I'm beginning to think I should just "subscribe" to a couple of record labels (Pharmacy, Spunk and probably Chapter if it's still up to anything in future), since I seem to end up buying just about everything they're putting out. You know. I just hand over a wad of cash on a regular basis, and they just send me whatever's coming out. I wonder if any of them do that ? Anyway, I'm still waiting for Spunk to locally release the Notwist's Neon Golden (another week or two, apparently), but I wandered into Raoul today and found another new release of theirs by Bright Eyes, the work of yet another Nebraskan dude called Conor Oberst. A little Raoul blurb on the front made comparisons with Will Oldham and so forth, but it's a little more "all over the place" than that, bouncing between raw lo-fi yearning and a bass-with-keyboards track where he sings not too unlike....I dunno, Robert Smith ? (hmm. I might have trouble backing that one up, actually). Mostly, though, he seems to have that man-on-the-verge strained vocal thing happening. But it's an interesting album on first listen, certainly.

The other one I picked up was by ex-Willard Grant Conspiracy dude Paul Austin's new band, Transmissionary Six (a duo with Terri Moeller, who I don't know anything about). It's still got a WGC-like guitar sound, but perhaps a little less traditional, thanks to the layering-on of some other, newer kinds of sounds. Naim Amor and Marianne Dissard help out on a track, too (Marianne provided the vocals on Calexico's The Ballad of Cable Hogue, which you might've heard played on stations like 3RRR a fair bit, a year or two back).

Also (I don't know how many of you notice my "ten most recent CDs" column over on the right), I finally found a copy of Swervedriver's Never Lose That Feeling EP the other day - it was the one thing I'd always look for on the few random occasions I'd bother to look in the CD singles section of a second hand shop.