Album Review: CT57 - Road to Nowhere

Hinted and gliped at on earlier releases, CT57's Road to Nowhere is the culmination of their ambient quintessentially quotidian aura mining. The lifeblood of the deep, dark arteries that spread in horizontally varicose planes of the logico-geography dimension of this continent's straining, fading providence, the subject of this album is the roaring silver beasts and their wakefully somnambulist handlers, who act as thankless red-blood cells circulating oxygen in a corpulent and ungrateful host. A faltering pulse of static and muffled engine groans, which overturns the solitude of the night with an eerily comforting hum that stretches like a blanket of sound over the sheltered and sand-blasted tresses of a world that is recognized only in passing. The cab buzzes like a knitting-circle of wasps, subsumed in ghostly transmissions from distant, similarly pressed compatriots and hungry points of terminus greedily awaiting longing to swallow the guts they pull in train. The road exhales in warm tones even in the dead of night, the friction of the tires defibrillating a mask of life into each pebble and grain it passes over. A midnight lullaby of deasil-odysseys, breathing cold solace into the depths of the day's shadowy twin, revealing secret societies and unknown passages, as they slip away in the endless stream of blind commerce. Delivery fulfillment without a guarantee of mortal fulfillment, lumbering through galleries of interstate-interstitials lit by a driving enterprise that only knows its next destination, but has yet to glimpse itself in the rearview mirror.   

Album Review: High. - Come Back Down

I'm writing this review entirely sober (unless you're like a Mormon or something and have hang-ups about caffeine). It's not a usual state for me to be composing in. I generally confine my drunkenness/ inebriatedness/baka-bacchanalness to the weekends. Which is why I'm listening to music nearly as often as my schedule allows. For me (and presumably others, presumably you), when a song hits right, it's better than a drug- it's an entirely distinct level of euphoria. New Jersey's High. certainly is helping me stay hitched to the dragon's tail at the moment with their EP Come Back Down. A series of highs that will keep you low and lows that drag you down a drainage vent, like you foolishly accepted a solicitation from a sewer-dwelling clown, who, rather than eat you, wants to sequester you and interrogate you for your impressions on where his life went wrong. As if they've been struck by a vengeful clap of lightning, the internal temperature of High.'s calamity-chasing, Vans voyeurism is like that of a cracked pressure cooker- boiling with an irrepressible yearning and an unrequited expectancy that builds and surges on each track in a fated eruption of kitchen decor, obliterating catharsis. Through the cracks in the wall carved by the swelling distension of their distortive feedback-blossoms and the raking lacerate of the reverb extending from the dusky spindle of their grooves, you can almost glimpse the golden preserve of untarnished tenderness which vocalist Christian Castan is attempting to reach with the misty keen and the chest-emptying sigh of his lament. Come Back Down will bury you in heavy moods while delivering the type of high that you'll need an excavator to free yourself from- if that's even what you desire... 

Throwing you a bone (Kanine Records).

Album Review: Ghost Mountain - October Country

There is a Chinese legend harkening back to the 3rd Century BCE of a man who dies working on the construction of the Great Wall during winter due to a lack of warm clothes and general exhaustion. His wife, not having heard the news of his passing, travels over rivers and mountains to bring him winter clothes, only to find that he had died before she arrived. Unable to locate where his body is buried, she begins to wail with such tremendous, weighty sorrow that it causes a section of the wall to collapse, revealing where her husband's bones have been laid. There is a haunting resonance of poetic angst to this tail that ricochets like a solemn rale through Ghost Mountain's solo release, October Country- a recognition of loss as a scrying prism through which we discover what treasures bind our souls, as well as the motivation to recover them, or the decrement to leave them in the depths of the grave. Here we find Wren Kosinski pricking his fingers and allowing the crimson runoff of his essence to trickle like ruddy, gory glops of wax over crumbling epitaphs and mingling with the crematorial soot of long extinguished funeral pyres, gathering the grieving wisdom of a thousand past lives to form a seal of approbation upon the bleached white envelope containing the sum of his contritions, destined to be burnt in a ritual to liberate the shades of his dissociative withdrawal and replenish the soil of his own absolution- like a self-immolating wickerman. A chilling tale of reclaiming oneself from absolute spiritual poverty and self-denial, one that casts a merciful corpse-like pallor over one's personage as we enter the open-air oven of these blistering summer days. 

