At our best, I like to think music journalists/critics do more than just provide a consumer guide to the flood of new and old albums constantly available in stores. We introduce new ideas, participate in the cultural discourse, make fun of crappy bands, etc, etc. But sometimes it is necessary to just suck it up and get all Consumer Reports about shit, so here goes: There are (at least) two albums covered in this issue of the Stranger that you must go out and purchase today. They are:

The Sight Below - Glider

and

Max Tundra - Parallax Error Beheads You

Dave Segal discusses the Sight Below in this week's High on the Down Low - The Sight Below's Subliminal Techno Seduction:

The Sight Below's set at this year's Decibel Festival was a highlight for many attendees. His mesmerizingly muffled 4/4 kick drums pumped like an excited hippo's heart beneath gaseous synth tones and spectral guitar spray, while his voluminous bass frequencies seemed to threaten the integrity of the Baltic Room's sound system. To those on the Sight Below's rarefied wavelength, the result was a steady-state, subdued ecstasy similar to that induced by Kompakt Records artists like Gas and the Field.

The Sight Below's debut album, Glider (out November 11 on the respected Michigan label Ghostly International), meticulously re-creates that live experience while also exploring his more ambient proclivities. The Sight Below's deft aptitude on guitar (typically stroked ever so lightly with a viola bow or plectrum) and keyboards glimmers brilliantly on the disc's nine cuts, evoking masters of subtle sonic bliss like My Bloody Valentine, Brian Eno, Harold Budd, and Fennesz.

To which I would only add: Do not be scared off by the use of the word "techno" in the title of this piece. Yes, the Sight Below records and performs his music with a laptop—it's 2008—but he also uses a guitar and a shit ton of effects pedals. This is shoegaze or ambient more than it is techno. About the closest it gets to techno is that several of its songs feature a weak 4/4 heartbeat murmuring through the amniotic fluid of guitar and effects. It's a Gas; buy it.

The Sight Below - "Further Away" from Ghostly International

I attempt to review Max Tundra in this week's Album Reviews:

There's something almost sad about the Jekyll/Hyde schizophrenia of the starry-eyed crooner and the mad studio scientist. It's like Max Tundra keeps trying to make a simple pop song but instead ends up with these wonderfully confounding creations. When he sings, "I was born to entertain," there's something pleading about it—this is all he can or wants to do—but he's not boasting, he's begging. So it's especially satisfying when it all comes together on the romantically confused "Which Song," whose melodic, digitally breathy chorus is the most catchy and affecting pop moment I've heard in a while.

But, really, Parallax Error Beheads You is one of those albums that seems impossible to confine to a mere 300 word review. So here briefly are a few other favorite moments from the album:

-The joyous, busy microsample bounce of "Orphaned," which scatters and coheres around a beat for three and a half minutes before the blissed-out vocals kick in (another note: all of Max Tundra's vocals on this album are as high and thin as ozone but digitally crisp and in tune to the point that I wondered if I was hearing the ghost flutters of some AutoTuning here and there.)

-"Number Our Days," which can be added to the very short list of shiny happy atheist pop songs about death, with its lyrics, "Nothing happens when you die/you don't leave your body or fly off into the sky."

-Speaking of lyrics, the chorus of "Which Song" that I allude to above, goes like this: "My future unfurls untenably/my schemes are cut down like a dying tree/if this one is the tune about you and me/then which song is the one about Kelly B (?)" It sounds way better with the melody added.

Anyway, the album is fantastic (although I lately find myself skipping "Nord Lead 3," but that's just one track); go out and but it today. Also highly recommended are Max Tundra's covers of the KLF's classic "What Time is Love?" and Hot Chip's "Playboy."

Max Tundra - "Which Song"