Is this the most uplifting song ever with the word “coffin” in it? It’s certainly more joyful than Fela Kuti’s “Coffin for Head of State,” although Thee Oh Sees’ “Corrupted Coffin” could give it a run for its morbid money. “Coffin Maker” comes from Chrissy Zebby Tembo’s 1974 LP My Ancestors. Both the song and the album are Zambian garage-psych classics. Paul Ngozi’s eloquent fuzz-tone guitar is a goddamn delight and Tembo’s vocal is at once heartbreaking and heartwarming. Plus, the buoyant rhythm-guitar riff is worthy of an appearance on the Velvet Underground’s third album (this is what goes on in my mind).

Shadoks/QDK Media reissued My Ancestors in March. Forced Exposure distributes it in the US, or you could look for it in your finer local record shops (Now-Again also reissued the vinyl last year. Cop it on all formats and editions.)

The Heliocentrics are a British group who alchemize many of the most interesting tropes—funk, psychedelia, library music, spy-flick jazz, Ethiopiques, BBC Radiophonic Workshop—into imaginary soundtracks for impossible movies playing in Saturn’s finest cineplexes. Their forthcoming album 13 Degrees of Reality (out April 30 on Now-Again), is another third-ear-toasting chapter in the Heliocentrics’ saga of sonic sorcery.

The highlight in a work full of them is “Wrecking Ball.” It begins with what sounds like a very warped didgeridoo that warbles with frightful ominousness. Soon a subliminal groove not unlike that purveyed by Primal Scream in “Trainspotting” (from the Trainspotting OST; check it and the film) kicks in, with clackety metallic percussion and a distant, distorted guitar soloing a variation on Hendrix’s “Third Stone From the Sun.” The main motif, though, comes via an instrument that sounds like it may have been scrapped by Harry Partch for being too strange—perhaps a harp made out of radioactive porcupine quills. The overall vibe is swamp dub crossed with Plutonian psychedelia. Rewind, selectah!

Not sure why, but I've been sleeping on Australia's Blank Realm. I finally woke up with the Go Easy album (out May 14 on Fire Records; it was released on LP last year by Siltbreeze). They play rock music with vocals, choruses, and fairly typical structures, but all of these familiar elements somehow cohere into dewdrop-fresh songs, even to my jaded old ears. I don't want to say Go Easy is a miracle or anything, but it is pretty dang special for making rock sound like it's not wheezing on its deathbed; bonus—it's catchy as hell without sounding the least bit hokey. In 2013, we'll graciously take that sort of gift. If the idea of Royal Trux recording for Flying Nun in 1993 excites you, then you'll probably want to explore Blank Realm.

So it pleases me to announce that "Acting Strange" is best song ever (this week... and maybe next week). It's the lead-off track from Go Easy, and it's a paragon of how to start your goddamn album. It begins immediately with the tension ratcheting up and a bass riff of feedtime-like girth, laying a foundation of momentous danger, not unlike Sonic Youth's "Death Valley '69." The track alternates between seething paranoia and effusive rage, making the time-honored loud/quiet/loud dynamic seem totally vital. In their distinctive hands, Blank Realm's refrain of "Guess I've been acting kind of strange" becomes a rallying cry rather than an alibi. Freak the fuck out.

Press release after the jump.

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Finders Keepers/B-Music issued the punnily titled comp Man Chest Hair late last year, and if the idea of alpha-male, mutton-chopped, hard-groovin’ rock from the northern English city of Manchester gets your earholes quivreing, you need this. Hell, even the band names are entertaining: Urbane Gorilla, Stackwaddy, Spider Jive, Grisby Dyke, So On & So Forth, King Dick II, etc. FK co-owner Andy Votel collated 18 tracks of this boozy, surprisingly funky strain of rock—and wrote 26 pages of tiny-fonted liner notes documenting the overlooked scene. I hope to read the whole damn booklet during my retirement years.

My favorite track on Man Chest Hair is Greasy Bear’s “Windy Day”—although Savoury Duck’s “Dragonflight,” a clavinet-powered prog nugget, comes close. “Windy Day” is one of those songs that boast a groove that’s at once slack and tight (think Steve Miller Band’s “Take the Money and Run") and features a chorus that makes your life seem to open up with infinite possibilities, like a spectacularly excessive delusion of grandeur. The articulate guitar licks snarl at responsibilities and promise free and easy good times. Vocalist Chris Lee’s gruff timbre resembles that of grizzled troubadour Michael Chapman, but the overall vibe is more Southern US (Lynyrd Skynyrd, Allman Brothers, et al.) than Northern UK.

I recommend daily (or even hourly) listenings of this to keep the doldrums at bay. The entire comp could soundtrack your summer party season, even if you’re the most curmudgeonly antisocialite.

You know that ultimate writer’s copout, “Words fail me”? It’s an awful construction and an even worse admission: No, buddy—you failed words. Get out of the game if you can’t formulate sentences in any situation. But Dariush Dolat-Shahi’s “Zahab (Tar and Electronic)” damn near made me think that I’d have to utter this lamentable cliché, that I’d lack the verbiage to capture the unique greatness of this piece. I try to do it justice below, but I realize I fall short. Just listen to the damn thing already.

“Zahab” is an extraordinary musique concrète tapestry of minimalism, birdsong, riversong, frogsong, experimental electronic sound design, and traditional Iranian music that morphs with baffling, dream-like logic over its 13 minutes. Wherever it goes, it surprises and fascinates. Had this song and the album from which it springs, Electronic Music, Tar and Sehtar, been around when Nurse With Wound’s Steven Stapleton made his original listening list, Dolat-Shahi surely would be on it. "Zahab" is one of the greatest, most confounding musical achievements I've ever heard.

[Original copies of the album Electronic Music, Tar and Sehtar are going for over $100 on eBay, but UK label Dead Cert is reissuing the 1985 LP by Iranian-American composer Dolat-Shahi.]

Lungfish frontman Daniel Higgs has had a strange and rewarding solo career since his excellent drone-rock group went on hiatus in 2005. Right now, after careful consideration, I have to say my favorite album by Higgs is Metempsychotic Melodies (Holy Mountain Records). The highlight of that 2007 record is “Leontocephaline Rhapsody,” an eight-minute magnum opus marked by staunchly strummed acoustic guitar hypnosis and what could be a wildly modulating electric guitar (or is it a harmonium? shruti box? bagpipes?) that whirls, soars, and ululates in articulate sweet and sour tones. I could listen to this for eight hours.

Higgs plays Cairo Fri. Nov. 9 with Arrington de Dionyso and Calvin Johnson. Here's my Stranger Suggests blurb on him.

Dunno much about the cumbersomely named Eat Lights Become Lights, but they have a fab new album titled Heavy Electrics out now on England’s Rocket Girl Records. They’re an LA/London trio led by Neil Rudd, and their list of influences should excite people with refined taste: Neu, Loop, Kraftwerk, Twelve, Holy Fuck, Glenn Branca, Miles Davis, Pete Kember, Michael Rother, Cluster, Harmonia. I can get behind those musicians.

The lead-off track, “Bound for Magic Mountain,” recalls the relentless, awe-inspiring, maximalist space-rock ascension of Holy Fuck. That is a rare commodity these days, so cherish it wherever you can find it. The rest of Heavy Electrics cruises, soars, and hovers in spine-tingling krautrock/kosmische climes, employing plenty of mantric, motorik rhythms, sweetly FX'd guitars, and celestial synthesizer motifs in familiar yet non-stale ways. Some formulas are simply superior to others, and spinning variations off of them can still result in exhilarating music decades after the templates have been set.

I'll be keeping close tabs on Eat Lights Become Lights—and encouraging them to change their name, as well.

Maria Minerva’s Will Happiness Find Me? is a dream-pop opus that has one foot in future-bass music’s aquatic dubbiness, the other in ambient’s haziness. The music made by Minerva (New York via Estonia producer Maria Juur) resembles that of understated diva/knob-twiddlers like Cooly G, Ikonika, and Leila in that it’s marked by an otherworldly sonic beauty, poetic lyrics (“It’s so strange to see myself coming of age/the trees in my garden are my growing/the garden is my mind”), and an overall feeling of oceanic dispersion.

It’s not easy to determine what track is Will Happiness Find Me?’s peak, but right now I have to go with “Never Give Up.” For a song with such a tenacious title, it’s very much horizontally inclined, a paradisal, woozy slice of lover’s dub. Near the four-minute mark, Minerva’s voice slowly freefalls into a pool of sweet reverberation; shortly thereafter, the track goes on a gorgeous side trip that sounds like Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval sighing over hypnagogic synth snarls and a daintily plucked koto (I think), as Minerva launches into the mantra, “I’m born again, I’m born again, I’m born again (again and again).” I love when a song starts out great, then goes off on a 90º tangent and gets even better.

