Album Review: Fulu Miziki - Mokano EP

Uganda's favorite sonic salvagers Fulu Miziki already had a recognized and well-received album under their upcycled, polyurethane waist straps (2021's Ngbaka) by the time 2024 EP Mokano sprang from the soil like a disco-ball-patterned sunflower, but in many ways this later release is their earnest debut to the world. Ngbaka, while being sonically and texturally interesting and imaginative in its own right, denied a prospective audience a proper exposition of the group's unique interchange of Cuban-inspired and East African sounds- a regrettable development for a band whose raison d'être is raising to the plane of consciousness the natural and genuine in a sea of manufactured superfluity. Mokano gives a stronger sense of this purpose, while being a more straightforward reclamation of aural authenticity, thriving amidst the mountainous cast-offs of decadence and decay- in other words, it's landfill music meant to root you back in the dirt and struggle of this planet. A call to motion and unity of action rings out from the first strike of a PVC pipe on opener "Mbanga Pasi," with its banded, jived-out rhythms, inundating percolation of improvised percussion, accompanied by a multi-tiered torrent of vibrant group vocals, a potent display of energy that heightens the senses suitable in preparation for the bopping scoot and scrapping skip of "Bopeto" with its pepper-bark puff and gum-boned slap, which then winds down just in time for the high-traction bustle of "Tamatu" to take center stage, followed by the monsoon-summoning charm "Vie Eza," the ascendant acapella of "Soki Ozwyi Yako Lia," and finally, the jerky rhythmic convoke "Mosala," which seems to pull flesh and blood from the clay of the altar on which it pivots to give body to a prancing homunculus, whose gesticular form is as dynamic as lightning and who lithe figure extends as a bridge between the plane of the sky and the terrene flats below. Not everywhere in the world has the infrastructure to dispose of the refuse generated by modern industrial output to satisfy consumer needs, and as a result, many around the world end up living with and amongst the consequences of light production and petty consumption as the terrain around them fills up with refuse and non-biodegradable elements, from both their communities and abroad, as their home becomes a dumping ground for places rich enough to have the luxury of forgetting about the debris created by their lifestyles. But in heaping and accumulating, these disregarded residues of modernity reshape the land where they come to rest, and for those who still maintain a connection to this land, even as undesirable as it is, the detritus integrates into their cosmos, augmenting the spiritual balance and flows of energy but not disrupting the fundamental obligations which the living have to the cumulative well-being of creation; instead, demanding an infusion of imagination to reintegrate what is cast off back into an integrated whole and renew humankind's commitments to the Earth in the process. Fulu Miziki play "junk music," because junk is the indigestible kernel and stubborn gallstone lodged in the belly and at the heart of the contemporary schism with the forces that sustain life on this planet- by reclaiming waste, they are reclaiming the world itself.

もしもし! はい, レコードでございます!

