Interview: Superdestroyer x Phonewithchords

Two dudes from different worlds meet in the cosmic dustbin of the internet and emerge carrying a brilliant ball of concentrated hope and burning plasma. They call it Surrealist Love Songs, and an EP to survive the astral cull of the necroeconomic austerity combine currently crawling the latitudes and longitudes of most known creation- an emo-beat space-odyssey to keep you sane while you scan for an entry point in the event horizon of what you can only hope is the gleam of a brighter future. Superdestoyer and Phoneswithchords basically take the reins for this episode while I merrily ride shotgun- more of a postmortem than an interview in some ways. Listen to the convo below: 

Surrealist Love Songs is out on Lonely Ghost Records. Check it out here: 

Album Review: Seabomb - Dolphin Chamber

Dolphins! Man's steady, loyal, and aquatic companion, who has been with us and been watching over humanity for as long as we as a species have braved the open waters. Since the first fisherman set raft to surf, the dolphin has been there for us, guiding the passage of our vessels, rescuing sailors from watery graves, directing the ambitious among us to buried treasure, and, while often mistaken for mermaids, has sung lullabies to many a ship's crew, ensuring them a restorative night's rest. Why are dolphins so helpful, you may ask? It's possible that they see something of themselves in us, as we are both intelligent, creative, and socially complex mammals who greet each other by tasting each other's urine. [Citation Needed] With all dolphins have done for humans over the millennia, it's about time that someone gave back to our moist, squealy siblings of the sunlit zone. Enter Seabomb and their LP Dolphin Chamber. Seemingly a tribute to these saltwater samaritans, the album presents a bright and refreshingly brisk approach to breakbeat production that is defined by its fluidity and affable tone. Resolved to the task of evaporating boredom, the bubbly percolations and interdependent, rippling, and interlocking orbits of sequences stir a salty broth of sound into an intoxicating libation to fuel a disco in the shallows of the seabed in an observance of inter-ecological, cross-species solidarity, connecting timeless patterns of compatriotism with the persistent pull of currents both sonic and tidal in nature. From the first voyage to today, this party has been saving you a spot on the dance/sea floor. Why not dive in? The water's fine, and the company is divine.
 

4 Millennia of good vibes. Don't deprive yourself for one minute more.

Album Review: SickOnes - Find Energy

Man, SickOnes... it almost makes me nauseous thinking about what could have been. The UK three-man (+ one lady) crew came up in that weird window in the late '10s when otherwise cool Millennials started coming out to their friends as fans of Minor Threat and Bad Brains and Biohazard and Youth Brigade and began starting bands that could actually get booked at hipster festivals as more than just a sideshow or treated as something other than a public spectacle. Trash Talk pioneered the possibility of flexibly minded old school revival in a lot of ways, which Turnstile used as the runway for their own take off into the stratosphere, and I always felt like SickOnes could have obtained a parallel altitude had they stuck with it. Unfortunately, they decided to ground the project in 2021 after releasing the "Agility" single, leaving their most recent and lengthy release of note being their 2018 EP Find Energy. Find Energy is undoubtedly worth revisiting, representing a forceful intersection of punk grooves, punchy melodies, and hip-hop attitude; it feels like being funneled into a first-person perspective of someone completing a legendary run of a Ninja Warrior-style obstacle course with sure-footed grace and levelheaded aggression. The standout track is obviously the whiplash PMA anthem "Bad Way", but the warped and fiery "Ego Death" and the hammer-headed optimism of "The Choice" can hold their own as crowd-killin' rampage rustlers even when stacked against the best of contemporary hardcore. We probably won't see another album from SickOnes for a minute (if ever), but what they've left us with is more than enough to cement their legacy.

Album Review: Innumerable Forms - Pain Effulgence

Innumerable Forms is the fetid brain loogie of Jon DeTore, who, along with pals Jensen Ward of Iron Lung, Chris Ulsh of Mammothgrinder, and Connor Donegan of Genocide Pact, has wrought upon the Earth a genuinely malevolent force of oppressive morbidity. Innumerable Forms is a necrotic, frost-ravaged take on Finnish death metal combined with American doom in the vein of Brooklyn’s Winter, imbued with a palpable rage carried over from DeTore's days in the Boston power-violence group Mind Eraser and with a knack for darkly penetrating melodies honed from his years playing in power metal groups Sumerlands and Magic Circle. Their third LP, Pain Effulgence, is just as crushingly moribund as its older siblings, feeling like a torturous preamble to a final crushing tragedy, like Sisyphus losing his footing on the soft peaty ground of a Tartarus incline, and watching helplessly as the boulder he had been pushing slowly topples backwards towards his prone and vulnerable form, about to transform him into a pulpy grist. "Impulse" begins with a coffin-rattling howl before leaden riffs begrudgingly pry a leprous melody from its cursed sonic foundation; "Blotted Inside" is bleak and ominous, hanging its gargantuan grooves over the listener like a crow-pecked carcass of an accused warlock; while "Overwhelming Subjugation" unleashes a formidable, all-consuming deluge of acid sludge-punk; and "Austerity and Attrition" churns out a final light-swallowing dirge of doom that only the most depraved of God's rejects could muster the blasphemous nerve to peer into as if it were a mirror. Pain Effulgence is cold liquid anguish incarnate, the kind that burns in the best sort of way.

