Album Review: 鬱P - Perfect Persona

The following is a vignette inspired by 鬱P's Perfect Persona:

A bride, dressed all in white, inhales deeply before stepping through the doors of a small, steepled church with stained-glass windows as it stands in the foreground against a serene small-town backdrop. Her cheeks pink and pricked with a blush of adrenaline, and her long aqua-blue hair is tied into a twin, waist-length ponytail that drifts behind her as if it were in the grip of a pair of rutty, cheerful cherubs. She is empty-handed except for a flower bouquet of red roses wrapped tightly in expensive paper and tied with a dark red ribbon; a cross of lovely soft sashes intersects over her chest and runs around beneath her arms to then come up again over the back to be secured at the base of her neck.

The church's interior is modestly full; 30 or so people stand in clumps of association, chatting and idling on their phones, ordered in two rows of pews, separated by a carpeted thoroughfare leading to the altar, where a man in a conspicuously expensive-looking tuxedo stands opposite a plump and dowdy priest. In fact, all in attendance are a display of painfully embellished, high-thread-count, gaudily patterned suits and dresses of cuts and concepts that would normally not make their way past a Parisian catwalk, let alone serve as formal attire for an occasion in the rural steppes of this community. The bride's entrance has gone unnoticed by most of the crowd, save the tuxedoed man, who stares down at her smugly, a crooked smile splitting his lips and wrinkling the long, deep scars that part the skin on his left side like partially filled irrigation troughs. He runs his hands through his greasy, product-laced shock of sandy hair, almost self-consciously, almost to give the impression that he's not as nervous as he is, as he turns his head slightly to refocus his gaze on an older woman in a severely cut, broad-shouldered, and heavily tapered purple suit with the same flush of filthy cream-colored locks as his own. She doesn't return his stare; her eyes are turned down at her phone, flicking through graphs and columns of numbers. A younger version of herself hovers beside her in a similarly severe navy suit; a bored look sags the younger woman's features as she silently swipes through noxious bursts of luxurious lifestyle content. The older woman pauses mid-swipe before leaning down to whisper something to the younger woman at her side; a large, mustached man in a grey suit shifts tensely in his soft Italian loafers on the opposite side of the woman in purple, scanning the room as he overhears the brief exchange to his right. "The Senator's tip seems like it was spot on; you need to call your broker as soon as we're done here." "Clocked it, thanks." "You know, I'm not even sharing this with your brother; you could act a little more grateful when I share these kinds of things with you..." "Yeah, well, he's going to be set after today, isn't he?" The young woman glances over her shoulder at the bride still standing in the entryway and discharges a disgruntled huff. "What a freak..." The man in the grey suit follows the young woman's line of sight to the bride and coughs up a startled sound from the depths of his throat. "What the fuck? Where is her god damn escort? Someone find Joey and Enzo. I want them on her ass like cheese on my mother's risotto."

Still blushing, the bride's white teeth gleam like the tail of a shooting star, grinning as she sorts through her sashes with her free hand. Finding what she was searching for, she thrusts her arm out in front of her, straight and purposeful as if holding a saber; in her clenched fingers is a small white remote. Directing pressure through her thumb and onto a button, the music piping through the speakers in the small chamber of the building snaps from lofty opera standards to a blare of frantic stings and stormy electronics; a menacing momentum builds in the air. It is then that the man in the grey suit notices the body slumped in the entryway of the church, fresh blood speckling the concrete leading to the parking lot, the smell of iron slowly creeping into the house of worship—he reaches into the breast of his suit and takes hold of the cold steel within as recognition of the tailored suit on the crumpled form and the set of large ostentatious rings on its hands strike his mind like a lightning bolt. "Shit, god damn it! Doesn't anyone have a leash on this harpy?" Waving his piece for emphasis, the grey-suited man barks at a nearby guest, a clear subordinate. "Sal, grab that bitch! We're putting an end to this circus now!" Before the oily, dark-suited goon can fulfill his boss's request, though, the bride reaches into her bouquet and gives something inside a deliberate backwards tug, emitting a mechanical clicking as if something had shifted inside a small metal cylinder. "Holy mother, hit the deck!" The grey-suited man hollers to the room, raising his sidearm level with the bride's torso before his own chest erupts in a rupturing spurt of gore in synchronization with a roar of blast beats and toothy guitar grooves crashing out of the overtaxed sound system. The flower arrangement in the bride's hands has become a biting haze of smoke and fire, petals and stems breaking and bursting, their remnants falling away to reveal the cold countenance of a submachine gun, chattering in hot fury in the bride's talon-like grip. She fans a hot sheet of lead across the confined quarters of the room, cutting down the guest list by half before the attendees can turn to grasp the gravity of the dire straits they'd slipped into. Pews explode into pockets of splinters; the brick interior becomes marred by impacts like a lunar surface; a round strikes the priest in the throat, lacquering the unblemished side of the tuxedoed man's face with arterial splash as he surveys the carnage in awe and anger. Guests take cover where they can and let loose with reply from their own fiery steel in the direction of the bride, but her fatal command of the room is unchallengeable as she strafes along the perimeter, scouring the center of the room with a blazing shower of perdition. Retaliatory shots only ever strike close enough to graze her and rip her sashes and dress, causing them to fall open and reveal bandoliers packed with extended magazines and rows of holstered, small-capacity, high-caliber pistols; the latter she retrieves to pepper the room with while reloading her full-automatic casket stuffer. As she circles the periphery of her collected quarry, the bride pauses her assault only long enough to kick over baptismal fonts; once overturned, they flood the area with a harshly scented liquid, whose fumes could choke the breath out of anyone unlucky enough to take them into their lungs.

The woman in the purple dress is one such unfortunate soul. While hiding behind a pew that has been partially dismantled in the exchange of fire, she finds herself heaving as the stinking liquid soaks the carpet beneath her. In a scramble to seek fresh air, a slug from the bride's repeating saber pierces her spine and bursts out the front of her pelvis, causing her to slump where she is as her trunk pleats into a backward fold like a broken lawn chair. The last thing she sees is an inverted visage of the bride shoving a flagpole through the brassy, looped handles of a door leading to a side room just as angry voices congregate into a crescendo behind it. The barred door begins to shake as it is struck from its interior; curses and pistol-caliber rounds flow from behind the congested gateway into the main room of the church as the bride continues her fatal procession, now wading into the center aisle. A swarthy man in a white suit seizes a wishful window of grace when he believes he is in the bride's blind spot, springing above the safety of the cap rail with a double-barrel shotgun. He is surprised when his collarbone splits, his ribs become flayed, and his right arm is severed at the elbow before he is even able to level his aim; he collapses with a gurgle, losing his grip on his barreled piece. It slides to a stop at the bride's feet. She stomps the narrow point of her heel into the plate of the shotgun's butt, causing it to rise to her arm level in a pinwheel-like whirr. She catches the deadly implement and opens the breach to check that it is loaded. At that very moment, the door she had barred finally gives way in a rain of splinters. A grey and grizzled man whose girth resembled more bison than bipedal specimen, adorned in fine formal attire, has put his entire weight into the now shattered door, and the momentum of his strength has carried him through. Behind him are four equally well-dressed, stone-faced associates, each gripping their sidearms purposefully, scanning for a target. Unimpressed by this entrance, the bride unleashes both barrels into the small crowd of intruders, knocking them backward into a heap before the entryway they had just vacated. She coolly drops the now-empty armament before retrieving a pistol from her sash and picking off the survivors, of which there are only two. One of the surviving intruders is struggling under the weight and horror of the large grey man, attempting to free her arm and revolver from beneath his sunken and ruptured mass, averting her eyes from the bulk of exposed tubes and shredded glands of his now-exposed interior when a gap opens in her temple and the contents of her head slides out the other side. The other, a younger man with spiky black hair, manages to stagger to his feet and register a shot at his opponent before she pierces his jugular, resulting in his final moments being consumed in a futile fit of compression over his open neck before the icy flows running through his limbs cause him to lose his grip and slump to the floor in an awkward clump of clammy flesh, gushing crimson.

