Album Review: Meridian Brothers - Meridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento

Meridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento is true. It is a verifiable certainty. It is also an elaborate fiction. A fiction, that tells a faithful story cut with genuine feeling and affection. Swelling with an affinity for people who never existed, but whose narrative plays out in the waking experience of everyday people. A myth marbled with history. Out of this enigma hatches the latest offering from celebrated Columbian songwriter, singer, and one-man orchestra, Eblis Álvarez. Eblis often plays on his own as the Meridian Brothers, but this time he has teamed up with El Grupo Renacimient in order to revive the latter's lost classics. Classics that Eblis has specifically written and performed for this collaboration. Did you catch that? Alright, I'll clarify. Eblis is playing on this record as both the Meridian Brothers (a band that he is the only consistent member of) and another band that he created, El Grupo Renacimiento (another group that is the only real member of) and he has written an extensive catalog the second in the style of a '70s salsa band. In embarking on this charade, he is toying with a familiar narrative; a critical darling in the present paying their dues by helping a band that inspired them, but who never met with the success they deserved, put out one last record- only there is no unsung hero, and no accolade adorn upstart, there is just one guy whose is obsessed with salsa music pretending to be two bands. Part of Eblis's plan in intentionally blurring the barriers between fact and fable appears to be the granting of himself the license to perform music from the salsa's golden era with an outlandish, parodic flare, while still maintaining the kind of veracity that you might expect from a skilled journalist or a professional documentary maker. He wants it both ways, to be both jester and court historian, and for the worth of my judgment, he's largely succeeding. My Spanish is terrible, but even with my limited comprehension, I can easily pick up on the incisive humor of this record, as well as the brutal realities that its addresses, both textually and subtextually, such as police brutality, the struggles of poverty, slow suicides by addiction, personal and professional degradation and failure, and the overriding power and hope of redemption. Eblis makes a mockery of our demands for fidelity while substituting something unadulterated and contortedly authentic in its stead. Like all great records, you don't have to know the truth behind Meridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento to recognize it as being real. Its truth is in how it makes you feel; if it feels real, it is real. 

Available from Ansonia Records.

Album Review: 96 Cougar - The Cheapest Thrill

Despite living in the same city, I only recently discovered Chicago's 96 Cougar through their latest single, "Hot Town (Bummer in the City)," a classic indie-oriented piece of work that spars with the cheesy '70s goodness of a Jon English number by the same name. I liked it enough that I went back and took a dive into their catalog and discovered the aptly titled The Cheapest Thrill. Big smiles, slashy live-wire guitars, tearful beer-swilling laments, and greasy ball antics fill this release to the brim and then some. More so than the single that introduced me to the band, this EP pulls into the present several dated models of rock and roll and gives them a fresh coat of lacquer and a full belly of liquor. It's like a revival of Al Stewart where ol' Al's tragically too fucked up to stay on his feet but is still somehow able to pop a pimple off the stage and directly into your eye with pinpoint accuracy. Other times they resemble Kris Kristofferson doing an ugly crying outside a CVS. But my favorite is when they come raining down like an imploding glam fest and impromptu hardboiled coliseum where Cheap Trick airdrops in on Supertramp and starts kicking the shit out of them like they've stuck the former with the bill at a restaurant, or owe them song royalties, or maybe just because. It's an album that doesn't lack for moments of high ambition and low-brow attempts at melodic grandeur ("Dr. Science",) and unwashed but soulful country crooning ("The Dog Days of Bummer"), but still, I can hardly hold it against the band when they kick into a comfortable gear, get blitzed out their gourds and let their angst play out at excessive volumes (See, "Ritalin Refill Blues), 'cause it all suits me, every shade and stripe, just fine. Life can feel like it last but barely a moment, so you need to get your thrills in while you can- the cheaper, the better. 

 Tapes are out on Klast Records.

Album Review: Baseline. - Landfill

As we enter the home stretch for this Holiday season, I'm finding myself looking for stuff that would be good to listen to with friends. Back when I didn't have much else to do other than cruise around in the back seat of a car with a bunch of dudes and smoke and complain about nothing/everything, I used to listen to a ton of pop punk and alternative rock. When I see friends now, it's mostly at one or the other of their houses, and we mostly talk about family and our jobs (and anime), but we still listen to tunes, and some of them remain dedicated pop punk partisans. This year, I think I'm going to try and get them into Baseline. The band's new EP Landfill is a pretty good entry point, I think. They don't have a huge catalog, so I don't have much choice, but it's an album that has some big, rangy hooks in it, it also dives deep into watery distortion in the same way the Title Fight does, but with more fidelity to the massive gutsy outbursts and gliding grit that made Local H, Lit, or Silverchair so infectious in their heyday. Baseline. is making a very punchy kind of punk that folds well into the toetapping-to-humming-to-shoutout the choruse-pipeline of alternative jams that took over rock radio in the mid-90's. Especially when it comes to the  "(they should have stopped at) Blade II" drunken shifting build and sluggish windup and letdown of their chord progressions which definitely has a Lit by way of Toadies kind of feel. "Left Behind" on the other hand, leans more into the libations-swilling, nuggie-dispensing, org-core that you'd expect from a Florida punk band and Fest lineup contender, while closer "The Room" splits the difference between a more mature and reflective portrait of punk pontifications and a buzzy careening, crash landing. It's good for reminiscing and making new memories alike. Now, if you excuse me, I have some friends who are waiting on me to grab a drink with them. 🎵 It's the most wonderful time for a beer. 🎶

Recovered and distributed by Salvaged Records. 

Album Review: Cerrero & Viivi María - Cumbia de Las Almas Extra​ñ​as

Cumbia de Las Almas Extra​ñ​as comes to us by way of a meeting between estranged talents from disparate partitions of our little island in space. A crossing of the cultural streams and folk ties that compress across the globe, towing North and South closer together until they overlap in a marriage of form. Whether it was the winds, or fate, or harmless accident, the odd souls at the project's center have made the most of their encounters, and we, the ever-curious auditors, may now wholly reap the benefit of this serendipity. Viivi María is a Finnish folk musician, well-known in the international accordion competition circuit, and who is currently engaged in dispensing a variation of her Northern traditions to the rest of Europe and beyond as part of the duo Vilda. Cerrero is the nom de plume of Diego Gómez, head of Llorona Records, and highly praised internationally for his dusky and leaky hybrid of Jamaican dub and saturated cumbia. Their collaboration is as unlikely as a shooting start dropping in a catcher's mitt during an amateur baseball game, but just as phenomenal. Viivi's predilection for lanky, swaying melodies suits the rhythmic snap and roll of cumbia quite well, managing to slow the proceedings down with her deliberate techniques without sacrificing their essential weight or physical persuasiveness of the Southern style, all while gifting them a leanness that allows for a narrow threading of seemingly precarious portals- her notes acting as sea birds darting under the peaks of cresting waves as they crash across a rocky shore, grasping nourishment in the moment as if that moment knew no end. Cerrero's moody maelstrom of electronics further freshens Viivi's plucky performance with a cool condensation of subtle rave-beat ramps and a gooey drizzles of chewable dub that lays over the mix like warm arequipe, sweetening and enriching its textures as it smooths out its contours. The album has but three tracks, the first and last are variations on the themes of the other, with the middle track serving as both binder and intermission, spiraling as it weaves diamond-colored laces between the albums halves, orienting them back towards each other, making the entire presentation a kind of mirror reflection of itself, extending in two directions simultaneously as an expressive duel vector of fantastic longitude. Cumbia de Las Almas Extra​ñ​as's title implies that this was an unlikely meeting. I content that it was an essential one. 

Found and shared by Llorona Records.

Album Review: The Katy - The Katy

I have a special affinity for punk bands who are able to make smooth and delicious R'nB, or rather, R'nB bands who approach writing and performing like 'an 80s punk band, and letting their natural grittiness rise to the surface through a curtain of streetwise timbre. I'm not sure which exposition Cleveland's The Katy would prefer, but they are definitely some mixture of the two. Taking their name from blues revue standby "She Caught the Katy," and inspired by a congregation of talents as diverse as The Clash and Billie Holiday, their debut self-title is the stark inheriter of these differentiated canons, and something of a more progressive order of divergence than their combination would necessarily anticipate. Leaning into the heart of the matter, the album seems to find its sturdiest ballast point with "Elbowroom," a mid-sequence song, which makes space for band leader Cathalyn's voice and the quiet rumble of her bass playing to illuminate a dissenting path into the full swell of the group's nurturing enclave of acid-fringed, jazz-organ murmurations, loadbearing and dependable percussion, and an encultured environ suffused with the practiced calm and evocative pretense of a beat poetry reading. The tendrils of "Elbowroom" wind through the levels and wells of the rest of the album, transforming the decadent potential of each into flourishing gardens of ambitious aural adventure. "Bonnie Single" is possessed of a generative, kosmische scan that perpetually uncovers new dimensions of warmth and variance within the street sounds and metropolitan nesting material it uses to furnish its abode. "Market Cornered" is a deep, funk and R'nB slide that feels like a bathtub draining in reverse, as in, once uncorked, it will fill until overflowing, drunkenly submerge you in lavender and the kiss of exotic flowers peddles. "Juice" is a sweet, slick and funky kind of jam that sees Cathalyn channeling a raw and righteous Corinne Bailey Rae, and "Who You Are" is a bubble-blowing, sugar crawl through the gutter of the heart that drags itself deliberately to the light of epiphany. The Katy is as The Katy does, and the Katy pretty much does it all. 

Album Review: Geiger von Muller - Slide Sonatas I.

Geiger von Müller plays like a man with two minds and four hands. He's primarily a solo performer, favoring slide techniques and focusing his efforts on coaxing aural abstractions from an acoustic guitar. The melodies he produces often have a contrariness to them that is unexpected level and congenial- as if they are an opposing viewpoint on some topic of normative value- a contradiction that you had not previously considered but which comes from a legitimate, outside perspective. It almost sounds like he's rattling off chords in front of a mirror and his reflection is playing counter harmonies. His performance represents both himself and a stranger who shares his body, and the man on the inside certainly has some funny ideas. Each stroke of his guitar is a point and a contention, a refutation of the previous chord that also acts as its proponent and champion. Beckoning past recollections while irreparably impacting the future from a lean and narrow territory of time that slices and folds itself in half only to bend back into shape, whole and de-stressed. His latest album Slide Sonatas I. considers the American blues as raw material on which to practice is a self-constructed manual of sonic origami. His uniquely articulate and strident style makes chords that reflect life in the mountains flutter like harpstrings brushed by the wings of a stork, renditions inspired by downhome porch ditties ring out like a chorus of electronic crickets, and dirt-road ambling melodies come to resemble the motion of tracing the circumference of a ufo as it weaves between the tips of skyscrapers below a star-speckled sky. Whatever dimension Geiger learned to play the blues in, it was certainly a more interesting reality than the one you or I inhabit.

Interview: Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis of Sound Opinions

Image by Marty Perez

Saving the best for last this year. For my last interview for the CHIRP Radio Artist Interview Series this year I got to talk with two people who I have admired for many years from afar. Greg Kot and Jim DeRogartis are two people who I have trusted for news and opinions for close to two decades and it was a true honor to speak with them about the origins of their excellent podcast Sound Opinions, as well as integrity in reporting, and the ongoing importance of genuine music journalism. I'm not going to wax anymore about this one because I could probably run on for another five paragraphs. And, frankly, the episode speaks for itself. Check out the interview on CHIRP's site or below: 

