Songs of Green Pheas­ant is the record­ing name of Dun­can Sump­ner, orig­i­nally of Eng­land, and resid­ing now in Cal­i­for­nia. I’ll be damned if I can remem­ber where I heard about Aer­ial Days, 2006’s follow-up EP to his debut LP of 2005, but for a while in June it sound­tracked my falling asleep at night.

Any­way I just got a hold of his new LP, Gyl­lyng Street, and it’s pretty beau­ti­ful. Accu­sa­tions of freak-folkdom weren’t totally unfounded before, but I think this release will help to abol­ish that mis­cat­e­go­riza­tion. It’s gauzy, even a lit­tle shoegazey, and, admit­tedly, kind of pas­toral. But its chug­ging momen­tums and elec­tronic flour­ishes recall Bibio, Chessie, Cari­bou at times (due to the vocal qual­ity, I think), and I swear I even hear a lit­tle Joy Divi­sion. “West Coast Pro­fil­ing” is par­tic­u­larly great, rat­tling along grace­fully for five min­utes before mor­ph­ing into a bleak, fune­real elec­tric gui­tar line, soar­ing, uniden­ti­fi­able pipes, and thump­ing, tambourine-led per­cus­sion. A great sound­track to the falling temperatures.

For­give them for being from Canada, for­give them for hav­ing six(ish) mem­bers, a vio­lin, a banjo, a xylo­phone, and who knows what else. Despite all appear­ances to the con­trary, this is not another cloy­ing, for­get­table act clam­or­ing for bread­crumbs at Pitchfork’s table. In other words, you’ll enjoy these guys the sec­ond time you hear them, too.

Ohbi­jou’s twi­light cham­ber pop is rem­i­nis­cent of The Con­cretes’ softer work, but this prob­a­bly owes a lot to their female vocals, light orches­tral touches, and pen­chant for 3/4 time sig­na­tures. Their debut LP, Swift Feet For Trou­bling Times, was self-released this year and pro­duced by Leon Taheny of Final Fan­tasy. It’s the kind of sum­mer album meant not for sunny after­noons, but for nights alone in your bed­room with the win­dow open and the cur­tains blow­ing; so hurry up and grab this before autumn hits us for good. My best guess at a way to obtain a copy would be to email them – there are no shop­ping carts on their site.

Back in March, Carey Mer­cer was fea­tured on Phon­ing It In, a weekly radio pro­gram on WMBR Cam­bridge and WBSR Prov­i­dence, in which musi­cal guests lit­er­ally per­form over the phone. Mer­cer did some old Frog Eyes mate­r­ial, three new (pre­sum­ably) Frog Eyes songs (“Ambas­sador,” “Car­a­van Break­ers,” and “Future Fortress”), and a song from the upcom­ing debut of his Bejar/Krug col­lab, Swan Lake (“The Par­ti­san But He’s Got To Know”). The sound qual­ity is under­stand­ably awful, but you can think of it as charm­ing if you want.

The Phon­ing It In blog is worth sub­scrib­ing to, as the show fea­tures some inter­est­ing per­for­mances. Hard­core Frog Eyes fans will also want to check out don’t laugh don’t choke, a fan­tas­tic resource with news, bootlegs, a forum, and more.

I’ve heard this name float­ing around for a while now, and despite the name’s sheer and over­whelm­ing awe­some­ness, I had failed to take notice. But I’m doing my best to quickly make up for that.

From what I’ve been read­ing, these guys are fre­quently get­ting pegged as “rip­ping off” Boards of Canada. It’s a com­par­i­son that would occur to any­body, but “rip­ping off” is a harsh and plain inac­cu­rate way to put it. Still, they are heav­ily informed by BoC’s hyp­notic, break-driven ambiance. And if you amplify these ele­ments with the bom­bast of M83, and hints of Aavikko and Appa­rat Organ Quar­tet, you’ve got a pretty close approx­i­ma­tion of BMSR’s sound.

Fur­ther infor­ma­tion is scarce (not even sure where these guys are from), and they seem to remain inten­tion­ally elu­sive to pho­tog­ra­phers, so please excuse the brevity of this post.

“Drippy Eye,” “Side 8,” and “Lost” all come from their (rather lengthy) EP of this year on Grave­face Records, Lost, Pick­ing Flow­ers In The Woods.