Partly this is because Hussalonia is really good*, partly it’s because they (mostly just he — Jesse Mank basically is Hussalonia, although he has some collaborators on some tracks) is strikingly diverse, encompassing minimalist folk, musique concrète, power pop, heavy metal — too many genres to list. Like the work of many of my favorite songwriters, Mank’s songs are frequently funny and serious simultaneously; they’re seldom straightforwardly jokey. (His track-by-track re-invention of Billy Joel’s 1980 new-wave cash-in album Glass Houses is no joke; it’s a revelation.**)

“For Those About to Rock, We Ignore You,” is one of those tunes that makes me smile and wince at the same time and it melds a couple of Mank’s aesthetic directions. It’s about how unpleasant it can sometimes be to make it through a local band’s set to hear the band you came to see (or are in). This is certainly familiar territory for me.*** Mank approaches it with delicate picked acoustic guitar and a hushed, appropriately world-weary vocal. But what lifts it into the realm of the extraordinary are the underlying layers of guitar feedback — noisy, but melodically smart, and at least partly belying the sentiment of the lyric. (Another of Mank’s projects, Satan Among the Sofa Cushions, is a heavy metal EP that is too successful as metal to be dismissed as parody, even if Mank’s tongue is clearly in his cheek.)

Jesse Mank is manifestly uninterested in participating in the industry part of the music industry; his recent catalogue is only distributed digitally, and he gives the vast bulk of it away free on the entertaining and informative Hussalonia website.

*Triple-threat good: he’s an outstanding songwriter, a gifted multi-instrumentalist, and displays much more solid recording chops than I expect from indie home-recordists.

**Glass Houses was one of the first three LPs I ever bought, but while I still like Steve Miller Band’s Greatest Hits 74-78 and even some of Foreigner’s self-titled album, Glass Houses was the first record I disowned. I used an exacto to cut up the cover so it said “Mr. Shit” instead of “Billy Joel.” I hadn’t thought of that in years, and certainly never regretted it until Mank’s amazing renditions made me want to A-B against the original.

***For a couple years I’ve been trying to finish writing a song that starts “There’s not enough booze in this bar/To get me through another set by your band/And there’s not enough beer in my glass/To get me through one more song/But I’m too cheap to waste half a drink/So I guess I’ll buy another round.” Mank’s lyric is much better than mine; also, he finished his.

So I went looking for info, and found plenty at the Simulacra CD Baby page. Turns out there are neither keyboards nor guitars on this recording — it’s all clarinet. No joke — the distorted B-flat clarinet is provided by project mastermind Aaron Novik, and the distorted bass clarinet is courtesy Cornelius Boots of “Edmund Welles, the world’s only composing ensemble for bass clarinet quartet,” which I will probably have to check out. The great drumming is from Matthias Bossi (Sleepytime Gorilla Museum/Book of Knots) and the vocals are by Jesse Quattro (of heavy metal band Hammers of Misfortune and Mr. Bungle/Faith No More guitarist Trey Spruance’s Secret Chiefs 3 project).

I love the cheap-sounding keyboards (Casio? I can live in hope). I love the also cheap-sounding and frequently fuzzed-out guitar and bass (Slates amps and Skinny Rat guitars? Sounds like they could be), the determinedly plonky single-note guitar lines they play, and the sudden sheets of blissful noise they make. I love Golf’s “what is pitch and why should I be bothered with it?” and “Do I think I’m Stephen Malkmus, or do I think I’m Andy Falkous?” vocals. I love that the song title “FKUSA” stands for “French-Kissing in the USA” and not the ruder thing it also might stand for. I love how that song devolves into its own remix, and then further devolves into what Jason Korzen* might call an “ambient industrial dronescape.” I love “Mlle Amy Dutronc”’s occasional backing vocals and her lead turn on “Three Cigarettes in an Ashtray”. I love the “we can’t afford all those fancy microphones” drum tone. I love the unexpected, gloriously ragged horns that rip open “It’s Coming Straight for Us” just when you think you’ve pegged it as a foul-mouthed and perhaps uninspired rip-off of Aiden Moffat’s songwriting style.

I love how, while some of Smokers Die Younger’s influences are obvious enough, this band doesn’t sound especially beholden to any one of them in particular.

I love the sheer stones this band consistently displays: the potentially-offputting name, starting their album with the harshest, least-welcoming track (”Bad Driving School”), tackling a Patsy Cline showpiece song with nothing like the requisite equipment, avowing that their eclecticism warrants coining their own genre (”hard trasp”).

I love that I can listen to X Wants the Meat straight through and want to hear the whole thing again immediately.

Perhaps most of all, I love how Smokers Die Younger takes attributes that would usually be weaknesses and mutates them into strengths.

If you would like to see if you love them too, you can listen free to maybe my favorite song, “I Spy Dry Fear” at last.fm. Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation can hook you up with a physical copy if you’re in the UK or don’t mind international postage&packing; I got my 320K MP3 hookup from Pure Groove Digital, which I endorse despite a clunky download user interface; and iTunes Music store is another digital option.

* SDY sound nothing like the sprites, truly, but Korzen’s coinage is too apt to not swipe, and too good to not attribute.

Colleen (real name: Cécile Schott)’s story would be intriguing even if I didn’t love the music. She assembled her first release, 2005’s Everyone Alive Wants Answers by manipulating samples from old records — the sort of records that are usually filed in the “classical” section, whether or not the composers are strictly from the early 18th through early 19th centuries. That album’s extensive use of loops and the often prominent presence of vinyl surface noise gave it a superficial gloss of glitch-pop electronica, despite the unusual sound source choices.

It found considerable critical favor, and when in response Schott began touring, she felt that performing with a laptop would be too sterile and uninteresting, and opted to work live with acoustic instruments. The ensuing The Golden Morning Breaks was assembled from original source material, and much less reliant on looped sounds.

Les Ondes Silencieuses (The Silent Waves) is even sparer. My wonderful girlfriend observes that Erik Satie is perhaps the best touchpoint. I also hear some of Harry Partch’s fascination with the tonal qualities of unusual instruments, although Schott adds the dimension of manipulating the sound sources significantly after they are digitized. Since Schott’s compositions are assemblages, they don’t fetishize performance technique the way many “classical” recordings do. Her lack of “first chair” control over the clarinet (for example) imparts a certain unusual quality of fragility, (even, almost naivety) to her music.

Les Ondes Silencieuses has a very sculptural aspect. “Echoes and Coral” evokes images of moving slowly through some darkened, twisting gallery and seeing its bell notes revealed like hanging beacons as I turn corners. The concluding section of the baroque-influenced harpsichord piece “Le Labyrinthe,” despite its name, makes me think of circling a single, dense, complex, object and observing the play of light and shadow on its surface. (I noticed that when Schott talks about her creative process she sounds more than a little bit like my favorite sculptor, Sarah Sze)

Colleen’s music is often, but not always, pretty in a conventional, accessible, sense. There’s ample musical tension and discordance to keep it wll clear of new age/aural wallpaper territory. At its most intense, as on “Past the Long Black Land,” and “Le Bateau,” Schott’s viola de gamba even evokes a more stately version of John Cale’s mind-bending see-saws on “Black Angel’s Death Song.”

Throughout it’s a surprising, thoroughly rewarding musical experience and very highly recommended.