:Episode Eighty-One: 11.3.2017

Description

First up this week is Papir, a Danish band that has managed a feat that Led Zeppelin nearly achieved but fell just short of: naming their first five albums after Roman numerals (Zeppelin stopped at IV) (Also, while the Fucking Champs made it to V as well, they cheated by naming their first album III). But, if you can ignore their unwavering commitment to uninspired album and song titles (all their songs are numbered rather than named, as well), they make some pretty darn pleasant instrumental psych rock.

Later on in the show we hear a new single from Texas's Khruangbin, who seem to be augmenting their heavily Southeast Asian-influenced sound with some Turkish inspiration, a track from Silver Apples' second album Contact, recently reissued by Portland's own Jackpot Records, and a song from Muddy Waters's great rock album Electric Mud, that I've long maintained could be passed off for a lost CAN number if you removed Muddy's vocals and replaced them with Damo Suzuki's.

Finally, in the last set, we hear from the UK's The Belbury Circle, whose new album, Outward Journeys, features lovely retro electronic sounds, and what might be one of my favorite covers of any album of the past few years, as it manages to look like the packaging for a piece of educational software from the 1980s. You could easily imagine it sitting on a shelf alongside The Oregon Trail or Carmen Sandiego, just waiting to be played on a Commodore 64 or an Apple IIe or a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A (yep, even beloved-of-nerds calculator manufacurer Texas Instruments got in on the 80s home PC craze).