Album Review: MAMA - Speed Trap

I've been sitting on this review for a while. Not sure why. When Speed Trap dropped back in 2014 I must have listened to it close to a hundred times (not hyperbole). Who's MAMA? Straight up rock 'n roll from Chicago, IL, brother! MAMA performs blistering power-pop in the vein of Exploding Hearts, as if they were playing songs written by Rick Nielsen and attempting to catch up to Husker Du's Land Speed Record. Contrasting somewhat with the reckless punk pedigree of their fast and brash style, and releasing Speed Trap through local punk historians Hozac Records (who were definitely a big deal in Chicago at the time of this release), there is a real love of gaudy 70's flare (a la Kiss) and cheeseball 80's romanticism (smacks of The Knack) that seeps through to the surface on these songs. Luckily, the thick shellac of nostalgia only proves to enhance the appeal of these tracks, pairing crisp performances with an instantly recognizable sonic pallet in order to breathe life into the sounds of a prior era of debauched living. Rip the sleeves off your shirt, grab yourself an Old Style, and check out the Cheap Trick meets The Cars hard-pop pogo of "Three Tricks," the relentlessly hooky and paranoid, Phil Lynott possessed leads and epics rollicking builds of "Open Secret," the relentless, rolling drum work, shimmering guitars, and fiery gang vocals on "White Hen," and the pensive, Buzzcocks indebted "Bad Reputation." While Speed Trap felt like an effortlessly cool and timeless record when it dropped, but in retrospect, it definitely was stamped with the preoccupations and prevailing sounds of its time, and represents one of the better closing acts of the 2010's garage revival, a medium-range epoch of DIY that never felt like it would fade until it did. This kind of sound started to usher towards the exits right around the time that normcore started becoming the, well, norm. Now I'm not blaming high-waisted pants and turtleneck sweaters (ugly as they are) for diminishing the joy one could glean from dumb, sweaty, power chords performed by the masses of unwashed bar-backs and bicycle delivery dudes on their nights off, but there is some correlation with the drop off in interest in this style of rock and more dudes pulling up to shows looking like extras from Seinfeld, or that movie where Joaquin Phoenix becomes romantically involves with is iOS. I'm a noticer. It's what I do. I notice things. MAMA only released one more EP after Speed Trap that I am aware of, 2016's Eye In the Sky, which is more Beatles-esque and leans firmly into early R'nB territory. It's good; stronger songwriting with a firmer grasp of melody, but it lacks the blaring intensity of Speed Trap. And in all honesty, it's this garish need to be as loud, fast, and loutish as possible while maintaining a tune, that still causes Speed Trap to hold the first-place position in my heart.

More infectious audio from HoZac. 

Album Review: Booze Radly - Lose, Badly

I first became aware of Booze Radly back in 2020. I noticed that their name came up in conversations concerning a number of bands I was following at that time, and of course, they had that name... puns and literary references are archetypal naming conventions for emo bands, and Booze does them both!* Needless to say, they raised my brow line, even if I didn't pay them much mind at the time. That is until they followed me on Twitter and I noticed that their pfp was just Strong Sad wearing one of their shirts. That REALLY piqued my interest. If there was ever an unsung mascot of third-wave underground emo from the '00s, one that no one cops to or otherwise will acknowledge their psychic/thematic debt to, it's that particular lachrymose marshmallow from the Homestar Runner universe. So why have I waited to write about them until now? Well, they have a new EP out titled Lose, Badly, so the timing is right. But also, frankly, because I was afraid to cover them. I thought they'd be too much my sorta thing and that I wouldn't actually have anything interesting to say about them. I'm glad that's not ended up being the case. Despite being, maybe, technically, a fourth-wave emo band (formed in 2013), they have more of a lo-fi type of fifth-wave feel, in that they tend to view any kind of alternative rock or variety of subcultural tendency (past or present) as fair game as far as inspiration goes. The first song off Lose, Badly** makes their scattershot, irreverent, and highly referential style immediately clear, being a swoopy-haired pop-punk number titled "White Guy Emo," which takes the entire Warped Tour-era trend of misogynistic and self-pitying screeds against ex-girlfriends to task while engaging in a fun, accurate, and somewhat crunchy reenactment of the period's powerchord fueled tropes. It's somehow perfectly logical then for the band to transition from this moody pastiche to the dizzy guitar sweeps and messy acid-fried garage rock of "Hydro Illogical," which then feels in total continuity with the spacy post-hardcore and chrome-plated, backwoods racer "Crash and Burn." Underlying their heavy melodicism and distortion forward guitar work is a solid sense of pop songwriting, which makes the transition between all these vignettes, which combine like a montage of the soundtrack from a VHS skate demo, to align and become perfectly in sync when the vibe shifts to full-on, AJJ-fancying, busker punk with songs like "Unlearning Sadness." I genuinely appreciate the fact that the lyrics throughout Lose, Bradly read like something Ben Gibbard would write for Joyce Manor, and that they can come across as totally sincere while also making me laugh. This might all sound like a lot, and it is, but that's ok, because it all eventually reaches a strangely, barbaric fusion and pinnacle on the penultimate track; the progressively theatrical "Admission of Infirmity," which starts out as a kind of drama-club version of At the Drive-In which quickly descends and devolves into a cathartic and bloody sounding summoning ritual set to the tune of groaning background chants and some heavy, brooding, psyched-out thrash grooves that could just as easily of appeared in the bridge of a late '80s hardcore record as they do here. It turns out Booze Radly is my kind of thing, after all. Just, not in the way I was expecting. Take it from me and don't hesitate a minute longer; the only way you can "lose" when it comes to this record, is if you never give it a spin in the first place.  

*Although, the reference point for their name is clear, I always secretly harbored the hope that it was actually an allusion to a certain brit pop band from the '90s. And, I will continue to hold onto this allusion/disillusion until definitively proven wrong, and even then... 

**Which I keep typing as "Lose, Bradley" for some reason.  

Album Review: Give Me Monaco - Luminance EP

Luminance is the second of two EPs released by Oxford producer Give Me Monaco, both of which span the cleft between 2022 and 2023. This most recent EP, as well as its sister release, explore the awesome destructive and reconstructive cycles of the Earth's geothermic disposition. Many dense and lush forests can trace their genesis to the ash and charcoal spread by tremendous combustive cataclysms, mountains rise because they are forced into grandeur by immense pressure from below, and most islands are essentially the dried outflow of volcanic outbursts. To this day, the world manages to make itself over and over like a sculptor who can't quite find their muse in a hunk of clay. Shifts in tectonics combine and fold over one another, like a jigsaw puzzle with fluid edges, tabs and sockets towing and tightening in a generative tug of war and embattled synchronization with the planet's core. While 2022's Inferno depicted the dangers that this perpetual order of metamorphism poses, Luminance examines the resulting convalescence and rejuvenation that comes from these ruptures. Cross-pollinating complementary tactile and bright sonics across both releases, the latter focuses its vitalic ethos on high-energy sequencing and melodic builds, elevating bass lines that extend in waves like open blossoms turning to greet the light of the incoming sun. An electrifying current builds and burgeons through veins of percolating rhythmic elation on "Basalt," before a cool rain-like pattern takes shape on "Caldera," filling the crescent basin of available space with a deluge of aquatic-tinted beats and a thirst-slackening draft of liquid grooves. "Lahar" slides into the vessel of your perception on a flow of rollicking synth churns, ebbing over outcropping beats in a dauntless rush that only gravity could account for, while "Magma" sizzles in slow motion, clicking its heels in a secret code on a hot pan of searingly tranquil beats that pop with drama like burning ore quenched in ice cold water. Give Me Monaco's Luminance isn't just a bright spot in the contemporary dance underground; it's a positively glowing one. 

Album Review: Kolb - Tyrannical Vibes

Mike Kolb's debut LP as, what else, Kolb, is actually, meaningfully, and intentionally, unassuming. Tyrannical Vibes was recorded and performed mostly on his own, in an apartment that could make a shoebox look roomy; the funky, post-baroque, minor, mouse-hole glamor of the release hardly needs any spit and polish to shine, but does require a moment of your time to settle in. Kolb's style on this release is simple, sturdy, and unobstructed by unnecessary flourish, telling stories of isolation and overwhelming feelings that are scarcely contained within the average two-minute run time. This constant strain is emblematic of the title, which warns you of the tendency of these tender vignettes to boil over the brim of their carefully constructed confines; a fact that rarely obscures, and generally only reinforces the uncluttered framework of these songs. The raw expression and electric bones of a song like "Ectoplasm" oozes with a sad stirring of recognition that bubbles with the explosive energy of an accusation under lightning-hot guitar licks, before resolving as a series of relieved exhales of identification and clarity, the kind of solace that can only come from being seen as you truly are. Just as emotive, but less turbulent, is the opener, a coasting kite of popcraft called "Cruising," which shows a powerful sense of loneliness through Mike's wandering, high-register croon, while conveying some measure of redemption through the persistent tug of the guitar line, an interventionist bit of instrumentation that is always trying to pull him into the orbit and range of friend and collaborator Ani Ivry-Block's encouraging inverse vocals, a loadstar of hope at the center of a crossroad he can't help but intersect. Even in Tyrannical Vibes boldly bereft moments, there is a wonderful spark of humanity that shines like a jewel catching the light from under a dust-mopped dresser, such as with the attentive and bustling groove of "I Guess I'm Lucky," an ode to a table for one, which with its honeyed, counter-currents, appears to work backward from New Pornographers to the Brill Building standards of a simpler era, or on "Internal Affairs" which is fabricated in the opposite direction, with a mechanical trickle of rhythmic, kosmische assemblage, progressively finding a path to rebirth, cohering from a point of avent-abstraction and into a realm of intuition and tactile impression, fleshed out by the warming presence of Ani's pleading mellifluence, transforming the songs austerity into a pleasantly persistent embrace. Tyrannical Vibes is barebones enough that it doesn't bother to lay out a welcome mat for you; it also doesn't bother putting a door on its hinges. The album is essentially and an open invitation for anyone to leave the tyranny of their apprehension at the threshold, step in, and soak in the wellspring of vibes.

Find more fun via Ramp Local. 

