Interview: We're Trying Records

Life is a struggle. If you're not trying, you're dying. And if you're Jordan of We're Trying Records, then you're thriving in a labor of love, attempting to bring the very best of DIY punk and emo to the masses. I always like it when people send me music, but whenever I see the WTR logo in my inbox, I get genuinely excited. Jordan has introduced me to some amazing acts over the last several years, and I am incredibly thankful for his efforts. To commemorate his previous ten years of doing-it-'cause-no-one-else-will and get to know the man behind the music a little better, I had Jordan on the podcast to talk about the label's origins, his general philosophy, and what he'd tell his fromer self about where is now if he had the chance to shoot backwards through the veil of time.

Featured tracks: 

Townies - Gallows

95Corolla - No Coast 

Scarlet Street - Victory Speech

If you're in Chicago, you can celebrate We're Trying Record's 10th at the Subterranean on August 29, 2025. Doors, 6:00 pm, show, 6:30 pm. Get your tickets here. 

Album Review: SARN - i'm am in dark places

Sometimes, the memories of growing up in the Midwest come flooding back in a vibrant rush, and it’s difficult to perceive why any singular point of reflection still possesses such a hold on my mind. Now, if you’re not familiar with how things work in the center aisle of this country’s landmass, you might mistakenly assume that the most pivotal of my reflections would be the memory of riding a goat to school or something. But alas, it’s nothing so charming as that... no, instead, I’m plagued by memories of how many copies of Herb Alpert’s Whipped Cream & Other Delights I would be confronted with... like, literally everywhere. Plagued— plagued is the proper word for it, because there was just a rash of these things floating around at one point: sticking out from the shelves of records at friends’ parents’ houses, begging to be rehomed at thrift stores and flea markets, and resting in frames in the back bar of local watering holes. Funnily enough, it’s not like anyone could ever tell you anything about the record, despite how numerous it was. I don’t think anyone ever actually listened to the damned thing. Honestly, I think people just liked the lady on the cover... or maybe they just had a sweet tooth... or a very specific fetish... anyway, the weird trick it played on my psychology is that I’ve developed a cordial fascination with records that feature random pretty women on their covers, and that’s more or less how I ended up checking out SARN’s i'm am in dark places. As with Mr. Alpert’s record, the woman on the cover of this LP is a mysterious siren who leaves more questions asked than answered and has almost nothing to do with the music (both women are also wearing white, but that’s about where their similarities end). i'm am in dark places is a weird pop record—specifically, a VERY weird pop record—defined by passive-aggressive countermelodies, post-rock emulations, soothingly demented drum loops, and a preoccupation with pearlescent textures over rough, grounded grooves. It’s a little bit John Dwyer-esque, a little Magnetic Fields, a little Cindy Lee, and kind of a lot of Giant Claw, but much more pared back and focused than anything else I could compare it to. Most of these tracks are content with a core melody that’s developed between SARN’s sparse vocals and a guitar line, which are then braised by some form of electronic interference while simultaneously bickering with an intersecting rhythm that makes them appear to find their momentum out of sheer spite and clumsy ambition. Listening to the record feels a little like SARN is messing with you—seeing if you can predict where their songs could be headed, despite their simplicity and concessions to pop convention (however tortured), only to deny you any anticipated resolution and substitute an extraordinary, if improbable, catharsis in its place. I get that SARN is doing what these songs need, serving their own interests instead of rushing to grant the wishes of the listener, and I appreciate the commitment and circuitous way this music ends up reaching our ears—almost your hearing these songs is a kind of knock-on or concomitant coincidence of their existence rather than their intended purpose. I'm very appreciative of the fact that the mystery of these songs stays intact through the naturally ensuing obscurantism of their conception, and attempting to unwind the tight ball of thorny brush that binds the heart of each song on i'm am in dark places is one of the thrilling reasons it’s been on repeat for me since its release in July of this year. I’ve listened to it in full more times since its release than I have Whipped Cream & Other Delights in the previous three decades... make of that what you will.

The long arc of history bends towards justice death (Deathbomb Arc).

Album Review: Feral Ohms - S/T

Feral Ohms is a gritty, unhousebroken rock ‘n/'r roll presage from Oakland, CA, and side hustle of Comets on Fire’s vocalist/ guitarist Ethan Miller. Their sound is like an unhinged MC5 with a grizzly speckling of psychedelia and noise rock poking its coat like a scaly case of mange. They were in good company when their self-titled album dropped in 2016, as it was an era when wild-eyed mutants like OBN III, Zig Zags, and The Shrine roamed the piss and pilsner-lacquered dens of the American underground like packs of distempered hyenas. The group's self-titled debut studio LP is their only full-length album—if you don’t count live albums (which I don’t). Many of the tracks on this album had previously been released through a series of 7” singles that subsequently slithered free of the suctioned grip of Alternative Tentacles or were featured on their aforementioned live LP, lobbed from the tower of John Dwyer's Castle Face Records. Even with most of these tracks being rehomed for this LP, it’s far from sounding like a second-hand snoozer. Even with most of these tracks being rehomed for the purpose of this LP, it's far from sounding like a second-hand snoozer. “Living Junkyard” is a real kick in the teeth with its muscular anthemic riffs that push the ante of Ethan's mongrel howl straight over the moon. “Super Ape” with its crushing chords, celestial bridges, and earthquakin' bass grooves has all the bone-compacting strength and devastating force of a car-crusher or an industrial-sized blender designed to turn whole steers into beef-purée... and probably puts about as much demand on the local power grid as either as well. Then there are “Sweetbreads” with its Zeppelin aping, arena-sized riffs, and album closer “The Glow” which is a jammy, Soundgarden cribbing, blues freak-out that's about as subtle as a tsunami generated by off-shore atomic testing. It's an ideal record to drop the needle on if you're looking to wind yourself up into a blind frenzy- as applicable and timely today as it was back in 2016. 

