Album Review: Ben Quad - Im Scared Thats All There Is

Oklahoma emo band Ben Quad is a lot like Billy Talent in that they're an emo four-piece who play under the designation of a single dude's name- a name that is not shared by any of its individual members (at least not yet and at least not legally). That's where their similarities to Billy Talent end, though. For better and for worse (I happen to like Billy Talent quite a bit... you might give them the gong. I would not). On Ben Quad's first LP I'm Scared That's All There Is, the group displays a powerful binary ability for belting out big, yank-on-your-heartstrings, punk-pop choruses while winding through mazes of skronky, sparkle-shine guitars. These aspects of their sound justifiably anchor them in the center of an American Football, Promise Ring, Cap'n Jazz, and Elliot (to name drop another band with a person's name as their name) four-square of catchy introspection, maturing punk attitude, DIY passion, and firm dynamics that are pliable enough to fit any mood a young person might dwell on long enough to pen a song about. In true Mid-Western style, Ben Quad aren't afraid to run their output through a couple of different guitar pedals when plunging into their songs, and they do so in a way that I don't often hear in emo, and which lends them a bit more of a bar-band thump and big-shouldered umph than you might expect. I definitely enjoy the subtle but effective manipulation of different waves of distortion on "Joan of Hill" where sunny echos and liquid halos of sound dive for cover under a roll-out of sharp thunderous distortion once the chorus picks up steam, with the song reaching its climax in the third verse, a section where singer Sam Wegrzynski screams, with increasing abandon, "Recycled pace designed to break / Throw me away / It was always my fate," as if he's afraid it's the last thing he'll ever have a chance to say. It's an impressive and inspired end to the album that wasn't short of pleasing moments to begin with. But if you are just here for the genre standards, there are plenty of those on I'm Scared That's All There Is as well. Lightening figures math riffs dominate tracks like "Blood for the Blood God" and "We're Gonna Be Here for a While" which will take you from 0 to 60 in a single tear-jerking sprint before lunging into some satisfying, crowd-surfable gang vocals. Even in light of their consistently glistening guitar work, Ben Quad's songs never feel wanting for heft, with the beat and grooves on tracks "You Gotta Learn to Listen, Lou" and "It's a Kinkade!" evidencing just how substantially the essence of taut, old school, punk rock fundamentals manifest within their playing style. There are very few parts of their record where Ben Quad doesn't exhibit an equal commitment to pumping up your adrenaline as to any abstract reflection on emotions. It's amusing to me that they called their record I'm Scared That's All There Is, because every time I listen to it, I find something else I like about it. 

Ben Qaud's record is out on Chillwave Records.  

Album Review: Maria Chiara Argirò - Forest City

Recently it's become harder and harder to define the parameters of what is and isn't jazz. Even during the innovations that overtook the genre as a concept in the mid-20th century ('50-'70s) it was still possible to point to a post-bop performance or a transcendental piece from Alice Coltrane and say to the person next to you, "That's jazz." This is just not the case anymore as baseline reference points become increasingly diverse. While curatorial projects like Jazz is Dead attempt to preserve some semblance of its past, labels like International Anthem continue to press records that point towards an ever-evolving future. Still, even forward-looking jazzheads might be a little taken aback at how far things have progressed on Maria Chiara Argirò's Forest City. A pianist by training, Maria uses her familiarity with resonance and percussive melody to assemble a cosmopolis on a plateau in the sky, one where stone mixes with remnants of stormclouds, the air is wet with a cool electric charge, and the streets are illuminated by bursts of silent, ever-igniting thunder. A place where all that is solid drizzles from the canvas of your reality like wax from a lit candle to pool around you in a bounty of delights. Maria's piano playing, in a menagerie of forms, is always at the center of these songs, a lantern light that guides you through the mists of this welcoming wonderland. It is fascinating how the imposition of decaying electronic half-lives and cricket-barking drum-loops manages to enhance the core of the traditions she draws from rather than detract from them. These languid and black-rose pedal padded, soft industrial elements usher the album into a realm that is closer to post-punk or underground disco than what one might consider a congenial plot on which jazz can flourish. Ever defiant, in its own little way, Forest City demonstrates what vibrant new flora can emerge from a contemporary urban setting when heirloom seeds are nurtured with the right amount of imagination. 

Find it from Innovative Leisure.

Album Review: Lloyd Miller - Orientations

If ever there was a disorienting topic to explore, Lloyd Miller's life and career as a jazz musician and international intellectual might be one of the more exciting and bewildering. Also known as Kurosh Ali Khan, the academic and polyglot, who has mastered over 100 instruments and is fluent in half a dozen languages, is nearly as famous for his studies of Afghan and Persian musical traditions as he is for hosting an Iranian variety show in Tehran for seven years during the '70s- a role he landed while in the country on a Fullbright Scholarship. Can you imagine that? Traveling to a foreign country to study their culture and ending up as a local version of Johnny Carson? It takes a remarkable variety and blend of plasticity and charisma to pull off a trick like that. I see many a wanna-be public intellectual trying their hand at generating genuine spectacle and popular engagement with their scholarship on Twitter daily- most of it is about as gripping as watching someone grasping at straws just out of reach as the golden strands dance on the wind. Lloyd's realm of expertise, in contrast, is broad and incredibly sticky, seemingly capable of transforming everything it touches into a subject of investigation as an extension of his previous work. His latest collection titled, Orientations is exemplary of his scholarship and popular appeal in this regard, arranging several recordings from his personal vault, ranging from the '60s onward, which see him braiding together and finding common reservoirs of modality between musical traditions of the Near and Far East, as well as amicable repurposings of distinctly American jazz styles. Beginning with the weighty trudge and silty undertow of "Camels To Cairo" and traversing through the late-night haze of deteriorating TV broadcasts, performances from festivals unstuck from time, and doppelganger improvisations like "Pacific Breeze," you will find yourself approaching a Platonic crossroads of a culture where the ideal overlaps precisely with the real and tangible. A meeting of worlds that are isolated geographically but which occupy the same space in the mind. One arrives at the impression that these arrangments have always cast a shadow over one's life, and you have only been waiting for the right moment to turn and recognize the significance of the objects whose presence was foretold by the fuzz outlines that have long invaded your line of sight. It is going to be hard to imagine how your appreciation of music, and in particular jazz, made any sense before hearing Orientations, but with time you'll acclimate and learn to prize what it has added to what you've already, always known. 

