Album Review: Dirty Fences - Goodbye Love

Can I say something? Can I say something without everyone jumping in to praise me for my bravery and independence of thought? Right, here goes. I really hate the Spotify algorithm. Their suggestions are trash, and they have no idea how different styles of music and artists are actually connected. At this point, just playing something at random would be an improvement over their machine-generated guesses as to what would be appropriate in sequence. So here's the scene: I'm busy, I have music on, I'm listening to an A Giant Dog album (Pile, to be exact). The album ends, and it starts autoplaying just... whatever-Alvvays, Diet Cig, Lucy Dacus... and I kind of get it from a robot's perspective: distorted guitars, lo-fi-ish production, former "indie" rock stars retired to the big farm of major labeldom- Oh, and there is a female singer, so that means they all get to live in the pink aisle of the algorithm, only the aisle has A24 lighting so it's a little less patronizing, right? Wrong. None of these people have anything to do with each other, and they sound nothing alike. You can't just mash together Obama-era dream pop, tender punk, and random sad-girl indie-pop with early '10s garage punk and expect me not to take umbrage. I'm not one of those people who insists that everyone has to memorize the entire Wikipedia page for an artist or genre before they can appreciate music for what it is, but this is a pretty good example of how culture and context can be paved over and suffocated to death in this new digital era, and why actual music curation still matters. A Giant Dog came out in an extremely hairy, hazy, and homely era of underground rock that has almost entirely evaporated at this point, related to the same trends and aesthetic preferences that also spun up Hozac Records and at one point made Beerland an inescapable cultural pivot point within the Austin scene. This means that to put them in context, an A Giant Dog playlist would need to pair them with psyched-up power-poppers and rock revivalists in the treds of Shapes Have Fangs, Bad Sports, Big Eyes, Natural Child, and purely as a sonic concession, Dirty Fences- who I don't think ever played with A Giant Dog, but who I have to listen to in succession after an album like Pile, without fail. Dirty Fences were (and I guess still are) a tribe of greasy, goofball, gutter crawlers who came out of NYC swinging for the bleachers with every plate of wax they allowed their rough-and-rumpus sound to be carved into. Their last blitz of Schlitz-hammered power pop and sweat-lathered punk, as of this writing, is the 2017 LP Goodbye Love. The riffs and hooks spill out of these tracks like a froth of cataract sprawling into the street from a cracked fire hydrant knocked over in the course of a high-speed chase. These party-ready, jaunty blasts of rock 'n' roll revelry draw complementary comparisons to pogo-powered proto-pop-punks The Nerves, love-sick strummers The Undertones, and slick rock revivalists like The Knack, but had for their time a very contemptuous take on all these classic '80s peals, causing them to feel perpetually fresh and fecund enough to impregnate impressionable minds with dreams of fast times, free love, and the sensual splendor calling to them in the night and leading them astray from the starchy spiritual squalor of buttoned-up suburban living. Tap the keg, pop a tab, and turn up the toe-tapping, slapdash grooves of "Goodbye Love," the ribbed guitars, spiked melodies, and floor-stomping beat of "Teen Angel," and the windmill riffs and punchy tempo shifts of "Love for Higher," the volatily vulnerable, bed-sheet-knotting insistence of "Four Leaf Clover"- whose softly twisting chorus is so strangely reminiscent of a Sabrina Ellis and Andrew Cashen joint that I'd be willing to put any amount of money on the premise that it was penned on the beer-soaked cushions of an Austin green room with said dynamic duo, if not leering in person, then within earshot from the stage- and finally, the plucky, distortion-buoyed ballad "One More Step" featuring guest vocalist Christina Halladay of Sheer Mag, as if there wasn't enough degenerate dynasty already gracing these decks. At the time that Goodbye Love debuted, it seemed like just another addition to a deep catalog of great rock and roll that endlessly proliferated across the Rust Belt and central US, in celebration of the persistence of spirit imbued in the nation's castoffs as well as their torrid tendency towards outright depravity... but now it more resembles a love letter dropped in the carrier slot mere moments before it all fades to black. I miss this era of DIY, even more so because I don't think it's ever coming back. Goodbye Love- they really called it. 

It's always greener on the other side (Greenway Records).

Album Review: Cold Summer - Den Umständen Entsprechend

It's getting to feel like summer out there- the sun is bearing down, and the heat is soaking in, cooking your innards like a sack of giblets crammed in the body cavity of a Thanksgiving turkey (which they kinda are anyway). What are you going to do to avoid heat stroke? What's the plan? Pull the tab on a cold one and sit under a fan? Guzzle some gazpacho? Listen to Cold Summer's Den Umständen Entsprechend EP... I'm not sure how that's going to help, but I'm with you in spirit. Germany's Cold Summer certainly isn't known for their abundance of "chill"; if anything, I'd describe them as thoroughly overheated- from the cleaving, forge-fire maim and inductive sear of their desperately distorted guitar churn, to the intemperate and irascible snarl of the percussion section's predatory and indiscreet hunt for vulnerable junctures through which it can funnel its skin-rending punch, or the itchy angst and coarse logic of the vocals, which scrapes and chisels around the ears like a block of ice that someone is attempting to sculpt into a moody effigy but more transparently using as a glossy sponge for their agitation, the apparent abandonment becoming more severe with each hewing hack they chew from the block. It's a mixture of compulsion, conviction, violence, and cool sneering confidence that will boil the fat off your chassis and leave behind only a clammy ossature of recalcitrance and a rat's nest of nerves slung around it like a handmade scarf. Nothing beats a heat wave like a cold surge of aggression.

Its Eleven Records (11:08 pm to be exact) / Kink Records (get your head out of the gutter!)

