The Rubber Room column is a weekly look at recent and notable releases that don’t fall into the rubric of traditional reviews or reviewed material—namely 7”’s, 12”’s, 3” CDs, EPs, cassette-only, DVDs and MP3-only releases.

Number None
Nervous Climates (3” CDR)
[New American Folk Hero, 2005]

Bucking the obvious Number None take the brave step of featuring two drone tracks (both the swelling wave of “Chevy Hex Setup” and “Psychic Exhaust Vehicle”s cries from limbo) that run under two minutes. Central to the disc, and the longest piece at just less than eleven minutes, is the howling icy desert storm of “Polar Kraken.” A deluge of flat even drones cruises and bruises up against snipped sirens and drought infected tones, creating a shrieking clutter that fills and shrinks rooms and headphones. 3” CD-Rs might look cute, but they can hide murky worlds.
[Scott McKeating]

Two Gallants
Las Cruces Jail
[Saddle Creek, 2005]

A whistling Western intro tumbleweeds across the horizon as a rock n’ roll guitar meets a narrative handshake voiced by the Marlboro man’s Punk brother. A stompy little number with an odd similarity to “Hotel Yorba” leaves Two Gallants sounding like The White Stripes with four testicles instead of two. At times there’s a wavering sensitive quality to the vocals that seem to rub up against the roughness, elevating it above a hundred other trendy Alt-Country loving singers.
[Scott McKeating]

Euros Childs
Y Mwnci Drwg (B-side of debut solo single)
[Wichita, 2005]

The A side “Donkey Island” is probably what you’d expect from the Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci frontman in 2005. It’s typical tuneful but decidedly odd Gorky’s done on a cheap keyboard and sounds like it was recorded under the influence of cheap Port and stale seaside candy floss. Much better is “Y Mwnci Drwg” which marries the bizarre seaside influence with nifty percussion, squelchy keyboards and a monkey attack. If it’s going to be bizarre you might as well go the whole hog.
[Scott McKeating]

Various Artists
Yokomono 2
[Staalplaat, 2005]

Both the grace and painted-in-the-corner loss of lock-grooves is examined on the new vinyl Yokomono 2 compilation. Side 1 is embedded with 55 loops of “digital silence” that supposedly give a “vinyl live” experience. The result is essentially 55 chances to hear the sounds of electrified metal cutting vinyl—some loops are smothered with static while others gently hum along to the dust getting caught in the needle. The idea is that the stylus wears down the grooves over time and thereby changes the sound. In short, it’s more enjoyable to read about than to play.

11 avant-noise and post-techno artists contribute loops on Side 2. The best loops release a seamless stream of sound that can snap the imagination into focusing on whatever vivid images arise from the ether. Charlemagne Palestine, Fennesz, and Beijing’s FM3 all deliver predictably strong loops, while other lesser known artists such as Anton Nikkila, CM von Hausswolff, Ignaz Schick veer towards the “miss” end of the spectrum.

Yokomono 2 exhibits the best of what a lock-groove can do, along with its most pretentious worse. Still, it’s great to hear more artists trying to figure out where to go next with the supposedly obsolete vinyl format.
[Cameron Macdonald]

HiSoft
Amateur
[Chocohearts, 2005]

Gerhardt Koerner and Steve Keller step away from Lilys to record an EP and they make Philadelphia sound much dreamier than it felt the last time I was there. That might be because their tracks "Soft Rock," "West Coast," and "Country" fittingly have a California feel, albeit one with a shoegazer tinge. The Galaxie Lips vibe pleases, but the greatest joy comes when you notice the sticker on the album: it's a somewhat irrelevant quote followed by a three-and-a-half-star rating, and it's given out by Koerner himself. Three of those stars are honest, but the other half's just because he knows these guys.
[Justin Cober-Lake]