Out on Fountain AVM

Album Review: Catarrh Nisin vs. 6v9id & Swordman Kitala - blue forty​-​four

What we have here is a gloriously brash split between two international hip-hop talents. The slippery and contorted grime of Japan's Catarrh Nisin and the steely dancehall smash of Uganda's Swordman Kitala. Both sound dangerous cutthroat and resolute in their own firm but graceful way on blue forty​-​four. Catarrh, with the help of producer 6v9id, sounds like he's training for an MMA match in a rainstorm- striking trashcans, utility poles, wood panels, and whatever else is handy as he splashes around in the dirty water, bruising his knuckles and hardening his resolve- one lightening fast jab after another. By the time the rapid fire of his flow and the grit and grimace of his beats has faded into memory, you are left with the solid impression that this is not a dude you want to mess with. On Swordman Kitala's side, his elastic and taunting flow weaves around in tight dangling lines like the strings of a giant spiderweb dripping with slime- hanging around you ominously and leading you to wonder if you've stumbled into the domain of a mischievous deity with an insatiable appetite. At least that's how the first track of his side, "Your Ma Babe," feels. The following track, "We De Gail a Mad Over" has a slight reggaeton bend to its breezy dancehall clatter, and the last track, "Jangle Fever," is a contender for a worldwide, block party banger, with cool Caribbean rhythms and an infectiously repeatable chorus that demands to be shouted back at the sound system that it's bumping out of. Whatever your expectations are headed into blue forty​-​four, you should prepare for them to be obliterated. 

It's out on Blue Tapes. 

Interview: M.H.H.

For the latest episode of this blog's very own podcast, I have an enlightening conversation with Matthew Himes about his project M.H.H.'s LP Cassiope: Protection Songs for Guitar and unpacked its themes of healing, protection, gods, and folk magic. This is a stunningly beautiful album that I hope you'll check out after listening to our conversation. You can find his album on his own label Home & Garden.

Metal Monday: Looprider, Ruthless, Drawn and Quartered, & Indian

It's a Monday. I'm listening to metal. It's a Metal Monday. I've put together another smorgasbord of short reviews covering some metal I've been listening to lately. There is no unifying theme, these are just albums I've been listening to and felt like writing about... Alright, I lied. There is a theme. All the cover art prominently features skulls and/or skeletons. A very rare motif when it comes to heavy metal visuals. You're very unlikely to see this many skulls/skeletons anywhere again, so count yourself lucky. 

Looprider - Ouroboros (Call And Response Records)

Nothing helps take the edge off a long day like some spacy stoner metal, and Looprider's Ouroboros is spacier than most. Think Kyuss on an international space mission with Boris on the ground in Houston, guiding their atmospheric trajectory. You almost need to take the "stone" out of the word "stoner" to properly describe how much altitude the band is getting on this album. I mean, they are getting high as fuck and these songs seem almost weightless as a result! As lofty as the Japanese group's melodies and post-structural writing style get though, Ouroboros is still a rock album at heart. QED: super hot cruisers like "Reactor" and "NWOBHM" that get a boost from borrowed Queens of the Stone Age riffs in order to tear up the desert and turn it into a field of glass shards. Of course, if you want to feel the burn at a lower RPM there is always the ashy blues of "Heavenless" and the title track. Whatever your speed and preferred burn-rate, Ouroboros will meet you there. 

Ruthless - Evil Within (Pure Steel Records)

If Ruthless is best known for anything it's their 1984 EP Metal Without Mercy. This is totally legitimate. That album is a classic slab of American heavy metal. They aren't resting on their laurels through and are constantly demonstrating their willingness to grow and expand on their past successes. The Ruthless released their comeback album They Rise back in 2015 and then followed it up in 2019 with Evil Within- the latter of which is by far my favorite of their catalog. Like Satan with 2018's Cruel Magic, Ruthless have managed to give an old-school heavy metal formula a facelift, making it sharper and deadlier than ever. I really love the locked groove thrash, duel guitar harmonies, and ground-quaking thump of "Atrocities" and really get a jolt from "In Blood," which exudes a shaggy kind of speed metal stoicism with their reliance on steely melodies and marching progressions. Most impressive of all is how physical and restive Ruthless sounds, almost like they were storing their energy in a battery pack during their hiatus and are now releasing it in controlled bursts of ultra-focused artistic aggression. If I didn't know any better, I'd think Evil Within was made by a bunch of dudes in their '20s. One thing is clear though, Ruthless still knows no mercy. 

Drawn and Quartered - Congregation Pestilence (Krucyator Productions)

Ok, here is another blast from the past for you. Drawn and Quartered have hailed from Seattle since 1994 (and even earlier under the name Plague Bearer). Their latest album Congregation Pestilence is their eighth overall and represents the mindset of a band that is used to ruining people's days with ugly, dissident sounds and couldn't think of anything they'd rather do, even if the opportunity presented itself. This album is all about grim, deliberate death metal, played with painful clarity in a soup of misery. They can build cavernous spaces of deathly atmosphere like Hypocrisy while painting articulate pictures with elaborate, gory riffs like Autopsy. The core of the songs are simple but are layered with complexity to provide a sense of retrograde in action- like your mind is slipping backward into a primordial, cro-magnon state. If you are looking to rally around a death metal record today to introduce some steady mayhem into your life, make it Congregation Pestilence. 

Indian - From All Purity (Relapse Records)

Some writers/reviewers like to include a pick at the end of their list as a pallet cleanser. Something a little different but benign to even things out before sending you on your way. Chicago's Indian is more of a pallet spoiler. Their last album From All Purity is from 2014 and is uncomfortable, to say the least. Like having bear spray funneled into your ear canal, or like having a tarantula crawled down your throat and begin making a nest in your stomach. It makes you feel just awful and like you need to escape your own skin somehow- which I'm pretty sure is the point. There is a certain amount of perverse joy in seeing of low of a mood you can obtain, and Indian's acidic cacophony, coal-tar-caked riffs, organ liquifying rhythmic mutilation rituals, and the absolutely bloodless shriek of the vocal work will undoubtedly get you there as you are overwhelmed by cresting waves of unrelenting antipathy on "The Impetus Bleeds," the dislocating eclipse in trepidation of "Directional," and the oppositionally defined and calculatingly thuggish "Rhetoric of No." The only rectitude From All Purity has is in its ability to embody the profane. 

Album Review: Luka Aron - Tinctures

A reverberation through a hall of mirrors. The shimmering surfaces of each shift and froth in its wake. Like water splashing against a rocky shore. Resolving finally to reflect your face in clear view- clearer than you've ever seen. The face below the mask you wear to the world. 

The dang of a bell echoes from above. It sounds like a violin string struck with a knitting needle. Its vibrations shake lose a drop of dew that clung to the wick of a candle stick, and now it begins to burn without remorse. 

A bead of oil climbs down a string into a vile. A toad watches from a nearby jar, sweating poison and bitter dreams of freedom. The workbench under both shifts with a creak as the apothecary leans his weight against it, placing his elbow on its surface to steady his hand. Hoping to save a young girl from a rash of elf-shot. 

The breeze is steady and calm. It speaks with an exacting voice while it deposits riddles in your ear. It bears a harmony from yonder stone abbey, ushering forth from an attic window. A resonance that is now so close that it feels as though it has homesteaded in your soul and begun mining for daylight. It breaks through and now all tumbles inward. 

Available from Ediciones Capablanca.

Album Review: Motherhood - Winded

New Brunswick punk trio Motherhood released their third LP Winded this year and it's a definite improvement over 2019's Dear, Bingo in my opinion. Dear, Bingo was denser and more chaotic, two things that I normally like, but it also appeared to lack focus. Winded is quite a bit more orderly and sees the band better identifying and developing their strengths. Thematically, the album focuses on the ways in which nature mirrors human suffering, or rather, how we can see our own pain as reflected back at us by the world. Motherhood is well suited to explore these motifs as they have a swampy kind of backwater vibe to their music, which they then take pains to filter through the urban, hippy freakouts, indie-kid melodicism, and patterns borrowed from back-packing hip-hop. The easiest identified touch point to the band's sound is probably the Osees (or whatever John Dwyer calls his band these days), but Motherhood are not quite as indulgent as Dwyer tends to get, and the reigning in of some of their impulses is what makes Winded superior in my estimation. The LP kicks off with the two-parter "Crawly" which begins with a break-beat and a Radiator Hospital-esque, hooky careen before bulking up into a muscular, sasquatch stomp. The combination of baroque pop, hillbilly swagger and greaser R'nB melodies on "Shepherd" is beguiling and alluring, while the sparky "Tabletop" sounds like Tilly and the Wall directing the path of a GTO by tapdancing directions on the hood to the blindfolded driver in a whimsical variant of morse code. "Ripped Sheet" is the most chaotic track, harkening back to Dear, Bingo with its elastic, jumpy rhythms, sci-fi soundscapes, and busy, rushing melody, but with all of the extraneous features shone off- a perfectly circular cannonball of indie glory crashing into the battery of your ear holes. And then there are the parts that more than concede to the Moherbaord being a folk-punk band at heart, like the maudlin, campfire strum of "Brakes Snap," the chamber-country bow and curtsy, call and reply of "Shuttered Down," and the M.Ward-esque western-blues jam "Trees." Motherhood really honed in on the special particulars and potentials of their sound on Winded and it paid off in a big way. This record is a hoot!  

Find it from Forward Music Group. 

Album Review: Big City - Liquid Times

Living in the city. It's a Friday night. What to do? Go out? Nah. Phone a friend? No. Sit with my thoughts? Unavoidable, maybe. But it won't be my whole evening. Jam on some jams? Yes! Big City has the sauce. They are the spark in the bulb. The glow of the moon. The feeling between your first shot and the one you order next. A cold bolt of courage and rush of blood down your spine. Out of Vancouver, their debut EP Liquid Times is a cool bed of boiling, fresh dynamics that plunges through the keyhole of Thatcher-era psyched-out and dissociative post-punk, plummeting through time and eventually seeping up through the sidewalk cracks on a rainy night in LA to bleed up through soles of Butch Vig's feet, griming around his toes, infecting his blood with a variety of intoxicating lubricants as he ponders how some of those old Spooner riffs might sound remixed into Cyrstal Method outtakes. Big City's sound is like a fine wine and your soul is the chalice. Opener "Vicious" saturates the brain with ecstasy- a sudsy guggle of carbonated electronics and head-spinning washes. "Feather Light" sounds like the Cocteau Twins pinned to the ceiling by a geyser of coco cola and gratifying catharsis rising out of Shaun Ryder's open, acclivous mouth. The whirly haste of "Zero Gasoline" could power a whole squadron of Propellerheads and "Popcorn" winds up the tension for a hip-tripping and foggy stumble down a slope of oily sax croons and boney, snapping beats. It's your night, seize it by the collar as it spreads its wings. Big City is waiting for you to join them in the neon cloud kingdom beyond the hum of the street lights and below the collision of the stars above. 

Out on Perennial and K Records. 

Album Review: Disco Doom - Mt. Surreal

Disco Doom. I like disco. I also like doom metal. But will I like Disco Doom? Yes. The answer is yes. If you would like to learn more, read on. 

Disco Doom is neither an Italian synth experiment from the mid-'70s, nor a bunch of whisky-poisoned ex-cons and day laborers from the Amerian South who taught themselves to play a handful of Black Sabbath riffs. Not even close. Disco Doom is Swiss duo Anita Rufer and Gabriele De Mario. Two cats who have been in the game for around two decades but still sound as raw and enigmatic as a band that has been writing for less than a year- with the caveat Disco Doom is a band definitely knows what they want to sound like and have the technical varsity to see their vision to fruition. They are not wandering through the desert searching for milk and honey; instead, they've resolved to make their own, and it came out like a hurricane of dayglo miasma. 

Their first album in eight years has arrived under the moniker of its first track, "Mt. Surreal" which sounds like someone playing guitar with a hook tied to the end of a rubber hose; it's both elastic and perilously sharp, with chords flexing and slumping at odd angles like trees melting in a hot lysergic rain. The following track "Rogue Wave" sounds like Pile playing a Beach Boys song in reverse as surfy riffs recede backward from the shore and off the end of the world as Gabriele's lethargic vocals stretch themselves out over the devolving scene like the wings of a fantastical sea bird. Later, "Prolog" rises like a waterspout from an oil slick, a rainbow of whispering torrents and the sighs of dying water nymphs, while "Static Bend" delivers a kind of funky, post-rock that sounds like its accompanying J Mascis strutting in a denim tux that is being actively tailored by a tiny cadre of robots that ping-pong off the surrounding building in a crisscross of methodical mayhem and daydream praxis.   

Mt. Surreal is what it claims to be. A behemoth of wild, uninhibited imagination, unleashed on the unenlightened world in the form of a beautiful flood of confident mystery and pristine illusion. 

Find it on Exploding in Sound Records. 

Interview: The Cool Kids

Got to chat up the ever-evolving duo, Sir Michael Rocks and Chuck Inglish of Chicago's The Cool Kids for the CHIRP Radio Artist Interview Series this week. They went a lot deeper than I expected them to into their new musical project, cinematic triptych, mega-album(?) Before Shit Got Weird, as well as their multi-level performance (literally) NIGHT SCHOOL at Thalia Hall this weekend (9/24). They are serving food that they cooked themselves at the show. I've never experienced something like that before but I want to! I hope it starts a new trend frankly. When people make it out to a show, feed them dammit!

You can listen to the interview either here, or below: 

CHIRP Radio · The Cool Kids Interview

Listen to Before Shit Got Weird Below: 

Album Review: Well Wisher - That Weight

Well Wisher should probably be on your radar if you've been following the recent wave of pop-genius underground and low-end favoring punk that's been percolating over the past decade. The New Jersey band is kind of a less moody version of Bleached with an easy blend of '90s alt-rock and '00s emo, staging a vibrating layer-cake of Paramore dusted with Pixies and Jimmy Eat World seasoned with Veruca Salt. You can't really reduce them to preoccupations of previous decades though, as their sound is very current, throwing off bright, care-free and glancing sparks as they round the edges of Hop Along's eclectic twirl while providing a cooling countercurrent and covalent blush to Illuminati Hottie's sardonic pop ultimatum. Their debut That Weight is quite light and pleasant to the ears, but with enough body in the mix to push back against any wondering of your attention. "Miserable" has a beguilingly hooky build-and-bust structure with the right amount of pop-punk punch. "29" has a wonderful, agreeable temperature to its mix, rinsed in golden-hour light that touches up the pained practice smile that the lyrics display, a sensitivity further betrayed by the distant, lonely, coyote-like howl of the guitars. And then there is "Need You Around" which sounds like Peach Keli Pop swiftly maneuvering around emotional obstacles like a professional rollerblader, losing the fears that hound her through her day in an athletic display of flexibility and masterfully executed avoidance. Let some of the burdens you have been carrying slide off your back for the next thirty minutes and put That Weight in your ears instead. 

Find it through Egghunt Records. 

Interview: Chicago Research

Had a chat with Blake Karlson of local electronic and post-punk label Chicago Research, where we talked about the collaborative origins of his label, its aesthetics and focus on local music, and why it's coming to an end. I also got the scoop on Blake's new record store, Signal Records, located at 3156 W. Diversey Ave. This was for CHIRP Radio's Artist Interview Series. You can listen to it here, or below: 

CHIRP Radio · Chicago Research Interview

Album Review: Tama Gucci - Almost Blue

Every time I think I'm done with Tama Guchi's Almost Blue it pulls me back in as if to reassure me that I never should have left. Released last year, it features the Miami artist singing in breathy, alluring heaves in an affected gloss of passion while tumbling through firm but pliable pleats of hard techno beats. It's kind of like listening to Seal after he's come away from a studio session where he had to harmonize with Imogen Heap, and feeling newly inspired, took a limo to a club doing a '90s house night and commandeer the stage to demonstrate his familiar prowess in a new and evolved way. I like to think of myself as in the crowd on that hypothetical evening, completely caught like a leaf in the current of a river, entranced by his lovely voice, the beat coursing through my heart and down through my toes, losing myself to the music but gaining a new sense of freedom in return. I can return to that dance floor on that dreamy evening anytime I want, thanks to Almost Blue. Escape into a prism of ardor and adrenaline in an infinite moment of sonic bliss is only a click away. 

Available from Sinderlyn.

Album Review: Blurry The Explorer - Blurry The Explorer

Blurry The Explorer released their debut LP last year (2021), a collaboration headed by experimental composer Jeremy Gustin in collaboration with Ricardo Dias Gomes, Ryan Dugre, Leo Abrahams, and experimental Japanese  pop group Tenniscoats (yes, we have a band inside a band situation here). Named for a character invented by Anne Frank (the one you are thinking of) the collective performs a kind of impressionistic sonic rendition, reminiscent of an abstract sculpture painted with the texture of lullabies and speculative poetry. It is a project defined by motives and wisdom that is only fully comprehended to itself, and even then, it is somewhat of a enigma. A tower in the center of an ancient garden with consequential adornments weaved and wound around its facade in a crown of kaleidoscopic roses with coded messages etched into their stems like living manuscript of prophetic morse code. Their music will fill and expand your core like a cosmic wind, exhaled from a living planet, lonely in orbit in a galaxy without a center, waiting to receive a postcard from you in the shape of a distant, satisfied sigh. It contains caribian funk played on aluminum trees connected by taught, gummy, cords of taffy. It shuders with the sway of shambolic folk with black sand leaking from its gills that is as sweet to the tongue as confectioners sugar. It contains histories of invisible civilizations. It has the scents of extinct flowers. You can't know a thing until you experience it and even then, Blurry The Explorer will remain tantalizingly elusive, yet unexpectedly near and reassuringly close. 

Album Review: Olivia Nowadays - My Plants Are Hanging on by a Thread

It's hard to reconcile your relationship to the wider, natural world as a human being. You are obviously a product of processes of evolution, and you can't live while denying your biological needs to sleep, eat, and be social- as much as the demands of work and the temptations of isolation through information technology may intervene to convince us otherwise. Our alienation from the natural world is further complicated by industrial innovations, consumer products, and modern housing, making it possible to meet all of your needs without having to touch a single grain of soil or breathe a single breath of air that hasn't been filtered through an HVAC system. This isn't a bad thing, mind you; our inventions and manipulations of our environment drastically improve the quality and length of our lives. But they also produce a longing that is hard to fully contain and satisfy- a desire for something that is often filled by small, conciliatory tokens, like houseplants. Albuquerque's Olivia Nowadays takes our odd relationship with tamed, domestic floral companions to explore greater themes of organic life and its intersections with our artifices on their latest album My Plants Are Hanging on by a Thread. The album is a temperate and largely subdued survey of how products of nature (like you and I) deal with our self-imposed exile from the greater biosphere. An investigation they embark on by blending spontaneous field recordings with concerted currents of flowy and exquisite pop, electro-folk, and post-rock. It's an absorbing and refreshing listen that manages to cultivate fertile spaces for contemplation on all the ways we box ourselves in, only to invite back in all things that we once excluded. It is a thematic exercise that applies not just to ecology, but home decor and social relations as well. A nutrient-rich encounter that is the next best thing to a breezy hike at a state park or forest preserve- but one that you can enjoy in the temperature-controlled environ of your present abode. Now if you will excuse me, my house plants are looking a little thirsty.  

Album Review: London Plane - Bright Black

London plane is such a good name for a post-punk band. It's so good I almost expect you to be able to find them in an updated edition of Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again on the basis of their name alone. The image of an escape into the air by means of a machine, destined for parts unknown, amongst sheets of rain and clouds of billowing fog is irrepressible and gets to something deep about the suspicions and hopes for modernity that are inherent in the genre. It’s not all in the name, though, and if you called a black rose by any other name, it would still smell as lush and sweet. London Plane is possessed of a dark beauty that penetrated down to their roots, a truth they make clear on their debut album Bright Black. Harkening back to an era when strong songwriting was as necessary as high cheekbones, the band exhibits a confident variety of sharp, dramatic, and timeless fanged charisma, that can't wait to get its teeth into you. Instead of opting for the kind of industrial detour and free-wheeling chaos of Throbbing Gristle, coy satire in the lane of Devo, or even straightforward angular rock music in the vein of Gang of Four, the London Plane opts to stick to the fundamental, creating solid grooves and memorable melodies that exhibit an authentic kind of maturity that is extremely rare amongst any rock bands performing today, post-punk or otherwise. Their singer Jessica Cole is right out front with a confident wail and a baroque croon, backed by a band comprised of five leather-clad players who work in concert to bring the group's twisted dark romance to flesh and fulfillment. Part of the maturity of the band is not only their conviction in their performances but also the production of their recordings- icing dark and roughly textured Echo & the Bunnymen-styled ambiance with guitars and vocal lines that have been polished like a knife. Bright Black gives you the impression of what some of those classic goth rock albums from the 80s and 90s might have sounded like with the benefit of modern studio tech- allowing you to embrace the bliss of their moonlit traipse in high fidelity without losing the feeling of dirt between your toes. There are definite, body-moving moments on the album, like the shadow funk of "Gold Soul" where the band comes its closest to paying homage to Oingo Boingo, balanced against brooding outbursts where they resemble something like a proto PJ Harvey Band- sweet-stained gothic auras mixing with the spasming release of hard confessional lyricism in a precise rock milieu. Bright Black is defined by its depictions of a gloomy, overbearing metropolis much like the group's native New York, where looming skyscrapers barricade the streets like silent titanic sentries- a commitment couched subtle, ominous awe that is even carried over to the urban cowpunk of tracks like "Homocosmicus." As you might expect, the band appears to be most in their element when they are venting their fury against the insidious forces of war, greed, and corrupt power that flow through these conduits of hierarchy and averse that continue to breathe life into decaying machines of graft and avarice, mounting a spiritual hurricane of escalating, cindery synths and a whirling guitar charge paced to a ruckus, leaping hurtle on "Francesco," and convening a blinding visionary staccato wave of grooves and wall-crumbling battle cries on the title track. Bright Black is a shining beacon of dark passion and alluring possibilities that seeks to light the way for those who are willing to tread its path of nocturnal luminescence and enlightenment.  

