Release Me: All Smiles, Amber Asylum, Obituary

This week is so slow, you'd swear it were a Wino song.

You know it’s a slow week for new releases when one of the highlights is Cledus T. Judd’s Polyrically Uncorrect. I’m sure Bill Maher is laughing his ass off at that one.

There’s new Moby, new Rob Thomas, a new Now comp, The Very Best of Babyface and a bunch of other crap we won’t bother telling you more about. And we did already tell you about the new Suicide Silence record, No Time to Bleed, which we can’t wait to be brutalized by.

Another new ‘un we’re digging is the latest by All Smiles, the pseudonym of Jim Fairchild (Grandaddy, Modest Mouse). Oh for the Getting and Not Letting Go is anything but a “Sophtware Slump” - sounds like a softer, sweeter version of Grandaddy, what they may have sounded like had Wilco been pulling the strings. Interested? MySpace is streaming the sucker right here and you can pop over to Fairchild’s Web site for a free download.

As Fairchild vaguely puts it on his site, ”This new album deals with a few ideas. But it speaks a lot to making sure that we make damn certain the people around us know we love them. And somehow, once again, that seems more important than ever.”

There’s also a new Amber Asylum record called Bitter River, but it sounds pretty gay. Over-the-top melodramatic neoclassical nonsense created by soprano singer Kris T. Force with help from members of Hammers of Misfortune, Giant Squid, Grayceon and other bands we’d much rather hear. Brooklyn Vegan apparently thinks otherwise and has a couple of tracks to share if you’d rather make up your own mind.

And we’re not about to recommend the new Obituary album, Darkest Day, either - from what we’ve heard, it doesn’t measure up to 2007’s Xecutioner’s Return, which itself wasn’t all that exceptional death metal. Too much wankery, not enough melody. The album cover’s pretty hilarious, though: