Album Review: DJ Fantome - Zando Beat ! / Electro Madness from Congo Kinshasa

Bandito bards dropping bars in the bifurcating cleft of commerce and culture, nervous flows of energy and goods, commodities and the condemned, circulating in synergy and thriving in a vivid sanctum of sound. In 2021 Congolese producer DJ Fantôme set up a studio in the heart of Kinshasa's Zando ya Monene, the market mecca, a complex of vendors and hustlers who will sell you everything you need, and plenty you won't, an ecosystem of petty puckish entrepreneurs who toil tirelessly to relieve the witless and careless of the burden of an overstuffed pocketbook, literally and figuratively robbing the rubes as an ROI for loading all their skill points in rhetoric and sleight of hand. In this den of dealers, dips, and dubbers, DJ Fantôme found inspiration for a sound project that combined the bustle and bully of this shopstall sprawl with the after-hours retreat of the club where many of these rapscallions can be located after a long day of profit and plunder. Offering various gang members and other locals the chance to spit shards and barbs over his original beats, Zando Beat ! is an attempt to capture the effervescent energy of this market and mayhem mill and juice it with the pulse it deserves, threading the barking, chiding clip, and frequently commanding prose of amateur vocalists with the enigmatic producer's fresh and freaky strains of ghetto techno and trance. It's a symbiosis worth celebrating, flourishing in the open, and thriving in the narrow trench of the tacit vice that validates the will to survive. It's one of those mixes where you have to watch your back while you boogie to it, but that small trippy dose of malice just adds to the thrill of it all.

Ain't no fortress of solitude, this is an armory of sound (Palenque Records). 

Album Review: C.L.S.M. - Infinity Shit

I was thinking the other day about how stone-cold spectacular it was to see Coliseum and United Nations play at the Sub T in support of the former's LP Anxiety's Kiss, declaredly their final album back in 2015. The intensity of both their performances is something of a core memory at this point, especially the manner in which Ryan Patterson would kinetically manifest the emotions and intentions behind each song in his set to narrow the circumspection of the audience while approximating the dread of being a raccoon facing off against an oncoming train- guy has a talent for making one fear for their splatability. Coliseum cracked and crumbled after that tour, and Ryan moved on to his pure post-punk project Fotocrime. It was bittersweet to bid the group farewell, but I'm not one to begrudge an artist for shifting focus, even if their choice of direction leads us down divergent paths. As for Fotocrime, it affects me about as much as the mating habits of endangered Andean condors- interesting but ultimately inconsequential to my life. Imagine my surprise when I looked up old Battledome-C on a whim, only to learn that they had constructed a new arena in which to display their prowess and spill their carnage, a retcon back to the cockcrow of their conception, indecently identified as Infinity Shit and released in 2023. I'm somewhat shocked that Ryan would claw back his declaration that Anxiety's Kiss was the group's parting buss, but seeing how he's now calling the band C.L.S.M., I guess this is more of a reincarnation than a reunion- a reversion to a simplified structure, reminiscent of a prior instantiation, in order to ignite a freshly ascendent blaze of destiny. Back in the mid-'00s, when highly commercial third-wave emo and pop-punk were at their zenith, there was more or less an undercurrent of backlash within the punk scene that manifested in a consistent outflow of d-beat, crust, and gritty hardcore that offered the nation's youth a more caustic alternative to the outwardly docile, consumer-friendly sense of alienation and punk rock they could purchase at the mall. Coliseum, in its original infleshed epitome, was a byproduct of this schism. This sinfully ugly trio of Louisville punks headbutted their way out of the Midwest with their lurching blend of sludge metal, roadhouse country-blues, and bloody-knuckled hardcore, and helped to bring the skuffed metallic punk hybrids of the early-to-mid '90s into the new millennium along with a devastated earnestness that their big-city peers would take almost a decade to catch up to. Infinity Shit is eternally bestial, far more so than the majority of the group's catalog, save their debut, with in particular Ryan sounding like a caiman crammed full of amphetamines to the point where its overheated snap-box of brain has discovered how to mimic the human tongue, or at least pull off a half-blinkered parodic impression of Jaz Coleman after drinking a grail brimming with Lemmy's blood. Tracks like "Dehydrated Flesh of the Bourgeoisie," "Trash the Human Race," and "Alchemical Terrorism" place a premium on cyclonic grooves that penetrate body cavities, vibrate, jostle, and partically liquify organs, and involuntarily convert toe-tapping into tile-splintering stomps, taking less of an indirect Buñuelian path to insulting the Burghers, resolving to simply spit at them for being ugly parasites and wishing to stack their bodies as the planks and foundation of a new world. Ominous in its intentions, the beatdown is without pause, fetting one bitter rebuke to the next in a cacophonic catena of punk-metal mendacity towards a world that more and more resembles a moral and intellectual cesspool, a condemned noetical superfund site, each day we wake into it. The effluent of iniquity flows eternally, as does the fury to combat it. Infinity Shit is C.L.S.M.'s rousing return to a campaign against the corruption that besets this world. 

