there is no “Owls Are Not What They Seem” remix. Leland sez:

You’re going back to Missoula, MONTANAAAAAAAAAAA.

Brand new on eMusic on a Saturday(!): The Best Metal Record of 2009, Funeral Mist’s Maranatha!.

I actually yelped when I saw this in Freshly Ripped today. I have been obsessed with this record for months, going so far as to try to track down the digital distributor to see if we could get it for the site. I bought the 200g Import-Only 2xLP. Man oh man, do I love this record.

Extreme metal is a hard sell for a million obvious reasons, so if you already know that it’s not your thing, this record is probably not going to change your mind. However, if you’re even remotely intrigued by Satanic Black Metal, or think that you might be, you just don’t know where to start, Maranatha! is the record for you.

To dispense quickly with some biographical information: Funeral Mist is essentially a side project of Arioch who, under the name Mortuus, is also the lead vocalist for longtime outstanding blasphemers Marduk (Arioch/Mortuus stepped up to the mic in 2004, with the group’s white-knuckle horror show Plague Angel). I can’t give a good explanation for why dude has two different names, except to say that sometimes, you know, being a Satanist is complicated.

Anyway.

Black metal has a way of being confining — all of those hammering, one-on-top-of-the-other riffs create a kind of claustrophobia that, while essential to the music’s overall tone of panic, can be a bit exhausting over long stretches. Maranatha! works because its assault is never relentless. It may rocket out of the gate, with the psychotic drilling of “Sword of Faith!”, but it lets up almost immediately. “White Stone” is a slow churner, grimy guitar riffs slithering like shiny black asps over thumping percussion. The arrangements are fascinating and considered, too — it’s not just jetpack guitars and heart-attack percussion — there are grim Satanic choirs and searing, requiem-like orchestral sections. Unlike a lot of other black metal records, the songs here actually have movements, progressing from relentless pound to long, gut-wrenching moans.

The astonishing (and, sorry, album-only) “Blessed Curse” begins with a thick film of guitars and a long passage of wild-eyed and seriously threatening Christian preaching, an icy guitar line arcing up over the din. A single melodic theme is repeated over and over and over, gradually gaining in force and power — Arioch ranting like a man possessed (which, let’s face it, he probably is), until the whole thing goes up in a puff of thick, sulfuric smoke. A weird, witchy choir winds their way through the background of “Living Temples,” shrieking and braying. As a bonus, Marantha! also begins better than any other album released this year, with the sound of a panicked Pentecostal preacher yelling, “It’s the blood! It’s the blood! It’s the blood!”

It doesn’t hurt that, throughout the record, Arioch takes passages from the Bible and inverts them, giving sacred text nefarious meaning. “My heart is fixed, O lord,” he grunts in “Anti-Flesh Nimbus,” “My veins are prepared to receive thy venom… I open my chest, and my word shall devour flesh.” In the bleak and ironic “Jesus Saves!” he cries, “”And the son of falsehood shall shine with trust, from the depths of Satan in the name of God / Jesus Saves! Jesus Saves! / Eat now his flesh and inject the venom in his name.”

So, yeah, serious stuff. But also as chilling and riveting as video footage of an exorcism. Metal fans, rejoice: your savior has come.

From the band’s bio:

Lead by the band’s leader and namesake, Maris The Great is the gay zombie of Rock and Roll that threatens to take your life or (if you’re a cute boy) your wee wee. Their shows are visual rockfests full of glitter, gore and projectile fecal matter.

As Alex said, “Maris, they totally stole your schtick.” Those bastards.