A fresh, yet familiar, chapter in the history of brutality (Profound Lore).

Album Review: Trust Fall - You Can Glow In The Dark

Trust Fall started out as the big solo leap of Erica Leshon, resident of Olympia, WA, and member of a diverse (and now mostly dormant) pantheon of passionate DIY sound-peddlers such as Margy Pepper, Prank War, Pines, and Tankini. Trust Fall sounded pretty radical to my ears when I encountered the project around the time their EP Giants of Love was released in 2018, and they certainly appeared to be thriving and flowing with the currents of cutting-edge culture at the time. Of course, times change, and they're not really riding any kind of a wave at the moment, but I'm still glad to see that they're around and sorta doing their thing. Trust Fall's sound mainly consists of softly distorted, lo-fi, reverb-heavy and bashfully grungy bedroom punk and emo, and it's stayed consistent from their earlier releases to their most recent, 2023's You Can Glow in the Dark EP. The songs here trade in the same coy punk and flirty feedback-pedal-pushing twee in the vein of Waxahatchee and All Dogs that dominated the scores for underground haunts and unlicensed gig spaces in the latter half of the 2010s. The album begins beautifully with a credo of contemplation and vulnerability that communicates a kind of solidarity that perseveres through adversity in the form of opener and title track "Glow in the Dark." It is followed by the buzz-hook pivoting wheel of fire dubbed "Revisiting" and a hot-blooded, jangle-fisted teardown they call "Not Dead Yet." After that, the band escapes from the trouble they've stirred up via the sizzling and cathartic, caravanning joust of "Clear Blue Sky," leading the way to the late-bloomer bop of "Little Lost," the deceptively inclement bluster of "Storm Inside," and the sundry and sympathetic climax "Nobody Knows." Whether you want to day drink and smoke American Spirits on a friend's porch or sit in your kitchen, sipping coffee and watching the rain through your back window, this You Can Glow In The Dark can supply the ambiance for whatever self-replenishing vibe you are in most in need of.

Album Review: Bombardement - Dans La Fournaise

Bombardement is exactly what they sound like they are... which is a freaking wave of harsh, stray particulates which coheres into a pelting deluge of antagonistic fury. The French croisst-punk quintet puts the listener under the gun on their LP Dans La Fournaise, as they lob just about everything they've got handy at your sensitive little ear holes: Saxon-sharpened solos, Sacrilege-soaked grooves fished straight from the storm gutter, gale-ful shouts, weird Slough Feg-esque interjections, player pianos, alarm clocks, bathtubs, fistfuls of trash, bloated specimens of expired local fauna—you name it, it's inbound and coming your way! Vocalist Oriane is particularly well-suited for her role as lead barker, almost playing the role of drill sergeant for the unruly unit, cracking her voice like a horsewhip in a kind of Colin Abrahall of GBH fashion, goading each track on the album towards an accelerated abandonment of caution in the ultimate pursuit of an evermore potent expression of spite. While Oriane eggs on the band, guitarists Boubi and Stéphane, and rhythm section Nico and Luc, explosively excavate a steeply graduated escalation of concrete, socially antagonistic sounds that give the vocals a launchpad to leap from in order to signal the next volley of the assault. They're like a perpetual motion machine, fueled by indignation, and whose primary output is caustic provocation- a fire brimming, spleen, belching sulfur into the nostrils of the arrogant and unduly proud.

