Interview: Superdestroyer

I've been a huge fan of Superdestroyer's work since he pitched his first LP to me back in 2021, completely out of the blue. I really had no idea what to expect from his Such Joy album, but it ended up thoroughly blowing me out of the water (you can read my review here). Fast forward to last year and I'm comparing his album Goon to Husker Du's Zen Arcade! A bit of effusive? Sure. But hell, he's earned it! I am entirely indiscreet about how much I enjoy his work and the output of his label Lonely Ghost, and when I heard that he had a new album coming out this year, I lept on the chance to have him on my podcast to discuss it. Superdestroyer's next release SoakedInSynth.zip drops later this week (the 30th to be exact) and sees the enigmatic electro-emo wunderkind confronting one of his oldest and most dastardly foes, the Cartoondemon! A fiend that has lurched in the background of many of Superdestoryer's past releases, but has never dared to show his face... until now! Will Superdestroyer prevail over his adversary, or is his ship destined to sink in a sea of woe?!? You'll have to check out the record to find out. Of course, if you're curious about spoilers (and why wouldn't you be?) you can check out our convo below: 

More info about Superdestroyer and the rest of the Lonely Ghost roster can be found here. 

Interview: NaturoSynth

Image Credit: Zain Siddiqui

Got to talk with the cool cats of NaturoSynth for the CHIRP Radio Artist Interview series this week. They make a very slick-sounding, '80s-inspired style of future funk and psyche that sounds like a cross between Tame Impala and Daft Punk and I'm all about it. They are super polished, confident, and great to talk to, as well. I was shocked to learn this was only their second interview ever. You can check our convo on CHIRP's site here, or below: 

CHIRP Radio · NaturoSynth Interview

Check out their latest EP In Control here: 

Album: Starman Jr. - Temple

What do you think Starman Jr.'s power level is? Don't look up a player's guide, I want you to give your best, educated guess. Would you rate it high or moderate? Do you think he's a fair, early encounter, or should his fight be put off until you've maxed out some stats? I'm of course talking about the NOLA-based indie rocker and not the Earthbound adversary of the same name, but I can see how you might get too confused. Unlike his namesake sibling, running into Starman Jr. (the musician) is not inevitable (as it is [sort of] in the game... you know, Earthbound). He's been a prolific recording artist since at least 2015, but I only encountered him for the first time this morning while looking for something to put on while replying to emails (I guess you could call it a random encounter). I was initially intrigued by his 2022 LP Hardcore (a consequence of my long recovery from a prior era when I unironically referred to myself as a "punk kid"), but I ended up really falling for his most recent release Temple instead. Temple overall has a softer focus to its production than some of his other work, personifying a gentle balance of balmy restfulness and understated splendor, a contagious kategori of bare folk kindness and lopsided pop bliss that blisters achingly like a tar bubble crying for relief and release. Here SJr. plays a kind of fleecy, proto-catatonic country in the class of Coma Cinema, which if it gets you under its spell, will cause all your ideal aspirations to float through the exhaust vents of your ears and into the world like clouds of concrete, falling into place until they convene a chapel of faultless attainment where intentions become stirringly factual and real, and any tongue is intelligible as long as it is spoken with honesty and care. Mello liquid mushroom melodies cascade from cracks in chamber-conscious compositions like sunrays dancing through the gaps in a rainbow. Songs come together like a mirror shattering in reverse to capture the moment a stone was cast into it, permitting you a moment to contemplate the regret in your own eyes and grant yourself a premonition of pardon for future transgressions with a promise to do better next time around. As it turns out, Starman Jr.'s (emotional and aesthetical) power level is pretty high. Thankfully, he's not a boss encounter, more like a new addition to your party- one who can raise your HP with a simple strum of his guitar and chase off baddies with the disarming sincerity of his aura.    