Album Review: NEOCONS - EP

With the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War recently having passed, I'm sure many of us have found ourselves in a reflective mood. Recalling how odious the build-up was. The obvious lies promoted by the US government to justify the campaign. The way anyone who was against the invasion was literally labeled a "terrorist" by the news media. At present, most people claim to see the error in instigating that conflict and acknowledge to misinformation used to rationalize support for it, but if you were actually against the war during its build-up and initial phase, you are probably still nursing some psychological trauma from witnessing the entire political and media framework of the United States leveraged into a single a tidal wave of psychopathy, baying for the blood of innocent people who did not, in fact, pose a threat to you, or I, or anyone else in this crack-pot country. Twenty years is a long time though; a whole generation has passed since the brutality of "shock and awe" air strikes on Bagdad were repeatedly broadcast on corporate news programs like a perverse Fourth of July fireworks display. Even amongst those who did participate in the resistance to the war effort and its consequences, might be forgiven for forgetting the justifying ideology of these attacks, that being Neoconservatism: A long percolating strain of right-wing cosmopolitanism that believed that because the United States had the military ability to directly intervene in the affairs of other countries, it had the absolute right to under the banner of "spreading democracy." It is a dangerous kind of derangement that still afflicts the brains of many in our country's leadership today, partly due to the fact that none of the people responsible for the aforementioned criminal intervention were ever held accountable. Even though we're far from having escaped the bloody shadow of neoconservative war-mongering, it's refreshing to be reminded that there was a period in our history when it actually raised alarm bells when politicians only discussed their plans to police the world (Cue your favorite clip of George Bush senior repeating the words "A New World Order.") I've been listening to a lot of industrial outfit NEOCONS their self-titled EP from last year as a result- it is an album that recaptures not only the style of late 20th-century industrial disco, but also the justifiably paranoid, heuristic worldview of that by-gone era's underground dance culture. Juxtaposing the vocalist's warry, throaty shout with genuinely frightening soundbites from various saber-rattling psychos and heartening clips of ordinary people protesting for their dignity, the album submerges these contrasting conversations into a thick jungle bed of mecha-tribal Bambaataa beats, laser-focused heavy metal riffs, and a winding slither of big, hungry funk bass parts, all of which combine to prompt the overwhelming impression of a people in a struggle for their very lives, twisting in the grip of a leather-clad hand that has been squeezing their larynx like a stress ball. Industrial music of the era which NEOCONS is drawing from had a complicated relationship with the machinery that society relies on, as the computer technology and industrial infrastructure of the modern era enabled a certain level of relative affluence and literally made their modes of expression possible, while simultaneously, many of these same highly-technical innovations, as well as the country's industrial base, were inextricably linked to a system that made nuclear armageddon, during the cold war, and beyond, a hauntingly real and possible future. This interplay and entanglement with the war machine makes the urgent compulsion to dance all the more pressing, in my opinion, and causes the kind of industrial disco NEOCONS are performing to remain prescient in this day and age. We all may just be small creatures, attempting to stay between the threads of a colossal apparatus of death as it rolls over us, but if we can use that same technology that oppresses us and others for something besides killing, as a source of joy and connection even, then there may be a possibility of transforming the use of these terrible tools of destruction, and the social structure that they depend on, towards building a path to perpetual peace. Kind of like fighting fire with fire; only the heat we deploy against the war machine, rather than napalm, is of the variety we find in our hearts. 

Album Review: Helena Celle - If You Can​​​’​​​t Handle You At Your Worst, Then I Don​​​’​​​t Deserve Me At My Best

Have you ever melted a vinyl record over a bowl in the oven? I haven't, but it's something that I witness evidence of at craft fairs all the time. Whenever I spot candy bowls, or what have you, fashioned out of records, I can't help but wonder what it might sound like if you could manage to run a needle across the whole of one of the grooves. I bet it would sound pretty gnarly, or at least as gnarly as Helena Celle's If You Can​​​'​​​t Handle You At Your Worst, Then I Don'​​​t Deserve Me At My Best. Helena Celle is the longest-running side project of composer and Scottish sound alchemist Kay Logan. Her sonic creations can have a truly lovely, fractal, and interstitial grain to them that makes them seem like their bleeding through dimensions and cross-pollinating timelines through curved space, and If You Can​​​'​​​t Handle You is no exception. Conceived as an interlocutor with her 2016 LP If I Can't Handle Me At My Best, Then You Don't Deserve You At Your Worst; the present EP directly addresses EDM, jungle, and the like, in the same manner that its predecessor concerned itself with abstractly sensual soundscapes. Only now, it appears that the modular rebounds and clouds of atmospheric density present on that earlier release have been eased by their own flaking entropy into shedding their plaquey exteriors until they are rounded off into frantic pinball-like objects, bouncing off satellite dishes and triggering fountains of technicolor light displays in their wake. Peering over the neon dividing line of a track like "Ennobled Reception of The Excellector (My Face When Mix)," you will encounter a civilization-wide freak out of alien forms, all sucking in space dust with panting breaths and exhaling a moist vapor of Euro-house scented perfume that further fuels their galactic gyrations, while taking a trip down the slopes of "Snow-Filled Chalice of My Magonian Exile (ft Jennifer Walton)" reveals an accommodating traunch of momentous acid house slush grooves upon which you can skim like a breaching dolphin while catching laser beams between your teeth to let them recoil between your jaws and polish your veneers. In a kind of mirror trick, the final track, "Original Besttrack (Abe's Oddysee Extended Mix" brings the experience full circle, back to the strange, eerily comforting, and corridor-like sonic chambers of  If I Can't Handle Me, only now with breakbeats bleeding through the walls, a final pleasant reminder of the curious, playful joy you've been invited to partake in as you leave the party at the album's conclusion. You might not have thought you deserved something so warped and wonderful in your life- thankfully, Helena Celle thought better of you. 