Silver Current, rich in talent (ie music not minae).

Album Review: Nanoray - Manzai

I've never been one for game shows. They're mostly the type of entertainment that you watch passively (unless you're a real freak and think you can answer the questions / complete the challenges better than the contestants—in which case, what are you still doing on the couch! Go fulfill your destiny!)... and I tend not to watch if I don't plan to give it 100% of my conscious attention (I understand that I am in the extreme minority in this respect—sorry for calling you all freaks, only to immediately out myself as one as well—ごめんなさい). Still, I'm familiar enough with the concepts of most game shows to be able to peer into and appreciate the vision behind Nanoray's LP Manzai, a breakbeat record grounded in the premise of two up-and-coming comedians (named, for reference, Applemotan and Bananamada) who are conscripted into participating in a surrealist game show, presumably to compete for a grand prize... like a fabulous career in comedy, a high-rise pent-house, a million dollars... and the greatest fortune of them all... their lives. The track sequencing is aptly ordered to facilitate this narrative, and the beats (sonically and story-wise) perfectly convey a sense of rising and falling action, conveying the drama of the characters' circumstances through high-intensity synth warps and washes, zig-zagging and serpentine rhythmic changes that transform the tracks in a shedding metamorphosis along consistent thematic motifs, golden-toned beat interludes that hint at revelations and new information acquired by the characters as they unravel the logic of the adversities they're faced with, puckish sputtering vocal swatchs that humorously and invigoratingly texture topline rhythms, and tense cymbal break-ordered downbeat cacophonies that undergird low and desperate points of conflict in the plot. "Signon" begins with a burst of applause that transitions into an undulating seismic wave of grooves that narrows into a frantic, swirly dash to the finish, providing a preview of the arc of the tone of the album on the whole. The next track, "Samp1," with its overheated synth melodies and sharp, cracked, glassy beats and craggy builds, hints at a rough acquisition phase as the comedians learn the rules to the deadly game they've been enlisted to play. The punchy "Build Shit!" with its squishy mash of beats and sequences suggests that Applemotan and Bananamada have been dropped into some rendition of a live-action Rhythm Heaven Fever, while "Diver" subsists within a gravitationally defined column of plummeting arrangements, punctuated by samples that sound like they've been plundered from various instruments aboard a submarine. Each successive track adds new dimensions, and thus new challenges to be surmounted, such as the springy joust of "UO!," and the depth-charged and humbly delirious blasts of "hh." It's all so vivid and tantalizing to the imagination, eliciting visions of the story's protagonists hopping through non-Euclidean geometry and physics-defying spaces towards a finish line, dodging hazards like enormous balls of spikes, confetti jets that breathe rainbow-hued napalm, and cannons that spit live cobras and scorpions—kind of like a deadly, psychedelic adaptation of Takeshi's Castle or Unbeatable Banzuke... only with a much higher penalty for elimination. I can also imagine there being comedic elements to the challenges as well, like the players having to make situationally appropriate puns to unlock secure doors in a maze, lobbing sick burns at their opponents to activate flame jets on the other player's side of the map to impede their progress, or... I don't know, dodging tomatoes and cream pies packed with C4? There are really infinite possibilities presented by the scenario Nanoray has crafted on this record, and I could literally spend the rest of the day digging through and describing all the strange challenges that it's inspired in my head. The penultimate track "Kama6" proceeds with a deliberate, sure-footed, and earned confidence through treacherous twists and turns that communicates the extent to which the protagonists have mastered the rules of the game and are now able to pass through challenges with ease and grace—presumably while some shadowy mastermind shrieks in a control room backstage, frantically flipping switches and smashing buttons while berating subordinates in a futile bid to prevent our heroes' total triumph against the odds. Afterward, the easy keel, sparkling textures, and relaxed rhythms of the final track "Signoff" can be interpreted as a victory lap, accompanied by a montage of Applemotan and Bananamada signing autographs, accepting bushels of roses, and wading through a swarm of fans and paparazzi as they plod toward a stretch limo in the distance, all the while villains and adversaries lick their wounds and vow revenge. It's the perfect note to end this kind of record on, as well as a great wind-up for a sequel. Now my only question is, when are we going to get Manzai II? 

Album Review: Black Salvation - Uncertainty is Bliss

Dark, heavy, seedy psychedelic rock out of Leipzig Germany. Uncertainty is Bliss is the Relapse Records debut of Black Salvation, the controlled substance-enhanced side project of Uno Bruniusson, lead singer of modern death-rock band Grave Pleasures. It’s hedonistically hypnotic and brimming with magical maleficence, reminiscent of labelmates Ecstatic Vision, but with less guitar wankery. Bruinusson embraces an economical approach to his song-craft, gifting these tracks a tense logic of restraint and secrecy that enhances their shrouded and darkly transcendent appeal. Check out the bluesy bulging chords and tread-jumping groves of “Floating Torpids," the subterranean mysticism, tunneling groves, and mercurial mood shifts of “Breathing Hands," and the haunted, sludgy, suspended and distended 9-minute jam “A Direction is Futile" for a taste of that desolate yearning that beckons to you from beyond the sheath of this mortal veil.

On Relapse... because I am apparently once again covering records from big metal labels... It's like I'm back in 2021 or something.  