Album Review: No Momentum - Triple Threat

Triple Threat is a completion of three of No Momentum's EP; Mach Punch, Seismic Toss, and Parting Shot. The New York-based emo quartet like to play around with amateur wrestling imagery and sound clips, but as far as I can tell, the past time of hitting friends and acquaintances in the head with folding chairs or placing them in choreographed chokeholds doesn't permeate the content of the material any deeper than the superficial cuts a performer might razor into his forward head during a boiler-room brawl. That's alright. The lyrics and rock riffage they coast on are pretty hardcore even without the added wrestling innuendo. You can hear from the outset, on the opener "I Quit," how recklessly the group throws themselves into the material. Their main vocalist Kelly belts out every lyric like it might be her last, like she's imminently aware that there is an errant sawblade, sprung loose from a shop bench, and careening towards her neck like its the one thing in the world standing between it and the exit. A heightened level of intent and urgency charges the entire comp like a fork in an electrical outlet, filling it with nearly enough wattage to stop your heart, stone-cold. Especially on later tracks like "Boss Battle," which has this combustible rope-a-dope groove that makes you feel like you've been cornered by the band and their batting you around like a jobber squaring off against a heel whose finisher is a choke slam, or "Dance, Dance: Revolution" a circuit frying torrent and fuzz fricasseed free-fall that narrowly avoids succumbing to full skull-splitting skramz by a virtue of a groovy bassline and the inclusion of  Sega soundcard sojourn in the bridge. That's the other thing about No Momentum; they really have a knack for chiptunes. It's not something that they mix with guitar riffs all that often, but they do include short, whimsical, vignettes of lo-fi, internal expansion card-enabled melodica at the end of each EP, which helps to earmark the different sections of the record as it is ordered chronologically by release date (earliest to latest). This sequencing actually works really well for the album on the whole, as the band's performances have become tighter and more intense over time, providing the record with a terminal sense of momentum (*cough cough*), building towards the final tightrope drop of the American Fugazi-ball, Terror-Drive-In, KO-cry of "Parting Shot." The kind of impassioned sincerity exhibited on Triple Threat kind of menace I wish I had more of in my life. Don't be a jabroni; put this record at the top of your card. 

Album Review: Kmaiuscola - Che colpa abbiamo noi

I'm choosing to write about this group's music because there is so little available information about them... at least in English. They could have reached a saturation point in the media of another language. If that is the case, I'm not aware of it. I'm often seized by the urge to step outside my relative experience and lean into a faithful step into the unknown... even if said step produces a plunge with a faceplant at the bottom. It's just how I do. Writing for myself has its advantages and its hazards- both of which boil down to the fact that no one can talk sense to me and hope to win. The pitch that I'm winding you up for is that you should listen to Kmaiuscola, specifically their EP Che colpa abbiamo noi. I can't provide much more context than that because none is available to me. All I have is this recommendation: Listen to Kmaiuscola, specifically their EP Che colpa abbiamo noi. Near as I can tell, Kmaiuscola is an Italian rap group with a penchant for portraying themselves as primates. This vulgar visual vanity offers some amusement, as well as a hint to the cheeky nature of the group's combined flow which comes across as very casual and playful. It also invites obvious (and hopefully flattering) comparisons to the Gorillaz's baselayer of atmospheric drum 'n bass. Generally, though, Che colpa abbiamo noi is made up of simple tracks without much pretense or studio pomp. The group sounds good, qualitywise, and even expensive at times, but tracks like "Chi fa da sè" and "Gambe corte" are shockingly unadorned- the beats of the foremost are comprised of little more than bird call-like whistles, a minimal xylophone riff, and some acapella bass lines, while the later strips the surrounding sounds to little more than supplemental bass slaps and a distinctly sharp, ping-ponging ripple of treble. The lack of distraction would really help me focus on the group's rhymes... if I understood more than four syllables of Italian. As it is, I'm having to draft off the aesthetics and energy of their flow, which is pretty effortless, as these guys have a lot of personality and an easy sense of timing, which translates as entirely copacetic despite the language barrier. Again, I don't have much else to offer here other than my recommendation of something that I happened to enjoy, which is Kmaiuscola, specifically their EP Che colpa abbiamo noi. As corny as it is, I even got into their dub throwback "Worldjam," which makes liberal, (almost noxious ample) use of air horns to accent a terribly straightforward, but genuinely agreeable, summer party jam about the importance of having music in your life (sung mostly in English). Such innocent and earnest vignettes are balanced out by more darkly sharded numbers like the brooding shadow bounce and midnight trotline of "Mai il sole" and the tense, bent rail skirt and suppressor beat exchange of "R.O.Y." on the back end of the album. When you run out of words to describe your responses, all you can do is offer someone the chance to experience the thing you've been expounding upon for themselves. There is an ocean of understanding that separates me from Kmaiuscola, and I actually don't know what their deal is beyond a surface-level impression. All I can say is that I recommend spending some time with them, even if you have to crawl into the same cultural/linguistic liferaft I did. It didn't sink for me, and I can only hope that it will float for you as well. If not, I'll be the first to through you a life preserver. Beyond that, all I can ask is that you take this next step with me, in anticipation that there will be solid ground below our feet and that we haven't just marched ourselves off the end of a pier that is too short for our stride. Thus, I leave you with my final and ultimate appeal; stop monkeying around and listen to Kmaiuscola, specifically their EP Che colpa abbiamo noi. 