More dreamy tunes from Night School Records

Album Review: Natural Velvet - Cruel Optimism

Stick your hand down your throat. Keep reaching. Reach until you find what you're looking for. You'll know it when you get there. Now, at the end of this short exercise, there is a dilemma. Do you pull out the thing you have squeezed between your fingers, or do you leave it lie? Surrender, or savor? Strip, or succour? An optimist might persuade you to pop the lid on that can of worms, retch it up like day-old spaghetti, and let it squirm around on the floor like it had a knife in its back. "Better out than in," they might say. Optimists are the great sadists of our age. Human emotions are more than just circus performances for others' ponderance and amusement, and it is a vicious thing that we do when we convince ourselves that we don't need space away from prying eyes to feel. Pronouncements in the manner of potents and protests reverberating up from the internal reliquaries of our soul's meat cage are essential, but there always needs to be room for retreat, a ladder back down the well. Baltimore's Natural Velvet appears to grant themselves such a balance of courtesies on their Cruel Optimism, pulling the listener to the precipice of porous confessions, hanging them over the ledge, but never lowering them in or granting gravity its due- forcing one to eternally weigh the awful unknowing, a cold curiosity in regard to how far one might fall before bedrock absorbed their momentum. Songs like "Guarantee" come up from these hidden fathoms like a forceful Southern wind, warm and bitter, while "Signifier (Desire)" inverts the trajectory, beginning by floating above your plane of perception, as if suspended by the surface tension of a phantom body of water, before progressively sinking as the weight of revelations mount and a cloudy maelstrom of feedback, shrouding a gracefully torrent of severe guitar grooves, rises to envelop vertical descent. Pushy, guarded theatrics and long-fused incendiaries dot "Data Trail" like landmines waiting to miraculously dig you a memorial sinkhole, while "Swan" lifts off from a treacherous terrain and into the night sky, like a woman whose bargain with a nymph has finally paid with interest, bestowing her with a libratory uplift in which she sheds the burden of gravity and the dictates of others, as if such limitations were water droplets spilling off the tips of long, slotter feathers. Those slimy bits inside of all of us need a good airing out from time to time, but like a bushel of thorny blossom sprouting from a neglected section of plumping, there is no telling how deep the roots go, or if you'd even survive the hundreds of puncture wounds you'd acquire in any vain attempt to find out. Only an optimist would be so cruel as to convince one to uproot such a splendid and dangerous thing. 

Metal Monday: Ninth Circle, Animalize, Soul Remnants, and Oxygen Destroyer

It's another Metal Monday folks. That special moment every couple of weeks when I plug some metal releases that I've been listening to. One of the greatest aspects of heavy metal is that it tends to get right to the point. To that end... 

Ninth Circle - Dis, Emerge (Self-Released)

If you're going to go to hell, why stop at the fourth, fifth, or even eighth ring? Just go all the way. Dive head first into the center of the abyss and give it some gusto! Who knows? The swirl of chaos and disembodied horror might even rise to meet you. That seems to be the hope on Dis, Emerge, the debut from Texas blackened crust and thrash band Ninth Circle. Its a grizzly and well-bile-oiled monstrosity that forges a path to its own damnable ends without restraint or remorse, sounding like some twisted spiritual bonding of Kvelertak and Watain and breath of fresh, cold hell to set the mood at a backyard beer fest near you. It will inspire a mosh of revenants so amusingly frenetic and foul that it could cause the devil to heave up partially masticated bits of Judas all over his hoves from a combination of motion-sickness and excitement. Need I go on? Dis, Emerge is disambiguously good at being bad.  

Animalize - Tapes from the Crypt (Dying Victims Productions)

Resuscitated by popular demand, France's Animalize reissued their 2020 debut Tapes from the Crypt on vinyl earlier this year. It's not hard to understand the demand once you've seen this beast in the wild- its a leopard-printed burst of deadly rock and roll fury, swift as a jungle cat, determined as a dive-bombing eagle, and proud as a lion extracting a rib from a vanquished gazelle (or luckless tourist). Tracks like "Jungle Dance" are crowd-pleasing frolics played at speeds that would give Enforcer whiplash, while hungry numbers like "Meatnight Race" combine the tasty licks and camp of classic-era hair metal with the deadly resolve and executioner's grin of Iron Madden, with a prayer going up to mighty Judas Priest in the album's final moments in the form of the lockjaw iron bite and road warrior credo of "L'Aigle de la Route." You can't cage that which can't be tamed. 

Soul Remnants - Raising The Sacrificial Dagger (Self-Released)

I learned about Soul Remnants when talking with Cody of Cryostasium a couple of months back, and I'm not sure how they remained hidden from me before that point. These guys are unbelievable! Raising The Sacrificial Dagger is their fourth LP and kind of picks up where their 2017 Ouroboros left off, constituting a reentry point into an incredibly vicious but refined variety of overdriven American melo-death, a skewering of the perceptions of pain and pleasure that would even have Pinhead taking notes. At this point, Soul Remnants riffs are as catchy as anything Hypocrisy is laying down at this late stage in their career, maybe even catchier, as the intensity of the playing never really lets up, not during the chorus, not during the bridge, or even the outros- they are maxing out the effort with every distortion summoning strum and driving percussive wallop. The vocal performances are particular exciting, with singer Mitchell Fletcher sounding like he's half hyena about three-fourths of the time, and during the remaining quarter, he sounds like he's challenging you to a fight from the opposite side of the bar while your drowning in the drippy stooper of a bad, psilocybin trip. With Raising The Sacrificial Dagger, Soul Remnants have carved for themselves an idol of rogue ambition worthy of your adoration. 