Sensing that the cull is nearing its climax, the bride proceeds towards the altar in a progression of eddying pirouettes, maintaining a constant rate of fire as she twirls, catching stragglers in the spray of her leaden claws as they expose themselves in a last gasp of vain bravado or flee for the open exit at the front of the church, including the young woman in the blue suit. A bullet passes through her abdomen; she doubles over, then claws up the side of a pew to persist in her getaway, only to find that her legs have become tangled in her own entrails. Toppling once more, she squirms in her own tangle of innerds and the spongy slickness of the carpet which has become saturated in the noxious, pinguid substance that had filled the baptismal fonts. The sounds emitted by the few remaining speakers is a cacophony of exalted, falsetto vocals, a vicious churn of razor-lined rhythms and bracing, full-contact grooves that accentuate the staccato of the bride's revolutions and relentless cycle of fire as a chorus of Armageddon, a punctuation to pure brimstone.

Finally, this black swan of white fury ascends the stairs of the altar and arrives at the threshold of the tuxedoed man's now-shattered psyche. As she approaches, his legs lose their constitution and he crumples gracelessly on his back, crabwalking backward to attempt to maintain his distance as her shadow overtakes him. Trembling, he cranes his neck as if to bear witness to the parting of the heavens and meets the bride's gaze, a crucifix looming overhead reflected sardonically back at him in the voids of her pupils. She is smiling at him, the most gruesome vision he has witnessed since the advent of the whole bloody ordeal, a more wretched sight than the swath of slaughter that swamps the chamber she has passed through to meet him at this apex. "Listen, there may have been some misunderstanding between us..." He stammers, drowning in sweat and panic. "Maybe you felt like you were getting a raw deal, but you're a very tough negotiator, and you've made your point. I'm willing to hear you out now; let's talk this through..." He flinches as she leans over him, his eyes squeezed tightly shut as to not see the blow he expects is coming. When none arrives, he reopens his eyes and takes in the bride once again as she towers over him. She has taken a tall lit candle from a candelabrum on the altar and now holds it at the full length of her arm by its white stalk overhead, shining like a beacon; her submachine gun is gripped tightly in the crook of her other arm, pressed into her ribs at a slight outturned angle, cradling it like it were her manifesto, her bible in action. She is still staring down at him, still smiling, but now softly shaking her head. "You... you... fucking bitch! You're fucking crazy!" He writhes out from beneath the pillar of her silhouette, stumbles on all fours, and rolls down the steps and away from the altar. "I'll kill you! You're so dead! I know some very dangerous people. You think you saw killers today! You have no idea the people I know... I... I..." His words drift into silence as a chilling sound accosts his ears. It is the bride; she's laughing now, still standing at the altar, laughter bubbling out of her with the effervescence of a thermal spring. He is sinking into the wet mass of fibers around him now, frozen in fear, sick and swamped with the vapors of spilled blood, the sulfurous tang of cartridge discharge, and the suffocating essence and acrid industrial aroma that has suffused the carpet from the overturned fonts. The bride lowers the candle in her grip; drawing it behind her, she then swings it forth in an underhanded arc, letting it slip from her grip. The lit waxen baton sails through the air and lands between the thighs of the now disheveled and broken tuxedo-clad man. He catches a final glimpse of her beaming, chortling face before an ice-colored inferno consumes his world. His body folds and compresses in the flame like old newspaper as the blue blaze spreads in a withering tear to engulf the entire carnage-soaked room.

Outside the church, emergency responders and police have begun to pull into the parking lot and quell the advance of a swarming, curious crowd of onlookers just as the stained-glass windows of the chapel-turned-tomb explode into violent twinkling rainbows of shattered varicolore reverie, flames belching from the front door and now-open windows as if the building were an open kiln. Firefighters hasten to and fro, attempting to wet the building with their hoses and contain the blaze. Around the rear of the building and away from the amassing crowd, a back door bends and creaks until it finally bursts open. A person in a fire-resistant uniform, different, but just barely distinguishable from those of the public servants attempting to battle the hellfire furnace that has swallowed the church- thick material, gas mask, reflective visor, and wide-brimmed helmet—teeters forward after knocking the door off its hinges with their shoulder. They stagger and then falter to their knees. An EMT rushes to the doubled-over figure and, slipping an arm around them, helps them stumble to his emergency vehicle. "What were you doing in there? That place is a fuckign furnace! I thought your captain told everyone to hold back and not go charging in. You could have been killed!" He hands his rescuee a bottle of water, which they accept politely but don't open. "Listen, it's bad that you were in there. You could get canned for being so reckless... what division are you from anyway?" There is no reply. The EMT's brow furrows and he's about to resume his line of inquiry when his attention is diverted by a coworker. "Hey Larry, we just got an estimate of what the body count might be. It's a god damn massacre. Looks like it could be the whole Conti family in there. I just got a text from my girlfriend in dispatch. Take a look at this." The EMT pauses, torn between his duty and morbid curiosity. "Alright, be right there." He shoots his rescuee a stern look. "Don't go anywhere." The EMT lumbers off in the direction of his coworker, his back turned to the mysterious figure sitting on the bumper of his vehicle. Nary a moment passes before the figure has noiselessly slunk off towards an adjoining field, sifting through the ripening stalks of grain; they slough off their fire-retardant clothing to reveal a familiar face. The bride, or former bride, her visage smeared with ash and blood, eyes pricked with a veiny redness and slightly watery from irritation, has shed her nuptial attire, and now slinks out into the night in a black matching set of polyamide athletic bra and shorts; she is otherwise bare except for a smile and a pack of cigarettes tucked into her waistband. As she weaves through the field, she retrieves the carton and plucks out two darts and a lighter; guarding the flame with her palm, she lights both, inhales with ecstasy, and exhales with relief. Behind her, the church continues to burn. She doesn't look back; she doesn't need to. Everything that matters to her at this point lies straight ahead.