CHIRP Radio · Sound Opinions Interview

Album Review: Teen Mortgage - Smoked

There are definitely some bands that are easier to get into than others. Some you need to sit with, think on, and get a little lost in before you fully appreciate what they have to offer. Others have an appeal that is as direct and blunt as a stray nail piercing your palm. Washington D.C. duo Teen Mortgage are clearly the latter. You don't even have to listen to them to get this impression, either. Look at the cover of their latest EP Smoked. It has a zombie getting smeared on the pavement after tumbling dead-ass over empty-head from an unseen, but apparently, perilous height. A perfect visualization of the way that one's libidinal drive interacts with the wall of impassible sound that the band conjures- as in, it will splatter into shards and goo like a dropped jar of preserves. The image however holds a small secret. Besides, being visually and thematically striking, it is also a reference to Fondation Skateboarding's That's Life tape, whose cover features a young Corey Duffel flatout painting the concrete with his face after botching a grind. These guys are clearly connoisseurs of underground culture and it shows up in their music as well. There are so many bizarre and delightful touchpoints that Teen Mortgage seamlessly integrates into their incongruous wretch and pummel that hearing their record is almost like experiencing a truncated tribute to the last thirty years of underground rock and roll. There is the pelvis-breaking low-end of the mean and danceable squall of the title track that sounds like Jesse F. Keeler of Death from Above 1979 backing up Ty Seagel as he rehearses a punched-up version of his early material. Then there is the way that Oasis's pop-infused psychedelic probings are suffused throughout the stomping clap of "Ghost Girl" like the scent of perfume on old clothes. Lastly, there is the sharp and stipulated hooks that drag "Can I Live" out of the gutter and into the searing light of day, where it steadily garners momentum like a piece of heavy machinery with a faulty emergency brake careening down a hill and into a farmer's market, a track that combines the terse melodic discernment of a group like the Strokes with the terminal perception-altering post-sludge plunge of Big Business. Coming away from Smoked is like fleeing a fire in a record store, it will leave you shook and coughing with a faint dusting of vinyl and nostalgia clinging to your hair and skin. Even though you barely escaped with your life the first time, you may find yourself possessed by an urge to go back in to see what else you can salvage- a product of a sort of adrenaline-tempered muscle memory and shock. My advice: grab a pack of tall boys and get back in there champ! Get Smoked! 

Served up by King Pizza Records. 

Album Review: Jensen Interceptor & DJ Fuckoff - Club Angels EP

I'm going to assume that you are reading this on a Saturday afternoon and not on a Friday night when I'm actually writing it. I'm going to assume this for my own sake, because I like to think that the people who read my blog are cool, with exciting social lives, and not loafing on the couch reading blogs when they could be out with friends or getting laid. Regardless, wherever you are when you read my endorsement of it, your life will feel like you've dropped ass first into an illegal underground rave while the Club Angels EP is rattling the cones of a nearby sound system. The four-track banger is a collaboration between producers Jensen Interceptor and the ludicrously libidinal DJ Fuckoff. This little album is nasty, and it knows it, and it wants you to know it too. Its unabashed, brash, and confrontational presentation is as liberating as a pair of boltcutters comping through the chain that keeps a horny, junkyard-dwelling rottweiler from living out all his most prurient fantasies with the pure-breed sheltie next-door. Ghetto-tech gilded rave beats whirl in sharp, circular circumferences like propeller blades guiding a payload to its payoff. Explicate invitations to freak and fumble are signed, sealed, and delivered by the lyrics over grinding, impatient grooves that drive these tracks through one sweaty debauched juncture to the next, accompanied by daggering electronics that intervene like a haze of javelins, piercing the hot-air balloon that is your prone sense of inhibition. Let Club Angels EP help you get down- by yourself, or with a mutually consenting partner- as if nobody is watching... unless someone is watching. In which case, you should probably get a room. 

Known to be found on Unknown To The Unknown.

Interview: Fordmastiff

Lucas Stamford runs the Brazilian experimental label Municipal K7 and has been a supporter of this blog since its start in earnest back in 2020. I believe he was one of the first people to send me music from the artists he distributes with a genuine interest in hearing what I had to say about them. And this appreciation is mutual, as I take a special interest in what he sends me as it is consistently elegant and haunting. Even though the music is from different artists, the releases always have a noticeably impressionistic and paradoxical sensibility about them; existing in a quantum integument spanning life and death, growth and inertia- constant metabolic motion locked in eternal ember. These bridged distinctions are no less present in his own work, and are particularly noticeable in the constitution of his new project, Fordmastiff. 

His first album with the project, Counterfeit, serves as a reflection on one of Rio's biggest events, Carnival, which takes place before the fasting of lent commences each year, starting on the Friday before Ash Wednesday and ending on Ash Wednesday at noon. It consists of parades and other festivities centered around the elaborate floats and demonstrations by the city's many samba schools. Counterfeit is a celebratory album, in a way. Despite its dark, moody tones and ghostly environmental grain, and the typical English connotations of the word, Counterfeit is the product of an effort to make something beautiful- an attempt at capturing and cognizing the imagined potential of Rio, both as a city and as expressed by its most emancipated and jovial of festivals. I picked up on this underlying romantic quality of the record during my first couple of listens but was otherwise at a loss to describe it. I still may have failed in this regard.

Thankfully, you don't have to solely rely on my description of the album to guide your own understanding. I reached out to Lucas to get a perspective on the album in his own words, and you can read out the exchange below. My own criticism of the character of Counterfeit is close to the mark, but nowhere near sufficient to capture the depth of the album's full intention. 

Listen to Counterfeit while you read my interview with Lucas below:

   

Interview conducted over email on Decemeber 12, 2022. It has been edited slightly for clarity's sake.  

Is this your first album under the name Fordmastiff?
Yes.

How did you settle on the title Counterfeit for your album?
I like the sound of it, and it feels nicely bureaucratic, the name of a crime related to piracy. And I think it alluded to some of my thoughts and processes: the idea of a beautiful falsification, in a carnivalesque sense. There can be some duality, as "counterfeit" can summon the meanings of deceit, but maybe, in context, it can also conjure a sense of invention, "fantasy."

Where is the cover image from and what are we seeing in it?
It's part of a samba school compound, where allegorical floats and costumes are designed and crafted, and they rehearse.

This photo was taken by my friend Claudio Szynkier. Claudio is an amazing musician releasing some spectacular music as Babe, Terror and Zpell Hologos. I believe he was documenting samba schools in São Paulo at the time for his film Os Pólos (made with music from his album Horizogon). Besides the incredible music he has released for more than a decade now, he's doing impressive stuff as a filmmaker too.

What was your recording setup like for this release?
It’s a simple setting. Everything was done with really cheap equipment: my old computer, old keyboards, homemade effect pedals, a fake sm57 microphone (a "counterfeit" piece of equipment). I'm sure some would call it precarious... It's all barely working equipment, as it can be when you are an underground musician in the global south.