Album Review: Mona Demone - S3rp3nt

Damballa is praised as the origin of all things. The great serpent loa is considered a wise, patient, and benevolent creature from whom all life emerged and from whom the cosmos owes its order. Damballa is like the ocean. A fathomless entity of profound dimensions whose gifts are incalculable and whose generosity is perpetual. They're both fierce without question, but their hazards are not what defines them; rather their roles in the cycles and circadian recurrence of existence. I see LA producer Mona Demone's S3rp3nt as a kind of ritual dance to commune with these primordial forces, to take their insights and strengths into one's self and learn to be a nurturing force for the perpetuation of life and love on this Earth through their tutelage. It is not always a simple task to move one's body, and it can be particularly daunting to do so with purpose and design, but it is the intention with which we imbue our actions that makes us who we are, and which gives us the resilience to pass the virtues we have cultivated on to others, like pearls along the beach, a path of tiny stars in the sand, small fortune distributed to promote future discoveries and fund the construction of a new Atlantis. 

Find more rad records via Ratskin. 

Album Review: Mother Fortune - Mommy is missing

Chicago has some of the more underrated hip-hop collectives in the country. At least that's how it appears sometimes. I'm not always the best at keeping up with the ways and goings-ons of local up-and-comers, but when accolades are due, they are due. Mother Fortune is the jackpot for weird, serious, but not too serious, alt-rap right now. Their latest album  Mommy is missing has a Quelle Chris and Jean Grae collab crossed with a JPEGMAFIA EP sorta vibe- you're not really sure what you're going to get from track to track, but you know it's going to leave an impression as well as manage to twist that little nerve in your brain that all your existential thoughts have to run through before they're emptied into the trash bin of the unconscious. It's a high energy, effortlessly elastic, and penetrative poignant mix of R'nB, noise, chiptune, and odd pop art preoccupations that facilitates a threading weave that can run from Nnamdi, to Open Mike, to Death Grips, usually in the course of a single song. On this record, Mother Fortune feels like a more evolved Odd Future in many ways- there is a high premium placed on the group's sense of humor, but it never feels alienating or shocking for the sake of shock value. Instead, it rides like the group is letting you in on the joke and trying to get you to laugh along with them as they riff off Mario Savio soundbites, invent new culinary enigmas, toss out intentionally dated Superbad callbacks, and discuss going to dog shows while stone-tripping. It's all the kind of smack talk and goofball antics you'd get into while your Mom is away at work, and know you're not going to be under too much punishment if she catches you when she gets back. It's the odd kind of fun that feels like character-building as much as a diversion from school work, chores, work-work, or what have you. It's the kind of mischief that she might even be secretly proud of you for immortalizing in some kind of artistic endeavor after a fashion, even if she won't say so to you directly... not while there are still dishes soaking in the sink and trash needing to be taken out. 