Album Review: Bereft - Lands

Blackened sludge metal out of Madison, WI to give voice to a once sacred, now defiled and ravaged terrain, Bereft play a deeply atmospheric hybrid of black metal and sludge metal, placing them in a uniquely crushing category of extreme metal with other chimeric monstrosities like Stone Titan and Chicago’s own Lord Mantis (circa their 2017 LP Lands- the subject of this write up). Think Agalloch meets Baroness, with all the aspirational and uplifting parts sucked out and replaced by earth-cracking, tarry guitar dirges and despair-inducing primal howls. This is bleak, acerbic, and enveloping metal music that is as compelling as it is desolate... and it’s pretty fackin' desolate. Lands is Bereft’s second album and first with Prosthetic Records. Brace yourself for the leviathanic “We Wept” with its lumbering, impossibly heavy bass which collides with knotted guitar dirges under pained howls and other vocal lamentations before exploding into a fury of tremolo-picking and ruthless blast beats, “The Ritual” which leads in with Agalloch-esc ambient guitars before unfurling into weighty funeral march with an ever-quickening tempo which ramps up into a tug-of-war between swampy mid-tempo chords and a dissonant stomp of blast beats and demonic guitars, and (lastly) the devastating fourteen minute closer, “Waning Light” with its gargantuan, rolling riffs that produce the auditory sensation of being swallowed in the yawning mow of a tremor with brief reprieves of rippling ethereal guitars to break the filthy, clausterphobic tension. This land isn't your land, this land isn't my land, this land belongs to the dead. 

We can rebuild your record collection... make it better, faster, stronger, and heavy as fuck (Prosthetic Records)

Album Review: Lowe Cellar - TAGU

I always appreciate it when post-hardcore bands approach each song like it's an abstract art piece, and that's where I think Seattle's Lowe Cellar is coming from on their LP, TAGU. Every lyric, every riff, and each gripping groove is meant to exhaust your interpretive dexterity and pull you into a resonant headspace with as much depth to be explored as the Earth's Lithosphere. Lowe Cellar often sounds potent and dire without giving way to overt aggression or tipping the scales into sheer chaos, preferring to build elaborate continuities of tension with unexpected payoffs that are as sweetly melancholy as an unturned sundae left out in the rain. While maintaining a protracted distance from direct expressions of mood and social observances, they meticulously nurture a ripe intellectual peat from which elucidatory explorations may blossom- they can really write a hook too! As much as Lowe Cellar take after hyper-expressive and adventurous emo bands and burning-heart Prometheans like Cursive and mewithoutYou, there is also a playful elasticity to them that I would hazard to attribute to some preoccupation with Built to Spill, as well as a fundamental pop orientation that is roughly aligned with '90s indie jangle jockeys like The Posies and Velvet Crush. That is to say, that as much as these guys get into their own heads on this record (and help you draw into your own), they never shrink so far away from the light of accessibility that they eschew enjoyability for the purely evokative. 

Not as much of a pariah as you'd think (Outcast Tapes Infirmary).

Album Review: Batuqueiros e Sua Gente with Douglas Germano - Partido Alto

It's getting to feel more and more like summer in my zone of the Midwest, and it's got me in the mood for some samba- particularly singer and composer Douglas Germano's 2021 collaboration with Batuqueiros e Sua Gente, literally titled after the style of samba to be found on their record, ie Partido Alto. It's generally a nectarous ensemble of spritely and spiritedly animated tracks characterized by bustling rhythms, cavorting percussion lines, trading call-and-response melodic choral cues, and the overwhelming sense that you've just stumbled upon the most fabulous block party of your otherwise parochial existence. From what I understand, the record is felicitous in its reproduction of the styles of samba that were popularized in Brazil during the '70s, but I wouldn't have known that just from hearing the record, as it feels very fresh and unburdened by nostalgia or any covetousness for a bygone era, instead representing a fashionaly conscious if almost timeless party record, steeped in the culture and dignified history of Latin America as it manifests in the modern day. That's more or less what you want from a record like Partico Alto, honestly- something that you can listen to anytime, and every time feels just as rich as the first. 

