Friday, July 25, 2025

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? 

Saturday, July 19, 2025

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 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).

Monday, July 14, 2025

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. 

Sunday, July 13, 2025

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 this 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)

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

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.   

Tuesday, July 8, 2025

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).