Various Artists – Adult Swim Singles Program 2012 [2012; [adult swim]]

This thirteen-track compilation brings together popular counter-culture acts of the time, including Com Truise, Wavves, Death Grips, and Flying Lotus, among others, for a collection which eagerly swerves through a broad range of styles and dispositions. Electronic, garage rock, metal, dreampop, and more are served up without much rhyme or reason to the track ordering, and while the picks are almost unanimously enjoyable, or at least stylish, the jumbling doesn’t do the experience any favors beyond underlining the already-evident variety. As a result, while it does offer an informative cross-cut of the year’s top alternative acts (as estimated by the cable cartoon channel), that’s about all it does.

Salem’s Pot – The Age of Salem [2012; self-released]

With this first public track (later removed from their BandCamp), Salem’s Pot establish their style of psychedelic doom with thick-fuzz bass, plodding drums, and swelling roars of stony tones. Filtered vocals and dives into feedback round out the track, and while it basically rides three riffs for about seventeen minutes, there’s enough panache put into the swirling cycles to let the group pull it off successfully. Not as good as what the band would put together later, but not nearly bad enough to warrant wiping from their catalog.

Corroded Master – Afterbirth [2012; self-released]

Hard EBM and electro-industrial trappings mark the six songs of this EP, with raspy grunts, hissing growls, steady hi-hat beats, chopped and repeated vocal samples, and layers of compressed keyboard waves hitting 4/4 base-lines. Half of the tracks are remixes (two of them targeting the same song), which introduces a little variety to the proceedings, some of the breaks go off in interesting directions, and the rhythms are usually pretty good at keeping momentum rolling through the changes, but in the end (outside of the draggy malfunction groove of “Bodycount (Acid Trash remix)”), there’s just not a lot to help it stand out from the masses of similar industrial-tinged EBM.