Interview: Paida

When you're an intergalactic pop sensation, and you come across a planet on the verge of catastrophic ecological and psycho-social collapse, it puts you in a bit of a pickle. You can, of course, whisk yourself away to a solar system better known for its sanity and stability, or you can make landfall and understake an attempt at sensible astral diplomacy- so the story goes, polaris pop idol Paida has shouldered the onus of bringing enlightenment to the rest of us instead of kicking back and sipping sake in a satellite resort orbiting Zatan... regrettably, good samaritans rarely enjoy the fruits of their own labor, but she's making the most of it as any good idol would! Hailing from her crash pad in Space City, Texas, Paida does what she can to bring humanity closer to the stars through her blend of J-pop-inspired hits, infectious enthusiasm, and an eccentric brand of gallows humor. Harbingers of dystopian futures never sounded so delightful! Check out my interview with the ever-invigorating Paida below:

Check out Paida's most recent LP Second Sighting:

Album Review: Bad Breeding - Blood Manifest

Born in a concrete council block crib, Bad Breeding is anarcho hardcore out of Stevenage, UK. Part Discharge, part Amebix, flush with a rutty blush of Flux of Pink Indians, scrubbed grubby with a hank of Icons of Filth's soiled rags, with an infusion of bloodthirsty metalcore à la Expire, Bad Breeding is an astoundingly harsh punk outfit with a penchant for polemical lyrics against the status quo. Blood Manifest is a 7" sorta EP-type deal that bridges their 4th LP Contempt with whatever horrors they plan to unleash on the world next. The title track "Blood Manifest" wastes no time, revealing its malicious intentions and sordid skills from the drop, drawing a sharpened lace of toothy chords across your throat, leaning the pressure of an undulating, concussive groove into your back, and sticking around just long enough to watch you squirm in the pincers of your predicament, before plunging you mug-first into the scalding thrum and sanity-parcing peal of "Weapon of Tradition." If the A side wasn't jarring enough for you, then you're welcome to pull the ripper on "Exactly as They Wanted You," which dishes out a torrent of crusty skull-carving chords, sure to relieve you of the load of your smugly contorted countenance, just in time to have your dome-goo simmered in a bath of cerebral torment by the crunchy, death-crawl, and psychedelic glass-chewer, "Competition for Existence," an undeniably terse and truly terrifying evaluation of one's individual call to preserve the torturous and meager means by which their right to claim a ration of bread is earned day by miserable day. There is no redemptive arc for the squalor of the psycho-social. 

One, two, buckle my Little Independent Records.

Album Review: Telesonic 9000 - E.C.H.O.

Are you ready for a new technotronic age? An eon of telescoping, infinite horizons that slices through the staid film of the possible like a superheated knife through a partition of aluminum foil, permitting the divine ray of exceptional human promise to extend through the newly opened aperture and rebound past the edge of our present limitations- isn't that the kind of world you want to live in? Doesn't that sound exciting? Well, keep waiting, 'cause it's already passed. Your future is compulsory and predetermined- a mostly sedentary and anxiety-prone test subject in Sam Altman's open-air laboratory, who, if they are lucky, will get converted into a battery once they've been wrung dry as a dataset. Ah, if only we controlled machines instead of being controlled by machines that serve other masters. Electronic rock artist Telesonic 9000 prefers to wallow in the wellspring of potentiality that existed in the pre-internet age, exploring the hinge points of alternative pathfindings on his 2023 EP E.C.H.O., an audaciously warm resonance cascade that ripples into the ether with immaculate clarity of purpose, intercepting the invisible shapes floating in the torrents of oblivion and mapping them with the precision of an oscillating, cyber-brained chiropteran as it glides out of the snares of the digital dragnet and blindly follows a faithful course of deliverance charted by a reflexive sense of contingency and expectant outcomes once considered common place in an advanced, technologically enmeshed society- a compass of sound, navigating by the vibrancy of the terra incognita in which it seeks, a place whose presence we can hear, but which we must still struggle to depart for if we ever hope to arrive... The album also comes in punchcard form... which is about as whimsical as it is impractical.

Album Review: Etienne Charles - Gullah Roots

Well, I'm glad that I picked up Gullah Roots from an all-star jazz man, Etienne Charles, as it has confirmed an aspect of my childhood that I honestly thought had slipped southward through the opal of the hourglass. When I was nothing but a rugrat, there was a show on Nickelodeon where kids learned life lessons on a tropical island somewhere out in the Atlantic ocean with a giant tadpole in tow- I always assumed that it took place somewhere in the orbit of Haiti because of the accents that everyone had, and it's not a show that I've ever been able to reminisce with anyone about because no one else my age seems to be able to recall it existing, so I've mostly filed it away as a hallucination that I've experienced in my childhood, and left it in the backup RAM of my memory, teetering on the verge of oblivion by inattention. Well, wait a jog my memory there, Chuck! I've been sent down a rabbit hole this afternoon, confirming that Gullah Gullah Island was in fact NOT a fever dream I experienced as a toddler, and probably most shockingly, it took place in the UNITED STATES! Gullah Roots is the byproduct of composer, recording artist, assistant professor of jazz studies at Michigan State University, and trumpeter, Etienne Charles's exploration of the salt marsh swells and thriving island culture of South Carolina's Lowcountry, finding in these settings a certain familiarity between the people who call these places home and the Caribbean from which he hails. Gullahs, or Geechee as they're also sometimes called, are the people who share a namesake with the region, a distinct population in the American South who, due to their relative isolation over the centuries, have developed a unique and distinctive culture, as well as a language, primarily speaking an English-based creole with a plethora of terms and phrases on loan from their ancestors who were trafficked from the Congo River basin, modern-day Sierra Leone and Liberia, to work in the rice plantations which produced some of the first viable agricultural products of the Carolinas (and yes, as you've probably guessed, Gullah Gullah Island is set on an isle off the Carolina coast, in one of these communities that retains its exceptional Lowcountry heritage- and is also apparently plagued by giant singing frogs, for better or worse...). Charles's treatment of this region on Gullah Roots is, of course, beautiful and radiant, but doesn't stray too far afield from what you'd expect based on his previous efforts, 2024's Creole Orchestra and 2019's Carnival: The Sound of a People Vol. 1, combining the traditions of American jazz with those of his native Trinidad, with dashes of French Caribbean tossed in to spice things up, augmented here to a degree by a certain pan-diaspora spiritualism, which knits together the spirit and heart of displaced people in joy before creation and the Almighty, expressed through the gospel and soul-infused "Watch Night I (Prayer)" as well as the blissful step and shuffle of "Ring Soul," while paying special attention to the contemplative contributions of rhythm and resonance on the polymorphic title track and the arresting, unorthodox homily to slaves in revolt that is "Igbo Landing," which unfurls in a diptych style epic in exultation to pride and defiance. Gullah Roots is a sonic tome waiting for you to unravel its secrets; every phrase an ode, every groove plots the path towards a fresh perspective- good music is like that, though: it maps the terrain and sets you free to discover its treasures and partake in its blessings.

Electrifying etiquette (Culture Shock Music).

Album Review: Creeping Death - Boundless Domain

Texas, man, it's a whole different kind of place. While the Midwest is still sheltering itself from the last blizzardly breaths of winter, they're already in the swelter of summer. But this is not a normal summer, you understand... from what I hear it's like the state is closer to the sun than the rest of the country. Like camping on a frying pan with a gas flame dancing beneath its keel. It's the kind of place where you can find free rattlesnake jerky sizzling on the ground in a Wal-Mart parking lot, and you can stick an egg in your back pocket and barbecue it on your own butt sweat. Dust-choked, UV-deathray-sautéed, half-buried in sift and seemingly forsaken by God, it's the sort of place that you have to be half-coyote to survive in. It's the only place on Earth I would believe a band like Creeping Death would call home. Named after a Metallica song off Ride the Lightning, Creeping Death is basically a death metal crossover band with a lot of metallic hardcore and thrash elements woven through its core, forming a rough subdermal exoskeleton of rusty barbed wire and reclaimed heavy machinery. Boundless Domain is their second LP, following up on their RuneScape-inspired debut Wretched Illusions, and their tribute to late Power Trip singer Riley Gale, 2021's The Edge of Existence EP. Their sound combines elements of '90s death à la Bolt Thrower with Swedish death by way of Entombed, the thrashy peel of Morbid Visions-era Sepultura, the vicious deathcore of Human Error, and the hardcore thunder-horse pummel of twisted Lone Star stallions Iron Age. Their sound and aesthetic are in line with the death metal revival hardcore like Fuming Mouth and Brainoil from a few years back, but with a certain element of savagery that you can only acquire from forging under rocks for bugs and lizards to fortify your sustenance. "Cursed" is a steamroller of galloping beats and meat-rending guitar churns, while the title track vacillates between a dry-rot, thrash-necrotic pit of pestilence and a d-beat death-nado of crust-punk fury. Following closely behind is "Intestinal Wrap," a sufficiently fast and terrifying barbed-whiplash of a number with some bold and brutal thrash elements sounding like Outer Heaven doing a Red Death impression, with the final track "The Common Breed" offering a buffet of gorgeously gruesome old school death worship with enough of a classic punk pulse to keep you headbanging until your dome is filled with nothing but batter-whipped, pink toothpaste. Boundless Domain is as brutal and inexhaustible as the arid plains from which it hails.

