I never know how to deal with these situations where someone I barely knew but didn’t like very much dies and an outpouring of sincere sympathy emits from tons of people I like and/or respect who apparently liked them quite a bit. I didn’t know this dude and the only interaction I had with his band Woods Of Ypres left a sour taste. Maybe he was a super nice guy and just the rest of his band were dicks. Fetal Pig got booked to play a show with them at Vaudeville Mews, before which I’d never heard them. I downloaded their new album to get a feel for what we were in for and determined that it was a really well-done album, a bit overlong but full of really catchy songs, very radio and major-label ready, but I failed to see what was “black metal” or “doom metal” about it as stylistically it mostly sounded to me like the same old whiny petulant post-grunge Active Rock crap, but all that really only meant that it just wasn’t my kind of thing because the songs definitely were catchy and there were some pretty decent riffs too and I know tons of dudes who would have loved it and I really got the sense from listening to it that this band was right on the verge of a big-time breakthrough. Then they came and played the show and were totally unfriendly, completely ignored everybody and buried their faces in their laptops the whole time, started their ridiculously short set by announcing to to all in attendance “all right let’s get this shit over with!” and just generally acted like they were oh so put out to have to be playing this shitty gig for this small crowd in this redneck town. Then afterwards they put out a mean-spirited tour-diary video on YouTube bagging on my city and the bands that opened for them. Real fucking classy, Anyway, the founding mastermind of the band (and only original member, I believe) died a couple days ago at age 31 in some kind of accident. So that’s news. Rest in peace, guy I saw once; if there’s a life after this one I hope you’re happier in it and find better people to associate with there.

All 9 volumes of the Contact Compilation are out now, including the long-delayed all-collaborations volume 5. Head over to Hal McGee’s bandcamp page to check them out.

Lovers of the old-school shoegaze wall-of-sound, psychedelic vibes and sunny major-key melodies bathed in fuzzed-out guitars and reverb, rejoice: we have Thunder Bunny. The band consisting mainly of New Jersey’s Christopher Padula released this EP earlier this year through Ames’s Workerbee Records.

Opener “paint a golden stick” sports an especially charming lead guitar line right out of the gate. Four tracks, three of them easy-tempo noise-pop gems driven by woozy drums, a thick mystery-inducing haze of fuzz guitar and shamanic tambourines in the reverby temple of the cult of sound. Of course the third track will be the instrumental. “headless” slightly resembles an excerpt from one of those improvisation tracks Amon Düül II put on Yeti or Tanz der Lemminge after getting rolling with a classic octavey bass ride of the kind favored by Wooden Shjips.

“(when you’re here)” ends the disc on a high note, reminiscent of middle-era Flaming Lips or classic Mercury Rev, in both the vocal melody and the floaty acoustic bit that reminds me of the verses of “Snorry Mouth,” introducing the song and recurring between the lush, sexy verses. And speaking of sexy, check out the video:

Sorry if it seems like I haven’t posted here much. If you want more, I share a lot of stuff on the Centipede Farm Facebook page. I’ve got a bunch of stuff that’s come my way this year that I’d like to write about before the year’s out, but then I was in the same position last year and didn’t manage to touch on near all of it. We’ll just let it come out as it can.

Peopling is R.Gonzales, who introduced himself to me over e-mail as a “noise-rock musician.” But don’t think noise-rock as in any of the followers of Sonic Youth or AmRep. This is closer to the stuff I’ve been digging into of late that’s filed under simply noise, but Peopling hammers that noise into rough rock shapes. This 6 track EP starts out upbeat with “Come Home Eccentric”, which opens with a loop of distorted outer-space radio-static noise that’s joined by a two-note synth bass line, loose punky drumming, and a heavily distorted taunting vocal. While it’s the most “rock” track of the bunch, the remainder of the disc follows much of the tone it sets. Hypersonic feedback, malformed power electronics, and heavily overloaded 4-track circuits swarm around sparse drums and electronic rhythms, loops of distorted metal-machine noise, some minimal distorted guitar, and even more heavily distorted vocals. Have I mentioned a lot of it is really distorted? It can be a disorienting assault, but also strangely mellow, almost folky in an optical illusion kind of way. A welcome respite from the noise comes with the acoustic guitar intro of “Summer Such And Such” before distorted elements begin creeping back in; there are also some melodies, of a sort, popping out at points.

Overall, Peopling comes off a little bit like a much harsher, yet somehow mellower, version of No Age — similarly oriented around stripped-down rock frameworks, but rhythmically laid-back, yet with many of the levels cranked to beyond the red. It’s a worthwhile concept taking the sonics of pure electro-noise and giving them a bare-bones level of rhythm and structure, a field ripe for further exploration and a possible remedy to the sometimes problematic tendency of noise music towards faceless interchangeability. Get it in digital form from Bandcamp or contact thepeopling at gmail to inquire about a CD copy.