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.  

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.