Various - Rough Trade Counter Culture 08

Customer reviews
Press release

TRACKLISTING:
CD1

1.   Department of Eagles - Classical Records
2.   Bon Iver - Flume
3.   The Low Anthem - Charlie Darwin
4.   Peter Broderick - Below It
5.   Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal
6.   El Guincho - Palmitos Park
7.   Festival - Fair and True
8.   The Acorn - The Lullaby (Mountain)
9.   Headless Heroes - The North Wind Blew South
10. The Heart Strings - Jose Fernandez
11. The School - All I Wanna Do
12. Atlas Sound - Recent Bedroom
13. Sic Alps - Sing Song Waitress
14. Crystal Stilts - Graveyard Orbit
15. Vivian Girls - Where Do You Run To
16. Koko Von Napoo - Polly
17. Lucky Dragons - Oh I Understand
18. High Places - Vision's the First…
19. Softboiled Eggies - Only Loved At Night
20. Telepathe - Chrome's On It
21. Zombie Zombie - What's Happening in The City?
22. Emporer Machine - Swiss Machine

CD2

1.   Chris Corsano - What Movement Helps You When You Are Trying To Run Out A Batsman?
2.   Boris - LaserBeam
3.   Times New Viking - My Head
4.   Gun Outfit - Your Will
5.   Correcto - Joni
6.   The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Come Saturday
7.   The Shitty Limits - Here Are The Limits
8.   HEALTH - TRICERATOPS
9.    Indian Jewelry - Temporary Famine Ship
10. Shit and Shine - Shit No!
11. Salem - Redlights
12. Opium Factory - Rainbeaux
13. Alva Noto - U_08-1
14. 2562 - Kameleon (edit)
15. Dusk and Blackdown - The Bits ft. Trim (edit)
16. Flying Lotus - GNG BNG
17. Tobacco - Dirt (ft. Aesop Rock)
18. Rustie - Zig-Zag
19. Yo Majesty - Blame It On The Change
20. ZZT - The Worm (edit)
21. Mark Stewart - Mr. You're A Better Man Than I
22. Pablo - Record Shop

OVERVIEW: Rough Trade Shops present our annual 'best of the year' release, new curiosities selected in the name of encouraging your continued patronage of independent record stores everywhere. There is not room to tell you about everything here, but we can say with confidence that despite the economic gloom® the music scene is as strong as ever.

The Counter Culture CD is a blend of big hitters from the shop floor, staff favourites, exciting new artists, exclusive edits and a few rough diamonds. We filter further by presenting as many of the different musical genres in stock, from folk and indie-pop to dubstep and electro-techno, and from the warm and friendly to the de-tuned and experimental. Finally, we sculpt the whole into the contemporary equivalent of the good old C90 mix-tape, a selection that we hope will not only entice and educate, but that will also entertain.

Over the 44 tracks on this 2CD release, you will find rural homespun craft, space-age tropicalia, dream pop, lo-fi garage, phaser-driven space disco, grunge (it's back Baby!), d-i-y punk rock, crunk, hairy drums, razor-sharp beats and the slow-motion ghost of jungle, amongst other things...read on.

It was an excellent year for those who like their music reflective, with the folky, the low-key, the lo-fi and the shoe-gazey featuring strongly in our chart. Some stunning debut albums from Bon Iver, Headless Heroes, Peter Broderick and Atlas Sound are represented here on CD1, alongside some that we believe will do well next year, The Acorn and The Low Anthem among them.
Rough Trade staples indie-pop and garage have been reinvented once again, this time by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, The School, Crystal Stilts and the Vivian Girls, while noisenicks Sic Alps and Times New Viking have been bubbling for a couple of years now on the excellent Siltbreeze label, 2008 being the year they came through with excellent albums, the latter having since signed with Matador.
For those that are pining for that Neals Yard vibe, we have much to recommend in the form of what you could call 'outsider' music. HEALTH, from The Smell scene in L.A, are reinventing no-wave, while Indian Jewelry provide a unique lo-fi gothic brew from the Now We Are Free label. The Upset! The Rhythm collective have wow-ed us with some out-there live shows and some wax to match, from the likes of High Places and Softboiled Eggies, while Gaz WIIIJA came up trumps again by turning us onto the indie-electro of Telepathe.
Loudest and proudest and standing out from the crowd are Boris and The Shitty Limits. Musically as well as geographically they are poles apart, but both bring the serious noise to this release. Southern Lord's Boris are a jet engine of Ramones-influenced lo-slung skuzz, while the Shitty Limits inject a hardcore dose of seventies punk into the mix. The 'Limits track is only about a minute long but, like all their releases, it is straight-to-the-fucking-point business, and they could well be the most exciting band of the next 12 months.
If CD1 is good to stick on while yr in the tub, just try not pogo-ing to CD2.

The best description of our role at the shop is that we act as a filter. We don't like to blow our own trumpets, and we can only recommend what's out there, but this year the records have been as exciting and diverse as they always seems to be at RT, making this part of our job easy