Album Review: Cime - The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble

When it comes to punk-jazz hybrids, the obvious and best example that comes to mind is Naked City. However, I wouldn't make this comparison to California's Cime too hastily. Not because I don't think the latter isn't of the same caliber or quality but due, in my opinion, to Cime representing an entirely different approach to the concept at its core- for starters, I don't think Naked City ever bore their souls on any record like Cime does on The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble (despite what you might think based on their name). The lyrics on Cime's six track LP (and before you say to yourself, "Six tracks? Is that really an LP?," note that the full runtime is 56 minutes in length), are delivered in such a raw and unfiltered manner that you'd swear they were peeled from vocalist Monty Cime's spirit like loose pieces of birch bark, before combusting on the heft of their breath like a burnt offering. The declining state of the American polity- spiritually, psychologically, morally, and artistically- is raised like the rifles of a firing squad whose imminent volley- daily indignities, constant scams, the raising of false idols, and general hostility to group's self-evident queerness- are reconciled by the band as inevitable, even if unjust, and acknowledged in light of faith in the fact that a broken body does not make a broken spirit. What's remarkable about the Cime Ensemble on this record, is not necessarily how they articulate their pain, but rather the joy that is expressed in the face of such destructive reverberations- a facet that unequivocally qualifies them as unique amongst punk-jazz hybrids, is that the focal points of dissonance and despair are communicated topically, while the real flesh of the compositions- drawing from traditions of Latin, fusion, lounge, and even some classically baroque genera of the jazz form- commit to a jubilee of transformative triumph, recasting the strife they feel into a bountiful current of ebullience. In rising to the challenges of this era with such elation, the group proves that you can only be brought as low as you yourself allow your spirit to be corrupted by the fallen state of your surroundings. 

Reach for the Skyline. 

Album Review: Benjamin Lee Farley - The Stalker

This may be one of the most underground artists I've written about.* Benjamin has a lot going on, mostly in his head,**  allowing his naturally abundant discharge of nervous energy to cascade over the layered plateaus of technical expertise traumatic experinces he's cultivated over a twenty-year career** (that only seems to be accelerating****) to finally manifest into a self-titled exhibition- a solo album, he's dubbed The Stalker. The title is fitting, given the densely claustrophobic atmosphere of the record, as well as the sort of agitated paranoia it projects, almost as if it is mirroring some psychic battle with a vicious, unseen force lurking on the opposite side of the clairvoyant curtain that separates our conscious reality from a maelstrom of negative energy. His fits and righteous screeds on this album kick up a whole lot of dust to the tune of crooked, junk-yard rhythms, jagged jangle-pop grooves, and raw, barbed, and bendy guitar chords that alternate texturally between that of close shave with an aluminum knife and a large bird tangled in a net of sparking telephone wires. The whole thing comes together like the chemically burned son of Mojo Nixon renting space on the 13th Floor of a municipally condemned Byrd-house and surviving on an exclusive diet of canned Beefhearts and Chocolate Watchbands - there is a bit of Zeppelin in there too, if you're listening for it as well. It's a wild listen as far as contemporary garage rock records go, and I respect the hell out of it- something I say freely, and of my own volition, and not because I'm afraid that Benjamin may be hiding in my bedroom closet, ready to karate chop me in the neck if I said otherwise.****

* Judged purely on the number of Spotify listeners this project has, which as of this writing is exactly 0.

** You could even say that Benjamin has be'n jamin' for over two decades... 

** He's been diagnosed as bipolar and also has schizophrenia. 

*** He has released 50 albums in the last 5 years under various project names. 

**** All joking aside, this is a sincere opinion. This is a fascinating and fun record. 

Album Review: Pink Must - Pink Must

I think the guitar line from the opening track "Morphe Sun" off Pink Must's self-titled LP rearranged my DNA somehow. I've always enjoyed tight, reedy riffs that follow a bendy melody, but this particular set of chords carved me up like CRISPR etching a new flavor into an otherwise bland strain of peaches. It made me feel very pliable and ready for what came next. That's the thing about Pink Must; there is a delicious softness that draws a reciprocal, sympathetic squishiness from the listener. You can feel them molding to your mood, as you, in turn, are shaped by their complementing presence. I think this has a lot to do with the way that they bridge musical forms while embellishing the natural fondament of the combined forms they've elected to experiment with. They have a penchant for baroque string arrangements that cut into and congeal with playfully pocket-sized triphop beats, often with a crunch layer of bubblegum-pop chord-crackle spread between. In addition, the languid melodicism and eletocnic enhancment of the vocals has this elastic longitude to it, where it feels very close and determinately distant at the same interval, causing you to always feel like you are traveling with the music, being carried by its movement and passage to destinations both anticipated and unknow, like your a lucky, dog-eared Pokémon card in the singer's back pocket. It's the gentlist headtrip this side of a warm bowl of kava root. I don't see Pink Must's LP as just suggested listening in 2025; it's a (Pink) must hear! 

Down but not out (15 Love).