On some label of something.*

*Ok, so Boundless Domain is released on MNRK Heavy. I don't know what MNRK stands for, so I'm just going to assume it's a stand-in for malarky. I'm also not going to link to said label because it's like a brand or something managed by a tangle of conglomerates, and I really don't care. I wrote this review not knowing what label Creeping Death was on, and simply because I like their record. After I finished though, I sort of regret it because you really don't get much more into the realm of faceless corporate halls of mirrors than whatever entity is currently distributing this record. 

Album Review: Kadavar - Kids Abandoning Destiny Among Vanity And Ruin

Do you know what it's like to split your face like a dinner plate and serve the hot, fresh sponge cake of your reverie as it oozes out of your bone tin to an impregnable stranger as so much greasy spilled lava cake dumped directly into their lap? No? Well, Berlin's Kadavar does- so shut up and listen- if you're ever in a situation where you have to divulge the full nakedness of the putrid inkwell of your subconscious to someone (in self-defense, or out of perverse wish-fulfillment, what have you), you'll at least be prepared (it's working for me at least). Kadavar traditionally plays a nostalgic blend of Led Zeppelin-worshipping guitar chords, southern-fried Lynyrd Skynyrd grooves, and Ozzy-jocking vocals that combine to form a smooth, psyched-out, mid-tempo version of Clutch with aspirations of becoming Witchcraft. They took an undercarriage-scraping approach to low-end, scuzz-bomb production and tuning on their 4th LP Rough Times, but since their 2021 COVID response, The Isolation Tapes, they've embarked on a meandering road to essentially chase the arc of Yes's career like a bloodhound tryign to catch a mouthful of a hare's butt fuzz- from progressive headcases to consummate pop-chart-cracking czars of an itchy electro-hook, they really pulled out the monty- a strategy that, while bearing fruit in terms of some phenomenally imaginative and often catchy forms, didn't manage to fly the group's freak flag at full mast, and therefore felt somewhat bereft of much-needed climax. That vitalness, that hot-bloodedness, that ugly urgency of Rough Times and their earlier self-titled work is back to a gratifying degree on their latest LP Kids Abandoning Destiny Among Vanity and Ruin, but now balanced by the more patient and elongated gaze of those later releases, a concontion of unlikely stagedressing and inspiration akin in spectacle to an all-caveman crew of the Starship Enterprise on a mission to boldly crush alien life beneath the stony mill of their wheels and start fires where there were never fires lit before. The album starts off with a satisfying stoner sludge swing in the vein of Acid King with the demonic fuzz rock aura of Electric Wizard, titled "Lies," before transitioning into a wormhole of transdimensional tempestry on the windtunnel-shaped "Heartache." "Explosions in the Sky" sounds nothing like the band it shares a name with, instead lapping at the banks of the Styx to paint a blazing rainbow of death across the troposphere, subsequently the group indulges their motorik tendances on "Stick It" an initiator of wacked-out disco-gloom that lashes out in a razor-wielding dance of bloodletting rebuke, crying with laughter as it twirls on a length of spider's silk over a bed of flames. "You Me Apocalypse" takes up the off-kilter groove of its predecessor and twists it in a slightly more harmonious and yet still creaky direction, pushing the boundaries of quixotic optimism as it leans into a somersault over the jutting mouth of a volcanic wound in the earth's flesh, a diabolical dichotomy that winds you up for the mystic pulse of "Children" as well as the thunderclap and collapse of "K.A.D.A.V.A.R." like you were a fly that landed on a spinning top with a yin and yang on it, just as it began its centripetal turn, and now you can tell your sucky bits from your cloaca, before finally finishing you off with a return to form on the absolute ripper, "Total Annihilation." Abandon whatever fate you imagined for yourself and give yourself over to the pride of desolation that Kadavar will lavish upon your meager mortal form. 

Where dreams are made (Clouds Hill Records).

Album Review: Plax - Clean Feeling

An Austin-based, self-described "outsider" punk band, Plax is comprised of seasoned area punks who cut their teeth playing in local mainstays like OBN III, Spray Paint, and Skeleton. Of course, when you're from Austin, self-anointed "outside" status is a given, sorta like saying, "Hey, I'm from Cincinnati, and boy do I like chili, and getting stabbed while walking home from a Reds game!"—it's one of the most "yes, and..." ways of describing your band I've encountered in my xx years on this wet, molding marble of a planet. Their lack of self-awareness is more than made up for by the intensity of their music, though. Plax takes the angular, jumpy chords of Wire and plays them like the resulting feedback will balm some deep irritation in the recesses of their organ tissue, packing a sort of prickly, desolate angst and southern swing into what amounts to a gritty, woodglue-and-flesh-mortared art-punk potash in the vein of self-loathing, blight-rock lodestars Iceage and Drug Church. Victor Ziolkowski's vocals are particularly arresting, favoring the breathy, lurching quality of Keith Morris's vocal delivery, which pushes against the bruising guitar noise as if it's fighting for air. Clean Feeling is their debut, and only record, released on Austin label Super Secret back in 2017, but as you'd expect, Plax sounds anything but bashful and indecisive despite the green behind their gills at the time of its release. Strap up your spurs and get ready to kick over the charcuterie at your next local gallery showcase with the rubbery hooks, leap-frogging chord progressions, and bitter, saliva-slick vocals of "Boring Story," the bashing, weighty chords and combustible, propulsive grooves on "Not for You," and the dirgey, feedback-infused, shambling, black-out shit-stomper "1x1" ringing in your crusty, blood-clotted ear canals. The best art makes a legitimate sonic spectacle out of ruinous intentions, and this is the inflection point where Plax thrives.

