Faces with maces for eyes, dissected frogs and smiling clowns – it’s as if Woodring is working in the same vein as graphic artist Charles Burns if Burns were a carver of cameos. Now here’s Woodring’s self-proclaimed “generic anthropomorph” Frank, a buck-toothed creature traveling through a black-and-white animated diorama wasteland, encountering strange sniveling pig-men and a big jar of bones on his way to have a picnic.

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Visualizations heralds a new American mysticism, a tradition that trails back through the Pentagon-levitating ’60s to Felix the Cat, theosophy and beyond. I’d say “Buy or die,” but with Alpine Decline, it’s more like “Buy or have your soul rest in a limbo state depending on your individual spiritual karma.”

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The park is the perfect place for ships passing in the night as hundreds of Craigslist “missed connections” are born. The dark is the perfect place to have little breakdowns in loud corners, moments of diamond-tipped emotion shuddering through the haze and the bass. And then the damnedest thing flies overhead: an airplane outfitted with LED panels mounted beneath its wings, methodically and brilliantly advertising the coming HARD Summer Music Festival.

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It’s a friendly dissection of an instrument that doesn’t sound like a guitar so much as the thing viewed through the prism of the base psychotropics of fatigue and imagination. A gateway into the velvet-lined universe of an arcane musical mind. There aren’t enough synonyms for “recommended” in the thesaurus to aptly describe this record.

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It’s been said that Uphill Gardeners represent some kind of No Wave by way of Los Angeles, but No Wave always seems like such a New York thing that it comes off as slightly disingenuous to assign them that signifier when they’ve got so much happening on their own merits. Primitive disorienting art rock might be a better way to put it; “moody noise noir” might make even more sense, but only time will tell.

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Chabot talks about swimming across a lake in Michigan to see the absent Michael’s monkeys before jumping into “Biophelia,” his faraway voice kicking the band into 23rd gear. Rather than the vocals vanishing into the mesh of the song to become another instrument – cf. Skullflower’s Matthew Bower – it’s a voice to which you’d pay attention even with those gale-force winds of rock blasting past.

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It’s a performance that inspires fingers in the ears—partly because it’s loud, partly because in doing so one can more precisely decipher the inescapably worthwhile lyrics. “Civil War Correspondent” segues into “I’m a Soldier,” gradually including Parish on ukulele as the others come in minimally yet with great impact. The attention to space in the songs—that stunning care for the physical dynamic of sounds working—hammers meaning home better than any monolith monster wall of sound. Witness the withering psychodrama of “Taut” and the mesmeric, cochlea-boggling tones of “Un Cercle Autour Du Soleil” and “The Chair.” Harvey’s flouncy dancing falls somewhere between the moves of Bez from Happy Mondays and the Martha Graham Dance Company; “Leaving California” opens the range of her colossal voice like a drop of water in quality scotch—an experience.

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Nite Jewel stands built of bass, drum machine and synths, converting the heat of the crowd into energy as they go nuclear without all the messier consequence of things like mutant babies. The rhythms and melodies here are vaguely Afro-Cuban; humid white man’s funk in a world of—at best—grey and at worst, light beige. Ramona Gonzalez’s and Emily Jane’s voices float over the fringes and their beats descend like visitors from planets much more interesting than this one.

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I eventually did get out of the house by Thursday night, touring both floors of Amoeba Music prior to fading down Vine St. to 3 Clubs. Briefly fashionable after the 1997 movie Swingers, this venue I’ve long associated with dreadful music and gave the place up entirely after I quit martinis. Still, the Rumble’s night of indie-squawk sounded promising enough outside muffled through the walls. Both light and prospects were considerable dimmer inside, as French Miami- a trio of Bay Area collegians beloved of NME -was onstage thrashing around inside a math rock that was obviously failing to carry its twos and decimal points.

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