Album Review: Studio_Dad - Endless Summer Vol. 1

I bet you wish you had a cool Studio_Dad instead of a lame regular Dad. While Studio_Dad is a slick producer, running a label out of San Francisco and working with shrewd, street-smart visionaries like Ricky Lake, Tia Nomore, and Taifa Nia, your Dad is burning your college fund on sports betting- and always landing on the flipside of a windfall, every. damn. time! While Studio_Dad is sugar-coating sunbeams, inlining a '90s zest and a Californicated twist into the teeming bliss of tempered heartbeats and fissuring teenage fantasies with the help of vocalist Tzar on a track like "Tightrope" off his 2023 Endless Summer EP, your Dad is getting his wallet pumped and dumped in yet another crypto charade or investment bamboozle he read about on that app where the SpaceX CEO keeps posting videos of himself burning millions of dollars under the premise of reinventing nominal space flight- where does Elon need to go anyway? Does he think he won't owe child support if he skips town for Mars? While Studio_Dad is working with Madge and Taifa Nia to encode sparks of rhyme and reason over a cyber-wired pop-punk-styled stitch-up, "In My Side," underscored with the grit of resilience and the tremors of soft revenge, your Dad has a new girlfriend who keeps forgetting your name and won't stop vaping in the house- it doesn't stain the curtains or make the furniture smell weird (at least not permanently), but it's still nasty as hell, can't she do that outside or in the garage? While Studio_Dad is bestowing unnatural strength and ghouly pep to the sinking lonesome and subterranean despair of Siri Seiko's quick-lash laments and the drip-patterned thaw of Ricky Lake's frozen heart as it fights to warm itself back to life on the track "Unalive," your Dad is trying to jujitsu his way out of the 36% APR loan he took out on an F-Series pickup that he drove off the lot and totaled in the same week. While Studio_Dad is taking off on a smooth, synthy, beach-coating R&B getaway with Tia Nomore, Stoni, and Amen on "For the Weekend," and cutting a gold-cast, classic neo-soul shimmy for Stoni and Siri Seiko to bop some bars over on "Better Days," your Dad is red-faced, filming an angry Reel in a rented SUV with all the windows up and his neck meat rolls sweating like a brick of spam folding over itself in the summer heat, howling about Brandon like he's not going to have to take out a second mortgage to fill that tanker up before he head into the office tomorrow. How much clearer of a picture can I paint here? For all his faults, I'm sure you still love your Dad, but as sure as I am that Endless Summer is tits-to-toes all-jams, I'm dead ass certain you wish your Dad was a little more like Studio_Dad.

Text Me (maybe) Records. 

Interview: Heavy Metal Chess Club

Courtesy of We're Trying Records

The other day I was listening to an interview with a Japanese musician, and she was describing her experience in her high school's band club. To give perspective on the topic to her interviewer, she brought up K-On! only to wipe the slate moments later with the clarification that her experience was "nothing like that." No snacks. Full practice room. You had to practice every day, and when you did play for the club, everyone judged you. This was her experience, and yeah, on balance, watching K-On! sounds a good deal more pleasurable than actually doing the extracurricular that inspired it... I'd wager the closest you could ever come to such an experience in this life is joining a DIY band in the United States. There is still some judgment, sure, and it's still a major time commitment, but there are also tons of snacks and opportunities to simply chill. You'll also probably produce some recordings and play some shows that you can be proud of for the rest of your life, as well as make some lifelong compatriots to boot. Keiongaku certainly has a future, just not where you'd expect...

So if you're going to have an extracurricular that consumes, disrupts, and alters your life, for better and for worse, but mostly for the better, then you might as well start a band with your buds... sort of like Henry from Heavy Metal Chess Club did. Now Henry and his pals don't throw horns and rip power chords in honor of the dark lord, and our main man in particular is no Bobby Fischer, but everything else about them seems faithful to the core conciets of DIY as their music is a perfect synecdoche of life's convoluted trails converging at intersecting epiphanies in the wild fields of youth, sodded in the soil of error and nurtured in murky flash floods of pensive perspicuity. They might not be true to their name, but they are certainly brimming with concrete existential observations, engaged in probing schematic interpretations of the world, managing to be loud in inquiry, and quiet in conclusion, and they have a new LP called I Think It'll Haunt Me Forever out on We're Trying Records, which is worth an awful lot in my humble opinion. Get to know Henry and his band below, and don't forget to grab some taiyaki and tea before heading to the basement to jam with your crew.

Introduce yourselves. Who is in the band, what do they play, how did they come to be in the band, and what are their rider stipulations?

My name's Henry, I normally say "I play guitar and yell." I started writing songs in high school and formed a band when I got to college. For the past year or so now the band's included Connor on drums. His band Melon Husk from Colorado played with us a couple of years ago, we reconnected at a new year's party, and got closer after he transferred to Drexel (where we all go to school) following UArts closing. Will's on bass, I kinda knew him through Connor and also just kinda being around, another UArts to Drexel guy. We saw each other at shows and got along really well and we really jive energetically when we play together. Gray's the last one on lead guitar, we did a little tour in August of last year and I needed a guitarist for it, I had seen his band Exit 109 before and really liked them and knew he was going to be in Philly over that summer so I asked him to join us for that run and he clicked really well with us. He played his first show with us on just a few days' notice, and wasn't even able to make a practice so our first time playing with him was on stage and it went perfectly. They're all a blast to play and hang out with. We've never had a rider, but it would probably include beer.

What were your goals headed into making I Think It’ll Haunt Me Forever, and were they achieved?

I never intended for this to be the only album we do, in fact I'm super energized to get working on another record as soon as possible, but I wanted to put something out where if it was the only full length album we released, I would be content with that. There were a lot of times I acted as if this was the only album we'd do. The perfectionist in me can point out a lot of things I wish were different about it, but if this band were to cease to exist tomorrow, I would be happy with what we did with this record. That being said I do hope to one-up it next time around.

The title for the album comes from a poem recited in the track "Christmas Lights." What is the meaning behind this passage, how does it fit into other themes on the album, and how was it that a line from this poem became the title of the album?

For most of the time this album was being written I was sold on this being a self titled album. I'm not quite sure how to describe this but I don't think a whole lot when I write lyrics. I like to say that they mean things on a macro scale, not a micro scale. I could tell you what a song is about more or less but not most individual lines. I see a lot of things in my life in relation to being "scared." I'm anxious and shy and I fuck up a lot, and I'm scared of fucking up more. Persistence in spite of this fear is a skill I've developed as I've become a young adult. I'm scared of fucking up? Well, I've already fucked up, I can learn from that. There's stuff that I think might haunt me forever. I'm young and dramatic, maybe it won't "haunt" me but it'll probably stick around somehow. So will the fear, and the anxiety and all that. You can't be brave if you're not afraid, you can't learn and grow unless you fail. I'm not too sure how to tie that all up but those are the general thoughts I have around the title, I think it ties the themes of what I write together.

