Helado Negro
Canta Lechuza
(Asthmatic Kitty)

Helado Negro’s music can be difficult to understand, and not just because it’s recorded in Spanish. The second album released by Helado Negro is an entrancing and sometimes confounding hybrid of Spanish pop and electronic music that embraces the trippy nature of the electronica genre. Helado Negro (“black ice cream”) is the nom de plume of Robert Carlos Lange, a Floridian musician of Ecuadoran descent. Lange’s voice is cool and sweet, dripping with tranquility, but Canta Lechuza is all about the background noise. The long pauses between the vocals are filled with a mezcla of instrumentals and synthesizers, which ripple across the tracks like stones dropping in water. Electronica fans will find him soothing and unique, while new listeners may need some patience with the slow and often strange sounds of songs like “Globitos” and “Lechuguilla.” Canta Lechuza is an acquired taste. Like black ice cream, though, it is dangerously sweet. —Rachel Dougherty

Michael Chapman
Fully Qualified Survivor
(Light in the Attic)

The career of Michael Chapman, cult British guitarist and singer-songwriter, is currently undergoing a well-deserved revival. There’s an anthology out on Tompkins Square and a brand new instrumental guitar release on Ecstatic Peace!, but the reissue of his 1970 album Fully Qualified Survivor is the best place to make his acquaintance. This wide-ranging album was too eclectic for its time, veering from ornate orchestral chamber folk to melancholy dirges to sultry rockers. Some songs offer complex lyrics that evoke Bob Dylan, others feature moody acoustic guitar passages worthy of John Fahey. There’s also some stinging proto-glam electric guitar from Mick Ronson, whose playing so impressed David Bowie that he hired him for Ziggy Stardust. The album is a more effective sampler of Chapman’s talents than any greatest hits, held together by the force of his personality and his persuasively expansive musical vision. —Jeff Jackson

King Creosote & Jon Hopkins
Diamond Mine
(Domino)

It’s unclear just when this album was recorded, as U.K. label Domino is one with a large catalogue of reissues. From the cover, you’d expect it to be bluesy Americana, performed by the older African-American gentlemen pictured on it, but in fact it turns out to be a sort of watery Celtic ether, written and performed by very white people. The entire experience of listening to Diamond Mine is akin to witnessing a bagpipe corps slowly droning Moody Blues tunes at some Scottish funeral, where not even the tears that trickle down mourners’ faces are in any sort of hurry. A few primitive electric instruments occasionally creep into the mix (courtesy of Hopkins’ reputation for electronica), but the work is chiefly a gentle acoustic whisper on a northerly ocean breeze, a distant memory of a lost civilization or a scant scent of the dreams of dreamers past. —Tom Sturm