Saltillo

With a name like Menton J. Matthews III (aka menton3), Saltillo sounds like you would imagine. This Chicago, IL producer paints aural pictures of neo-classical shaking hands with trip-hop, static-laden boom-bap beats and intense literary spoken word samples tied together by sorrowful strings. The debut Saltillo album, Ganglion, came out in 2006, so naturally its follow-up, coming six years later, Monocyte, shows a more refined approach to the aesthetic. The beats have less of a scratchy, analog sound and more of a distorted, industrial edge, with the consistent sound helping to hold the concept album together. Intended as an accompaniment to a gothic horror comic of the same name by menton3 and Kasra Ghanbari, Monocyte is a visceral listen, evoking post-apocalyptic imagery in high definition. Where so many gimmicky contemporary musicians are constantly throwing together two genres in search for the next journalist hyphen orgy (i.e., glo-fi), the sound of Monocyte is eerily organic, dripping with emotive sincerity and almost unbearable dread. This makes Portishead's Third look like Beethoven's 2nd.