Alpine Decline Go Big Shadow City

Alpine Decline appeared in East Los Angeles in 2010. Within a year the duo recorded three albums - including "Visualizations" and "Disappearance" with modular-psych guru M Geddes Gengras - before promptly spiriting off to China. One year after landing on the distant outskirts of Beijing, the band recorded "Night of the Long Knives" with Yang Haisong of the seminal Chinese underground band P.K. 14.

Alpine Decline albums are the kind you listen to compulsively, perhaps even excessively. With blasting guitars and drums, surrounded by drones and a spiderweb of noise, Whether evoking dizzying high altitude peaks or chaotic dystopian landscapes, Jonathan Zeitlin and Pauline Mu always seem to be writing with such honesty and freedom that the music never feels cold or artificial, but is always close and real.

Their new album GO BIG SHADOW CITY is their most coherent and unique album, with everything heightened (or maybe, as the song dictates, deepened). The rock band sounds rawer, the swirling tape loops and atmospheric synths more mythic, the melodies and lyrics more confident in their vision. GO BIG SHADOW CITY 's 11 songs lodge in your skull when consumed individually, or take over your mind completely when consumed together in one big serving of 12" vinyl.