Album Review: Merc - No One Leaves This Room

The Sunday before last, a pretty prominent personality in the hardcore scene told me I needed to take the next day (Labor Day) off. No work. No chores. Just me, my ass, and a bag of chips. And like the overachiever that I am, I ended up taking the entire week! Facedown on the concrete slab that is my basement floor, no chips though, just lapping up mildew and sucking on mold and spider eggs. Talk about your stay-cays, am I right, girls? So now that I've dragged myself up and homo-vertical again, I'm ready and raring to tell you all about something that matters! Something that I'm deeply passionate about. That's right, New Jersey's very own Merc(k), a high-quality producer of essential medicines and cancer treatments, who leverage the power of heckin' science to save and improve questionably sentient biomass across the globe. Their subsidiaries represent an attractive portfolio for pre-seed, targeted investment for savvy funders looking to finance in the future starting in Q1 of 2027, and... *deafening sonic howl increases in pitch in the background* Um, do you all hear that? *an unmanned Shahed drone crashes through the window and explodes, taking out the whole floor and causing the building to collapse into itself, floor by floor, into a pile of rubble. As the fog of devastation clears, I can be seen casually wandering into frame to survey the destruction. Amongst the heaps of shattered concrete and splintered timbers, I peer down at my own mutilated visage, a mangled human form with sparking wires and other mechanical components jutting out from the crushed and burned formerly human facsimile. I smile, cock an eyebrow, and look at the camera* Boy, AI is really getting out of control? Wacky stuff, cuh! Anyway... *camera switches vantage point, I am now in profile facing left* Let's get back to the REAL review! *an abrupt coughing sound is heard off screen. *In a nervous blur I pivot to face the new angle of the lens, my eyes now meet yours, a strained chuckle of embarrassment escapes between clenched teeth* Sorry, it's hard to see my mark with all this... um, rubble around. Alright! What does North Carolina have that South Carolina doesn't, besides higher taxes and stricter firework laws (so lil' Johnny can keep all his fingers on the 4th)? The only real answer is Merc, the powerviolence duo who have a date with disaster. Following the misanthropically materialized 2025 LP Debhumanized, No One Leaves This Room punches the pedal all the way through to the wheel well as they spin out into a corporate lobby with a trunk full of propane and a grudge to kill. It's as frothy at the gums as its predecessor, with a slightly smoother gait, meaning that each track can close the gap between it and your throat with less effort than previously believed. Slithering without friction in a sea of muck, liquid decay, and viscera, they strike without hesitation like a cobra, poisoning and incapacitating, before bending and breaking the limbs of their rueful targets. From the corrupt to the capricious, if their crimes weigh too dearly on others' shoulders and conscience, then a gashing groove of barbed bass and skull-craving rhythmic acrimony is eagerly incoming to black-bag and tag these tyrants with extreme prejudice. Parsing these bouts of righteous dread dispensary are intersections of moody vespertine waltzes of undertow, wine-dark post-punk vintage from the best years of Bauhaus, a provable spawning ground for banshees and kuntilanak, restless spirits set loose to roam and wrack their cries over your senses, a devilish harem which may help to explain the wailing affliction that suffuses the rest of the record. No One Leaves This Room is a tactical detonation of severe, morbid-future-averting punk, emitting shock wave after rippling shock wave to fry the motherboards of a system that is void of integrity and which is owed no Merc(y). *a whirling howl can be heard incoming* God damn it, this is for that last pun, isn't it? *everything within 20 feet of the impact site is suddenly vaporized or turned to molten glass*

Album Review: Jealous Yellow - Czech Vampires

Prague was the right city for Jealous Yellow's chief sonic summoner, Benjamin Rea, to find himself housebound, as he has now extended that city's haunted legacy into our lives, even if only incrementally. So the legend goes: while Benjamin was on tour promoting his solo release Sugarweeper in 2021, he was struck by a sudden illness... a curse maybe, the spite of a venefica, or perhaps he had caught the eye of a ravenous lamia who extended her robes over him in order to squeeze him dry. Whatever the cause (apocryphally, the official explanation was COVID), the condition of his humors lent panic to the public, and he was sanctioned and condemned to quarantine. There in the dark, overlooking an urban waste cleared by plague, a bedevilment during which one may expect to find the avenues patrolled by lumbering golems, Benjamin was visited by 14 children of the night, rapping on his window with a scraping solicitation before gaining entry to his parlor. In his fever, the afflicted young man consulted these cold hematophagous house-crashers about the nature of their appetites, the cut of their toothy jib, interrogated their truths and trimmed the frills off their deceptions, realizing through the course of his inquest the intercoursing circulation of spirit and energy between a city and its denizen apparitions. Czech Vampires is Benjamin's long-awaited exhalation from these encounters, one which relieves him of the tension and mounting shock of his redoubtable rendezvous- a coarse brush with the inevitable that is as sticky, disquietingly supple, and unobtrusively ensnaring as spider's silk.

Needles and pins, needles and pins, a happy sifter is the one who's most grim!

Album Review: Swanwriter - Melodies of Despair

Vancouver multi-instrumentalist Koda clearly conveys a fair warning about what to expect when cracking the casket on one of their releases under the Swanwriter moniker. No half-truths, prevarications, or distortions (other than in the guitar mix) are present to muddy the refrain on their latest LP, titled Melodies of Despair- a pronouncement of sickly succor you can feel in your bones. This gallery of roguish tunes sounds like an outro that accompanies a slow curtain draw on a reenactment of some gruesome Slavic folk tale where a series of unfortunate events leads to a small pack of adorable children meeting an untimely and tragic end- each a swan song for the unfortunate, hapless, and calamity-inclined. And if you think this is me simply being illustrative and evocative (thank you, by the way, I do try my best), this is literally the context of the opener "The Painted Valley," which recounts an orphaned Hungarian girl's ill-fated adoption and later encounter with the vampiric noblewoman Elizabeth Báthory, which resolves with a conclusion that is, let's say, beyond the pale. Much of what you're going to encounter on these dissonant lullabies could safely be described as progressive metal, embracing a philosophy of composition that is less like traditional scoring or pop peddling and more like reverse-engineering a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle- layered, intricate, even confounding at times, and liable to trap you in a head-exploding cage with a nefarious riddle as your only key to survival (sorry, wrong Jigsaw, but still accurate to the material). Far from being bereft of ideas, Melodies of Despair is decidedly baroque in its orchestration, incorporating many stylistic and structural inspirations from composers like Johann Sebastian Bach and others of a similar pedigree, which bestows upon these renditions of woe a weighty mantle of gravebound gravitas. The specificity of its more classical components can get somewhat overwhelmed by the spiteful spur of the album's most manifestly heavy metal-oriented passages, but only in an initial listen, as they often surface like a black iceberg in the sea lane of a pristine, white Victorian yacht and floating hotel, angling to claim its passengers as a fresh crop of human barnacle beds in the trench of the abyss- icy collisions of blackened death, finding harbor in the shadowy shelter of Emperor's In the Nightside Eclipse, more so than the deformed theatricality of a Fleshgod Apocalypse. Melodies of Despair is the sound of a final breath caressing the fleshy petals of a black rose before descending to mingle with the miasma of Erebus.

Album Review: MoonDoctoR & Surly - 10 Days in San Antonio

I'll often listen to interviews with DJs for their music recommendations. DJs are essentially professional music appreciators, after all, and will often be more honest, upfront, and concise about their tastes and interests than most recognized critics and cultural commentators. It's a fruitful pastime, and I have no regrets. Although there are times when the subject is somewhat of a blemish on humanity. I remember one guy recently who was being interviewed for a localish metropolitan outlet, and it's hard to believe what the producer was thinking having him on. From his put-on affect to his dated, ill-fitting wardrobe, he did a poor job of concealing that he was one of those failed entrepreneurs and former tech hucksters who fell into disc jockeying as a pivot and alternative model of getting paid for producing nothing of measurable value. Everything he recommended was straight buns, just full-on cheeks. It was astounding to see someone gas for 10 minutes while batting that many strikes in a row. It was like he never actually listens to music for the pure pleasure and simply builds his playlists based on some data-driven hallucination of audience segmentation in an Adderall-induced, algorithmic trance. I suspect that the only thing keeping this guy rolling in ice rather than being laid up on it is his final recommendation, "Scare Em to Death" by Surly. Somewhere along the line, he got clued into the fact that this was a pretty hot track, and it's probably been his saving grace ever since. Regardless of how many bougie bottom feeders attempt to hitch their wagon to it, Surly's 2017 EP Trip to Warsaw is still a rock-solid slice of non-standard juke and footwork, one that seamlessly interlaces Chicago styles of high-energy house and the producer's familiarity with Central European jazz as encountered through his father's career of playing music with experimental musicians hailing from a certain former Soviet republic. While his Polish jazz and Chicago-style jungle bounce fusion is easily his best-known work, he did produce another album's worth of material around the same time that was lost until very recently. Mixed and maestro'd over a little over a week's time in collaboration with his friend MoonDoctoR at the latter's home, the bones of what would become 10 Days in San Antonio solidified after successfully scoring a dance battle in Chicago. According to MoonDoctoR, they were mostly just kicking it down in Texas at his place, and the music just percolated up and out from the ether of the low-key rager they were wading through. Comparatively, 10 Days is a more conventional collection of footwork, infused with a dark intrigue that boldly traces the unquantifiable qualities that separate and blend dance floor and back alley, basement and skydeck, constantly in motion like a shark, inhaling the particulated grit of UK garage, rattling thrums of ravey synths, and hydrophilic diffusions of soul, and exhaling a glowing cloud of syrupy, incandescent composure- a placid romantic melancholy that can't resist coasting in the moonlight on the chromed reflections of low-riding G-funk pump- a fantastic collection culminating in the key collaboration "The Friends," a hypnotically ponderous gyration and intimate looping concord that rings in a finally casting call of the pair's combined potential with its dense layers of dependable vocal brushes, heart-skipping basslines, and brassy blushes of devotion. The session tapes for this record were misplaced somewhere along the way, making it very unlikely to have ever surfaced in any form until some technical solutions were discovered that permitted the dynamic duo to reconstruct it from previously discarded demos. It could have been a real loss, but in salvaging these sessions, we can see that those 10 Days in San Antonio were not spent in vain.

