Album Review: Fend - Disc

Minneapolis's Fend rotates between concentric and interlocking revolutions of breezy pop rock and rough and ready jangle-core on their debut LP Disc. Released at the end of last summer, it is a refreshing blend of airy distortion and hooky sincerity that tenderly squeezes fresh Lemonheads through a Weezer-shaped copper spiral into a tempered boiler to be heated by the broody afterburn of Heatmiser until the citrusy mash foams and thickens into a palatable XTC-flavored balm to chase out the lonely chill those cold Minnesota nights. Their seemingly Slumberland Records adjacent sound bores through modern trends and netted nostalgic callbacks, aligning like a laser to separate the torpor and carve out a cozy, clubmoss-lined drey* in the current thicket of emo and DIY, where they can stake their claim and let you get acquainted with their attainable comradery and ruminative calm. Opener "1:59 AM" unfurls like a bittersweet lullaby that rouses you from the hold of a fitful slumber with rolling percussion, wind-tussled melodies, and soothing horn accompaniments that rub along you lengthwise like a caring press of a canine companion. The next track, "Ghost Ship," sets the tempo for most of the remainder of the album with grungy, fret-skating interludes, steady pocket-popping grooves, and vocals that navigate lyrical narratives like a biplane attempting to put out an engine fire with a series of aerial acrobatics performed with cautious courage. "Let It Eat" feels like floating through an unwater forest of beat curtains, whose glinting strands have been inverted like a wall of waving Bohemian baleen, and "Michigan Beer" is a petite and messy crescendo that reveals itself in clumps and gluey layers, as if it's being scrapped off like the label of a bottle of domestic brew that's been chilling in a creek bed. "Angel One Million" dazzles with dry, twinkly riffs as it unpacks the mystery of longing and desire with affable vulnerability, while the plodding joyous sulk of "Palm in Palm" pulls you in with the weight of its certainty and holds you prisoner in the bonds of its enigmatic mood. The album exhausts its final few rotations with the cherrywood-scented blush of the gently psilocybin "Crimini 2 (Window People)," an appropriately ponderous but determined folk note to wind down on. Disc is one spinner you won't find easy to discard once it's caught you in the glare of its deceptively reflective charm. 

*A drey is the word scientists use for a squirrel's nest. I've always wanted to use the word in a review in some capacity. And now I have. That's it. That's the note. 

Album Review: Tuff Sudz - Tough Suds

Man, I'd have to reach deep into the old memory hole to recall a Chicago band quite as youthfully impish, snake-armed, and hard-headedly catchy as Tuff Sudz on their debut LP (eponymously titled?) Tough Suds. Rooting around, I can scope Twin Peaks's Wild Onion out of the dirt plot of my personal recollection, although Twin Peaks never managed to be quite as amusingly petulant in their execution or as diverse in their aesthetic approaches or styles. For example, the floor-boards cracking stomp and tainted bubble-tar-clap of "No Time for Love" spins out in the cracked groove of a Dictators' b-side until it rolls over into a full-throttle Rick Nielsen fret-peeler while extolling a parabole of a guy who likes getting high more than he can be bothered to see his wife and kids- it's villainously deranged and dumbfounding in its conceits, but I'll be damned if it doesn't crease my lips with grim mirth between bouts of throwing my body into a lurching headbang. Tough Suds is uniform and consistent in this way, whirling though-in-cheek anthems that operate at the intellectual level of glass-chewing and fork-socket-mining that none-the-less sublate the gutter of their inspirations to achieve a sort of alienate honesty soaked in pitch-hued comic strife. In a thematically analogous form to Pissed Jeans and other self-aware hardcore acts of the '10s, the through line of their Phil Lynott ringed hooks and fog of leaky, Agent Orange-esque tainted-grooves, sneering Undertones odes, and servings of dust-huffing country-sludge is an unflappable observance of the grimy vanity that coats our obligations and obsessions, whether they be self-improvement, gainful employment, fealty to family or the snare of our vices, and greets them all as the express horizon where heaven bears down at hell and hell pushes back with smoldering girth and fury. The rough soak of their harlequin parcels of woe is a grinning acceptance life, not as we'd like it to be, but as it is, and finding a delirious glimmer of joy in its obstinant refusal to accommodate us and our inability to rise to its overbearing challenges... It's also just a good ass rock record. Simple as. 