Album Review: Jah9 - Note To Self

Jah9 is a Jamaican singer, blessed to be known by friends and family as Janine Elizabeth Cunningham. Her style has been described- by herself, mind you- as “jazz on dub,” combining vocal performances inspired by Nina Simone and Billie Holiday, over Augustus Pablo infused dub rhythms and elements of dancehall- an honest self-assessment if there ever was one. It sometimes pays to be a little skeptical of the ways that artists describe themselves, but as I said, she speaks the truth! Spot the lie and I'll put a pin in my eye.* Essentially, Jah9 has the soul of a classic jazz crooner, thriving in living color on God's green Earth while carrying out the mandates of King Jammy to the letter.** Note To Self, is her fourth studio album and follow-up to her 2017 collaboration with Mad Professor, appropriately named Mad Professor Meets Jah9 in the Midst of the Storm. The themes of NTS album are apporiate to the artists style- confidence, power, and Jah9’s connection with the universe... this last one I can apprcate a lot as the universe can often feel like a foreign place, even to to those of us who are native to the Milky Way, and so it's nice to have someone who feels at home here to show us around and make sure we don't get lost or fall down a well/blackhole/whathaveyou. “Note To Self (Okay)” is a pretty good place to start with this LP, as it has a silky R’nB vibe with a cool, cleansing ripple of reverb flowing through its essence and out its pours. Tracks like “Field Trip” are slightly more complex, and while it's driven by a bold and funky rhythm, its true heart can be found somewhere halfway up a cosmic elm tree, as a harbor between roots and stars. For a more traditional taste of dub, all you have to do is get your arms around the loving slinky squeeze of “Feel Good (The Pinch),” while modern soul parishioners will find their prayers answered by the scorching path of passion and possibility pioneered on “Could It Be” as it lays down some funky soul rhymes with a delicious dub coating. Note To Self: drop the needle and let it ride.

Get your pass to the VP Area (VP Records).

* Speaking purely metaphorically here. Don't expect any follow-through on this one. 

** When it move yuh soul, of course! ... when the music hits, you feel no pain… but, you affi move!

Album Review: Never Dull - Secret Stash Collection I & II

 

It's one thing to put on a great performance, but to see the absolute potential of that performance is something else entirely- it takes a certain level of vision- a gift of precognition and the commitment to grasp it with both hands... or spin it like a top! Never Dull has one such perceptive yield of musical grace about him. Working from live samples, he's able to manifest crisp yet beautifully ambient forms of house and nu disco that find the latent beauty in even the most wayward specimens of sonic particulate, resulting in each scraped scuttling of audio feeling/sounding fresh and unblemished, like a pentimento that becomes more defined with each brush stroke that glides over it. Released in 2020, Collection I is the pressing together of three EPs of the same name, along with a filament of scattered singles and rarities, all of which generally denote Never Dull's crucial attention to the interlacing aspects of groove and melody, composing densely tempered and reverby house that soothes the nerves like a warm kiss on a cool summer night. Collection II rolls together his singles and releases since the previous compilation, and demonstrates his increasing tendency towards tightly structured sequences that exude a sense of loose spontaneity, guided by waiving electric-eel shaped patterns of keys and talkative retro-electro accents that ooze with lysergic flavor, drafted along with enticing vocal melodies that cooly pluck you from your seat and into the train of their tenacious strut. I prefer to listen to both these compilations in sequence and together, as that's how I get the most out of them, as it's the most fun for me and provides the best sense of trajectory that he's pursued as an artist, from his early years on to the present, and this also is why I'm reviewing them together. All told, it's about two hours worth of music, so if you need to break it off, jump around, or just listen to a couple of singles in situ, that's up to you- but I have a feeling that once you slip into the flow of these collections you'll find it's easier to see it through then cut yourself loose from their groovy grip. 

Album Review: CarCrashPoolParty - CarCrashPoolParty EP

CarCrashPoolParty... crashing a pool party with your car... it honestly sounds like the most John Hughes name a band can have... without being a direct reference to any of his works, that is. Like, imagine this, a protagonist drives a car (likely borrowed from a friend's Dad without his permission or knowledge) over a three rows of hedges and into the pool at a country club to break up a party hosted by some hoity rich kid who is bogarting the attention of a gorgeous love interest- a display of churlish heroism and reckless disregard for life, limb, and property that some how saves the day and wins back the girl... I can see it vividly, painted before my eyes in bright '80s Hughes-y hues... of course, the band CarCrashPoolParty, actually has nothing to do with any of this (looking through their discography, I'm not even seeing the shadow of a Sixteen Candles reference... so accusations of affiliation are somewhat unwarranted)- although they're not the type of group I'd except to shy away from brash romantic gestures- in fact their self-titled EP more or less swoons in that direction as a matter of distinction. It's not like allowing yourself to be strung along by your own heart like a sucker tied to a balloon string is an unusual approach for a group playing any sort of emo music, and while they can grace the listener with some downy and wistfully pensive passages, these are measured against a stony sort of angst evident in the brooding guitar work and the intermittent growls of the vocals, both of which speak to an unsated hunger the group is possessed by which has yet to be sated, and which they are discontented by the passage of time towards its resolve. Listening to the careening, teary, gilt, and patter of the confessory "Grieve," and the grippingly ostentatious, spiritual suturing and post-hardcore disaster reporting of "Hovercraft",  you get the sense that whatever sustaining fulfillment or epiphany that can be obtained from love and loss, the group is destined to chase it down rather than allow the universe to swivel on its axis while they wait in place, encountering relevant plot point by inertia alone. This boldness is evident not only in the lyrics but in the extensively ambidextrous construction of these tracks as well, combining elements of shoegaze, emo, parlor jazz, and hardcore into a single coherent narrative thrust. There is another side to the band too, one that seems to exist in a distinct and separate plane of the multiverse, where they are a post-psychedelic anomaly that exists somewhere in the fluxing nexus between Glassjaw and Incubus, but in the iteration of the world in which their self-titled EP is set, CarCrashPoolParty are the protagonists of a gripping melodrama that can only end with them either succeeding despite their foolhardiness, or drowning in a valiant vehicular gesture of smitten courage. Whatever the outcome, this EP gets two thumbs WAY UP from me.  