You have a very compelling, quiet dynamic on this album. How do you feel the juxtaposition of reflection and fury draws out the themes and thought processes behind your work?

The loud/quiet dynamic is something the bands I listened to growing up were very good at, Pixies, and Smashing Pumpkins being the big two. I see the louder more explosive parts of our songs as incredible cathartic and that's what I like about them most, it's a bit of a balancing act, something to build up to I don't think the yelling and screaming should be the whole thing. I don't think that hits as hard. I think you need softer more introspective moments to complement and build up to the moments of explosive catharsis. 

Who are some of your favorite scream vocalists, and do they have any impact on the way more aggressive vocal styles are deployed on this album?

I was really inspired by Jack Senff's vocals from Merchant Ships and Midwest Pen Pals, also stuff like early Pdaddy, Old Gray, and I was listening to a ton of Foxing's self titled when I was writing some of these songs, I was definitely inspired by some of Conor Murphy/Eric Hudson's more aggressive vocal performances throughout Foxing's discography.

Were any of you members of the chess club in high school?

I don't think so? Connor's been reading Gotham Chess' chess book, I've played against Connor and Will before. I'm quite bad.

What is the wisest, most far-sighted plan you have ever carried out, ie When was the last time you were really playing 4D chess?

I bought a cheap mini-van of Facebook marketplace so we could start touring and playing more regional shows. For a while I was like "that was stupid" since it was a really big purchase for me. Since then it's actually been really convenient to have a paid for vehicle thats got a lot of space, even if it is sort of a piece of crap. Getting it cheap and not financing it was the wiser part of that choice.

Who is playing clarinet on "Squids" and what does SpongeBob’s long-suffering neighbor have to do with this track?

That's a Saxophone actually, my buddy Charlie's playing it and you can hear it at the end of Christmas Lights too. Squidward has nothing to do with "Squids" but maybe he should have. I really liked the additional horns/piano we added to the record it filled out a lot more space than I thought it would.

Who is "Michael," and what is it that he is doing that is "Gross"?

I play a game called Balatro, when I started I swore that we'd make the first emo song that had a Balatro reference as it's titled. The title is referencing a card in the game called "Gros Michel" which is in turn referencing the real life thing. The card has an image of a banana on it and using it unlocks a card called "Cavendish." At the end of the day it's a long winded banana reference.

What dirty deeds inspired "Sweaty Palms / Bloody Hands"?

Honestly nothing in particular, I came up with the riff first and knew I wanted the song to be a bit heavier. The imagery of cleaning blood out of a floor came to mind and I leaned into that when writing lyrics.

What are your favorite spectator sports, ie sports that you watch but don't play? Real and/or figurative.

I love baseball! I played when I was really little but I wasn't a very athletic kid. I think it's a well paced game and the dork in me enjoys the stats-heavy side of it. 

The cover art is pretty busy. Are those equations, or are you diagramming a detective show's plot? Please explain what is going on in this image.

This was my thermodynamics midterm that my friend cut up and collaged. I think I got a 70 something on it?

When was the last time you built a sandcastle, and what are you most afraid that the ocean/time will wash away before you are finished with it?

When I was a little kid I saw some older kids making a sand castle on the beach and I asked them to help work on it. I was some single digit age and have no idea how old these other kids might have been but it seemed like an awesome sand castle and I wanted in on it. They let me play with them and I think about it more than you'd think. I think there's a lot of beauty in things being temporary, as much as there is pain. Things can serve a purpose and when their purpose is done they don't need to be around anymore. Relationships, emotions, tv shows, sand castles, there's a lot of pain in endings but there's purpose and beauty in there too. I remember writing that song feeling like people would always get sick of me after a while and none of my relationships would last. Its a sucky feeling but that type of stuff comes and goes, people play a part in your life, and you in theirs, and sometimes when both of you have played your roles you drift apart. You're different because of each other, not just in romantic relationships but all types of relationships with other people, hopefully we make each other better.

Who are your favorite heavy metal bands?

I'm actually not super into heavy metal music, but I grew up on Rammstein and got to see them live the last time they were in the U.S. One of my earliest memories is my dad showing me the music video for "Mein Hertz" brennt and being mildly traumatized. Connor and Gray are really into Metalcore and play some heavy stuff in the van sometimes. "Heavy Metal Chess Club" as a name came from a shared google doc my friends and I had in highschool that was just a list of "things that would make cool band names." I saw "Death Metal Chess Club" in there one day and really liked it, but switched it to "Heavy Metal Chess Club" just because I thought the cadence was better, I liked it with the extra syllable there.

Who are your favorite poets? 

I'm really not well read poets wise. I really like Billy Corgan's lyrics from Smashing Pumpkins, they were probably my biggest influence when I started. Right now I've really enjoyed/connected with Sydney Sprague and Oso Oso's lyrics a lot.

Give me a math equation that you think will stump those reading this interview.

This isn't an equation but here's a problem I remember enjoying working on when I was taking Discrete Math. You have a number p, p is prime, p - 2 and p + 2 are both also prime, Prove that p = 5. If you want a hint, try start dividing prime numbers by 6 and see what happens.

Interview conducted via email on May 28, 2026. 

Keep doing your best. That's what counts. 頑張って!

Album Review: Cult Leader - A Patient Man

Pain-stricken hardcore out of Salt Lake City. That's pretty much the whole bag of worms, but I digress... Cult Leader began their ascent up the ranks of the metal underground in 2013 when it became clear that time was up for a regrettably christened prior project (Ask Jeeves or whatever if you don't know already). The band has kept the same lineup since its inception, with Mike Mason on guitar, Casey Hansen on drums, Sam Richards on bass, and Anthony Lucero on vocals. They've released two EPs and now two LPs on Jacob Bannon's Deathwish, Inc. Cult Leader just sounds like suffering personified. They adopt grindcore blastbeats, harrowing powerviolence tempo changes, blackened-doom guitars, and Lucero has a vocal presence that could intimidate the piss out of Dwid Hellion. And that's just when they feel like kicking out the jams. The band also has a penchant for death rock, which they pull off to devastating and peerless effect on their 2019 LP A Patient Man, see "To: Achlys" and, appropriately, "A Patient Man" off that release. Also on that release, you can find "I Am Healed," which bursts with agony and strangulating arpeggios, "Curse of Satisfaction" is the emotional equivalent of surviving a suburban rollover, and "Aurum Reculsa" is literally a sonic blender. If you've ever wanted to know what it feels like for your soul to break out into a cold sweat, set this shit spinning and let it drag you to hell.

