Interview: Gabe Noel

I'm slowly coming to terms with what AI will mean for music. Both its benefits, in making and enjoying music, but also what it will mean to be a music lover in the future. I'm not going to go into too much detail, but it seems possible that the advent of AI will only make the human aspects,  its emotional resonance and communicative impact, all the more important. Because, how ever people come to use AI, it will always just be a tool. One more in a growing array of technical advances that musicians will have at their disposal to try and reach an audience. This is at least my takeaway from my interview with composer and session musician Gabe Noel in talking with him about his latest project, The Randy Paserntes Trio, and AI vocalist-fronted endeavor he has embarked on upon with saxophonist Sam Gendel. During our conversation, we discuss the origin of the project and Gabe's goals for it, as well as the messy reality of co-staring on an album with a machine. Really fascinating stuff. I hope you enjoy. 

The Randy Paserntes Trio's debut Now At Last is available from Colorfield Records. 

Listen to the record below: 

Album Review: Ohma - Between All Things

I am drawn like a hummingbird to the Ohma's "Worlds Within Worlds." It's the second song off their 2022 debut Between All Things, and it presents itself as an entry point into a world meaning that I had not previously known. Liquid in its structure, but stable in its contents, the song is like a crystalline fountain formed by a jet of clean spring water forced through a natural vent in a rock face whose gushing expression inexplicably takes the shape of a rose in a flickering spout of briefly eternal beauty. It is not merely the ephemeral resplendence of the interplay of Mia Garcia's woodwind whisper or Hailey Naiswanger's patient, rippling guitar playing that gifts the track its gravity and magnetism, as solely an adroit blending of aesthetic harmonies, but moreover, the purposeful essence and carnality with which their performances obtains. It's like an alchemical reaction, the product of a conditioned hermeneutic which manifests through its practice a wider gage of perception and a revitalized spectrum of sense and sense objects. This grounded sort of metaphysical connectedness ripens, unwinds, desaturates, and reabsorbs differing variations of its own amplified sense of communion in alternating patterns throughout Between All Things; like with "In Essence," where wind-chime carved percussive-flows and subtonal hip-hop inspired reverberations overlap to forge a gradually advancing and upward swinging carousel of enlightenment and composure, or later, where the sincerely palliative stride of "Everything & Nothing," fosters a comradery of sturdy, binding bass elements and stark vibrations which elevate each other as if pulling one and other up the branches of a tree so tall that the sun appears to rise out of its canopy rather than the horizon, until eventually splitting this endeavor in twine to fashion elegant bits of flotsam on which to embark on blissful excursions in kosmische folk and busking crystallomancy.  All things are connected. All things are distinct. The path you weave between them perpetuates an inescapable oneness and the absorbing adhesion between our separate orbits is that thing which fills the universe with warmth. 

More lovely flowing vestibules available from Colorfield Records.

Album Review: Scree - Jasmine On A Night In July

I heard recently that there was a period in human history where there was no separation between poetry and music. They were indistinguishable and interchangeable in their inception. To some degree, I see Brooklyn trio Scree returning to that tradition- only in reverse. Where poetry is often understood as rhythmic patterns of speech, offering suggestible phrasing for interpretation, the group, led by guitarist Ryan El-Solh, instead renders suggestions of textual phrasing through graciously patient, rhythmic interplays of guitar, percussion, and upright bass- an interlacing of sound which hues towards the grandiloquent in an unpretentious and accessible manner. In particular, Ryan's guitar playing on their latest LP Jasmine On A Night In July, elevates the floor of perception up to the level of the mind's eye, presenting a stable of fable-like portrayals upon the stage of your own cognition, allowing sounds and attentive waves of motion to pluck character sketches, scenes and dialogue from the gallery of the unconscious in prompted participation where there would otherwise be mere spectacle. As a result, it's almost impossible not to feel tangled in the threaded sway of the group's arrangements- a serious degree of engrossment that never presents as confining, only supportive. The warm, vespertine vim of Scree's performances is inviting at its utmost, permitting a projection of one's self into the evening to write one's own stanzaic impressions upon the twinkling tassels of the stars. Held aloft by the enduring poetical trestle of the group's strings and percussive inlays, Scree tenders to you an encounter that is as gentle as falling starlight and revitalizing as a deep inhale of clean, night air. 

Find it on Ruination Record Co.