Oxygen Destroyer - Sinister Monstrosities Spawned By the Unfathomable Ignorance of Humankind (Redefining Darkness Records)

God, what a mess. Oh, you thought I was talking about Oxygen Destroyer's music? Nope. They're tight as hell. What I mean is the brazen path of destruction they leave in their wake. It's like a scaly typhoon just split the town in half like a fortune cookie... and it didn't even buy us dinner first. Oxygen Destroyer's second LP Sinister Monstrosities... is a tribute to classic kaiju cinema, from American entries like The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, to admirable UK efforts like Gorgo, to definitive Japanese titles like War of the Gargantuas. True to its inspirations, the album is relentless, unstoppable, and able to melt steel building frames with its radioactive halitosis. It's on the technical side of the death-thrash equation, but with a strong emphasis on groove, and singer Lord Kaiju's notably gesticular performances, the band deploys its skills effectively to embark on a captivating and raucous rampage. Like the end of most monster movies though, and despite the carnage that the titular beast has unleashed, you'll find yourself missing the gargantuan presence of Oxygen Destroyer once their swath of terror through your town has led them back to the open sea. However, their bittersweet departure will only make their return in a much-anticipated sequel all the more triumphant... hopefully you've upped your home insurance coverage by then. 

Album Review: The Drin - Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom

Most psychedelic bands worthy of attention have a certain mystery attached to their music, substantiated by the inverted nature of their sound, or the altered state they aim to conger through it. It's usually just an aesthetic though, or they otherwise make the entire map of the terrain they'll be exploring with your apparent through the lyrics and other cues. Few feel as esoteric as The Drin. Your first clue at this should be their cover art, which tends towards the monochromatic, chewed-up xerox layouts popular amongst the more enigmatic circles within post-punk and hardcore. A format that they deviated from slightly with their 2022 release Down River In the Distance, where a shot of a band member in the woods appears like a negative from an ill-fated expedition to hunt down the Flatwoods Monster. Their most recent effort, Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom, takes on yet another deviant form while retaining the same dark aura, emerging as if through the b-grade, '80s cinema trope where a child's innocuous artwork reveals some dark secret of the seemingly gentle Mid-Western town they inhabit. Crawling down the attic stairs on all fours to the sounds of charismatic hymns and the buzzing of flies, the opening track "Venom" slithers between the shadows cast by the muntins of a window cracked pane, winding amongst the moldings and along the base of sagging drywall, until it can skirt up your pant leg like a rat up a drain pipe. Up through the cracks in the floorboards, rattles the rhythmic creak of "Five and Dime Conjurers," its course progressions slicing through and wounding the warm quietude of the track's humble ambiance, poisoning it and giving it a sickly sweet fragrance, like bile mixed with lavender water. "Peaceful, Easy, Feeling" is a clattering, claustrophobic sputter that will toss you around as if you've been blindfolded and stuffed in the trunk of a car, permitting you to sense the grinding din of an unpaved road beneath you, while jostling unceremoniously on the alter of a spare tire, shaken by the jounce of the wheels striking rocks and potholes in its path, while the barely audible dialogue of your captures filters back through the hallow frame of your steal cell, echoing like a credo of doom. Provided you make it to the second half of the album with your sanity in check, "Walk So Far" will draw you out of hiding and into the open, gripped by the howl of a baneful wind and the shrieks of small devilish birds, your gaze fixed at the center of sun, whose golden shade has turned a watery red, like the center of an iris when saturated with light from an otoscope- a peaceful horror whose hypnotic, slavish thrash resolves into the skeletal bellydance of "Go Your Way Alone," where flesh peels like the blooming of a rose, and the ashy melodicism of "The Day (Azoic)," with its brushing grooves and the slow reap of its chord progressions, a song that will suspend you in an astral plane above the blackened heap of a long extinguished funeral pyre, where all your earthly remain charred and splintered. The Drin are brewing an uncommon alloy of proprietary mischief on Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom. You can't always tell what's in it, but you can sense it, carving through some knot in your brain that the world at large would prefer to stay tied.

More strange vibes from Feel It Records.

Album Review: Adult Leisure - The Weekend Ritual

Adult Leisure is a relatively young band out of Bristol who have a mature sound and a balanced view of life. The group formed during the 2020 lockdown and dropped their debut EP, The Weekend Ritual, mid-Decemeber 2022. Their early practice and writing sessions, during a period of relative isolation, admittedly helped the band hone their sound, and as a result, they come across as rather well-established despite still being a little pickled behind the ears. Their lyrics come from a vantage point of a sturdy, far-seeing gaze and their overall presentation is steeped in a tremendous sense of calm, which feels reminiscent of the early work of The Police, by which I mean romantically hooky post-punk chords and surefooted grooves supporting hopeful observations about humanity, glimpsed from weathered eyes. Despite Adult Leisure's grounded sense of tender, fantast poise, they still manage to make The Weekend Ritual an undeniable rock album, triggering positive comparables across a wide index of indie and (what we would call in the US) radio rock acts; from relative newcomers like Fontaines DC, to pioneering standards like The Cure and the Pixies, and through to formerly marquee names like Snow Patrol. There is even a pinch of punk afterburn that fizzles to the surface of the guitar work when it comes to tracks like the relentless and persevering hurtle of "Happiness" and the bendy itch and evasive tumble of "I Don't Want to Talk." The high point of the release though, is the middle track "Control," a shakey-legged number that manages to stay on its feet through a combination of willpower, firm and reassuring bass lines, and a suite of genuinely invigorating vocal harmonic sweeps that provide an accommodating and encouraging bolster whenever its seems like the song is about to fall flat on its back. It might not be the weekend just yet, but that doesn't mean you can't indulge yourself a little by giving Adult Leisure's debut outing a spin or three. 