Freshly squeezed moon juice does a body good (Freshmoon).

Interview: The Eradicator

Listen up, pusshead! You ain't nobody unless you're somebody on the squash court! It is the ultimate game of manly endurance, speed, agility, and intelligence. A test of will and fortitude on a magnitude that rivals the myths of ancient gods. Two men enter the court; one man leaves... and shortly thereafter, the other man, having declared himself the victor, also hits the showers. Sure, it's the same showers that the loser is using, and yeah, he may have to ask to borrow a towel and some deodorant from the loser, and he might have forgotten his wallet so he can't pay for a cab or the train and will be hoofing it back to the office that morning, but that just makes the triumph all the sweeter. The stains on his collar and in the pits of his suit jacket when he arrives in the lobby of his employer's building are the laurel rings of a champion, and no one can erase their golden glory- as much as one might try with a Shout stick or other name-brand stain remover. No one knows the perspiration of perseverance and the stink of success better than The Eradicator, aka Andy Slania, the demon of the D Squash Ladder, banshee of the back courts, the phantom of the point-a-rally, the shaitan of sweat- in short, he's your worst nightmare... and the latest guest on this podcast!

Check out The Eradicator's latest LP You Can Hate The Eradicator: 

Album Review: Sistema de Entretenimiento - Arcade Punk

Chongqing, China, one of the largest municipal districts in the world, may rightfully have laid claim to the title of Cyberpunk Capital, earned through its advanced technical sector and neon-future landscapes, but the soundtrack of the nigh-approaching total-techno dominion is transmitting across sea and air, out of the leaky boiler rooms and dank basement dens of Barcelona. It's the future, baby! ...of a distant past. What Spanish FM synthesis and electro-punks Sistema de Entretenimiento are excavating are already decayed and tarnished remnants of tomorrow in the ashes of today. Squaring the freshly freed angst of the post-Franco '80s into a pixelated, soft-tooth buzzsaw of oscillating lo-fi disco puntazos, they construct with sound a virtual vision of the 21st century from the vantage point of far-flung yesteryear that is more advanced and exciting than the one we find ourselves mired in the depths of, but nevertheless, just as desperate and disquieting. A prophetic fever of fortress-like, chrome-gleaming skyscrapers so tall that they literally pierce through to the void of space and are in constant threat of colliding with satellites; widespread commercially available cybernetic anatomical augmentations and back-alley butchers licensed to install them for bottom-barrel prices; rogue killer androids; flying cars; android spouses and electric sheep- their oneiric implications nearer and auspicious promises farther away today than they were when the now-diseased circulars of mass-market paperbacks and VHS OVAs articulated their conceivable emergence- at least on the Western half of the globe. I guess that's why EPs like Arcade Punk seem so prescient; they're paving the night with percolating neon-noise-tinted excess in anticipation of a future that will never arrive, but is somehow already receding in the rear-view mirror.

The United States has the highest carceral rate of any country in the world, and yet Prison Records is based in Spain. Curious...

Album Review: Chuwi - Tierra

Apparently there is a fair amount of hype around Puerto Rican electric plena quartet Chuwi, and it stems in part from their inclusion on a Bad Bunny track last year. I haven't heard it. Probably won't either.* I know about Chuwi because I Shazam'd one of their songs while waiting for a sandwich at a Cuban restaurant. I'm an organic music forager, it's true. Chuwi's second EP, Tierra, has a noticeably breezier quality to it compared to their first EP, Pan, released two years prior, with its haunted scans of dizzy disquiet and uneven sense of crawling across a steadily eroding incline. This more recent EP instead draws forward the more outwardly tropical aspects of their sound, diverting it through riven veins of pooling electronic diffusion, like channels cut in the sand allowing fresh water to flow inland where it can replenish parched lips and cleanse calloused hands. The teetering sway and lapping melodies could easily be mistaken for a resort accompaniment at times; its accommodating abundance and ebullient affection for its subject matter are certainly pliant enough to appear insouciant at a brush and even offer overhangs of respite for tourists. But Tierra at bedrock is a carta de amor and homenaje to the group's home, a land in unsettling limbo- swallowed whole, chewed up, and regurgitated back in place in an increasingly unrecognizable form by the cold logic of commerce, the callow capitulation of corruption, and a naturalization of neglect, the compounding conditions of colonialism which, together, conspire, among other insults, to perpetuate a vampiric attrition and wringing out of the island's lifeblood: its people. What is a land without its people? At best a desert, at worst an empty crypt. Balmy as it is sonically, Tierra is an echo of the unheard, one that manages, at times, to land sweetly on the ears, but which smuggles into the open the indisputable certitude of a sour state of affairs.

*You really have to drag me like I'm a mule over a mountaintop to get me to listen to anyone big enough to play the Super Bowl (an unfortunately annual exhibition of the crassest excesses of commercialism and a monument to human sacrifice and wasted potential). That said, I don't have a negative impression of Bad Bunny himself, and I think he has a nice mustache, but the vibe I get from the obsessive celebrity cult around him is that his stuff is probably not for me. Who knows, I could be wrong... First time for everything. 

Album Review: Forever ☆ - Second Gen Dream

Wake up! There is a party raging on a cloud, and it's finally dipped low enough for you to hitch a ride. Kansas City's Forever ☆ have charted a course for a nearby rainbow-paved cumulus kanibaru due North, and they're only making a single pass through your block, so if you want in on the action, you're going to have to pick out the brightest star visible from your vantage point and make a wish so big that they can't help but collide with it as they cruise the air currents overhead. If you can cut past the strong-arming bouncer of your own inhibition, then you might just find yourself in the catbird seat of a souped-up Second Gen Dream, punching the gas and hewing through a gossamer bastion of club-commingled claps of restorative feedback, golden waves of frosty jungle heat, and hot cycling jolts of drum 'n' bass palpitations with enough surging electricity to burst half the street lamps in Manchester and turn them into teeming dispensers of flaming confetti. As of this writing, it is Thursday, August 27 at 02:14 UTC, and Wednesday, August 26, 21:15 local time. Nowhere on Earth is it Friday night yet, except for right here, right now. You, this magnificent Missouri duo, the molten kiss of brassy loops, and the bladey purr of an acid-peeled groove, making the city your personal music box, pummeling the pavement and cruising the small hours into a vaporous spectacle of bluff and beguile, escaping from the day-walking world into the waxen reel of a city painted in moonlight and balmy eros, hinged on an easy-rolling centripetal spindle-fount of starry-eyed felicity. Forever. The night is forever, so long as you're dreaming. 