Deathwish granted *BRAP! BRAP! BRAP!*

Album Review: My Point of You - This is My First Heist

What can be said of you, from another's point of view? What is another from your standpoint? Overlapping and distinct prognoses that nonetheless form a consecrated whole- you are a shape in the world, a totem of recognition, a symbol, a limitation, and a reflection in the sighted pools of those who sit opposite yourself, and they in turn are that thing which forces a recognition of the self as a self, in the recursive tension between the awareness of the perceived and perceiver, at once in two parts, and yet one and the same. My Point of You exercises the blessing of the penetrative interchange of human consciousness, to create beautiful sounds that intercept your distant orbit, bridging profound barriers of distinction, discernment, and dimensionality, to steal you away from the unstable sequester of alienation, providing a path that extends as a peninsula of positive confirmation that noise is good, and it's good to be nervy enough to know the right kind of noise. Emerging from the static like a seashell revealed in the sands by a receding tide, the harmonious rapture and regeneration that their debut EP, This Is My First Heist, extends into and expands within the marginless terrain of perfect freedom and therefore absolute annihilation, for which their outstretched aura represents a salvatory vein of Mineral wealth which enriches the interior life of the observer, exercising through Lemuria the geists of acidic sequester. The only crime would be not letting them crack the vault of your heart and bathe the inner chamber with the light of sound, beholding yourself in their graceful intrusion, and affirming them in the unfurling communion of the self.

Album Review: Blind Justice - No Matter the Cost

Blind Justice is a hardcore band from New Jersey, and I'm pretty sure they only have two albums: 2015's Undertow and 2017's No Matter the Cost. This was a period when Zzz'rs and youngish millstones were still (re)discovering hardcore music, in the same way that you might discover that you left a fiver in your back pocket on laundry day, and manage to magically dig it out on a day you left your wallet at home and decide to stop by the taco truck for lunch (and yeah, you can still get pretty good tacos in Chicago for a fiver... you know, in the event you'd rather eat than save for a lead-lined firetrap in an under-resourced part of the city in 4-5 years for double its current market price). This music was always there, but greenhorns were just managing to gouge themselves on its rougher edges at a time when underground music was desperately in need of an adrenaline fix- on god, good on them. As for Blind Justice, they're named after an Agnostic Front song (Duh!). The album of theirs that I'm best acquainted with is No Matter the Cost, and it's pretty much all there in the title. Relentless, untrammeled truth and fury, unleashed without regard for life, limb, or the happiness of liars, cheats, and hypocrites. They're not metalcore; they don't play around with time signatures; they don't accent tracks with samples from action movies or French New Wave cinema; and there is nothing "elevating" about their sound that attempts to "push the limits" of hardcore. And boy, is it pure mana from mosh-Minvera. Old-school, heedless, don't-mess-with-us hardcore in the vein of Sick of It All, Terror, and Bane. Stomping guitar churns, depth-charge bursting subtonal bass, plummeting breakdowns, and relentless air-raid siren vocals. Lyrics deal with self-assertion, wanton destruction of property, building lifelong friendships, and attacking political corruption. Blind Justice will kick down your door, windmill-kick all your shabby, sunken, second-hand furniture to death, and burn the roach motel sublet to the ground just for the hell of it. They're frankly doing you a favor. No dump, no lease, no landlord, no problem. Go with the wind. God speed.

Flatspot (on your forehead where the spin kick hit) Records.

Album Review: Hiro Ama - Booster Pack EP

I chanced upon a book compiling '90s rave posters from Japan the other day, and it was pretty exciting. The use of color, and often lack thereof; the stylized and expressive characters drawn specifically to divert the eye and cause the brain to sizzle with imagined possibilities; the chaotic, trippy, and almost manic layouts and combinations of fonts and graphics—totally anarchic, fierce, and belligerently charismatic. More punk rock than the punk rock flyers I grew up with, which were mostly photocopy stills from films like Taxi Driver and Repo Man with the bands' logos superimposed over the actors' eyes, like we were pretending that Robert De Niro was in witness protection or something. No doubt, if the electronic music scene by me in Anywhere, Wisconsin, had the vibrant energy of these rave flyers while I was in high school, my life would have taken a dramatically different turn (and I'd probably have had to go to rehab for some all-too-abundant party drug too)... maybe it all worked out for the best. My tendency to cultivate a quiet, hermetic life in the sprawl of urbania is a byproduct of having already OD'd on power chords and pogo grooves in wilder years, and this more mature malaise has brought me to the point where I'm able to fully appreciate the densely textural and ruminative ambiance of the kind that producer Hiro Ama is keen on plucking from her daydreams and casting into the wind like a fistful of dandelion pappus. This is, of course, all brought full circle by Ama's latest EP, Booster Pack, which is unmistakably a trance album, but not of the kind that one might find in any of the erstwhile basements, lofts, or warehouses advertised during the high-water mark of Japan's rave era—it's highly tactile, with the grain of polished leather, a palpable kind of body-music that doesn't attempt to escape the confines of personage or personification, but is localized in the pumping circulation of energy through vessels that connect the body with the soul, and propel it to move on command. It's polished, but not barren of imperfections or the pulse of human warmth. Like her other work, it's not a collection of tracks that takes one out of the moment, but rather permits one to sink ever deeper into it, intensifying a sense of lucidity the longer the listener learns to identify with and interpret the imprint of echoes that it traces on the consciousness. The fact that these tracks are so boldly propulsive when compared to her other pieces grants a certain kinetic liveliness to the reflective reverie of the work, causing a kind of extended anthropomorphism to boil up and swirl around the objects in the vicinity, ceding them a lively and conversative plasticity, and enlisting them as rebounding partners in a volley of charades and assorted gambits of memory. If you find yourself in a full-on argument with a potted plant about the explication of a tarot card you pulled from a deck, or discussing with a nearby interior divider whether its current coat of paint possesses the proper undertone of warmth for the present season, you know you're starting to get somewhere with this record.

