Interview: Cheem

Photo by Abby Clare

Cheem may be the best band in the world. There really isn't even a contest. Hardworking, original, and friendly af, they're the complete package for any DIY devotees/appreciators/aficionados who recall the intoxicating blend of rock, rap, rap-rock, Swedish-penned mega-pop-hits, and hardcore electronic beats that suffused the flavorful yet perplexingly complex and layered braise of popular music in the late '90s and early '00s- all the stuff that ended up getting exiled to the back of the freezer known as MTV2 and later completely off the table and onto compost heap of MySpace after 2005. Their sound harkens back to a time when there was greater permeability between the underground and what we could deem the mainstream, and in modernizing this sonic mesh of synecdoches and loose ends into a coherent vision that is recognizable and embraced by contemporary fans of underground music, they fill a niche in today's scene that nobody else can. Hopefully, the love they inspire will lift the group to the heights of fame and success that the inspiration and ambition of their sound prophesies as practically inevitable. And if you weren't there when Incubus, Linkin Park, Savage Garden, and the like were churning out singles and iconic, high-concept, top-tier videos, then Cheem can serve as the elder sibling you never had, introducing you to the sounds and styles of decades past and priming you to embrace the next big thing as it comes around the bend- which, in this case, just so happens to be Cheem themselves, and their latest LP, Power Move. Power Move is a follow-up to their breakout LP Guilty Pleasure, a tour de force covered positively on this very blog (and other publications of lesser cultural impact as well), whose momentum is retained and magnified on this latest release. From the vibrant, scratch-textured, and concussive internal tug-of-war of opener "Pivot," to the bust-out and build-up-the-break-down, skate-groove slap of "Gorrilla Glue," to the vaporwave-infused, Caribbean-spiced splash of "Quench," there is nary a dull moment or an inspired idea that goes unrealized on Power Move. Even though the band is currently on tour, vocalist/guitarist/scratch master Skye Holden still found time to parse some interrogatories that I slid his way, and you can read his responses below.

 

Let's set the stage- what does the journey from Guilty Pleasure to Power Move look like? 

We were working on Power Move since before Guilty Pleasure even dropped, the first full band recordings of songs like "Quench" and "Octane" were done in 2021 and a few elements from those sessions did end up making it into the final album.  Aside from that, we tried to stay consistent while working on such a big project behind the scenes so we dropped two EPs, Fast Fashion and Faster Fashion.  We were not expecting them to get so much traction but thanks to that we ended up being in a really good spot to drop a record after a stint of social media success in early 2025.  We kinda expedited the record release for that reason and went in on finishing it.

Why was Power Move selected as the title for your latest release?

The original record was 18 tracks, and that's the version that is being released as Power Move: Victory Lap.  Dropping a statement like that is a power move, in our opinion.  Especially with the range we were trying to showcase across all the songs.

"Pivot" is such an amazing way to start out this album. What is the story behind it? 

"Pivot" was the last song written for the album, it almost didn't make it in time but it was so good I pushed for it to make the tracklist.  It's a song about a relationship becoming one-sided, where one party is trying hard to be communicative and make things work and the other seemingly can't be bothered and is either fine with the dysfunction or just looking for an exit.

Tell me about the features on this Power Move? Why did you choose these artists as creative partners? What is the story?

For the most part they were just artists we crossed paths with playing live who we ended up becoming friends with, it was all very organic.  The only one we haven't met in person is Brazil-based MC Taya, we came across each other via a Twitter account called "crazy ass moments in nu metal history."  We just had a mutual appreciation for each other's work and we knew after hearing her style that we wanted to get her on a heavy song.

Pitchfork gave Guilty Pleasure a rating of 6.9. What rating would you give Pitchfork?

4.20

Objectively, what rating would you give Power Move on a scale of 1-10 and why?

10, it's by far our best work and we're making exactly the kind of music we want to hear.  And if you're not gonna ride for yourself then nobody is.

What is Power Move: Victory Lap and what can people expect from this DLC pack? 

Power Move: Victory Lap is the actual album we wanted to drop.  It's the director's cut.  People can expect even more sides of Cheem that weren't showcased on the initial release and smoother transitions between songs because of the adherence to the original track order.

Not that you were lacking it on earlier albums, but you do sound more confident and comfortable in your skin on this record. Can you tell me how being in a band for as long as you all have contributed to your sense of self as performers and to the kind of music you can make?

The longer you do it the less you care about what other people think and more about how satisfied you feel with the end product that you're working on.  The music becomes less about what you think will do well and more about a sound you wish existed and want to bring into the world.  We also think more about what's gonna be more fun to play live since our live show is such a huge part of what we do.  I think this album has a good mix of experimental studio-oriented tracks and live bangers.  We think it's important to do both because we want to explore every corner of the Cheem sound.

 
I'm loving how deep and rich a lot of the tracks on Power Move are sounding, can you tell me a little about the production choices that went into this release?

There was definitely a conscious decision to make the quieter sections more atmospheric.  There's all kinds of samples and noises buried in the mix here and there that just add a little to the overall feel.  We also included a couple of interlude-esque outros on songs to help bridge the gap between tracks.  I would say the biggest influences in that regard would be trip hop and vaporwave.

Would you still consider yourself Nu-Pop? What are the parameters of this genre? Are there any other bands you would consider Nu-Pop, or Nu-Pop adjacent? 

Absolutely, we are a nu pop band.  It's the genre blending of nu metal but with a more melodic and pop-oriented approach, essentially just incorporating elements of hip-hop, electronic, R&B, Latin, and Caribbean music to the more traditional rock band format with loud guitars and live drums. 

If I had to name some nu pop adjacent bands I would say South Arcade, Cherie Amour, Medekine, Scro, Symposia, and Pink Pool.

At this point in your career, where do you see yourselves as fitting into the larger spectrum of DIY/Emo/Punk music? 

It's tough to say because even though we are pretty DIY (recording, production, mixing, graphic design, etc.) we're at a point where we can't really play house shows anymore.  For us to faithfully put on a show for all the people that want to see us we need a venue that can comfortably and safely accommodate a decent amount of people and a nice loud sound system.  That said, we try to keep the DIY ethos in mind and we do keep up with what's happening in that scene to some extent.  I think people have finally stopped classifying us as emo though.

Say some nice things about John and the rest of the Lonely Ghost crew. 

Lonely Ghost is a great label to be on for a DIY band because they do their best to let you just do your own thing and accommodate that into their release schedule.  They never said no to our ideas, and they really believe in the future of innovative and unique music.  Great people operating a pretty busy label purely for the love of the game.

Is ska due for a comeback?

If you mean in the mainstream then yeah, I'd like to see a modern pop take on ska.  If Olivia Rodrigo or Pinkpantheress dropped a ska-infused song I think that would be sick and probably wouldn't sound like any ska we've heard before.  I think reimagining the production choices while maintaining the core identity of the genre is the only chance it has to get a big break again.

What's the best thing someone has ever written about your band, and why did you like it so much? 

Angel Marcloid (aka Fire-Toolz aka Mindspring Memories) mastered our new record and she sent us an email telling us how much she liked the album and why and all the things she said really rang true with what we set out to do with this album.  We really enjoy and respect her work so it meant a lot to hear.

What is the ideal piece of coverage that a music publication (not saying Nu Metal Agenda, but not not saying them either) could do for your band that would help your career right now? Put another way, what is the value/role of music journalism from your perspective in this day and age?

Truth be told I don't know how many people are reading music publications nowadays.  I think it would have to be a pretty huge publication to move the needle in any meaningful way.  For us music interviews are just about getting a chance to express ourselves and our intentions in detail for the passionate fans that care enough to dig deep.

How is your current tour going? What dates/cities are you most excited about?

Our past couple tours have been incredible, more sold out shows than not which is a good sign.  Our last Brooklyn show and the festival Burn Bright (Editor's note: I was there!)were two particular highlights.

What are the best albums from the late '90s/early '00s ('97-'04), and what about them inspires you? 

You picked a great era so I'll keep it to 5 records.

Transistor by 311, it's 21 tracks of the band at their most experimental and the production was mind-blowing to me the first time I listened to it.

Celebrity by NSYNC, it has really strong pop hooks and incorporates UK garage, breakbeat, and hip-hop production.  There isn't even another song I can think of that sounds like "Do Your Thing" (the closing track) which is a pretty cool achievement for a boy band.

Sol-Fa by Asian Kung-Fu Generation, this is how pop punk should have evolved in the West but never did.  This is an example of what you can do when you're inspired by a genre but not tethered by nostalgia.  (Their 2008 album World World World is an even better example of this.)

Get Rich or Die Tryin' by 50 Cent, this was one of the first hip-hop records I fell in love with as a little kid.  Track for track it's so good.  I always love when a rapper has a great flow but also a sense of melody, like a lot of these songs don't have a featured singer on the chorus but they still have hooks you can sing along to.

Meteora by Linkin Park, I don't even need to get into this one.  A lot of people probably prefer Hybrid Theory but as someone who has probably listened to both records a thousand times this is the one that comes out on top, if only by a little.

What is an influence on your group that has never come up in an interview before, or that no one has been able to pinpoint in a review of your music?

The Hives, I've listened to their first four albums so many times.  I accidentally straight up stole a Hives lyric in "Nano." (Editor's note: Good artists borrow, great artists steal!) And our song "Motorola Razr" was originally a GarageBand file called "hives beat" because of the drums and percussion in the chorus.

When are you starting an official fan club, and what can people expect as far as exclusive merch and events from such an organization? 

We kinda tried to do that with a program called CheemQuest but we've been insanely busy and haven't been able to update it.  We'll probably go back to doing that but also maybe starting a more straightforward street team based out of our discord.

I've heard Cheem is a romantic sort of group and/or for lovers, describe to me your perfect date.

Picking up good food to eat at home and watching a really good show or playing a really good video game.  If you want a less introverted answer I would probably say a beach day but that's not really on the table for the vast majority of the year where we're from.

What recommendations do you have for fans who want to take a date to a Cheem show? 

DM us on Instagram and tell us to pretend to know you so you can impress your date.

What are your signature combos and/or finishing moves?

All of our combos involve complicated polyrhythms between buttons so no one has actually ever executed one before.  For our finishing move we combine into a Voltron/Megazord like entity and annihilate our foes with a beam sword called the Cheem sword.

What are your favorite game OSTs and how do they contribute to the Cheem repertoire? 

I think games like the first three Mario Bros, Wario Land 4, and Pokemon Colosseum subconsciously influenced my melodic and rhythmic sensibilities because I played them so much as a child.  A few highlights from soundtracks I got into later in life would be Katamari Damacy, Danganronpa, Earthbound, and the Ape Escape games.  Anytime I hear a cool production touch in a video game song I always think about how I can incorporate it into Cheem.  I think it also inspires me to utilize unconventional instruments outside of the actual makeup of the band, stuff like strings, woodwinds, extra percussion, etc.

What games are you playing now? 

The only game I'm really playing right now is Doubutsu no Mori e+ (Japanese exclusive Animal Crossing game) to help me work on learning Japanese.  I did just finish the Xenoblade Chronicles trilogy though.

If Cheem were an acronym, what would each letter stand for?

Cool Hard Extreme Exquisite Music

Photo by Abby Clare

Cheem you later space cowboy!

Album Review: Monolord - Your Time To Shine

Monolord is definitely laying it on a little thick with the cover and title here—Your Time to Shine? A lifeless lepus, wreathed with flowers? A bit of that restrained Swedish dourness goes a long way. Me being my tactful, beneficent self though, I'm going to put it to you even more bluntly: you are a vermin, a noxious nuisance, a dyed-in-the-wool cretin. You're running around the metaphorical jungle of modernity, the great urban holt, red-assed and cross-eyed, flapping your cheeks in the wind with the pride of a blooded noble, bellowing like a being of untold importance and boundless delusion, a shadow that runs before the crumbling ruin of your actual personage, a scared animal shitting under a bush, too dumb and blind to be ashamed of its own specious projections of hubris. Only in death will you attain the aura that you sought in life, because it is the only point in history since your birth when you will be remembered with ubiquitous fondness, owed solely to the practicality that you can no longer do anything to further embarrass yourself and others... It's sorta zen when you think about it. In nothingness, you finally find the serenity of peace that escaped you in life. Ah! Nirvana at last! ...right before you're reincarnated as a tampon. This fatalistic, if backhandedly optimistic, outlook- liberation via the unburdening of life in its continuance- is certainly reflected in the billowing, cosmic star-rangler and veristic tendencies of this inky, astral-hued sludge metal band from the great white North, whose gripping, nature-worshipping, navel-gazing sound is as contemplative as it is flesh-flatteningly heavy. Their mournful, hazy riff-hammering makes its home somewhere along the broken highway between Mastodon and Hawkwind, with dark, beautiful cascades of guitar cracking the sky and lighting your way through the phenomenally thick atmosphere the band has managed to conjure as it leads you to your new abode, a 6x6 efficiency, in the clodded turf of nature's bosom where you can tranquilly dissipate into the successive churn of eons... or more precisely, become fertilizer. A good place to start if you're looking to have your bones ground into plant chow early is the devastating massive opener "The Weary," which hews closer to the chunky beardo-with-a-heart-of-gold, party-pit groove rock of Red Fang, or "I'll Be Damned," with its shovel-hefting, dirt-sifting, crack-and-slam grooves, each repetition of which is like another pound of gravedirt piled on your rotting bones. "To Each Their Own" is a hauntingly somber number, with the crushing gravity of an imploding star, that sucks you in, pulverizes you, and then mixes your dust with a palette of paint which the band uses to revarnish the celestial dome above. Then there is the ten-minute title track, which is fierce and whimsical while remaining compellingly heavy and undeterred, making use of meandering grooves and quivering feedback to leave the impression that you're being boiled in a pot of lysergic pekoe to fill the gullet of a frog wizard while he ponders and stargazes, parcing clouds of violet-tinted scholastic cogitation with the warty weft of his intellect. You might never summit the peak of your facile ambitions, but you can take solace in the supposition that you'll at least be helping to keep the grass greener once you're gone.

熱があります (Relapse Records).

Album Review: 紅髮少年殺人事件 - Brutal Girl Dillusion

紅髮少年殺人事件* isn't a paint-by-numbers Girl homage, at least not anymore, but there is a faint echo of laudation that resonates with the veritable plucky Fukuoka prefecture progenitors of understated youth-rock refractory, lingering like a ghost in the band's sound. But what untangles 紅髮少年殺人事件 from any of their reasonably attributable influences is the extent that they are not overly persuaded by the examples of their senseis- that they're not shackled to precedence or encumbered by the weight of the past in the least- a bursting blossom with no stem whose petals spark at the lips, vents of an inborn flame. On their most recent release, Brutal Girl Delusion, the Guangzhou-based group seizes on every opportunity to sling-shot around your ears in intersecting, concentric orbits, treating the rhythmic interplay between the members like games of badminton played with live grenades, with the consequential booms of feedback landing like a rain of electrolytes to fuel the generation of their caustic creation. Alternative rock verve and indie-shock spikes of melodic perturbation get pulled and twisted until they're thin enough to fail before being folded over again into themselves, reinforcing their initial promise of tensile strength and fortifying a renewed pledge of potent fury- a moldable but sturdy platform which the band can kick out of shape and scuff back into new and thrilling forms at will. Spry and edgy, heartfelt and anxiously serene, Brutal Girl Delusion is a cry down the well of youth to see if there is any soul left lurking at the bottom who can answer back with any compelling force of reply.

Little critters, big sound (SmallAnimalsRecords).

*I'm not translating their name b/c every translator I use gives me a different response. From what I can gather it's something like "the murder case of a red-haired child," but what really matters is the music, not what they call themselves. 

Album Review: Beastmaker - Inside The Skull

Wwwaaaahhhhhhhhhh Beastmaker breaks my heart. The burly doom metal out of Fresno, CA, was briefly euthanized in 2019 to fill the spiritual vessel of Haunt to the brim by both bands' all-father Trevor William Church. Now, while technically revived, for tax reasons (probably), etc... Beastmaker as a band has essentially been hibernating while the aforementioned Haunt gallivants over the moors of the metal scene like a big-haired, bullet-belt-adorned Baskerville. I get why that is. I don't begrudge Haunt's success. Beastmaker had a hell of a run, dropping 10 EPs in 2018 alone, before getting iced in the wake of the Eye of the Storm EP's gale... but I just prefer their monster-mash, mushroom-headed, ooze-and-booze style of doom to the more epic and thematically dense material that Haunt embodies and exudes. Maybe it's too many late nights as a kid hypnotized by MST3K reruns on the Sci-Fi channel, or all the time as a teenager I spent digging into the schlock horror inspirations of my favorite Misfits songs, but if a band nails the crunchy macabre oeuvre of these imprudent pastimes of mine, then they've earned a loyal fan for me.... 'til death do us part... or maybe longer. So who/what/were(wolf) is Beastmaker? Well, they're a hazy, horror-inspired doom metal, heavily influenced by downer-rockers Black Sabbath and later psychedelic and blues-fueled doom purveyors like Pentagram. As I alluded earlier, they have a surprisingly dense catalog, of which Inside the Skull is only their second and (at this point) most recent LP, released in 2017 via lauded metal asylum Rise Above Records. The production and mixing on this album are... well, let me put it this way: the master might have been boiled in hog fat before it was sent to the presses, but that only enhances the grimy, grind-house vibe of the record on the whole, and the musicianship is tight and compelling enough to shine through any disputed flaws one may notice with the recordings. Most of the songs have a pulp-horror narrative similar to the macabre vignettes from Tales from the Crypt, recounting stories of nightmarish eternal life, malevolent black widow lovers, and other things that go bump in the night. If you dare, and are up for a scare, then creep into the trippy psych-drenched "Now Howls the Beast" featuring guest vocalist Johanna Sadonis of Lucifer, as well as the swampy, southern riffs and fat undulating grooves of "Nature of the Damned," the muscular, maudlin riffs and oozing crawl of "Inside the Skull," and the sludgy, venomous grooves and spitting hooks of "Night Bird." Inside of you are two wolves; Beastmaker would like nothing more than to rile them up and set them loose in the dark, gothic theater of your mind.

Up from below (Rise Above Records).

Album Review: canekzapata - the consensus isn't dead, it just smells jazzy

One of the most irritating things dimwits attempting to sound intelligent will do is reduce some facet of the human subject down to a rudimentary syllogism- one of the more popular, and stupid, being that the brain is little more than a computer- reasoning that because computers make calculations and process information, and human brains do the same, Q.E.D., our brains are simply low-wattage computers. Absolutely idiotic. A weapons-grade brainlet level of casuistic officiation. News flash, genius: You are not a computer! Like a hammer is not your hand, a shoe is not your foot- humanity is defined by our extensive usage of tools, a pattern of behavior that does not replace our bodies and minds, but rather augments them on orders of magnitude that make the unimaginable become real and tenable over the course of a single generation, as of the advent of modernity. Ergo, humanity can never be displaced by its creations, not entirely, rather we are perpetually on the verge of rebirth in a world shaped by our collective ingenuity. What does this have to do with an experimental music album out of Mexico? Well, due to the advancement of available digital instruments, it is now possible for the purest forms of our imagination to gain some form of grounding, to be filled with marrow and held up by raw, bleeding flesh. If desire has wings, then the graceful appendages holding our passions in ambiance have extended to the farthest lengths of measurable latitudes. Case in point, The consensus isn't dead, it just smells jazzy fragments and shuffles the planes of jazz and soul to repurpose their osseous matter and proteins in a novel metabolism that reorients and re-tangles what it ingests into an elucidating pastiche, refracting the resiliences of its sources and the pageantry of stirring poignancy in a mold that is both distinctively unreproducible and indelibly universal, without the disclusion of direct linguistic translation or conceits to the treacherous topography of discrete cultural forms. The worm of the processes that produced this record bores through any barriers to consciousness and alignment with intentions that refuce to give way on their own, eating through the rot of intransigent concurrence, the cold hand of resting stone in a shwabble-dabble-glibba kind of pattern, like a steady drip of water on a mountainside, or a worm inching through mulching, tunneling through a first edition of Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, instructing in its progressive path of transformation that the weight of presupposition is little more than a temporary impediment, and often rather serves as a buffet to replenish its replacement. Every revolution of the globe is a new day, and every innovation produces a dawn that stretches beyond the line of sight, breaking only on the shores of infinity- inching ever closer to the sun, and yet never burning. 

Interview: Cocojoey

Born on a whim and sailing through tragedy, Chicago's experimental sound cub and maximalist melodist Cocojoey hangs off the ledge of infinity's crest while netting the fractured crystals of the universe in outstretched palms on their Hausu Mountain debut, a digi-orchestral odyssey, concisely and informatively titled, simply Stars. They also make some hella wacky music- in a good way, in a fun way, in a sort of serious and enlightening way too. In another place, in another time, it would not be far-fetched to imagine Russell Mael or Dr. Demento leaping over each other to present Joey with pathfinding mentorship and formulative counsel- alas, in our forlorn era Joey may have only the distant spheres of atomic combustion to illuminate and gird their bearings (ok, so there is Doug and Max too, but let's be real, not all viable advice can be boiled down to Phish metaphors). Even in the swirling void of our present-day cultural miasma, these seemingly insignificant pinpricks of burning lights align in a constellation of ebullient steps for Joey, with the cosmos extending like the playfield of a pinball machine, attending to their quicksilver as they parlay impulses into a responsive material reality, simultaneously generating conductive flashes of joy and blissful energy in a tumbling accumulation of ephemeral fortune accelerated by a boundless sense of presence, that seeps into gaps of despair and terraforms them into dens of accentuated recognition. If any of this sounds intriguing to you, and I hope it does, then check out my interview with Cocojoey below, for a glimpse into their inner world:

Note that this interview was done in the fall of 2025, hence Joey's comments about what they planned to do over the winter (2026). I meant to release this interview in December (2025), but due to work, the holidays, travel, health stuff, and a lot of me just being me, its drop date got pushed back. Maybe Joey can write a distrack about my lack of time management. I would welcome the creative feedback. 

Check out Stars below and visit Hausu Mountain for more cool records. 

Album Review: Booze Control - Forgotten Lands

March is a special month for me,* so I'm popping the tab on it with Germany's NWOBHM-inspired bruisers Booze Control and taking a long pull from their fourth LP (and most recent, as of 2019), Forgotten Lands. Booze Control isn't the subtlest of bands. Their sound is essentially all of the sprinting parts of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, with some flush nods to the battle cry fury of Manowar steeped in the brew. If you like the big acts to come out of Britain's metal scene in the late '70s but could do without the arty, acid-flavored tangents those bands would sometimes embark on, then you'll certainly appreciate how close to the marrow Booze Control tends to strike. It's hit-the-ground-running, bar-juke-box-booming, muscle-head metal to crush some cans (or skulls) to. Highlights include the Judas-esque chopper ride "Attack of the Axemen," the deliberate and saw-tooth-riffed "Of the Deep," the spin-riffed march "Slaying the Mantis," and the sweeping heat of "Playing with Fire." Put some lightning in your blood tonight!

* Doing a dry March. First dry month ever. You may have some questions, such as: 1) Do I have a problem?, and 2) Is this for Ramadan? The answer to both is "No." 

Album Review: fallingwithscissors - the death and birth of an angel

Young'uns are calling fallingwithscissors's second EP the death and birth of an angel "breakcore"... Now, I'm in the habit of defending the opinions of my juniors, but in this case the kids' brains are shot through, I swear. Does this sound like "Same Old Chiyo Shit"? Come on, get educated... On the flip side, I read a review of this album from someone who is clearly 40, who described it (lovingly?) as an incoherent mess... Are people just not able to hear and appreciate a song with multiple parts anymore? And I thought the yutes had short attention spans. My rebuttal to said reviewer: "Sir, don't you have something more pressing... like planning your retirement? Where is your wife?" I hate to break it to you all, but there isn't some secret code to understanding the death and birth of an angel- Errorzone was only 8 years ago. Atari Teenage Riot launched 34 years ago. Get caught up, or get left behind. fallingwithscissors is a current-day metalcore band. the death and birth of an angel is a current-day hardcore record with nods to dissonant dance music, a digital hardcore record if you will -a very fine hardcore record at that- but let's not get too distracted by the anime visuals and start slapping "break-this" and "break-that" all over everything. Okay? Have a little restraint, folks. Now the death and birth of an angel a cool take on what's come before it, and is very much informed by contemporary production and EDM trends in a way reminiscent of forward-facing artists in the vein of Femtanyl and Machine Girl- with, of course, emo vocals and melodic conceits delivered with the flair of a wounded devil and evocativeof turns taken by Alice Simard with her Coffret de Bijoux project. As far as metalcore and its consequences are concerned, though, I do like the direction that this record is pointing, one that feels fresh but firmly rooted, and one that, sonically and meta-texually, acknowledges the human race's consciousness as it rapidly synthesizes with an augmented digital reality- all while retaining some semblance of the rage exerted by the animal nevertheless impounded in the interior. The way the death and birth of an angel sort of clicks together with such baneful efficiency has me thinking it's the extreme aural equivalent of a Battle Angel style cybernetic being, assembled from components of disparate designs and eras, but repurposed into a sleek and deadly visage of mechanized bionic fury, capable of venting the calvaria of a skull with a single swift blow like it was a can of cranberry sauce. A sweet cybernetic cherub, whom death follows like billous oily perfume.

Album Review: No Soy Bill Murray - Error, Fatal Inferno

No Soy Bill Murray implies the existence of a "Soy" Bill Murray, much to the delight of some sarcasm-loving vegans, I'm sure. However, I've never ordered an impossible burger in my life, and don't intend to change my dietary habits on a hypothetical whim, so we'll be sticking with the All Beef Bill Murray for the rest of this review (you're welcome to sample alternatives and report back). As their name implies, No Soy Bill Murray is not, and has no affiliation with, the Evanston-born comedian-turned-actor, best known for his work in the seminal romance Mad Dog and Glory, playing opposite Robert De Niro, rather they're actually from Honduras, not Illinois, and don't have much of a movie career to speak of (at least not yet!). To avoid any of you getting too lost in translation, the group's name literally translates to "I'm Not Bill Murray," which may bust the ghost of some of your expectations concerning the level of schlubby, throwaway repartee the band is likely to display, but that's not my problem, I don't care, and I'm moving on. Their first and only record was released last year- 2025's Error, Fatal Inferno-, and it is a psychedelic shindig fit for the end of days: smooth, relaxing, and steamy, like sunbathing on the charred exposed rim of a gaping hell mouth as it belches tropical-temperature vapors into the atmosphere. The low-key radiance of their floating grooves, the solar-ray-emulating weave of guitar work, and refreshingly lustrous and lucid melodies will almost make you forget the imminent and immediate dangers of surfing on the landslide of modern material and social decline, as experienced across the globe (but particularly in the good ol' US of A). There are really worse (and possibly more deadly) mistakes you could make today than giving Error, Fatal Inferno a spin- it's certainly less of a macabre blunder than The Dead Don't Die.

Album Review: Fulu Miziki - Mokano EP

Uganda's favorite sonic salvagers Fulu Miziki already had a recognized and well-received album under their upcycled, polyurethane waist straps (2021's Ngbaka) by the time 2024 EP Mokano sprang from the soil like a disco-ball-patterned sunflower, but in many ways this later release is their earnest debut to the world. Ngbaka, while being sonically and texturally interesting and imaginative in its own right, denied a prospective audience a proper exposition of the group's unique interchange of Cuban-inspired and East African sounds- a regrettable development for a band whose raison d'être is raising to the plane of consciousness the natural and genuine in a sea of manufactured superfluity. Mokano gives a stronger sense of this purpose, while being a more straightforward reclamation of aural authenticity, thriving amidst the mountainous cast-offs of decadence and decay- in other words, it's landfill music meant to root you back in the dirt and struggle of this planet. A call to motion and unity of action rings out from the first strike of a PVC pipe on opener "Mbanga Pasi," with its banded, jived-out rhythms, inundating percolation of improvised percussion, accompanied by a multi-tiered torrent of vibrant group vocals, a potent display of energy that heightens the senses suitable in preparation for the bopping scoot and scrapping skip of "Bopeto" with its pepper-bark puff and gum-boned slap, which then winds down just in time for the high-traction bustle of "Tamatu" to take center stage, followed by the monsoon-summoning charm "Vie Eza," the ascendant acapella of "Soki Ozwyi Yako Lia," and finally, the jerky rhythmic convoke "Mosala," which seems to pull flesh and blood from the clay of the altar on which it pivots to give body to a prancing homunculus, whose gesticular form is as dynamic as lightning and who lithe figure extends as a bridge between the plane of the sky and the terrene flats below. Not everywhere in the world has the infrastructure to dispose of the refuse generated by modern industrial output to satisfy consumer needs, and as a result, many around the world end up living with and amongst the consequences of light production and petty consumption as the terrain around them fills up with refuse and non-biodegradable elements, from both their communities and abroad, as their home becomes a dumping ground for places rich enough to have the luxury of forgetting about the debris created by their lifestyles. But in heaping and accumulating, these disregarded residues of modernity reshape the land where they come to rest, and for those who still maintain a connection to this land, even as undesirable as it is, the detritus integrates into their cosmos, augmenting the spiritual balance and flows of energy but not disrupting the fundamental obligations which the living have to the cumulative well-being of creation; instead, demanding an infusion of imagination to reintegrate what is cast off back into an integrated whole and renew humankind's commitments to the Earth in the process. Fulu Miziki play "junk music," because junk is the indigestible kernel and stubborn gallstone lodged in the belly and at the heart of the contemporary schism with the forces that sustain life on this planet- by reclaiming waste, they are reclaiming the world itself.