Why choose when you can have it all, à La Carte (Records)?

Album Review: Shirley Scott - One For Me

One for Me is literally One for Her, her being Shirley Scott, soul jazz pioneer and organist, and one of the few female bandleaders of the '60s. One for Me (originally released on artist-run-and-focused Strata-East Records in 1975) was recorded in 1974 with saxophonist Harold Vick and drummer Billy Higgins, a continuation of her preferred trio ensemble arrangement, and came along a few years after her divorce from saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, with whom she was a frequent collaborator. Culminating during a lull in a very storied career, one which saw Shirley releasing albums on the NYC-based Prestige and Creed Taylor's Impulse! Records, among others, the impetus for a solo record of this kind was a shade of enterprise directed towards vindication and edification: a conviction to utilize the talents she had honed for others to precipitate a performance that reflected her unaltered vision, without deviation or compromise- the indulgence of a satisfaction that was her own, and a pleasure that topped off her chalice before cascading into the waiting cup of another. Shirley's handling of the Hammond B-3 holds court somewhere between God's house and a smoke-saturated subterranean saloon, a crossroads of Gospel and bebop that is as heavenly as it is heavy with pensive purple dreams and cerulean introspection. Despite it all, there is a gaiety and an ebullience to the ambiance that spills out from Shirley's moody sonic exposition, one that gives it the airy din of laughter; there is a posh sort of rapture in this run, almost as if it were her very soul stroking these keys and pedals rather than the work of human hands and feet.

It all started one peaceful day, the day that everything changed... (Arc Records). 

Album Review: Volatile Ways - Perfect Dark

Commencing their warpath as a birthday gift from bassist Lewy Glass to vocalist Emily Beekmans, the group lives up to the premise of their name on their second LP, Perfect Dark. Favoring low, grinding grooves that scrape the surroundings like a spinning wheel of devastation appended to the arm of a Bagger 293 Bucket Wheel Excavator, they're metalcore in the transmissibly threatening pathogenesis of The Acacia Strain- slow, crushing, unsparing- a patient form of ruthlessness that builds on its own momentum to ensure the thorough defilement of the listener's imortal (yet soon to be tarnished) spirit, ascending in the darkness in an eclipsing invocation of perdition that blots out the sun in a warmthless grey quilt of gloom. Can you believe this stuff is inspired by Dark Souls? I ask rhetorically, because if it wasn't, I'd be completely at a loss. "God Will Be Cut" causes St. Peter's gates to quake on their hinges, exploding like a meteor burning up in the atmosphere, spreading a deafening violence and upheaval in the wake of its sonic boom, while "Pink Mist Wish List" tallies up its dead pool winnings with the lash and rip of saber-shaped riffs, and the claw-and-gnaw of gruesomely carnivorous grooves that mop up the scene like a tiger licking the floor of a slaughterhouse to a gleaming, polished, refective radiance, and "Perfect Dark" initiates with a turgid, undulating trawler of a riff before cracking into a yarble pitting chop and tilted, aggression-laden blade pitch, mincing with equal measured precision and patient ferocity whatever resistance you have left to the gravitational haul they exert to impel you into the density of a white-searing void. Now you have perfect knowledge of Volatile Ways dark methods. This is my gift to you. Do with it what you will.

Bereave in God Records... that's actually the name of the label. They're doing my work for me now!

Album Review: Gun - Neo Notown

It's hard to overstate the mythic position that guns have within the contemporary imagination. Sources of power and dispensers of fear, they are implements that set their sights on the hinge points of history, striking them and spinning them on their axis; an exchange of smoke and blood in incalculable magnitudes; the trajectory of countless pivotal, piercing brass streaks tear through the tomes of time like a bullet through butterfly wings, rewriting the course of human affairs in their wake. One of the enduring legacies of the Mongol incursion into Europe, it was the gun that changed the tides of the Sengoku period when Portuguese traders washed up on the Southern rim of the Japanese archipelago, bringing this violent innovation full circle and changing the nature of conquest in East Asia 400 years after gunpowder was introduced to the West by the great horde. Every revolution in the modern era has leaned on this tool as both agency and arsenal, justice and deliverance, while every uprising that has seen itself smothered was choked out in a haze of hot, chalky blue residue coughed out by the same. Then there is America's specific relationship to these instruments of grandiose annihilation, a pillar and totem of popular political strength; they mostly serve as playthings for the socially marginal and declassed for performing toothless tantrums in provincial wooded areas, and as the means for settling petty grudges and satisfying venomous resentments in a litany of tragedies recounted across timelines and news feeds, landing in the lap of the public with little more than a resigned sigh. Few would aver to embody such a disputatious and complex legacy, or don such a heritage of revolution and ruin by choice, and yet New York City tetrad Gun have proven so bold. On their second LP, Neo Notown, the group compresses their insurgent energy into a progressive message of hope broadcast across a desaturated techno-surveillance dystopia, not unlike the Big Apple of present-day, or any other collapsing megacity one can find themselves slowly crushed by across the globe. A jet-set soundtrack that twists early '00s alt metal, industrial rock, noise punk, and funk into a riffled cylinder of steel by which to discharge a burst of pure adrenaline to your cortex in a colorful splash of heat-ignited, reactive rebellion. They sweep and stun from the outset on the groove-swagger slugfest opener and title track, before bouncing the turnstile and grinding the rails on "Laser Gun," directing fluctuating phaser fields of pitch-shifting guitar fluctuations to power a Cypress Hill-summiting royal with a panged, determined, and desperate trust in the direction of Stabbing Westward. Wacked-out grooves rebound off brick facades, flickering streetlights, and past spying doorway portals on the clandestine cylinder slide and delayed sizzling payload of "Bullet Town," while "Walking on the Sun" sprays straight from the hip, letting the trigger slip as they carve a full-metal manifesto in the air, bars whirling in a ballet of carnage like spent cases spinning south of heaven, all while grooves claw at the seams of sonic propriety, prying away the varnish in a torquing separation of flesh from its fetters. "Star-Crossed Fighters" brings a knife to the fray, one large and sharp enough to rive the roof clean off a Buick, surprising the interior of the cabin, and your skull, with a glistening bath of uninvited sunshine, a high point which leaves room for the downshifting reprieve of "The Armory" to follow. Once fully recharged and resupplied, Gun takes aim and empties the clip on "Ready, Set, Action!" - a rich and chewy serving of lead salad with a side of gut-ripping riffs and stomp-steady grooves that will reduce the brawn of the unworthy to a pliable pulp, a fine-grain pâté suitable for the palate of the discerning sewer-dwelling vermin, it is a triumph that is preceded by a sweeping procession of closer "Victory" a track that rolls over the vanquished with light-footed, moonwalking grooves and a Richter scale-busting beat. You've heard voices of previous generations tell you to load up on guns and bring your friends; well, presently, you and your pals just need one to seize the day, and this is it- point-blank and in your face. Fill your hands, you son of a bitch, and show what grit you've got to give! Neo Notown or bust! 

