I’ve written before about those rare times when you truly “get” the music you’re listening to. When something clicks, and in a rare moment of synchronicity, music that may previously have been distant and obtuse becomes an integral part of your life, if only for a little while.

When, through some magical process, you can fill it seeping into your pores, settling underneath your skin, and filling in some crack in your psychic facade that you didn’t even know existed a few minutes prior to the experience.

I’ve found that those times usually happen when I’m exhausted, run ragged by the world, work, relationships, etc. In my fatigued state, my defenses are lowered. Music has a more curious pull over me in those times, when I’m more susceptible to its ebb and flow, and the emotional effect it can have.

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Nebraska weather is perennially odd, but especially odd during the crossover weeks of late winter and early spring. During this time, it’s not uncommon for the weather to be relatively balmy one day, with plenty of sun and blue skies (enough to make you want to break out the shorts and sandals), but while you sleep that night with visions of sunny days floating through your dreams, several inches of snow will appear out of nowhere and blanket the city.

This can wreak havoc with one’s psyche, especially if you’re at all prone to some form of seasonal affective disorder. This constant lurching between opposite ends of the weather spectrum induces a strange kind of nostalgia and longing; you get just enough of a taste of spring to remember all of those gloriously warm and balmy days of yesteryear (which of course, are so much better as memories than they probably really were) and yet the sudden and shocking shifts back to winter weather, where Jack Frost comes howling back with a vengeance, causes one to wonder, with no small amount of despair, if the ice and sleet are ever going to disappear.

I mention all of this because the title track from Northerner’s debut full-length captures all of that climatological give and take in a way that took me by surprise. I’m always amazed at how the music that lands on my desk, and that spends the most time on my headphones is that which most closely mirrors the weather outside my windows. And as we’ve ping-ponged back and forth between winter and spring during the last few weeks, The Ridings has provided a fitting soundtrack.

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There are some folks who just can’t quite put the past behind them, who seem almost unhealthily fascinated and attracted to the trends, ideas, and styles of yesteryear. And while that can often increase one’s chances of embarrassment and foolishness, if nothing else, it can make for some pretty good music.

Such is the case with Daniel Land & The Modern Painters. The Manchester-based six-piece have a decided fixation on the sounds associated with the glory days of 4AD Records. Which means that, while listening to the five songs of the Imagining October EP, you’ll hear plenty of woozy, shimmery guitars that bring to mind the likes of Robin Guthrie (The Cocteau Twins) and Miki Berenyi (Lush).

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For many years, my company has been located in the downtown area of Lincoln. And while Lincoln is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a bustling metropolis, it’s still a city—and all cities, regardless of their size, operate according to the same rules.

And one of those rules is that, no matter how big or small your city, it becomes a “no man’s land” in those early morning hours. Even the most familiar streets become strange landscapes, and buildings that you pass by everyday become haunted places behind their steel and glass facades.

This was impressed upon me whenever I’d pull late shifts at work, and find myself stumbling home around 3:00am. Naturally, I was exhausted, my mind and body reeling from having just worked 15 hours straight, and so my sense of perception was certainly altered.

But my feelings of “otherness” were largely due to the town’s emptiness. Aside from a few drunken bar denizens or homeless folks, I might as well have been the only remaining citizen, and it’s a strange and discomfiting feeling to be sure, to see what were busy streets and bustling offices transformed into neon-lit ghost towns.

Marconi Union’s Distance provides the perfect soundtrack for that sort of environment, and listening to it immediately takes me back to those late night/early morning travels.

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Several years ago, a friend gave me a copy of Park Avenue Music’s For Your Home Or Office, and I found myself instantly enamored by the duo’s blend of atmospheric, slightly glitch-ified electronica and female vocals. True, it’s a formula that’s been used many times over on countless albums, but For Your Home Or Office did it incredibly well. Indeed, that little release still holds up remarkably well, four years after the fact, when it could be argued that the glut of similar acts has, in no way, diminished.

Well, it’s now 2008, and the Sacramento-based duo of Wes Steed and Jeannette Faith have released By Hearts+Horses, which finds them exploring moods and tones similar to those on For Your Home Or Office, only they’re exploring them in a slightly different fashion.

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The Weather Clock has been in development for years, originally slated for release on Make Mine Music at least as far back as the fall of 2006, only to get pushed back time and again. But now it’s finally here, and it’s really more of the same from Harding and his collaborators (which includes members of Epic45). At its best, I find it to be just as affecting as when I heard Dreaming Of Spires so long ago.

If you’ve heard any of Harding’s previous output, then there’s nothing on The Weather Clock that is truly groundbreaking or revelatory. If you haven’t, then prepare yourself for some of the most wistful, nostalgia-prone, navel-gazer pop one can imagine.