Album Review: Kata Phore - Virevolte

Virevolte (which I think translates from French to English as "Twirls" [which makes sense when looking at the cover]) is an uplifting and consoling experience. It's the first release from electronic conjurer Kata Phore, who seems to be from everywhere and nowhere at the same time. A sense of placelessness suits Virevolte, though. Its methodical, soliloquy-like progressions pursue a self-referential dialogue with themselves, unraveling like a ball of yarn, and snapping back into geometrical loops like a slinky. Its twists and inversions would seem to be alienating if the direct experience of them was not like losing touch with gravity and but not your orientation in space; like being forced upward to a stable altitude within the unperturbed stream of a vertical wind tunnel and permitted to glide and summersault in ambivalence to the normal rules of terrestrial living. The album is wordless, but as I've alluded, the looping selections of sequences serve as a worthy lyrical substitute, sublating the need for a particular lexicon, while creating space for a distinguishable acoustic colloquy. I feel that if I had a synth in front of me at this very moment, I could carry on a full conversation with the chiming, churning passages of Virevolte, and it would somehow feel like I was having a dialogue with Kata herself. Kind of like me in Chicago, and her in a far-off land, where actually neighbors, gossiping into tin cans connected by a string strung between parallel windowsills facing an alleyway; a live wire binding two souls; our vibrations intelligible to each other, if to no one else. 

Debut release from DDDD. Learn more here. 

Album Review: Party Dozen - The Real Work

Party Dozen make an unbelievable racket. I don't mean that in any pejorative sense, but I do mean it literally. I'm bewildered by what I'm hearing on The Real Work, their third album. All I'm sure of is that it does, in fact, work. My synapses turning into a firework display in response to the arrays of parps, hooles, feeps, grauls, and all manner of exceedingly ominous clangor that they disgorge over the course of the album is proof that whatever they are doing, they have tapped into something both real and uncanny. At its base, Party Dozen is one man (Jonathan Boulet), posed behind a drum kit, which he hammers like a grudge, and one woman (Kirsty Tickle), a solo saxophonist, whose retorts and replies, to the percussive knots that bind these songs together, resemble someone raising the alarm of an impending industrial mishap through a shattered megaphone. A rock, or jazz, or composition recital, featuring only two performers is nothing out of the ordinary, but the sounds Party Dozen muster together are just so devastatingly anomalous, rudimentary in their bludgeoning grandeur, and unaffectedly transcendental that they don't truly feel of this world; despite their unmistakable physicality and weighted material presence. Like no wave, as blood sport. Like Metal Machine Music, but intimidatingly coherent, and maddeningly intelligible. Party Dozen are like if John Zorn parachuted unannounced into a Lightning Bolt set at Taicoclub and started using his sax to spar, gladiator style, with Brian Gibson and his bass.  Such incredible collaborations (confrontations?) are not as challenging to imagine as one might think. In one of The Real Works's early highlights, Nick Cave makes an unobtrusive cameo muttering and then shouting a variation of the title "Macca the Mutt," crooning with full, desperate Grinderman charisma as if he was being dragged away by men in white coats during the song's coda. Soon after, "Fruits Of Labour" presents a low-riding sax groove as if it was the jaundiced sweeping gaze of a clandestine operative on the lookout for a surreptitious drop from one of his underground contacts, then the song gets ugly, and suddenly the g-man realizes that someone must have slipped something into his coffee, and everything is covered in silty dry moss, and he is sinking, sinking, sinking, as if the ocean were flooding through the windows of his convertible, forcing him below the surface of the pavement and into a briny tomb. Mutilated and opaque protests struggle below rising waves of thunderous bass and edifying sax wails, amplifying the form, if not the substance, of the many galvanizing objections that spur and parry within the cage of "The Worker," elsewhere "Major Beef" has all the black majesty of a Coven performance at the band's theatrical height and sounds like it is echoing up from an orchestra pit dug into the frozen shores of Cocytus, while still later, the band returns to their penchant for semi-surf rock abstraction on "Earthly Times" sounding something Dick Dale might have written after an encounter with an Old One. The Real Work, as the product of Party Dozen's brow sweat, leads me to hazard that they are exuding something stronger than lysergic acid from their pores. 

Check into Temporary Residence Ltd. and stay a while. 

Album Review: Ree-Vo - All Welcome On Planet Ree​-​Vo

Ree-Vo have engineered a world that perfectly reflects a certain vision and method towards electronic dance music and hip hop on their latest LP; an all-encompassing, scientifically calibrated, omni-motion-catalyst, that presents an open invitation to anyone willing to join the experiment and find their groove; a proposal evinced by the title, All Welcome On Planet Ree​-​Vo. The duo at the core of the project is a recent collaboration between two established figures in the Bristol underground, that of rapper T.Relly and producer Andy Spaceland. My first impression of the record, and an impression that was cemented upon multiple listens, was that their selection of sparky, percolating and reggae reminiscing beats, as well as T's deft and energetic flow are a purposeful echo of an era of house and rap that was immortalized in the South London club scene of the '90s, as represented in fictionalized documentations like the Junglist, and other such street level recollections of the time. It's a record that is full of hijinks, meticulously plotted schemes, and sharp displays of forethought, that combine with a commitment and judicious approach to fat-back funk and boom-box-busting trip-hop sounds, all of which somehow still come across as effortlessly spontaneous and ephemeral despite the music's clear and qualitative impact. Still, this is only a starting point, as All Welcome... is not a throwback record. Just because much of contemporary hip-hop feels devoid of structure and intention, doesn't automatically convert any record that does consciously embodies these values into boomer boom-bap. The tightness of the sequencing of the beats present here and T's tendency to mock, box, and spare with their grooves is essential to the dynamics of the album. These consequential structures are not just enabled by modern studio tech, but representative of different, unique, and progressive sensibility for how beats combine with rhymes in a way that conveys a message as well as a body moving momentum. All Welcome On Planet Ree​-​Vo might feel at times like it is simply escaping the inertia of the past, but in reality, it is hurdling the passivity and pessimism of the present in a quest to open a lane to the future. 