Album Review: Oruã - Íngreme

Oruã's Íngreme feels odder than it should. The spark of the record is owed to the band's support for Built to Spill during a US tour in 2019. The songs were a kind of grounding exercise for the group while on this journey. There isn't a specific Oruã's sound per say; they'll do sound collages when it suits them, and jazz when it feels right, but what is really striking about Íngreme is the way that it feels like a meeting point between all of these disparate strands while translating them into the sphere of '90s indie rock. It's truly invigorating to hear the way in which Oruã are able to thread the warped and time-distending qualities of Brazilian funk and psyche and lace them elegantly with clumpy indie rock grooves and art-punk percussive flare. It feels like stumbling on a '60s freak-out in the basement of a Berkeley townhouse- a wormhole that connects today to our evaporated, wigged-out past as if they were part of one subterranean digestive track, each nurturing the other and calling the other into simultaneous and spontaneous being. Like Os Mutantes growing spurs to be fired by Archers of Loaf into the broadsided palate (pallet?) of organized disorder raised by groups like Fixtures to create oil stain rainbow effects that jell and spread across a continuum of practice and insight. Its origins might be clearly delineated, but there isn't any containing Íngreme once it's poured its contents out into your ears. It's like water flowing downhill, there isn't anything it won't pick up and carry with it downstream, and there isn't any nook or cranny that it won't fill and fully investigate while on its kaleidoscopic voyage.

Change your view, change it all with Transfusão Noise Records.

Album Review: Memnon Sa - Offworld Radiation Therapy

Out in the woods. From the bosom of the oldest bard, a place of knowing older than any language. Deep in the metropole of trees. A sound ponces from limb to limb, scraping along scales of bark until it reaches a clearing and scatters like buckshot. A force as sharp and determined as the gust of a blizzard. Cold and cutting, but only towards the accesses that cling to you, like barnacles to the shell of a baby sea turtle. It means to trim away your debts. A jubilee of dizzying, incisive modulation. Shoring the bad and broken feathers and leaving only those that are light and fine as the flame of a candle. You will become weightless. Like smoke. Released from the jealous pull of the Earth, you will be lifted toward the loving regard of an ever-watching eye. Unblinking and unclouded, it will guide you in induction into a court of mercy without illusion of judgment. Like a wild strain of cardamom, you will sail and savor and be savored, dissolved and condensed and inculcated in fresh flesh and incomprehensible forms. Drifting back on a river of delicate budding gratuities, you will come to rest again amongst the trees, now no less their kin. Endowed with their wisdom you are as their trustee, counsel, confidant, and earnest friend. Footsteps in the foliage. A ramble without destination. Never imposing a trace by its passage. A rustle without a sound. 

Peak under the curtain of Shadow World. 