20/23 is not perfect vision, but it's good enough for Equal Vision. 

Album Review: h4rtbrkr - me & u (h2rtbrkr)

It's profoundly whitepilling that love songs still have resonance in this era of acute isolation and subjective omni-management. Inside your overleveraged pen, you are playing for dopamine pellets until your circuits fry and you CTD. So touch grass, right? ROFL. It's too expensive to leave your hovel, and when you do, you immediately become enmeshed in the tendrils of a web of predatory invisible eyes (ie every chud-skulled, mouth-breather with a smartphone and the lo-jacked data-mining cancer box in your own back pocket), and then when you've trotted long enough to squat in a brunch village, biding your time for the privilege of paying for a Sysco sizzler platter, you run a 50/50 chance of becoming a victim of an industrial accident or a deranged dissident radicalized in a Discord with four other "people"* in it... What a time to be (allegedly) alive (well, not for long...)! Even in this open suicidality sewer, somehow your average floating eye still grasps at hope, still longs to meet the gaze of another floating eye in answer to the yearning search that a spark of affinity may lower a drawbridge over the gulf between them and allow the trails of their synapses to commingle. Even in a suffocating void, a simple glance can usher in enough oxygen to evade anoxia. A thought of someone you miss may find them in their dreams and comfort them in the dark- spiritual succor for the sanctioned, like a file in a loaf of bread mailed to a prisoner staring down a life sentence. A whisper carried on a gallant rhythm, a compliment rolling off a chorus, hearts pulsing in time to a beat pushed through wireless speakers in distant locales, keeping time and keeping faith. The miasma of this manufactured somnambulist modernity will lift someday, and when that happens, you'll find the person who was crying out to you through the fog and over the electric mnemonic-ramparts, and you can sing the songs that you pre-compiled together in the DMs of the astral strata while you wrestled separately in the partitions of a machine-demarcated info-clink. Maybe you won't need h4rtbrkr's me & u (h2rtbrkr) EP when you arrive at the doorstep of such a fate, but in the interregnum, the leaky cache of your heartbreak will at least have a righteous score.

*ops, federal agents, rogue AI, vtube chatters, and other entities that pass for human in our day and age. 