もしもし! はい, レコードでございます!

Album Review: Summer Cannibals - Can't Tell Me No

I never considered Summer Cannibals to be one of the essential acts of the late great garage rock boom of the early '10s, but they always had a certain spunky charm that made the group notable if nothing else. Their first LP had the title No Makeup slapped across its face, and from the moment that dog hit the track they never backed down from that no-second-chances, put-up-or-shut-up style of rock on a kaiser roll... But they DID eventually refine the hell out of it! 2019's Can't Tell Me No is the fourth album from Portland's Summer Cannibals. The era when this defiant bit of pop art dropped was afflicted with an unsightly rash of two-bit hucksters of all hackneyed strains, frankly scraping the barrel for whatever nostalgia they could sprinkle on top of their garbage to hide their stink with a dusting of legitimacy- the dead horse de jure being being Dinosaur Jr.- but Summer Cannibals escaped a trip to the glue factory by only ever aping the Pixies, and doing it in ways that were often as unexpected as a stray toenail glazed into the surface of an apple fritter... albeit far more tempting, as it were. Clearly, when they were bashing together Can't Tell Me No, there were going to be zero naysayers to dissuade the group from recasting and redefining their tried-and-true, no-frills brio- thankfully, such additions managed to clarify and sharpen their sound, rather than weigh it down with gaudy hubris. The album strikes the right note out of the gate with the buzz-guided killer ray of perception "False Anthem," that has this infectious yet measured bounce and enough wiggly elbow room to permit the cracking off of a few groovy and rewarding side tangents. Following that is the title track, "Can't Tell Me No," a feisty little stomper helmed by an angular, desaturated guitar groove reminiscent of Sleater-Kinney circa All Hands on the Bad One with some appropriately fizzy breakdowns thrown in for good measure. Later, "Behave" platforms big Veruca Salt-esque vocal hooks embedded in a tense, Pixies-inspired, riffy groan-huff. Things get a little more lonesome cowgirl-esque with the dizzy, nipping rebuke "Like I Used To," before dipping into the subdued ripple-pop splash of "Innocent Man," which doesn't flinch at the chance to litigate crimes that only take place in the dark, and then "Start Breaking" takes us on a sweetly retributive demolition exhibition. Lastly, I genuinely appreciate how this heater fades out with a shimmering, melt-on-touch adieu, "Into Gold"; it's a sweet and affirming send-off that the album had surely earned by the end. Can't Tell Me No really feels like the culmination of the band's career and intentions- if they were satisfied to kick up their feet and lean on this thing's laurels for now until the big one drops, I wouldn't blame them one bit.

Tiny Engines, big ambitions.

Album Review: Coffret De Bijoux - My Limbs Are Not Mine

Of all the tattered flesh shrouds and spectral shades she slips through, Coffret de Bijoux appears to be maturing into Alice Simard's most compelling and sonically adventurous manifestation. The vicious Québec-based virtuoso has quite the rap sheet, splitting her time and a swath of eardrums across a range of abominable aural bêtes noires; whether she is flexing her carrion-fed, brutal-death shredding chops with Codex Crudelitas, communing with the gods of inter-neuro-grid with the Lain-inspired cybergrind exe. FILESHAREMAIDEN, or gutting the idols of restraint with the dauntingly anointed goregrind sauvage Onchocerciasis Esophagogastroduodenoscopy- there is no height of extremity too lofty, or aquifer of dissonance too low, that to drill to its depths would be unimaginable. Which brings us back to Coffret de Bijoux; outwardly, it is a depressive atmospheric black metal project- the first releases under its mantle were ghastly and otherworldly, devoid of recognizable human warmth (or verbal expression) and submerged in the oily dew of void-burn existential perturbation, an orientation towards sound that culminated in the pinnacle of 2025's wen jalè jalè gunala, a fraying web of gossamer that shrieks and rends its own soft flesh in a fitful attempt at self-reorganization and recognition, tortured form that threatens to spontaneously combust through the friction of its interior traivol. There was perhaps a considerable dose of Damian Anton Ojeda's Trhä in the alchemist's vessel out of which Coffret de Bijoux emerged, especially in the way that emotion tends to leak out all over performance like black lacquer seeping from a cracked inkwell, but there is certainly more to its chemical composition than simply a reflective polymerization of her peers. Last year, Coffret de Bijoux also introduced this world to the project's emo chip-tune side with the sullenly angelic and blindingly enigmatic intablej' u ana, which could have convincingly fronted as a Weatherday and Këkht Aräkh collaboration and left me uncertain about its true origins. This willful and restless transmutation is again evident on my limbs are not mine, which, as far as I can tell, is Alice's first (mainly) English-language release with Coffret De Bijoux, as well as her first full and proper punk record- scraping together brisk, punchy third-wave emo-inspired grooves, pop-punk melodies, and early metalcore riffs to beat back the night with a force of resilience possessed only by the perpetually young at heart. Incredibly, the record retains enough of its black metal allele to not result in too dramatic or off-puttingly divergent a turn for the project on the whole, but rather offers an opportunity to comprehend the richness of the vein of influences and inspirations that conspire to produce the genius of Coffret de Bijoux's spellbinding cache. From the rattling rollick and arresting seraphic avowal of "i need to see" all full of loose screws and bent halos, to the sweetly venomous coo of "nuit d'automne," to the veiled hunger and agitatedly exposed decampment of "i never recollect," through to the quietly wounded, organ-transplanting, and giallo-stained lament of the title-track, and finally the crushing return to form on the tearful, ruminating spectre and closer "pillow poise remembering"- my limbs are not mine extends the tensile subluxation of Alice's spirit as embodied in Coffret de Bijoux in a manner that magnifies the luster and ethereal shine of its fractured intricacy and interior.

