Another week, another hunk of free chiptune from the refuseniks at CalmDownKidder. The net-label’s yah-boo-sucks demeanour and madcap love for slot machines has made them a bunker for all those wondering pad-mashers, providing online counsel to any punks with a closet Atari habit. The latest oik to sign up for some neophyte anarchy is Mr. Tin Foil Hat Brigade, seen here splitting his debut EP with fellow scally Soundmatrix, and the pair of them forage the LANs of Liverpool in a fight against the British wing of Omni Consumer Products: retail overlord Tesco. A well-required boot in the balls of Lady Porter’s tentacled empire, the Brigade visit upon us a mix that’s equally repellent and majestic; mad as a ship’s cat and sticking a spearhead through their chances of a Sunday job. Christ knows what the chain did to promote this kind of sting in the first place, but I bet the Tin Foil Hat in question is still buzzing from the Building Stable Communities scandal (still just about google-able).

Of the six efforts on the EP, the track with perhaps the most staying power is “CHK DIS OUT”: a nod to the inner Tyler Durden sick of the nightly shuffle to the self-service (today’s purchase: equal parts gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate). Opening with a hail of low atomic bombers captured in old-school greyscale, “CHK DIS OUT” convulses into life with crackles of Frankenstein lightning, peacock-bright with its strobing chips and deadly as Boris Karloff. Merry keyring beats stagger into a witchlike hiss before pow! Mice besiege the kitchen, squealing their last as they’re stuffed one by one into a fax. I’m not sure exactly who or what a track like this is designed to mobilize, but it sure as shit isn’t the outside crowd of school kids busy guzzling back their energy drinks. If you like you can download the whole EP and choose a favourite all of your own, but the way I see it, anything this fizzy should be enjoyed as it’s presented here: in nuggets.

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Henrik Jonsson is a man to keep tabs on, and not purely because he’s the father of this millennium’s most enlightened band name. Anyone who got into him via the fake trailer pitch doing the rounds on Youtube will appreciate his music’s best enjoyed before it becomes the future jingle of the Discovery Channel, toppling Sigur Rós from their throne and shooing them back to the base of the lighthouse. From custom John Hughes soundtrack cheese to trip-hop sizzled in static, Jonsson can do homesick like no one else, laughing off commitment to one particular genre so he can steal from every plate in the room. It’s a refreshingly toothy attitude from a grunt in the ambient corps, and one I imagine comes as standard when you record all your shit under a sign for the three Swedish contrabands. Last stimulation for 600 miles.

The three preceding Porn Sword Tobacco LPs all shone with tiny minotaurs, and this latest cut from some undisclosed session is no exception to the trickery—despite being a mite more luminous than Jonsson’s usual skuzzy preferences. A fortifying five-minute keeper, “Strictly For Karaoke DJs” is precisely not what it says on the tin: if you slid this one into a jukebox for impromptu cat-stranglers, you’d instantly flatten the atmosphere like a boulder rolled toward a paddling pool. End-of-the-pier piano interludes dice with distant jets, stoned and droning and another reminder of how much this guy’s first OST will melt me. There’s a thinly spread breakbeat to keep the blood from collecting in your toes, and as the chill-out flag goes down to half-mast you know the King is most definitely at home. If it’s intended as a teaser for Album #4 then Jonsson’s still very much the Wario of texturing—rough round the edges, endearing as a scallywag—and hopefully it won’t be too long before he’s out of that wooded bolthole of his and back hypnotising the thrill-seekers with a full-length.

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I feel like Bradford Cox’s output, and specifically Atlas Sound’s Let the Blind Lead Those Who Can See But Cannot Feel, gets the short end of CMG’s stick. I’m not sure if he ever claimed to be reinventing the wheel, but for those among us who’re suckers for the occasional sheen and shimmer of bedroom-recorded beauty, it’s enough. Maybe I’ve found myself more interested in Atlas Sound for the way it peels back the already thin skin of Deerhunter’s orange, making even less excuses for privileging the plentiful over the perfect.