Album Review: Junkbreed - Cheap Composure

Portugal's Junkbreed intrigued me when I encountered them back in '21 when their debut Music for Cool Kids dropped in my lap while writing covering metal for a rock magazine. I dug that they were a European group with a bit of a sense of humor, who seemed to be leaning into the renaissance of "junk" culture going on at the time- playing nu-metal adjacent post-hardcore with rap-rock elements and even going so far as slapping a Yolandi Visser look a like on their cover. Fittingly, their vocalist Miranda sounds little like Casey Chaos of Amen trying his hand at some more graceful melodic aggression ala Cedric Bixler-Zavala- a fact that helps cement the "California Babylon" themes sprouting from the lyrics, which often present their subjects as badly negotiating with their circumstances with the aid of drugs, deception (self-and-otherwise), and general delusional thinking. I mean, they're called Junkbreed, is it any wonder that they're mostly going to write about "garbage people"? Cheap Composure is the group's second release, a seemingly transitional EP that keeps a lot of the energy and themes from their first LP alive, while making the leap from more groove metal territory to approach more contemporary hardcore by beefing up the buzzy energy and a putting a greater focus on riffs as a complement to the vocal melodies. It's really amazing how close they come to sounding like Turnstile in some parts of this record, especially when they jump into the "run-you-down-grooves" of "To the Lions," which make you feel like you're being pursued by a pack of wild dogs. They haven't totally nixed their roots though, opener "Dipsonamaniac" has a topsy-turvy, Faith No More-esque bombast to it, while "Automatic Drills" sounds like Converge wringing all the adrenaline they can out of messianic iguana, and "Casual Anger" slaps and bullies its way through a Botch'd batch of Scratch Acid. How the band plans to follow up their latest act, I couldn't say, but I do know it's going to be tough keeping my composure while I wait to find out. 

Album Review: fangface - thank your lucky stars

Breaking: Florida duo from Gainesville decode that city's decades-deep tradition of cranking out catchy garage rock and pop-punk and re-upload it with a fresh chiptune-emo patch. That's it. That's my take. That's what Fangface has accomplished on their EP thank your lucky stars, and while it might seem rather matter of fact, I still think it's worth celebrating. Sometimes the heartbreak we experience, or recall from our years of indiscretion, are best reconstructed in a sonic grotto, one with the texture of well-loved, plushy zoological specimens and dotted with spongy input switches reminiscent of turn of the century consumer electronic devices- a safe place of reflection where one can bounce off the walls without risking life, limb, or lasting emotional damage and it's the belly from which Fangface is disgorged. The group cracks the shell of their hermitage and releases the fresh gasp of "Anti-Trust" as the EP's opener, a rattly review of lost confidence that sounds like a musical genie attempting to jam its way out of a Gameboy Color while it reconciles past mistakes and squandered boons of faith. Continuing in this rough but generally rock-oriented vein, the next track "what would i know?" is a beautiful, if desperately humble tumult, followed by the cuttingly emotive and claustrophobic melodic fray of "ouroboros" and the dislocated down-tempo groove kit of "nail polish remover." Diving one level deeper, the group permits themselves room to articulate their more progressive songwriting tendencies, starting with "revolutionary," a rebounding expedition that sees them climbing to the heights of basement pop excellence as well as diving into the deep coves of the low-resolution digital underground in search of forgotten treasures and discarded sympathies. The final two tracks represent a refractory cool off, blitzing through the buzzy turmoil and sizzly sting of the first half of "cigarette burns (death of the author)" to then transitioning into a course put comforting confluence of melodies that tranquility floats a cranial collapse and outburst of poetics which rolls neatly into the closing, self-titled track.  No matter how persistent the heartache, you can thank your lucky stars that fangface is there to match the bitter tempo, beat for beat. 