Album Review: Forests - That's Not Very Mid-Century Modern Of You

Alright, what have we got here? Epic fantasy setting. Hell in space, or maybe an open-air dungeon sunk into the inner rim of a volcano. Antagonistic, voyeuristic extraterrestrials en route. Cal-Art-injected pastel hardcore fonts. ASCII Miffy art. Midwestern emo and gang-vocal pile-on pop punk with a conspicuous familiarity with Melt-Banana. Singapore... Yeah, none of this is very Mid-Century Modern, which was a design philosophy popular in the immediate post-war period in the continental United States, which emphasized bold curvatures and defined contours, emphasizing truth in structure and materials, and intrinsically forbearing superfluous embellishments- That's Not Very Mid-Century Modern Of You is as inverse to these principles as the sun is to the moon's shadow. While earnest in intention, Forests are almost fully defined by their embrace of the extraneous, including text art in the lyrics for every track and utilizing children's mascots, obtuse musical genre litmus tests, ubiquitous trans-Atlantic technological fatigue, and bit-tune techno to elevate sonic texture and textual ballast, and uplift gleaming pop grand jetés to reach a suitable height in order to bathe the atrium between your ears in an acute overflow of stained specular reflection. It's colorful, it's consistent, it's heartfelt, and it's awesome- Forests doesn't bow before a single aesthetic idol; they've built their own atelier, as mysterious and deep as a jungle nestled in the belly of a gorge, one where they hold all the keys, and can unlock a door in the trunk of any tree they choose, bounding up their rings like great concentric staircases, toe-gripping branches in a sprint and hopping off the apex to belly flop onto another buoyant epiphany as it drifts on course toward the canopy- rising above the conceits of critics and dogmatists alike and bridging a gap that feels narrow in retrospect. Midwest corridor, corn country, to the Strait of Malacca- the distance is shorter than you think.

Album Review: Craft - White Noise and Black Metal

Craft was quiet for quite a while before this. Granted, they've been quiet since as well, but at least there is a precedent for it now. After drummer and founding member Daniel Halen quit in 2005, the band briefly considered breaking up, with the ultimate fate of the group remaining unclear even after 2011's Void, where Dirge Rep of Enslaved filled in behind the kit. White Noise & Black Metal was Craft's first album in seven years, heralding their triumphant return to a Darkthrone-devoted cleave of severely sharp and acerbically aggressive black metal, an invigorating blast of arctic misanthropy and cosmic angst that exhumes the genre's simple, bleak, and world-wearing forecast for humanity and serves as bait for the rotten, scale-shedding eels that squirm in writhing heaps below the surface tension of the soul- carving up the frost-fortified ramparts into intricate etches and runic arcs, a tormented intercourse of vesica piscis through which dark auras pulse and old grudges flow to attain a ripe bloody luster. WN&BM is a cleaner-produced album than its predecessor, the platework here acquiring the polish of an unnatural and sickly shade of silver- in spite of this turn towards refined, translucent shades of mayhem, there is a surprising live-recording quality to these tracks, making it possible to imagine yourself in a dungeon-like practice space submerged beneath a barn in the Swedish rurals, petrified and dragging oneself across the floor as these riff revenants raise a sigil-scrawled, phantasmal citadal of white-burning annihilation from the blackening earth of a cellar floor with the adumbral iridescence of their sinister symphony, the gust from their amplifiers coursing cold down your collar like the breath of a sky-swallowing wolf, and the thump of their grooves reverberating through your chest like a hammer striking iron. Honestly, I had a lot of fun with this release when it came out in 2018, not just because it rules in an ontological sorta way, but because at the time I was working with an incredibly annoying washed-up hipster who dropped out of New York to settle in Chicago as a sort of "Plan B" and settlement with his own ambitions. He was the kind of guy who "liked a little bit of everything," so long as "everything" was something approved by that month's flavor of byline-boasting shitshovelers, more commonly known to the public as "tastemakers." We were in a shared workspace, and I knew I could always throw it on to piss him off, especially when he suggested that we listen to something like Deafheaven or the like. It is ingrained in my lobes how this record never failed to carve a grimace across his perpetual five-o'clock shadow, deep enough to threaten to crack his gaunt, frail jawline intwine. I learned then that Craft is capable of casting a dark cloud over all of the right kind of people, and for that, they will always have my respect.

The Season of Spite (Mist) is upon you! 

Album Review: Paul Coleman - The Weather Man

You don't have to dig much to pry up stories about artists getting screwed sideways in the music industry. The frequency and severity of the repercussions reaped from advances taken and recouped in mythic levels of psychic damage, or the prevalence of general business chicanery, became almost a rite of passage for alternative artists in their dealings with the vampiric patronage of major label syndicates in the '90s- souls were reaved and dreams were decimated, scarring a whole generation of rock star wannabes- but you don't have to hunt down the survivors of the first wave of grunge to fill your ears with the horrors that circle the periphery of the lime light like a school of dagger-toothed piranhas- just buy any DIY musician a Pabst or treat them to a Yerba, and they'll unspool a yarn that will leave you hanging by the collar in despair over their dealings with the industry and the backstabbings, cross-stabbings, and bag-nabbings that define even the dive bar, dreg-scraping levels of the industry. One fine fellow who certainly saw his fill of it was Chicago's Paul Coleman. Originally of the (ironically) fatally fleeting funk ensemble Rasputin's Stash, and the pristine but untimely tarnished soul-pop quartet Crystal Winds, the enterprising keyman was presented with the opportunity to create a soundtrack for the newly launched Weather Channel sometime in the early '90s- a potential windfall that came his way because an executive at the channel was dating fellow Crystal Winds bandmate Corky Brown's (aka M.C. (Morris) Brown) sister. Writing the entire repertoire over a sleepless two-week marathon, the final cuts were accepted by the programming director and played on air, offering a refreshingly buoyant complement to the dry business of local forecasts and barometric reports- none of which ended up benefiting Paul though, as his whimsical climate compositions were tossed out with a sudden change in ownership, and he was never paid. It's always painful to witness talented people crash headfirst into the realities of corporate acquisition and power plays, like moths disappearing into a mass of goo as they intersect with a sedan windshield screaming down the Eisenhower, but as the fates preserve, Paul's recordings have been salvaged and repackaged for modern listeners' vindication under the title The Weather Man. The selection offered by this project presents a lighter side of funk, a crisp and invigorating, lean and balanced portrait of elegant simplicity that invites interpretation and absorbing contemplation, just as passing clouds compel the earthbound to divine galloping signs and symbols in the sky and place perspective on our relative position in a large, interconnected globe. Softly textured and accommodating, The Weather Man teems with a mist of optimism and a belief that all things will find a site of affordance to brace against the tempest and find one's fortunes in the fronts of simmering, silver-lined clouds as they swirl and billow about us. Hopefully these tracks bring you more luck than their maestro, or at least remind you to get everything in writing before you commit your heart and soul to it.

Destination is only excuse for the journey (Athens of the North).