Album Review: Heart to Gold - Free Help

Neil Young has penned many songs that have been etched into the bedrock of this country's collective memory. One in particular comes to mind at the moment. See if you can't guess it from the lyrics: I want to live / I want to give /  I've been a miner / For a Midwest punk band / It's these expressions / I never give / That keep me searching / For a Midwest punk band / In DIY they'll take their stand / For a Midwest punk band / Someday you'll understand / A Midwest punk band / With a heart to gold... Or something like that. Pretty prophetic, right? It's almost like he predicted the arrival of Minneapolis's Heart to Gold all the way back in the '60s. Good on him for keeping that crystal ball nice and polished. I hope the nurses who mind his assisted living situation give him an extra jello tonight. The official history of Heart to Gold (the band) goes back to a couple of demos in recorded and unleashed on the public in 2015, but unofficially, the moniker that the group goes by was hammered into existence years earlier when vocalist Grant Whiteoak and some friends attempted to intervene in an incident of neighborhood animal abuse, only to have the sobriquet pinned on them by the assailant as an insult (Ex. "Heart to F[omitted]ing gold!" the drunken dog-beater allegedly hollered at him). What is a better name for a punk band than something that someone tries to pin on you to break your spirit? In this vein, the band's latest album, Free Help, is brimming with a certain modest but heroic energy. Smelting together earnest lyricism with heartfelt guitar playing, this robust organ of compelling sound and fury pulses with catchy and instantly appreciable fervor. A melodic-hardcore kick-up tussles the nerves on opener "Surrender" where a savage encompassing skirt of pushy chords and blunder-busting beats encircles the listener while Whiteoak's reaching vocals sound like he's attempting to escape by flinging his shouts skyward in a bid to hook a passing cloud and reeling himself to up and away solely by the wind bearing out his throat. "Can't Feel Me" sifts through a crunchy huddle of gungy riffs, building its morale to rattle the walls of its enclosure until they crumble brick-by-brick. The passionate and pounding confrontation "Mostly" sounds like it was recorded while being half shouted in the bathroom mirror in full view of the band's own reflection, with the way it dresses down a full wardrobe of perceived inadequacies and meager stabs at self-realization, and the sliding breakout "Get It Back" feels like it's slamming through a maze of emotions by killdozering its way through the walls headfirst, staggering with hot zeal and purpose towards a central point of clarity. On Free Help, Heart to Gold spins the rough and brittle harvest of their breasts into a potent sonic surplus that is worth its weight in bullion. 

Like a ribbon around your finger, Memory Music.

Album Review: Cicada - Autumn

Earlier this year, if you live in the right parts of the continental US, you were confronted with the emergence of the 17-year cicada, also known as the periodical Cicada- a strange, bumbling and bulbous insect that lives an extended, decades-long adolescence underground, only to dig its way out of the safety of the soil only to sprout a pair of wings and stagger around hoping to get lucky. Most of them don't end up mating. Most get noshed by birds or fly into car windshields or unsuspecting bicyclists at high speeds. That is, when they're not clinging to the brick exterior of your apartment building, screaming their heads off like a crowd of tiny tornado sirens. While the Brooklyn-based electronic-folk duo shares a name with these pesky little paramours, that's thankfully where the similarities end. Their first outing, arriving presumably after fewer than 17 years of gestation, is titled Autumn, a time of year when there are notably few of their namesakes buzzing around, and so you are free to indulge in the bathing whispers and warm, inviting timbre of their dollhouse sized orchestrations in unobstructed tranquility. Combing somewhat traditional jazz and country instrumentation with dust-stirring and breathy electronics, Cicada approximates a species of folk music fostered by crinkled gnome-like creatures in the shadows of projector booths, stage lighting boxes, and pit orchestras- absorbing humanity's intricacies of artisan craft and performance and reproducing them as a naive but potent form of lingua franca. Delicate, unassuming, and supplely erudite in its chosen spectrum of memetic serenades, Cicada possesses an air of the familiar while encapsulating a brush with an elfin layer of the ephemeral. 

