Enclosed, please find some of the local/locally-released music that’s been occupying my headspace of late.
Patrick Galactic
Running from the Sun (EP)
CT Pak Records
On his winning new EP Running from the Sun, space folk troubadour Patrick Galactic (listen here) suggests Glen Campbell or Gram Parsons sharing a space capsule with early David Bowie, as produced by Lee Hazlewood. And if that combo doesn’t float your boat mightily, I just can’t help you, Bucky.
On the face of it, Galactic’s aesthetic—contrasting acoustic warmth with glacial and foreboding electronics—ain’t nothing new. But his keening and affecting tenor, awash with earthily-strummed acoustic guitar, nails the inherent tension of man’s fight against the sterility of modern life with clear-eyed fidelity. It takes a special kind of courage to go full-on, heart-on-sleeve sincere amidst an art form that traffics in detached cool, and that total commitment gives the songs on this lovely grower of an EP their quiet power. He’s five-for-five in the songwriting here, but the tracks that keep re-asserting themselves in my head are the brooding, hooky, jangly “Center of Command,” the elegiac, soaringly-sung “Dying Days of Lois Lane” and the EP’s longest track, “Dumb Luck,” a gorgeous cowboy ballad with a melancholy chorus/refrain that’s genuinely chills-inducing.
John Dillon
The Lost Estate (LP)
Erasurehead
Yauhtli (Cassette)
Because
I Want to be Your B (LP)
Magic Magic Roses
Dusk (LP)
Plume Records
Seattle-based indie label Plume Records is one of the newer kids on the block, having just formally made their bow last year. Based on their output so far, they’re an imprint to watch.
The label got off to a great start last March with The Lost Estate, the debut by John Dillon (listen here). The band, fronted by Tomten member/Plume co-founder Dillon Sturtevant, crafts ragged but oft-sparkling psych-rock that detours into sleek post-punk dance pop on the wonderfully pogo-worthy single, “Death Mask”. Like the rest of the label’s product, it’s a nuanced, subtly surprising record well worth extended exploration.
Plume’s three most recent releases run quite a broad map stylistically. 
Erasurehead (listen here), the nom de muse of composer/mad professor a. cooper reid, indulges in skewed, low-fi pop suffused with electronic noise and an impish twinkle. His/their cassette release Yauhtli comes with a packet of tagetes lucida (hallucinogenic Mexican marigold) seeds, complete with care and feeding instructions.
Former Radiation City drummer Randy Bemrose’s mostly-solo project Because (listen here) shares his previous band’s penchant for kitchen-sink genre hopscotching on his newest full-length I Want to Be Your B. Beatles piano pop (“Lock-Out Time”), lazily-slurred dance music (“Young Feather”), and smeary psychedelia (“Our Last Embrace”) all make appearances, with an approach that eschews immaculate Radiation City perfection in favor of a more laid-back vibe.
Bemrose’s voice, a deceptively woozy summit meeting between Beck and Coldplay’s Chris Martin, makes for an engaging focal point. Best of all, the songs are uniformly great, and as hooky in their own surreptitious ramshackle way as anything you’ll hear all year: “Your Shoulder,” the record’s most polished track, features lush vocal support from RC singers Lizzy Ellison and Patti King, in the service of a sublime little samba number perfect for a sunshine stroll after a few bong hits.
Solid as the rest of Plume’s lineup is, though, Magic Magic Roses’ Dusk just might be the (pardon the pun) dusky jewel in the label’s crown (listen here). The San Francisco-based band’s latest is one of those effortlessly sustained mood-and-vibe records whose whole manages to be far greater than the sum of its relatively straightforward parts. 
If you’re gonna put a numbingly convergent point on it, Dusk is a female-fronted folk-pop record. But the execution—from Kate Sweeney’s and Sarah Simon’s dreamily-beautiful vocals, to the tastefully inviting ensemble instrumentation, to the sensitive and carefully crafted production by Sarah’s (I’m guessing) sister/SunBreak fave Lena Simon—renders it quietly, inexorably incandescent. It’s cold as fuck as I write this, and Magic Magic Roses have taken my ears to Muir Woods, just as the sun’s setting and the trees are casting shadows against the orange Creamsicle glow and the warmth of a late summer day is tapering into evening. If that isn’t magic magic, damned if I’ll ever know what is.