Album Review: Harper Kill - A Taste of Harper Kill

Harper Kill Ichiban! Their debut EP, A Taste of..., first-press you could even say, is as smooth and refreshing as they come. Hailing from Grand Rapids (and Illinois, because why not have band practice over Zoom- it's the 21st Century for crying outloud!), Haper Kill are one of those bands who can drop a hook that immediately sinks about three inches into the folds of your frontal lobe and makes a home there, burrowing in like a little musical badger, until you either call a doctor to cut it out with a laser, or learn to live with it homsteading on the curveture of your cortex. I'm in the latter camp because after cohabitating with A Taste of... for about a year, I'm starting to wonder what my life was like before it got its catchy little claws into me. For such a young group, they've already coalesced into a very dependable and practiced, classic sorta punk sound- one that gives off unmistakable notes and nods to their influences, without deluding their own distinctive flavor. Take "Death and Taxes," whose churny, buzz-saw surge and anxious circleback approach to building up hooky payoffs obviously couldn't have existed without Green Day having blazed the way for this particular kind of slacker-germinated melody stacking decades prior- still, the actual construction of the song and its premise (praying for death so that you can finally relax and escape the crushing debts and overbearing burdens of modern life) rests on a very sturdy sonic substratum one that is pinned in place by a wry dynamic that is both bitterly earnest and tenderly ironic. Similarly, you could pick up on some Bouncing Souls-esque melo-core croon and riff pile-ups on "Chinese Restaurant," but accompanied by a satirical drag that rolls back the tempo, allowing the riffs and punishment-magnet lyrics to punch well above their assigned weight class. Then there is the sensibly tender drift of the unrequited anguish-bomb "I Swear," the nervy and defiant skate-a'billy bombing run of "Daguerreotype," and whimsical and harsh, power-pop bubble-burster "BLOAT" to cap things off. The whole album has the vibe of a definitive Gilman St band but with the buff-and-scruff of downtrodden midwestern charm that polishes well-worn conventions into genuine rock gems. Just A Taste of Harper Kill is all you need to know that you need more!  

Speakermaxxx('d)/The Tape Deck Below (Outcast Tape Infirmary)

Album Review: Asian Glow - 11100011

I had initially resisted listening to Asian Glow until this year, when the hype became essentially unavoidable. The main reason was their name. For a Korean artist to christen themselves Asian Glow felt somewhat ridiculous and reductive to me, and I didn't want to dignify it. Really, imagine if I started a band and went around calling myself "Celtic Neon," or "White Lumen," or "Western Filament ," or... Actually- all those go pretty hard. Hmm.... kind of wrote myself into a corner here, didn't I? Whatever, the lesson is: never judge a book by its cover. To that point, if there were ever an artist who was more than they appeared on the surface, sonically at least, it would be Asian Glow (known on the street as Shin Gyeongwon). Far beyond any binary or restrictive procedural output, their latest album 11100011 embodies an approach to shoegaze, noise, and emo that drastically exceeds the imagination of their peers, both at home and abroad (except possibly Weatherday, with whom they mingled their talents to make an EP in '22). For example, tracks like "Feel All the Time" are suffused with a heavy sort of electricity that tints the air and discolor it with tension, like the atmosphere on a muggy summer day just before a big storm, it comes pouring out of the speakers like a Biblical flood and there is no way of packing it back in to avoid drowning in its afflicted, neo-romantic discharge- you just have to let it take you. This weighty pulsation of cloudbursting potential is reflected in the pained and unrequited ebb of that track's rhythms and the anguished flow of its lyrics, which seem to usher forth through shellacking eyewalls of composure bracketed by a partially camouflaged, but overall keening disquietude. This cool, phantasmagoric swelter also beautifully binds together the disparate traces of the gothic-leaning "Jitnunkebi (Winter's Song)," securing into a singular continuity a rich, glistening fabric of baroque pop, vampy Italian psychedelics, and tortured third-wave emo grandure into a neon redux of something like the Black Parade. Subtlety isn't necessarily the key to what Asain Glow accomplishes on this album, as much as their triumphs are manifest in the total integration of disparate signifiers, presenting the opportunity for the strange to marry the ordinary in a kismet of cross-pollinated chaos- like when a bounding twinkle-hook takes on the quality of an MBV-esque brainpeeling feedback ripple subsequent to a saturated and smoke-choked Manners-era Passion Pit riff on "Out of Time." Other analogous and admirable amalgamations can be located on none-other-than the title track, where a maladjusted indie groove tarantellas in a stop-start wincing progression as if stumbling through a dancefloor full of thumbtacks while wax sculptures of Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser of MGMT burn in the background, as well as the gorgeous conflagration of "Camel8strike," which sounds like Cocteau Twins melding with Team Sleep as they molt and become reborn like a two-headed phoenix in the pit of a haunted and abandoned LA recording studio, set ablaze by faulty wiring coming into contact with a capsized liter of Coca-Cola. There appears to be even more below the surface on 11100011 that I could hope to cover in a review even three times as long as this one is at present. That's alright. If I can pique your interest enough for you to give 11100011 a spin, then I've done my job. The album is a magnificent enigma, waiting in a state of troubled magnanimity to be decoded by an open ear concomitant with an open mind. 

