Album Review: Antibalas - Hourglass

Sometimes, the ripple of an earshot can be heard around the world. The local is the expression of global conditions; global conditions are the percolation of circumstances that well up around one's feet where they stand, like the spreading overflow of a well with too many stones in its gut. There aren't many bands that can capture the feeling and sound of being from anywhere without losing the essential imprint of their place of origin- but I can certainly name a few- although one will do for our purposes here. Led by multidisciplinary musician and activist Martin Perna, Antibalas ("bulletproof," like an idea, like the soul, you can kill the vessel but you can't snuff its will) is a tour-tested and perfected, horn-driven, traditional Afrobeat band modeled after Fela Kuti's Africa 70 band and Eddie Palmieri's Harlem River Drive Orchestra. Like many Afrobeat outfits, Antibalas addresses dire social and political realities through positive, motivating, and cathartic party music. As Perna says, "We take a hard look into the past while forging a future of solutions." Their eighth LP, Hourglass, sees the band following the curve of inspiration back to intimately acquainted patterns of enlightened practice. Twisting back through time to tread fresh turf, the group has eschewed vocalist collaboration for this album, and singing nearly entirely, so as to avoid the demands and determinism that language and its expression place on sound, instead embracing the natural, untamed flow that a groove can take when players can intuitively delineate its coalescing contours, free of the constraining rib and hem of a singer's thread to tether its course. There is no exogenous plane to define itself against, no vista that exceeds its breath, no people who are beyond its borders. Hourglass is the sound of a world opened up from the inside, pried into a pluming dispersal and everted outward in all directions like the fresh, cloying flesh of a ripe orange spread open for the taking- refreshing, sweet, intricately textured, but most of all, free.

Dap's the way I like it! (Daptone Records)

Album Review: Cattle - Sweet Dream,Tender Light and Your Memory

Anytime you dare to pipe up about the hardships in your life, your struggles, the inherently cursed nature of the present state of things in any way, shape, or form online, you will inevitably be flooded with comments justifying your misery. Can't afford a house? Can't afford rent? Groceries? Healthcare? Should have gone to college; then you'd have better job prospects, get paid more, and be able to afford to live a decent life. Oh, you went to college and still can't afford those things? Should have majored in something useful! Oh, you have a degree in engineering and/or computer science, but now you're in triple-figure debt and still can't afford the median standard of living? Should have gone into the trades! Oh, you're in the trades, and you're making squat, working terrible hours, it's wrrrrreeeeeeeccccccccking your body, you have no romantic prospects and have to rent a house in a crime-ridden exurb with a 2 hour commute to your job, living with five guys who are all addicted to sports betting, 85% refined over-the-counter THC supplements, and Wingstop? Should have gone to college! Circular logics like these abound in a tail-chasing charade strung up to obscure the realities of a collapsing society where individual choice and perception matter about as much in altering the trajectory of one's circumstances as a single tear spattering on a granite countertop has at punching through the stony facade like a bullet through a fiberboard disever. The duffers and sycophants who drag people for identifying the obvious impossibility of the current economy functioning in any harmonious manner are just like so many dull beasts- they enjoy being led around by the nose and only kick up a fuss when someone points out the omnipresent state of degradation we, they, everywhichway, live, breathe, and psychically suffocate under the weight of. If they had their way, the whole planet would be nothing but cattle, just like them. In fact, people like the ever-present, casually reductive casuists you encounter online give cattle a bad name. Cattle just want to chew cud and shit. While these cranks aren't much more sentient than their bovine counterparts, no cow will go out of its way to take a shit on your life like they will! And you know who else isn't going to go out of their way to spread sticky, nitrous-rich, chocolate frosting all over your proverbial windshield? Tokyo-based starchildren, Cattle. Now, the preamble to this here review is a specifically American web-based fable of woe, but, as I understand, Japan has its own cost of living crisis and its own economic difficulties, and I'm sure if you asked any averge ただの人 (after a long enough Duolingo streak) what kinds of chud-logic gets dumped on anyone in their country who blithely questions the status quo, you'd likely hear some real horror stories. But enough about the cattle in the comments sections, let's talk about the Cattle who matter- the ones who want to whisk you away on a sojourn of sound, rather than those who wish to drown you in the effluent of their brainrot. Cattle, self-determined and subtly fierce, are a shoegaze band that plays sugary, buzzsaw riffs, reverb-enhanced guitar-pop in the vein of Ringo Deathstarr, only more streamlined and with a better emphasis on hooks than atmosphere. Their 2019 LP Sweet Dream, Tender Light and Your Memory is their one and only full-length so far, and absolutely delivers on the jangly, joyous promise of their early EP, starting with 2015's Somehow Hears Songs through their split with Taiwan's Motorik released earlier the same year. Impressively, most of the lyrics are in English, painting wonderfully ambitious and softly relatable human portraits to accompany the beautifully fluttery texture of their delicately swollen and slightly bruised melodies, a gently persuasive and yet uncompromising direct orientation towards the more eloquent iterations of power-pop potentiality. The journey begins with the limber bow and balance of a My Blood Valentine-inspired slow-motion ricochet insulated in the confectious confessions parlayed by cotton-candy melodies and spiraling out in a gossamer blitz on "Shooting Star"; the fluid high-register guitar purr, cutting-clarion tones, and dreamy vibe of "Happy! Happy! Happy Valley!" plunges into a bath of pleasant recollections and playful enticements to seize the root of future fulfillment and ring it out over a waiting grail of ecstasy; later, the poshly textured, punk-tinted roller-rally "Boy Wanders" takes up restless grooves and coy grabs at spiny inflections in a natural, vigorous venture-lust, an undaunted excitement echoed on the reflective thunderstorm of fantasies that is "Sweet Dream"; finally, the group settles into a well-earned tranquil sendoff in the form of the patient, pining, and pillowey jangle-rock soundscapes of album closer "Wishing You All the Best for Today and the Days to Come." Life is seemingly defined by disappointment, fruitless struggle, and the callous disregard of others, but as long as you have music-music like Cattle's- you have a reason to greet each new day with a smile.