Girls who say PRAH (Recordings). 

Album Review: Ex Eye - Ex Eye

Welcome to Number of the Beef- the only late-night metal hash dealer this side of the river Styx. We got three hot plates here for you knuckleheads. Boy, you knaves really love your jazz-metal. Are you sure you should be ingesting something this dense so late? Ah well, I'll let all y'all's wives scold you later after she notices your spare tires have started to overinflate. Okay, we got a short stack of Dead Neanderthals, here you go. And a skillet full of Sly & the Family Drone, there you go, darlin'. And... who had the Ex Eye? Boy, hadn't had one of these on order in a while. Let me tell you a little about them. Ex Eye is an instrumental metal quartet, led by avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson. Stetson is joined by Shahzad Ismaily on synths, Toby Summerfield on guitar, and Greg Fox, formerly of the "black metal" band Liturgy, on drums (because of course he does- you want this man on the friggin' bassoon?). They perform tightly wound, incredibly intricate, and aggressive post-rock, with hints of free-form jazz and thick layers of hazy, void-gazing doom metal, a la Electric Wizard and Acid King, folded into the mix. Stetson's saxophone playing is always a rewarding and fascinating listen, but it is particularly astounding to hear him keep pace, note-for-note, with the blazing guitar work on this album. Ex Eye was their debut LP, and only full release to date, dropping in the summer of 2017. It was recorded live at Ismaily's own Figure 8 Studios and released on established extreme, top-tier metal bulkhead, Relapse Records. Check out the punchy album opener "Xenolith; the Anvil" with its savage, cascading drums, adrenaline-pumping synths, and the deep, leviathanized grooves laid down by Stetson's sax; "Opposition/Perihelion" with its wormhole-like, intersecting guitar tremolos, screeching synths, and, of course, Stetson's sax performance, which pours over and melts through the compositions like molten hail; and lastly, the trance-inducing and intensity-ramping maelstrom of "Form Constant; Grid." Bon appetit, assholes!

Jazzcats were the first counter-cultural junkies, and they had an unfortunate tendency to Relapse (Records). 

Album Review: Tequila Mockingbird - You Always Felt Lost

Harper Lee wrote that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird because of its inherent innocence. To snuff out a mockingbird is to silence a creature whose only earthly desire is to sing. Fair enough. But what about getting one drunk? Would it be wicked or winsome to party with a mockingbird? Is a mockingbird a shy drunk, or a surly one? After pounding un par rounds of Patrón, is a mockingbird going to drop the singing bit and start roasting my ass like a little feathery Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (Hey, where did he get that cigar?) Of course, none of these pressing moral quandaries are answered on Tequila Mockingbird's LP, You Always Felt Lost. Taking their name, I presume, from the 1977 album by the late jazz pianist and legend, Ramsey Lewis, the Lansing-based group generally runs the exposed raw nerves of mid-'00s post-hardcore through the pasta-roller of 5th-wave emo, cranking out kinky, rough-grain, and discernibly heavy guitar-pop, which translates abstract caterwauls of rebellion into plainly personal insights that peer down the narrow halls of depression, loss, and a diminishing sense of purpose, often name-checking peers and guiding confidants such as Hot Mulligan and Michael Cera Palin in their song titles and lyrics, and drawing direct influence from them in constructing their sound. The lyrical delivery of vocalist Joseph adds that extra density of circuitry and connectivity that makes the sensibilities of this passionate kinetic ordinance of sound combust and resolve like a mile-long string of firecrackers- pain and perseverance mixing in a smear of splattering, effusive elocution that brings the strength of a wild cataract to a single shuddering tear. You Always Felt Lost is a sonar beacon to locate the like-minded and lonely in the depths of the perpetual winter of stifled sentimental solidarity. Now if only they could tell me whether or not God will condemn me for getting his favorite flighted crooners plastered, then they'll have basically provided me with all the answers I need in this life and beyond. 

Album Review: Lobsterfight - My Coat Hanger Is A Necklace

My Coat Hanger Is a Necklace because I'm always just hangin' around. It's not uncommon to be mistaken for a piece of furniture. A backrest to throw a jacket on, or a stool to heave a pair of loafers over. Sometimes everyone's invited to the party except you- a troubling epiphany, especially when you're the host. Drunken renditions of songs you remember from high school, about boys coming of age and recognizing themselves in the beautiful, sleek visage of swelt, prowling jaguars from National Geographic posters hung up in the science lab. Colorfully plumed creatures sing their own praises, nearly slurred, the words already half-forgotten, in a chorus of gaily varnished martins, and the whole world sings with them; even the armchair hums a few bars, vibrating a hushed resignation to the whims of the crowd, wishing someone would perchance tilt their solo cup full of Kool-Aid and Captain Morgan over its cushion so the nauseating concoction can seep in and soak up some of the social torpor and relieve the inertia that has relegated it to mere rear support in this crowded den. Souls rise and fall, and the wind of jolly bluster goes out through the gaps in this creaky old house. The band plays; they invite a racket; they bang on all manner of things, and it makes a melody as sweet as amber scraped from a royal Egyptian apiary while they sing of dancing blades twirling in the clouds, dead men walking, dreams of misfortune as accosting as a traipsing shade, and close passes with the devil. A lamp is decked off a table; sparks course through the hot, swirling air and conversation; a flame creeps up the wall, out the window, and is hoofing on the roof before anyone is the wiser. By daybreak, the soirée and socialites are little more than a charcoal bed, still glowing, still laughing, still hot but hushed now to a crackle, inert but pensive, anticipating the day when St. Vitus will descend to their resting hearth. On that morning, the now-skeletal band will reskin their drums, stretch their own singed tendons to restring the chords of their piano, and strike up a tempo as these scorched merry bones carole in a train, off and over the horizon. And still I'll be hanging here, wondering when it will be my chance to join in this danse macabre to celebrate my so-called life. 