Album Review: Green/Blue - Paper Thin

Abstract and knowingly disoriented, Green/Blue's Paper Thin, is like wadding through a desert mirage. The heat of the overdriven guitars ripples above you, breaking up the sunbeams into vicious microwaves, cooking the air in your surroundings while the trenchant grooves unfailingly pull you to some unseen center of gravity, your feet splashing through sand as it rises around your shins like the receptive wake of a vernal pool. The unperturbed pulse of Jim Blaha and Annie Sparrows's spooling vocals, combine like the winds of the East and West at the crossroads of your burnt and exhausted body as it lies like a fallen weather vain, circling you in an incorporeal maypole dance, mockingly celebrating the manner by which the ridge of your skull still protrudes from the sand, like a mother's pregnant stomach breaching the waters of a birthing pool, a perverse reversal of your genesis as you are gradually reclaimed by the Earth. Yet, you do not know peace in this unmarked tomb. The cutting, circular passage of "Last One" tills the ground above you in a motion that is half field hand and half grave robber, a skeletal grip guiding its efforts, as it grazes and knicks your exposed flesh. After such exposures, songs like "Floating Eye" come at some relief, where a waterlogged bass places its full weight against you until you are forced back and gently submerged in a sinking well of insentience and lulled in a deep swoon by a simple and softly psychedelic chorus. From this sunken place, you are optimally positioned to appreciate the stormy, surface clap of "Moving On," where the combination of wavy, jangle chords and harsh percussive patter create the sensation of reclining under a car's windshield as it is battered by rain, and "In Time," where sharp, trembling guitar lines and splintering feedback create an infinite, reflective illusion of a carnival hall that you always seem to be running through without ever reaching a point of egress. Paper Thin is named such, not from a dearth of substance, but rather how easily that substance can be pierced to find yourself on the other side of a new reality. 

More sensational records from Feel It Records.

Album Review: Melted - Self Deflection

There is a distinctly melancholy luster to Melted's "Wraith." The song marks the mid-point of the So-Cal punk band's 2021 album Self Deflection, and forms a synecdoche for the album, as well as the band's career up to this point. A haunting visage of past pain and ambition, dissolving before the path of daybreak, seeing the shadows scurry defensively under the bed, as the curtains are thrown open and light conquers the room. Melted at one point exuded a typically kind of buzzy, carefree persona- a prefabricated exterior common to artists of their background- raw pink skin that became a scab with the abrasion of time- a defenseless shell that acquired enough scuffs and cracks that when they finally hatched from the hiatus of the COVID lockdowns, they resembled a gaunt and fully groan vulture as opposed to the fluffy fowl with a rotten attitude they went into the incubation of isolation as. A dark disposition now hangs over the band's sound like a decaying, moth-gnawed canopy, sagging dismally over a collapsed four-poster bed where a shade lies prone. Yet, somewhere there is a glint of light- an unsnuffed candle flickering by the bedside, a solitary sun ray peering between the slots of a cracked window shade, a residual glow clinging to a vanity mirror- a faint glimmer of hope, not much, but just wide enough to grasp. Taking this thin defiance in hand, the line "You don't haunt me anymore" from the aforementioned song gains the mustering strength of a steed, cautiously accelerating into a full gallop, bolstered by brash and hooky chords that punch through the heart of The Lillingtons and strike the dead center of Title Fight's dented bell. Trace the rings of distortion emanating from this collision and you will find yourself trading knife stricks with the glinting, gashing chords and biting, hooky lashers of "Who's To Blame," gazing down the gullet of the gravely hoarse, growl and Screeching Weasel-eque spit-shot of "Solace," and falling through the floor buckling, spiral sinkhole of "No Use," only to rise again, pulled up by the power-chord polished billhook and breathless, reaching retch of "Lower," a track that captures the daunting adrenaline rush of falling out a second story window and having to make a split-second decision about which side of your face you'd rather use to make your landing. Self Deflection is a ugly, surprisingly heavy album with a lot of heart- almost too much at times, as the thumping organ is hardly contented in its enclosure and seems ready to burst out like a xenomorph chest-burster, anxious to be born despite the pain and anxiety that awaits in the wider world beyond the dim safety of it pulmonary womb.    

Knocking on Open Door Records.

Album Review: Sick Thoughts - Heaven is No Fun

It's always a pleasure to dip back into my roots and see what's going on in garage punk land. I recall when I picked up Live & Dangerous II back in 2021 and how blown away I was by it- twenty minutes of pure, unrestrained and consequence-free disaster that left my brain feeling like a dead gerbil left clinging to a still-rotating exercise wheel. Now I don't and can't go a week without thinking about that band.* My most recent find from the tool-self-bracketed and beer-saturated carpeted dens of America's regional underground is Drew Owen's Heaven is No Fun, released under the nom-de-plume Sick Thoughts. Drew has that classic kind of scuzzy, filth-flecked punk vibe to him- husky, greasy, and slightly grizzled, he's gracefully afflicted with a bit of Bruce Willis syndrome, where he looks like a handsome guy in his mid-40s while having hardly passed through his mid-20s. His disheveled persona is reflected directly by his music as well, electrically animating a kind of Johnny Thunders composite, shorn up with scraps and hypotheses conspicuously purloined from the secret journals of the Scientists. The homely, street slime-painted, haggard swagger of Heaven is No Fun's recreational gas-huffing, back-alley smack-up has enough downtown, gutter-trawling credence to breathe life into the soundtrack of a full film adaptation of some script that floated to the bottom of John Water's desk drawer in the late '70s, where it has been festering as a minor mecca for grime and malign pathogens like a porkchop that had been kicked under the fridge and forgotten. Derranged little ditties like "Mother I Love Satan" hurl out declarations of pure feeling and affection for the enemy, like Joey Ramone revealing his beguiling intentions in "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend," but instead of remaining steady in his delivery, Drew's confessions of iniquitous infatuation becoming more cutting and devout the longer the see-sawing, bawl of the accompanying power chords are allowed to continue their pendulum-like slash. "Smash The Mirror" is a heedless clash of ego-shattering, trouble-mustering, make-shift exit music that will help you punch through to the second half of the LP, where you will find the black-and-blues-y, chopper barrage of "Submachine Love," the sensitive, faithfully slanted, and oddly Ergs-y love-lark "Someone I Can Talk To," and hard-staring, groovey grumble of closer "Rich Kid." Sick Thoughts make heaven look like a dentist's waiting room. Don't RSVP to the pearly gates until you see what's happening in the basement first. 