Album Review: Summer Cannibals - Can't Tell Me No

I never considered Summer Cannibals to be one of the essential acts of the late great garage rock boom of the early '10s, but they always had a certain spunky charm that made the group notable if nothing else. Their first LP had the title No Makeup slapped across its face, and from the moment that dog hit the track they never backed down from that no-second-chances, put-up-or-shut-up style of rock on a kaiser roll... But they DID eventually refine the hell out of it! 2019's Can't Tell Me No is the fourth album from Portland's Summer Cannibals. The era when this defiant bit of pop art dropped was afflicted with an unsightly rash of two-bit hucksters of all hackneyed strains, frankly scraping the barrel for whatever nostalgia they could sprinkle on top of their garbage to hide their stink with a dusting of legitimacy- the dead horse de jure being being Dinosaur Jr.- but Summer Cannibals escaped a trip to the glue factory by only ever aping the Pixies, and doing it in ways that were often as unexpected as a stray toenail glazed into the surface of an apple fritter... albeit far more tempting, as it were. Clearly, when they were bashing together Can't Tell Me No, there were going to be zero naysayers to dissuade the group from recasting and redefining their tried-and-true, no-frills brio- thankfully, such additions managed to clarify and sharpen their sound, rather than weigh it down with gaudy hubris. The album strikes the right note out of the gate with the buzz-guided killer ray of perception "False Anthem," that has this infectious yet measured bounce and enough wiggly elbow room to permit the cracking off of a few groovy and rewarding side tangents. Following that is the title track, "Can't Tell Me No," a feisty little stomper helmed by an angular, desaturated guitar groove reminiscent of Sleater-Kinney circa All Hands on the Bad One with some appropriately fizzy breakdowns thrown in for good measure. Later, "Behave" platforms big Veruca Salt-esque vocal hooks embedded in a tense, Pixies-inspired, riffy groan-huff. Things get a little more lonesome cowgirl-esque with the dizzy, nipping rebuke "Like I Used To," before dipping into the subdued ripple-pop splash of "Innocent Man," which doesn't flinch at the chance to litigate crimes that only take place in the dark, and then "Start Breaking" takes us on a sweetly retributive demolition exhibition. Lastly, I genuinely appreciate how this heater fades out with a shimmering, melt-on-touch adieu, "Into Gold"; it's a sweet and affirming send-off that the album had surely earned by the end. Can't Tell Me No really feels like the culmination of the band's career and intentions- if they were satisfied to kick up their feet and lean on this thing's laurels for now until the big one drops, I wouldn't blame them one bit.

Tiny Engines, big ambitions.

Album Review: Coffret De Bijoux - My Limbs Are Not Mine

Of all the tattered flesh shrouds and spectral shades she slips through, Coffret de Bijoux appears to be maturing into Alice Simard's most compelling and sonically adventurous manifestation. The vicious Québec-based virtuoso has quite the rap sheet, splitting her time and a swath of eardrums across a range of abominable aural bêtes noires; whether she is flexing her carrion-fed, brutal-death shredding chops with Codex Crudelitas, communing with the gods of inter-neuro-grid with the Lain-inspired cybergrind exe. FILESHAREMAIDEN, or gutting the idols of restraint with the dauntingly anointed goregrind sauvage Onchocerciasis Esophagogastroduodenoscopy- there is no height of extremity too lofty, or aquifer of dissonance too low, that to drill to its depths would be unimaginable. Which brings us back to Coffret de Bijoux; outwardly, it is a depressive atmospheric black metal project- the first releases under its mantle were ghastly and otherworldly, devoid of recognizable human warmth (or verbal expression) and submerged in the oily dew of void-burn existential perturbation, an orientation towards sound that culminated in the pinnacle of 2025's wen jalè jalè gunala, a fraying web of gossamer that shrieks and rends its own soft flesh in a fitful attempt at self-reorganization and recognition, tortured form that threatens to spontaneously combust through the friction of its interior traivol. There was perhaps a considerable dose of Damian Anton Ojeda's Trhä in the alchemist's vessel out of which Coffret de Bijoux emerged, especially in the way that emotion tends to leak out all over performance like black lacquer seeping from a cracked inkwell, but there is certainly more to its chemical composition than simply a reflective polymerization of her peers. Last year, Coffret de Bijoux also introduced this world to the project's emo chip-tune side with the sullenly angelic and blindingly enigmatic intablej' u ana, which could have convincingly fronted as a Weatherday and Këkht Aräkh collaboration and left me uncertain about its true origins. This willful and restless transmutation is again evident on my limbs are not mine, which, as far as I can tell, is Alice's first (mainly) English-language release with Coffret De Bijoux, as well as her first full and proper punk record- scraping together brisk, punchy third-wave emo-inspired grooves, pop-punk melodies, and early metalcore riffs to beat back the night with a force of resilience possessed only by the perpetually young at heart. Incredibly, the record retains enough of its black metal allele to not result in too dramatic or off-puttingly divergent a turn for the project on the whole, but rather offers an opportunity to comprehend the richness of the vein of influences and inspirations that conspire to produce the genius of Coffret de Bijoux's spellbinding cache. From the rattling rollick and arresting seraphic avowal of "i need to see" all full of loose screws and bent halos, to the sweetly venomous coo of "nuit d'automne," to the veiled hunger and agitatedly exposed decampment of "i never recollect," through to the quietly wounded, organ-transplanting, and giallo-stained lament of the title-track, and finally the crushing return to form on the tearful, ruminating spectre and closer "pillow poise remembering"- my limbs are not mine extends the tensile subluxation of Alice's spirit as embodied in Coffret de Bijoux in a manner that magnifies the luster and ethereal shine of its fractured intricacy and interior.

Album Review: Ikebe Shakedown - Kings Left Behind

Thrones are toppled, kingdoms laid to waste, histories are reduced to sand, and all roads lead to ruin... but not if you're Ikebe Shakedown. The seven-member instrumental funk band out of Brooklyn, New York, may seem like they've abdicated and gone incognito since their 2019 LP, but their legacy has yet to be turned to ash by the ravages of time. Their sound is horn-driven, highly cinematic, stylishly psychedelic, and inspired by the soulful charm of Curtis Mayfield, the weighty rhythmic pulse of Fela Kuti, and the epic scope of '70s spaghetti western soundtracks. Kings Left Behind (as previously alluded, released in 2019)is the band's fourth studio album (and most recent), recorded straight to reel-to-reel by the band's bassist, Vince Chiarito. The album unveils an oasis of melodious intrigue with "Not Another Drop," establishing the group's predilection for gonzo grooves, which is supercharged on the following smoky, hookah-haze-infused "Unqualified," and is fully realized with a vengeance on the mid-album stinger, the momentous, bongo-and-horn-driven spanner "Hammer Into Anvil." "The Witness" takes things in a more mischievous direction, with its quivering guitars and spit-and-pucker percussion, a track that would slot easily into the soundtrack of some lost supernatural western thriller, set in a traveling carnival where all the orphaned performers inexplicably have telekinetic powers and a predilection to deploy them in a zeal for vindication. The most retro-sounding tracks on the album come near the end, with the spy-thriller-esque "No Going Back" and the rose-tinted slow jam "Kings Left Behind," a worthy pair of companions to help mask the cry of a gunshot ringing out over shifting desert dunes. It's the kind of album Coalmine Records exists to put out into the world. They dig through the rough and excavate the gems, so you don't have to.

Ain't no diamonds without Coal(mine Records).

Album Review: DJ Ramon Sucesso - Sexta dos Crias 2.0

Democratic in origin, flexible but dictatorial in constitution, DJ Ramon Sucesso's second LP is a direct sequel to 2023's Sexta dos Crias, itself a deposition of his infectious virtual "bubble beat" demonstrations. The channeling of his style into the cast of an album is more of an extension of the experiment than a formal climax, though. In comparison and guided by this analysis, the resounding conclusion is that Sexta dos Crias 2.0 is demonstrably mad, cracked, loopy, unwound, and sublated- a contorted hip-hop engine that operates on oxidized hardware and a slime-warping logic board, blithely unfurled in a brambly drugget down a hall of bruised spoils and landing in the pit of an anarchic rubber-room only to shoot back up the silo of its descent to clear a near-perfect dismount before catching the wings of another precocious rhythmic laceration of logical succession. An impish and impractical-seeming chiding of sequential experience and sensory cohesion- a cartoonish illumination of divine dance-floor intervention- a fission of splintering sonic compounds whose scattering particulates pierce and recombine their neighboring resonances, driving them to implode, invert, and reunify upon impact into deranged but adaptive novel configurations. A nourishing primordial soup that replenishes as it is consumed- never expended, ever expanding, like the contents of a cup that runneth over with frothy inspiration. Everyone is working for the weekend, only some are working (and succeeding) at making the liberation we seek on a Friday night into the standard we enjoy every day of the week.

Como acima, assim embaixo (Lugar Alto).