Album Review: Dirty Fences - Goodbye Love

Can I say something? Can I say something without everyone jumping in to praise me for my bravery and independence of thought? Right, here goes. I really hate the Spotify algorithm. Their suggestions are trash, and they have no idea how different styles of music and artists are actually connected. At this point, just playing something at random would be an improvement over their machine-generated guesses as to what would be appropriate in sequence. So here's the scene: I'm busy, I have music on, I'm listening to an A Giant Dog album (Pile, to be exact). The album ends, and it starts autoplaying just... whatever-Alvvays, Diet Cig, Lucy Dacus... and I kind of get it from a robot's perspective: distorted guitars, lo-fi-ish production, former "indie" rock stars retired to the big farm of major labeldom- Oh, and there is a female singer, so that means they all get to live in the pink aisle of the algorithm, only the aisle has A24 lighting so it's a little less patronizing, right? Wrong. None of these people have anything to do with each other, and they sound nothing alike. You can't just mash together Obama-era dream pop, tender punk, and random sad-girl indie-pop with early '10s garage punk and expect me not to take umbrage. I'm not one of those people who insists that everyone has to memorize the entire Wikipedia page for an artist or genre before they can appreciate music for what it is, but this is a pretty good example of how culture and context can be paved over and suffocated to death in this new digital era, and why actual music curation still matters. A Giant Dog came out in an extremely hairy, hazy, and homely era of underground rock that has almost entirely evaporated at this point, related to the same trends and aesthetic preferences that also spun up Hozac Records and at one point made Beerland an inescapable cultural pivot point within the Austin scene. This means that to put them in context, an A Giant Dog playlist would need to pair them with psyched-up power-poppers and rock revivalists in the treds of Shapes Have Fangs, Bad Sports, Big Eyes, Natural Child, and purely as a sonic concession, Dirty Fences- who I don't think ever played with A Giant Dog, but who I have to listen to in succession after an album like Pile, without fail. Dirty Fences were (and I guess still are) a tribe of greasy, goofball, gutter crawlers who came out of NYC swinging for the bleachers with every plate of wax they allowed their rough-and-rumpus sound to be carved into. Their last blitz of Schlitz-hammered power pop and sweat-lathered punk, as of this writing, is the 2017 LP Goodbye Love. The riffs and hooks spill out of these tracks like a froth of cataract sprawling into the street from a cracked fire hydrant knocked over in the course of a high-speed chase. These party-ready, jaunty blasts of rock 'n' roll revelry draw complementary comparisons to pogo-powered proto-pop-punks The Nerves, love-sick strummers The Undertones, and slick rock revivalists like The Knack, but had for their time a very contemptuous take on all these classic '80s peals, causing them to feel perpetually fresh and fecund enough to impregnate impressionable minds with dreams of fast times, free love, and the sensual splendor calling to them in the night and leading them astray from the starchy spiritual squalor of buttoned-up suburban living. Tap the keg, pop a tab, and turn up the toe-tapping, slapdash grooves of "Goodbye Love," the ribbed guitars, spiked melodies, and floor-stomping beat of "Teen Angel," and the windmill riffs and punchy tempo shifts of "Love for Higher," the volatily vulnerable, bed-sheet-knotting insistence of "Four Leaf Clover"- whose softly twisting chorus is so strangely reminiscent of a Sabrina Ellis and Andrew Cashen joint that I'd be willing to put any amount of money on the premise that it was penned on the beer-soaked cushions of an Austin green room with said dynamic duo, if not leering in person, then within earshot from the stage- and finally, the plucky, distortion-buoyed ballad "One More Step" featuring guest vocalist Christina Halladay of Sheer Mag, as if there wasn't enough degenerate dynasty already gracing these decks. At the time that Goodbye Love debuted, it seemed like just another addition to a deep catalog of great rock and roll that endlessly proliferated across the Rust Belt and central US, in celebration of the persistence of spirit imbued in the nation's castoffs as well as their torrid tendency towards outright depravity... but now it more resembles a love letter dropped in the carrier slot mere moments before it all fades to black. I miss this era of DIY, even more so because I don't think it's ever coming back. Goodbye Love- they really called it. 

It's always greener on the other side (Greenway Records).

Album Review: Cold Summer - Den Umständen Entsprechend

It's getting to feel like summer out there- the sun is bearing down, and the swelter is soaking in, cooking your innards like a sack of giblets crammed in the body cavity of a Thanksgiving turkey (which they kinda are anyway). What are you going to do to avoid heat stroke? What's the plan? Pull the tab on a cold one and sit under a fan? Guzzle some gazpacho? Listen to Cold Summer's Den Umständen Entsprechend EP... I'm not sure how that's going to help, but I'm with you in spirit. Germany's Cold Summer certainly isn't known for their abundance of "chill"; if anything, I'd describe them as thoroughly overheated- from the cleaving, forge-fire maim and inductive sear of their desperately distorted guitar churn, to the intemperate and irascible snarl of the percussion section's predatory and indiscreet hunt for vulnerable junctures through which it can funnel its skin-rending punch, or the itchy angst and coarse logic of the vocals, which scrapes and chisels around the ears like a block of ice that someone is attempting to sculpt into a moody effigy but more transparently using as a glossy sponge for their agitation, the apparent abandonment becoming more severe with each hewing hack they chew from the block. It's a mixture of compulsion, conviction, violence, and cool sneering confidence that will boil the fat off your chassis and leave behind only a clammy ossature of recalcitrance and a rat's nest of nerves slung around it like a handmade scarf. Nothing beats a heat wave like a cold surge of aggression.