Out on Dell’Orso Records.

Album Review: Hysterical Love Project - Lashes

Lashes seem like the staging ground for a diseasing act. Only one where the person you think you are dematerialized and the person you actually are emerges from the recesses of the unconscious. A fathomless, centerless whole- a dream with no egress, a cathedral with no floor. It's one of those albums that has enough depth that you can sense yourself sinking into it. Like you've been gazing into your own reflection, and then suddenly, it's no longer your reflection but a ripple of tension running across a small pool that you're just about to breach with your face, like an ice cube splashing into a glass of vodka. The New Zealand duo Hysterical Love Project have synthesized something so strange and beautiful with Lashes that it could cause Narcissus to pry his entranced stare away from his own visage, lured by the distant riveting pluck of its rhythms, and stayed from his mythic fate long enough to be saved from the deadly embrace of his echo. They have cultivated an enigmatic chamber of sonic sense operations that absorbs all light that transgresses its barrier and keeps it suspended like fireflies in a mote of obsidian. Languorous, teary and affected with dispirit, the vocals wind through the evenly spaced, mechanical rotation of beats with the assistance of a lubricating frost of synth codas, as if these yearning harmonies were a delicate strip of silk winding its way through the guts of an automaton, having been inadvertently swallowed during an incident at a haberdashery, it patiently and searchingly slips between synthetic spleens and hissing circulatory valves, leaving curly stray strands of itself dislodged and tangled in its passes, diminishing as it progresses, it dissipates into the open cavity of this model, manufactured man, integrating inseparably with the logic of his interior. Given enough time, you will not just find more places to explore within the ascetic sphere of Lashes, but more hidden places inside of you that its essence has dripped, spread, and accumulated until you find yourself subsumed within the wealth of its weightless anatomy; free to dance upon the wire of a vespertine daydream. 

Perpetual rotation in the Motion Ward. 

Album Review: Nutrients - Different Bridges

The title "House Fire Painting" sums up a lot of what Toronto-based funk-pop group Nutrients are about on their LP Different Bridges.  It's actually a good starting point for the album, even though it's buried deep in the sequencing. A breezy, reedy chord progression weaves on a bongo beat like a stray feather caught in the drooping thread of a spider's web, straining on its teether while flowing on the draft of a semi-Caribbean groove; not in a bind, just trying to unwind. This incredibly chill conflux is, of course, decompressing under a header that both communicates its beauty as well as the terminable nature of such an appealing thing as a painting melting in a house on fire. The course of many aspects of life have this quality. A moment of contemplation, a kind gesture from a friend, a momentary reprieve to watch a bird forage from a window; all spent up like a love letter put to the fire. Fully consumed by the sequential pace of more mundane or agonizing encounters. Yet, it's these small moments, these ampoules of peace and connection, that deliver us from our worries and hurries long enough to make the day worthwhile. Every winter has a spring, and if you wait long enough, also a summer. Nutrients wrote Different Bridges during the heart of the pandemic, in a house that did not belong to any of the members. In isolation, it was easy to imagine that the world was going to be very different once they reemerged back into it. I don't know what their impressions were when they finally reentered the wild, but I want to imagine from the music on this album that they were hopeful, weary maybe, but also enthused. I like to imagine the sun-kissed qualities of their guitar work, the swaddling brush of the bass grooves, and the dear hush of Taylor Teeple's vocals are more than just a vain intercession in the dark, but disclosures to inspire rejuvenating acts of kindness in the face of the blunt glare of day. I hope that the band are living their lives to the fullest after the freeze of their sequester thawed. I know Different Bridges is reminding me to do the same in my own little neck of the woods. 

Dig into more tunes from Earth Libraries.