Album Review: Kurayamisaka - Kimi wo omotte iru

Japanese alt pop/rock group Kurayamisaka is a band that doesn't spend that much time looking in the rearview mirror. Their most recent singles are definitely of a more "mature" pop persuasion, but this doesn't detract from their earlier work in the slightest. The heart-fluttering whimsy of more recent efforts like "Evergreen" is presaged by the dove-winged dramatic catharsis of tracks like "Cinema Paradiso" off their 2022 EP Kimi wo omotte iru, but even in the light of these premonitions, their earlier work retains a distinctive character all its own. Kimi wo omotte iru (basically I'm Thinking of You) is one of those albums that impeccably balances temperate coquettish purrs and dulcet whispers with a visceral, suffocatingly dense undertow of distortion in a manner that is both fantastic and liberating- a veiny rill of intersecting streams where shoegazey sizzle roils over emocore pathos in its most essential form. They essentially synthesize the brazenly exquisite charm of Pains of Being Pure at Heart and the volatile fuzz-fry of Ovlov's landfill style of guitar noise without cutting corners on either melodicism or delivery on blistering impact. Tracks like "Seasons" are amongst the most impressive in this regard, starting out with a roll of heated rock thunder before effortlessly unfurling a delicate and enduring bristle of melody that manages to hold its own even in the ensuing maelstrom of a gratifyingly emotive upswell of energy and release. There are more subdued moments as well, like on the cautious waltz of "Last Dance," but even in their moments of reprieve, the group manages to hone a vital energy that is given more conspicuous expression on the turn-up-and-burn-out closers "Farewell" and "Curtain Call". Kurayamisaka may have progressed in their endeavors and moved on (as they should), but I've been thinking about Kimi wo omotte iru almost daily since it first graced my ears, and I'll probably continue to ponder it for years to come.

Album Review: Femtanyl - Reactor

I'm going to drop a tl;dr here and just say that I think Femtanyl's Reactor EP is pretty freakin' great. If that's all you came to see, then you can mosey on back to Reddit or wherever, but if you need to know more, read on, I have plenty more to say. Periodically, I'm struck by the concern that I'm not going to be able to find novel things to write about breakbeat, drum'n bass, jungle, dance, and electronic music, etc., just in general. Like, it's not always an intellectual style- it's something that is validated more by vibe than whatever verbiage myself or others can heap on top of it. It's a disheartening prospect because I very much love how radical artists working in these spaces sound on their face, but if I don't think I have anything novel to say about a record other than "slaps" well... I'm not going to write about it. To make things worse, an artist like Femtanyl literally does not need a tedious written extolment of their merits-they already live in a sphere of internet infamy and an evolving mythology that attempting to encapsulate is like putting up a fly screen around a radiative fog- it's unclear what you could even possibly be attempting to catch, and you might just be snagging a clump of the big 'C' in process, so why even try... well, attempting the impossible and stupid has never stopped me before, so why let it start now. A big part of what makes Femtanyl interesting in my opinion is that she lets a lot of her personality through on her material. The artist responsible for dance and electronic music tends to be unpersoned while their music is actually playing- they're the clockmaker and their machine can mostly run without their caring hand- this is usually ideal, because while people are dancing or vibing, they want to really sink into the moment and not have someone's ego budding in and bringing them down- but with Femtanyl, her presence on each track is unavoidable, not only because of the hyper-expressive and modulated digital hardcore (and frankly, just plain hardcore punk) vocals that provide the hook and melody for most tracks, but also because her persona is imprinted unmistakably on the incredibly angular and prickly integration of loops and beats that she articulates, none of which feel like they have been assembled for the listener's mere pleasure or euphoria- instead being a product of some fixation or monomania on the part of its creator- an explosion of another's intrusive thoughts and obsessions into others’ minds through the contagion of sound. Femtanyl's sound, especially on this EP, feels like a vertical slice of the layer cake of her brain, dripping with greasy discolored offal, foul-smelling ooze, and inhabited by swarms of insects with way too many legs and abdominal segments- her spirit takes this wedge of disgorgement in the shape of dessert and smear it all over some breaks like a chunky piece of clay until the whole productions looks like a murder scene- and that's when the beats really start to rip- when things get so grotesque that you can't look away anymore, then that's when Femtanyl really makes herself known, emerging from the viscera like a scene from Hellraiser- a malcontent, slighlty toothy and plush-textured abomination reassembling a physical manifestation in this world once enough blood has been spilt on her grave. This more or less gets to the heart of what's intriguing and so... let's say polemical about Femtanyl- you can't listen to Reactor, or any of her body of work, without feeling her presence and looming aura- you literally can't escape her while her beats are flowing and I think this triggers a flight response in some and a deranged tendon of connection for others. She's kind of the monster under your bed in that way- a projection of your own fears in the face of something there but unknowable- hiding in a place of supposed sanctuary, and thriving in the mystery of the dark- a manifestation of a dayglo beat-making boogie-girl ready to strip the lining of your head cage to make a sour broth to sooth her restive soul.