Interview: Angry Blackmen

I'm very pleased to present to you, dear readers/listeners/faithful kōhai, an interview with two very cool fellas. Despite the impression imposed by their name, Chicago hip-hop duo Quentin Branch & Brian Warren aka Angry Blackmen are super chill and down to Earth dudes who took time out of their crazy schedule (they were prepping for a European tour when we recorded) to chat me up and recap their big year and discuss what they hope to see happen in even bigger years to come. It's a wide-ranging conversation with plenty of insights into their career and music-making approach up to the release of their LP The Legend of ABM and beyond. You can check out the full interview below: 

Listen to The Legend of ABM, our on Deathbomb Arc, below: 

Album Review: Brownout - Fear Of A Brown Planet

Technically, these guys have a newer album out, but this is the one I'm most familiar with, and like the best, so this is the getting a write-up from me. Austin funk-freaks Brownout have tasked themselves with the outlandish objective of reinterpreting the classic bombastic beats of Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad on their Fat Beats debut, Fear of a Brown Planet. However, simply covering the source material that Enemy’s production crew sampled in a Latin funk style is only part of their objective. The real magic of this release is the way Brownout has taken the most iconic kernels of dense sonic gold from the Bomb Squad’s repertoire and expanded and reinterpreted them as if they were meant to be incorporated into a James Brown-styled soul revue. Each iconic track is rebuilt from the ground up to the point where it becomes a wholly original composition, even when standing next to the giants of its inspiration. “Louder Than a Bomb” is reimagined as a debonair, swaggering Peter Gunn-esque strut, “Fight the Power” becomes a slapping psych-funk cruiser accompanied by a roaring horn section, “Trackstar the DJ” is a scratch session with a cracking beat and Latin flavored brass section punctuated by various KRS-One vocal samples, “Welcome to the Terrordome” is realized as a kaleidoscopic, blood-sucking sandstorm, and “Prophets of Rage” feels ripped from the soundtrack of a gritty ‘70’s, smack-dealer-roundhouse-kicking crime-thriller. Someday, we might find ourselves living in a saner sphere, but in the meantime, we at least get to share this plane with the likes of Brownout and enjoy their vision of a better (sonic) world. 

If your beats aren't fat, than they ain't heavy (Fat Beats Records)

Album Review: jimrat by jimrat

Boston's jimrat is in a pretty exciting stage of their career. The presently constituted five-piece ensemble has pathogenically established itself in the chrysalis of a previous garage rock band of the same name (give or take a hyphen and or space) and has emerged a delicate fluttery creature whose pigments are barely perceptible within the human ocular range- perceptibly familiar and handsome, and yet comfortingly alien and thoroughly alienated. They seem content to release mostly singles at this stage, covering topics like falling for a fated romance, or alternatively, (possibly inevitably) blowing one's best odds at obtaining happiness due to clandestinely joining a shoegaze band (a subject matter choice that may be based on a true event; yet, unverified). However, jimrat do have some extended players as well... Well, just one actually: their self-titled EP from this past summer. The official tie-in screensaver/visualization/brain-smoothing-distraction associated with the album is fairly indicative of its mood and content, out-of-context images of lanky teens in long coats and fetish-inspired club gear burning out before the backdrop of a crumbling technopolis. The attractively grim-urban and aesthetic shadowplay plainly overlays LiquidTV visuals with something akin to Tsutomu Nihei's Blame! to arouse an ocular-spiritual hybrid of My Chemical Romance's Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and Serial Experiments Lain- a dreary, emanation of emotion and isolation tangled in the wilderness of cyber-enabled-interconnectedness and the listless weight and burden of youth. 

Distortion subtly crackles like the ashing of a stale cigarette while guitars claw at the fibers of the spirit, attempting to unravel them like a ball of yarn. Half-moaned vocals whisper in your ear like the ghosts of past regrets, dripping off the senses like oily honey, promising future rendezvous with remorse with a hint of gnashing catharsis. It's kind of a bummer... but in a good way. Sort of how a good hard cry can be followed by a sense of exhausted relief- you might still feel sad, but better in a way, and slightly more thankful to be alive- thankful to be feeling anything other than the well of pain that just burst inside of you. There is no telling if this sort of spirit-shaking shoegaze and weary-making emo will be the trajectory the jimrat stays on (last I heard, they've been collaborating with a hip-hop beat-smith on a new project), but it's a persuasive point for them to pivot from regardless of what they end of doing next. 

Who is (jimrat) Records?*

*I guess we'll find out won't we...