Interview: Fire-Toolz

Had my second conversation with Angel Marcloid for CHIRP Radio's Artist Interview Series last week and the episode is now live (this is literally the fastest I have ever edited anything in my life)! We mostly talked about her new album I am upset because I see something that is not there. This may sound like a standard interview, but she started it out by telling me that the title was inspired by a channeled work, and things pretty much proceeded apace from there. I ended up having to cut out quite a few interesting tidbits in order to trim it down to time. Some fun facts about the fundraising campaign and merch decision are now lost to the abyss, in addition to some in-depth info on the cover art. Most interestingly I learned that the holy trinity is represented there. I'm not going to say how, but if you give it a glance you might be able to guess. You might also notice that Angel herself is featured on the cover (possibly a first for the project), adorned with a halo. The reason, as she explained to me, is not to sanctify herself but rather to indicate her connectedness to all things; an acknowledgment, not that she is most sacred, but that all living things, humans included, are sacred. There is more that I'm not going to get into right now, but if you listen to the interview you'll still be able to glean some penetrating insights. Most illuminating of all, is that Fire-Toolz is about having fun. Mostly Angel having fun... but she's not going to deny you a good time if you're open to it. You can listen to the full interview on CHIRP's site or below:

CHIRP Radio · Fire - Toolz Interview

Listen to I am upset because I see something that is not there here: 

Album Review: The Laughing Chimes - Zoo Avenue EP

I was taken by surprise by The Laughing Chime's Zoo Avenue EP. I don't always go for jangly, retro indie rock, but I dig what these guys are doing. The band's members are very young too,  and that's what has stunned me more than anything. I'm not used to listening to music made by literal teens. Usually, bands I encounter who sing about youthful exhibition and the angst of adolescence are in their late '20s, at least. Also, rock bands nowadays are pretty long in the tooth before they are able to pin down a decent record deal with a medium-sized indie label (Slumberland in this case). Kids starting a band in their garage and getting signed before they can legally buy their own beer is more of a '60s thing. The story of The Laughing Chime is almost not even of this century, and reads more like the beginning of a VH1 special where the interview subjects are recounting the band's first big break- getting signed to Sire, or some other seeming stroke of luck; brothers, Evan and Quinn Seurkamp, picked up guitars in a sleepy Midwest town and formed a band with some friends just to prove that they could, they then gain notoriety from playing local gigs, and a Battle of the Bands or two, and then before you knew it, Boom! they've inked a deal and are overnight sensations. That's all she wrote (or I wrote?)! Except for the overnight sensation part. They might still have a ways to go before they fully get their due. A record deal is not worth what they used to be (and I'm sure whatever artistic ambitions it has amplified, they're all still going to need to finish college and weigh their options at other careers), but it's still somewhat heartening to see young guys get to live out this kind of rock 'n roll dream in the midst of our current and profoundly cynical era. It's fitting, too, that The Laughing Chimes are playing in a style perfected in the '80s, that was heavily inspired by the music of the '60s. REM was thoroughly indebted to the Byrds and Velvet Underground, and the Laughing Chimes, are in turn, inspired by REM, The Smiths, and others to make music that continues this grand fashion and legacy of unapologetically delicate, blushingly passionate, and lyrically poetic guitar pop. Zoo Avenue is timeless in that regard, in that it is able to reach back through the decades, grasping the fundamental essence of each period through which it passes, without distorting these vital patterns, or losing its own sense of identity in the process. You can hear the softness and the tenderness of those '60s boy bands whistling through these tracks like a whisper on the wind, getting caught on the contemplatively angular guitar work and subsequently diverted into inward leaning and intimate reflections on the unassuming and quotidian aspects of small town living. While its charming to hear these almost anachronistic portrayals of American life in the heartland depicted through retro-engineered sounds, the album also benefits from a knowing implementation of modern musical modalities; punching these numbers up with peppy rock tempos, bristlingly textured chord progressions that ride the line between pure skill and telegraphed sincerity, and powerpop harmonies that have clearly had time to stew on the impact of grunge before consciously eschewing its edicts. Zoo Avenue is a bountiful menagerie of the familiar and time-honored, faithfully repurposed with a high level of esteem for their source in order to give context to the lives of young men making their way through the world today. 

More sweet, dreamy tunes from Slumberland Records.