Keep it to yourself (Super Secret Records).

Album Review: Pacifica - In Your Face!

The story of the band Pacifica- the music duo, not the city in California, or the mean girl from Gravity Falls- is all about the global reach of New York City, but actually, but really, to get what's going on here, you have to make a layover in the UK. Pacifica, an Argentine band that sings primarily in English, has the kind of vibe that drives rock fans on the island downright mental- cool, detached, hook-heavy, glossy and polished, with cut-edit ready grooves seemingly tailored for high-end perfume ads as much as montages of modish youth raving in a warehouse basement. With a little Arctic Monkeys' DNA percolating up from the group's evolutionary past and a general adherence to the playful pop-bite that dragged groups like The Kooks into the center spotlight for a brief moment in the '00s, paired with promo images of the duo running around urban byways in brightly coloured tracksuits and indie-sleaze-inspired dress-down formal wear, it's enough to get them plastered all over what remains of the rainy island's music press and compel tender but insular youth to track down every bit of biographical info there is to be found on the duo, down to scans of their dental records (it probably doesn't hurt that lead vocalist Inés embodies a spit-take-inducing image of a young Mick Jagger on the original cover of their LP... likely one of the reasons they've swapped it on Bandcamp and elsewhere). They're sort of what limeys wish us yanks were like, rather than the harsh reality of slovenly decline and blind obstinacy that actually defines our national character. From the prickly, playful gnaw and sugar-coated strokes of melodic rebound and skating roll of "What You Doing," to the high-heel-clacking club beat and post-punk zoot-up of "Indie Boyz," to the fog-clearing, reflective ambiance cohering in a condensation of revelation and rebuke on the title track, In Your Face! is the cross-cultural pop phenomenon that you can more or less take anywhere and enjoy anytime- the type of simulated global sweep that networks the world through sound and transcends the strife that actually stains the quotidian of the teeming masses who congregate in every corner of the globe. If the US is going to have a de facto ambassador to the old world and beyond, I can think of worse candidates than these two ladies, content to skip their way across the pond, panhandle, and plateau, and proliferate a generally positive resonance throughout the world as representatives of the best that the Americas have to offer, as opposed to what the country typically displays as its cultural and societal output, which, when not exported in the form of literal and unilateral annihilation, has become akin to so much discarded plastic dumped directly into the ocean. If folks in the UK and elsewhere come to view stylish, smart, and sincere actors like Pacifica as the worthy inheritors of the aspirations of the cross-continental, Atlantic seaboard on this half of our blue pearl, I'm happy to deputize them as such. There are certainly worse types of Americans you could have in your face than Pacifica. 

Album Review: Dreadnought - The Endless

Big fan of the cover art for this one. Even bigger fan of the fact that the music matches the cover in its majesty and complexity. The Endless is the fifth studio LP from Colorado doom metal and post-metal unlikely upstarts, Dreadnought. Their sound is akin to a cross between Pelican, Isis, and Procol Harum, with periodic black metal vocals, drawing not-too-surprising influence from groups like King Crimson, Opeth, and Moonsorrow. The Endless is an exploration of, conversation with, and at times flight from, man's essential duality- a creator and destroyer, a divinely endowed creature burdened by its freedoms, crying out for deliverance only to find the chains of vice grow ever tighter with the resonance of his wail, knowing only emancipation through submission in a cowering shade, ceasing his struggle so that the occasion never again arises for him to curse the bite of the irons that weigh him down. Either the body depresses and encumbers the soul, or the soul repudiates the body- whichever is the more acceptable death determines the winding path you take in life to get there, and with every step a little drizzle of the psyche eeks out between your toenails; whether it boils like tar returning to the Earth, or soars like a dove once it escapes the shelf of your little spurs, is a fair indicator of where the rest will follow. A splendidly moving and disturbing premonition of fate and the consequences of habituation, as ensnaring, troubling, and poetically melancholic as the dark churn of juxtapositions that fires the cauldron of Dreadnought's auditory dispensation of the braided, interminable whorl of salvation and despair, in whose eye lies the human heart, bleeding and pleading with spite.

Southbound and down, aren't we all... (Profound Lore).