Album Review: Wet Nurse - So It Goes

Due to an internal rule for this blog (that I'm not going to explain*), I have to cover this release now or never. This is far from a gun-to-the-head type of situation- Orlando's Wet Nurses were a real treat back when they were still credentialed and active members of the Florida pop-punk scene, and before they fall into total obscurity, I'm going to give them at least one (possibly final) and well deserved shout out. Wet Nurse play a crisp and hooky style of garage-slab homesteading punk in the vein of The Ergs, Toys That Kill, and Sacramento's Groovie Ghoulies (probably the best direct comparison of the three). The three-piece released a series of spunky and skrappy demos and other lesser releases before hitting the ground running on an adrenaline spike of indigent fury on their first LP, 2012's Daily Whatever. Released three years later, So It Goes is Wet Nurses' second album and their first with Recess Records, and flushes a bit of the piss and vinegar of prior releases from their system and replaces it with an IV of caramel-enriched, sweetness and sentimentality. They've still got a sassy sort of bite to them on this release, but they're also much more relaxed sounding, with the primary source of their everpresent psychic-ulcerations resulting from the prickling pain of separation from loved ones and disturbances to hard-won domestic bliss rather than some allusion to a generalized anxiety disorder level anti-social orientation. So It Goes still has plenty of terse, crunchy guitars paired with humorous lyrics about failure and social iniquity to provide a suitable level of downer vibes to soundtrack an otherwise idyllic picnic lunch of PBR tall-boys and hand-rolled cigarettes, if that's what you're in the market for. This is music to help you feel better about all of life’s disappointments, from the minor to the utterly catastrophic, while celebrating all the seemingly insignificant triumphs earned along the way. What else is pop-punk good for, really? Check out the punchy and rollicking "Got You," the slamming sock-hop of "Girl Problem," the pensive riffage and love-sick balladry of "Belly Hurts," the cut-the-crap attitude, Mean Jeans-esc pogoing vocal delivery on "Rat Race," and lastly, the reflective tone and driving, spurred hooks of “The Spin," to name just a few highlights. If you haven't been admitted into the ward of this Orland band's fan club yet, then I hope this review has at least whet your appetite and nursed your curiosity for what they have to offer. 

HhheeeAHHHHey! Come out and play (Recess Records)

* What are you looking down here for, I already said I wasn't going to explain further. 

Album Review: MIDI Bunny - MIDI Bunny LP or, "Songs to Hurt Others​.​"

There is a lot to admire about MIDI Bunny's expansive and somewhat laboriously titled MIDI Bunny LP or, "Songs to Hurt Others​​," but one thing in particular that tickles my pickle is that MIDI Bunny's LP is not an album at all but is instead described as a novel- That's right, a novel. A novel with a jaunty piano riff intro accompanied by a disquisition on dying for your art, which concludes with a skit about how skits are cringe... This is some Max Bemis-level narrative twisting, my dude- an implosion of expectations and blenderized genre etiquette that drives the subjective into the fabric of the real at such a fine point that they invert at the point of impact. A book that your eyes can't read but have to feel instead, like the pen-scrawled indentations in an old composition notebook, or a fresh panoply of singing photographs that you hear with your heart before they congeal into coherent scenes. Looking at the album through a literary lens lends the sprawling 23-chapter work a tether of cogent lucidity as a sort of post-modern inversion of tropes separated into narrative beats by branching musically divergent styles that when taken together, form a cohesive romance with a winding meta-logical that buttresses the chronicle and keeps it on the rails. Songs to Hurt Others is sort of like a gorilla opera rendition of a yuri-subplot in a manga adaptation of Breakfast of Champions (only a version where everyone still fully dissociates, but never-the-less manages to find true love in the end)- it's both real and a tabloid misprint, true and truly unbelievable, a faithful retelling of events and an A&E daytime slot cash-in, the ending in a choose your own adventure where find your way out of the maze but a werewolf grabs you before you can finish turning the page- some chapters are like a big, streamer-popping parade of marching ska bands, other's are self-contained rock operas in the vein of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars with a sheen of Glass Beach' enigmatic panache, still others are mere glimpses of the glamorously drab and quotidian strained through a rainbow-stained hyperpop colander, pulping emo sparkle riffs through a tilting-whirl of jungle threshers to churn out juicy globs of bodacious, breakbeat burlesque. A sapphic bunny/cat romance to define an age of love, tragedy, and the invasion of the internet into the concrete and tangible world. Some epics you read, others to smash play on, this is one of the latter. 

