Originally an all-things-not-Panthers outlet for guitarist Kip Ulhorn swapping musical ideas with Simon Wojan (now in King Khan and his Shrines), Cloudland Canyon spent several years interpreting the more structurally-challenged examples of Krautrock, '70s psych of the drone-discovering variety, spots of unnerving (in a good way) improv here and there, and the wonderful '90s bands that started out as head-scratchers and ended up as innovators (first-wave Siltbreeze and Kranky highlights). Fin Eaves, the band's third full-length overall, is the inaugural album from Cloudland Canyon Phase II. Joined once again by significant-other Kelly Ulhorn and a rotating cast of contributors, Kip has crafted a unique take on really, really goddamned loud and noisy. Most important--hinted at on 2008's Lie in Light--are big, unavoidable pop hooks clawing their way out of a pulsating, throbbing thickness of guitar, bass, who-knows-what-type-of-effects and understated but omnipresent drumming. Imagine a Flying Saucer Attack foundation supporting noise on par with the first two Iran albums, or maybe even Jesu, with flowing vocals providing the major pop-hook components. Cloudland Canyon's new creative level is not indebted to, but informed by the aforementioned band. Fin Eaves is an antidote for widespread devastation caused by Creative Bankruptcy and The Arrogance of Assumed Originality--two epidemics of devastating mediocrity that will cause our children to break their own ribs with convulsive laughter. This album will be slobbered over by both cobweb-crotched solitude-enthusiasts and beautiful people alike for years and years, necessitating a barrage of reissue box-sets that make that Stone Roses behemoth look like a cassingle. Here's your chance to get blown away the first time around.

Recorded in Brooklyn, Germany, and Memphis, Silver Tongued Sisyphus followed Cloudland Canyon's well-received Requiems Der Natur 2002-2004. The album's secular calls to prayer with humming, looping, and loping ambient passages are interspersed with bursting rhythmic energy and agitated guitar lines. 
Pulling influences from the foggy ether of generations past, the band stakes their claim to the shadows of the cult musical culture of the late 1960s and early 1970s German underground scene. Live shows sound like unauthorized soundtracks to netherworld versions of The Swimmer or Scorceror. 
Originally released on vinyl in an edition of 96 copies on Germany's Meudiamorte label, Silver Tongued Sisyphus is now available once again.

This collaboration between the mellow, Memphis-meets-Germany duo of Kip Uhlhorn and Simon Wojan (a.k.a. Cloudland Canyon) and Chicago's great rock 'n' roll concierge and knower-of-mystics Mr. Robert Lowe (a.k.a. Lichens) was born on a trip to the West Coast of the United States a few years ago. 

Exterminating Angel's single 30-minute track uses voice, guitar, samplers, and ARP synthesizer. You've heard of the unmade science fiction epic whose would-be director proposed using different big-name progressive bands to perform a soundtrack for specific planets used in the script; here then are the sounds accompanying a spacecraft that's a combination Death Star and Taco Bell from the 1970s filled with cement Mayan temples and pyramids populated by large, snappily dressed reptilian beings. Every so often a bell goes off to break the spell and presents convincing evidence of this record's special journey.