What is the connection between your new album Counterfeit and the city of Rio de Janeiro?
As I was releasing this tape, there was a strange, beautiful happening in Rio: an abandoned ship went adrift in Guanabara bay and crashed into the main bridge to the city. It felt somewhat in tune with this album's imaginings.

You have said that you view Rio as a kind of dream world. What does this mean and how does it inform your project?
There’s a great historical undercurrent embedded in Rio’s cultural history that infuses the city’s modern identity with a sort of "paradisiac" fantasy, the utopia of a magical Rio. This dreamy utopian construct is instilled in the imaginative pulse that shaped some of the greatest music ever made in Brazil. It's an imaginary landscape that was perfectly embodied in the music of artists such as Tom Jobim, Luiz Eça, Quarteto em Cy, among others.

That wonderful falsification of a "paradise Rio" had an expiration date, as the surrounding poverty made it crumble away. I think the answer is to see that this "dream" was always a falsification, but a powerful magical one, and to keep in touch with this utopian specter, not as a nostalgic gesture, but in new bold ways, while incrementally pushing for reinvention in the material basis.

What is the significance of Rio Carnival to your album?
I was imagining mad carnivals that could be conjured by the music made in my bedroom; in my mind, I had this image while I was recording. I like the way The Quietus's Daryl Worthington has put it (in this great selection of tape releases from 2022) that in this album, Rio's carnivals seem to be a world of endless possibilities. Maybe my "theme" is a parade of radioactive ghosts making carnivalesque appearances- hints from an underground world hidden beneath the surface of the city.

What role does Carnival have in reinforcing your sense of the city as a dream world?
Rio's Carnival is a civilizational event of culture (rather than a "culture of event," a distinction made by Brazilian philosopher Luiz Antônio Simas, whose writings I'd strongly recommend to better illuminate that question) and, as such, it mobilizes powerful meanings and existential relations within the city. It is a ritual enchantment of spaces. The samba schools are its fundamental element, its spiritual essence. Their parades are sensorial, bodily experiences that manifest radical inventiveness from Rio's black communities. The Samba School is the greatest and most profound Brazilian invention. Without a doubt, far greater than the airplane.

Do you plan to attend Carnival in 2023? If so, what are some of your favorite parts? If not, what are your preferred alternatives to the festivities?
Yes, I do! I always try to, one way or another. The part that interests me is the samba school parades. Carnival is nothing without the samba schools. It’s a huge artistic happening, with highly elaborated designs and sophisticated music. The higher division parades take place in an avenue specially designed by architect Oscar Niemeyer, commissioned by legendary socialist governor Leonel Brizola and anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, while lower division samba schools parade at Estrada Intendente Magalhães, a street in the Madureira neighborhood. 

I enjoy attending the parades in Madureira as you can get really close. It's "lo-fi" and untouristy. Sometimes you can simply get there, drink beer, and find a samba school with an extra costume for you to take part in the parade on the fly.

I also enjoy watching it on TV. It goes on through the night, with the last samba schools parading at dawnbreak. Though I like to see it on mute, while simultaneously following the transmission through the radio. On the radio, you can hear more of the music, while TV focuses too much on showcasing bullshit like TV celebrities.

How does the issue of poverty interact with and illuminate the themes of Counterfeit?
This one is difficult because it isn’t something I imagine one would easily think about while hearing it, as there are no lyrics. But a sort of answer may come if we think about Rio's Carnival as an inspiration and what it really is. It is an uprising of magic, disrupting "normality" and defying structures of neo-bondage and servitude that are pervasively present in a certain version of Brazil (a kind of mad ultra-capitalist laboratory for the world, fueled by a colonial cognitive "blueprint"). That version of Brazil had its culmination in the rise of a violent fascist regime, rooted in repulsive delusions of a national past. Historically, the great fantasies of Carnival's samba schools gave birth to a truly modern, elegant idea of Brazil.

Do you hope that your album can help address some of the issues like poverty that you see Rio suffering through, or do you have other social goals that you hope to address with it?
Music can help to heal impoverished imaginations, imaginations diseased by the bourgeois mentalities that ultimately are at the root of brutal schemes of suffering. It's no surprise that Bolsonaro's regime has its own representation in music, a strain of business-oriented "sertanejo music."

One can only hope to incrementally build something through music on a small scale out of collective engagement. So, maybe in a broader sense, I hope that as an underground tape label we can help to bring out a certain feeling against ugly corporate cleanliness in music.

What is next for this project and your label Municipal K7?
I have another one almost ready, where I’m delving into different fantasies and processes. Recently, in a conversation with brilliant filmmaker and magician Natália Reis, we had an idea for a new project together that involves film and music.

Right now, Municipal is preparing a "Christmas Special" compilation with tracks by various artists.
We're looking forward to releasing new artists next year, as well as new music that might come from acts such as Atletas (following his astonishing debut) Crocodilo Slam (recently saw a show where she played in São Paulo and her new stuff just blew me away) and Fantasma do Cerrado (which btw received a great review written on this blog.) [Editor's note: I also covered Crocodilo Slam back in 2020, read the review here.]

Interview: Oort Smog

 

On the invitation of Scott Osgood of AKP Recordings I had the opportunity to speak with Mark Kimbrell and Patrick Shiroishi of the weird, heavy, and enigmatic jazz project Oort Smog. We mostly discussed their latest album Every Motherfucker is Your Brother, but that gave us a good enough vantage point to examine their distinctive approaches and how they combine their talents to produce the project's unique sound. We also had a friendly disagreement about the band Yob, decided what genre Oort Smog really belongs in, and learned what a "primordial embryo" looks like. I honestly think the guys had more fun than I did. If I didn't know better, I'd think they were brothers. 