Find other totally cool records from Total Punk Records.

*They have a new record out on Goner as of two weeks ago, called Goodnight Neanderthal. 

Interview: Crisis Actor

Late in 2022, I had a very fun chat with Jonathan, Zach, and Tony of the LA punk band Crisis Actor. We had a previous conversation while I was writing for New Noise in 2021, which unfortunately never got published, but I really love their style of old-school punk revival, and I felt like I owed them a do-over. So I got back in touch with Tony and we had our do-over, and everything was great... until I realized that the audio had become corrupted somehow. It seemed like the universe was conspiring to keep this conversation from reaching your ears. Thankfully I was able to persevere and recover most of what we recorded. Fittingly, this is the 13th episode of my this blog's podcast and I am very glad to get it over the finish line for your to enjoy. We go into the finer details of their latest LP False Flag, and I also get their essential takes on things like paranoia, The Misfits, ACAB, and the end of Alex Jones's career.  Check out the interview below:

Listen to Crisis Actor's False Flag here: 

At one point in the interview, Tony mentions that the band is best experienced live. Well, as luck would have it, they released a live album last month. It's raw, real, and in your face, like a classic punk live tape should be. Check it out below: 

Album Review: Dame Area - Toda la mentira sobre Dame Area

There is something haunting and terribly truthful about Barcelona band Dame Area's LP Toda la mentira sobre Dame Area. It's an obscurantist and subjectively interoperable kind of truth though, a facet that partially accounts for its lingering, phantasmal nature. Once you have begun your journey through the record, it won't take long to see what I mean. A hostile aura greets your ears at the outset of "Innamorata del tuo Controllo," where a chillingly conceived and wimpling synth groans with a twisting howl like a banshee weaving its way through a discotheue's circuit breaker, producing a rain of sparks that baths a waiting crowd of revelers in a cleansing fire while singer Silvia Konstance Constan mutters a panting prayer of bridled hopes, pleading for the intervention of a tremendous outside force. Such deliberately nightmarish portraits are an essential part of Dame Area's exploration of an authentic modern vision of a world torn asunder and ensnared by conflicting dependencies between humankind and their creations. A place where an emancipated sense of authority is afflicted by a damnable and emergent rash of chaos, ingendering a further damned for control and an even more resilient bombardment of disarray. Almost to prove this point, "Hasta el Fin" begins with a suitably warm sweep of electronic melodies that complement an adorational murmur ushered forth by Silvia, a whispered intention whose inflection gradually becomes more sharp and intense as the surrounding electronic tones become cooler, more grating and panicked with conscious reverberations, as if a soul trapped within the borders of the track were slowly being lowered into a trench filled ice water until finally becoming submerged in the percolating silence of a glacial sarcophagus. Waves of siren sound methodically etch themselves across the membrane of "Danza dell'Equilibrio" searing like a laser carving ruins into a hunk of ore desiring to raise an iron golem. The lurking Italio-disco slink of "La Nueva Era" tastes the damp night air with its tongue between climbing arpeggios that rise in motley heaps as if they were the discarded regrets of a priestly figure, freshly scrubbed of his faith in the baptism of a midnight storm. The searching rhythms of "Vivo e Credo" sees the city outside your window as a maze of gothic intrigue where you can glimpse your shadow self running in the reflection of rain puddles, hurdling like a lover desperate to taste your lips, or a rat scampering to outrun a flood industrial discharge. Ghosts pass through the translucent barriers erected within the lustrious cavern walls of "Quando mi dicevi" before dissipating like closely guarded secrets into the aether, while "A volte sembra stia per finire" carries the uncanny reflexive ease of a talk therapy session with an AI counselor programmed to mirror your personality and paranoia back at you. The truth is, that sometimes the only choice we have, the only control we can earnestly exert, is a conscious decision to give ourselves over to the mayhem of the moment. If there is a lie in this, then it is one that you have told yourself, and one that only you believe.

 Pressed and spinning thanks to BFE Records.

Album Review: Mari Dangerfield - Love And Other Machines

West London's Mari Dangerfield examines our dependence on technology and how it mediates even our most intimate human interactions on her debut, Love and Other Machines. Thematically and aesthetically, the album comes across as well balanced, being primarily synth and electronics driven, it manages to make its most poignant statements while implementing a tried and true form of pop musicality. "Virtually" in particular, makes its way, pivoting between sonic outbursts of compressed soundboard cycles, genuflecting in shallow baroque pop passages to maintain a steady momentum before sliding through an accompanying babble of bassy grooves. Even more exemplary of this interplay is "Hardwired," in which retro electronics plunk out a guileless refrain that keeps Mari's classically inclined melodies floating on a kinetic, nipping gush. While many of her touchstone tones and precious proclivities are traceable to the late '60s and '70s, there are junctures where she turns to bask in the still-bright glory of more recent pop sensations, in particular Lilly Allen. There is a wry interplay between infatuation and disappointment on tracks like "The Stars Were Wrong" and the title track, which resembles Lily's own bruised and soulful vocal inflections, but imbued with a subtle charge of rare energy and electropositive epiphany that is now decidedly Mari's signature. As our relationships with others become more and more dependent on the functions and features of apps, interfaces, and OSs, Mari's Love and Other Machines seeks to remind us of what is most important about these connective devices, not the speed and fidelity with which they permit us to share, but the heart and soul that they enable us to bare.

