Important

If you’ve never heard early Holy Sons – the solo music of guitarist, prolific sideman and singer Emil Amos – it’s a little like the cassette releases that Beck put out before Geffen signed him, but with a misanthropic cloud over it all. His music is deeply quirky, threaded with absurdist samples and fixated on themes of slavery, god, evil and paranoia. Amos viewed his obsessive lo-fi home recordings – fueled by a fair amount of LSD – as a kind of “experimental therapy” in which he thought of his four-track recorder as a “radical mirror” where he exposed and explored his innermost fears. He made and tinkered with these recordings during a 15-year period. Some of these tracks were a part of an ultra-limited edition 10-inch (80 copies) that was released in the late ‘90s, and they’re now being re-issued with nine additional tracks. It’s a grim world of solitude and warped psychedelic snippets. It’s a bit of a sonic and psychic time-capsule, capturing a spooked and self-obsessed Gen X reality that seems like distant history and yet may be more relevant now than ever.