Album Review: Dream Machine - The Illusion

Feed your head popping poppies, chips of fractured pellucid fog, and scratchy heather to polish the crystal ball that hangs from the inmost concave of your dome. Dream Machine is a husband-and-wife duo, Matthew and Doris Melton, who miraculously arose from the once-still, tepid brew of Matthew's previous group, Warm Soda (which has been reformulated as of 2022). They combine the heavy, proto-metal grooves of bands like Iron Butterfly and Deep Purple with the murky psychedelia of the Doors and the larger-than-life hooks of Heart to create cascades of compelling psychedelic-garage pop. The Illusion (2017) is Dream Machine’s debut record, released on their good friend John Dwyer’s Castle Face Records, and later reacquired by Matthew's own Fuzz City. According to Matthew, the album is an antidote to the feelings of isolation and dislocation caused by social media and is meant to inspire people to share feelings and music face-to-face again, rather than through an ad-supported data mine. Unplug and unwind with the scaling, Deep Purple-esque guitars and huge, sonorous organs on “I Walk in the Fire,” the folding waves of organs and the relentless bass undertow on “Buried Alive,” the sparking jazz, adrenaline-pumping hooks, and ear-snaring chorus of “All for a Chance,” and the confident, toe-tapping, brick-house blues swagger of “Back to You.” Ironically, The Illusion is their most concrete and sincerely palatable work, having released two subsequent albums- Breaking the Circle and 2022's Living the Dream- both of which lack the punchy, raw panache of their debut and somehow fail to radiate the same potency of hypnotic magnetism as their initial pledge. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Album Review: Opal Vessel - Flesh Grinder

Subliminally caustic. Understated madness. Incomprehensible forms, with roots veining into the imaginary, as sepsis would leak from a rotten tooth into a pink-sheathed jawbone. Spreading as a wildfire, only as a brain fever of disconnected images, sounds, electric impulses, and tremorous anxieties. Violence in its final, most hushed permutation. Insidious, a poisonous aura with no taste or scent, encircling its prey without judgment or mercy. A finality colder than death. Not ruthless, but implacable all the same. Bubbling up from the pulpy bed of a blood-drunk akasha, inky and tenacious, but sobered from its feast of carnage, reflective in the depraved glow of its excesses—not remorseful, but one could be fooled. What more can be wrought from a mean horizon of esse but the lamentations which a thing such as it can inspire? The whimpering, the braying hatred, the orotund waves of sorrowful cries... a sweet symphony on some planes, but a hollow din on levels much higher. Hunger comes after the first course, of course, but it's a peculiar appetite that scrapes the guts even when the plates are clean, and it comes time for dessert. A silent expectancy and greed for a bounty richer than carnal comestibles can furnish, and yet blacker than the shade offered by six feet of grave dirt. When the Flesh Grinder has concluded its bladed dance, what satiation can the aurlization of a black hole continuum pursue to make whole the fullest deprivations of its sanguinary intentions? Where does the chthonic nadir of desire lie?

Album Review: Cerberus Shoal - Cerberus Shoal

Clipping and grafting the etching of an idea pilfered from a book of poetry written by Brown University students in 1893, Cerberus Shoal breached in Boston in 1994, before spawning up to Portland, Maine, to experiment on their ash-grey, half-pickled offspring in inky green hatchery jars. While hanging up their snaring tools in 2005, Cerberus Shoal invaerted and reemerged through a plethora of homely yet exquisite and adventurous phases over the course of their career, lumbering up from the fleshy bluffs of the human ear in the guise of a whisper-calm post-hardcore band before floridly unfurling into a powdered bone-dusted and warmly abstract folk band. Their precocious accession in planting a flag on the far shore of second-wave emo's sweetly caustic and bitterly gladsome Slint-mixed colluvium rim is still their most endearing work to these hairy old ears, though, and it's what I want people to hear most dearly from their revived catalog. The band's long out-of-print self-titled debut, recorded in 1994 and released in 1995 on Stella White records, and lovingly resuscitated by the applied sonic residency skills of Temporary Residence Ltd. (circa. 2018), documents the band's precocious beginnings and acts as an initial schematic whose architectures would be redlined, revised, and addendumed on later releases as the group increased the quotient of raw granola and thorium granules in their increasingly crunchy, amalgamed sound. In these early days, though, Cerberus Shoal embodied the marriage of rhythmically dislocated chord progressions characteristic of many Dischord Records signees and the progressive push, patient dynamics, and suppressed convulsions of slowcore dreamweavers ala Codeine, a fragily distilled formula which only occasionally tips its hand to spill into less equable fits of screamo-induced sensory disarray.

