As you can imagine, one of the perks — and one of the pains, if I'm to be one hundred percent honest about it — of writing about music for a site like Blogcritics, is all of the free music you get.

I get so much of it these days that I am now in fact on a first name basis with my UPS man.

But again, in the spirit of that same aforementioned honesty that I mentioned above, I have to tell you that about 99% of it goes into that netherhole that I like to refer to as "the pile."

I'm equally sure I'm not alone there either.

As a guy who did some years as a (part time, at least) A&R guy for a few record labels — in addition to being a music journalist — I am in fact quite confident that there are similar "piles" in record company offices and writer's desks across the land. They are filled with hopeful, but nameless CDs by bands with names by artists like "The John Roberts Band" and "Mudcrutch" (oh wait, Tom Petty used to be in that one, didn't he?).

My point here being — and here is a word to the wise for all you developing bands out there — if you want to get noticed, then do something to get, well noticed.

The flip side to all of the nameless, faceless music we journalists, A&R guys, and the like get in our mailbox every day, is that every now and then something comes along that really grabs our attention.

Such was the case earlier today when I received this huge box in the mail from a label called Beta-lactam Ring Records.

Wading my way through this rather immense box of music from the label — and even after listening to a fair amount of it tonight — I'm still not sure that I can offer an informed opinion of what these guys are all about.

But what I can tell you is that it damn sure got my attention. And at least so far, I like it.

The best I can tell from listening to the box of CDs I got from this label tonight is that these guys seem to specialize in progressive avant ambient noise. Reading through the bio material, it also becomes clear that there is some sort of a connection to the Legendary Pink Dots.