Its Eleven Records (11:08 pm to be exact) / Kink Records (get your head out of the gutter!)

Album Review: Studio_Dad - Endless Summer Vol. 1

I bet you wish you had a cool Studio_Dad instead of a lame regular Dad. While Studio_Dad is a slick producer, running a label out of San Francisco and working with shrewd, street-smart visionaries like Ricky Lake, Tia Nomore, and Taifa Nia, your Dad is burning your college fund on sports betting- and always landing on the flipside of a windfall, every. damn. time! While Studio_Dad is sugar-coating sunbeams, inlining a '90s zest and a Californicated twist into the teeming bliss of tempered heartbeats and fissuring teenage fantasies with the help of vocalist Tzar on a track like "Tightrope" off his 2023 Endless Summer EP, your Dad is getting his wallet pumped and dumped in yet another crypto charade or investment bamboozle he read about on that app where the SpaceX CEO keeps posting videos of himself burning millions of dollars under the premise of reinventing nominal space flight- where does Elon need to go anyway? Does he think he won't owe child support if he skips town for Mars? While Studio_Dad is working with Madge and Taifa Nia to encode sparks of rhyme and reason over a cyber-wired pop-punk-styled stitch-up, "In My Side," underscored with the grit of resilience and the tremors of soft revenge, your Dad has a new girlfriend who keeps forgetting your name and won't stop vaping in the house- it doesn't stain the curtains or make the furniture smell weird (at least not permanently), but it's still nasty as hell, can't she do that outside or in the garage? While Studio_Dad is bestowing unnatural strength and ghouly pep to the sinking lonesome and subterranean despair of Siri Seiko's quick-lash laments and the drip-patterned thaw of Ricky Lake's frozen heart as it fights to warm itself back to life on the track "Unalive," your Dad is trying to jujitsu his way out of the 36% APR loan he took out on an F-Series pickup that he drove off the lot and totaled in the same week. While Studio_Dad is taking off on a smooth, synthy, beach-coasting R&B getaway with Tia Nomore, Stoni, and Amen on "For the Weekend," and cutting a gold-cast, classic neo-soul shimmy for Stoni and Siri Seiko to bop some bars over on "Better Days," your Dad is red-faced, filming an angry Reel in a rented SUV with all the windows up and his neck meat rolls sweating like a brick of spam folding over itself in the summer heat, howling about Brandon like he's not going to have to take out a second mortgage to fill that tanker up before he head into the office tomorrow. How much clearer of a picture can I paint here? For all his faults, I'm sure you still love your Dad, but as sure as I am that Endless Summer is tits-to-toes all-jams, I'm dead ass certain you wish your Dad was a little more like Studio_Dad.

Text Me (maybe) Records. 

Interview: Heavy Metal Chess Club

Courtesy of We're Trying Records

The other day I was listening to an interview with a Japanese musician, and she was describing her experience in her high school's band club. To give perspective on the topic to her interviewer, she brought up K-On! only to wipe the slate moments later with the clarification that her experience was "nothing like that." No snacks. Full practice room. You had to practice every day, and when you did play for the club, everyone judged you. This was her experience, and yeah, on balance, watching K-On! sounds a good deal more pleasurable than actually doing the extracurricular that inspired it... I'd wager the closest you could ever come to such an experience in this life is joining a DIY band in the United States. There is still some judgment, sure, and it's still a major time commitment, but there are also tons of snacks and opportunities to simply chill. You'll also probably produce some recordings and play some shows that you can be proud of for the rest of your life, as well as make some lifelong compatriots to boot. Keiongaku certainly has a future, just not where you'd expect...

