Secret Boyfriend: Listener's Guide LP

Usually sticking to his own Hot Releases imprint, Martin took a step into the wider underground a few years back with two releases for Blackest Ever Black that scratched the surface of his contradictory persona. Secret Boyfriend isn't easy to pin down: the first album 'This is Always Where You've Lived', released in 2013, was made up of sketchy, enigmatic songs, while the second, 2016's 'Memory Care Unit' featured beguiling minimalist synth music. And as Nick Klein notes in the 'Listener's Guide' press release, that's exactly what makes Martin such a constantly fascinating figure. His live shows are famously unpredictable, as likely to be held together by screaming feedback or drum machine loops as they are by placid ambience or skeletal pop songs, and his releases follow the same notion. It's all noise, after all, right?

But enmossed has done its best to prune Martin's most touching, appealing songs from his vast catalog, prepping 'Listener's Guide' as a welcoming first step into the North Carolina eccentric's idiosyncratic world. 'End of All' is a seamless first step, an entrancing 'Silent Hill'-style ambient gust that's shifted into a new realm thanks to Martin's whirring beatbox loops and whispered vocals. A beatless, wordless version of the track appeared on 2020's 'Memory Care Unit vol. 2', but this shows Martin's range far more effectively, somehow sounding like Junior Boys and Signer simultaneously. He's on more familiar territory on 'In Absentia', snipped from 2021's split with Russian Tsarlag, singing sweetly over blown-out, boxy drums, downtown strums and growling, dissonant machine hum. Martin's ability to balance out his noisier elements with emotive, open-hearted melodies and schmaltz-free pop is remarkable, and this that grounds the entire comp.

Even on the ambient 'Alpha Rhythm Fade Out', there's a captivating interplay between gnarled textures and bliss, and when the noise takes a backseat - on tracks like 'Treil' and 'Night Waste', for example - Martin's DIY smarts twist the songs into unexpected dead-ends, creating the same set of questions and a similar barrage of sensations. Our fave is 'Boy Queen Candidate', another cut from the Russian Tsarlag split that sounds like an ode to dream pop's distant past with cloudy, tape-warped pads, shimmering riffs and empty 'Garlands'-style drum machine snaps.