Marching Church was previously the solo project of Iceage frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt, but now it's a full-band project featuring members of Lower, Puce Mary, Choir of Young Believers, and Hand of Dust. Their debut album This World Is Not Enough is out on March 30 via Posh Isolation in Europe and on March 31 via Sacred Bones everywhere else.
In a press release, Rønnenfelt detailed his vision for the band: “What I pictured was me in a comfortable armchair, adorned in a golden robe, leading a band while a girl kept pouring me champagne when I required it. This raised the question, ‘What sort of music would go along with this picture?’”
The press release also notes that the album was influenced by David Maranha's Antarctica, Young Americans-era David Bowie, as well as James Brown and Sam Cooke.
Rønnenfelt discussed the album's sessions in a statement:
The whole month of writing and rehearsing and the one week we had in the studio was truly an explosion of ideas. Improvisation, something I have never worked with before, was crucial in the making of this album, considering the loose nature of the writing on some of these songs. The album works because of the band’s incredible ability of breathing life into these, at times, very simple ideas and experiments.
The band features Rønnenfelt, Kristian Emdal and Anton Rothstein (Lower), Cæcilie Trier (Choir of Young Believers), Bo H. Hansen (Hand of Dust, Sexdrome) and Frederikke Hoffmeier (Puce Mary).

Luis Vasquez never intended for The Soft Moon to reach the public’s ears; for him, music has always been about self-actualization rather than self-aggrandizement. Nevertheless, the bleak, hushed sounds he created years ago in his small Oakland apartment bubbled to the surface and 2010 saw his debut LP, The Soft Moon, released on Captured Tracks rise to critical acclaim. Pitchfork’s 8.1 review stated that Vasquez made “oblivion seems like an enticing prospect” and, indeed, listeners were immediately drawn into his murky musical wasteland, swathed in the moody atmospheres of jagged dark wave and wayfaring postpunk. For them, and for Vasquez, there was no turning back. The Total Decay EP and Zeros emerged soon after, and now Vasquez returns with The Soft Moon’s most introspective and focused album to date: Deeper.
Following live line-up changes and a lull in the The Soft Moon’s constant touring schedule, the year 2013 found Luis Vasquez lost in the void. Though he fatalistically stated that 2012’s Zeros would be the last album where he was the sole songwriter, Vasquez realized that The Soft Moon has always been one man’s vision. Over time, it’s been the one place where Vasquez can express himself, totally and singularly, on his own terms.
Thus, in July of 2013, Vasquez decamped from Oakland, CA to Venice, Italy, unsure of where The Soft Moon would land. While Zeros was written and recorded between long days on the road, Deeper was begat from an almost primal urge to recoil from the world and experience total solitude. During the writing process, Vasquez pushed himself to discover the reality and nightmare of living with yourself, in entirely foreign surroundings with nothing and no one to fall back on. Stepping back and letting inspiration fall where it may, Vasquez only had one goal in mind for his third album: to pen his most emotional record yet. Between frequent visits to Berlin, Vasquez retreated to Venice’s Hate Studios, located in the mountains near electronic guru and spiritual anchor Giorgio Moroder’s hometown.
At Hate, he worked for almost a year with producer Maurizio Baggio to piece together Deeper, only completing the album in August 2014. While maintaining the stark sonic formula so indicative of The Soft Moon’s music — that bass that reeks of chorus, those unrelenting, mechanized beats, that wailing synthesizer and those eerily, angular guitar lines that worm into your ears and never leave — Baggio also worked to refine the album’s gothic palette, leaving Vasquez to concentrate more intensely on songwriting and singing than ever before:
“I’ve never worked so closely with someone before. Working with Maurizio felt right and I completely opened up to him during the entire process. I finally felt the urge to express myself more verbally with this record and I was able to focus more on songwriting rather than just experimenting with soundscapes.”
The voice of The Soft Moon has never been more clear and honest than it is on this record. With eerie, immersive tracks like the dogged “Far” and slow, beautifully melancholic “Wasting” (the first track written for Deeper), the album is a penetrating portrait of Vasquez as he wrestles thoughts of suicide, vulnerability and what it means to heal. By facing the most hopeless parts of himself without illusion and putting his past demons to bed, the creation of Deeper was an intense personal exploration of existence for Vasquez — old wounds were forcibly opened, deep anger and paranoia were manipulated into song — and he did not emerge unchanged. Deeper may have delivered Vasquez back to the waking world, but it willingly drags us further into The Soft Moon’s dark, euphonic universe once more.

Complex and conceptual Chicago outfit Disappears didn’t manage to issue any new material in 2014, but it’s been announced that the krautrock-loving crew will materialize again early next year via the release of their fifth full-length, Irreal.
A press release confirms that Kranky will have the album out in stores January 19. As with 2013’s Era, the upcoming eight-song LP was recorded with producer John Congleton at Chicago’s esteemed Electrical Audio facility.
Disappears’ latest LP is described as “a master class in texture, pace and control,” with the album apparently featuring “imperfect melodies” and post-punk arrangements that “collapse onto each other.” Thematically, Irreal weighs in on “eternalism, roboethics [and] identity.”

On Iceage's self-produced second album, they come off even younger, wilder, and more chaotic than on their 2011 debut, but also more experienced and nuanced. They've used their resources to hone what they already did well without abandoning their allure.

