Peter B's The Sound of Doves in a Cave (Shinkoyo)
Skeletons and the Girl-Faced Boys put the Shinkoyo label on the map (relatively speaking), but I find the label's owner, Peter Blasser, and this handmade, hand-typed (as in "typewriter") cardboard-packaged CD far more fascinating. Vocals, drums, guitars, electronics and all the other building-blocks are present in his music, but he has a really skewed take on these elements. Blasser uses a process of "automatic through-composition, following the ever-changing textures generated by a wandering computer program". This translates to "damn the meter, damn linear progression of ideas, and to hell with anything your Western brain learned about tuning." If that piques your curiosity, you'll be pleased to learn that Blasser, a self-proclaimed "synthesynthesizer" (maker of synths), has also invented instruments such as the "Chucky" (a long, guitar-like instrument), the "Blowin' Bear" (a breath/touch-sensitive analog synth) and a surfboard modified with bent circuitry, over which he pours earthworms to realize his works. He sells them at http://www.ciat-lonbarde.net. (DM)

Nurotica's Very Close to Beautiful (BlueFire)
Even now, a few years after my review, I still pull out this EP for a quick dose of high quality Neo Wave. As it turns out, having a three-song disc of shimmering, Cure-influenced goth rock has proved useful for those times when I needed a quick dose of the '80s but didn't have the time to break out the black eyeliner. I never heard another thing from these guys, which makes this disc all the more precious. (Ron Davies)

The Graves Brothers Deluxe's Gonna Happen to You (Unsafe at Any Speed)
I've reviewed two more Graves Brothers albums since this one, and it's still my favorite -- a volatile mix of loungy jazz and Beefheart-centric experimental rock that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. As far as I know, none of the mainstream press outside SF has picked up on this eccentric, boundary-jumping music... and it's their loss. The best cuts here are smokingly carnal -- tracks like "Raw Stinking Beautiful" and "So Hot I'm Fried" -- and abstractly twisted, as with "Deadbeat Heart". No one should ever cover a band as distinctive and individual as The Monks, but frontman Stoo Odom does it anyway with the hard-stomping "I Hate You". (Later albums include his perverse attempts to one-up Pere Ubu and, er, Diana Ross. No one can say he takes the easy way.) What sucks about Splendid ending is that not that I'll lose track of Graves Brothers, but that the next band this weird and unclassifiable will never reach my CD player. (Jennifer Kelly)

Dave DeCastro's Plowing the Clouds (Ampco)
Way back in December 2003, I wrote this about the first of several self-released, self-recorded albums by the man best known, if he is known at all, as Steve Wynn's bass player: "Quietly, unobtrusively and without any hoopla, Flowing the Clouds is turning into one of my favorite records. It is guitar-driven folk-rock misted over with psych, sunny summer pop with dark undertones, wispy and ethereal as a passing cirrus cloud -- yet oddly, insistently memorable." The record's blend of folky melodies and sonic experimentations has held up amazingly well over the last couple of years. "All that Remains" is haunting and strange and "The Test" uneasily beautiful, while "One Fine Day" sounds like a song you've known all your life, even the first time you hear it. (JK)

Thomas Truax's Full Moon over Wowtown (Psycho Teddy)
I remember listening this one on the plane back from my first SXSW, a little shell-shocked by the industry-ness of the music world and seeking respite from hot new bands and hype-driven crowds. (People were all excited about The Datsuns and Hot Hot Heat that year.) The record was so strange and so well-crafted that I instantly fell in love with its home-made instruments and weirdly compelling characters. As I listened, the cell phones and networking and lawyer talk faded away until, right there in the cramped middle seat, I inhabited the surreal universe of Wowtown. (JK)

Knotworking's Notes Left Out (One Mad Son)
From my very first package of review CDs, back in the days when we still occasionally ran out of records in the slow period between November and February, and when new writers were lucky to see a label they recognized in their assigned records, let alone a band. So I knew nothing about Edward Gorch, an Albany-based singer-songwriter -- except, after listening, that he'd written "Lawn Plastic Santas", one of the most heartbreaking and intense songs about young poverty that I'd ever heard. (JK)

Deverova Chyba's Doforoty (Free Dimension)
This bass-heavy trio's proto-metal remains as thrilling now as when I first hit upon it four years ago. What has changed for me is that I can now sing along with the band's Czech lyrics. No, I haven't learned the language, I've just listened to it enough times that I can phonetically growl along with the band. I still keep hoping that someday I'll be wandering in Prague and discover to my delight that Deverova Chyba are playing a block from my hotel. (RD)