Album Review: Ikebe Shakedown - Kings Left Behind

Thrones are toppled, kingdoms laid to waste, histories are reduced to sand, and all roads lead to ruin... but not if you're Ikebe Shakedown. The seven-member instrumental funk band out of Brooklyn, New York, may seem like they've abdicated and gone incognito since their 2019 LP, but their legacy has yet to be turned to ash by the ravages of time. Their sound is horn-driven, highly cinematic, stylishly psychedelic, and inspired by the soulful charm of Curtis Mayfield, the weighty rhythmic pulse of Fela Kuti, and the epic scope of '70s spaghetti western soundtracks. Kings Left Behind (as previously alluded, released in 2019)is the band's fourth studio album (and most recent), recorded straight to reel-to-reel by the band's bassist, Vince Chiarito. The album unveils an oasis of melodious intrigue with "Not Another Drop," establishing the group's predilection for gonzo grooves, which is supercharged on the following smoky, hookah-haze-infused "Unqualified," and is fully realized with a vengeance on the mid-album stinger, the momentous, bongo-and-horn-driven spanner "Hammer Into Anvil." "The Witness" takes things in a more mischievous direction, with its quivering guitars and spit-and-pucker percussion, a track that would slot easily into the soundtrack of some lost supernatural western thriller, set in a traveling carnival where all the orphaned performers inexplicably have telekinetic powers and a predilection to deploy them in a zeal for vindication. The most retro-sounding tracks on the album come near the end, with the spy-thriller-esque "No Going Back" and the rose-tinted slow jam "Kings Left Behind," a worthy pair of companions to help mask the cry of a gunshot ringing out over shifting desert dunes. It's the kind of album Coalmine Records exists to put out into the world. They dig through the rough and excavate the gems, so you don't have to.

Ain't no diamonds without Coal(mine Records).

Album Review: DJ Ramon Sucesso - Sexta dos Crias 2.0

Democratic in origin, flexible but dictatorial in constitution, DJ Ramon Sucesso's second LP is a direct sequel to 2023's Sexta dos Crias, itself a deposition of his infectious virtual "bubble beat" demonstrations. The channeling of his style into the cast of an album is more of an extension of the experiment than a formal climax, though. In comparison and guided by this analysis, the resounding conclusion is that Sexta dos Crias 2.0 is demonstrably mad, cracked, loopy, unwound, and sublated- a contorted hip-hop engine that operates on oxidized hardware and a slime-warping logic board, blithely unfurled in a brambly drugget down a hall of bruised spoils and landing in the pit of an anarchic rubber-room only to shoot back up the silo of its descent to clear a near-perfect dismount before catching the wings of another precocious rhythmic laceration of logical succession. An impish and impractical-seeming chiding of sequential experience and sensory cohesion- a cartoonish illumination of divine dance-floor intervention- a fission of splintering sonic compounds whose scattering particulates pierce and recombine their neighboring resonances, driving them to implode, invert, and reunify upon impact into deranged but adaptive novel configurations. A nourishing primordial soup that replenishes as it is consumed- never expended, ever expanding, like the contents of a cup that runneth over with frothy inspiration. Everyone is working for the weekend, only some are working (and succeeding) at making the liberation we seek on a Friday night into the standard we enjoy every day of the week.

Como acima, assim embaixo (Lugar Alto).

Album Review: Dream Machine - The Illusion

Feed your head popping poppies, chips of fractured pellucid fog, and scratchy heather to polish the crystal ball that hangs from the inmost concave of your dome. Dream Machine is a husband-and-wife duo, Matthew and Doris Melton, who miraculously arose from the once-still, tepid brew of Matthew's previous group, Warm Soda (which has been reformulated as of 2022). They combine the heavy, proto-metal grooves of bands like Iron Butterfly and Deep Purple with the murky psychedelia of the Doors and the larger-than-life hooks of Heart to create cascades of compelling psychedelic-garage pop. The Illusion (2017) is Dream Machine’s debut record, released on their good friend John Dwyer’s Castle Face Records, and later reacquired by Matthew's own Fuzz City. According to Matthew, the album is an antidote to the feelings of isolation and dislocation caused by social media and is meant to inspire people to share feelings and music face-to-face again, rather than through an ad-supported data mine. Unplug and unwind with the scaling, Deep Purple-esque guitars and huge, sonorous organs on “I Walk in the Fire,” the folding waves of organs and the relentless bass undertow on “Buried Alive,” the sparking jazz, adrenaline-pumping hooks, and ear-snaring chorus of “All for a Chance,” and the confident, toe-tapping, brick-house blues swagger of “Back to You.” Ironically, The Illusion is their most concrete and sincerely palatable work, having released two subsequent albums- Breaking the Circle and 2022's Living the Dream- both of which lack the punchy, raw panache of their debut and somehow fail to radiate the same potency of hypnotic magnetism as their initial pledge. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Album Review: Opal Vessel - Flesh Grinder

Subliminally caustic. Understated madness. Incomprehensible forms, with roots veining into the imaginary, as sepsis would leak from a rotten tooth into a pink-sheathed jawbone. Spreading as a wildfire, only as a brain fever of disconnected images, sounds, electric impulses, and tremorous anxieties. Violence in its final, most hushed permutation. Insidious, a poisonous aura with no taste or scent, encircling its prey without judgment or mercy. A finality colder than death. Not ruthless, but implacable all the same. Bubbling up from the pulpy bed of a blood-drunk akasha, inky and tenacious, but sobered from its feast of carnage, reflective in the depraved glow of its excesses—not remorseful, but one could be fooled. What more can be wrought from a mean horizon of esse but the lamentations which a thing such as it can inspire? The whimpering, the braying hatred, the orotund waves of sorrowful cries... a sweet symphony on some planes, but a hollow din on levels much higher. Hunger comes after the first course, of course, but it's a peculiar appetite that scrapes the guts even when the plates are clean, and it comes time for dessert. A silent expectancy and greed for a bounty richer than carnal comestibles can furnish, and yet blacker than the shade offered by six feet of grave dirt. When the Flesh Grinder has concluded its bladed dance, what satiation can the aurlization of a black hole continuum pursue to make whole the fullest deprivations of its sanguinary intentions? Where does the chthonic nadir of desire lie?

Album Review: Cerberus Shoal - Cerberus Shoal

Clipping and grafting the etching of an idea pilfered from a book of poetry written by Brown University students in 1893, Cerberus Shoal breached in Boston in 1994, before spawning up to Portland, Maine, to experiment on their ash-grey, half-pickled offspring in inky green hatchery jars. While hanging up their snaring tools in 2005, Cerberus Shoal invaerted and reemerged through a plethora of homely yet exquisite and adventurous phases over the course of their career, lumbering up from the fleshy bluffs of the human ear in the guise of a whisper-calm post-hardcore band before floridly unfurling into a powdered bone-dusted and warmly abstract folk band. Their precocious accession in planting a flag on the far shore of second-wave emo's sweetly caustic and bitterly gladsome Slint-mixed colluvium rim is still their most endearing work to these hairy old ears, though, and it's what I want people to hear most dearly from their revived catalog. The band's long out-of-print self-titled debut, recorded in 1994 and released in 1995 on Stella White records, and lovingly resuscitated by the applied sonic residency skills of Temporary Residence Ltd. (circa. 2018), documents the band's precocious beginnings and acts as an initial schematic whose architectures would be redlined, revised, and addendumed on later releases as the group increased the quotient of raw granola and thorium granules in their increasingly crunchy, amalgamed sound. In these early days, though, Cerberus Shoal embodied the marriage of rhythmically dislocated chord progressions characteristic of many Dischord Records signees and the progressive push, patient dynamics, and suppressed convulsions of slowcore dreamweavers ala Codeine, a fragily distilled formula which only occasionally tips its hand to spill into less equable fits of screamo-induced sensory disarray.

Out on Temporary Residence Ltd... I might have mentioned that already.

