Wet Hair

Referencing everyone from Silver Apples to Suicide to Young Marble Giants, Iowa City's Wet Hair takes the keyboard-smeared, minimalist-art-rock-duo shtick to a new extreme of awesomeness. Granted, the sub-subgenre isn't broad enough to brook much fakery — and frontman Shaun Reed (along with collaborator Ryan Garbes) carves a singular niche out of that most essential chunk of musical weirdness. With Reed's bubbling, demonic moan and mitten-fisted organ drones looped and reverberated to the point of either ecstasy or oblivion, Wet Hair's two full-lengths, Dream and its followup, Glass Fountain, conjure the mood and sound of interstellar decay. Hold a stethoscope up to the heart of a dying sun; it might just sound like this.