Western Vinyl

This Texas-based label offers us music (usually in the superior form of a seven-inch record) that is as expansive and full of promise as the West itself. These records are honest, beautiful, and deceptively simple, so put on your headphones, close your eyes, and dream of mountains and deserts, trucks and tumbleweeds, and the compelling lure of unexplored destinations.

Appendix Out
Scotland's Appendix Out makes music for dreams. Their fragile, ethereal songs evoke buried memories, lost loves, and unarticulated desires. Quietly, gently, persuasively, these songs will creep into your heart and start gnawing away, devastating you with their simple beauty and understatement.

Lieder Fur Kaspar Hauser Seven-Inch - 1999


Burd Early
Burd Early is a city boy with a rural sound, a singer-songwriter who writes meandering, introspective folk-based compositions that will call to mind the likes of Giant Sand and Smog.

Magnet Mountain - 2000


Early Day Miners
This Bloomington group crafts warm, placidly beautiful, mostly instrumental songs that evoke vast, peaceful open spaces. They do so with a minimum of resources and even less affect.

Placer Found - 2001
Let Us Garlands Bring - 2002


Win Foster
Sedate, sorrowful, and soothing, Win Foster mixes looped beats and twinkling keyboards with sincere confessional vocals.

A Man's Heart/Trade Single


Havergal
From deep in the heart of Texas comes this achingly beautiful bedroom pop from a young lad battling personal demons with a guitar and a four-track as his only weapons.

How I Do Seven-Inch
Lungs For The Race - 2001


Knife In the Water
Knife In the Water
Southern country pop from Austin that will coddle you in a wash of organ and slide guitar.



Nourallah Brothers
No one knows how to cut right to the emotional quick like siblings, and the Nourallah Brothers prove it with poignant, intensely personal pop songs heavy with nostalgia and memory.

Nourallah Brothers - 2001


Papa M
David Pajo's Papa M is sparse, elegant, and powerful, much like his legendary first endeavor, Slint. Here Pajo proves that sometimes less is more.

Songs of Mac - 2002


Songs: Ohia
Songs: Ohia writes songs infused with the kind of wisdom gained only through pain. This is incredibly gorgeous and affecting music with similarities to Palace Brothers and other contemporary indie-folk artists.

Untitled Seven-Inch
Axxess and Ace - 1999
The Lioness - 2000
Ghost Tropic - 2000
Didn't It Rain - 2002


Windsor for the Derby
Melodic sound experimentation with a Germanic flair and a Tortoise-like penchant for building drama. In the crowded post-rock scene, Windsor for the Derby stands tall.

Difference and Repetition - 1999