Album Review: Boko Yout - Gusto

Anytime I'm in a new town, I engage in various habits that are against my preferences towards longevity- one of which is picking up half a dozen donuts from one or more proprietors of such insulin-shock-inducing confections. Something I've noticed at many of the dens of these hip, sweet-salt-dealing devils is the prevalence of pink-frosted rings adorned with sprinkles on offer... something which leads me to wonder about the enduring influence of the Odd Future Collective. Sure, you could assume that these peony-painted threats to my gut health are downstream from the prolonged curse of Millennial arrested development and their senile Simpsons-mania, and nothing else, but I think you'd be wrong to jump to such conclusions. Who made such an iconic pastry cool after all? Not Al Jean, that's for sure. The Simpsons essentially became roundly and deservedly reviled under his stewardship. No, being reminded of Homer's indiscriminate sugar intake and the flailing legacy of a once celebrated sitcom is more likely to spoil one's appetite as we reflect on our own failures than to compel a joyous purchase. No, it's rather the opposite. The irony of adopting something completely uncool and popularly derided as a floating symbol of antagonism that I think makes the pink donut ironically VERY cool when ornamentally assumed by Tyler & Co., and which keeps it in the forefront of the cultural purview- an anti-symbol symbol, if you will- something that can be anything but is always an assertion of the self, even when declared in the negative... as well as a totem of one's (read: MY) future struggles with diabetes. Where else might you find Odd Future's resonance intervening remarkably out of the blue? Well, to answer this, you need to look no further than the Swedish band Boko Yout, whose album Gusto dropped late last year. For lead singer and creative keystone, Paul Adamah, the deranged reflection of late '00s LA as the site of a persecutory cataclysm and an endless moshpit on the rim of the abyss- which Odd Future divined- had the effect of cracking the carapace of his incarcerated figuration, eventually leading to the summoning of Dr. Gusto, a lwa-like presence that rises through the cracks in sidewalks, scurries up light poles, and tumbles northward, scaling pantlegs like a hairy spider up a sweating downspout intending to ride a cheval worthy of his emphatic tutelage. You can hear the incantation of drums beckoning Dr. Gusto to take the reins on the track "Shift," before the full force of his charisma seizes you in the bracing, rubber-skulled bounce and scrape of epi-biological recall on the preceding track that bears his name. Now smoldering, Blue Velvet-crushed-and-coated hip-hop is likely not the first impression that one would take away from Boko Yout's sound, as the group's hook-heavy and expressively groovy rock pedigree more immediately invokes the icy and cutting, yet fresh-faced and energetic '00s-ish British garage and indie revivals, splashing in the same youthful fountains as Bromheads Jacket and Maxïmo Park without sacrificing either sincerity or inborn inclinations towards spectacle—a playful kind of seriousness that resolves through sober internal inquisition into the phenomenon of the self and the fosterage of one's heritage, straining through this focus as if through an aspheric lens to uncover a sonic arterial lane that conjoins chaotic funk with slippery post-punk, and diasporic disco with confidently anti-fashion folk, making the wraparound rollicking and catchy call-up "Ignored," the wiry, gold-bug-busting and crypto-clay-soled manic clap of "9-2-5," and the motorik rev and waterslide-like groove of the courageously catchy "Imagine" come alive in a form that is both scientifically anomalous and yet ordained as inevitable by some dark sorcery accessible only through an oily globe that rotates like a molten core deep in the center of Paul Adamah's skull. What doesn't kill you makes you odder, and only the odd survive, so long as they have the appetite to chew through the chains that hold them back.

 

Hoop springs (digs) eternal (Hoopdiggas Recordings)

Album Review: El Sexteto Tabala - Reyes del Son Palenquero

I promised that I would cover more African and South American acts in 2026 when I wrote my 2025 Invitational, and if you thought I was simply blowing smoke and all manner of noxious fury, then you'd better sit yourself down and get ready to house a full buffet of smoked crow. Today, I am introducing you to Sexteto Tabalá, a Colombian folk group whose African ancestry and diasporic connections are so tightly wound around their sound that such lineages and histories are synonymous with themselves in the same way a cat identifies with its own striped coat. Sexteto Tabalá boasts of playing the ONLY true form of Colombian music,* in that it is free from guitars and electric instruments, in addition to pulling from the rich and dearly specific past of their nation's heritage and their familial ties to rebellious maroons, and deploying only instruments that were available to sugarcane workers in centuries past; notably amongst them the marímbula, a plucked box instrument, inspired by African percussion tools, but which owes its origins to Cuba. Further, the sound of Sexteto Tabalá is largely credited to the influence of Cuban engineers hired to supervise the sugarcane industry in the early 20th century in an area of Colombia which had been granted its autonomy by the Spanish Crown since 1713, San Basilio de Palenque. In their off hours, these Cubans would play son montuno songs and teach them to the agricultural workers of the area, most of whom were still descendants of runaway slaves. Over time, these once Cuban sounds would acquire their own distinct character as they were adopted by the Palenque people and transformed into the particular hybrid of African diasporic sound and Caribbean proto-salsa known as son Palenquero, a style that invoked its practitioners' Angolan, Central, and East African roots, sung in a unique dialect Creole derived from Bantu, while remaining independent, flexible, and conspicuously unadorned with the extraneous din of modernity. Sexteto Tabalá hold themselves out as continuing the traditions of the style's best-recognized purveyors like Sexteto Habanero, while taking care to respectfully innovate on traditional workingman's songs when inspiration strikes with indisputable serendipity. Their LP Reyes del Son Palenquero was recorded in San Basilio de Palenque but reissued by the Bogotá-based Palenque Records in 2016. Rhythmic inspiration that proudly carries the wealth of centuries of history and the debts owed to generations of pastoral workers, a burden as weighty as a mountain, which they hold aloft as if it were as light as a feather.

Palenque Records, where history comes alive!

* I have no way of verifying this, and I'm not saying that I condone such an assessment, however, it is what they say about themselves, which for a band from such a culturally rich and musically inclined country as Colombia, these are really fighting words, and the unnecessarily antagonistic character of their self-assessment genuinely amuses me. Like, why do you have to be so savage, bro? Damn!

Album Review: Bucle Lunar - ¿Qué pasó en Medellín?

Moon gazing has been an enthralling pastime for much of human history. For instance, the names of the various phases of the moon in Japanese correspond with the suggested activity observers should engage in while waiting for the celestial queen to make her debut each evening. The moon that rises on the 17th, for instance, is known as "tachimachizuki," which means that you can stand and witness the moon on that night's ascent without fear of taxing your weary legs, while "fukemachizuki," the name for the moon that rises on the 20th, suggests that you're better off catching a few winks before Tsukuyomi's lantern lights up the sky. In South America, there are some who say that witnessing a lunar eclipse can leave beauty marks on the face of one's future children—a sort of permanent reminder of the lunar guardian's blessing and distant stewardship of the people below, even when it itself is subsumed by the dark, or cast out by the light of day. You might not always see the moon, but you can still witness its gifts each morning when you gaze in the mirror. Reminders of an absence are painful, but unavoidable in life. Sometimes the only relief from anguish is song. "Cry Moon" by Venezuela's Bucle Lunar gives voice to this amiable sort of lament, with plush melodies and pale loops of powdery tranquil groove. Waiting and pining for the return to some truant felicity or tranquil degree of composure appears to be a recurring theme on their debut album ¿Qué pasó en Medellín?, of which "Cry Moon" is only one of its many splendid shades of luminance. The steady thumping progression and subtle electricity of the lush dream-pop pulse of "Tachycardia, thump thump" and the affable push of "Me muevo" prove capable of dislocating one from the entropy of their angst, while the slow embrace of the languidly expectant swirl of "Atemporal" and the persistent undertow of enticement and tenacity of "Terca" resist any reversion into despair. Sympathies filter in from abroad to gracefully envelop one's ears on the motorik psyched-out-mirage and cumbia-infused flow of "La kumbia," as well as the whimsically consecrated closer "Miranda en Belén," a track that is soaked in tears, whether they are of joy or deep sorrow, which may be an oscillating facet of speculation. Like the eternal circuit of the moon's perambulation around our sphere, there is no true end to the state of things, only phases and new beginnings; nights are long but not bereft of solace, and any absence felt is only a yearning yet to be fulfilled.