Album Review: This Curse is Gift - A Throne of Ash

Digging into the black, sodden wilds to find hexes and dark enclaves of deep aura with Swedish blackened hardcore oath-keepers, This Gift is a Curse. Rising from the muck of mirthless quagmires and the heap of half-drowned and burnt cast-offs that suffuse and populate the modern world, TGC make hell a place on earth on their third LP, A Throne of Ash. While the band stakes their turf on the well-trodden, viscera-coated bridge that arches between second-wave black metal and crusty hardcore, there is an added depth of desperate searching anguish to the proceedings that help TGC stand out from their petulant peers, claiming the high ground for themselves atop a twisted hoshi and monument to turbulent spiritual angst. One such aspect that defines the group's eldrich embodiment of animus energy is the frankly chilling occult aesthetic they’ve adopted for their album art and stage personas. Surrounded and adorn with hoods, twisted crowns, and devilish-looking farm equipment, they present as a secret society to themselves- one in possession of knowledge that was better off buried or lost to time. I'm not one to doubt the depths of the void they slithered out of; their music is proof enough of their ascent from the pit of raw arcane rupture. The chaotic "Wolvking" is haunted by some of the more esoteric and bone-chilling sounds the band has to offer, while "Wormwood Star" seethes with dark radiance in a rippling pool of black oily rhythms, and the daring death-wish “In Your Black Halo” is pure, unspoiled noise-core. More straightforward hardcore can be found on the Converge-indebted “Gate Dweller” and the power-violence imbued "Thresholds," where you truly get the sense of something ancient and foul invading the plain of Euclidian reason. Plunge into the crimson pyre and arise a regent on A Throne of Ash, awaiting a new dark dawn when you may relinquish your crown to an even more formidable terror. 

*Clears throat for Donovan impression.* Must be the Season of [the] Mist, yeah!

Album Review: Vazum - Western Violence

I came across a comic the other day. Two panels. Very simple setup and punch line. A man is talking to his therapist and says, "I think my greatest fear is dying alone." The therapist, looking out the window of his office and seeing a mushroom cloud in the distance, replies, "Well, I have some good news..." It really sums up what living in America can feel like sometimes. The only silver lines we can expect to glean are those we glimpse on the threshold of unmitigated disaster. The title track from Detriot deathgaze duo Vazum's LP Western Violence is illustrative of this dreary state of reality. Through a veiling mirage of distortion billowing from the seams in a slithering, creaking, descending crawl of a chord progression, venomously sourced from guitarist Zach Pliska's own hands, singer Emily Sturm channels a viciously exacting personification of Romeo Void's Debora Iyall in recounting the fouling of human bodies and souls wrought by the opioid epidemic and its correlative with a rise in gun violence across the increasingly desolate expanses of the American West. There will be no retribution or restitution for the lives lost or the harm done for the sake of greed and cheap thrills depicted here- coordinated in cloud-kicking boardrooms and concluding in trash-glutted gutters and parking lots outside abandoned strip malls, dilapidated churches, and soon to be deserted schools- this long, tragic chapter of our nation's history will not have a poetic moment of justice- the people responsible made their paper, and the miserable details of the entailed crimes will be recorded in feeble ledgers and left to sit on back room shelves, molding until they succumb to the ravishes of moths and the inertia of indifference. The bleakness of the bare facts of this life makes the techno-dystopian fantasies of an AI-tailored tyranny depicted on tracks like the shadow-cast and subduedly operatic "Breach" refreshing in a feat of twisted irony, as there is yet a sense of resistance and defiance in Zach and Emily's bitter and resolute vocal deliveries as they outline a fictional web of control. If the hypothetical ever concretizes where Grok accelerates into the dispatcher of 10s of thousands of T-800-styled killer androids, there will be a clear focal point to which one may target their energy and fury in order to rest control back from a singular and centralized cybernetic dictatorship and restore a priorly displaced state of liberty, presumably enjoyed by humanity. In our present reality though, the evils we suffer seem to flow inherently out of systems and dynamics that operate entirely as intended, and as far back as we can recall... it's never been any other way. It is clear that the plain order of things privileges violence against us, and we are merely objects cursed to bear witness to a pertinacious ontological state upon which we are powerless to force an effective change. What is there to hold on to in this perverse demiurgic domain? Perhaps the answer is close at hand? We have each other, after all. Even in the well of hell's gullet, there is still the solace of company and we do not suffer alone. As indicated by Vazum's sweeping, sanguine-hued and honey-textured, Cocteau-coktail "Stellium," there is always someone with you in the dark- they may be as bloody, bruised and broken, but as long as their pulse runs quick, they will be there. There is a certain solidarity that the recognition of the other engenders. A sympathetic recognition of ourselves in the reflection of a shared humanity- a grain of love in a fallow field- and a glimmer of salvation cutting through a curtain of acid rain- a sunny day that drys the wet terror of an evening past- You see me, and I see you, and together we live in the light cast down into the shadows- splinters that form the silver lining of a rising mushroom cloud.

