There won't ever be shortage of the legendary Les Rallizes Denudes performing live. And while there's a good chance listeners won't be able to readily identify the era from which any song springs, the group's weird uniformity is enticing. It's just all good, dumb rock music.

Most folks who read – for real, not just in passing, every once in a great while – probably don’t start a book and not finish it. If that does occur, some catastrophe could only explain the inability to complete a nominally easy task. So, my not finishing The Magic Mountain, since it was interrupted by some emergency, can only be explained by my lack of focus, or the boring nature of the book. That latter seems right, though.

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Bands today might believe themselves to possess the same sort of disregard for convention that acts back in the sixties had, but that’s really not the case. If you head out to pretty much any live performance, each act on the bill is going to sound kinda like the one that follows. To a certain extent, that’s to sate the crowd, but no scene can flourish if bands mining disparate territories are kept from co-mingling. None of that means any one group is going to move deftly between genre tropes, but live scenarios go a long way to tipping off players as to what’s acceptable and what’s not.

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The title of Exile’s latest long player is at once a throw back to early days as well as a proclamation of new fangled music distribution.

Named Radio AM/FM it’d be easy to simply understand the Los Angeles based producer to be commenting on the state of radio – past and present. The medium at one point worked as a child’s imagination, spitting out song after song by unseen performers. Anyone could be behind those notes, those harmonies and progressions. And with the expansion of FM radio in the seventies, there should have been an even greater wealth of music to discover. Of course, radio’s wound up being nothing but nonsense. And really, who wants to hear a pre-determined playlist, re-spun every few hours.

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It’d be difficult to quantify the general cache Terrascope Music carries around. It was an internationally distributed magazine focused on disseminating criticism concerned with the most obscure sorts of music. And in the new millennium migrated to an online presence, all but withdrawing from a print medium. Perhaps it’s that shift, which so many other publications undertook, that’s mitigated Terrascope’s broad impact. But the outlet still posts on a semi-regular basis, so maybe there’s hope.

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Bands coming from Australia – or anywhere that could potentially prove odd and foreign for American audiences – have been crafting exciting and obviously skewed variations on pop music since the seventies. For the most part, the folks gaining attention in the West have leaned towards to more palatable end of the spectrum-odd. So, figuring that, the group’s not granted relative fame in the States most be really odd. Kinda.

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Leroy Pullins' "I'm a Nut" easily counts as a novelty song. And while that shouldn't diminish one's ability to appreciate lines like, "I drove to Vegas to satisfy my lust," it's an odd amalgam of pop, blues and country. I don't know if the song counted as a 'hit,' but it should have.

It's hard to get an angle on Code of Honor. Its hardcore is all over the place and frequently moves beyond any perceived genre restrictions. "Fight to Die," as the title may hint at, is nothing short of a full on blast of eighties' styled HC.

For the most part Augustus Pablo serves as a name for those interested in reggae, but not well acquainted with it, to drop and appear well educated on the topic. More over, Pablo's work is pretty one dimensional. That, though, doesn't "AP Special" from being one of those tracks that just gets stuck in your head.

One would think that the truly great psych-era classics have been unveiled somewhere by now. That apparently isn't the case. The Accent and its poorly titled song are just this side of incredible. Of course, it'd be easy to guess that the track counts as a lone career highlight.