So consider these free downloads from Cox’s blog, a Halloween special that tinkles and crackles its way through two underdeveloped ideas with all of the inherent melodiousness and background comfort that music so undemanding implies. The first is a playful skip, clumsily building chimes over a small, semi-distorted sample and keyboard loop; the second ventures a simple beat and, opening that way, pushes the song somewhere repetitive and textural. At their end, neither song finds itself very far from where they began. “Danse Macabre” in particular seems barely enough to be considered anything other than a rough sketch or demo. But each represents, because of their incomplete state, exactly the reason why some of us follow what Cox is doing: the man is bursting with so many ideas he can barely wait to refine them before they enter the world. It’s true that rarely does he seem to release an absolute thought, but the faithful are placing bets that Cox is capable of one day releasing that rare gem of the natural, inspired, planet-aligned perfect song, the sort of song made impossible by the recording processes’ obsessive compulsive desire to revisit and sand away at the edges of the songwriter’s personality.

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We’ve all been there before; let’s not be glib. The morning after an incompatible dalliance, shuffling home like a fresh wren turfed from its love-nest; eyes swimming in greasy films and a prawn stink under the fingernails; you’ll never be reckless again, yeah yeah yeah. All of a sudden you’re on the corner of Main Street, just trying to keep it in line when—Christ in a Jensen—you realise you left home yesterday with protection instead of your iPod. Suddenly you’re halfway home with nothing but a choice of the six test mp3s you keep on your phone for back-up. But which one’s going to save you? And where can you score that all-important Sugar Puff sandwich for your headache?

Well, thanks to Welsh blogger Bransby Macdonald-Williams, you need never dither again. His sweet ‘n sour “One Night Stand” has been re-released from its Spinach compilation CD and is now open for public download, presumably to help promote the album’s worth of material he’s offering for free on his homepage. A one-man blues and busking template, it’s a stricken, soulful wedge of hindsight told from the point of view of someone who’s just been initiated into a life of grisly misfires. “Call me what you want, just don’t call me the next day / I love you here and now the outside world has gone away / In the morning light we’ll see that this could never last / And as that sweet sorrow descends it would be nice to have some breakfast”, he croons at the climax of the tune, perhaps offering the dictionary definition of what it means to postulate. It might not be the kind of mood boost the masses will go nuts for if they’ve just stuck their tongue in a stranger, but it’s got that holy X factor that supplies you with the one thing you were after all along: empathy. We’re sorry it didn’t work out for you, Mr and Mrs Macdonald-Williams. Perhaps next time you should try screening each other via Facebook.

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There’s an ancient remedy to clearing that long-standing “unsigned” hurdle: instead of mailing three-track demos to every imprint in the Northern Hemisphere, simply pick out your zestiest ditty and get it on the desk of the ad man. It worked for Mr Oizo and Stiltskin in the UK (though at the cost of their shelf life and integrity, perhaps) and it came this close to working for ambient stuntmen Lien, who very nearly found themselves the new face of Levi when they sent in a disc a couple of years ago. In true Cool Runnings fashion they got all the way to the finals, taking home bronze while gold and silver went to Mogwai and Boards Of Canada respectively. Clearly the commercial’s producers could see something in the undiscovered Southampton computer duo that bracketed them alongside two such high-punching cult heavyweights.

Well, like a boomerang that came home the long way, it’s now possible to glimpse that allure again on the latest cut to be trialed for the Lien comeback LP. Following on from Matica (2002) and its self-titled sequel three years hence, Lien now offer a more feisty, temperamental insight into their neon celluloid soundworlds. “6 Mill Of 185” uses erupting glyphs to portray a city in endless time-lapse, traffic stabilised only by the drawl of the lower hertz as guitars condense into luminous smog. It’s lively to the point where you could believe the band’s hiatus has been spent scoring steroids, and radiates more awe and white noise than a bomb on the side of the Alps. Maybe Lien will never get as near to mainstream recognition as they did with their denim entry, but with material like this on standby, I’m sure it won’t be too long before the independent filmmakers start returning their calls.