Interview: Andy Loebs

Andy Loebs is the first goocore artist I've interviewed for this blog's podcast (but hopefully not the last). I'm very smitten by the luster of his incredibly imaginative and dream-like productions and it was very cool to finally have a chance to talk with him about his process and his latest album Cercopithecoid (SIR-koh-pi-THEE-koyd). It is out on Orange Milk, the gooey-ist label of them all. Check out our convo below: 

Listen to Cercopithecoid:

 

Album Review: The Sword - Used Future

Bluesy, denim-shrouded, intergalactic mercenaries The Sword are on a planet-hopping crusade to boldly go where many machismo rockers the likes of ZZ Top, Thin Lizzy, and Blue Cheer have totally been before, but maybe with less dark irony. Armed for the voyage with a stockpile of industrial-grade glowing alien ganja, a traveling black tie caller full of Southern Comfort, and a thrifted library's worth of maliciously annotated, dog-eared Philip K. Dick paperbacks for the trip, they're bronco busting the outer limits of our star system looking for a good time, or at least a place that isn't lousy with Daleks and dick-noses. Used Future (shorthand for the gritty, lived-in, futuristic aesthetic of 70's classics like Star Wars and Alien) is the sixth album from these Austin space-junkies to deliberately crash-land into some seriously cushy, laid-back vibes. You will be hard-pressed to find a more immediately digestible, effortlessly exotic blend of southern rock, sludge metal, and mystic psychedelia this side of Andromeda. With environmental degradation, xenophobia, and late capitalism pushing civilization as we know it to the brink, the future seems bleak, but with a soundtrack like this, it still might be a place we can call home. The Sword doesn't have all the answers, but they're game to let you hitch a hike on the fin of their rocket as they cruise the cosmos.

Razor & Tie, don't leave you home planet without them you dapper devil, you. 

Album Review: Alsarah & the Nubatones - Seasons of the Road

Alsarah & the Nubatones has been around for more than 10 years, elegantly matching North African music with a lively cross-stitching of neo-soul and R'nB- unsealing the potential that this harmonious integration contains to embody history and the patterns of global migration. Seasons of the Road is the group's third LP, and likely takes its name from the constant state of motion through which the well-traveled and tour-forged crew has earned their reputation. It may also reference the sense of alienation that being witness to a world that is unremittingly committed to tremendous acts of violence can engender in a person not yet ready to forsake their humanity. When horror is commonplace, living with a feeling of placelessness inevitably becomes normal. While Alasarah's resplendent vocal prowess and fluid sense of melody, and the band's overall accomplished sense of rhythm and composition, can, and often does, lend itself to some extraordinarily intriguing and accessible acoustic folk hybrids, the fact that they're willing to embrace a kind of futurist outlook to their radiantly retro style makes each listen that much more engrossing- almost like your encountering a backdoor into an alternative past, one that is more abundant and gracious than our own- an envelope of possibility where brutality of the present was not inevitable. "Fa3el Fi Eldawam" begins the album with a suitably restless rhythm and poly-percussive pastiche of caravan craft, which moves in consonance with Alasarah's wondering, plaintive bawl. "Bye Bye" is more stripped-back and playful, ridding a reticent, shuddering chord progression on a star-catching offering to the seizing draw of spellbound devotion. "Disco Star" feels like a nomadic astral march through a needle's eye of chance and determination, while the evocative textures of "Tendo" feel like being baptized in the ocean. There will always be rough road ahead, not just a season, but a whole lifetime, and when conditions are inhospitable underfoot, something lovely in your ears can be a balm for the pain of our pilgrimage.

Album Review: Jr. Thomas & The Volcanos - Rockstone

Since reviewing JER's Bothered / Unbothered earlier this year, I've dispelled the curse of nerves that had been put up to barricade me against enjoying ska and raggae and have started to revisit some semi-recent favorites, such as 2018's Rockstone, the sophomore LP from Minnesota-born reggae artist, Jr. Thomas, aka Thomas McDowall. The project got its start when Thomas joined forces with former Aggrolites guitarist Brian Dixon with the intention of creating a tribute to the classic, honey-toned reggae of artists like Jimmy Cliff. The title Rockstone is a reference to the fact that we memorialize things we adore in stone so that they last long after we are gone. Hence, the album is a love letter to not just Jamaican music, but also Thomas’ wife, family, friends, and band mates, a tribute to humanity’s boundless capacity for love and drive towards unity. “True love,” as Thomas notes, “cannot be defeated.” A good entry point to this album is “What A Shame” with its warm organ-led melodies, skipping syncopation, and heartfelt vibe. “Til You’re Gone” has a earnestly smitten doo wap feel, while “Rockstone” is a monumentally subdued close-dancing lullaby, and “Second Time Around” is a perfectly balanced slow-jam that could easily pass for a hot Maytals single circa ’68. Rockstone, it's as stready as they come. 