Listen to the Oort Smog interview: 

Check out Every Motherfucker is Your Brother:

Album Review: Arrrepentimiento - Birth of Significance

This blog wouldn't be worth much if I couldn't turn you on to a band like Arrrepentimiento every once in a while. The Tokyo ensemble specializes in audio collages that superimpose pop-folk melodicism and a delicate, contingent sense of rhythm onto field recordings and other miscellaneous audial sensations. Their fusion of the errant and purposeful emerges as an anarchic take on Fleet Foxes or Iron & Wine, or other such chambré, low-key rockers of the '10s- only much more interestingly. With singles like "Rewind the Sun" and smaller releases like Syllabus #1 & #2, they've managed to make this somewhat incongruous experiment of theirs more cohesive, aligning the various and straining nonlinear strands that make up each movement knit together enough to become a commanding symphony of formal defection. Still, improved command over their style doesn't cast a dim light on their earlier efforts. In retrospect, I've developed a fondness for 2020's Birth of Significance. It's their longest release that isn't a live album, and it quietly boasts many of their most solid and cogent grooves, while demonstrating the fundamental soundness of their harmonic potential. The immersive pump and push of "One Day of the Optimist" stands out in this regard, feeling pungently bassy without being overly intrusive, while earlier tracks like "Resonance" find a contend medium between a post-rock jangle and a lush baroque heave amongst a hornet's swarm of construction noise. The record is a bit of a turning point for the group, demonstrating a peak in their traditional songwriting sensibilities and proving the effectiveness of their designs, resulting in the moments where the quietly troubling bawl of ambulance sirens that roar through "Sequence is Ready" and the curious chatter of caged birds and scratchy radio interludes that interject into the gentle dance of a track like "Pollen" all the more intriguing for the verisimilitude they cause to drain into the otherwise dreamy flow of these songs. The conflicts posed by the non-musical elements resolve mostly as added texture, but also play an important role in prompting inquiry into the settings in which these songs were made and the lives of those who made them. It reminds me that these songs are not just diversions offered for momentary pleasure and consumption but the product of human intention as a crystallization of some thought or feeling that called out from within their maker to be given a voice. That voice and its message find us, despite the interference of an unpredictable and disorganized world- and yet, it is that disorder that perhaps uncovers the value and meaning imbued within these sounds. Birth of Significance locates its cause and origin in that discordant state in which the spark of purpose is immaculately conceived and flourishes like a wildfire. 

Album Review: Borguefül - Horst

I'm finding myself drawn to another simple vocal and instrumental combo today. This time, the invocations of French singer and upright bass player Mélanie Loisel, under the name Borguefül. Horst is Mélanie's first LP with the project, a reclamation of deep sentiment and discordant heuristic, tilling for a contested past, while settled in the vantage point and bower of a harrier's nest. A quaking emergence, out from under the dust of ancient tears, and a yearning cry for an unknown emotion to sink one's teeth into and sup of its juice like a ripe pomegranate. Chords plucked like feathers from a crow's tail, a squawk of a bow shouts back in reply to its own mischievous transgression. Globular repetitions chase jousting indictments as a marble caught in a pinwheel stalks the wind, ignorant to the truth that it is the wind's capricious impetus that keeps it from plummeting to the ground. Growning bellows harmonize with Mélanie's lucid aural articulations as a woman attempting to sing a cyclone to sleep- a vain nursery rhyme persuasively pouring from a place of optimism into a world of resolute opposition. A scourge of rain prompted a mountain to collapse inward into a surging landslide, a redwood tree withering in the heat to a heap of tumbleweeds, a desert flooded with stagnant water, a return to paradise by casting oneself into perdition. Horst is elevated through its ability to brace for the ultimate and inevitable fall.  

 Distributed for your delight by La République des Granges.

Album Review: Gollylagging - Ain't That Just The Way!

I like that Gollylagging hides their power level a bit during the first half, of the first song, off their first 2021 EP, Ain't That Just The Way! The Boston band is very capable of projecting their sound and cranking up the volume, but "Capsizing" begins with a solitary, jangling guitar stroke that sways indecisively like it's not sure it has the gumption to say what it intends to- but then someone steps on a distortion pedal, the vocals jump from a deliberate whisper to a shirt-ripping, throaty howl, and Gollylagging have blasting over 9,000 volts of pure emo energy directly into you skull cavity. The slow start to the record makes this fast wind-up feel all the more impeccable- and they never really let up the rest of the record either (with the notable exception of the acoustic number, "Dealing Cards")- not even to pluck up out and spruce up one of the several earwormy melodies that float through the empathetic ferment. Mostly, because they don't have to. Gollylagging are one of those groups that can pin the odometer to the floor like they were arm wrestling with it- like they're Macho Man Randy Savage and their challenger was Bill Nye- and still, they come off as catchy as they come. The band can, and does, tear through these songs like the frantic abandon of Texas is the Reason on their '95 EP, but with the aforementioned fineness of champion bull rider, never losing their grip on the essential, live wire groove as the core of each track, and wrangling them into an orderly, if not tame, efficacious whip and jog. Ain't That Just The Way! is raw and fractious, but it shows a band capable of turning their internal combustion into a viable fuel for introspective enactments of punk prowess. Lollygagging, they are not. 

Album Review: Uncle Nop Nen - Kite Songs

I don't have much in the way of context for this release and not much to say about it, but I do find it interesting and would like to turn other people on to it if possible. This is a small collection of field recordings collecting the performances of a man who goes by Uncle Nop Nen as he performs both traditional Cambodian folk songs and original compositions on his two-string chapei dang veng. I really enjoy the thin and deeply reedy quality of the instrument on these recordings. It sounds both sinewy and rarefied, specific in a way to the singer, as is extracted from his body and then woven by hand into delightful, transportive patterns. I'm not used to hearing music this arpeggiated either, and its clarity is a pleasant break from the business of most Western music. I recommend grabbing some tea, putting on your headphones and doing nothing for the next twenty minutes while it plays. That's what I'm up to this Friday night, and it's cathartic, and forcing me to reflect on how important it is to simply clear your schedule to think and sort your emotions throughout the day and into the evening. And just as importantly, to hear something you haven't heard before, and welcome it to excite your senses. 

