Prestige Format Picks 🦃 25 November 2025

Castanets - Cathedral & First Light’s Freeze

These albums both came out in October almost exactly a year apart, in 2004 and 2005. They’re both 33 minutes and 33 seconds long, and they both contain a mix of nearly perfect, timeless songs and interstitial moments of noise and atmosphere. Great mix of loud and quiet, acoustic and electronic, and just permeated with a very autumnal lonely sadness. Masterminded by the dearly departed Raymond Raposa, these are two absolute all-time albums for me.

Viva Voce - Lovers, Lead the Way

A husband-wife duo, refugees from the Contemporary Christian Music industry, blew me (and a lot of others) away with this album when Asthmatic Kitty released this album in 2003. I ended up seeing them live several times over the next few years, and I still keep an ear out for their music projects now that they’ve broken up (see GVTH DVDDY) all because of this incredibly inventive slab of psychedelic tunes. It’s warm and enveloping, like a cozy fall album should be.

The Clientele - Bonfires on the Heath

This album is the sound of the astonishingly dark six p.m. of post-DST November for me. It’s jangly and lush but somehow so quiet. Full of chiming instrumentation that glows with analog warmth and hummable choruses that sound great with a cup of warm pumpkin tea.

Gigi - Maintenant

In 2010, a buddy of mine sent me an IM and told me I needed to check this album out. I still had credits that month on eMusic, so I grabbed the whole thing. I’ve listened to it several times a year ever since. It’s an album that I only recently discovered the backstory of: two dudes from Vancouver, songwriter Nick Krgovich and producer/engineer Colin Stewart, got their hands on some vintage plate reverbs and decided to put together some classic 60s tunes to play on them. They slowly worked with friends and collaborators and created this collection of nigh-perfect tracks.