Album Review: Faraway Plants - Faraway Plants

Faraway Plants is a local Chicago jazz trio that primarily plays spaces like the Whistler and Hungry Brain. Their music has mainly been improvisational, but their 2019 self-titled debut LP shows some signs of having been graced with a composer's pen, at least in part, ahead of the actual recording session that created it. They have a spacey, funky electronic sound anchored by Anthony Bruno’s soulful alto-sax, which rides the roll of drummer David Agee's judicious clatter like a comet joy-riding on one of Saturn's rings, while Gerald Bailey's trumpet playing provides a guiding narrative texture to the proceedings as they progress in variegated transmogrifications of sound and substance. There are hints of Sun Ra and Albert Ayler throughout these tracks, and some subtle polyrhythms to keep things fresh. If you feel like you could use a number with some ‘70s flair in your life, check out “Starship.” For more meditative motifs, look to the sudsy synth-propelled toss of “Sunsaturate” or the tubular slide of “Komorebi.” And if you need something that will help you pass the summer hours we still have left ot use this year in a blazingly good mood, try out the sweet and sunny beach companion “Islands” and the warm embrace of the sax lead “Birds,” the latter being replete with a choir of melodious songbird calling you to attention in its early waxing phases.

Album Review: Victims Family & Nasalrod in the Modern Meatspace

It's the Bush era again. Don't ask me how we got here. We wouldn't be if I had my druthers. This wasn't my call, but here we are... back in the sh!t*- endless wars, secret black sites operated with impunity and without democratic oversight, and brutal fights over immigration statute, all transpiring against the backdrop of precipitous Imperial decline. The only difference is that there doesn't seem to be much in the way of music that's up to capturing the moment (not that it would help!). I recall that Ol' Uncle Hank received a collective rap on the nose for suggesting that 45's first term would "make punk rock great again" (and he kinda deserved it too!), and on reflection, the Anti-Bush anthems that swarmed the culture during the Second Gulf War were more opiate than any sort of overture to action, but still... It's hard for me not to miss the energy and resonance with resistance that music had in response to the ascendancy of a neocon to the office of the presidency. That period was like Yalta for punks and hippies, as they finally set aside their differences and combined their creative forces against a common enemy. This climactic front of righteous freeform aggression and culturally cross-pollinated clarion-confrontationalism, favored by Alternative Tenticals, among others, sort of fizzled out as the protests wore down and the population grew accustomed to living with the reality of constant foreign conflict. Every scripted drama's climax has its falling action though... as well as its depressing and inevitable sequel, and boy is that ever true for American politics, writ large.** Still, I miss it, all of it, and there are hardly any acts attempting to revive the vibrancy of antagonism present in the early '00s.. unless you're willing to look in a place like... oh, I don't know... Portland, Oregon? If you did care to peel back the petals of the Rose City's underside, there you might find a little group called Nasalrod. Collaborating with the social-skewering Elastic Man-core of the Bay Area's Victim's family for a split last year, I was shocked and delighted to encounter their aggravated eccentricities and poignant spirit through said Modern Meatspace EP. Nasalrod's style is a roughly hewn twill of nightclub drama, hardcore punk, and cold-blooded, amphetamine-spiked noise rock, that is stubbornly spazzy and vehement in its relentless criticism of all that exists (and plenty of things that have yet to transpire). The fluidity with which Nasalrod blends commentary with a twisted logic and approach to composition is a compliment to the rubber lashing and shout-you-down with verbal flak approach of Victims Family, but is equally compelling, with a playful tendancy towards catch and release dynamics, where the listener is drawn in by more subdued passages, only to be blasted off their soles when they consumate the crescendo. Like on their track "The Maker," which opens with a fishtailing baseline that seems to be goading you into an arm-wrestling match before pouring a pan of hot grease in your lap in the form of a seethingly assertive guitar line- you're not going anywhere once that guitar hits, your initial distraction has lead to your wranglers being fused with the polypropylene base of your chair- they can do with you what they want at that point.... and they will! Appropriately, "The Maker" has an overall sort of fever-dream, tent-revival meets Barnum & Bailey vibe that helps give an absurdist overtone to the hopeless dredge through the fathoms of discount spirituality it describes, conveying a darkly comedic quality that is consistently present throughout their half of the split. "The Maker" is followed by the jacklighting troll hunt "Get A Life (Or A Coffin)," which combines high-flying Cheap Trick-esque arena-ready anthemics with a swarming sensibility for guerrilla theater that makes it feel like the band could descend on their targets nearly as quickly as their quarry can reply to an OP  from someone other than one of their two dozen mutals. "Redefined Apocalypse" follows with a dire rhythmic display of gritty, imploding grandure as the group scrambles up one collapsing card deck of lies, only to find themselves cresting atop another, eventually coasting downhill into a vivarium of bespoke caustic approval that acts as a trash compactor for the human soul, a trap for consciousness called "Online Validation." Nasalrod concludes their half of the split with the grinding Bungle-bust funk*** of "New Education," an exasperated exploration of the degradation of epistemology and pedagogy in the brain-smoothing acid ponds of the information age. A willingness to lash out in all directions like an exploding porcupine, armed with whatever cultural tools are handy, is the type of rogue aspiration that I recall punk rock personify in periods past, and for what it's worth, I feel like Nasalrod embodies this ethos as much as any endgangered species can still claim to have any consequence for its environment, despite dwindling numbers against overwelming odds. Sometimes, the only solace you can take in a decaying empire is that the hegemony might circle the drain slightly faster than yourself, teasing the pleasure of watching it slither into oblivion slightly ahead of yourself. Of course, knowing where you're headed opens the opportunity to beat against the current in the hope of preserving what little there is left to save. It's a nice thought, provided no cowboy actually pulls the trigger on WWIII before you can escape the suck. 

Say her name! Nadine Records.

*Mind you, this is an ironic statement. The reality that we actually live with is one of continuity of agenda. Our history is a stack of warmongering tortoises, arranged in a totemic column that descends through the muck of a blood-soaked swamp to the bedrock of hell's front step. 