Album Review: Emamouse - FiRe

These last few days have left me feeling like I live in the armpit of a housecat. And not the kind that gets to roam the streets like a king, picking up second and third dinners from nieve and well-meaning families who it keeps secrete from its real owners. I mean the kind that barely notices when a bird lands outside the living room window or the smoke detector gets triggered in the kitchen because it sleeps sixteen hours a day on a messy thrown of blankets left to accumulate on the floor of a wardrobe closet. I mean, I don't get out like I used to, but I at least thought I was keeping up with the "cool" underground electronic and DIY acts by sifting through the ether of the internet for an hour or two per day. Yet, here comes Emamouse, like the emissary of a wasteland-savaging, road warrior tribe, zipping over the dunes to wreck my shit! Alright, I'm exaggerating a bit here. Emamouse is, by all measures, a creature of kindness. Somewhat shy and insular, the Tokyo producer's hallmark is an elasticity of structure that stretches far beyond what is typical of even the most adventurous electronic artists. As evidence for my claim, I could just point to the artist's most recent release カ​ミ​ナ​リ​マ​ッ​パ (Kaminari Mapper), an album which sees the artist tortiously fluctuating the speed of previously released tracks until they become as blurry and mystifying opaque as the dust-congested skies above the Mint 400. A record like that is obviously a bit of a stunt, a dare-devil feat to test the limits of one's work as well as the dedication of one's audience to it. I'm more interested in the oddities that can be salvaged from one of their more straightforward releases like FiRe. The seemingly innocuous seven-track EP begins abruptly, almost mid-groove, with the digital diamond-belted shatter-splash of compressed glass-fiber techno, a track they dub "9," and which winds down to create a base layer of combustible material from which the title track can draft off from a break-beat busted collage of electro-hip hop hammer sequences and comically catchy vocal loops that foretell what Afrika Bambaataa could accomplish with the right Schwarzenegger samples and a properly preserved Sega Game Gear speaker array. This is all well and good, but an unusual shift of priorities occurs once we reach the midway mark of the album and "Distorted Bayer song" has a chance to display its wares. Here Emamouse power-downs, disentangles and readjusts to realize the veneer of a latent petite baroque savant, prudently plucking out an obscure melody on a toy-like piano as if trying to decipher the vernacular of a dream-invading fey through the magic of sound, a weird firmament by which the artist then molds the catchy composite of hooks and verbose melodies that comprises the wishful thrumming ambiance of "ϒ ϒϒ ϒϒ." The two previous styles established on the record- the disjointed dance numbers and the heavy-hearted outsider pop- then collapse back into each other, like a double trust fall, merging their auras like colliding waterfalls on the remaining tracks, coalescing into the kinetic empyrean skylight that is "さようならフライパン," followed by "∞" a singular strand of hyper-sensational sheen and starlight etching tool employed to burn a message across the broadside of your soul. I've heard that Emamouse's music is for people who have very little interest in the outside world, and I can see why now. They offer an overwhelming kind of eclecticism, one that shocks you with its splintered coherence and comforts you with its varying and diverse affordances and concessions to indefatigable reverie. It's the kind of music that clears a sonic space that you can easily get lost in, and that you might find it difficult to separate yourself from. At least it feels that way for me. As it is, I'm not feeling so estranged by my shiftless, feline-approximate existence, not so long as I have FiRe to keep me cozy.   

Album Review: Big Hug - Don't Threaten Me With A Good Time

You can threaten me with a good time any day. I'm always tempted to play hooky. I rarely give in to such temptations, but they swirl around me endlessly- like sharks in a tidepool. Sometimes I wish one of those big gray suckers would get the nerve up to take a piece out of me and initiate a wacky misadventure to retrieve my missing forearm, liver, etc... Anything to give me an excuse to put some of the life I've built on pause while I grapple with a bloody exigency- I'm not necessarily asking to be sent on a recon mission to reclaim a purloined pound of flesh per se, but any interruption to add a slice of unusual topography to my current milieu would be welcome. In lieu of basking in a fire that uses splinters and fragments of my life as fuel, I can always bathe in the light of another's pissed-up glow. The easy-flowing confessions of Big Hug's Don't Threaten Me With A Good Time are more than a suitable source of such warmth and excitement in my opinion. They have a fast and very focused style that favors sharp chord changes that alternate between fickle, lapping riffs that trace the vicissitude of life and longing and break-through rushes of eager quicksilver which concentrate the wedge of each track like the point of a rail spike driving through sandstone. Big riffs, huge vocal hooks, and a genuine forward-yielding tilt that grasps for the highest of highs but settles for a stumble into a soft and abiding cache of even larger feels makes for an exceptional debut EP from this amply able trio of rockers.  