Out on Temporary Residence Ltd... I might have mentioned that already.

Album Review: Boko Yout - Gusto

Anytime I'm in a new town, I engage in various habits that are against my preferences towards longevity- one of which is picking up half a dozen donuts from one or more proprietors of such insulin-shock-inducing confections. Something I've noticed at many of the dens of these hip, sweet-salt-dealing devils is the prevalence of pink-frosted rings adorned with sprinkles on offer... something which leads me to wonder about the enduring influence of the Odd Future Collective. Sure, you could assume that these peony-painted threats to my gut health are downstream from the prolonged curse of Millennial arrested development and their senile Simpsons-mania, and nothing else, but I think you'd be wrong to jump to such conclusions. Who made such an iconic pastry cool after all? Not Al Jean, that's for sure. The Simpsons essentially became roundly and deservedly reviled under his stewardship. No, being reminded of Homer's indiscriminate sugar intake and the flailing legacy of a once celebrated sitcom is more likely to spoil one's appetite as we reflect on our own failures than to compel a joyous purchase. No, it's rather the opposite. The irony of adopting something completely uncool and popularly derided as a floating symbol of antagonism that I think makes the pink donut ironically VERY cool when ornamentally assumed by Tyler & Co., and which keeps it in the forefront of the cultural purview- an anti-symbol symbol, if you will- something that can be anything but is always an assertion of the self, even when declared in the negative... as well as a totem of one's (read: MY) future struggles with diabetes. Where else might you find Odd Future's resonance intervening remarkably out of the blue? Well, to answer this, you need to look no further than the Swedish band Boko Yout, whose album Gusto dropped late last year. For lead singer and creative keystone, Paul Adamah, the deranged reflection of late '00s LA as the site of a persecutory cataclysm and an endless moshpit on the rim of the abyss- which Odd Future divined- had the effect of cracking the carapace of his incarcerated figuration, eventually leading to the summoning of Dr. Gusto, a lwa-like presence that rises through the cracks in sidewalks, scurries up light poles, and tumbles northward, scaling pantlegs like a hairy spider up a sweating downspout intending to ride a cheval worthy of his emphatic tutelage. You can hear the incantation of drums beckoning Dr. Gusto to take the reins on the track "Shift," before the full force of his charisma seizes you in the bracing, rubber-skulled bounce and scrape of epi-biological recall on the preceding track that bears his name. Now smoldering, Blue Velvet-crushed-and-coated hip-hop is likely not the first impression that one would take away from Boko Yout's sound, as the group's hook-heavy and expressively groovy rock pedigree more immediately invokes the icy and cutting, yet fresh-faced and energetic '00s-ish British garage and indie revivals, splashing in the same youthful fountains as Bromheads Jacket and Maxïmo Park without sacrificing either sincerity or inborn inclinations towards spectacle—a playful kind of seriousness that resolves through sober internal inquisition into the phenomenon of the self and the fosterage of one's heritage, straining through this focus as if through an aspheric lens to uncover a sonic arterial lane that conjoins chaotic funk with slippery post-punk, and diasporic disco with confidently anti-fashion folk, making the wraparound rollicking and catchy call-up "Ignored," the wiry, gold-bug-busting and crypto-clay-soled manic clap of "9-2-5," and the motorik rev and waterslide-like groove of the courageously catchy "Imagine" come alive in a form that is both scientifically anomalous and yet ordained as inevitable by some dark sorcery accessible only through an oily globe that rotates like a molten core deep in the center of Paul Adamah's skull. What doesn't kill you makes you odder, and only the odd survive, so long as they have the appetite to chew through the chains that hold them back.