Album Review: Battle of Santiago - Queen & Judgement

Queen & Judgement. Not Queen of Judgment, but more of a "Yes, and..." type of situation concerning mythic forces, as in more is more in the cornucopia of the cosmos. They arrive together as each other's steed and hussar- Oya, the Yorùbá Orisha manifestation of winds and cyclones, appearing under the mantel of Queen, and the Sky Father, Obatala, creator of the human form, riding in under the banner of Judgment. Ostentatious, sure, but we all meet our makers eventually, and I could think of more ominous conditions to do so than through an album from Toronto's Battle of Santiago. I found their 2017 LP La Migra* pretty compelling, and their 2020 release is every bit of a revelation. Battle of Santiago plays a super fly and stellar seeking mix of Latin American dance music with heavy Afro-beat influences and an anxious strain of post-rock interlaced throughout. On Queen & Judgement, the band tilts into the Afro-folk parts of their sound in an even more unapologetic way, allowing them to spin up and flourish in a maelstrom of jubilance, exploding in a catharsis of hurricane-like proportions. According to the band, their music is written to "invite everyone to dance, have fun and forget about the problems of life..." and I think this is a worthy sentiment even when things seem at their bleakest. There is only so much you can do about the problems of the world, and once you've done your part, all you can do is take solace in each other's company and permit fate to weave its course with the Queen at its back and Judgment as its guide. 

Made with (only the finest) Pencil Crayons

*The title is an informal name for "Immigration and Customs Enforcement," a reference to the terror experienced by displaced Latin American people in the current political climate. 

Album Review: The Marmozets - Knowing What You Know Now

"I can see a major system error in you / You think one plus seven, seven, seven makes two / If your story ever, ever, ever came true / Can you keep it together, ah?" That's the starting line of The Marmozets's track "Major System Error." It's such a juicy and viciously dramatic string of phrases, all of which fill me with an explosive nemesistic zeal- so much so that I'm willing to bend one of the many unwritten rules of this blog in order to cover it.* We've all encountered someone in our lives, some short-circuiting creep who needed to have a few inches shaved off of their pride, and lines like these, delivered with the passion and courage, really do the work of making one's righteous accusations stick while leaning in close enough to flip the kill switch on the bastard. It's a prickly species of lyricism that is nearly extinct in 2024 (at least in rock music), one that is equally directed at facilitating a parable of bad dealing with bad actors, defending one's self from ego-depending manipulation, and empowering the listener to dance in a manner of free-spirited flight that only their body and spirit truthfully comprehend. About 10 years ago, you could still find a dozen bands on the radio that could pen a lyric that strips the copper-coated nerves from a malfunctioning narcissist over a floor-pounding groove in about as much time as it takes to lay down 2/5ths of a chorus, but it's seemingly a lost art now, taken over by cloistered indie and pure pop artists with more or less uneven and middling results. Even when their strengths were more widely shared though, Marmozets still stood out from the troop of their peers, especially on their second LP, 2018's Knowing What You Know Now, on which the jittery head-rush "Major System Error" is the fourth, nail-through-heart driving, track. In their day, the British pop-punk and garage band cultivated a genuinely precocious train of roller-coaster chord progressions, air-tight rhythms, down-tuned guitars, polished production quality, and gripping vocal performances. They first broke onto the scene when the majority of their members were barely 18 back in 2007 and gained the attention of the British music press through their chaotic live shows and vicious stage presence. On Knowing What You Know Now, The Marmozets take the raw material of their 2014 debut Weird and Wonderful and use it to sculpt something sleeker, angrier, and deadlier. These are rock anthems with fangs and a deathwish, with enough hooks and natural charism to charm the pants of the devil himself. Opener "Play" breaks in with a teeth-rattling beat and layers of danceable raucous riffs, “Habit” has gluey guitar hooks and a chorus that is pandemic levels of catchy, “Meant to Be" combines juicy vocal harmonies with vengeance-seeking guitars, and “Lost in Translation” swings and stomps like the Bride of Frankenstein on a bender. Knowing what we know now about how sterile and desiccated mainstream and radio rock has become, would it be too much to ask The Marmozets to come swing back into action? It might be me going out on a limb, but I'm going to say that it's not. 

Roadrunner Records... they might not be Acme, but they still pack a BANG. 