Available via Declared Goods. 

Album Review: fanclubwallet - You Have Got To Be Kidding Me

It's fitting that Hannah Judge would name her band fanclubwallet- it's kind of the perfect name for the variety of indie rock she's playing. Coy and fragile, gentle and introspective- it's like a small pocket of feelings you can climb into and hide away in with the comfort and company of your own thoughts- a clubhouse of one, suspended in a sling of reflective moods. Her debut You Have Got To Be Kidding Me, is very credible in what it sets out to accomplish- examining life from an engaged removal. Many of the songs were written while Hannah was living with her parents and focusing on her comic (as in an illustrator, not the stand-up variety) career- somehow, this phase in her life resulted in an album rather than a new American Splendor-styled, graphic auto-biography. The project seems to act as a mirror of her life in the moment that it was written though- intentionally or not. Breakups and boredom, slacking while on the skids, a mid-life crisis cropping up in one's early '20s- it's all there and unpacked in a cloudy kind of drawl that is part J Mascis with a dash of Nina Persson, and backed by illuminating shades of staccato guitars and dreamy California-sun-kissed feedback, punctuated with percussion that overflows with personality and synthesizers that sizzle while diverting down clever, Dan Deacon-inspired circuits. Its present insularity is as much a choice as it is an embodiment of its inescapable inspirations; bands like Tegan and Sara and Rilo Kiley, but also harkening back even further to groups like the Violent Femmes and Teenage Fanclub- music that always feels like it is being performed in a bedroom for a small group of friends, or a pile of stuffed animals, even when it's given the stage and the wattage deserving of a summer festival headliner. You Have Got To Be Kidding Me is full of music that sounds like it is whispering in your ear, even when it's putting every ounce of sweat, blood, and runny eyeliner it has into a persuasive, full-body rock anthems. No joke, You Have Got To Be Kidding Me makes a great first impression. 

Out with the help of AWAL. 

Album Review: Cobra Man - New Driveway Soundtrack

I'm taking a look back at Cobra Man's debut, New Driveway Soundtrack, tonight because it made a strong impression on my back when it dropped in 2017, and it's still a banger. The Los Angeles group was originally formed when Andy Harry and Sarah Ray came together to soundtrack skate videos with something less aggressive and with more personality than the standard rotation of metal/punk/hip hop that tends to accompany kickflips and halfpipe runs- in other words, they wrote a bunch of disco and new wave tracks for fun and it turned into a sequences monstrosity that they couldn't contain. Despite being more interested in groove and ambiance, New Driveway Soundtrack still has some obvious punk in its DNA, an aspect of its character that shows up in Andy's sometimes maniacal vocal intonations and the anxious way that the duo attacks their songs- an approach I can't help but get a laugh out of. The whole project has the enthusiastic energy of an underground comedy troop! But their work is far from parody and the goofiness is more an expression of the band's identity than a commentary on their sources of inspiration. These songs are obviously all reflections on artists they undoubtedly revere. I'm really enthralled with the way they've managed to combine the camp of the B-52s and the self-serious, self-awareness and detached romance of Gary Numan on "Weekend Special," as well as how they've threaded a kind of non-sequitur sexuality and with the cool collectedness of Berlin-era Bowie, and mounted a full Chic homage for "Fistfight at the Stoplight," while still managing to pivot into a butterfly stitching of evil sounding oi and greaser rock that they've then graphed to an epic, modular kind of space disco for "Lazyman." The space disco elements are probably the most prominent and consistent part of Cobra Man's sound, with high airy synths and nebula ruffling oscillations comprising the body and operative aspects of tracks like "Magic Hour," "Research Project," "Friends of Tom," and many others. New Driveway Soundtrack is a crazy and often furious album that is as madcap as it is competent- equivalent to the likes of Teenwolf spontaneously combusting midway through a slamdunk but still managing to place the ball in the net before disappearing into a cloud of cinders. It's as much about flair as follow-through- consequences be damned! 