So if you're going to have an extracurricular that consumes, disrupts, and alters your life, for better and for worse, but mostly for the better, then you might as well start a band with your buds... sort of like Henry from Heavy Metal Chess Club did. Now Henry and his pals don't throw horns and rip power chords in honor of the dark lord, and our main man in particular is no Bobby Fischer, but everything else about them seems faithful to the core conciets of DIY as their music is a perfect synecdoche of life's convoluted trails converging at intersecting epiphanies in the wild fields of youth, sodded in the soil of error and nurtured in murky flash floods of pensive perspicuity. They might not be true to their name, but they are certainly brimming with concrete existential observations, engaged in probing schematic interpretations of the world, managing to be loud in inquiry, and quiet in conclusion, and they have a new LP called I Think It'll Haunt Me Forever out on We're Trying Records, which is worth an awful lot in my humble opinion. Get to know Henry and his band below, and don't forget to grab some taiyaki and tea before heading to the basement to jam with your crew.

Introduce yourselves. Who is in the band, what do they play, how did they come to be in the band, and what are their rider stipulations?

My name's Henry, I normally say "I play guitar and yell." I started writing songs in high school and formed a band when I got to college. For the past year or so now the band's included Connor on drums. His band Melon Husk from Colorado played with us a couple of years ago, we reconnected at a new year's party, and got closer after he transferred to Drexel (where we all go to school) following UArts closing. Will's on bass, I kinda knew him through Connor and also just kinda being around, another UArts to Drexel guy. We saw each other at shows and got along really well and we really jive energetically when we play together. Gray's the last one on lead guitar, we did a little tour in August of last year and I needed a guitarist for it, I had seen his band Exit 109 before and really liked them and knew he was going to be in Philly over that summer so I asked him to join us for that run and he clicked really well with us. He played his first show with us on just a few days' notice, and wasn't even able to make a practice so our first time playing with him was on stage and it went perfectly. They're all a blast to play and hang out with. We've never had a rider, but it would probably include beer.

What were your goals headed into making I Think It’ll Haunt Me Forever, and were they achieved?

I never intended for this to be the only album we do, in fact I'm super energized to get working on another record as soon as possible, but I wanted to put something out where if it was the only full length album we released, I would be content with that. There were a lot of times I acted as if this was the only album we'd do. The perfectionist in me can point out a lot of things I wish were different about it, but if this band were to cease to exist tomorrow, I would be happy with what we did with this record. That being said I do hope to one-up it next time around.

The title for the album comes from a poem recited in the track "Christmas Lights." What is the meaning behind this passage, how does it fit into other themes on the album, and how was it that a line from this poem became the title of the album?

For most of the time this album was being written I was sold on this being a self titled album. I'm not quite sure how to describe this but I don't think a whole lot when I write lyrics. I like to say that they mean things on a macro scale, not a micro scale. I could tell you what a song is about more or less but not most individual lines. I see a lot of things in my life in relation to being "scared." I'm anxious and shy and I fuck up a lot, and I'm scared of fucking up more. Persistence in spite of this fear is a skill I've developed as I've become a young adult. I'm scared of fucking up? Well, I've already fucked up, I can learn from that. There's stuff that I think might haunt me forever. I'm young and dramatic, maybe it won't "haunt" me but it'll probably stick around somehow. So will the fear, and the anxiety and all that. You can't be brave if you're not afraid, you can't learn and grow unless you fail. I'm not too sure how to tie that all up but those are the general thoughts I have around the title, I think it ties the themes of what I write together.

You have a very compelling, quiet dynamic on this album. How do you feel the juxtaposition of reflection and fury draws out the themes and thought processes behind your work?

The loud/quiet dynamic is something the bands I listened to growing up were very good at, Pixies, and Smashing Pumpkins being the big two. I see the louder more explosive parts of our songs as incredible cathartic and that's what I like about them most, it's a bit of a balancing act, something to build up to I don't think the yelling and screaming should be the whole thing. I don't think that hits as hard. I think you need softer more introspective moments to complement and build up to the moments of explosive catharsis. 

Who are some of your favorite scream vocalists, and do they have any impact on the way more aggressive vocal styles are deployed on this album?

I was really inspired by Jack Senff's vocals from Merchant Ships and Midwest Pen Pals, also stuff like early Pdaddy, Old Gray, and I was listening to a ton of Foxing's self titled when I was writing some of these songs, I was definitely inspired by some of Conor Murphy/Eric Hudson's more aggressive vocal performances throughout Foxing's discography.

Were any of you members of the chess club in high school?

