Album Review: Tough Cuffs - All Dogs Go to Heaven

It's hard being in a band. Finding motivation and inspiration, plus coordinating with and around the schedules of your bandmates to practice and put yourself out there for gigs- it's one Sisyphean hill after another. Risking embarrassment and financial ruin in the hopes that some half dozen hands will clap in a poorly lit, lousy dive in flyover country and then maybe buy a shirt after you finish your 2 o'clock set*- who in their right mind would sign up for that? It's a rough and rocky path that puts significant restraints on your time, finances, and life in general... yet against their better judgment, thousands of people make it work every day. People who commit themselves to this thankless, inadvisable struggle have my admiration (hence, this blog), especially if they can manage to push against the mounting inertia of their situation to steadily improve their sound. Speaking of which (and to the point), Pittsburgh hardcore group Tough Cuffs has made a significant leap with their EP All Dogs Go to Heaven. Their previous release, Bliss Point, showed a lot of potential, incorporating Cure-esque, moody post-punk hooks and a purposeful sense of rhythm to shroud their blasting, steel-toughed, gut-rock plunge in a cloud of compelling nightmares. On their latest EP, the midnight-tinted melodic potential encapsulated in their early work is now thoroughly threaded through the skin of each track, armoring their approach in a coherent mesh of kevlar-grade canorousness that punches through the resistance of the listener's apathy like a hollow point, clearing a gap for reflections on life's motivation, mere survival, and troubled notions of masculinity to pour in and steep like a bubbling jacuzzi of hurt. The record also sees the group going in a much harder direction overall, taking thrash ques from meat-packing NYC hardcore crashers and stagger-stomping, army-booted, youth crew-crushers- concessions to their brutal inner demons, which dog-pile up to reach an alter of Collective Soul scraped and bathed Kyuss, a plateau of bone-rattling angst, simply titled "Feel." All pooches might make it to paradise, but wherever Tough Cuffs are headed I'm not sure any God-fearing mutt would dare to follow. 

* am if you're luck, pm if you're not. 

Interview: Discoholic

Many say that music is like a drug, but few take such a comparison as seriously as the Discholic- a consciously goofy and chaotic force for good in the vast landscape of electronic music on the internet, he is a one-man disco revival that the world never asked for, but so clearly needs. Also, he has a disco ball for a head... which is a good look, honestly. In my conversation with disco-adorned incognito he gives me an overview of his career and insights into the world of discoholic anonymous, while I get to ask him specific oddball questions like, how much does your head weigh, and how/why did you interview the top dog from Doom Trip Records for your comedy stream? I also learned during the course of this interview that it is possible to drive entirely blind... as long as you do it very slowly. Life lessons, am I right? Throw on your best polyester, strap on a pair of platforms, pour yourself a drink and check out our conversation below: 

Check out Discoholic's latest EP Welcome to Discopolis!

Album Review: Andy Loebs - Hyperlink Anamorphosis

This may sound odd coming from someone who is in the process of writing a review of an "experimental" music artist's album, but I really adore melody. It's one of the aspects of music that I cherish the most, even when it comes to avant-garde works. This confession may seem especially odd when it comes to the praise I'm about to bestow on Philadelphia sound assembler Andy Loebs and their most recent LP Hyperlink Anamorphosis. Odd, because it's definitely not their most cleanly flowing or melodic effort to date. While previous LPs like Focus Shape Ascend and Flexuous Vertex emphasized clearly defined, although consistently porous, patterns that take root and extend their tendrils before blossoming into a fresh cache of luxurious fixations, Hyperlink Anamorphosis is much more playful and unrestrained in presentments, even if the approach to recording the album was far more concentrated and pragmatic. In an attempt to echo the acknowledged limitations of a live performance while affording its potential for spontaneity, Andy centered their efforts for this release on prospects offered by the Korg Electribe 2's bombastic stock sounds and presets, slicing and slotting these cockamamie curios through the layers of other sound collages to animate a dialectical skirmish between what could be a sentient Nokia flip-phone and an antagonistic soundboard operator at a nationally-broadcast NBA game- a sputterphonic plunder of decaying technology, longing to gain ascendance in new digital flesh, clawing it's way to heaven so that's its mangled anatomy may assume a dazzling sublimity when viewed from the chaos out of which it had managed to scale. The release is a bit of a Frankenstein for sure, but one with a vein of groovy gold circulating through its abnormal physiognomy, discernable to those who are willing to embrace the twists and tangents of its cross-stitched topography, enriching their senses with novel degrees of incursion within crystalline dimensions. 

Stay current with JOLT Music.