Album Review: All Young Girls Are Machine Guns - Don't Let The Music Fool You

 
I've heard of women referred to as battle-axes before, but machine guns? That's an escalation. That's like entering a Mustang into a soapbox derby or bringing sex in a box to a family potluck. Unnecessarily increasing the tension of the situation. Inappropriate too. Or at least it would be if the band All Young Girls Are Machine Guns were anything like their name implies. Thankfully they're not. Instead of seeking out hostilities, the group represents a full détente, a mixing of passionate exuberance and comfortably nested joy that also happens to sound so god-damned hip and swagicious in its retro-phase reminiscence that you'll almost forget that the '60s were... well, 60 years ago. These are lovers, not fighters, or at least good ol' wholesome entertainer types. The last thing they're sniffing about for is a scrape... unless that scrape opens up into a sanguine affair, in which case, they might already have a 5-stage plan of attack. The group's debut LP Don't Let The Music Fool You reaches our ears after more than a decade in the making and provides one of the more scintillating and consistently captivating revivals of nearly-departed and stubborn nostalgic gestures and styles of sound and ambiance this side of sockhops and dates to drive-in theaters. This might not appeal to everyone, but I've found it to be as cool and refreshing as a summer mai tai, or the feeling of letting the ocean roll in between your toes while you watch the sun tuck behind the horizon. The Omaha-based doo-wop and roots R'nB group is led by vocalist and "guitarist" Rebecca Lowry, who actually wrote most of these tracks on a ukulele- a fun fact for those of you who may need a reason to find this material even more charming and effervescent. I put the scare quotes around "guitar" because Rebecca's instrument of choice is a notable and fantastically thematic prop; shaped like an M-16, her instrumental doesn't load full-metal jackets, but does display a certain mettle, one oriented towards devotion and a preparedness to fight for the affection that one feels they deserve. If love is a battlefield, then you'd best pray for peace, because whatever you're packing, All Young Girls Are Machine Guns's has already got you... *drum roll* OUTGUNNED. 

Album Review: The Necks - Travel

It's a little fucked up to admit, but I very nearly didn't give The Necks the time of day. Knowing nothing about them, I saw their name stamped in the subject line of an email in my inbox and the message barely escaped my trash folder. And, yes, it is entirely due to their name. Many, many, many, in fact, nearly all,  "THE" bands are as derivative as ChatGPT generated clickbait. Everyone knows the kind of band I'm referring to. And the absolute worst kind of THE band are the kind who try to get clever by tieng their name into a pun or dropping the THE altogether and going by a past tense verb or exclamatory singular noun instead (eg Stuck, Yuck, Fu... you get the idea- they're still all THE bands, no one is fooled!). Sometimes I feel as though I could write a salient and culturally literate remark on any one of these groups inspired by THE Smiths, or THE Velvet Underground, or THE Pixies, or THE Fall while recovering from a car crash and in a medically induced coma. And the most anxiety-producing aspect of these types of groups is that EVERYONE listens to them, and EVERYONE expects you to have a nuanced opinion of them as a "music guy." It's a dreadful kind of cultural cornering. I feel like a fox chased into a hole in the ground by a pack of bloodhounds whenever I come across one of these groups in my timeline on Twitter or while reading over the lineups for this year's Festival circuit knowing that this will not be the last time I run into them. Knowing, and dreading, the fact that I'm going to have to have an opinion on the next crop of sound-alikes that's been bailed onto a stage in a cordoned-off street near me this summer, and if I'm not excited about the prospect of witnessing and/or discussing these machine-stamped gray-goop golems people are going to treat me like an out-of-touch leper with bad breath. I would give just about anything for The ACTUAL Necks to play one of these hipster hoedowns sponsored by Goose Island or this-or-that neighborhood's chamber of commerce happening near me this year. I'm even tempted to pay for their airfare and lodging myself to see it happen! What triggered me to click and sit with The Neck's latest record was when I realized they were neither a rock or pop band, but a jazz group. And not just any jazz group either, an exceptional one. After listening to their 21st(!) full-length LP Travel, I have to confess that I've found them to be an inexhaustible source of relief in the present hyper-sensational and simply oversaturated media and entertainment landscape. I come away from each meditative listening session feeling as though I'm returning from a spa, or just the right amount of yoga (ie an hour). As I understand, the trio have a reputation for being avant-garde, but to me, it's not their eccentricities or vanguard posturing that cause their sound to fortify my spirit- it's their utter presentness and substantive sense of anchoring. Travel shows the band to be grounded in the absolute, metaphysical phenomenon of being, a cosmic coincidence as profoundly strange in its actuality and magnificent mundanity as would be tears of pure white milk dripping from the pours of the moon, exuded through a channel starlight and dispensed into your palm like a delicate little pearl. Weighty and dextrously graded, the positively predicative emergence of their weaving forms would be akin to a miracle if they weren't so palpable and human. Listening to any track off of Travel is like running your fingers through the threads of a loom and being able to see, as through a divining aperture in your consciousness, the intricate blanket that the strands will knit together to become as well as the family that it will someday comfort and keep warm. Always progressing, becoming, and adapting, its muscles and skeleton maturing in a remarkable, deaccelerated advance towards a paradoxical composure, realized in silhouettes both unrecognizable and consummately conserved from a prior point of impact. A ball of light that becomes more solid the longer you peer into its center, its blinding glare growing more tolerable as its outlines are drawn out to a darker pronouncement of its border. It is like a circle in the sand, an etching to represent the sun, a real and imaginary artifact at the center of its own tiny universe of crab shells, bottle caps, and warn smooth stones, its exalted position and centrality to the ecosystem never dissolved or diminished despite its diminutive, earthen anatomy and dependence on the grace of the elements. Travel will take you places, even when you are standing still as a rocky bluff against the batter of the ocean. I'm glad I punched the ticket and took this ride. It's pushed me farther out into a setting of calm and ruminative contentment than I ever could have anticipated, especially coming from a band performing under a certain cursed determiner.*  