Album Review: Demon Eye - Prophecies and Lies

In about 2017 or somewhere around then, all the little shops by me that are run by like one girl and sell mostly Sears catalog jewelry they picked up at estate sales, a selection of three interchangeable blouses, and tour shirts from the '90s at a 1000% markup also started offering nazar amulets in various guises and trinkets. I don't know why, but other girls who couldn't afford to run stores with a lower daily sales volume than your average yacht broker really seemed to dig it and pushed those purchases per diem up into the double digits. Presumably, the idea was that these concentric blue circles would protect you from the premonitional gaze of a roaming malocchio and help them find a boyfriend who is easily bullied or land a promotion to superintendent at the non-profit orphanage for wayward Victorian dolls they work at, but I actually think there was more to it. Calling yourself a witch became popular around the same time, and rather than warding off evil, I think decorating oneself with these charms was meant to place the world on notice that the forces of evil were at her command, that the maleficence of the world bent to her will. What's a bigger power play than flipping a reverse card on Father Brimstone himself, making life a game of Faustian Uno where the objective is to make the devil your bitch? As a metal fan, I understand this impulse. Metal musicians are adept at adopting the iniquitous and vile to lend power and potency to their sound, whether it be naming themselves after an unholy disease or giving their albums and songs the titles that align with various curses- evil flows through metal like blood through the gasping pumps of the human heart. More to the point of donning a malignant gaze to publicize one's perihic influence is Raleigh, North Carolina's Demon Eye. On their most recent (as of 2017) LP Prophecies and Lies, the group proudly performs a nostalgic and measured homage to Black Sabbath, with flashes of Iron Maiden's guitar heroics and Blue Öyster Cult's playful, psychedelic mysticism. This is very familiar, fuzzy, hooky, and muscular metal that is unavoidably charming in its brash display of unself-conscious depictions of might and wizardly wickedness. Early into this misadventure, the group tiptoes up to the altar of doom-shrouded Hecate before barreling over into Sabbath swagger on "In the Spider's Eye." Their outlandish outlaw nature takes on new dimensions of depravity on the blues bruiser "The Redeemer," and later the mystic, Deep Purple-worshipping "Vagabond" glides on a pungent lilac-tinted cloud as it scrapes the countryside in an endless quest for invigorating brushes with budding chaos. Is the sweep of el mal de ojo the harbinger of great misfortune, or a tiger yet to be tamed? For each of us, the answer is different, a rejoinder whose verdict rests solely in the eye of the beholder.

Souls are like Pokémon cards, the money is in the margins (Soulseller Records).

Album Review: Antibalas - Hourglass

Sometimes, the ripple of an earshot can be heard around the world. The local is the expression of global conditions; global conditions are the percolation of circumstances that well up around one's feet where they stand, like the spreading overflow of a well with too many stones in its gut. There aren't many bands that can capture the feeling and sound of being from anywhere without losing the essential imprint of their place of origin- but I can certainly name a few- although one will do for our purposes here. Led by multidisciplinary musician and activist Martin Perna, Antibalas ("bulletproof," like an idea, like the soul, you can kill the vessel but you can't snuff its will) is a tour-tested and perfected, horn-driven, traditional Afrobeat band modeled after Fela Kuti's Africa 70 band and Eddie Palmieri's Harlem River Drive Orchestra. Like many Afrobeat outfits, Antibalas addresses dire social and political realities through positive, motivating, and cathartic party music. As Perna says, "We take a hard look into the past while forging a future of solutions." Their eighth LP, Hourglass, sees the band following the curve of inspiration back to intimately acquainted patterns of enlightened practice. Twisting back through time to tread fresh turf, the group has eschewed vocalist collaboration for this album, and singing nearly entirely, so as to avoid the demands and determinism that language and its expression place on sound, instead embracing the natural, untamed flow that a groove can take when players can intuitively delineate its coalescing contours, free of the constraining rib and hem of a singer's thread to tether its course. There is no exogenous plane to define itself against, no vista that exceeds its breath, no people who are beyond its borders. Hourglass is the sound of a world opened up from the inside, pried into a pluming dispersal and everted outward in all directions like the fresh, cloying flesh of a ripe orange spread open for the taking- refreshing, sweet, intricately textured, but most of all, free.

Dap's the way I like it! (Daptone Records)

Album Review: Cattle - Sweet Dream,Tender Light and Your Memory

Anytime you dare to pipe up about the hardships in your life, your struggles, the inherently cursed nature of the present state of things in any way, shape, or form online, you will inevitably be flooded with comments justifying your misery. Can't afford a house? Can't afford rent? Groceries? Healthcare? Should have gone to college; then you'd have better job prospects, get paid more, and be able to afford to live a decent life. Oh, you went to college and still can't afford those things? Should have majored in something useful! Oh, you have a degree in engineering and/or computer science, but now you're in triple-figure debt and still can't afford the median standard of living? Should have gone into the trades! Oh, you're in the trades, and you're making squat, working terrible hours, it's wrrrrreeeeeeeccccccccking your body, you have no romantic prospects and have to rent a house in a crime-ridden exurb with a 2 hour commute to your job, living with five guys who are all addicted to sports betting, 85% refined over-the-counter THC supplements, and Wingstop? Should have gone to college! Circular logics like these abound in a tail-chasing charade strung up to obscure the realities of a collapsing society where individual choice and perception matter about as much in altering the trajectory of one's circumstances as a single tear spattering on a granite countertop has at punching through the stony facade like a bullet through a fiberboard disever. The duffers and sycophants who drag people for identifying the obvious impossibility of the current economy functioning in any harmonious manner are just like so many dull beasts- they enjoy being led around by the nose and only kick up a fuss when someone points out the omnipresent state of degradation we, they, everywhichway, live, breathe, and psychically suffocate under the weight of. If they had their way, the whole planet would be nothing but cattle, just like them. In fact, people like the ever-present, casually reductive casuists you encounter online give cattle a bad name. Cattle just want to chew cud and shit. While these cranks aren't much more sentient than their bovine counterparts, no cow will go out of its way to take a shit on your life like they will! And you know who else isn't going to go out of their way to spread sticky, nitrous-rich, chocolate frosting all over your proverbial windshield? Tokyo-based starchildren, Cattle. Now, the preamble to this here review is a specifically American web-based fable of woe, but, as I understand, Japan has its own cost of living crisis and its own economic difficulties, and I'm sure if you asked any averge ただの人 (after a long enough Duolingo streak) what kinds of chud-logic gets dumped on anyone in their country who blithely questions the status quo, you'd likely hear some real horror stories. But enough about the cattle in the comments sections, let's talk about the Cattle who matter- the ones who want to whisk you away on a sojourn of sound, rather than those who wish to drown you in the effluent of their brainrot. Cattle, self-determined and subtly fierce, are a shoegaze band that plays sugary, buzzsaw riffs, reverb-enhanced guitar-pop in the vein of Ringo Deathstarr, only more streamlined and with a better emphasis on hooks than atmosphere. Their 2019 LP Sweet Dream, Tender Light and Your Memory is their one and only full-length so far, and absolutely delivers on the jangly, joyous promise of their early EP, starting with 2015's Somehow Hears Songs through their split with Taiwan's Motorik released earlier the same year. Impressively, most of the lyrics are in English, painting wonderfully ambitious and softly relatable human portraits to accompany the beautifully fluttery texture of their delicately swollen and slightly bruised melodies, a gently persuasive and yet uncompromising direct orientation towards the more eloquent iterations of power-pop potentiality. The journey begins with the limber bow and balance of a My Blood Valentine-inspired slow-motion ricochet insulated in the confectious confessions parlayed by cotton-candy melodies and spiraling out in a gossamer blitz on "Shooting Star"; the fluid high-register guitar purr, cutting-clarion tones, and dreamy vibe of "Happy! Happy! Happy Valley!" plunges into a bath of pleasant recollections and playful enticements to seize the root of future fulfillment and ring it out over a waiting grail of ecstasy; later, the poshly textured, punk-tinted roller-rally "Boy Wanders" takes up restless grooves and coy grabs at spiny inflections in a natural, vigorous venture-lust, an undaunted excitement echoed on the reflective thunderstorm of fantasies that is "Sweet Dream"; finally, the group settles into a well-earned tranquil sendoff in the form of the patient, pining, and pillowey jangle-rock soundscapes of album closer "Wishing You All the Best for Today and the Days to Come." Life is seemingly defined by disappointment, fruitless struggle, and the callous disregard of others, but as long as you have music-music like Cattle's- you have a reason to greet each new day with a smile.

Pass, fail, or a secret third outcome (Testcard Records).