 

Hoop springs (digs) eternal (Hoopdiggas Recordings)

Album Review: El Sexteto Tabala - Reyes del Son Palenquero

I promised that I would cover more African and South American acts in 2026 when I wrote my 2025 Invitational, and if you thought I was simply blowing smoke and all manner of noxious fury, then you'd better sit yourself down and get ready to house a full buffet of smoked crow. Today, I am introducing you to Sexteto Tabalá, a Colombian folk group whose African ancestry and diasporic connections are so tightly wound around their sound that such lineages and histories are synonymous with themselves in the same way a cat identifies with its own striped coat. Sexteto Tabalá boasts of playing the ONLY true form of Colombian music,* in that it is free from guitars and electric instruments, in addition to pulling from the rich and dearly specific past of their nation's heritage and their familial ties to rebellious maroons, and deploying only instruments that were available to sugarcane workers in centuries past; notably amongst them the marímbula, a plucked box instrument, inspired by African percussion tools, but which owes its origins to Cuba. Further, the sound of Sexteto Tabalá is largely credited to the influence of Cuban engineers hired to supervise the sugarcane industry in the early 20th century in an area of Colombia which had been granted its autonomy by the Spanish Crown since 1713, San Basilio de Palenque. In their off hours, these Cubans would play son montuno songs and teach them to the agricultural workers of the area, most of whom were still descendants of runaway slaves. Over time, these once Cuban sounds would acquire their own distinct character as they were adopted by the Palenque people and transformed into the particular hybrid of African diasporic sound and Caribbean proto-salsa known as son Palenquero, a style that invoked its practitioners' Angolan, Central, and East African roots, sung in a unique dialect Creole derived from Bantu, while remaining independent, flexible, and conspicuously unadorned with the extraneous din of modernity. Sexteto Tabalá hold themselves out as continuing the traditions of the style's best-recognized purveyors like Sexteto Habanero, while taking care to respectfully innovate on traditional workingman's songs when inspiration strikes with indisputable serendipity. Their LP Reyes del Son Palenquero was recorded in San Basilio de Palenque but reissued by the Bogotá-based Palenque Records in 2016. Rhythmic inspiration that proudly carries the wealth of centuries of history and the debts owed to generations of pastoral workers, a burden as weighty as a mountain, which they hold aloft as if it were as light as a feather.

Palenque Records, where history comes alive!

* I have no way of verifying this, and I'm not saying that I condone such an assessment, however, it is what they say about themselves, which for a band from such a culturally rich and musically inclined country as Colombia, these are really fighting words, and the unnecessarily antagonistic character of their self-assessment genuinely amuses me. Like, why do you have to be so savage, bro? Damn!

Album Review: Bucle Lunar - ¿Qué pasó en Medellín?