Album Review: Generacion Suicida - Regeneracion

It's funny to me that I didn't realize how much I associated the "Killed By Death" style of punk with South and Central American punk groups until I picked up Regeneracion by Generacion Suicida. Funny, of course, becuase, 1) Generacion Suicida is from LA, and 2) Killed By Death comps mostly cataloged English language, or at least, Western European punk bands. That said, I have good reason (I think) for associating this classic and iconic style with groups like Sapu Punk, and others I've stumbled across on Bandcamp. For whatever reason, I was listening to a lot of that kind of stuff five or so years ago, and I remember it reignited my interest in going back and checking out some raw and underproduced punk comps from decades back. As a result, the two will likely remain entwined in my brain like quarreling lovers until the day I kick the bucket. This isn't a bad thing, mind you. Bands from the Southern Hemisphere tend, on the whole, to be a lot less self-conscious about what they play, and don't seem to care how old or well-trodden the turf they're transgressing might be. They don't tend to get into punk for the clout, is what I'm getting at. And that was true for the original KBD comps, as well; some Swedish dude thought bands like Zero Boys, Subhumans, and Violators sounded cool, and therefore he wanted more people to hear them. Any resulting cache was incidental (and mostly acquired by mistake). But when I think about it even more, my real reference point for this style of punk is probably most aligned with Mujeres Podridas, who I always erroneously thought was from Chile for some reason (Fact Check: they're actually from Texas). Anyway, at some point, a lot of people all came to the same correct conclusion that wiry, rare, and lightly crusted punk sounds best when shouted in Spanish with Southwestern-infused chords filling out the grooves. These elements add a crucial layer of intrigue to the whole affair, and, what's more, ground the sound in a more working-class, salt-of-the-earth orientation. It's not the kind of punk you'll hear in a high-end or legacy sneaker ad, but the kind that you might catch spilling out of a busted-up pick-up truck as it kicks up dust and leaves its owner's current worksite in the rearview mirror for another day, or hopping the fence and catching your ear from across a back alley where your neighbor's BBQ is still going hard at 2 am. While a good deal of Generacion Suicida's early material had that kind of knife-edge-playing, get-it-out or die-trying, Wipers demo vibe to it, Regeneracion rightfully revives and revolutionizes their sound by making a deal with a particularly handsome and skilled devil at the crossroads of desert rock and post-punk, and in the process rejuvenating their darkly critical perspective and aesthetic to make it even more piercing and crucial in its urgency. The band really sound like scrubland partisans planning their next daring raid while on horseback when it comes to tracks like the sidewinding venturer "Todo Es Un Sueno" and the iron-hoved dash of "Jaulas." Elsewhere, "Ilusion" emulates a perfect rendezvous point between prairie punk sensibilities and darkly elusive, neo-noir chord progressions, while later, the punchy "Violencia" plunges and parries in a series of subtle offensives while surviving on a sustained drip of spite and adrenaline. Finally, the band's near limitless determination resolves to an all-to-human demand for certainty and resolution on "Dime Donde Esta," before leaving the listener with the final, fatal echo of "Me Estan Buscando." Regeneracion sounds like the start of a new era for Generacion Suicida, a recommitment to form with added inspiration that leaves them inevitably changed, and for the better. 

Get down to with more from Downtown Records.  

Album Review: Narrow Head - Moments of Clarity

We all enjoy moments of clarity, however brief. Instances where solutions present themselves, or a previously obstructed path becomes clear. Our lives are complicated and our perspectives are limited. It's not often that we can obtain a clear line of sight on what to do next, or even what our priorities are from task to task, but when it does happen, it tends to be extraordinary. An uncluttered mind is one that is free from anxiety and dread, allowing the body to maneuver the world with ease and actualize its intent. Texas alternative rock group Narrow Head seems to have reached this point of fluid, uninhibited concurrence between mind and matter on their latest LP, titled (what else) Moments of Clarity. The name of the record is a reference to a series of personal trials and terrible losses experienced by guitarist and vocalist Jacob Duarte in the lead-up to the release of their prior LP, 12th House Rock. Emerging from these hardships, the phrase that now adorns the album, would burst into the purview of Javob's perception like the glow of a neon sign, pointing him forward and through one adversity after another. This perseverance is reflected not only in the very deliberate way that the album was structured and recorded (at two separate studios, no less), but also in the very relationship of Jacob's vocal performance with the rest of the band's. His calm, resolute, and at times resigned, delivery shapes a guiding pathway of lucidity through the murky, driving filaments and actively pulverized structures of a track like "Gearhead," while providing a tempering thread of sanity to the blinding uplift of "Caroline." While it's easy to make comparisons to what Narrow Head has accomplished sonically here to post-hardcore and post-rock pioneers like Hum, Deftones, and Quicksand, it's apparent that the group has arrived at their current sound and level of prowess by following a path that was not precedented by other, but predicated on the belief in the portent of their own ability. They saw the direction this path could lead them, and they forged ahead in actuation of a purposeful and innate drive. Seeing is believing, but it's in doing that we meet our destiny.

Someone's got you covered, that some is Run for Cover.

