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)

Album Review: Asian Glow - 11100011

I had initially resisted listening to Asian Glow until this year, when the hype became essentially unavoidable. The main reason was their name. For a Korean artist to christen themselves Asian Glow felt somewhat ridiculous and reductive to me, and I didn't want to dignify it. Really, imagine if I started a band and went around calling myself "Celtic Neon," or "White Lumen," or "Western Filament ," or... Actually- all those go pretty hard. Hmm.... kind of wrote myself into a corner here, didn't I? Whatever, the lesson is: never judge a book by its cover. To that point, if there were ever an artist who was more than they appeared on the surface, sonically at least, it would be Asian Glow (known on the street as Shin Gyeongwon). Far beyond any binary or restrictive procedural output, their latest album 11100011 embodies an approach to shoegaze, noise, and emo that drastically exceeds the imagination of their peers, both at home and abroad (except possibly Weatherday, with whom they mingled their talents to make an EP in '22). For example, tracks like "Feel All the Time" are suffused with a heavy sort of electricity that tints the air and discolor it with tension, like the atmosphere on a muggy summer day just before a big storm, it comes pouring out of the speakers like a Biblical flood and there is no way of packing it back in to avoid drowning in its afflicted, neo-romantic discharge- you just have to let it take you. This weighty pulsation of cloudbursting potential is reflected in the pained and unrequited ebb of that track's rhythms and the anguished flow of its lyrics, which seem to usher forth through shellacking eyewalls of composure bracketed by a partially camouflaged, but overall keening disquietude. This cool, phantasmagoric swelter also beautifully binds together the disparate traces of the gothic-leaning "Jitnunkebi (Winter's Song)," securing into a singular continuity a rich, glistening fabric of baroque pop, vampy Italian psychedelics, and tortured third-wave emo grandure into a neon redux of something like the Black Parade. Subtlety isn't necessarily the key to what Asain Glow accomplishes on this album, as much as their triumphs are manifest in the total integration of disparate signifiers, presenting the opportunity for the strange to marry the ordinary in a kismet of cross-pollinated chaos- like when a bounding twinkle-hook takes on the quality of an MBV-esque brainpeeling feedback ripple subsequent to a saturated and smoke-choked Manners-era Passion Pit riff on "Out of Time." Other analogous and admirable amalgamations can be located on none-other-than the title track, where a maladjusted indie groove tarantellas in a stop-start wincing progression as if stumbling through a dancefloor full of thumbtacks while wax sculptures of Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser of MGMT burn in the background, as well as the gorgeous conflagration of "Camel8strike," which sounds like Cocteau Twins melding with Team Sleep as they molt and become reborn like a two-headed phoenix in the pit of a haunted and abandoned LA recording studio, set ablaze by faulty wiring coming into contact with a capsized liter of Coca-Cola. There appears to be even more below the surface on 11100011 that I could hope to cover in a review even three times as long as this one is at present. That's alright. If I can pique your interest enough for you to give 11100011 a spin, then I've done my job. The album is a magnificent enigma, waiting in a state of troubled magnanimity to be decoded by an open ear concomitant with an open mind.