** Thanks Obungler. 

*** Funk as in musk. What did you think I was talking about? 

Album Review: Haust - Negative Music

Somehow, Haust has evaded my notice for decades. Despite being an influence on one of the bar-none, bottom-dollar, greatest rock bands of all time, Kvelertak, they also split cadre and share their craft with a legion of nasty yet devilishly vital acts that make a habit of peering at me through the veils of digital obscurity that reefs the fridge of my waking life- acts like Okkultokrati, NAG, and The Good the Bad and The Zugly. How I discovered the Norwegian group and encountered and learned to love their most recent LP Negative Music is still a mystery, even to myself. I believe it involved the instructions of a maze scrawled with a burning quill on lamb skin parchment, gifted to me by a pale woman, half naked and on horseback, upon whose head rested crowned a halo of black flames... or I stumbled upon them while surfing Bandcamp at around 3 am after downing a 16 oz of can of coldbrew coffee at/or around midnight- one these scenarios is bound to be more disturbing/intriguing to you as a reader. I'm willing to let you assume whatever keeps you most engaged. As you might expect, the album begins with a declaration of the band's longevity despite inertia and spans of hiatus, kicking things off with tar-blooded, labor pains slither of "Let it Die," the pharyngeal arches of which later develop into rows of razor-sharp fangs and a set of gore shedding tusks on the ripping flay of "Dead Ringer." Singer Vebjørn sounds credibly vile and loathsome throughout, colluding in blighted fellowship and blending in time with the campy villainy of the foul runic-inspired black'n'roll that the rest of the band whips up like a frost giant on an akevitt-fueled bender. The gothic pivot of "Turn to Stone" is faultlessly petrifying, and "The Burning" feels like a futile attempt to escape a flame-engulfed opera-house after its misshaped subterranean resident set it a blaze in a fatal fit of passion, while "The Devil at My Heels" has the climactic frenzy of being chased down by a phantasmal beast that has leapt from a gapping wound in your psyche, and manifesting through the portal of your bathroom mirror, to now clip at your fleeing ankles like a parodic, piranha toothed roomba. It's called Negative Music, and it feels right in all the wrong sorts of ways. 

Carved with cruelty on black blood stones (FysiskFormat).

Interview: 2:00AM Wake Up Call

Had the chance to talk with Emily about her latest LP with her 2:00AM Wake Up Call project, called Dead City- an examination of abandoned places, distant pasts, and a contemplation on the inevitable revolutions of time- often towards death, but also towards a fresh flowering of life when circumstances conspire to allow it. Emily has such an eclectic sound, combining early '00s pop, folk, and indie with contemporary approaches to emo, pop-punk and electronic music to create a sound that is intrepid in its pursuit of the novel modes of popular expression that still achieve some semblance of the familiar. I really didn't think I could do Dead City with a review alone, so I'm thrilled that Emily was willing to mic it up with me and offer her insights as well. Check out our conversation below: 

Listen to Dead City below. It's self-released, so be sure to show her some love. 

Album Review: Heith - Escape Lounge

As our perception of the world becomes increasingly mediated virtually, who is to say what is real? You'd hope that there would be some subject, some transcendent and concrete self, but if everything the self is asked to parse is an illusion or a facsimile, how will this seemingly solid center preserve itself against erosion? Escape Lounge is the foregrounding of the backrooms of the mind—a structural excavation of the staging area of the consciousness, scalped and exposed to the patterns of judgment and social scrutiny that are usually reserved for public pronouncements and rituals embedded in relational fabrics as profoundly as bones in flesh. On this record, the Italian artist Heith allows himself to slump into the web of informational and electronic interference that orders the patterns of tangible events as they unfold on terra-ferma in order to understand the transfusion between blood and selective-edification that transforms human beings into agenda-driven wire services through the elaboration on a computational approach to composition that blends the etherical with the real. It is the mapping of a transmission that haunts the hardware of our personage, with a plan and origin point somewhere deep in the guts of junkspace. It depicts culture, history, and ideas, all of the world's verities, as absorbed by some silicon spleen and excreted as predacious truth and set upon gated covens bereft of antibodies needed to defend against such viral, formless, and abstract aborations of thought. Here, we are looking at an alien yet all too human self-serving inducement towards dissolution into the textural matrix of a cathodic, catatonic fairytale- built by machines and unleashed into a world of beasts without concern for the conductive casualties it will accrue. A digital morality marching under the banner of: "That's what it means to create context."

Intrepid and impish (PAN)

Album Review: CT57 - Road to Nowhere

Hinted and gliped at on earlier releases, CT57's Road to Nowhere is the culmination of their ambient quintessentially quotidian aura mining. The lifeblood of the deep, dark arteries that spread in horizontally varicose planes of the logico-geography dimension of this continent's straining, fading providence, the subject of this album is the roaring silver beasts and their wakefully somnambulist handlers, who act as thankless red-blood cells circulating oxygen in a corpulent and ungrateful host. A faltering pulse of static and muffled engine groans, which overturns the solitude of the night with an eerily comforting hum that stretches like a blanket of sound over the sheltered and sand-blasted tresses of a world that is recognized only in passing. The cab buzzes like a knitting-circle of wasps, subsumed in ghostly transmissions from distant, similarly pressed compatriots and hungry points of terminus greedily awaiting longing to swallow the guts they pull in train. The road exhales in warm tones even in the dead of night, the friction of the tires defibrillating a mask of life into each pebble and grain it passes over. A midnight lullaby of deasil-odysseys, breathing cold solace into the depths of the day's shadowy twin, revealing secret societies and unknown passages, as they slip away in the endless stream of blind commerce. Delivery fulfillment without a guarantee of mortal fulfillment, lumbering through galleries of interstate-interstitials lit by a driving enterprise that only knows its next destination, but has yet to glimpse itself in the rearview mirror.   