Find it at Oxlaey

Album Review: Lash - House of Women

The pettiest of disagreements, infractions, slights, and controversies can entirely derail one's day. A misunderstanding or an outright conflict with another person can introduce an untold amount of stress into your life, and yet it is navigable so long as you keep the matter in its proper perspective. When these dislocations happen within the self though, it can lead to outright ruin. The Greeks transcribed upon the walls of the Temple of Apollo, "nosce te ipsum" ("Know Thy Self"). But to which self shall you be true? The one in the gutter, or the one on a pedestal; the one who paid the electric bill on time, or the one who can't be convinced to make their bed in the morning? Inside you are two wolves. They're roommates and can't decide whose turn it is to do the dishes. Which part of yourself to appease and which part of yourself to regulate, at first, seems like a simple choice- but it's not. Society places many expectations on all of us, and what's more, we place just as daunting of expectations on ourselves. The divides that these pressures create are explored in a quizzical fashion on Lash's EP House of Women. The pop-industrial record explores the many sides of Lash's personality as discordant figures living within the priory of her personage. The first three tracks are given feminine names to solidify their identities, the first embodying her sense of discipline as depicted by the Sysophian haul of "Bernarda," a heaving stride through a blaze of lurching synths, combustible guitar solos, and stomping resolute percussion, whose ashy textures give the impression that Lash is singing it while wounded and attempting to escape a burning forest. Next, "Maldita" represents her sense of ambition, combining popular styles of dance production into a rapturous ascent, pricked around the edges by a crush of dark electronics, possibly symbolizing her sense of doubt, or the realization that with success will come a foreclosure of other possible futures and routes of personal fulfillment. Then there is "Ingenua," a sunny swivel, escorted through its paces by traditional Spanish rhythms, a track with an upbeat tempo and a playful chorus harmony that speaks to the personal betrayal she experiences in giving into society's demands of her, as a musician, and a woman. These three parts of her soul are reconciled within the final track, "House of Women," a nightmarish flight through unearthly sonic interiors and billowing gasps of noisy feedback, that climax in a coasting oasis of quietude that sails out of sight like an ark in search of a mountain top to anchor itself to. Each of us contains multitudes, but few are willing to unleash them all and live with the consequences. Lash is one such brave soul. How about you? 

Available from Éditions Appærent.

Album Review: Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith & Emile Mosseri - I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon

I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon is as abstract as any title you could give a piece of work. It is also to the point of the album's effects and purpose. Reflecting on a mangy transcendence, a loyal aloofness, a sociable radiance- it constitutes a merging spiral of self-identifying, dumb servility and unattainable eminence. A tension of irreconcilable concepts and associations that keeps your mind suspended and stuck in free-floating limbo, like a fly dangling from the single thread of spider's silk- unable to free itself and untroubled by the rationale to try, as the spider who made the silk was eaten by a bird earlier that afternoon. The pleasure and pale discomfort of these conflicting relations is the crux of the album's hexing charm. Composers Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Emile Mosseri met when Kaitlyn messaged Emile, entirely out of the blue, after hearing his score for the film The Last Black Man in San Francisco. It was seemingly an easy friendship that blossomed out of their conversations concerning Emile's work, and an effort to combine their visions was born out of the encounter. Despite the album's dichotomous, literal and figurative, structure, the conflict between the artist's techniques and tones produces a homeostasis that is a rich and inviting habitat for the mind's projection of itself and its image in repose against an ever-expanding world. A psychic soup that acts as both a spiritual koi pond and experiential petri dish in which exotic primordial amphibious fauna flourish and multiply after being discharged from the maniacal confinements of linear time. You can float on the surface of its atmosphere or dive to the belly of its depths. However you choose to make your peace, I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon will accommodate in its own deliberately detachment and darkly illuminating way. 

Appearing thanks to Ghostly International.

Metal Monday: Wake, Cryptae, Destillat, & Gridlink

It's another Metal Monday! Huzzah! I've once again picked four metal albums from my recent rotation of heavy and Hail Satan-ing albums to say a little something about. I picked these albums based only on the fact that they inspired me to write something about them. Like most things I do with the blog, there is/was/may never be a plan. I'm just feelin' out a vibe here folks. Funnily enough, a theme did emerge. All of the albums I wanted to write about turned out to be one flavor or another of death metal. So that's what we're going with tonight. Welcome to Metal Monday: Four Ways to Die Edition!

Wake - Thought Form Descent (Metal Blade)

Your first death tonight is by drowning. I have been witness to Calgary's Wake in the grips of an escalating, fast-progressing evolution since they caught my eye with 2018's Misery Rites. Since then, they have emerged from a state of hideous, Vermin Womb gestated punk and grind, and through the masticating gauntlet of 2020's Devouring Ruin, where the tenor of their increasing technical proficiency took on the arduous acrimony of black metal, and now through their latest album, Thought Form Descent, they have managed to ascend to a new plateau of transcendence. Their latest LP sees the band embodying a form akin to a liquid golem, one that can evaporate, freeze and flood at will- splashing between the cataract maelstrom of Inter Arma and the plague-bearing death rattle of Hissing, all while burying you in a concrete pour of sound so dense that it will squeeze the oxygen out of you like steam screaming from a tea kettle. This crush of gratuitous hostility is not just impenetrable, but veering on inexplicable as well, as throughlines of psychedelic guitars whip and parry throughout its intestines like electric eels gliding around the interior of a glacier, writhing and taunting as if they were thrashing in shallow water rather than the impassable interior of a wall of stone-solid ice. You will sink so fast into Thought Form Descent that you'll barely have the chance to scream before you disappear below the tension of its troubled, fluid mantel. 

Cryptae - Capsule (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Your second death is by way of madness. Cryptae is a Dutch death metal band, comprised of Kees Peerdeman of Heavy Natural and René Aquarius of... so many bands, not the least of which is Dead Neanderthals (my personal favorite of all of his projects). Their second LP, Capsule has the mechanistic and fatalistic character of Portal attempting to write a Cynic tribute album, only to be murdered and replaced by AI-enabled automatons who repurposed the album into a weapon of psychological warfare. The production is raw, and yet you can hear every tendon-sheering guitar chord and the spray of spital from every teeth-baring snarl. The structure of the tracks is a maze of circuitous passages, winding and intersecting beneath its own folds and muscular undulations like a heap of pythons engaging in incestuous coitus. Motherboards melt over fretboards, flesh fuses with fiber optics mesh, and heartbeats come to echo electronic polyrhythms. A merging of machine and human malice in an asylum of absolute dread. Capsule is the prism through which we may view our ultimate destiny and defeat. 