Album Review: Nicholas Merz - American Classic

 
What other name could you give an album like this other than American Classic? It's an impossible question to answer. Nothing anchors its themes with the same level of depth and accuracy as these two words settling up to one and other like lonely strangers in a dimly lit bar, weighing their options after last call. Nicholas Merz has been all over this country, most recently as one-half of the Seattle-based and soberly romantic duo Darto- but it's with his solo efforts on American Classic that he manages to dig his spurs into the dirt long enough to pause and drink in the great, diminished expectations of the promised land on the other side of manifest destiny. On American Classic, Nicholas still sounds somber and stoic, but there is now a country-western quality to his singing that helps give his lyrical descriptions of the lives of the declassed, no class, godforsaken and god-fearing a sentimental hue and a pulse of warmth. Not to mention a twinge of Twainian irony. There is a little bit of Leonard Cohen in his delivery as well, but unlike the wry crooner, Nicholas is all-American, and all too close to his subjects. The way he describes someone who is cohabitating with a lover as if the two were playing a game of chess is conspicuously human while lending the listener the benefit of a clairvoyant instrument; allowing you to see through the subject's eyes, while Nicholas's words pierce the veil of appearances to show you the drama of contradictions that flounders beneath. One of the more amusing scenarios on the album appears on "Great Spiders" where a flight of self-love diverges from the mundane into an act of narcissistic negligence, and ultimately, man-slaughter, scored by the mocking drone of a swirl and pandemonium of saxophones. Empathy comes to overlap with a carrion-eater's voyeurism on the grudgingly visceral, rag-timey sweep of "Condor," and a drawn-out good-bye implodes into an existential crisis on "A Day in LA," a climax that is bound to a percussion line that sounds like someone beating a throw rug on a clothesline, a nagging, futile racket, presented as if the abuse of some lowly strip of decore could cause an epiphany to emerge that had otherwise eluded the narrator. On American Classic, Nicholas tells it like it is- even when what it is, is an intractable, self-destructive mess. But hey, ain't that America? 

Find it on Aagoo Records. 

Interview: Screaming Females

Image by Krista Schlueter

Screaming Females was probably my favorite band at one time. The first time I saw them at a house show in Wisconsin and they made such a powerful impression on me that I would go out of my way, braving all sorts of conditions, to see them again afterward. Driving on black ice-frosted road conditions in the dead of night, careening around mountain passes, forgoing meals to pay for gas, getting back from a venue hours away at 4 am when I had to be to work a mere three hours later- if they were playing near me, I was going to see them. My interests in music have evolved a lot since I first encountered this band, but I am still in awe of them in many ways, especially their relentless tenacity and willingness to do it themselves, as much as possible, nearly 20 years into their career. It was pretty cool to finally have the chance to talk with vocalist and guitarist Marissa and drummer Jarrett for CHIRP Radio about the band's latest album Desire Pathway, and all the things that came together to make it happen. I might be an irrepressible enthusiast, but I don't think the conversation came off as a "fan" interview by any stretch. I kept it together, is what I'm saying. You can listen to our conversation on CHIRP's site here, or below:  

CHIRP Radio · Screaming Females Interview

Desire Pathway is out on Doni Govani Records. You can listen to it below: 

Album Review: Seasoning - The Condensation

Singer and songwriter Lachlan Buckle gives away the origins of his current project in two ways... that are really just one way (Hint, it's in the name). While fleshing out demos over the years he ended up giving life to something new by chance. Instead of a Frankenstine's monstrosity though, the consequence of his love and labor is something that reflects back the goodness that he has poured into it. Under the name Seasoning, he has released a six-song EP titled The Condensation. These songs have been with him a few seasons and have finally "condensed," with a little TLC, into a breezy, indie-pop record, animated by an amicably aspiring sense of purpose and a confident stride that is easy to get caught up. Looking to a few cherry-picked examples of what I am fond of about this record, we can start with "Next to Me" which is graced with a backpacker's wanderlust that lends a dreamy pace to the song's bendy, strummy powerpop skip, and then there is the country-reverb-rich "Change" which has a frank cadence to its inflections that causes it to resemble a caring but difficult conversation with a friend, and finally, there is the rambling break-beat and sunny disposition of the gleaming, dream-pop chords that lend motion and light to "Loop Song," a track that moves like a film with a recurring, montage like a structure which sees Lachlan whispering lyrics quietly, as if to himself, as he wonders like a stray atom through city streets at a pace that is slightly slower than the rhythms of the people around him, making it appear as if he is being lapped by the spinning world around him. Sometimes the city is too frantic. Sometimes when the world is spinning out of control you need to just bump the breaks. Slow down and stay awhile, and let Lachlan show you what Seasoning has to offer. 

Album Review: Noah - Noire

Noire is a collection of loose songs from Tokyo electronic R'nB artist Noah that have been tucked under her bed, laying pensive under a heap of laundry, or leaning anxiously against the back of her closet for years- waiting to be pulled out, polished, and given a purpose. These nine tracks owe their origins to various points in her recording career, starting with 2015's Sivutie, but truly acquiring their future, potential luster around the release of her Étoile EP back in 2021. Noah has a welcoming and warm quality to her voice, a cleanly defined human presence amongst the passages of electronically enhanced sounds that surround it. Her voice is like a thread around your finger, reminding you of something important from your past; running from your ring finger into the distant horizon, it is a lifeline by which you can pull yourself back to a previous promontory of clarity. The other notable aspect of the album's procession is her distant piano playing. While it is not a feature of every track, it does lend a distinct sense of hope to the wafting din of "shadow" and the expectant yearning of "cheshire," a searching sensibility that confesses its vulnerability through the bravery of its desire. There are many wonderous things one can find in the dark. Most surprisingly amongst them is one's self. 