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The Ramones’ promise that anyone can make rock music inheres not in the DIY laptop studio but at the edges of the scene. Yes, technology has created the long tail, but that has only made success more elusive, based on connections, luck, and having an extremely cool personal brand. Head on over to the Shining Hour website (itself a frame-based, animated GIF dinosaur) to see the antithesis: Marc Cohen, by all indications an exceedingly normal Horsham, UK citizen who’s been releasing music on CD, CD-R, and tape (!) since 1985. Though he has worked under various monikers, his current nom de plume has come one step closer to the centre as it moves from self-released, friends-only records to niche labels in the indie-pop scene.

“Before You Know It” is the third and final track on Cohen’s (sadly sold out) Cloudberry single. Sounding no more anachronistic than its retro-fetish brethren, “Before You Know It” is a tight knot of jangle and an exhortation to appreciate what you have: “Hold on to love / before you know it / it will be gone.” Love is fleeting, as is pop’s shelf life, so put this glimmering fist in your genius machine (iTunes 8, y’all) and enjoy the inner city commute to your creative media job a little bit more than usual.

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Abe Vigoda is often described as “tropical” or “calypso punk.” That might be accurate if jagged rock music drowning in reverb alluded to things tropical, or if Michael Vidal and Juan Velazquez’s howling and stabbing guitars actually brought to mind the up-beat, feel-good hits of Harry Belafonte. Instead, the dueling strings in “Dead City/Waste Wilderness” conjure images of two squids interlocked in deep-sea battle. Back on land, the lyrics have a stark urban feel during the cascading chorus when the two guitarists murmur together, “I can run through dead city / I will always fall.” This is a great song, but it’s time to call hallucinatory art-punk hallucinatory art-punk and leave it at that.

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Experimental Dental School’s charm lies as much in their agitated ravaging as in their name. Portland-based duo Shoko Horikawa and Jesse Hall (plus this record’s drummer) aren’t nearly as infatuated with improper dental practices as they are—if their website is any indication—with sea creatures, and their music brings to mind a panoply of weird things, among them malevolent carneys and the Toxic Avenger. Here they stay true to their name, though, and “Microscope Lab Voices” best emulates a dentist appointment gone terribly awry.

In the continuum of famous worst-nightmare scenarios, “Microscope Lab Voices” fits squarely between the Elvis-like number performed by sadist-dentist Orin Scrivello in Little Shop of Horrors and the absolutely horrifying scene from the B-movie classic Bloodsucking Freaks in which a clearly unaccredited dentist uses pliers to tear every last tooth out of the mouth of an innocent woman tied to a chair. In “Microscope Lab Voices” the intricate drums and beefy bass make up the complex chair in which you sit for examination, the poking guitar is the plaque-scraping sickle, the dreamy keyboard is the tangy fluoride toothpaste kids always get, and the climactic scraping at the end feels like the drill embedded with alloy bits that whirs against your teeth at 400,000 rpm.

If you’re already attuned to the twisted musical vocabularies of bands like Melt Banana and the Flying Luttenbachers, then this one should come off as a mere check-up and you’ll end up feeling refreshed.

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At just 1:32, freshly graduated Seattle outfit Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head show future signs of retro promise for Generation AD(H)D. Blink or bat an eye at this unabashedly electroclash cupboard anthem, though, and you’re sure to miss the point altogether. As high school sweetheart Claire England shouts validation for her asymmetric coif, three other hip, presumed boys anxiously concur: “I do, I do! / It’s true, It’s true!” There’s an endearingly non-sequitur steel drum solo near the minute mark, but then it’s right back to scrunchies and affirmation.

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Lost in translation, this Japanese three-piece take their name from the plough that almost broke the digital plain, the Y2K bug. And now that Norwegian imprint Smalltown Supersound has consolidated their two earlier EPs (2004’s Neji and the following year’s Tori) into one kick ass LP, we now have reason again to fear the year 2000. Poised on the interstices of surf-, kraut-, and noise-rock, if not for drummer Masako Takada’s incessantly clanging pulse, you could loose your head. Listen all the way to the end though as there’s a surprise/reward for those who make it to the finish line.

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