Destillat - Under Black Horizons (Self-Released)

Your third death is by poisoning. This ignominious end comes courtesy of German's Destillat, whose debut LP Under Black Horizons is the product of a venomous ferment of melo-death and black metal. Lyrical guitar solos rise into the air like volleys of arrows before a marauding groove sweeps your legs and the gnashing, war-dog snap and minor-dragon breath of fire that is the vocals start ripping at your exposed cadaver, spreading your entrails around like lunchmeat from an upturned lunchpail. It's unsavory and difficult to discount, like the taste of blood slowly spreading throughout your mouth and mixing with your saliva. Tales of war, lust, and greed, distilled into rumbling charges of moral soothsaying of near-operatic proportions- dragging you to a peak of emotions in order to show you how far man's folly can cause him to fall. Under Black Horizons tells a tale older than time, and teaches a lesson older than grave dirt- the deadliest poison in human history has always been his own hubris. 

Gridlink - Longhena (Selfmadegod Records)

Your fourth death this evening shall be by vivisection and your surgeon/executioner is Japan's Gridlink. They aren't traditional death metal or grindcore band (by any stretch of the imagination) but they get the job done. Longhena was the band's last album before splitting up. Released in 2014, it was the pinnacle of artfully pristine and precise intentionality, manifest through frenetic guitar playing and impeccably timed, tension-bursting grooves. Grindcore is generally considered the sloppy and willfully homely cousin of both metal and punk, but Gridlink was able to show that it could be something beautiful and refined when taken seriously. Longhena is as much a science as an art, and its cutting precision and conscious musicality still make many modern metal albums look like the petrified skeletons of malformed prehistroic beasts. For these reasons, and so many more, Gridlink will always be king. What an honor it must be to meet them in both of your final, and finest hours. 

Interview: Cryostasium

I was able to catch up with Cody of Cryostasium to talk about his latest album Dragon's Keep but we ended up unpacking a good deal of his project's history and I learned some amusing facts about his early releases. Cody is a very fun and enthusiastic guy and his energy is infectious. I've been fascinated by his project for a while now because of the wide and strange medley of styles he engages with, from black metal, to neo-classical, to whatever he fancies next. Talking with him and hearing how much he loves what he's doing reminded me a little bit about why I have this blog and why I put in the work to promote independent and underground artists. I really hope you enjoy this conversation, it's one in a million. 

Listen to my interview with Cryostasium below: 

Check out Dragon's Keep, which dropped on Fish Prints this past Friday, December 2. 

Album Review: QuinzeQuinze - VĀRUA

Paris-based QuinzeQuinze have tasked themselves with constructing a connective sonic tributary to permit fresh streams of electronic refrain to find safe passage to the rejuvenating mother-seas from which spring the traditional Polynesian music that is their heritage. They've been immersed in the project for close to a decade and have at least three impressive EPs to show for their efforts, of which Vārua is the latest, as well as my introduction to their work. While there appears to be a connection between QuinzeQuinze's sound and some popular French Polynesian dance genres like ori deck, the presence of such influences seems tangential to the facts of its anatomy. It seems rather focused on the cultivation and maintenance of a shared and overriding tenor of introspective climate and living harmonies. A general preoccupation with the metabolism of mood over the insistence of motion. Vārua is simple in structure but mighty in impact- conjuring a throne of hushed thunderclouds and a drift of elemental electronics from which a commanding quiet usher forth, guided by slick, bassy jetstream torrents and fertile reservoirs of marrowy percussion and ringing, concave drums that form the hutch and temple floor for a vocal performance that is both familiar and guarded, like the diffuse agony of lost memories surging back to conscious recollection without warning. Vārua is truly the proper title for this EP, and not without reason. The word translates to "spirit" in Tahitian, a concept which it embodies fully as it prompts you to grasp at its shifting and ethereal forms only to have them pass through your fingers like smoke. And yet it produces an aura that is more than just a phantom, a total manifestation of concrete sensation that creeps up your spine like a disembodied hand to rest, in a warm gripping embrace, on your shoulder. A presence of reassurance and weighted doubt that can't be ignored.  

Here thanks to S76. 

Album Review: Antoine Geniaut - Mausol​é​e Tape 7

I'm going to apologize upfront if I get any of the facts wrong here because I'm working off of information that I am translating from French, and my grasp of my own mother tongue is often tenuous, let alone anyone else's. What language you speak is of little relevance when it comes to one's ability to appreciate music though, and that's why I am compelled to say something about this release. I'm not sure how I found it, but this too, is irrelevant. What is of importance is the passion with which French guitarist Antoine Geniaut displays on Mausol​é​e Tape 7. His love for these songs infects my spirit and commands me to become his advocate. The album is a collection of 10 covers drawn from the catalog of the late Jean-Luc Le Tapenia. Nearest I can tell, Jean-Luc was a notable figure in the French folk-punk scene of the '00s, who lived an uncomplicated and somewhat unremarkable life, but who was able to translate the terrible ordinariness his life into relatable, and often very humorous, pop-acoustic explorations of the tender brutality and seething pleasure of modern life. Antoine's own style is very different in affect and approach, if not in content, from that of Jean-Luc, preferring a more measured, loose, satisfyingly brushy style of playing, which contrasts strikingly with his subject's acerbic, agitated, and often frantic method of conveying his ideas. Antoine compensates by approaching the source material without pretense, resulting in raw recordings that exude a prompt kind of urgency. I get the impression that he is performing these songs primarily from a kind of muscle memory forged by having played these songs for himself countless times. In fact, it doesn't feel like Antoine is playing for the benefit of anyone else on Mausol​é​e Tape 7, making us privy to a private exchange between one man and another man who edified the first. I feel very fortunate to have been let in on these intimate rehearsals, as I now not only have an appreciation for Antoine's gifted command of his voice and instrument, but the legacy of one of the irrepressible talents that inspire him, and many, many others.  

From La Souterraine.