Vår is the project of four best friends from Copenhagen. Each member of the band is involved in several other Danish bands and all four members are also accomplished visual artists. What began as the extremely lo-fi two-piece of Elias Rønnenfelt and Loke Rahbek recording on 4-track has evolved into an experimental noise/industrial/techno pop quartet. On this album Vår utilize everything from acoustic guitar, power electronics, bass, trumpet, multi-tracked vocals, and various percussive instruments, to broken glass & sheet metal samples. No One Dances Quite Like My Brothers is a remarkable debut, an emotional roller coaster of sorts which at times is profoundly uplifting, at times decidedly morose but remains unfailingly moving throughout.
Holing up in the extremely cramped and oft overheated quarters of Sean Ragon’s self-built studio in the back of his Bushwick record store Heaven Street, the band wrote and recorded their first full length during two intense weeks last summer. Exploring themes of love, loss, vanity, hope, fear, sexuality and friendship and drawing more on literary influences than musical ones (Bataille and Shaffer, specifically), the band craft an album which cannot be confined by any singular sub-genre. Words like “industrial” and “electronic” fall short here; they barely begin to scratch the surface of this work. This is soundtrack music for a play that has only begun to be imagined and is light years away from being consummated.

Zola Jesus is a chanteuse from Indiana who I'm told is one of the leading architects behind some sub genre called Crimson Wave. Excuse me for tryin to wrap my brain around this, but what does that mean? The undertones is certainly ripe w/Freudian connotations, conjurin up both castration anxiety & penis envy. And I know West Lafayette is a college town (go Boilermakers!) so let's leave this one on the shelf for blabbermouths w/majors & electives to concur or refute. So.....Zola Jesus. As charmin as the tape hiss is on this lo fi gem, that voice don't lie; this gal's got some range! Like the aforementiond TV Ghost, Zola Jesus traverses across some gothic terrain, but there's also tinges of Vega/Rev action, Cab Volt twiddle & an almost ESP like understandin've Amy Camus alter ego. Whatever it is, it works. So call it Crimson Wave if you's must, just don't lame up in the process or I will PERSONALLY see to it that Zola Jesus cuts off your balls & feeds them to you for supper. The Woodbe reach can be ruthless, beware.
So then, I begin with two new singles from the die Stasi label, currently presiding in—of all places—Findlay, Ohio. This is the label that unleashed TV Ghost onto the unsuspecting world, and they do the same with Madison, Wisconsin's Zola Jesus. A one-girl juggernaut, and card carrier in the newly-christened Crimson Wave movement consisting of Midwestern, female-dominated bands of "difficulty," Zola Jesus showcases her strong pipes, albeit with heavy effects, atop clanging piano lines and chunky beats. I thought about writing this off as "trying too hard," but these songs are beginning to stick, especially the dramatic "Dog" and its tape-loop backing.
More solo bedroom introspection! Please come up with a better name for it than “shitgaze” though. Dictaphone-quality recordings from Wisconsin synth pin-up, awash in open space and half-voiced sentiments. Fits nicely against the first Pink Reason single, I’d say, but more confident, less intentionally obscure, and kind of average. Goth cabaret for the few. White vinyl.
So now even the ladies are catching the weird wave. More ethereal than most of the boys drone, jerk & squall. Three moody Casio synth on the piano setting based songs that one moment start ya thinking something like Madonna getting heavy into Blues Control and making an album of torch songs under such an influence, others Suicide if Patti Smith sang and were produced by Richard Carpenter after a week long bender (Dunno if Richard Carpenter even drinks...so imagine where his mind would be at on a week long bender either way). Between side one's "The Way" (70's AM soul decaying in a crawlspace) and it's flip "Dog" (swirly and floating in space dream-pop) it's hard to call which one the sad girls of the world would warm up to first but one of them would be a hit in an alternate universe. Somewhere Ivo Watts-Russell (or Siltbreeze) is getting his ink pen that writes only in blood ready and luring Zola Jesus to sign on the dotted line.
It has taken me a while to get into Zola Jesus - basically because I haven’t really given it a lot of time. I got that Die Stasi XXperiments compilation which features a bunch of “Crimson Wave” artists like US Girls, Cro Magnon and the Zola Jesus song on that blows everything else out of the water. This is a collection of four songs recorded live at WNYU plus six unreleased songs.

Sacred Bones is proud to present The Spoils from Zola Jesus. Hailing from the unsuspecting locale of Madison, WI, Zola Jesus—the alter ego of Nika Roza Danilova—occupy a sphere of sparse industrial rhythms, no-fi drones, and ethereal femme vocals. Those who have seen her handful of live shows, heard her WFMU set, or caught any of the acclaimed, sought after, and now mostly out of print releases on Die Stasi or Troubleman Unlimited already know. For those uninitiated The Spoils may be the most fully realized representation of her sound. Zola Jesus have two previous releases on Sared Bones, the Souer Sewer single and a limited CD of a live performance from WNYU. The CD contains the entire “Soeur Sewer” 7-inch as well as the three songs from the Die Stasi single.
released June 21, 2009

2012 release from the Chicago-based Alt-Rockers. With Steve Shelley (Sonic Youth) now fully integrated into the lineup, Disappears return with a full-bore assault of a record. "Pre Language" finds the band speaking on, of all things, love. Direct allusions to Philip K. Dick, James Baldwin, and Joan of Arc sit side by side with songs about the lows of life and the characters that permeate it. Recorded in Hoboken, NJ at Sonic Youth's Echo Canyon West studio and mixed with John Congleton, Pre Language finds Disappears at their most potent and focused. The band has finally stepped into their own world and the results are thrilling.

It doesn't appear that Mark E. Smith and his legendary English post-punk act the Fall have any plans to slow the break-neck recording pace they've maintained over the last three decades. As Slicing Up Eyeballs reports, the band will release their 29th studio album, Ersatz G.B., on November 14 via Cherry Red Records. They'll also take a short tour around the UK to promote the record. Tracklist, tour dates, and the video for the Fall's "Mr. Pharmacist"