Album Review: Expulsion - Nightmare Future

Expulsion is the womb-pest of Matt Olivio, guitarist of grindcore legends Repulsion. It sounds like it too! Mean, ugly, thrashy, and well... repulsive! Although, Expulsion sounds a little more like a blistering, blood-thirsty hardcore band than a grindcore gremlin to my ears, and this I think is confirmed to the degree that they cleaved sustenance and influence from heavily punk-infected death metal acts like Gruesome and Necrot, pairing turgid tremolos, acidic bass parts, and savage tempo changes with undulating thrash riffs and cleaving arpeggios, replete with croaking shout vocals supplied by grindcore and death metal vet Matt Harvey (of Exhumed, and yeah... Gruesome! [Hell yeah brother!]). Think Gorguts meets Power Trip, minus the darkly festive sense of bombast that tends to soften the blow of either of those acts. With all these gory details to dye your expectations, you couldn't be faulted for anticipating that their 2017 LP Nightmare Future would have to be a hell of a ripper—in fact, it is! Strap in for the grinding, untrammeled fury of "Total Human Genocide" with its sub-tonal, somersaulting bass, roller-coaster riffs, and apocalyptic lyrical themes; the overdrive excess of "Nightmare Future" with its double-time tempo, prowling guttural vocals, and acrobatic thrash-infused riffs that rise and fall like an air-raid siren; and lastly, the heedless headbanger "Funeral Bells" with its alternating dynamic of souped-up riff-grinds which give way to sudden tempo downshifts and morbid, dragging guitar dirges. The real nightmare begins when the growling feedback and howling subsides, and you find yourself shaking, distraught, and too weak to hold back from hitting that play button again, finding yourself addicted to their savagery, and impetuously eager to crawl back into the belly of Expulsion's brazen bull of cyclonic sound, begging to lay your body down as fuel for their bellowing conflagration.

Getting back to my dumb metal guy phase. You could even say that I'm Relaps[e](ing).

Album Review: 32-Bit Operator - Trial Run

Crunchy, exuberant, and charmingly ambitious, 32-Bit operator is the pint-sized, rock-opera revue baked like a trapped, diminutive tempest within a juicy wedge of Raspberry Pi-sized ideaphoria, bursting with bitter zest and sweetly nostalgic relish. The group offers the agitated yet revealing lyrical content and delivery of an anarcho-folk-punk group with the bombastic compositional quirks and afflictedly affable pop tendencies of ophidian orators of the polymorphic cast such as Snakefinger and other lightly venomous sonic scribes, annotating the ledgers of the comprehensive repository of all human events with an index of pretty gripes and profound hemorrhaging lacerations. Trial Run is their most up-to-date sonic prototype, compressing and splitting the focus of their laser diode-like aim so that it produces a scattershot prismatic spectacle of runaway chords, overheated feedback, tenuously compiled architectures, collapsing builds, and dense releases, lushly abundant with a sparking amperage of electric emotion. It occupies superficially 2-D space rendered with the exactitude of the luxuriant realism of Strazza's Veiled Virgin, maintaining an affordable verisimilitude while crawling through a dungeon of dancing caricatures and comically embellished meshes, press-ganging the listener into their fantastic descent where reconciliations can only be achieved to the extent that they are emphatically embraced in all their messy, uneasy (dis)unity. Rated E for everyone with ears and a heart to spare.

Don't hate them because they're Beautiful Rat Records.

Album Review: Dustin Wong & Takako Minekawa - Are Euphoria

Am I writing a review of Dustin Wong and Takako Minekawa's collaborative LP Are Euphoria because I'm putting off drafting a retrospective on the previously mentioned players' 2018 collaboration with Good Will Smith, titled Exit Future Heart? I mean... maybe? I saved Exit Future Heart to my Bandcamp wishlist the week it came out, but only recently (as in two days ago) recalled that Dustin and Takako had an album out together just the year prior, and at some deep psychological level, my reluctance to cover EFH after all these years may be manifesting in a further fit of creative procrastination at the moment. As much joy as I take in floundering humiliatingly in front of you in the moment, I do actually want to take a moment to put a frame around Are Euphoria and point to it as a thing that exists today, because as far as things that exist are concerned, it's one of the pleasantest in my estimation. Are Euphoria is the third collaboration between guitarist Dustin Wong of the Baltimore art-punks Ponytail and Takako Minekawa, best known for her contributions to the Shibuya-kei pop scene in the '90s with Fancy Face Groovy Name, after which she developed her love of French pop, Latin, and electronic music over the course of a storied and splendid solo career. All of this being true and relevant, it doesn't get you to the point of departure for Are Euphoria, though, as sonically, it exists in a self-contained, if expansive, dream atrium, with an effusively tactile, yet strikingly spongy structure, where the listener is seized by the enticement of the abiding and unfurling edifices, and seduced into temporary rapture of peculiarly intimate and prevailingly recognizable motifs that lack an unequivocal origin point or visa, but instead coalesce intrinsically into internally magnified loops of mindful rendition of material precognition, embroidered with the discrete narrative overlays of the diffuse human clay whose evaporated aspirations have been condensed into a psychic biosphere, more diverse and fertile than even the sum of its parts can account for. Are Euphoria is an attempt to siphon and divert a limited sample of the spectrum captured from the combined pillar of light beaming from 8 billion brainstems in a manner that is representative of all and yet perceptible by the same, without overwhelming the senses—a reharmonization of the chorus of the heart so that it may resonate with the ecstasy of others. As I said, among the things that you may find manifest in this world, Are Euphoria is undoubtedly one of the more delightful.