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Metal Monday: Dryad, Hellion, Bones & Witch Vomit

It's another Monday. A simple, terrible, miracle. A Monday. Time to get motivated for another week of grueling, meaningless effort as a shambling human shell. Such drudgery isn't without its benefits, although I'm failing to recall any at the moment. Hmmmm.... Here is an idea. While I work on the quandy of our existence, why don't you check out some brutal metal albums to calm your nerves? No sense in us doubling our efforts. Especially, if all we're going to do is come up empty-handed. 

Dryad - The Abyssal Plain (Prosthetic Records)

The depths of the sea called out to humankind. Pulling us back to its sunless cradle. A familial siren cascades up from the churning chasm of the devouring mother's subaquatic womb. Her culling cry is even heard inland, and some howl back in a zealous, rapturous hiss. Iowa's Dryad makes themselves willing vessels for this ancient madness on their visceral and Poseidonion debut LP, The Abyssal Plain. Beckoning forth a baying tempest of black metal, and armored by a scabbard exoskeleton of crust punk, they delve into a sinking sense of airless dread, caressed by a current of acrid incursions and sinister presages curried by a shrowd finely woven dungeon synths. Dryad wastes no time bailing out their harvest, heaving stygian phantasms onto the wharf of your mind, where these eldritch things sprawl and writhe and wind their tendrils into the quivering clefts of your senses. The catch is good, and now the shore is littered with horrors beyond comprehension. 

Hellion - The Magic Within (Awakening Records)

Columbia's Hellion are endowed with a dark, primitive aura, a vicious primal hunger that rumbles from the very soil of the jungle, blind from anger and driven by an insatiable appetite. Their third full-length, The Magic Within, lunges forth, teeth bared, like the skeleton of a decayed jaguar, whose trapped soul suddenly reacquires its former urge to kill, and swiftly makes a go at your neck. The dark forest rebel band makes their deadly presence known by peppering your carcass with toothy waves of repeating thrash grooves, summoned by the sacrificial throaty trill of a black metal spell pilfered from Impurity, an impromptu and roughshod weapon that shoots up from a cold pool of mud, blood, and liquified carrion; biting and rending your flesh like an ax shaving through the bark of a tree. Theirs is a magic that comes from a dark place indeed. 

Bones - Vomit (Disorder-Recordings)

Brusingly kinetic death metal from the acres-wide meat locker known as Chicago. This gruff and uncompromisingly muscular group disgorges all their angst over the course of nine, stomach emptying tracks on their fourth LP, Vomit. The grooves on this god-forsaking brawler will catch you in the paunch with a boot and then sink its knee into your nose as soon as you're doubled over. And you'll probably ask these bad dudes for another as soon as you swish the blood out of your gums and reset your septum. Bones delivers the kind of punishment that is as addictive as a cold flash of vengeance; and just as satisfying too. 

Witch Vomit - A Scream From The Tomb Below (Memento Mori)

We end with another dark ritual. Another cthonic murmuration, this time rising like a death rattle from the side of a mountain, a stone barrier between our world and sphere of exile used to contain a crooked serpentess and scion of sin. Its mighty, scaled coils shaking the very fabric of reality with its inpatient thrash, causing the air to fill with a sickening rumble that shudders the humors until they dispel into disarray. Witch Vomit's A Scream From The Tomb Below will assemble all the beldams and hex-weavers of the banished and forgotten places to a single rancid pyre, a stewing pit where they may prepare the offerings of their final orgastic, wicked sabbath; presided over by a baneful guttural gurgle that tears open the sky in a torrent of acid rain and underwritten by a ripple of explosive grooves that could strip a cliff face of its graduate and leave nothing but a disfigured monument to bedlam in its place. Witch Vomit's searing death metal smirch harbors a painful echo that will spread through time until the cycle of rejuvenation and apocalyptic resolution can begin again under the cataract gaze of heartless stars. 