Album Review: High. - Come Back Down

I'm writing this review entirely sober (unless you're like a Mormon or something and have hang-ups about caffeine). It's not a usual state for me to be composing in. I generally confine my drunkenness/ inebriatedness/baka-bacchanalness to the weekends. Which is why I'm listening to music nearly as often as my schedule allows. For me (and presumably others, presumably you), when a song hits right, it's better than a drug- it's an entirely distinct level of euphoria. New Jersey's High. certainly is helping me stay hitched to the dragon's tail at the moment with their EP Come Back Down. A series of highs that will keep you low and lows that drag you down a drainage vent, like you foolishly accepted a solicitation from a sewer-dwelling clown, who, rather than eat you, wants to sequester you and interrogate you for your impressions on where his life went wrong. As if they've been struck by a vengeful clap of lightning, the internal temperature of High.'s calamity-chasing, Vans voyeurism is like that of a cracked pressure cooker- boiling with an irrepressible yearning and an unrequited expectancy that builds and surges on each track in a fated eruption of kitchen decor, obliterating catharsis. Through the cracks in the wall carved by the swelling distension of their distortive feedback-blossoms and the raking lacerate of the reverb extending from the dusky spindle of their grooves, you can almost glimpse the golden preserve of untarnished tenderness which vocalist Christian Castan is attempting to reach with the misty keen and the chest-emptying sigh of his lament. Come Back Down will bury you in heavy moods while delivering the type of high that you'll need an excavator to free yourself from- if that's even what you desire... 

Throwing you a bone (Kanine Records).

Album Review: Ghost Mountain - October Country

There is a Chinese legend harkening back to the 3rd Century BCE of a man who dies working on the construction of the Great Wall during winter due to a lack of warm clothes and general exhaustion. His wife, not having heard the news of his passing, travels over rivers and mountains to bring him winter clothes, only to find that he had died before she arrived. Unable to locate where his body is buried, she begins to wail with such tremendous, weighty sorrow that it causes a section of the wall to collapse, revealing where her husband's bones have been laid. There is a haunting resonance of poetic angst to this tail that ricochets like a solemn rale through Ghost Mountain's solo release, October Country- a recognition of loss as a scrying prism through which we discover what treasures bind our souls, as well as the motivation to recover them, or the decrement to leave them in the depths of the grave. Here we find Wren Kosinski pricking his fingers and allowing the crimson runoff of his essence to trickle like ruddy, gory glops of wax over crumbling epitaphs and mingling with the crematorial soot of long extinguished funeral pyres, gathering the grieving wisdom of a thousand past lives to form a seal of approbation upon the bleached white envelope containing the sum of his contritions, destined to be burnt in a ritual to liberate the shades of his dissociative withdrawal and replenish the soil of his own absolution- like a self-immolating wickerman. A chilling tale of reclaiming oneself from absolute spiritual poverty and self-denial, one that casts a merciful corpse-like pallor over one's personage as we enter the open-air oven of these blistering summer days. 

Album Review: Bereft - Lands

Blackened sludge metal out of Madison, WI to give voice to a once sacred, now defiled and ravaged terrain, Bereft play a deeply atmospheric hybrid of black metal and sludge metal, placing them in a uniquely crushing category of extreme metal with other chimeric monstrosities like Stone Titan and Chicago’s own Lord Mantis (circa their 2017 LP Lands- the subject of this write up). Think Agalloch meets Baroness, with all the aspirational and uplifting parts sucked out and replaced by earth-cracking, tarry guitar dirges and despair-inducing primal howls. This is bleak, acerbic, and enveloping metal music that is as compelling as it is desolate... and it’s pretty fackin' desolate. Lands is Bereft’s second album and first with Prosthetic Records. Brace yourself for the leviathanic “We Wept” with its lumbering, impossibly heavy bass which collides with knotted guitar dirges under pained howls and other vocal lamentations before exploding into a fury of tremolo-picking and ruthless blast beats, “The Ritual” which leads in with Agalloch-esc ambient guitars before unfurling into weighty funeral march with an ever-quickening tempo which ramps up into a tug-of-war between swampy mid-tempo chords and a dissonant stomp of blast beats and demonic guitars, and (lastly) the devastating fourteen minute closer, “Waning Light” with its gargantuan, rolling riffs that produce the auditory sensation of being swallowed in the yawning mow of a tremor with brief reprieves of rippling ethereal guitars to break the filthy, clausterphobic tension. This land isn't your land, this land isn't my land, this land belongs to the dead. 

We can rebuild your record collection... make it better, faster, stronger, and heavy as fuck (Prosthetic Records)

Album Review: Lowe Cellar - TAGU

I always appreciate it when post-hardcore bands approach each song like it's an abstract art piece, and that's where I think Seattle's Lowe Cellar is coming from on their LP, TAGU. Every lyric, every riff, and each gripping groove is meant to exhaust your interpretive dexterity and pull you into a resonant headspace with as much depth to be explored as the Earth's Lithosphere. Lowe Cellar often sounds potent and dire without giving way to overt aggression or tipping the scales into sheer chaos, preferring to build elaborate continuities of tension with unexpected payoffs that are as sweetly melancholy as an unturned sundae left out in the rain. While maintaining a protracted distance from direct expressions of mood and social observances, they meticulously nurture a ripe intellectual peat from which elucidatory explorations may blossom- they can really write a hook too! As much as Lowe Cellar take after hyper-expressive and adventurous emo bands and burning-heart Prometheans like Cursive and mewithoutYou, there is also a playful elasticity to them that I would hazard to attribute to some preoccupation with Built to Spill, as well as a fundamental pop orientation that is roughly aligned with '90s indie jangle jockeys like The Posies and Velvet Crush. That is to say, that as much as these guys get into their own heads on this record (and help you draw into your own), they never shrink so far away from the light of accessibility that they eschew enjoyability for the purely evokative. 

Not as much of a pariah as you'd think (Outcast Tapes Infirmary).

