Album Review: The WAEVE - The WAEVE

Describing The Waeve's sound in an exaggerated and effusive style would feel very appropriate.* Inspired by English folk melodies and the wide rolling weft of their native isle's countryside, Graham Coxon and Rose Elinor Dougall transpose a mossy draft of emotions and an acquired affinity for subtle baroque opulence into a tapered longitudinal sweep, which settles like a knife wound into a specific cognitive bailey, sinking deep into the fabric of rising sentiments as if it were a moat awaiting a siege. Though grounded in the unsightly sap and living flesh of hard-wrangled epiphanies, the actual experience of hearing the album is like an encounter with something distinctly unnerving in its ephemeral weight- like walking step-in-step, in a mirrored pace with your own shade on the opposing bank of a river- a harbinger you wish to flee as much for the doom it presages as the fact that such an unappealing omen shares your face and your unfortunate habit of appearing where it's not wanted. This kind of intimate terror of course permits candid access to a reflective dialectic of gracious ambiance and boney protuberances, a cross-section which is grimly evident from the surface tension cultivated by the lushness of the duo's melodies, the quivering suspense of their chord progressions, and the plangent, brassy groan of Graham's saxaphone, but which becomes all the more gruesomely obvious through the keeling allure of their lyrics- a constilation of entryways permitting you to sink your fingers between the ribs of a warm, bleeding animal to feel its life pulsing within a pinch of your fingertips- holding its fate in your hands as a darkening sense of finitude closes in like a thundercloud. Travel with The Wave over the hills and gates of blind perception as the wind lifts the wings of a wary crow over the high precipitous of a rocky shore, rising ever higher only to plunge like a lost tooth into the jagged overturn of the sea where the sand and salt will polish you into a crocked golden coin to be washed up on shore to await your chance to deposit the cursed heaviness of unsettled years onto the next wearied traveler.  

Know no limits with Transgressive Records. 

*While I'm an admittedly creative writer, what I actually feel compelled to do for this release is write in the old NME parlance, but as an American, I'm afraid I lack the right mix of cultural experiences and surliness to pull it off. 

Album Review: Ismatic Guru - III

 

The anatomy of a pair of peeling, toxin-sweating brainstems which have sprouted from cracks in the concrete trow paths of that slither pit called New York City have once again exposed themselves to rot before the gaze of god's naked twitching eye through the third installment of John Toohill and Bran Schlia's cave hippie cacophony Ismatic Guru, an EP unassumingly titled III. This crooked crow, acid felching, groovy goblin, tape-worm-tangoing throng only has 5 minutes of coherence to spare for your ears before regressing into a puddle of its own eggy sick. However, that 20th of an hour is more than enough time to pitchpole your membrane and leave you feeling like you just licked a line of bad dope off a day glow frog. Chewy, razor-wire chords floss between spooky synths, hacksaw-toothed vocal chucks, and night-stalking red-eyed bassline- a gregarious bundle of noise that bumbles through an ambiance as damp and frantically gloomy as a midnight birthday party for a vampire experiencing a mid-unlife crisis. It feels about as prickly as a briefly lucid Wild Man Fischer set with a hit of This Heat on his tongue, or a restored Jesus Lizard demo produced by Captain Beefheart thought lost in a fire, or some such similar auditory derangement that Frank Zappa might have signed so that he could unleash its disheveled aura onto a hapless and psychically unguarded world. In short, this freak machine can truck; be careful that it doesn't run you down. 

Sink or float, it's your choice. Same when it comes to Swimming Faith or Steak and Cake. 

Album Review: GENDEMA - sassy things

Albums like sassy things from Argentinian producer GENDEMA are the kind of work that can exist in the world without comment and still be adequately appreciated for what they are- an exceptionally chill drum 'and bass cassette with an understated penchant for ambient jazz. Electronic music producers are in their element on the internet, a place where they find themselves easily elevated within the algorithmic flow of streaming services to be welcomed by a receptive, plugged-in audience. People looking for the kind of vibe that GENDEMA is offering are only a click away from a copacetic gallery of vividly patterned ambiance- a breathable space in a digital refuge that is both immediate and near, and yet capable of transporting your very, very far away. I don't have to say anything about the reservedly graceful timbre of the album's clatter-clap beats, or its placatingly smokey, murmuring bass, or the transfixing brightness of its caressing synth melodies for someone to know sassy things is the kind of jam that will make their night. The cover art will do that for me! All you need is a glance at the splintered Tumblr window framing and the pfp of a Billie Eilish-phenotype chewing on a J to know where you're headed. Like any good piece of cover art, it's both advertisement and a preview of the album's contents- a comfortably dizzy, dissociative haze of soothing sensation transmitted through a quiet tumble of beats and bustling melodies ready to pad out the cognitive dressing of a productive evening or an empty hour of scrolling where you can be flush with the satisfaction of its own free-floating existence. I don't have to say anything about sassy things for it to achieve its ends, but when something is so perfect in its only little way, there is a tremendous amount of satisfaction that can be gleaned from speaking up to say so. 

Want more chill beat tapes? No Problema! 

Album Review: Nowaah The Flood And Giallo Point - Right Over Left 2 (Square Business)

I feel weirdly fated to review this album by Nowaah The Flood...* even if it's a strange place to start in the artist's catalog. Right Over Left 2 (Square Business) is a sequel to a 2021 project that also formed as a collaboration with British producer Giallo Point. For those not in the know, "Right Over Left" means to remain steadfast, resolute even, to not give up your space (your square), and to stand on your business. The album is as dirty and durable as its forebearer while justifying a return to well-trodden turf by reaching even farther back in time with its beats to evoke a certain ragtime aspect that feels haunted by its own alienated emergence- a splintered disclosure of gnarled ancestry and sound that clobbers and smashes the bright illuminations of funk and psyche-soul which gifted a tarnished luster to Right Over Left 1, before sweeping up the shards and grinding them into a sinister sepiatone glaze which Nowaah drools and spits like a cobra thawing out of a deep artic freeze, now rising hungry and ready to deal out just deserts. Nowaah's flow is deceptively forceful in its swift dispatch- taking cues from '90s mainstays like Ghostface and Nas; he tends to toss off rhymes like sideswiping blows, catching you off guard with how much dust he can beat out of the scenery before the whole joint feels ready to come crashing down around your ears. More enticing than his style or its accompaniments is Nowaah's general posturing, a knowingly cultivated crosssection of provocation and sermon deployed with a fixed aim as if attempting to conjure a lost spirit with his words or claw to the surface the seeds of some shrowded wisdom once erroneously abandoned. Holding ground for these bluntly eloquent excavations is undoubtedly in line with the subject matter prompted by the album's title. It leads one to ponder whether he's achieved all that he set out to here or if he will soon embark on yet a third expedition of aural archeology in due time. 

* I came across this album last month just as I was finishing The Autobiography of Malcolm X. When I looked into Nowaah, I learned that he is a Five Percenter, whose leader left the Temple Number Seven in Harlem, the temple where Malcolm X preached, to begin his own Muslim sect. Knowing these facts makes the titles of Nowaah's songs and a good deal of his lyrics much more intelligible to me than they otherwise would. It's an enlightening bit of serendipity that I felt like sharing, even if it might not mean much to anyone else.