Not Not Fun Records released Will Happiness Find Me? on Sept. 4. Minerva performs at Decibel Festival Thurs. Sept. 27 at Triple Door.

In recent years, the legendary Moritz Von Oswald (Basic Channel, Maurizio, Rhythm & Sound) has moved into more organic, avant-jazz territory with his trio, consisting of Sasu Ripatti (aka Vladislav Delay, Luomo) and Max Loderbauer (NSI, Sun Electric). The group’s output has evoked the stark, northern European jazz excursions of the ECM label at its ’70s peak. But with the new full-length Fetch (Honest Jon’s), MVO Trio forge a riveting, subliminal fusion of minimal techno, dub, musique concrète, and Miles Davis’ seminal electric period. (The core threesome are augmented by Marc Muellbauer, Jonas Schoen, Tobias Freund, and Sebastian Studnitzky.)

Fetch’s zenith occurs on “Jam,” a 17+ minute, uh, jam that sounds like Miles’ On the Corner recorded on the North Pole by Zen master musicians. On the Corner’s relentless percussive assault is muted into an intricate latticework of muffled kicks, reverbed metallic, wooden, and plastic percussion implements, and Dadaistic eruptions of crash/bang/thwock/whirrrrrrr/sproing. The menace pervading Miles' magnum opus gets transformed into an icy resolve that's more unnerving for being so understated. "Jam" is an instant classic that never stops giving over its 1,052 seconds.

Orcas—Seattle’s Rafael Anton Irisarri and Portland’s Benoît Pioulard—have a new self-titled album out on Germany’s Morr Music label. Its diaphanous, melancholy electronic-pop impressionism really resonates on those overcast/rainy mornings, of which Seattle just can’t get enough. The highlight for me is “Standard Error,” a paragon of becalmed ambience (think Brian Eno’s Discreet Music and Loscil’s Submers) overlaid with Pioulard’s Jesy Fortino's comforting, whispered vox and a single, poignant, watercolor piano tone. “Standard Error” is a beatific sigh of a song, and we can always use more of those in the 21st century.

"Make It Fast Make It Slow" from Rob’s 1977 LP of the same name (which Soundway reissued in late March) is an irresistible slab of Ghanaian funk. It’s a bit more subdued than the fieriest material on Rob’s party-igniting Funky Rob Way album, but the song charms through serpentine guitar motifs, uproarious horn charts, curt organ squawks, a füünky bass line, constant metallic tintinnabulation, and Rob’s warm, soulful vocals. “Make It Fast Make It Slow” exudes a distinct Cymande vibe to boot, and you can never go wrong by evoking Cymande—who recently reunited after a 35-year absence, by the way. The entire Make It Fast Make It Slow album is as solid as Rob's muscular, 1970s build and is a crucial addition to your African funk collection. (Don't tell me you don't have one...)

Check out the title track after the cut.

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Don’t know much at all about this current Portuguese trio Sunflare, but their track “Facemelt” is an aptly titled blast of High Rise/Psychic Paramount-style rock chaos, which makes the MC5 sound like coffeehouse folkies and comes in handy when deadline pressures become overwhelming (maybe you deadline-havers can relate). The combustible intensity and throbbing density on display here are extraordinary. Is it possible to headbang while your hair’s on fire?

Suzanne Ciani is another of those unjustly obscure electronic-music composers who is finally receiving wider recognition decades after her peak years. The impeccable UK reissue specialists behind FindersKeepers/B-Music have curated a wonderful collection titled Lixiviation, which gathers 16 pieces that Ciani realized from 1969 to 1985.

The album includes brief, alternately charming and discombobulatory snippets for Atari video game and Coca-Cola logos and various TV spots as well as longer, more ambitious compositions that soar at the level of the most cosmic emanations of figures like J.D. Emmanuel, Pauline Oliveros, Ariel Kalma, and Wendy Carlos. Ciani lives up to B-Music’s brilliant tagline, “The American Delia Derbyshire of the Atari Generation.”

To my mind, Lixiviation’s highlight is “Second Breath,” a nine-minute drone symphony of piercing, oscillatory intensity. Clamp on headphones and crank the volume for this one, and burrow into an existential reverie that makes your mental interior seem like an absurdly momentous anteroom to Nirvana. “This type of piece had no time limit and could go on for weeks,” Ciani wrote in Lixiviation’s liner notes. You’ll get no argument from me on that score.