Noise Ash

When Grinderman released their debut in 2007, Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos, and Martyn Casey created a reckless, drunken animal of an alter ego to the Bad Seeds. The album bridged territory mined by everyone from the Stooges to Suicide to Bo Diddley. Again recorded in the company of producer Nick Launay, Grinderman 2 is a more polished and studied affair than its predecessor, but it's a more sonically adventurous, white-hot rock & roll record. The opening, "Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man," comes closest to the songs on the previous album, but feels like it comes by way of Patti Smith's "Radio Ethiopia," Howlin' Wolf, and the Scientists. It's pure scummy, sleazy, in-the-red dissonant rock. The swampy, ribald blues of "Kitchenette," features Casey's bass roiling around distorted, Echoplexed electric guitar, electric bouzouki, and jungle-like tom-toms and kick drums. Cave does his best lecher-in-heat blues howl – if Charles Bukowski had sung the blues, this is what it would have sounded like.

After the spare and lengthy reflections and dislocated experiments of his excellent Dance album, Gary Numan made a return to a more focused approach with I, Assassin, which turned out to be his last truly great album for many years. Much of what would characterize his later music in the '80s did start to show up here, to be sure, but instead of the formless flailing all too apparent on Warriors, and especially on Berserker, Numan's work here with modern electronic funk combines his early rigor and to-the-point rhythms with a deft, creative hand in the arrangements. "White Boys and Heroes," the brilliant opening number, remains one of his best singles, featuring fretless bass work from Pino Palladino (long before both it and him had turned into rent-a-clichés), and set against droning, distorted vocals and doom-laden keyboards…

Ulvesang classify themselves as a blend of acoustic, ambient, atmospheric, black, neofolk, neoclassical, and even metal. They are a three piece instrumental acoustic guitar group who are inspired by spiritualism, paganism, nature, and melancholy. Multiple layers of acoustic guitars build a dynamic whole, with subtle drones and chants adding to the already immense atmosphere. Ulvesang has created a chilling debut album…