Moon gazing has been an enthralling pastime for much of human history. For instance, the names of the various phases of the moon in Japanese correspond with the suggested activity observers should engage in while waiting for the celestial queen to make her debut each evening. The moon that rises on the 17th, for instance, is known as "tachimachizuki," which means that you can stand and witness the moon on that night's ascent without fear of taxing your weary legs, while "fukemachizuki," the name for the moon that rises on the 20th, suggests that you're better off catching a few winks before Tsukuyomi's lantern lights up the sky. In South America, there are some who say that witnessing a lunar eclipse can leave beauty marks on the face of one's future children—a sort of permanent reminder of the lunar guardian's blessing and distant stewardship of the people below, even when it itself is subsumed by the dark, or cast out by the light of day. You might not always see the moon, but you can still witness its gifts each morning when you gaze in the mirror. Reminders of an absence are painful, but unavoidable in life. Sometimes the only relief from anguish is song. "Cry Moon" by Venezuela's Bucle Lunar gives voice to this amiable sort of lament, with plush melodies and pale loops of powdery tranquil groove. Waiting and pining for the return to some truant felicity or tranquil degree of composure appears to be a recurring theme on their debut album ¿Qué pasó en Medellín?, of which "Cry Moon" is only one of its many splendid shades of luminance. The steady thumping progression and subtle electricity of the lush dream-pop pulse of "Tachycardia, thump thump" and the affable push of "Me muevo" prove capable of dislocating one from the entropy of their angst, while the slow embrace of the languidly expectant swirl of "Atemporal" and the persistent undertow of enticement and tenacity of "Terca" resist any reversion into despair. Sympathies filter in from abroad to gracefully envelop one's ears on the motorik psyched-out-mirage and cumbia-infused flow of "La kumbia," as well as the whimsically consecrated closer "Miranda en Belén," a track that is soaked in tears, whether they are of joy or deep sorrow, which may be an oscillating facet of speculation. Like the eternal circuit of the moon's perambulation around our sphere, there is no true end to the state of things, only phases and new beginnings; nights are long but not bereft of solace, and any absence felt is only a yearning yet to be fulfilled.

Ain't no cure for Summerblue Records. 

Album Review: 1349 - Massive Cauldron of Chaos

Like most people who claim the ignoble mantle and nerd de plume of audiophile, I'm still catching up on releases from 2025 (formerly the dumbest year on record, a record that was subsequently surpassed by the first week of 2026). Of the things that I'm glad that I've scooped out of the eye of the abyss is 1349's live record Winter Mass. Recorded around the time that the lockdowns were lifted in (presumably) Oslo (or some other godless, frigid plateau), this live record is a raw but vital procession of ugly and void-gouging sound that demonstrates pertinently just why the band has been able to maintain an audience for close to three decades on this cursed ball of dirt we call a planet. Unavoidably (at least for me), hearing Winter Mass has made me nostalgic for the album that introduced me to the band in the first place, 2014's Massive Cauldron of Chaos. It's not, as far as I know, considered one of their better albums, but it's also not one of their worst- it just tends to be the one that I think about most whenever I'm reminded of 1349... which is any time the subject of medieval diseases comes up (which in my life is more than you'd think for someone who is neither a physician nor a historian, but who does watch an awful lot of Apothecary Diaries). Named for the year that the black plague finally overtook Norway, 1349's most obvious references stylewise are groups like Mayhem and early Satyricon, although there are instances of Kreator-esque thrash riffage, most notable on the clamoring gnaw of gothic angst “Slaves,” the second song off the album I'm presently examining. In general, MCoC is a return to the band’s coldly masterful, blood-nourished roots. The previous decade was one of experimentation for the group, releasing boundary-pushing albums Revelations of the Black Flame in 2009 and Demonoir in 2010, both of which were received with hyperbolic consternation by corpse-painters who prefer to keep things fast and nasty. This superfluous ire was mostly quelled by MCoC’s return to form though, with Ravn’s raspy forked-tongue vocals, Archaon’s peeling shred torrents, and the super-human speed of drummer Frost’s legendary percussion laying waste to the expectations of their audience, and further treating them to a dip in a bubbling lake of acid swirling with a crimson foam of vicera-churned froth on “Cauldron,” rending them like a rag doll in a tug of war between two competing zombified pit bulls on “Exorcism,” disfiguring them beyond recognition on the bruisingly unshackled melee of “Chained,” and then mercilessly desecrating their remains on the groovy gang press of “Postmortem.” 1349 would indulge in more abstract forms of expression on subsequent releases, 2019's The Infernal Pathway and 2024's The Wolf & the King, but the stewing malignance of MCoC was undoubtedly the odious succor needed to  breathe fresh hellfire into the group, rallying them to carry their campaign of darkness into the 21st Century.

Bringer of a long dusk of discord (Season of Mist).

