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.  

Album Review: Kaleidoscope - After the Futures

After the future... that's quite the proposition, isn't it? A little while back, I got my hands on a very cheap copy of Jack Womack's socio-political crime drama Let's Put the Future Behind Us set in post-Soviet Russia, and was struck by the portrayals of violence and corruption the book depicted as well as the ruthless fungibility of human values and social connections which such violence necessitated in a mise-en-scène where the future had abruptly and irrevocably been postponed. But what I still think about the most is the end, how after all the murder and mayhem had ebbed, the reader is led to believe that the surviving characters were going to continue their ironic and twisted adventures well into the ensuing decades, undaunted by the perpetual patterns of gruesome misadventure that splayed out before them. This brings me back to my initial ponderance... what happens when the future's over? Do we all just roll up and die, or is there still something worth living for when all our castles have turned to ash? I'm not sure NYC's Kaleidoscope have all the answers, but they're clearly interested in prodding at the mists of time to see if they can't find a passage to the other side of this opaque cloud of destiny. After the Futures (yes, they imply that there may be more than one) is the group's one and only LP as of this writing, a rough and apocalyptic blend of hardcore and anarcho-punk that hums like a bandsaw and handles like a convertible skimming the rocky rim of a long desert canyon- tempted by gravity to topple to its doom while clinging to the rough terrain with almost more resolve than rubber. This carcass crashing burnout is brimming with chastising screeds against austerity and the "sub-prime" nature of proletarianization, the tightening noose of surveillance technology, and vampiric arrangments of extraction which drain the life force from people and places for profit. Kaleidoscope bears their oppositional political posture with every charged second of erratic, economical aggression on this album, doing everything in their power to wake the listener up and confront them with the epiphany that the dumpster fire they thought they were observing at a distance is actually the room they presently occupy, reflected back at them through the fun-house mirror of neo-liberal hegemony. Even with all these points well made, the question still remains: When that fire goes out- when this hell finally freezes over- what's next? Поживем, а там посмотрим.

With a taste of your wax, I'm on a ride... Toxic State.

Album Review: Lumpy - Lumpy

If pressed, I'd tell you that I think Lumpy's honest-to-goodness place in this world is in the corner of a wood-paneled den somewhere in the Midwest, a guitar slung around his shoulder and plugged into a mini-amp, shouting out friends between songs he penned on his lunch break and talking about what an honor is to be opening for Joe Gittleman on this leg of his solo tour... I also would expect that, in a perfect world, he'd have at least one record co-signed by Rosenstock's Quote Unquote Records... But you know, sometimes the stars don't align as they should, and the former scenario, while not precluding the latter, is a whole lot more likely. What I hope you've gathered from this winding little farrago so far is that Lumpy, aka Bryan Highhill, is a musician with a low-key, home-spun, help-you-move-on-a-Saturday-no-questions-asked, nice guy sort of vibe, and a busky, tow-tone-tinted, pop-punk sound complimented by a semi-flat affect, a vocal delivery that dispatches a peppering of irony amongst fistfuls of earnest affection, ie all of the approachability of Greg Katz sans the ego-suffocating sag of sarcastic-self-awareness. His self-titled is a collection of songs that he's played for years, solo, and with the assistance of friends, for which he's finally got around to recording with a full band. His ska influences are pretty inescapable here and come out in a big way on tracks like the mopey but cautiously mirthful "House Plant," the upstroke-tickle-fight "Got a Plan," and the dubby, sun-set stained coaster "Stickler," with his two-tone tendencies emerging not just in his selection of guitar licks, but also his thrilling trumpet trills and the accompaniment of Matty Harris's boisterous sax playing. Other tracks throw the lever and jump lanes into down-tempo indie rock like the buzzy-fog of "Brainal Fatigue," which lands somewhere the aisle of Rentals-esque pawned but still serviceable spinners, while closer "Never Saw this Coming" has more than a few grams of a penny-loafer-pinching, heavy mod-molded gusto in its tank, especially near the end. This might be Lumpy's first full-effort recording with this particular set of musicians, but from my vantage point, things are already going rather smoothly. Hopefully, he'll pick it up* (ie full band recordings) again soon. 

*wink wink ska reference wink wink 

Album Review: Bixiga 70 - Vapor

Vapor is the fifth full-length album from Brazilian ten-piece funk band Bixiga 70. Hailing from the Bixiga neighborhood of Sao Paulo, the band’s sound is deeply nurtured by the sounds of the African diaspora, mixing elements of afrobeat, reggae, and dub in a kaleidoscopic celebration of their Brazilian heritage and West African roots, serving up tracks defined by danceable grooves, liberated horn guided melodies, and an indomitable sense of fluid kinetic drive. While all this could be said of their previous work as well, there is something new and fresh about Vapor, like a gasp of cool morning air. The band had to, in many ways, reconstruct itself after the long pause that COVID imposed on Brazil, a national period of intransigence that forced many members to move on to other projects and prevented the group from inhabiting their natural habitat under the halogen glow of a warm and well-lit stage. During this phase of coalescence, the group managed to attract the talents of Pedro Regada, a keyboardist who sheaths the band's earthy boogie in a capsule of future-forward reverberation that helixes the promise of '70s utopianism with a palpable, interminable joy that rises to catch the clouds like the Mantiqueira Mountains. These tunes are so smooth they'll run through you like smoke between the fingers of an outstretched palm, swaddling you in the summary advent of an exuberant, groovy flow. Vapor feels like a message of peace beamed down from an advanced cadre of our ancestors who escaped to a nimbus-mounted castle, gliding through the stratosphere and offering instructions on how to achieve their level of enlightened apex while keeping our feet shuffling rhythmically on the ground.

Put a sparkle in your step with Glitterbeat.

Album Review: Ghost Fan Club - Ghost Fan Club

Confessed to as a record examining his inner turmoil and reckoning with a history of depression and insomnia, Tyler Costolo's self-titled EP of his Ghost Fan Club project is a worthy detour from the sundrowning, distortion-well-diving trance of Two Meters. While easier on the ears and more soluble to one's consciousness, the self-titled record still grapples with a mess of constrictive emotions that bind the author to a flotsam of weighty, digressive dissolutions concerning permanence and purpose. At one point, Tyler discusses the fact that he nearly ended his own life before it had a chance to start (apparently, he was wrapped in his own umbilical cord at birth), and this revelation sets a certain tenor for the album's wider explorations of death, the void, and the parade of small tarnished wonders that strings the two together like a length of flickering and fractured Christmas lights. There is a certain affection for absences here, one which is filled out with bendy nods to the contorted psychic-musculature and preferential chord progression of Modest Mouse as well as the serenely caustic and pacifying style of strumming reminiscent of Mount Eerie's plaintive grip, styles which combine with the lyrics to give the impression that things are both out of place, and in places where they are slowly evaporating and won't be for long- a procession para-quotidian flutterings and ghosts in the process of becoming rooted to oblivion- the settling of space and erection for a clubhouse for those who have gone missing while standing in plain sight. 

Live on the edge with Knifepunch Records.