 

Album Review: Jared Mattson - Peanut

A din of reverberation swells slightly in your ear cavity. It expands like a balloon until it can't contain its surging interior, and then it caves in with a snape. In the open margin left by the collapse of this resonate envelope is the kernel of a beat. An oaky babble whose gait is complimented by the lumber of a dry but fleshy tom that manages to wind between the steps of the first rhythm like a stocky plover darting between the legs of a striding crane. The fellowship of these opposing sounds quickly find themselves in the company of ever more strange but gratifying partnerships; such a crackling sound of peanut shells underfoot, the bubbly skoosh of aqua-colored bongos, and a cheerfully wavy thread of solar-saturated guitar chords. I'm used to such combinations of AOR emblems sounding best when a layer of standard compression is applied, leaving the sounds slightly pruned and obfuscated, but left wholly occupying the available space of the recording- a common but aesthetical limitation of even high-end studio products from the '70s and '80s. What's really impressive about "Don't Run," off of Jared Mattson's Peanut, is that guitarist, songwriter, and producer is able to set such nominal sound collages within the depths of 3D space that modern sound recording is able to enable and still manage to make it sound novel and compelling. One of my main complaints about progressive rock recordings of this era is that they tend to lack the confidence to allow for open space on a record, as well as the frame of mind to properly direct the listener's attention toward sounds that are capable of striking the ear as inexhaustible, even after multiple listens. In this area, Peanut excels. However, Jared's debut solo LP has other facets that are worthy of commendation as well, whether it concerns his smooth, effortless guitar playing, which impresses on the sonic canvas of the record a natural parallel between smooth jazz progressions and Yellow Magic Orchestra-esque grooves, or his thrillingly subdued collaborations with Gotch, frontman of the Japanese punk band Asian Kung-Fu Generation, or the high whimsy blur and slow-motion pirouette of his cover of Ween's "She Wanted to Leave," or even his general synthesis of reggae embossed guitar melodies and brittle pop textures, the latter borrowed from artists in the sphere of Men at Work, which he then bends to his needs as if these panes of reflective glass were as flexible as blades of grass. Where ever you crack into Peanut, you won't find a moment that isn't the byproduct of some unexpected stroke of genuine inspiration. Still, I reserve my greatest praise for his ability to make sounds that usually benefit from a little bit of technical bottlenecking, feel fully realized and potent in their newfound abundance. 

You're in good with Company Records.  

Interview: Doom Flower

Image by Collin Bunting

Had a delightful check-in with Chicago band Doom Flower this week for the CHIRP Radio podcast. I got to talk with Bobby and Jess, the band's bassist and vocalist, respectively, about their latest album Limestone Ritual, the incredibly organic way that the group formed, their striking visual presence, and how that visual identity almost caused the band to go by a different name. We had to do this interview while Jess was waking up in a hotel somewhere out West while schlepping Destroy Boys around on tour. We had to schedule the call for 9 am Chicago time, and I'm still surprised that we made it happen! Even when sleep-deprived and road-worn, Doom Flower was a delight! You can listen to the interview below, or on CHIRP's site. 

CHIRP Radio · Doom Flower Interview

Listen to Doom Flower's Limestone Ritual courtesy of 'Record Label' below:

Album Review: Why Bother? - A City of Unsolved Miseries

Midwest punks Why Bother? are strangely proud to be from Mason City, Iowa. Proud enough, in fact, to chronicle the small landlocked town's long, distressed, degeneration into despair and tortured alienation on their third LP A City of Unsolved Miseries. Maybe proud is the wrong word; morbidly fascinated may be more accurate. This dreary sonic diary humbly inscribed tomes from the vantage point of living in a world losing all sense of form, its contents bleeding irretrievably through its grasp, like rain through a colander. The four member's famously lo-fi, basement recording setup could not be better suited for etching out the definitions and textures that lend honest verisimilitude to tales of small-town crime, missing persons, and the ubiquitously lubricious cocktail of psychoactive pharmaceuticals and a draining lack of purpose that many are forced to imbibe every day. Notably, there is a distinct lack of judgment directed towards the subjects of these songs, and no measure of warmth is spared them; the tragedy is that no one can survive on good intentions alone, and a simple abstinence of condemnation does little to keep the blood pumping when tripping ones way through a blizzard of suffering. Still, a flicker of kindness, is a glimmer of hope, even if it is akin to a bic lighter serving as one's only means of survival while freezing in a meat locker overnight. Circling into view like a flying saucer on fire, opener "Lacerated Nights" spirals chaotically, shakily maintaining altitude as its systems spark and fail, an intentionally ominous greeting at the start of the album that perfectly illustrates the dynamics of Why Bother?'s sound; darkly personal post-punk memoirs and melodies, forced to forge ahead by a buzzy confluence of martian soundscans and grimy '70s Zero Boys hooks fished from the void. Despite the doubts their music entertains about the human condition, the group elects to leave us with the ponderous closing note of "Useless Time," where Terry the vocalist reaches out and through the distended threshold of a warped, wormhole of feedback to offer a proposition; if you and he are going to be forced, by habit and circumstance, to waste your lives, why not waste them together? Is time spent with another who understands you and your struggles in life ever truly wasted? Comradery cures many ailments, and upon such reflections, the group's name becomes less an open question, and more of an open challenge to the nihilism that lurks in the shadow of day and stalks openly in the gloom of night. 

Get a grip with Feel It Records.