
I got to see Chrome last night at The Redwood downtown. Well, I saw Helios Creed playing Chrome songs...Damon died like fifteen years ago and I'm pretty sure the other guys were hired guns: Aleph on drums, Lux on bass, and the keyboard player who I see all over town who kind of looks like Eddie Izzard. I'm going to go ahead an say it was Chrome. Maybe you fuckers who saw the band in its early incarnation can really say you saw Chrome, but going to shows is a lot like playing baseball. What? Yeah, I said [...]

How do I even begin to measure how much ass Emerald's Mark McGuire kicked this year? Working under several different project names including Sun Watcher, Skyramps, and Peoples Parties, Mark quietly conquered the ambient underground in 2009. To combat sleeplessness, tour schedules, and boredom, he filled his four-track with buoyant, rhythmic meditations for guitar and tape with a deeply submerged pop sensibility. While varied stylistically, the handful of releases he put out this year are all anchored around his fluid and intuitive sense of song structure. If I had to pick one release that most accurately [...]
Sun Watcher - Untitled II More more Emeralds' Mark McGuire, this time from a collab with drummer Shane MacKenzie (Lambsbread) joined by second guitarist Zac Davis (Lambsbread/Sky Juice) and it sounds way more scratchy/lens flared than we're used to from his typically cosmic arpeggio-driven odysseys. There's been a lot of stuff recently that's tapped into this amazing sunny/foggy space, always grainy and always at a slight and particular distance (cf. Pocahaunted's Gold Miner's Daughter CS, Ulaan Khol, Hevoset et al, real dense but kind of ethereal somehow). Sun Watcher is strangely pure like that, [...]