Belbury Poly, the first and still poppiest artist on Ghost Box’s roster, released their third full-length record earlier this winter. Despite being the least abrasive of the Ghost Box club, they’ve still always retained a creepy vibe, something that is a little less pronounced here. Still, it’s more of what you’ve come to expect from the niche label — gurgling and plunking electronics seated squarely in a half-imaginary past of British alchemy, mysticism, and educational multimedia.

Also notable is the album art’s increased departure from the Romek Marber homages that have characterized Ghost Box releases. I’d have admired their tenacity if they had stuck with the same template through every release, but I guess they can’t be blamed for wanting to try something a little different.

And if you are in or around London, be sure not to miss the Belbury Youth Club Night at The Shunt Lounge, this Wednesday, March 11.

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.

I first encountered this album years ago, when somebody mentioned it in a forum thread about favorite album art. The cover is certainly intriguing, with that fat sans (Futura?) and the glowing purple mountain — and like all good album art, it really lends something to the sound it’s representing. The DC band does a kind of chugging, throbbing, ambient dronescape thing, which is typically more formless than the tracks I’m sharing here. Overnight is their third and most recent LP, from 2001.

I’m not sure whether “Chessie” is a reference to “the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway’s former holding company, the Chessie System,” or “a legendary sea monster supposedly living in the Chesapeake Bay,” but it seems to me that both meanings offer a perspective on their sound.

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.

Recently Dan Bejar was interviewed by CBC Radio 3 about (what feels like last year’s) Destroyer’s Rubies. These are really some of the most interesting insights into his relationship with his music that I’ve heard; plus, you get to hear the first 20 seconds of “3000 Flowers” like five times.

Thanks again to the Streethawk LiveJournal community for getting this to me. Click through to the full entry for a painstaking transcript.

Bejar: I like to start off with, like, some fanfare usually. Maybe it’s because for me to use a line as a springboard to write a song, I gotta feel pretty strong about it in the first place, to think that something else can follow it. That’s something I’m still a sucker for, is an opening line of a song that doesn’t sound like an opening line of a song usually. It’s a pretty good trick, it works most of the time, or just annoys people.

CBC: Tell me a little bit behind your process of writing lyrics. Where does this stuff come from and how do you get it down?

Bejar: I don’t know, something just comes into my head, and I usually will either try and remember it or write it down, and I’m kind of attached to phrases that have some kind of built-in melodiousness to them, whether they’re rhyming or not. Then a long time will go by, and with a couple exceptions, I’ll pick up the guitar, which I never usually touch, and try and strap some chords on to these vague melodies that are attached to the words, and then eventually get the guts to play it for the band. Or, with a couple examples, just piece it all together in the studio.

I think there’s some decent comic writing in Destroyer’s Rubies. I mean I think there’s always been that element in a Destroyer record. Not maybe funny “ha ha,” but funny that someone would say that in the first place? I don’t know if that’s a good funny, but, I think on this record there’s kind of just like lots of goofy asides, and it’s pretty laid-back. And I just wanted, like, a lot of images. I know I was anti-images for a while and I thought, “That’s just like, hippie, Dylan, easy thing to fall back on.” But this seems to have just, like, more taking joy in the act of writing, and finding threads in strange, very visual acts. And usually there’s a train, the words just kind of organize themselves for the most part, usually by, like, chronological batches of what was written when, or where.

CBC: Really?

Bejar: A lot of times, yeah. Even though it’s not intended that way, I’ll end up using a bunch of stuff that just occupies the same page together, even though I never wrote it with that in mind. Which is really great for me.

CBC: Two for the price of one?

Bejar: Yeah, there you go.

CBC: You can see that in the songs, I was gonna ask you about that. There’s a sense of continuity between a lot of them. It feels almost like a thread running through.

Bejar: Yeah, I mean some people think it’s just gibberish, or it’s just, like, cut-up, you know, like, that ‘70s Bowie-style of pulling sentences out of a hat. And, no, I mean it’s never been like that. I think, even if I’m bad at, like, iterating what the thread is throughout one song, I think there’s always, like, some kind of internal logic that works with the words, even if it’s just phonetic, you know?

CBC: So what do you hope your lyrics do?

Bejar: What everyone hopes their lyrics do, which is just garner some kind of emotional response, and reflect upon the music wisely, and you hope to come up with a voice that is recognizable as your own, you know? I mean, I don’t know if that’s possible, lots of people say it’s not, but, you just, like, wanna have a mode of speaking, or singing, or whatever, that seems true to how you imagine yourself, and keeps yourself, you know, entertained, for real, that, a song you can sing more than five times without getting sick of it, that’s always nice. I don’t know, I don’t know what other people look for, I assume it must be something similar. I’ll ask ‘em.

I can say that if it was like a Destroyer 101 class, it’d be like, something epic, and fatalist, followed by an aside, which is “Trust me I had my reasons,” which is something, you know, that you mumble to your friend who’s non-existent. And then something really material and maybe banal, and then another aside commenting on that which just came before it, the material or banal thing, “Had a dress for every season, it was worth it.” There, now anyone can write a lyric like that, and see how easy it is?

CBC: And do you just conjure these scenes up in your head, like, are these things that you just imagine to be happening?

Bejar: I just have a version of what rich language is, and I want to entertain myself with it, and, just like, a balance of, kind of, action, and image. I guess maybe I went through, like, a rediscovery of poetry, I guess. I’ve never really read poetry before. I’ve dabbled with it, but I’ve never, like, gone through a real poetry phase.

I have a lot of stuff that doesn’t work, because it doesn’t work in music, because that’s always the first thing, is that, it has to work as a piece of music, and the two things are actually really different, for obvious reasons, you know? I mean, lots of things that look really good, and when it’s time to try ‘em and sing ‘em, sound really bad, or just wrong in that context. And maybe are bad and wrong, I’m not sure, I don’t know if singing something is a test of how inherently good it is, but there’s, like, a certain musical quality to language that doesn’t always work out.

And things have to be simple, you know? Like, you have to simplify; that’s something I’ve kind of discovered in the last few years. I mean there’s still, like, a lot of words, but I guarantee you that if you compare, like, Destroyer’s Rubies to City of Daughters, say, the sheer amount of words has gotta be, like, I mean there must be way less words on the new record, I hope. I mean I know sometimes they get really garbled and sped-up on the new record, but that’s ’cause I’ve grown attached to this new, kind of barky, spoken-word delivery. You know, that kind of Lou Reed style, which I’ve always loved but always thought would be a really hokey thing to try and pull off, but now I’m just not scared of hokey things.

It’s really the least intellectualized it’s ever been, you know? I’m just, like, jamming with the band, and singing this stuff, and there’s some threads that run in and out of it, but it’s still a lot of it has to do with, like, putting two things together and seeing how they can possibly fit, or be even remotely close to being the same thing. “Oh ‘fire’ rhymes really well with ‘harbored an elementary desire,’ that’s so, it’s gotta be in there! What else can rhyme with that? ‘Tire’? ‘Wire’?”

CBC: “‘Dire’?”

Bejar: “‘Dire’? Good, that’s good.” Yeah none of those really worked at the time. It had to be fire, I’m pretty into fire these days.

But, aside from that, I think that there’s a lot more space in the songs. I don’t think they’re trying to impress with words anymore. I hope not, ’cause that’s, I couldn’t care less about that.

CBC: Really?

Bejar: Yeah. I mean that’s not a good reason for doing something. You know, if you discover that you’re really good at this one thing when you first start writing songs, and then you steer into your strengths as much as possible, good things can come out of that, but I think it’s something you have to, like, grow past. For God’s sake!

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.