Album Review: Batuqueiros e Sua Gente with Douglas Germano - Partido Alto

It's getting to feel more and more like summer in my zone of the Midwest, and it's got me in the mood for some samba- particularly singer and composer Douglas Germano's 2021 collaboration with Batuqueiros e Sua Gente, literally titled after the style of samba to be found on their record, ie Partido Alto. It's generally a nectarous ensemble of spritely and spiritedly animated tracks characterized by bustling rhythms, cavorting percussion lines, trading call-and-response melodic choral cues, and the overwhelming sense that you've just stumbled upon the most fabulous block party of your otherwise parochial existence. From what I understand, the record is felicitous in its reproduction of the styles of samba that were popularized in Brazil during the '70s, but I wouldn't have known that just from hearing the record, as it feels very fresh and unburdened by nostalgia or any covetousness for a bygone era, instead representing a fashionaly conscious if almost timeless party record, steeped in the culture and dignified history of Latin America as it manifests in the modern day. That's more or less what you want from a record like Partico Alto, honestly- something that you can listen to anytime, and every time feels just as rich as the first. 

Album Review: Cime - The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble

When it comes to punk-jazz hybrids, the obvious and best example that comes to mind is Naked City. However, I wouldn't make this comparison to California's Cime too hastily. Not because I don't think the latter isn't of the same caliber or quality but due, in my opinion, to Cime representing an entirely different approach to the concept at its core- for starters, I don't think Naked City ever bore their souls on any record like Cime does on The Cime Interdisciplinary Music Ensemble (despite what you might think based on their name). The lyrics on Cime's six track LP (and before you say to yourself, "Six tracks? Is that really an LP?," note that the full runtime is 56 minutes in length), are delivered in such a raw and unfiltered manner that you'd swear they were peeled from vocalist Monty Cime's spirit like loose pieces of birch bark, before combusting on the heft of their breath like a burnt offering. The declining state of the American polity- spiritually, psychologically, morally, and artistically- is raised like the rifles of a firing squad whose imminent volley- daily indignities, constant scams, the raising of false idols, and general hostility to group's self-evident queerness- are reconciled by the band as inevitable, even if unjust, and acknowledged in light of faith in the fact that a broken body does not make a broken spirit. What's remarkable about the Cime Ensemble on this record, is not necessarily how they articulate their pain, but rather the joy that is expressed in the face of such destructive reverberations- a facet that unequivocally qualifies them as unique amongst punk-jazz hybrids, is that the focal points of dissonance and despair are communicated topically, while the real flesh of the compositions- drawing from traditions of Latin, fusion, lounge, and even some classically baroque genera of the jazz form- commit to a jubilee of transformative triumph, recasting the strife they feel into a bountiful current of ebullience. In rising to the challenges of this era with such elation, the group proves that you can only be brought as low as you yourself allow your spirit to be corrupted by the fallen state of your surroundings. 

Reach for the Skyline. 

Album Review: Benjamin Lee Farley - The Stalker

This may be one of the most underground artists I've written about.* Benjamin has a lot going on, mostly in his head,**  allowing his naturally abundant discharge of nervous energy to cascade over the layered plateaus of technical expertise traumatic experinces he's cultivated over a twenty-year career** (that only seems to be accelerating****) to finally manifest into a self-titled exhibition- a solo album, he's dubbed The Stalker. The title is fitting, given the densely claustrophobic atmosphere of the record, as well as the sort of agitated paranoia it projects, almost as if it is mirroring some psychic battle with a vicious, unseen force lurking on the opposite side of the clairvoyant curtain that separates our conscious reality from a maelstrom of negative energy. His fits and righteous screeds on this album kick up a whole lot of dust to the tune of crooked, junk-yard rhythms, jagged jangle-pop grooves, and raw, barbed, and bendy guitar chords that alternate texturally between that of close shave with an aluminum knife and a large bird tangled in a net of sparking telephone wires. The whole thing comes together like the chemically burned son of Mojo Nixon renting space on the 13th Floor of a municipally condemned Byrd-house and surviving on an exclusive diet of canned Beefhearts and Chocolate Watchbands - there is a bit of Zeppelin in there too, if you're listening for it as well. It's a wild listen as far as contemporary garage rock records go, and I respect the hell out of it- something I say freely, and of my own volition, and not because I'm afraid that Benjamin may be hiding in my bedroom closet, ready to karate chop me in the neck if I said otherwise.****

* Judged purely on the number of Spotify listeners this project has, which as of this writing is exactly 0.

** You could even say that Benjamin has be'n jamin' for over two decades... 

** He's been diagnosed as bipolar and also has schizophrenia. 

*** He has released 50 albums in the last 5 years under various project names. 

**** All joking aside, this is a sincere opinion. This is a fascinating and fun record. 

Album Review: Pink Must - Pink Must

I think the guitar line from the opening track "Morphe Sun" off Pink Must's self-titled LP rearranged my DNA somehow. I've always enjoyed tight, reedy riffs that follow a bendy melody, but this particular set of chords carved me up like CRISPR etching a new flavor into an otherwise bland strain of peaches. It made me feel very pliable and ready for what came next. That's the thing about Pink Must; there is a delicious softness that draws a reciprocal, sympathetic squishiness from the listener. You can feel them molding to your mood, as you, in turn, are shaped by their complementing presence. I think this has a lot to do with the way that they bridge musical forms while embellishing the natural fondament of the combined forms they've elected to experiment with. They have a penchant for baroque string arrangements that cut into and congeal with playfully pocket-sized triphop beats, often with a crunch layer of bubblegum-pop chord-crackle spread between. In addition, the languid melodicism and eletocnic enhancment of the vocals has this elastic longitude to it, where it feels very close and determinately distant at the same interval, causing you to always feel like you are traveling with the music, being carried by its movement and passage to destinations both anticipated and unknow, like your a lucky, dog-eared Pokémon card in the singer's back pocket. It's the gentlist headtrip this side of a warm bowl of kava root. I don't see Pink Must's LP as just suggested listening in 2025; it's a (Pink) must hear! 

Down but not out (15 Love).