Interview: Post-Trash + 2025 Recap

You get through your first full week of 2026? Good! Glad the year hasn't killed you yet (not for a lack of trying, I'm sure). Before you finally kiss 2025 goodbye and drop it in the dustbin of history, take a look back with Dan and Pat of Post-Trash and myself as we chat about some of our favorite albums of the past year. 

If you don't already know, Post-Trash is an incredible resource for underground and alternative music coverage with a flexible coverage philosophy and a genuine openness to fresh critical voices. I used to contribute to Post-Trash back when I was just starting my illustrious music writing career (pause for applause/laughter/rain of rotten vegetables), and I'm forever thankful for Dan being willing to give a hopeless weirdo like me a chance to air out his errant opinions. 

Listen to the conversation here:

Albums covered in this episode (in order of appearance): 

Grace Rogers - Mad Dogs

Nyxy Nyx - Cult Classics Vol. I

Hiver & Jason Koth - Offers

Danny Brown - Stardust

Prewn - System

Wombo - Danger in Fives

Militarie Gun - God Save The Gun

Hedonist - Scapulimancy

Album Review: TrndyTrndy - Virtua

About a decade and a half ago, Vektroid raised it as a beacon and magnet for recognition of the existential ennui gripping those carried out to sea in the first wave of America's lost decade (still ongoing) in the wake of a major financial crash, and then Fire-Toolz optimized it to supercharge her caustic, rainbow-stained death spiral, leading to a badly realized and spotty cottage industry of extreme metal and punk bands trying to sound like the prime reference for their riffs were modernist watercolor prints found on the walls of dental offices nationwide (imitation is flattery, but it's also facile), and now it comes to this... all the hip, audacious, and circuitous routes have been trodden to the point that they have carved bleak, cavernous trenches and lightless, fallow gouges of no-man's-land into the culture; yet, it remains! So what to do with it? The only remaining ingress to the bounty of this small, fertile pasture is to step over the gate and waltz in like Big Chungus Bugs Bunny waddling into a vegan bakery with a hankering for a slice of cruelty-free carrot cake. The only thing in stock, though, is jazz- sweet, blithesome, impossibly pearlescent new-age fusion jazz, that's it! As the stars would have it, the kind of jazz that Rochester's TrndyTrndy curates and composes on Virtua was always the Fiddler's Green you pined to chart-wheel, thrown barefooted in your less guarded and honest moments of reflection- a plateau of fountainous mirth and charismatic intrigue, where knowledge is abundant and the future is as wide open as the horizon at dawn. TrndyTrndy is able to be the architect of this sonic encarta of bright, flawless forms, malleable flesh-marble, and dazzlingly synthesized auditory-tactile synesthesia despite being in their early twenties, and therefore likely never directly experiencing the era of Eyewitness CD-ROM guided tours of natural phenomena and archaeological investigations which serve as the aesthetic womb and inspiration for the project. They've dauntlessly condensed, extracted, and purified its primary essence, meaning that through the internet, all time is flat and abstract. You are 12, you've just hopped off the bus and are returning from school, your parents aren't home so you blow off your assigned school work and boot up the family computer, run a DOS executable from a digital encyclopedia, and spend the next two hours exploring a Smithsonian-sized archive of facts and photos about large jungle cats. You are 78, the young woman who brings you your pills in the afternoon has a playlist streaming on her phone and it is feeding music into the wireless headset in her ears, you accept the paper cup she hands you when she stops at your room, you pause and examine the contents of the cup, "Do I get the red pill today?" you inquire, she takes one of the earbuds of the headset out of her ear and asks you to repeat your question, the music pulsing out of the soft nub of the headphone is loud enough that you can hear it ring through the doorway without adjusting your cochlear implant, the sounds are sweet and comforting, familiar even, your memory is jogged but the recollection is so buried and long-forgotten you doubt its veracity as it has the clingy fuzziness of a hallucination... something... something about tigers? These worlds coexist, yours and everyone else's timelines have folded, and Virtua is the seam of the hinge where time and space collapse on their premises. It's all coming back to you now, isn't it?