Interview: Chaepter

Photo by Vanessa Valadez

My interview with the thoughtful and innovative Chicago-based pop artist Chaepter is now up on CHIRP Radio's site. We talked mostly about his new album, Kicking the Cat, but that was enough to fill almost an hour's worth of conversation. I'm sorry, that you only get to hear 10 minutes of it, but I still think you'll be able to get the drift. I saved you the best bits after the cut. Promise! You can listen to the interview on CHIPR's site here, or below: 

CHIRP Radio · Chaepter Interview

I can't get over how much I love his record. He describes it as "MidWest Gothic" which is perfect, in my opinion. Check out Kicking the Cat below: 

Album Review: 454 - Fast Trax 3

If there is one thing 454 is good at, it's keeping the listener guessing. If there is a second thing he's good at, it's making rap music. If there is a third thing... Actually, that's enough hypotheticals. I'm going to be real here with you, Fast Trax 3 is not what I expect from a hip-hop LP. There are beats and there are rhymes, but that's not what makes it unusual. It's the vibe. Which invades your senses in increasingly articulate and invasive ways throughout the album. The entire affair feels like it was made by Madlib's son, blindfolded and asked to assemble an album entirely based on intuition and past training- like the final test for a warrior monk at the end of his spiritual pilgrimage when he must demonstrate the wisdom of skill he's obtained through his journey. And I don't mean that 454 is actually Madblib's son, or that his talent draws from the legend in any kind of direct lineage, genetic or otherwise. To lay it out, what I'm implying is that 454 is what could happen if Madlib dug a hunk of earwax out his head and dropped it down a sewer grate, and then that gooey little ear goblin somehow gained sentience and used the hours of music that had imprinted on it while living in his involuntary father's cavities to instinctively navigate its own hip-hop career. 454 is an uncanny mutant, full stop. So what makes him so atypical? Well, his vocals, for starters. 454 has this squeaky vocal profile that sounds like someone vigorously polishing a large piece of jewelry- expensive, fluid, and hostile to imperfections and foreign bacteria. His pitched-up and smash-cut flow is reminiscent of the "chipmunk" vocals that might pop out at you from your average Soundcloud trap reel, but it's also its own thing that can't be pigeon (gopher?) holed. It wouldn't surprise me if 454 revealed one day that there was a smaller version of himself renting a timeshare between his gums and lower lip and who pays for his lodging by rapping on his host's recordings. This snappy and warped-cassette quality of 454's vocals fit into the overlay of his chopped and tempo-variant beats like a tailored tracksuit, comfortable and ready for action. Each track lasts about 2 minutes but in each of these condescend spaces, you'll duly encounter speed runs of unheard-of recombinants: make-out sessions between trap production and chiptune sonics, classic soul samples grinding on breakcore bombardments, sensual R'nB backfilled by the sounds of chained dogs, and a flood of ambient gangsta glitz. Fast Trax 3 has my head spinning, but there is no way I'd want to pump the breaks on it. Not even for the sake of keeping my lunch down. Sometimes you have to lose something to gain something. And I'm getting a lot back from 454 on this LP. 

Album Review: Junior Boys - Waiting Game

Waiting Game is a deep album. I don't mean that it is specifically intellectual, even if it does lend itself to a distinct level of ponderance. No, I mean that it is literally deep. As in, it is constructed to make you feel as if it has no true floor, and everything is occurring on your periphery- affording you a path to be drawn into its abiding form while losing track of your way back. It accomplishes this emersion by embracing the peaceful potential of layered, taciturn veneers. At some point, Jeremy Greenspan and Matt Didemus encountered the realization that the dynamic range of music is best decerned at lower volumes. This set them off on a personal and experiential expedition to determine the fullest extent they could furnish an album with texture and still be perceptible and discernable to the human ear. The ranging, radar-like pinging of "Fidget" as it performs an otherworldly strafe through your senses is one of the more obvious examples of the spacial awareness that Waiting Game possesses, but it is matched in subtler ways by the astral waltz of "Samba on Samba" where dripping beads of synthy echos slip past your perception in the tickling caress of "Night Walk" and the flash of twirling glances that defines "Samba on Sama," glossy tears of synthy echos drip through one's perception like water droplets falling from stalagmites, each containing an entire ballroom gala in its gravity-pinched, jewelry-like corpus. Waiting Game is an album that you will get more out of the more you listen with patience and intent. You won't be able to force it to disclose itself before earning its confidence. It is robust but discreet. Even a hushed breath could be enough to disturb its delicate ambiance. Handle with care. 

Don't wait! Find it on City Slang. 

Album Review: Dark Thoughts - Must Be Nice

I've always been a sucker for that black background / pink letters combo punk bands used to do. It's a slightly, kinky twist on the typical monochromatic art style that "serious" bands used to opt for to sidestep criticism that they weren't "tru punx." It gets the job done too, in communicating to the receptive lot among us, that the band is"punk" if that's what you're into, but that they don't give the term a lot of weight when expressing their identity. They're more about making relatable and fun rock music, and that music just happens to sound like punk! A near-exact paraphrase of this description of their sound has been repeated to me by close to fifty bands in my lifetime, and I never get sick of hearing it. Because it's true just about every time! Most people don't have to try to be punk musicians; when they play music, it just comes out that way- raw and weird! This little nostalgic/philosophical romp went through my head as soon as I saw the cover of Must Be Nice, the latest LP from Philly's Dark Thoughts. I could name a dozen bands Dark Thoughts reminds me of in terms of style and presentation, and almost all of them were either on Dirt Nap or Chicago's Red Scar Industries at one point or another. Very Ramones-y, no doubt about it, but with a bratty smarm akin to Dr. Frank of Mr. T Experince's chewy, cotton-candy backwash guggling up in the vocal department and a vigorous approach to buzz-bomb guitar work and hooky flare that is shaded by the long shadow of power-pop raconteurs The Marked Men. The album is a directed blast of self-assured energy that cuts through the malaise of Mid-West ennui with a shocking amount of speed and playful aggression. It will shake off the haze of another night shift at a dead-end service job to give you a momentary piece of mind and transmit a gracious jolt of energy up your spine as you bellyflop into the blitz and bliss of a full-bore, barrage of power chords. Some might have it better than you, but they don't have yours or Dark Throught's moxie. Must Be Nice is 12 reminders of how good it feels to throw two birds to the wind and say "fuck you" to the world for one more night. 

Find it on either Drunken Sailor or Stupid Bag.