Album Review: Junkbreed - Cheap Composure

Portugal's Junkbreed intrigued me when I encountered them back in '21 when their debut Music for Cool Kids dropped in my lap while writing covering metal for a rock magazine. I dug that they were a European group with a bit of a sense of humor, who seemed to be leaning into the renaissance of "junk" culture going on at the time- playing nu-metal adjacent post-hardcore with rap-rock elements and even going so far as slapping a Yolandi Visser look a like on their cover. Fittingly, their vocalist Miranda sounds little like Casey Chaos of Amen trying his hand at some more graceful melodic aggression ala Cedric Bixler-Zavala- a fact that helps cement the "California Babylon" themes sprouting from the lyrics, which often present their subjects as badly negotiating with their circumstances with the aid of drugs, deception (self-and-otherwise), and general delusional thinking. I mean, they're called Junkbreed, is it any wonder that they're mostly going to write about "garbage people"? Cheap Composure is the group's second release, a seemingly transitional EP that keeps a lot of the energy and themes from their first LP alive, while making the leap from more groove metal territory to approach more contemporary hardcore by beefing up the buzzy energy and a putting a greater focus on riffs as a complement to the vocal melodies. It's really amazing how close they come to sounding like Turnstile in some parts of this record, especially when they jump into the "run-you-down-grooves" of "To the Lions," which make you feel like you're being pursued by a pack of wild dogs. They haven't totally nixed their roots though, opener "Dipsonamaniac" has a topsy-turvy, Faith No More-esque bombast to it, while "Automatic Drills" sounds like Converge wringing all the adrenaline they can out of messianic iguana, and "Casual Anger" slaps and bullies its way through a Botch'd batch of Scratch Acid. How the band plans to follow up their latest act, I couldn't say, but I do know it's going to be tough keeping my composure while I wait to find out. 

Album Review: fangface - thank your lucky stars

Breaking: Florida duo from Gainesville decode that city's decades-deep tradition of cranking out catchy garage rock and pop-punk and re-upload it with a fresh chiptune-emo patch. That's it. That's my take. That's what Fangface has accomplished on their EP thank your lucky stars, and while it might seem rather matter of fact, I still think it's worth celebrating. Sometimes the heartbreak we experience, or recall from our years of indiscretion, are best reconstructed in a sonic grotto, one with the texture of well-loved, plushy zoological specimens and dotted with spongy input switches reminiscent of turn of the century consumer electronic devices- a safe place of reflection where one can bounce off the walls without risking life, limb, or lasting emotional damage and it's the belly from which Fangface is disgorged. The group cracks the shell of their hermitage and releases the fresh gasp of "Anti-Trust" as the EP's opener, a rattly review of lost confidence that sounds like a musical genie attempting to jam its way out of a Gameboy Color while it reconciles past mistakes and squandered boons of faith. Continuing in this rough but generally rock-oriented vein, the next track "what would i know?" is a beautiful, if desperately humble tumult, followed by the cuttingly emotive and claustrophobic melodic fray of "ouroboros" and the dislocated down-tempo groove kit of "nail polish remover." Diving one level deeper, the group permits themselves room to articulate their more progressive songwriting tendencies, starting with "revolutionary," a rebounding expedition that sees them climbing to the heights of basement pop excellence as well as diving into the deep coves of the low-resolution digital underground in search of forgotten treasures and discarded sympathies. The final two tracks represent a refractory cool off, blitzing through the buzzy turmoil and sizzly sting of the first half of "cigarette burns (death of the author)" to then transitioning into a course put comforting confluence of melodies that tranquility floats a cranial collapse and outburst of poetics which rolls neatly into the closing, self-titled track.  No matter how persistent the heartache, you can thank your lucky stars that fangface is there to match the bitter tempo, beat for beat. 

Album Review: Harper Kill - A Taste of Harper Kill

Harper Kill Ichiban! Their debut EP, A Taste of..., first-press you could even say, is as smooth and refreshing as they come. Hailing from Grand Rapids (and Illinois, because why not have band practice over Zoom- it's the 21st Century for crying outloud!), Haper Kill are one of those bands who can drop a hook that immediately sinks about three inches into the folds of your frontal lobe and makes a home there, burrowing in like a little musical badger, until you either call a doctor to cut it out with a laser, or learn to live with it homsteading on the curveture of your cortex. I'm in the latter camp because after cohabitating with A Taste of... for about a year, I'm starting to wonder what my life was like before it got its catchy little claws into me. For such a young group, they've already coalesced into a very dependable and practiced, classic sorta punk sound- one that gives off unmistakable notes and nods to their influences, without deluding their own distinctive flavor. Take "Death and Taxes," whose churny, buzz-saw surge and anxious circleback approach to building up hooky payoffs obviously couldn't have existed without Green Day having blazed the way for this particular kind of slacker-germinated melody stacking decades prior- still, the actual construction of the song and its premise (praying for death so that you can finally relax and escape the crushing debts and overbearing burdens of modern life) rests on a very sturdy sonic substratum one that is pinned in place by a wry dynamic that is both bitterly earnest and tenderly ironic. Similarly, you could pick up on some Bouncing Souls-esque melo-core croon and riff pile-ups on "Chinese Restaurant," but accompanied by a satirical drag that rolls back the tempo, allowing the riffs and punishment-magnet lyrics to punch well above their assigned weight class. Then there is the sensibly tender drift of the unrequited anguish-bomb "I Swear," the nervy and defiant skate-a'billy bombing run of "Daguerreotype," and whimsical and harsh, power-pop bubble-burster "BLOAT" to cap things off. The whole album has the vibe of a definitive Gilman St band but with the buff-and-scruff of downtrodden midwestern charm that polishes well-worn conventions into genuine rock gems. Just A Taste of Harper Kill is all you need to know that you need more!  

Speakermaxxx('d)/The Tape Deck Below (Outcast Tape Infirmary)