Interview: The Arrivals

If you could find something you love in your formative years and find a way to keep doing it for 30-plus years, wouldn't you? Not many people are so lucky, but Dave Marriman of Chicago punk pillars The Arrivals certainly is. He and his crew have been keeping steady and remaining reliably prescient all these years, and have recently (as of this spring) managed to release their 5th LP, Payload. You may wonder why it's been 16 years since their last album, Volatile Molotov, and the simple answer is that the timing just wasn't right, until it was... In Dave's own words, and summing up the ethos of the band, "If it's not fun, fuck it!" Truly an idiom to ideate on next time you find yourself running behind according to someone else's clock. They don't have any Chicago dates to celebrate the album release on the books yet, but when they do, you can bet I'll be there (and hope you will be too!). In the meantime, enjoy this conversation between Dave and me:

 

You can find Payload out on Recess Records here: 

Album Review: Blood of the Wolf - V:Indomitable

Chicago metal, underappreciated, yet undeterred. Despite receiving little to no love across the rest of this cursed land, the Second City is really second to none when it comes to spawning immensely visceral and bottom-buck-nasty musical marauders. Take blackened death metal project Blood of the Wolf, for instance. Every time they unveil a new record, it rolls off the proverbial press like a half-rendered and thoroughly shredded deer carcass plummeting onto the hood of your car from an overpass on the Dan Ryan- an ominous blast of boiling, flesh-withering blastbeats and peeling staccato riffage that is as outrightly threatening as it is cogently carnal- an externalization of a blood-starved beast's gnawing, insatiable hunger, poured through the siphon of the dialect of aural extremity. If you think you're in the mood for a band that will give you inner ear damage on a scale commensurate with an undersized detachment of lupine louts commandeering your auditory canals for their filthy pillaging and bloody contests of will, then look no further than last year's V: Indomitable- seemingly named as a promise, and executed with enmity. Blood's brand of death metal adheres closely to the playbooks of late '90s black metal practitioners Hate and Spearhead, delivering cruel waves of relentless, unsaturated percussion, with anguished and torturous guitar grooves, and volcanic vocal performances that could make the devil himself wet his tunic in panic. The production on this album is pretty much impeccable, and the mixing is balanced and smart, leaving nothing to be desired in terms of capturing the fire and fury of the band's performance. Inside you are two wolves, and they both cower, paler than sheep's wool in the shadow of this chord-churning, chaos-courting, canis-carnivorous beast. Indomitable, indeed. 

Album Review: Liai - Pastoral Stills From Every Age

A wrinkled evanescence. A chattering gem. Pearling curves which catch the light and curtail them into purple, blue, green, red, and yellow pinions. Frozen in an instant, iterative in plies, cascading in concentric columns, begging to have its rings counted- winnings pooled from serial adaptations and voyages to sunken substrates of voided eons. Echos of decaying echolons and the leer of dimming lights. The pulse of a flower's heartbeat, trapped in living, rippling, dripping resin, splashing outward like a tentative greeting before lapsing with a retreating sigh. Lives lived in the hollow of a windchime, warm breaths whistling between the pores, bodies like flutes, resonating with the vibrations of the atmosphere, finding a rhythm and keeping it a secret in the pocket of their lips. Tears droop and catch clarity, arching upwards towards the clouds, clear streams extending like grape vines, fanning out like peacock feathers, displayed with a humble triumph. A twinkling node collecting on a parched plot of flesh. A calm that blows in like a storm. All in a moment. Enclosed in a space, apeiron.

Album Review: Emma Aibara - u:phobia

Generally, escapism is viewed dimly in society- at least it was for our parents and older siblings. Now they do it too and just avoid conversations that tend to unearth the guilt they harbor while mired in a zombifying pool of blue light ever-present due to a screen addiction, or their mental absence while they cling to the tail of some projected fantasy of success or belonging, or emotional inaccessibility due to overcommitment to a hobby that might as well be a second career (but which doesn't pay the bills), or maybe they just have a good old-fashioned substance abuse conundrum, often, but not always, revolving around the compulsive consumption of some formerly sanctioned narcotic which now can be bought over the counter in exaggerated concentrations evidently cultivated to induce immediate psychological break in those who gulp them down. Everyone is running from something these days- bad economy, bad relationships, worsening prospects- but most of all, they're fleeing themselves, because in every bad situation, there is necessarily an observing subject whose conscious experience of it, and recognition of it, qualifies it as bad. And most people, being one of said people, like nearly everyone around them, can do shit all to make a difference on their own- where there is a fire that you can't put out, the most logical next step is to look for an exit, the nearest escape hatch, pry it open and drop out of sight. I don't know what Japanese, now ported to America, digital-sound artist Emma Aibara is ducking, cutting, and cantering to avoid, but I feel the angst and instinct to evade one's fate on her LP u:phobia like it was a knife pointed at my own throat. The synthesized heroine framed by the album, a projection of Aibara herself, is much like a partially formed butterfly struggling to free itself from the chamber of a cocoon that seems to be getting tighter, and more anaerobic the longer she gestates in its interior, and who runs the risk of being digested by the thieving stagnant ambiance of her crystalline cell- where it should be fortifying her future, it has become a straitjacket, repressing the exigency of her transformation. Flight is the only option, even on stunted and malformed wings, even where the key to one's salvation is tied to a kite of delusion; when the dilemma is survival or suffocation, escape is sine qua non. To that effect, sound serves as saving-grace: digital-hardcore grooves and loops collide in glancing scrapes off of cracked and shard-yielding percussion; long corridors of syncing effects suddenly shorten and invert their referential dimensions, leaving the listener uncertain as to the nadir and the direction in which gravity is compelling them; fae-formulated harmonizations narrowly evade being clipped by flourishes of shrapnel from caustically kaleidoscopic busts of acerbic beats; and overheated sequences scald and liquefy supple human hardware like a flash flow of magma carbonizing and dissolving the superfluous padding of the architecture of the soul's prison and allowing flitting pearls of internal light to squeeze through the open cracks and ascend heavenward. What shadows Emma Aibara is staying a heel and a jump ahead of is not clear from my vantage point, but I can see the crest of dawn illuminating the path before her. I know not where she is absconding, only that wherever she is headed, I want to be there too. I don't know what Japanese, now ported to America, digital-sound artist Emma Aibara is ducking, cutting, and cantering to avoid, but I feel the angst and instinct to evade one's fate on her LP u:phobia like it was a knife pointed at my own throat. The synthesized herione framed by the album, a projection of Aibara herself, is much like a partially formed butterfly struggling to free itself from the chamber of a cocoon that seems to be getting tighter, and more anaerobic the longer she gestates in its interior, and who runs the risk of being digested by the thieving stagnant ambiance of her crystalline cell- where it should be fortifying her future, it has become a straitjacket, repressing the exigency of her transformation. Flight is the only option, even on stunted and malformed wings, even where the key to one's salvation is tied to a kite of delusion; when the dilemma is survival or suffocation, escape is sine qua non. To that effect sound serves as savior, digital-hardcore riffs and loops collide in glancing scrapes off of cracked and shard-yielding percussion; long corridors of syncing effects suddenly shorten and invert their referencial dimentions, leaving the listener uncertain as to the nadir and the direction in which gravity is compelling them; fae-formulated harmonizations narrowly evade being clipped by flourishes of shrapnel from caustically kaleidoscopic busts of acerbic beats; and overheated sequences scald and liquefy supple human hardware like a flash flow of magma carbonizing and dissolving the soft superfluous junk of the architecture of the soul's prison and allowing flitting pearls of internal light to squeeze through the open cracks and ascend heavenward. What shadows Emma Aibara is staying a heel and a jump ahead of is not clear from my vantage point, but I can see the crest of dawn illuminating the path before her. I know not where she is absconding, only that wherever she is headed, I want to be there too.