*I usually avoid covering releases on major labels... and Roadrunner is definitely one of those. I honestly can't keep track of which major they're even a subsidiary of now, nor do I truly care... 

Album Review: Aggressive Perfector - Havoc At The Midnight Hour

Did you know there is a Dario Argento-directed film with a heavy metal soundtrack? It seems hard to believe that anything could improve upon the aesthetic perfection that his typical repertoire of sonic accompaniments achieve in cultivating a dense atmosphere of creeping danse macabre... and such skepticism is warranted because the 1985 film Phenomena (released with the title Creepers in the US) starring Jennifer Connelly, about an American teenager who uses her psychic powers to spoil the splatter-streak of a serial killer who is menacing a Swiss boarding school, doesn't actually benefit in any way from having Iron Maiden and Motorhead on its playlist- even if such coteries would seem like a compatible to the average horror fan and coke-blasted studio executive alike. Argento soundtracks are Goblin's turf, after all, and it's audacious to dethrone the Cherry Five of gore-mountain when they have the home crypt advantage- not to say that it couldn't have happened, though. Had Aggressive Perfector been stalking around three decades earlier, they might have been a suitable substitute for the job (and maybe if they could catch a jetstream through a wound in the fabric of space-time, they still could be). Despite their name paying a spiritual tithe to the thrashing blood-god Slayer, Aggressive Perfector are much better compared to groups like Venom or Merciful Fate, as the Manchester trio rarely sacrifice their penchant for camp and grimy theatrics for the sake of impressing the listener with their speed and ferocity on their debut LP Havoc At The Midnight Hour- not to say that they don't sound threatening, just their promises of peril are balanced with seedy sense of mirth. Aggressive Perfector is playing fast and loud to the cheap seats, tossing rotten meat to blighted swine, and drawing vitality and rich motivation from the chaos they reap in the surrounding squalor. They are a dragoon of sewer-zombie biker-bards, spreading the disease of perverse epicurean horror like a pox of oozing scuppers dotting the hull of listing ghostship. Gruesome giallo guardsman, eliciting a chuckle before replacing most of your teeth with their fist. Aggressive Perfector is the last thing you'd hear on a Saturday night before your blind date turns into a werewolf and eats you alive at the stroke of the midnight hour. 

Coalesce in decay, Dying Victims Productions.

Album Review: Bloodbox - Post Human Disorder

In keeping up with the conversation around cybergrind bands groups like Blind Equation, Zombieshark!, and others, coming across a monstrosity like Bloodbox is analogous to reeling in a "doomsday fish" somewhere in the South Pacific. At first, you're like, is this a cryptid? Is this a sign that the end is nigh? Should I call a priest? Then your frontal cortex kicks in and you realize that you've just hooked a rotted oarfish. It feels like a bit of a letdown until you realize just how weird and uncanny this lanky scallywag of the deep is in its own right. As for Bloodbox... same same in a parallel parade of introspections. Hearing their 2022 Post Human Disorder is an encounter with a creature that seems out of place in the modern world of reason and scientific explanation, but upon closer examination, it reveals itself to be categorizable, if still bizarre. The djenty guitar parts jut out with force like shards from a shattered windshield cutting through the air around your face, and the pained lab-animal-like cries that claw their way over tranquil turquoise-tinted synth melodies are drawn out like a wedge of sandpaper scraped across the ires, combined with other sinister elements, it all is giving off some seriously malevolent shades of violence, heightened by occasional breaks of bone-cracking, beat chiropractics and super-sub-terranean bass bellows that leave one entranced to groove amongst the waves of goreletting. Even though the bombardments of blastbeats, errant electronics, and frantic wreckage of chords is initially confusing and disorienting, a thread of familiarity does eventually emerge- for the better I would say. The more I make sense of what I hear, the more apparent it is that Post Human Disorder emerges as the offspring of warehouse-filling, late-last-century EDM and a wiggly window in the '00s when grindcore and d-beat seemed like constantly scrapping, conjoined twins. You could call it digital hardcore, or the more common parlance now is cybergrind (note, the band refers to themselves as breakbeat-grindcore), but Bloodbox are siphoning inspiration from a very different donor pool and are tuning in with severed ears to a distinctly chimeric chorus of muses from the metalcore and emo that preoccupies today's youths. Bloodbox, instead of synching compatible trends from the past 30 years of extreme music, are contemporaries of many of the artists that inspired today's cohort of techno-terrorizers*, meaning that they are not recycling the past so much as finding points of compromise between genres that did not co-exist happily in decades prior and forcing an accord within their living memory of desperate scenes through the tyrannical will of their maligned genius. In other words, Bloodbox isn't wading into the current flow of interpretation and simulation; they're possessed of a mutant strain of a gene that evolved into its own terrible taxonomic category long before such anomalies were considered theoretically possible by the tastemakers and take-droppers of yore. They are the OG digital debasers. 