Still available from Goner Records 

Album Review: James Singleton - Malabar

James Singleton has produced something very special with his album Malabar. The upright bassist from New Orleans has assembled a sextet that is able to swing like they are playing on a Charles Mingus record while dredging up a rusty, swamp-logged and twisted sense of American and the blues. Malabar is a very strange and wonderful record, mainly because of how moody it is. During some of the sinking, stinking, cracked and clever intervals on this record, I half expect Tom Waits to emerge from behind a curtain, walk to center stage, sit on a tarnished wooden stool under a flaxen spotlight, and read to me some of his cryptic poetry. It's not a bad-sounding record, in fact, the production is spotless, but it is "bad" in terms of its attitude- something that it has in abundance. Its inspirations are all too human, and down to earth as an earthworm's tunnel. Its perspective is downright subterranean. So dark the light of the moon can barely escape its surface. A sea of dark nights in a solitary city, bathed in tears and dirty rain falling through plumbs of smog, illuminated by the winking ambivalent angels of inadequately looked after street lights. You're thirsty. There's an unsettling feeling, a rumbling somewhere below your heart and in the hollow of your chest. It might be the vibration of a passing L train, or it might be something existential that is causing your insides to jostle and wander. Whatever it is, you need something to put in your stomach to douse the fire and quiet those nerves. A calamity of colliding rhythms greets you as you enter a lonely, lo-light, basement tavern and feel your spirit intersect with the sounds flowing out of the jazz band in the corner. You take a seat on a ripped leather cushion and try to keep to yourself- even then the sounds of fingers against taught bass strings, the hot breath heaving out of a saxophone, and a bevy of antagonistic drum patterns draws you out of your hermitage, even just so much as to remind you that you're not alone in the room- that there is a world behind the isolation of your own thick skull. Malabar enters through the unknown cracks in the armor carelessly put on each day. It lifts up and gets under the defenses that divide the real from the knowing of the real. It is an impressive sculpture of concrete feeling in that way- super real to the point of caricature, and therefore genuine enough to avoid contrivance. It is an album that manages to grab and hold abstract themes, all while maintaining a firm footing in the firmament and drama of the uncannily familiar. It has the wild, emancipated spirit of a Rob Mazurek session and the courageous but ugliness charisma of a Faith No More set. Hideous beautiful and naively artful, James has the knack for the kind of jazz that makes people who don't listen to Jazz wonder what else they've been missing. Now they don't have to wonder. Malabar will tell you everything you need to know in a way they can't ignore. 

Find it through Sinking City Records

Album Review: Paris Music Corp. - Paris Music Corp. LP

I am always impressed by musicians who are able to affect my mood without my realizing it. I often put on music while I'm working and sometimes it sinks into the background, flowing pleasantly on its own accord. But sometimes what I am hearing impacts what I'm doing and what I'm feeling while I'm doing it. I discovered this to be the case well listening to Paris Music Corp.’s self-titled album. John Andrew Paris, or as he prefers, Paris Music Corp., is a member of Austin's electronic music scene, integrating inspirations drawn from artists like Pink Floyd And Gary Numan into the inimitable fabric and digital ductwork of the intensive creativity network that buttresses that Lone-Star oasis. Andrew creates an incredibly brisk and aloof style of techno with subtle beats and cool, soothing tones that feel like they have erupted out of a dark but futile place, like a '90s cyber-punk graphic novel or immersive-necromancing RPG on the scale of Planescape: Torment. They are the sounds of a Bubblegum Crisis in full swing, a war for the human essence waged under webs of varicose silicon veins and within wells of clicking processors. Andrew hasn't released an album in a while which makes his recent self-titled album somewhat momentous- or at least it made my day feel that way. As I was going about the tasks that I do keep the lights, I found the liquid and disarming textures of his compositions flooding between the spaces and silences of my routine. A pleasant, energizing filament that made uneventful tasks like brewing coffee and answering emails feel vital in a way, like I was building, through these unvarying actions, towards some great crescendo- augmenting my day with an acute sense of audacious purpose. The world is structured in a way to make human beings obsolete and to write their needs out of its plan of operations. What this means for you and I, is that every day that we live is a strike against these schemes. Even small victories are a spur in the side of the hegemon. Be the glue in the gears. And listen to Paris Music Corp. 

Album Review: Noiseheads - somehow EP

When the enigmatic Phil Thomas Katt signs off on a band (as he did when he agreed to do the video for "Big Money"), then that band has my attention. But truly, I did not need the big man's co-sign to sell me on Noiseheads EP, somehow. I just needed to hear it. 

Noiseheads play an intoxicating, overdriven variety of powerpop that melds the liquid essences of Material Issue's rust-belt jangle-pop ardor and the radio storming mega-hook genius of Foo Fighters, with a dash and a splash of Superdrag and Squeeze to zest up their already savory dish to the level of a five-star, all-hits buffet.

If you couldn't guess, Noiseheads are pulling hard for that '90s thing- not only with their slacker-made-good pop anthems, but also with extra touches, like enlisting Steve Albini to "engineer" the record along with Lincoln Parish, Jordan Logue, and Nick Gray. Now that's a lot of dudes to have their hands in on one four-track EP, but it sounds like a million bucks (while obviously costing an order of magnitude less than that), so I can't argue with the results. 

Noiseheads throw all their chips down on the slingshot-grooved and sweet-tooth tickling "Big Money" and don't give up the game until the final blow of the punch-drunk honey-hook haymaker "Hindsight" hits paydirt. There is no indecision or ambivalence when it comes to somehow. It knows what it is, and that's a shamelessly good, bite-sized firecracker of a rock record. 

Album Review: Lou & Co. - The Dynamite Man

I have nothing in the way of a biography for Lou & Co.. I really don't need one either. An album review doesn't always need to be about the person behind the music. Sometimes the music needs to speak for itself. Lou & Co.'s The Dynamite Man is more than capable of making a statment, even if the language it speaks in was invented in an alternative '60s where the free flow of LSD and other hallucinogens altered the very substance of reality. A plain where x and y have been reversed, and the vertical is now the horizontal. The dead dance and the living look on in quiet delight. In other words, The Dynamite Man sounds the way a Stanley Mouse poster looks. As far as I can tell, Lou & Co. is a tape project, but the cuts are so fluid it sounds like everything was arranged as part of a live orchestra. You have Ethieopan jazz guitars dancing around soulful, sunkissed melodies, in a lysergic reservoir of surfy, sublated and transposed grooves. All of it is remarkably solid and cohesive. Organic like the beaming presence of a sunflower. It will make you feel like William Onyeabor swaggering through an early incarnation of Burning Man trading stories and barbs with Robbie Chater of The Avalanches and a delegation from The Source Family. Your saliva is wine, wet is dry, time is a river, tomorrow is a knife, and only sound can slake thy soul's thirst. The Dynamite Man is an oasis in a land of illusion. 