Available via Colemine Records (Not Coalmine Records. Can you imagine a record label going by Coalmine in 2025. Cringe. smdh.)

Album Review: No Problemo! - Year Of The Frog

More Michicagn emo! That's what I need at the moment, and No Problemo! (out of Lansing), wet behind the ears, and with a Spanish 101 under the bench-seat in their van, are fit and decorously determined to deliver. Year Of The Frog is the group's debut EP, hopping up to snag the spotlight a full 6 years after the band formed as a result of a friendship kindled on r/emo.* Their six-song seminar on living your best life, vengefully, and spitefully, online and otherwise, is light enough in tone to float on a lily pad without sinking into the mire below, remaining buoyant while not neglecting substance in terms of lyrics and managing to supply some incredibly crunchy riffs, all of which crinkle and pop deliciously, like deep fried bullfrog served up as the premier repas at a greasy French eatery. The gang gets twinkly on the ruefully optimistic opener "Gas Station Joe Jonas" and follows it up with the slingblade guitar sway of "r/Emo Drive," a quiver of cyanide-laced best wishes unleashed to rain down on a deserving pariah (or just some subreddit mod). The rhythmic interplay on "On My Glob" is easy to get tangled up in, even while the vocals steep you in a dint of bile and top-shelf vinegar. The chaotic energy of the prior track is a fair counterweight to the grungy, second-stringer angst and pushy reverie of growing pains embodied by the simply titled "MVP." The penultimate number, "twitter is a beautiful place & i am no longer afraid to die" is nothing if not grandiose- following a brief prolog of spoken word poetry it confronts the listner like an emphany upon realizing that they've been stood up on a date, causing a whole universe of aniscedents to converse on a single painful point of clarity, while managing to wind us up perfectly for the bubbly, down-and-out closer, "Mr. Pibb Ain't Quite Flyin' Off The Shelves, Todd," a track which match the vehemence of it predecessor as it hauls ass all the way back to twinkle-town, a return to the starting line of the EP that nips at its own toes, demonstrating the band's flexibility one last time by tying the album into a proper emoroboros. 

* Surprisingly, this is not a more common origin story. That said, there is more to life than updoots. 

Album Review: Provoker - Dark Angel EP

Provoker is such a strange creature to me. The LA group replicates cyber-punk aesthetics to package downtempo pop and R'nB, which always seems to be in the process of sinking into its own shadow, like a prehistoric tiger proudly drowning in a tar pit. They remind me a lot of The Weeknd if he sobered up and hired Drab Majesty to back him up on an album. I'm obviously not put off by the group's more accessible inclinations, but what keeps me coming back to their records is the subtly alien and arrestingly rawboned quality of their grooves, especially the guitar work, which has this ugly and lonesome jilt to it, like its violently shrugging away from a reassuring hand on its shoulder or some similar extension of human warmth. Their 2018 debut EP Dark Angel is particularly good at giving this wanton sort of cold shoulder to the listener. Opener "Flinch Awake" is a drizzly veil of nightmare-gaze, whose clawing chord progressions absolutely give the impression that you are being stalked through the entirety of its run time. Much later, the possessive closer "Body Vehicle" revels in an oppressive sort of sodden angst, like someone had seeded a cloud with annotated sheet music transcribed from The Cure's early-80s oeuvre, and now it's pouring buckets of melanocytic acidic tears all down our backs. Then there is the title track, which begins by writhing with stark and sinister assurance before settling into a plaintive, heart-breaking dalliance while bladed riffs pierce its back and sides like the proverbial Saint Sebastian- a martyr for its ill-fated passions. Provoker still has a lot to offer these days, but they really tapped into something dire and divine on Dark Angel. 