What's a synonym for Joy Rider? (Thrill Jockey Records)

Interview: Paida

When you're an intergalactic pop sensation, and you come across a planet on the verge of catastrophic ecological and psycho-social collapse, it puts you in a bit of a pickle. You can, of course, whisk yourself away to a solar system better known for its sanity and stability, or you can make landfall and understake an attempt at sensible astral diplomacy- so the story goes, polaris pop idol Paida has shouldered the onus of bringing enlightenment to the rest of us instead of kicking back and sipping sake in a satellite resort orbiting Zatan... regrettably, good samaritans rarely enjoy the fruits of their own labor, but she's making the most of it as any good idol would! Hailing from her crash pad in Space City, Texas, Paida does what she can to bring humanity closer to the stars through her blend of J-pop-inspired hits, infectious enthusiasm, and an eccentric brand of gallows humor. Harbingers of dystopian futures never sounded so delightful! Check out my interview with the ever-invigorating Paida below:

Check out Paida's most recent LP Second Sighting:

Album Review: Bad Breeding - Blood Manifest

Born in a concrete council block crib, Bad Breeding is anarcho hardcore out of Stevenage, UK. Part Discharge, part Amebix, flush with a rutty blush of Flux of Pink Indians, scrubbed grubby with a hank of Icons of Filth's soiled rags, with an infusion of bloodthirsty metalcore à la Expire, Bad Breeding is an astoundingly harsh punk outfit with a penchant for polemical lyrics against the status quo. Blood Manifest is a 7" sorta EP-type deal that bridges their 4th LP Contempt with whatever horrors they plan to unleash on the world next. The title track "Blood Manifest" wastes no time, revealing its malicious intentions and sordid skills from the drop, drawing a sharpened lace of toothy chords across your throat, leaning the pressure of an undulating, concussive groove into your back, and sticking around just long enough to watch you squirm in the pincers of your predicament, before plunging you mug-first into the scalding thrum and sanity-parcing peal of "Weapon of Tradition." If the A side wasn't jarring enough for you, then you're welcome to pull the ripper on "Exactly as They Wanted You," which dishes out a torrent of crusty skull-carving chords, sure to relieve you of the load of your smugly contorted countenance, just in time to have your dome-goo simmered in a bath of cerebral torment by the crunchy, death-crawl, and psychedelic glass-chewer, "Competition for Existence," an undeniably terse and truly terrifying evaluation of one's individual call to preserve the torturous and meager means by which their right to claim a ration of bread is earned day by miserable day. There is no redemptive arc for the squalor of the psycho-social. 

One, two, buckle my Little Independent Records.

Album Review: Telesonic 9000 - E.C.H.O.

Are you ready for a new technotronic age? An eon of telescoping, infinite horizons that slices through the staid film of the possible like a superheated knife through a partition of aluminum foil, permitting the divine ray of exceptional human promise to extend through the newly opened aperture and rebound past the edge of our present limitations- isn't that the kind of world you want to live in? Doesn't that sound exciting? Well, keep waiting, 'cause it's already passed. Your future is compulsory and predetermined- a mostly sedentary and anxiety-prone test subject in Sam Altman's open-air laboratory, who, if they are lucky, will get converted into a battery once they've been wrung dry as a dataset. Ah, if only we controlled machines instead of being controlled by machines that serve other masters. Electronic rock artist Telesonic 9000 prefers to wallow in the wellspring of potentiality that existed in the pre-internet age, exploring the hinge points of alternative pathfindings on his 2023 EP E.C.H.O., an audaciously warm resonance cascade that ripples into the ether with immaculate clarity of purpose, intercepting the invisible shapes floating in the torrents of oblivion and mapping them with the precision of an oscillating, cyber-brained chiropteran as it glides out of the snares of the digital dragnet and blindly follows a faithful course of deliverance charted by a reflexive sense of contingency and expectant outcomes once considered common place in an advanced, technologically enmeshed society- a compass of sound, navigating by the vibrancy of the terra incognita in which it seeks, a place whose presence we can hear, but which we must still struggle to depart for if we ever hope to arrive... The album also comes in punchcard form... which is about as whimsical as it is impractical.

Album Review: Etienne Charles - Gullah Roots

Well, I'm glad that I picked up Gullah Roots from an all-star jazz man, Etienne Charles, as it has confirmed an aspect of my childhood that I honestly thought had slipped southward through the opal of the hourglass. When I was nothing but a rugrat, there was a show on Nickelodeon where kids learned life lessons on a tropical island somewhere out in the Atlantic ocean with a giant tadpole in tow- I always assumed that it took place somewhere in the orbit of Haiti because of the accents that everyone had, and it's not a show that I've ever been able to reminisce with anyone about because no one else my age seems to be able to recall it existing, so I've mostly filed it away as a hallucination that I've experienced in my childhood, and left it in the backup RAM of my memory, teetering on the verge of oblivion by inattention. Well, wait a jog my memory there, Chuck! I've been sent down a rabbit hole this afternoon, confirming that Gullah Gullah Island was in fact NOT a fever dream I experienced as a toddler, and probably most shockingly, it took place in the UNITED STATES! Gullah Roots is the byproduct of composer, recording artist, assistant professor of jazz studies at Michigan State University, and trumpeter, Etienne Charles's exploration of the salt marsh swells and thriving island culture of South Carolina's Lowcountry, finding in these settings a certain familiarity between the people who call these places home and the Caribbean from which he hails. Gullahs, or Geechee as they're also sometimes called, are the people who share a namesake with the region, a distinct population in the American South who, due to their relative isolation over the centuries, have developed a unique and distinctive culture, as well as a language, primarily speaking an English-based creole with a plethora of terms and phrases on loan from their ancestors who were trafficked from the Congo River basin, modern-day Sierra Leone and Liberia, to work in the rice plantations which produced some of the first viable agricultural products of the Carolinas (and yes, as you've probably guessed, Gullah Gullah Island is set on an isle off the Carolina coast, in one of these communities that retains its exceptional Lowcountry heritage- and is also apparently plagued by giant singing frogs, for better or worse...). Charles's treatment of this region on Gullah Roots is, of course, beautiful and radiant, but doesn't stray too far afield from what you'd expect based on his previous efforts, 2024's Creole Orchestra and 2019's Carnival: The Sound of a People Vol. 1, combining the traditions of American jazz with those of his native Trinidad, with dashes of French Caribbean tossed in to spice things up, augmented here to a degree by a certain pan-diaspora spiritualism, which knits together the spirit and heart of displaced people in joy before creation and the Almighty, expressed through the gospel and soul-infused "Watch Night I (Prayer)" as well as the blissful step and shuffle of "Ring Soul," while paying special attention to the contemplative contributions of rhythm and resonance on the polymorphic title track and the arresting, unorthodox homily to slaves in revolt that is "Igbo Landing," which unfurls in a diptych style epic in exultation to pride and defiance. Gullah Roots is a sonic tome waiting for you to unravel its secrets; every phrase an ode, every groove plots the path towards a fresh perspective- good music is like that, though: it maps the terrain and sets you free to discover its treasures and partake in its blessings.