Ain't no cure for Summerblue Records. 

Album Review: 1349 - Massive Cauldron of Chaos

Like most people who claim the ignoble mantle and nerd de plume of audiophile, I'm still catching up on releases from 2025 (formerly the dumbest year on record, a record that was subsequently surpassed by the first week of 2026). Of the things that I'm glad that I've scooped out of the eye of the abyss is 1349's live record Winter Mass. Recorded around the time that the lockdowns were lifted in (presumably) Oslo (or some other godless, frigid plateau), this live record is a raw but vital procession of ugly and void-gouging sound that demonstrates pertinently just why the band has been able to maintain an audience for close to three decades on this cursed ball of dirt we call a planet. Unavoidably (at least for me), hearing Winter Mass has made me nostalgic for the album that introduced me to the band in the first place, 2014's Massive Cauldron of Chaos. It's not, as far as I know, considered one of their better albums, but it's also not one of their worst- it just tends to be the one that I think about most whenever I'm reminded of 1349... which is any time the subject of medieval diseases comes up (which in my life is more than you'd think for someone who is neither a physician nor a historian, but who does watch an awful lot of Apothecary Diaries). Named for the year that the black plague finally overtook Norway, 1349's most obvious references stylewise are groups like Mayhem and early Satyricon, although there are instances of Kreator-esque thrash riffage, most notable on the clamoring gnaw of gothic angst “Slaves,” the second song off the album I'm presently examining. In general, MCoC is a return to the band’s coldly masterful, blood-nourished roots. The previous decade was one of experimentation for the group, releasing boundary-pushing albums Revelations of the Black Flame in 2009 and Demonoir in 2010, both of which were received with hyperbolic consternation by corpse-painters who prefer to keep things fast and nasty. This superfluous ire was mostly quelled by MCoC’s return to form though, with Ravn’s raspy forked-tongue vocals, Archaon’s peeling shred torrents, and the super-human speed of drummer Frost’s legendary percussion laying waste to the expectations of their audience, and further treating them to a dip in a bubbling lake of acid swirling with a crimson foam of vicera-churned froth on “Cauldron,” rending them like a rag doll in a tug of war between two competing zombified pit bulls on “Exorcism,” disfiguring them beyond recognition on the bruisingly unshackled melee of “Chained,” and then mercilessly desecrating their remains on the groovy gang press of “Postmortem.” 1349 would indulge in more abstract forms of expression on subsequent releases, 2019's The Infernal Pathway and 2024's The Wolf & the King, but the stewing malignance of MCoC was undoubtedly the odious succor needed to  breathe fresh hellfire into the group, rallying them to carry their campaign of darkness into the 21st Century.

Bringer of a long dusk of discord (Season of Mist).

Interview: Post-Trash + 2025 Recap

You get through your first full week of 2026? Good! Glad the year hasn't killed you yet (not for a lack of trying, I'm sure). Before you finally kiss 2025 goodbye and drop it in the dustbin of history, take a look back with Dan and Pat of Post-Trash and myself as we chat about some of our favorite albums of the past year. 

If you don't already know, Post-Trash is an incredible resource for underground and alternative music coverage with a flexible coverage philosophy and a genuine openness to fresh critical voices. I used to contribute to Post-Trash back when I was just starting my illustrious music writing career (pause for applause/laughter/rain of rotten vegetables), and I'm forever thankful for Dan being willing to give a hopeless weirdo like me a chance to air out his errant opinions. 

Listen to the conversation here:

Albums covered in this episode (in order of appearance): 

Grace Rogers - Mad Dogs

Nyxy Nyx - Cult Classics Vol. I

Hiver & Jason Koth - Offers

Danny Brown - Stardust

Prewn - System

Wombo - Danger in Fives

Militarie Gun - God Save The Gun

Hedonist - Scapulimancy

Album Review: TrndyTrndy - Virtua

About a decade and a half ago, Vektroid raised it as a beacon and magnet for recognition of the existential ennui gripping those carried out to sea in the first wave of America's lost decade (still ongoing) in the wake of a major financial crash, and then Fire-Toolz optimized it to supercharge her caustic, rainbow-stained death spiral, leading to a badly realized and spotty cottage industry of extreme metal and punk bands trying to sound like the prime reference for their riffs were modernist watercolor prints found on the walls of dental offices nationwide (imitation is flattery, but it's also facile), and now it comes to this... all the hip, audacious, and circuitous routes have been trodden to the point that they have carved bleak, cavernous trenches and lightless, fallow gouges of no-man's-land into the culture; yet, it remains! So what to do with it? The only remaining ingress to the bounty of this small, fertile pasture is to step over the gate and waltz in like Big Chungus Bugs Bunny waddling into a vegan bakery with a hankering for a slice of cruelty-free carrot cake. The only thing in stock, though, is jazz- sweet, blithesome, impossibly pearlescent new-age fusion jazz, that's it! As the stars would have it, the kind of jazz that Rochester's TrndyTrndy curates and composes on Virtua was always the Fiddler's Green you pined to chart-wheel, thrown barefooted in your less guarded and honest moments of reflection- a plateau of fountainous mirth and charismatic intrigue, where knowledge is abundant and the future is as wide open as the horizon at dawn. TrndyTrndy is able to be the architect of this sonic encarta of bright, flawless forms, malleable flesh-marble, and dazzlingly synthesized auditory-tactile synesthesia despite being in their early twenties, and therefore likely never directly experiencing the era of Eyewitness CD-ROM guided tours of natural phenomena and archaeological investigations which serve as the aesthetic womb and inspiration for the project. They've dauntlessly condensed, extracted, and purified its primary essence, meaning that through the internet, all time is flat and abstract. You are 12, you've just hopped off the bus and are returning from school, your parents aren't home so you blow off your assigned school work and boot up the family computer, run a DOS executable from a digital encyclopedia, and spend the next two hours exploring a Smithsonian-sized archive of facts and photos about large jungle cats. You are 78, the young woman who brings you your pills in the afternoon has a playlist streaming on her phone and it is feeding music into the wireless headset in her ears, you accept the paper cup she hands you when she stops at your room, you pause and examine the contents of the cup, "Do I get the red pill today?" you inquire, she takes one of the earbuds of the headset out of her ear and asks you to repeat your question, the music pulsing out of the soft nub of the headphone is loud enough that you can hear it ring through the doorway without adjusting your cochlear implant, the sounds are sweet and comforting, familiar even, your memory is jogged but the recollection is so buried and long-forgotten you doubt its veracity as it has the clingy fuzziness of a hallucination... something... something about tigers? These worlds coexist, yours and everyone else's timelines have folded, and Virtua is the seam of the hinge where time and space collapse on their premises. It's all coming back to you now, isn't it?