Navigation made easy with Norther Spy.

*In case it's not clear, my criticisms of THE bands is a schtick in this review. I've actually loved a great number of rock bands that have used this naming device... I just don't love a lot of them right now. 

Album Review: Connie Constance - Miss Power

Everyone needs a righteous woman in their life. I have one. I live with one. Maybe you don't. Maybe you're living a life devoid of the dignified electricity generated by a feminine presence. It's possible you've done something to deserve such a sad state of affairs. Or maybe it's just bad luck and the planets and other celestial bodies are rotating in a way that makes your aura semi-translucent to people of a certain gender's persuasion. If this is you, and I hope it ain't, but if it is, I hope you're not feeling too sorry for yourself, or else Connie Constance might drop from a helicopter and bullseye some tender part of your anatomy with a six-inch heel. The UK singer released her most recent LP Miss Power into the wilderness of the world, late last year, and she hasn't had time for sad sack shit since. It's a record that has left me with the impression that this particular artist is a genuinely upstanding individual... whose scorn I'd be wise to avoid. Judging from the jettisoning flashbang incendiary packed with rusty nails and whipped cream that is a track like "Kamikaze" even minor infractions could be costly to both my body and pride. But it's not like she's out to get anyone (even if there are some who just need to get got and humbled, for our sake, as well as theirs). Like most of us, she's looking for love in places she hopes are right, hoping her warmth will open blossoms of opportunity, swelling at the touch of perspiration and passion, feelings exemplified by the devotional and undeniably danceable "Til The World’s Awake." But in lieu of such affirmations as affection and amorous returns, or perhaps in tandem, it is clear that she also seeks a courageous centering of self that requires neither facade nor pretext to persevere, a positioning marked out in the central spotlight of the punchy pop-punk infused title-track, the sheer laser cut outlines of "Hurt You," and the slow spreading crimson mood of "Red Flag" which spills over the brim of a cascade, separating as it falls only to bend back towards its sibling stream, like the bowing legs of a dancer in midair, or the two halves of a ribbon under seal which binds a promise and gift made to one's self. Whether solitary or in the embrace of another, she manages to stand tall. Make no mistake, this Ms. is power personified. 

Pick it up from Play It Again Sam. 