Pressed by Dimple Discs.

Album Review: Nuovo Testamento - Love Lines

There is enough room in our world for dreams. Most of us are roused in the morning by our obligations, we face our duties, and then we rest at the end of the day so that we may rise again for the next. The day is spent in toil. Sleep is functional. The ephemeral burns up in the daylight and only vapors remain after dusk. Where is it that our dreams can find sanctuary? International pop and dance trio Nuovo Testamento believes that the answer lies somewhere tangled in the laces and traipsing on the toes of "Lo Stivale," the Italian Peninsula. While influenced equally by '80s darkwave, Soviet-era synth explorations, and the long, living lineage of Italian Disco, the group favors the immediacy and pinning preoccupations present in the latter on their latest LP, Love Lines. Here there is no cage to pen the flights of one's fancy and no fetters with which to smother the glowing furnace of the heart. Tracks like "Heartbeat" honor the drive of desire and feeling of freedom that dancing feet can find when giving themselves over to the persuasion of another's movement and rhythm, individual fountains of undying metronomic metabolism syncing with a wave of freed momentum to beat as one. "Heat" sees the band pleading with you to transfer to them your volcanic passion, a feeling which gripping, polyrhythmic synth cascades and the implore of singer Chelsey Crowley lingering and beseeching call will playfully and seductively draw from you, like untying the knot of a necktie from around your throat with teeth and lipstick traces. Finally, the title track contains a pulsing bassline that feels like the echo of a real human heart, urgently thumping in the dark, yearning to be heard over the din of daily struggle and distraction, beating out a coded message that bleeds upwards via a latticework of surgically sharp synth patterns as mercury might rise to show the boiling point of some roiling substance, often cracking its confines and a releasing purifying and fragrant jets of exhaust produced by the increasing pressure and intensity the song's revolution and chorus. Love Lines traces a pulsing vein across a territory where dreams never sunset. The only question is, do you possess the courage to follow your heart where it desires to go? 

Album Review: Wu-Lu - Loggerhead

Loggerhead indeed resembles being trapped in your own head. I know this isn't an original thought, and I'm almost certain that Wu-Lu said as much himself somewhere (this is going to be one of those "do your own research" type situations because I'm not going to find the quote for you), but there isn't a better thematic explanation for the album's sound. The London producer and hip-hopper, like many of us, must have spent a great deal of time in solitary confinement at the start of the pandemic and Loggerhead is the consequential, psycho-acoustic repercussion of such an event. Wu-Lu's steady, groaning flow glides just below the surface of the production's damp haze like a cockroach perceptibly skimming between the wallpaper and drywall, drooping ever so slightly until it drips out of sight like a floating, oily pimple. The observations of his wondering lyricism triangulates the detritus of disjointed events in one's life until the form a confrontational web of concessions and confessions, routing patterns of thought into collisions with dangling flypaper traps and seizing the mind with fear as might a home invader casting a shadow through an open bedroom doorway, or slowly needling away at one's resolve and sense of dignity akin to a streak of black mold one can see dripping down the wall behind them every time they look in the bathroom mirror. Loggerhead is suffused with a foggy kind of clarity, a disassociative unity, and a deranged kind of alignment of post-punk, jazz, and trip-hop that all fit together like a rubik's cube covered in desaturated, Fincher-esque hues and warped into a deceptively tidy, Mobius strip-like passage. Hell might be other people, but living with yourself can be like double-booking an Air B'nB with the devil himself. 

Bend your ear to more Warp Records releases. 

Album Review: Cole Pulice - Scry

Cole Pulice's Scry is not a traditional album. Or maybe it is. Depends on how you look at it. Albums, in contemporary parlance, typically constitute a constellation of songs that all share some aesthetic binding, whether it be overtly thematic, or a grouping of similar acoustic explorations held in unison by some temporal glue. Before the Beatles and Miles Davies though, albums had a more parochial definition, as merely a collection of songs, not even meant to be heard in any particular order, but bundled together for the convenience and pleasure of the listener. Scry is certainly the latter- songs that are grouped together and meant to be enjoyed together. It's also the former- a collection of works arranged with the intent to lubricate and liberate an unrestrained sense of inquiry in which the presented pallet of sounds magnifies, amplifies, and transmutes perspectives and reflections on the loose, abstract patterns of reality. What's more, Cole seems to intend that Scry operates as both- a thing that is bluntly enjoyable and free of pretense, while being contrastingly and conceptually fluid without clear parameters for interpretation. Suspended in this dichotomous state, it becomes an apt tool for the act of scrying itself. As is the case with a shard of warn, tinted glass, the album serves as an unassuming, but plainly beautiful object, but when in the right hands and held at the right angle, it becomes a murky portal through which one can pass through the aether of our conscious discernment and discover the fantastic truths buried beyond the barriers of nominal sight. Trailing behind every note, and tucked around every corner, there is potential for treasure to be found. Whether you pick up such gems or stumble past them is a matter of openness and insight. Scry can assist you in honing your command of divination, but only if you let it work its magic on you.  

More far-out stuff from Moon Glyph.