Album Review: JJ Sweetheart - Big Things

Time for some wholesome woodland jams, from a guy who lives in *checks browser tab* ... Minneapolis! .... I mean, suuuuuure... why the hell not- Minnesota is a very forested state and I could imagine myself needing to live out a scene or two from Gary Paulsen's Hatchet if I ventured farther than a minute off a paved road there, so screw it, everybody who lives there is a basically a druid as far as I'm concerned. Including JJ Sweetheat, a decidedly modern sort of persona, but one with enough grit under his nails and sifted into his aesthetics that you'd swear he spent just about every night with nothing but his own hot breath between him and the open, starry sky. Big Things is JJ's conspicuously titled debut EP where he serenades your innocent ears with an ashy style of campfire-huddling wyrd folk that echos and wails like a diminutive cyclone rising like a dancing prophet from the hollow of a dead tree. "This World" welcomes you into JJ's realm of dusted soles and dusky dances, escaping the press of urbania with drops of electric-country guitars and the insistent, hypno-viper rattle of tambourine percussion. Next "Feral Feelings" draws you further into the updraft of his psychedelic bonfire with its darkly dreamy affect, where you are then tossed up and spun like a dandelion pappus on a cool September current on the mortius-minded fluster-tumble "Too the Grave." The spicy-sweet stroll of "Cinnamon" is wound around a cluster of suitably sticky hooks and gooey guitar rips, while closer "Heart Medal" is a delightfully overheated but subtly starting evaporation point from which JJ can make his exit into the dark night air like smoke escaping a dying ember. You can lose your map, lose your shoes, even lose your mind, but as long as you keep your ears open to Big Things, you'll never be totally lost. 

Album Review: Sacred Monster - Worship the Weird

Worship the Weird is the debut album* from Chicago doom metal band, Sacred Monster (from 2019, a very popular year for rehashing stalwart tales of cosmic horror for whatever reason). They perform a muscular blues-riff anchored interpretation of classic NWOBHM and doom grooves ala Pentagram, with vocals that run the gambit of strained reptilian cries interspersed with the clean ring of King Diamond-esque salvos. The contents of their songs are mostly homages to classic horror and sci-fi, presented with an appropriate measure of Cryptkeeper camp. Like the stomping Twilight Zone tribute "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," the uncanny Clutch-worshiping stutter-groove retelling of an '80s cult-classic "Re-Animator," and the superb, pugnacious knuckle-duster and Dark Tower homage "Face of My Father." The vampy-er tracks tell original stories, with "The Wraith," depicting a story of revenge from beyond the grave with a burning Orange Goblin-esque bridge, and the epic Candlemass-meets-King Diamond haunted asylum tour of "Waverly Hills." Embrace your weirder side and give this a spin.

Find more adherents of the dark arts from Ordo MCM.

*... and the last album too. The group disbanded in 2022. Another metal ulogy. It seems I've been writing a lot of these lately... 

Album Review: Dött ljus - Bottna

Bottna is the Slowcraft Records debut of Stockholm electronic duo Johan Kisro and Petter Lindhagen, known to us as Dött ljus (if you know any Swedish, this is your chance to turn to a friend, who is presumably reading this review simultaneously with you, in the same room, and tell them, "'Hey, Dött ljus' means Dead Light in Swedish," which I am positive will impress them and make them feel more warmly about you as a friend).* Bottna is a brief but impactful listen, submerging its audience in abidingly subtle textures and generously affected moods, that amasss in a gentile swell of nostalgia-priming motifs, as if the chain of memories that laces the quotidian turns of your life into a cognisant pattern were to materialize into a clear, babbling brook, which covers and rushes over you, wetting your face and hands like a baptismal font while eroding the grief and rueful dolor that weighs you to pitted, the sandy bed where your body is stretched prone. Sharp, interposed, and intently articulated beats tickle your ears like the nipping claws of hermit crabs come to whisper a lonesome tale to you in your sleep, accompanied by the soft clattering music of their shifting shells. Breathing sonic architecture contorts and molts like a chrysalis paroling its delicate ward into the catching breeze, while birds comprised of insulated copper and painted aluminum scourer for scraps of tinted vinyl and strips of celluloid to bump up the Boho of the nest they've made in an weathered and sagging willow tree they share with a family of kodama. There is no ceiling to the heights of experience which Bottna contains, only a bedrock of vivid, transformative sound. 

Take it slow. Slowcraft Records.

*If you don't know any Swedish, then I am that friend to you. You're welcome. 

Interview: Pete Min of Colorfield Records

I've been a fan of Pete's work with artists since the start of this blog. His work with Colorfield Records is completely in line with the ethos of my own blog, and in encountering his discography, it made me realize that I am not alone in championing the deserving but underrecognized talent of the world. He gives session musicians and unsung studio heroes a chance to really test their limits and craft music that is challenging to make but easy to enjoy. There are far too few people doing what Pete is doing, but the world is made much more interesting due to his efforts. Check out the interview below: 

Featured in this interview is music from Nicole McCabe's recent Colorfield Records release, A Song To Sing. Check it out here: 

This episode is, in part, dedicated to the great George Lowe, one of the greatest comedic voice actors of all time. Leaving us far too soon, he's returned to his home (Cartoon) planet for a well-deserved rest. RIP (1957-2025)