Electrifying etiquette (Culture Shock Music).

Album Review: Creeping Death - Boundless Domain

Texas, man, it's a whole different kind of place. While the Midwest is still sheltering itself from the last blizzardly breaths of winter, they're already in the swelter of summer. But this is not a normal summer, you understand... from what I hear it's like the state is closer to the sun than the rest of the country. Like camping on a frying pan with a gas flame dancing beneath its keel. It's the kind of place where you can find free rattlesnake jerky sizzling on the ground in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and you can stick an egg in your back pocket and barbecue it on your own butt sweat. Dust-choked, UV-deathray-sautéed, half-buried in sift and seemingly forsaken by God, it's the sort of place that you have to be half-coyote to survive in. It's the only place on Earth I would believe a band like Creeping Death would call home. Named after a Metallica song off Ride the Lightning, Creeping Death is basically a death metal crossover band with a lot of metallic hardcore and thrash elements woven through its core, forming a rough subdermal exoskeleton of rusty barbed wire and reclaimed heavy machinery. Boundless Domain is their second LP, following up on their RuneScape-inspired debut Wretched Illusions, and their tribute to late Power Trip singer Riley Gale, 2021's The Edge of Existence EP. Their sound combines elements of '90s death à la Bolt Thrower with Swedish death by way of Entombed, the thrashy peel of Morbid Visions-era Sepultura, the vicious deathcore of Human Error, and the hardcore thunder-horse pummel of twisted Lone Star stallions Iron Age. Their sound and aesthetic are in line with the death metal revival hardcore like Fuming Mouth and Brainoil from a few years back, but with a certain element of savagery that you can only acquire from forging under rocks for bugs and lizards to fortify your sustenance. "Cursed" is a steamroller of galloping beats and meat-rending guitar churns, while the title track vacillates between a dry-rot, thrash-necrotic pit of pestilence and a d-beat death-nado of crust-punk fury. Following closely behind is "Intestinal Wrap," a sufficiently fast and terrifying barbed-whiplash of a number with some bold and brutal thrash elements sounding like Outer Heaven doing a Red Death impression, with the final track "The Common Breed" offering a buffet of gorgeously gruesome old school death worship with enough of a classic punk pulse to keep you headbanging until your dome is filled with nothing but batter-whipped, pink toothpaste. Boundless Domain is as brutal and inexhaustible as the arid plains from which it hails.

On some label of something.*

*Ok, so Boundless Domain is released on MNRK Heavy. I don't know what MNRK stands for, so I'm just going to assume it's a stand-in for malarky. I'm also not going to link to said label because it's like a brand or something managed by a tangle of conglomerates, and I really don't care. I wrote this review not knowing what label Creeping Death was on, and simply because I like their record. After I finished though, I sort of regret it because you really don't get much more into the realm of faceless corporate halls of mirrors than whatever entity is currently distributing this record. 

Album Review: Kadavar - Kids Abandoning Destiny Among Vanity And Ruin

Do you know what it's like to split your face like a dinner plate and serve the hot, fresh sponge cake of your reverie as it oozes out of your bone tin to an impregnable stranger as so much greasy spilled lava cake dumped directly into their lap? No? Well, Berlin's Kadavar does- so shut up and listen- if you're ever in a situation where you have to divulge the full nakedness of the putrid inkwell of your subconscious to someone (in self-defense, or out of perverse wish-fulfillment, what have you), you'll at least be prepared (it's working for me at least). Kadavar traditionally plays a nostalgic blend of Led Zeppelin-worshipping guitar chords, southern-fried Lynyrd Skynyrd grooves, and Ozzy-jocking vocals that combine to form a smooth, psyched-out, mid-tempo version of Clutch with aspirations of becoming Witchcraft. They took an undercarriage-scraping approach to low-end, scuzz-bomb production and tuning on their 4th LP Rough Times, but since their 2021 COVID response, The Isolation Tapes, they've embarked on a meandering road to essentially chase the arc of Yes's career like a bloodhound tryign to catch a mouthful of a hare's butt fuzz- from progressive headcases to consummate pop-chart-cracking czars of an itchy electro-hook, they really pulled out the monty- a strategy that, while bearing fruit in terms of some phenomenally imaginative and often catchy forms, didn't manage to fly the group's freak flag at full mast, and therefore felt somewhat bereft of much-needed climax. That vitalness, that hot-bloodedness, that ugly urgency of Rough Times and their earlier self-titled work is back to a gratifying degree on their latest LP Kids Abandoning Destiny Among Vanity and Ruin, but now balanced by the more patient and elongated gaze of those later releases, a concontion of unlikely stagedressing and inspiration akin in spectacle to an all-caveman crew of the Starship Enterprise on a mission to boldly crush alien life beneath the stony mill of their wheels and start fires where there were never fires lit before. The album starts off with a satisfying stoner sludge swing in the vein of Acid King with the demonic fuzz rock aura of Electric Wizard, titled "Lies," before transitioning into a wormhole of transdimensional tempestry on the windtunnel-shaped "Heartache." "Explosions in the Sky" sounds nothing like the band it shares a name with, instead lapping at the banks of the Styx to paint a blazing rainbow of death across the troposphere, subsequently the group indulges their motorik tendances on "Stick It" an initiator of wacked-out disco-gloom that lashes out in a razor-wielding dance of bloodletting rebuke, crying with laughter as it twirls on a length of spider's silk over a bed of flames. "You Me Apocalypse" takes up the off-kilter groove of its predecessor and twists it in a slightly more harmonious and yet still creaky direction, pushing the boundaries of quixotic optimism as it leans into a somersault over the jutting mouth of a volcanic wound in the earth's flesh, a diabolical dichotomy that winds you up for the mystic pulse of "Children" as well as the thunderclap and collapse of "K.A.D.A.V.A.R." like you were a fly that landed on a spinning top with a yin and yang on it, just as it began its centripetal turn, and now you can tell your sucky bits from your cloaca, before finally finishing you off with a return to form on the absolute ripper, "Total Annihilation." Abandon whatever fate you imagined for yourself and give yourself over to the pride of desolation that Kadavar will lavish upon your meager mortal form. 

Where dreams are made (Clouds Hill Records).