Album Review: Ostseetraum - Wie ein übers​ä​uerter See

Berlin's Ostseetraum are full of surprises. I was under the impression that they had an established sound that they were on their way to perfecting, habilitating the frantic and semi-auto, replicant rhythmatics of their self-titled cassette to a kind of robo-rockabilly and cyberpunk scrap-hauling drape-rock for their Mondmenschen EP. However, the 11-track Wie ein übers​ä​uerter See manages to build on both these past releases without being anticipated by them and, therefore, feels like its own divergent, radical tangent. What remains consistent about Ostseetraum is their minimalist, desaturated compositions and the calculatedly indifferent, sanitized affect of the vocal delivery, but this latest release sees the addition of ballast-shifting baselines that anchor established aspects of their aesthetics in a manner that helps to flesh them out, not only in terms of their of the musculature of these track's melodies but the environments in which they inhabit as well. A track like "Leicht Verpackt" not only resembles a ritual out of time but actually feels like it's expanding through space as well, twisting the beads of a curtained doorway as it pulsates and manifests in a basement hooka lounge, increasing in mass until it punches through the gravity of perception into the subterranean depth of deeper comprehension. You can really sense the band leaning into the psychedelic potential in their sound when they dip their toes in some especially dank reverb on the Iron Butterflytethered, psychotropic-sink "Schlucken," while opener "Knallhart" embodies the twilight of an ill-fated magic mystery tour through a burning Korg warehouse. There is also a notable influence of early, experimental disco present on this release, whose spacy, funky overdrive can be experienced through the chime and charm cosmic corridor of "Macht" as well as the electric light-opera super-burnout "Wut." Ostseetraum has demonstrated again that there is no center to their sound, only an insatiable hunger to metabolize sounds and styles and recast an increasingly wide selection of aesthetics in their own galvanized image. 

Live fluidly with Adagio830 and Mangel.

Interview: Parent Teacher

Many of us, when we were young, lived in mortal terror of our parents colluding with our teachers to conspire against us and express how disappointed they were in us in novel and aggravating ways. Most of us have survived and moved on, but Parent Teacher still lives with the wounds he suffered as a youngin and bears them to the world through his music. Would you believe that he was well behaved during my conversation with him? Well, he was. And if you don't believe me, you can listen to our conversation for yourself below: 

Parent Teacher's latest album Etheral Collapse is out on Wilbur & Moore Records and Lonely Ghost Records, check it out the record below:

Album Review: Kill Gosling - Waster

You know, powerpop bands are the backbone of underground music, and I won't hear any backtalk on the subject. Sure, it's easier and requires fewer text and email threads to coordinate the downloading of a pirated version of Ableton and start messing around with crunchy bits of Simpson's dialog to see if you can squeeze a tune out of a pitching up daisy-chain of 'D'oh!'s, but it's unlikely to have the same swelling charge (or be as fun to perform with your friends) as a song you wrote from scratch and then hammered out on guitar with enough distortion to provoke a noise complaint three blocks over. The swiftest and shortest jump from a deviant thought that plagues the mind, like a worm embedded in the frontal lobes of a floundering presidential hopeful, to a pop song with strong-arming hooking is still the route that transmogrified Declan Patrick MacManus into a household Costello. Speaking of folks converting angst to audacious audibles, have you heard of Kill Gosling? The Ohio group's third EP, Waster, is something like a $10k pearl nestled in the belly of a neon-dyed fanny pack- loud, bright, boastful, and you can take it anywhere, and it will still be worth its weight in gold! On their latest release, the group takes a little nibble out of every notable powerpop permutation and juices it through the pipes of 5th wave emo and DIY to produce a durably chewy union of Blue Album-esque melodic tendencies and gritty, catchy churn-ups and consciously contained chaos a la Rozwell Kids (or some such similar Arrogant Sons of Bitches and/or the singular form of the same). A lot of what the group seems to focus on with this record (lyrically at least) is processing trauma and hardship, however, there is a romantic optimism to their performances that delivers an earnest and mighty upswing to their overall tilt and tenor that plausibly casts their sound as the equivalent of a Gilman Street band who could slay at a prom. If you haven't checked out Waster yet, then you're just squandering a good time. 

You're not wasting your time, so long as you're trying (We're Trying Records).

Album Review: Flowertown - Tourist Language

If ever there was an album that sounded like a slide reel of vaguely familiar, faded portraits of people you used to know at places where they used to be found, it would be Tourist Language by Flowertown. The second LP (if you don't count their 2020 self-titled compilation) from the SanFan duo arrives like a whisper in a dream, or a dusty old 45 that you can only hear when you close your eyes. It's like a minor storm cloud on the ceiling that keeps following you around the house, threatening a 60% probability of dosing you with a downpour of sober epiphanies. Karina Gill and Michael Ramos's interchanging, and often intertwining harmonies, present a hauntingly blissful convergence point between the Velvet's and Nico's mid-century collaborations for modish, melancholy teens and the garage-raiding, sonic cat-burglary of the Ravonettes, while the strumming strain and cobweb-catching grit of their guitarwork and accompanying atmospheric elements have the quality of a lost Guided by Voices tape-demo, which has been languishing in the storage shed of one of the band member's relatives, and whose magnetic strip has become so vandalized over years of being exposed to the elements that its surviving recordings have taken on the quality of ghostly, pitted dreampop revue, like Beach House attempting to persevere through a set in a deluge of acid rain, or Slow Pulp swimming to shore through a slurry of their own decay. If nothing else, Tourist Language represents a lingua franca of interpretative grammar that is your visa to search the fuzzy borders of present possibility as it leaps through the liminal folds of past observation and sensation. 

There is a buta load of great records to be found over at Paisley Shirt Records.