It's out on Mock Records.

Album Review: Holiday Inn - 2013​-​2016

I am flying blind here. I know next to nothing about Holiday Inn other than they were a '90s punk band from Rome, Italy, and have a reissue collection out on Maple Death this year. That collection is obviously 2013​-​2016. They have a legacy and a history, but the point of this review is not to unpack either. What I want you to do is just listen to Holiday Inn's record, and the reason for this is that it is nasty as hell. I spent long nights scouring Myspace for bands that sounded like this in college- some nights were more successful than others- but it was always worth the effort to find something incomparably weird and exciting. I'm still perpetually on the hunt for bands of this obtuse character and Holiday Inn fits the bill! There is a certain perverse and decisive quality to the band's overheated, underproduced, shouty and scruffy minimalist noise punk recordings that I find both comforting and validating in a way that I probably shouldn't be so ready to admit to... but I will anyway. There is something cathartic about how pathologically offputting Holiday Inn's music is and I find a strange kind of validation in its abrasive self-assertion. I have the same kind of self-identification with groups like Lumpy and the Dumpers for the same kind of reasons- although Holiday Inn is discernably more deranged and treacherous sounding. If a group like The Coneheads is a shot of discount liquor that sends a shiver down your spine, then Holiday Inn is the kind of drink that will lead you to leap from your barstool in search of the men's room. If Gee Tee were a cracked jar of pickled eggs sitting at the end of the bar that no one has opened in half a decade, then Holiday Inn is like an electric kettle filled with boiled piss and cigarette butts sitting next to the dumpster outback - you do not want to take a swig, but you also can't help but marvel at the depravity of its sheer existence. Existence through depravity, depravity as existence- this is the vibe I get from Holiday Inn and it's why I think they're freakin' great!  

Find it via Maple Death. 

Album Review: Lunch Money Life - Under The Mercies

Lunch Money Life is a band, or rather a roughly organized collective, with a clandestine sense of spirit and a lucid concise vision for their work. Formed in the enclave of a church practice space in London, where the band's saxophone player Spencer Martin performed the organ during Sunday mass, their sound has iterated with time and quotients of sweat into an escalating thoroughfare between the profane and the paradise upstares. While the group's sacred practice space does have an observable impact on their sound and aesthetic, the true genesis spark of the group was trombone player Jack Martin's attempts to fuse Kraftwerk futurism, Dilla-styled loops, and atmospheric jazz in a kind of live "robot music" revue. However, after many upgrades to their firmware, Lunch Money Life have settled on a model of expansive and polymorphous post-rock- a form, however distant, that still owes an evolutionary debt to the modal jazz and electronic freestyles of their origins. Their ability to direct the listener through any number of undeviating left-oriented turns throughout a single track is exemplified on their latest EP Under The Mercies. The final track off of this record, "Royalty Laid Bare Before God," conducts itself in partisan alignment with the precision chaos of a band like Battles, exhibiting a disciplined approach to groove that keeps a foot lodged in the stirrup on either side of a hellfire bass supercharge and an even current of angelic, soul seared, but soothing synth riffs- a tea-kettle sized battle as a part of a great struggle between the divine and the duplicitous. The final track's heavy-handed but graceful motions contrast nicely with the earlier numbers "Jimmy J Sunset" and "Holy Water Streaming," whose lighter, more agile structures and dancing guitar chords hint at some West African influences that symbiotically coincide with a cloudy, Mogwai-esque pressure system and a dedication to a kind of ecumenical pandemonium, one that could be expected from Enter Shikari, but is highly improbably coming from a group considered an upstart in a young jazz scene- even a culture setting as innovative as one gestating in East London. These incredibly dichotomous aspects of Lunch Money Life's sound all eventually swirl and part as a kind of an eye in the storm for the title track, where the tropical storm of jungle beats and scraping bassline magnanimous make way for a few bars of pristine pop excellence in the form of a whisper-soft and calmly firm vocal melody possessed of a restorative glow. Lunch Money Life shows the listener no leniency in their exhaustive impressionistic demonstration of defiance and embrace of an uncharted destiny on Under The Mercies. If you expected anything less, you're probably better off either repenting for your lack of faith in the group... or listening to something else. 

It's available through Wolf Tone

Album Review: Los Esplifs - Estraik Back

Here is something fresh for you to put in your ears as you slide into R'nR mode this weekend- Los Esplifs is a Tucson-based project organized by Saul Millan and Caleb Michel. I say organized because it's clear that they are not working alone. In fact, on their debut, Estraik Back, it sounds like they've roped half the neighborhood into being their backing band. The album is a throwback to classic cumbia and Afro-Cuban rhythm groups, wound around mid-Century expressivism, and injected with the vigor of a rockin' block party. Even the gradual crawl, posh psych, and smokey Devil's hooka den roll of "Donde Esta El Monsoon?" has an irresistible groove that wouldn't be outlandish to hear on a King Khan and BBQ Show outtake. More typical, though, is the jump up and jitter of "Otro Pais" with its romancing melodies, group chants, and live-wire tight-rope guitar twirls, as well as the surfy Caribian clammer of"Galaxia," and rhythm-driven, call and response anchored "Un Solo Golpe," a song which has the semblance of an energizing, collectivist after-party, lit exclusively by fire-light. The more exploratory tracks like the kosmische-powered "TeknoCumbia" with its belches and bends, and the goosed up and tipsy "Cumbia de Oli" (the latter of which resembles something like samba slapstick) don't fail to grab the ear and inspire the hips either. Like I said at the start, if you needed a party record for this weekend, you'd be doing yourself dirty if you skipped over Estraik Back.