Musically, the influencies are pretty obvious: Slowdive, Flying Saucer Attack, The Durutti Column, Robin Guthrie, and so on. Harding wears those influences on his sleeve with nary an ounce of shame, and they dovetail quite nicely with all of the emotional and memorial influences. Which, as his MySpace page puts it, includes such things as “lost youth”, “endless childhood summers”, “dreams of 50’s suburbia”, “time spent amongst long summer grasses”, and “overgrown ancient ruins that still stand”.

It’s certainly not for the weak of heart: if there’s even one cynical or snarky bone in your body, you’ll be tempted to chuck the disc into the bin within the first few minutes. And yet, as repetitive and familiar as it might be, The Weather Clock still inevitably pulls me in, being the nostalgia-prone sucker that I am.

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“Civil twilight” refers to the time of day just before sunrise and just after sunset, when the light is sufficient to leave objects here on earth visible while also allowing brighter celestial objects to reveal themselves. It’s a magical and surreal time, when the surrounding world somehow seems less tangible, when the term “otherworldly” actually means something when you describe what you’re seeing.

As such, it’s a perfect term for the title of an album that is so thoroughly obsessed with being otherworldly, with creating soundscapes as amorphous and spectral as possible. That is most certainly the case with Auburn Lull’s Begin Civil Twilight, which, if the title is any indication, is intended to be nothing less than an invocation of the “blue hour”.

But Begin Civil Twilight is so ethereal that at times, it’s rather unengaging. Now if one wanted to be particularly snarky, they might translate that to mean that the album is boring and dull, but I wouldn’t necessarily go that far. Sure, Begin Civil Twilight isn’t the album to put on when you want music that’ll grab you by the throat, shake you around, and not let go.

However, while there’s much to laud about the group’s skill at creating soundscapes—indeed, there’s no better word here, as every element blurs together to create a uniformly otherwordly expanse (even Jason Wiesinger’s drums and Ulrich Schnauss’s programming do little to provide any structure to the twelve tracks)—I find it very hard to be impacted on any sort of emotional level by these songs.

Begin Civil Twilight always remains detached and aloof, perfectly content to shimmer and float high overhead like some celestial body just barely coming into view. It’s pretty enough, and at times, even breathtaking (as is the case with “Light Through The Canopy” or “November’s Long Shadows”). But by its very nature, it always remains beyond reach—difficult to be affected by or interacted with, only observed and appreciated from a distance.

Over the past decade or so, Scott Cortez has been delivering some of the purest shoegazer sounds on the planet via his band Lovesliescrushing. Lovesliescrushing’s music essentially boils down to two things: the ethereal, wordless vocals of Melissa Arpin and Cortez’ effects-riddled, overdriven guitars. And when captured by Cortez’s Tascam 4-track, those two elements have converged over the years to create what is essentially shoegazer’s logical end, a glorious, blissed-out cacophony that is as delicate, fragile, and heavenly as it is ear-shatteringly loud.

But that was then. Chorus represents a significant shift for Lovesliescrushing, if not sonically, then at least foundationally. For this latest album, Cortez has set his Fender Jaguar aside—don’t worry though, his other band, STAR, is giving him enough of a six-string fix—and has focused solely on both his and Arpin’s voices, running them through all manner of digital effects and processing.

The results don’t sound all that dissimilar from past Lovesliescrushing albums on the first pass—Chorus still contains the same otherworldly beauty that you find on, say, Glissceule. If anything, though, the music is even more spectral, ghostly, and haunted because the sole instrument—the human voice—is one that is normally so familiar and yet this time, is so far removed from its normal range.

Cortez performs all manner of sonic alchemy on the vocals, bending, stretched, looping, and processing them until they contain only vestigial remains of humanity and instead, sound pretty alien. But enough familiar-ness is there that the sounds still resonate on at least a primal level, even on a track as distant and cosmic as “Merr”.

There are moments where it’s difficult to believe that all you’re hearing are just processed vocals. Whether it’s the buzzing drones that form “Zrint”‘s backdrop, or “Jomm”‘s gloomy, metallic-sounding rhythms, or the ghostly flute-like melody that loops itself around “Rhuv”‘s angelically forlorn vocals, they sound complely inhuman. Indeed, on any other Lovesliescrushing album, you’d chalk them up to Cortez’s skill at manipulating and manhandling his guitar. This time around, though, the sounds are testament to both Cortez’s skills as a sonic manipulator and to the malleability of the human voice.

Unfortunately, Chorus has not been officially released here in the States—it’s only been available directly from the band (and as far as I know, has only been officially announced on the band’s MySpace page). But it’s certainly worth tracking down, both by longtime fans of the band and by those looking for something a little different from the shoegazer/dreampop scene—or from ambient/experimental music in general.

As beautiful as they can be, there are times when shoegazer’s constant layers of gossamery guitars and glossolalia can get a little staid. Thank God, then, for a group like Lovesliescrushing who is always willing to shred the genre’s envelope and push things to extremes that few can withstand, all without sacrificing any of the music’s beauty or fragility. The results may not always be the easiest music to “get into”—even among diehard shoegazer fans, Chorus might be something of an acquired taste—but it’s never less than fascinating.