What the world needs now is another folk singer like I need a Headwound (Recordingz).

*Bloodbox formed in 2001 and released their first album a year later. To be fair, said album (Structure Against Self) is more of a noisecore outing, but it lays the blueprint that Post Human Disorder builds on and it is very clear that they are still (spiritually at least) the same band despite the decades that have passed between the releases.  

Interview: SkyJelly

I had a delightful encounter of the 5th kind with an enigmatic and musically inclined entity going by the codename SkyJelly Jones. SkyJelly is the ring lead of the (what else) SkyJelly, a merry band of galactic bards who made landfall earlier this year with their album Spirit Guide with the aid and abatement of I Heart Noise Records, delivering a mix of psychedelic desert rock and North African folk that is (literally) out of this world! You can check out my conversation with SkyJelly Jones below: 

Listen to Spirit Guide here: 

Album Review: Riley! - Keep Your Cool

There is a bar and venue here in Chicago that used to have a feline employee named Radley. Radley sadly passed a few years back after a storied career of mousing, bouncing, coaster-shuffleboard-playing, and witnessing enough amazing live music to fill nine lives and then some. I'm pretty partial to pretty kitties in mascot roles (I mean, Jesus, look at the banner of this blog!), and it was the opportunity to potentially meet Radley that first tempted me to attend a show at said fabled venue. Alas, Radley and I never crossed paths (not in this life at least- although I did have a dream about him once...), but that hasn't deterred me from continuing to look into just about anything music-related that has a fuzzy, domesticated killing machine* as its public face- which (confession time!) is the reason I picked up Riley!'s Keep Your Cool- it's truly just a bonus that it came out on Counter Intuitive (who I like a lot) and that the band plays a super impassioned brand of 5th wave emo (something I'm also into). What gets me from the get-go and keeps me in this album's sway through its entire runtime is just how well the band manages to sell the drama that propels these songs- regardless of how mundane or trivial the slight, squabble, or snafu, I unquestionably accept that vocalist Ryan Bluhmm is going to shambles over it. Their dynamic and uncompromising performance can overwhelm you suddenly with a flash flood of emotions, catching you off guard with its sweetness before tackling and tossing you aloft in a raw-nerve twisting typhoon of piss and vinegar. It's a performance that very much matches the subject matter of these songs- we've all felt ourselves losing our cool a bit when a friend or significant other won't explain why they're mad at us, or someone disrespects you out of the blue and treats you like a disposable known quantity, but it can also be enough just have a shitty boss you dread seeing every day- more often than not, life feels tailor-made to make each and every one of us lose our god damn marbles, and it's therefore vital to have consolatory performances, like the ones on Keep Your Cool, to vindicate our ire while reassuring us that processing our thoughts and emotions in a manner that dissuads us from social self-immolation (as compelling as it might seem in the moment) is likely the best course of action. Beyond Ryan's vocal contributions and gold-standard lines like "brace yourself for the impact / close your eyes and let it go black / left the light on, thought you'd come back / eat your heart out, are you full yet!," the group has mastered a taut and rhythmic acuity for tension and release- mesmerizing the listener with sparkly guitars, balanced-but-frothy bass-line, and galloping, kick-skip drum patterns, all of which combine to contribute to the feeling that you're being pushed over the edge of a cliff by a bulldozer along with a smattering of debris from your so-called-life which you have to jerry together to construct a makeshift parachute before you Wile E Coyote all over the pavement- every near escape and ankle splintering landing is imminently met by yet another big wave or riffs and cresting hooks which drop over you like a hungry vulture and sweep you away again almost against your will. A consent calamity that still somehow manages to feel convivial. Life demands that we maintain a certain level of composure to be considered for a place amongst polite society, but when a record like Keep Your Cool is on, cracking the seal on your pent-up catharsis is not just expected; it's unavoidable. 

It actually makes perfect sense, Counter Intuitive Records.

* It's estimated that house cats kill 1.3–4 billion birds each year in the U.S... which, let's be real, is probably a way higher number than you would have told me had I asked you to simply guess at their annual body count.