Downpilot's Leaving Not Arriving (Blue Disguise)
With strong songwriting and a wry ear for melody, this quartet's sophomore release is one of the few items I've encountered through Splendid that I ended up buying to give away as a Christmas gift. Downpilot's formula is nothing unusual -- unless you count rock-solid alt-country an unusual find. Which, given some of the stuff I've reviewed over the years, it probably is. (RD)

Diafana Krina's Silence Gives The Odor of Wild Cherries (This Is My Voice)
When I reviewed this disc back in 2001, I described its sound as "one part The Cure and two parts Bends-era Radiohead, shaken lightly and poured out in layers of breathtaking audio bliss." I stand by that statement. Oh, and it bears mentioning that they are Greek. That doesn't mean My Big Fat Wedding immigrant Greek. That means "you don't even comprehend the alphabet in which our lyrics are written, much less their content" Greek. Still, if you've adjusted to Sigur Rós, you shouldn't have any real difficulty getting into these guys. I'm not sure that their work has wide distribution in the US at this point, but this is one that's definitely worth digging up. (Brett McCallon)

Avey Tare and Panda Bear's Spirit They've Gone, Spirit They've Vanished" (Animal)
The original pressing of this album, on the duo's own Animal imprint, came with hand colored covers in miniature slip bags. They've matured slightly in the years since, and the record has long since been reissued to capitalize on the wave of Animal Collective mania, but to quote my review, Spirit remains "as abrasive as Metal Machine Music and as cuddly as anything Donovan ever committed to tape." (Jason Jackowiak)

Christophilax's Goldensmell (Self-Released)
Any of the seven or eight Christophilax records we've reviewed this year probably would qualify for this list, but Goldensmell is a good ambassador for the Christophilax catalog because (a) the fact that it is an instrumental album about smells makes it funny and, therefore, kind of accessible, and (b) it is a series of formless, grating noises, and therefore representative of the entire Christophilax oeuvre. Christophilax has been one of the biggest abusers/beneficiaries of Splendid's review everything policy, sending us bizarre, home-produced, high concept noise albums every month, accompanied by extensive xeroxed liner notes that were sometimes in Russian and at other times tried to convince us that Christophilax can't smell, is agoraphobic, is a women, is a man, has no ears and uses carrier pigeons. Despite the absurdity of the music and the claims that accompanied it, Christophilax has maintained an unyielding poker-face worthy of Andy Kaufman. Opinion on his work has differed, even among our staff: "For God's sake, please don't play this (al-andalus) to any of your epileptic friends"; "Mockba 1980 is an almost futile exercise in patience"; " Christöphilax wants to hurt your head (re: Kyber Pass)", "It (...as Formative of the Function of the I) might end up being the soundtrack to your mental collapse." Sound like fun? It gets better: all of the albums are available free from Christophilax's web site. (Philip Stone)

Justin Mikulka's Move Toward the Exit (One Mad Son)
The ongoing evolution of Mikulka's music reached its highest point here, infusing the "grunge-folk" aesthetic that characterized his early work with raw, bluesy Americana. It's simple music, well played, with a lot of feeling behind it; you probably own surprisingly few albums like that. Mikula is still working doggedly at the follow-up. Hopefully we'll have the new site up by the time it comes out... (GZ)

Bill Foreman's Chevy w/ Balding Tires (General Ludd)
Foreman is an observational, almost narrative songwriter who populates his work with memorable characters and highly specific details; he's a rock musician with a folksinger's mastery of language. You hear his songs as music, but remember them as photos or films -- that's how vividly he writes. 2003's Chevy w/ Balding Tires is his most polished effort to date -- well worth losing your CDBaby virginity to acquire. Once you've hunted down a copy, you'll be ready to tackle the rest of his work, including the massive retrospective Poison Against Poison: Recordings 1990-2003. Bill is taking something of a break from music at the moment -- he's teaching English in Senegal. This is your opportunity to know his entire catalog by heart when he returns. (GZ)

Spinmaster Plantpot's The Fried Onions Brigade (Self-Released)
I dismissed this as pure arse when I reviewed it, but subsequent listens proved it to be the most brilliant sort of arse I'd ever heard -- a guy singing stupid-silly a cappella songs that somehow changed from idiocy to utter brilliance in the microsecond between hitting the air and reaching the ears. Consider this bit of observational brilliance from "Dairy Milk": "Falling in looooooooove is like a bar of Dairy Milk (uh uh uh) / You can't just eat two cubes / I can see you're not of that ilk / Yeah! / Girls are funny things / they like us to be thin / the ones I like are fat! / Their standards are very slack." Perhaps, as with other supposedly cutting-edge comedy, there's an "Emperor's New Clothes" effect at work: the dogged insistence that it must be funny, combined with my earnest desire to get the joke, actually makes it funny. And really, who cares? We're talking about slightly more than three minutes of "music". (gz)