Prince Rama

Get ready for this, kids! Brooklyn-based psychedelic rock trio Prince Rama formed in 2007 around the talents of Michael Collins and sisters Taraka and Nimai Larson. The trio members, who were raised in a Hare Krishna-centric Florida community, met in high school and began their musical journey as a straight-up punk-pop outfit, but a year in a Boston art school, as well as a steady diet of Amon Düül, Animal Collective, and Gang Gang Dance records, helped them make the transition from wannabe skatepunks to cosmic purveyors of tribal, mantra-heavy, lo-fi psychedelic pop. The group’s debut collection, Threshold Dances, appeared in 2008 on the British-based Cosmos label. Zetland arrived in 2009, followed in 2010 by Shadow Temple, which was co-produced by Animal Collective’s Deakin and Avey Tare. The Larson sisters, Taraka and Nimai, pared Prince Rama down to a duo for the group's fifth album, Trust Now. Behold, we are up to Top Ten Hits at the End of the World, from late 2012. It's a concept album: the apocalypse happened and it is up to Prince Rama to replicate the best music in the world and they treat each track as a different band, complete with make up and hair-dos. It's very fun with quite the snake-charmer influence. Their vocals are a little off-key and muffled which adds to the medium-fi charm. Take a listen and viewing to "Those Who Live for Love will Live Forever", track 2 here. Buy your copy of Top Ten Hits at the End of the World here.

Berberian Sound Studio

We start 2013 with Broadcast's Berberian Sound Studio, a score to Peter Strickland's film about Gilderoy, a hapless English sound engineer working on an Italian horror movie in 1976. The film in question, The Equestrian Vortex, is never shown, leaving audiences to envision its horrors as Gilderoy stabs watermelons, rips vegetables, and sizzles cooking oil to obtain the perfect terrifying sound. Similarly, Broadcast's music provides a vivid backdrop not just to The Equestrian Vortex, but Gilderoy's response to his part in crafting it. This is definitely not relaxing background music. I was playing this in the store yesterday and one customer kept commenting on it and asking me, "what the hell are you listening to? I've heard some far out sh--, and this is just...unsettling!" My knee-jerk reaction, of course, is to like this album even more. It's very peculiar, sounding like music for a Vampire movie, such as Bram Stoker's Dracula. With nearly forty short pieces, it features no lyrics from Keenan, though her voice haunts the album throughout, with wordless melodies that flutter and float amidst a dizzying array of sound effects, dialogue, and an instrumental palette that focuses heavily on organ, fuzzy bursts of bass guitar, and swinging jazz percussion. It plays quite logically as a follow-up to Broadcast's previous Witch Cults album with the Focus Group, with a similar collage aesthetic, but that album's fragmented disorientation is here replaced by a more linear collage that pays tribute to the INA/GRM school of French musique concrete composers, Italian prog and soundtrack composers like Morricone, Goblin, and Piovani. I dare you to take a listen! Buy your copy here.