Album Review: Sea of Cars - Withered Trees

Sea of Cars are a Chicago band that winds in and out of existence as the dictates of life permit. Withered Trees is their debut LP, an anthology of arduous observations, dissociative distortion sheathed riffs, lashing post-hardcore groove punch-outs, and vocals that range from skramz-skimmer shouts to drowsy dispatches from guarded nests of depression. The group isn't very active... until they are. They burst and wither like the blossoms of spring and the abscission release of trees. They bear fruit when the season is right and then collapse back into the earth without leaving so much as a headstone to mark their passing. It's a ritual manifestation that faultlessly echoes their style of emo, a melancholic daydream that coasts across sidewalks and interchanges of empty streets like a smoldering parade float, a cursed crucible of joy that survived a malicious act of arson and now roams urban corridors of its own accord, a sodden ashen scar left by some decimated yearning that has taken on an animate life of its own. A drifting omen of kurai (暗い) that is both stirred by an internal observance of wakefulness that pulls it forward by the skin of its nose and against the tide and invisible burden of inertia which simultaneously plunges it into the wallow and slum of despondency. The future divides from our current path like branches sprouting from the trunk of a tree, allowing us to gasp at the idyllic mists of passing clouds while grave dirt collects around our chucks. I plan to go for a walk later with Withered Trees in my ears. Schlepping up Montrose Avenue to pass the time while breathing in the vibrance of the day, pulling as much of it into my lungs as possible before nightfall cools my ambition. Before the shadows become so long that they blot out the sun and the dark reveals the glow and smoldering dread that wafts from my shoulders, the true source and motivation of my aimless stumble.  

Static Ritual Recordings had physicals.

Album Review: Cecyl Ruehlen - Levitation Elixir

In the descriptions that Cecyl Ruehlen offers for his music, even his ripplingly ripe and refreshing LP Levitation Elixir, you will find a lot of wild imagery. He's not someone who is afraid to excavate nonlinear, extra-territorial (and even extra-terrestrial?) plains of meaning for the proper verbiage to inscribe the indescribable. I feel a kinship with him in that respect. One recurring motif that bubbles to the top of the pool of metaphors at his disposal, and which sticks to my sense of recollection in particular, are the optics of ooze. I have never encountered a saxophonist (or any musician) who has invited such comparisons before. The symbolism is more than glib self-effacement and actually appears to be indicating something inescapable and essential about his approach and sound; that is its acute morphology. There is a quivering vibrancy to his performances, one that percolates with potent life-igniting propellents, and which lacks a discernable consistency of form. His aural utterances instead shift and mold to their surroundings, like limbic fluid lubricating the senses and promoting all manner of festive, hybridized, fornicative frolics through wide-open possibilities and exploded alternative thresholds. Eugene Thacker identifies ooze (or slime) as a substance that reveals to us the uncanny; a world beyond our full and conscious perception. While Eugene views such a substance as a symbol of the limits of life as we know it, a substance that creeps in from the void, the impression of something formless and imbued with an unquantifiable essence is unavoidable. Life itself is its own unconditional limit, the measure of its own extended being. In its most naked and bluntest form, it arose from the ooze of a primordial era. Before there was language, cars, TVs, bows & arrows, wheels, and even campfires, there was the cold, gooey spark of creation twinkling in a pond of snot. What caused that booger stew to eventually mutate into trees, dogs, dolphins, dinosaurs, and, eventually, the human race is still a miraculous paradox. That infinite malleability is still the rule-brick that shapes mortal and conscious existence in all its forms. Its unpredictability is its only constant. Music may be one of the only ways of channeling the ancient rhythm of this churning babble of change, and I think it's spectacular the way in which Cecyl is able to tap into the seeping significance and indeterminacy of determinate structures with his gliding, infinitely malleable musicality in an elevation of the sticky threads that entwine mind and metaphor to our origins in the cache of organic alluvium which gurgled in some fortuitous, diverting slough and offshoot from the river of time.