I don't think so? Connor's been reading Gotham Chess' chess book, I've played against Connor and Will before. I'm quite bad.

What is the wisest, most far-sighted plan you have ever carried out, ie When was the last time you were really playing 4D chess?

I bought a cheap mini-van of Facebook marketplace so we could start touring and playing more regional shows. For a while I was like "that was stupid" since it was a really big purchase for me. Since then it's actually been really convenient to have a paid for vehicle thats got a lot of space, even if it is sort of a piece of crap. Getting it cheap and not financing it was the wiser part of that choice.

Who is playing clarinet on "Squids" and what does SpongeBob’s long-suffering neighbor have to do with this track?

That's a Saxophone actually, my buddy Charlie's playing it and you can hear it at the end of Christmas Lights too. Squidward has nothing to do with "Squids" but maybe he should have. I really liked the additional horns/piano we added to the record it filled out a lot more space than I thought it would.

Who is "Michael," and what is it that he is doing that is "Gross"?

I play a game called Balatro, when I started I swore that we'd make the first emo song that had a Balatro reference as it's titled. The title is referencing a card in the game called "Gros Michel" which is in turn referencing the real life thing. The card has an image of a banana on it and using it unlocks a card called "Cavendish." At the end of the day it's a long winded banana reference.

What dirty deeds inspired "Sweaty Palms / Bloody Hands"?

Honestly nothing in particular, I came up with the riff first and knew I wanted the song to be a bit heavier. The imagery of cleaning blood out of a floor came to mind and I leaned into that when writing lyrics.

What are your favorite spectator sports, ie sports that you watch but don't play? Real and/or figurative.

I love baseball! I played when I was really little but I wasn't a very athletic kid. I think it's a well paced game and the dork in me enjoys the stats-heavy side of it. 

The cover art is pretty busy. Are those equations, or are you diagramming a detective show's plot? Please explain what is going on in this image.

This was my thermodynamics midterm that my friend cut up and collaged. I think I got a 70 something on it?

When was the last time you built a sandcastle, and what are you most afraid that the ocean/time will wash away before you are finished with it?

When I was a little kid I saw some older kids making a sand castle on the beach and I asked them to help work on it. I was some single digit age and have no idea how old these other kids might have been but it seemed like an awesome sand castle and I wanted in on it. They let me play with them and I think about it more than you'd think. I think there's a lot of beauty in things being temporary, as much as there is pain. Things can serve a purpose and when their purpose is done they don't need to be around anymore. Relationships, emotions, tv shows, sand castles, there's a lot of pain in endings but there's purpose and beauty in there too. I remember writing that song feeling like people would always get sick of me after a while and none of my relationships would last. Its a sucky feeling but that type of stuff comes and goes, people play a part in your life, and you in theirs, and sometimes when both of you have played your roles you drift apart. You're different because of each other, not just in romantic relationships but all types of relationships with other people, hopefully we make each other better.

Who are your favorite heavy metal bands?

I'm actually not super into heavy metal music, but I grew up on Rammstein and got to see them live the last time they were in the U.S. One of my earliest memories is my dad showing me the music video for "Mein Hertz" brennt and being mildly traumatized. Connor and Gray are really into Metalcore and play some heavy stuff in the van sometimes. "Heavy Metal Chess Club" as a name came from a shared google doc my friends and I had in highschool that was just a list of "things that would make cool band names." I saw "Death Metal Chess Club" in there one day and really liked it, but switched it to "Heavy Metal Chess Club" just because I thought the cadence was better, I liked it with the extra syllable there.

Who are your favorite poets? 

I'm really not well read poets wise. I really like Billy Corgan's lyrics from Smashing Pumpkins, they were probably my biggest influence when I started. Right now I've really enjoyed/connected with Sydney Sprague and Oso Oso's lyrics a lot.

Give me a math equation that you think will stump those reading this interview.

This isn't an equation but here's a problem I remember enjoying working on when I was taking Discrete Math. You have a number p, p is prime, p - 2 and p + 2 are both also prime, Prove that p = 5. If you want a hint, try start dividing prime numbers by 6 and see what happens.

Interview conducted via email on May 28, 2026. 

Keep doing your best. That's what counts. 頑張って!