Pass, fail, or a secret third outcome (Testcard Records).

Interview: The Arrivals

If you could find something you love in your formative years and find a way to keep doing it for 30-plus years, wouldn't you? Not many people are so lucky, but Dave Marriman of Chicago punk pillars The Arrivals certainly is. He and his crew have been keeping steady and remaining reliably prescient all these years, and have recently (as of this spring) managed to release their 5th LP, Payload. You may wonder why it's been 16 years since their last album, Volatile Molotov, and the simple answer is that the timing just wasn't right, until it was... In Dave's own words, and summing up the ethos of the band, "If it's not fun, fuck it!" Truly an idiom to ideate on next time you find yourself running behind according to someone else's clock. They don't have any Chicago dates to celebrate the album release on the books yet, but when they do, you can bet I'll be there (and hope you will be too!). In the meantime, enjoy this conversation between Dave and me:

 

You can find Payload out on Recess Records here: 

Album Review: Blood of the Wolf - V:Indomitable

Chicago metal, underappreciated, yet undeterred. Despite receiving little to no love across the rest of this cursed land, the Second City is really second to none when it comes to spawning immensely visceral and bottom-buck-nasty musical marauders. Take blackened death metal project Blood of the Wolf, for instance. Every time they unveil a new record, it rolls off the proverbial press like a half-rendered and thoroughly shredded deer carcass plummeting onto the hood of your car from an overpass on the Dan Ryan- an ominous blast of boiling, flesh-withering blastbeats and peeling staccato riffage that is as outrightly threatening as it is cogently carnal- an externalization of a blood-starved beast's gnawing, insatiable hunger, poured through the siphon of the dialect of aural extremity. If you think you're in the mood for a band that will give you inner ear damage on a scale commensurate with an undersized detachment of lupine louts commandeering your auditory canals for their filthy pillaging and bloody contests of will, then look no further than last year's V: Indomitable- seemingly named as a promise, and executed with enmity. Blood's brand of death metal adheres closely to the playbooks of late '90s black metal practitioners Hate and Spearhead, delivering cruel waves of relentless, unsaturated percussion, with anguished and torturous guitar grooves, and volcanic vocal performances that could make the devil himself wet his tunic in panic. The production on this album is pretty much impeccable, and the mixing is balanced and smart, leaving nothing to be desired in terms of capturing the fire and fury of the band's performance. Inside you are two wolves, and they both cower, paler than sheep's wool in the shadow of this chord-churning, chaos-courting, canis-carnivorous beast. Indomitable, indeed. 

Album Review: Liai - Pastoral Stills From Every Age

A wrinkled evanescence. A chattering gem. Pearling curves which catch the light and curtail them into purple, blue, green, red, and yellow pinions. Frozen in an instant, iterative in plies, cascading in concentric columns, begging to have its rings counted- winnings pooled from serial adaptations and voyages to sunken substrates of voided eons. Echos of decaying echolons and the leer of dimming lights. The pulse of a flower's heartbeat, trapped in living, rippling, dripping resin, splashing outward like a tentative greeting before lapsing with a retreating sigh. Lives lived in the hollow of a windchime, warm breaths whistling between the pores, bodies like flutes, resonating with the vibrations of the atmosphere, finding a rhythm and keeping it a secret in the pocket of their lips. Tears droop and catch clarity, arching upwards towards the clouds, clear streams extending like grape vines, fanning out like peacock feathers, displayed with a humble triumph. A twinkling node collecting on a parched plot of flesh. A calm that blows in like a storm. All in a moment. Enclosed in a space, apeiron.

Album Review: Emma Aibara - u:phobia

Generally, escapism is viewed dimly in society- at least it was for our parents and older siblings. Now they do it too and just avoid conversations that tend to unearth the guilt they harbor while mired in a zombifying pool of blue light ever-present due to a screen addiction, or their mental absence while they cling to the tail of some projected fantasy of success or belonging, or emotional inaccessibility due to overcommitment to a hobby that might as well be a second career (but which doesn't pay the bills), or maybe they just have a good old-fashioned substance abuse conundrum, often, but not always, revolving around the compulsive consumption of some formerly sanctioned narcotic which now can be bought over the counter in exaggerated concentrations evidently cultivated to induce immediate psychological break in those who gulp them down. Everyone is running from something these days- bad economy, bad relationships, worsening prospects- but most of all, they're fleeing themselves, because in every bad situation, there is necessarily an observing subject whose conscious experience of it, and recognition of it, qualifies it as bad. And most people, being one of said people, like nearly everyone around them, can do shit all to make a difference on their own- where there is a fire that you can't put out, the most logical next step is to look for an exit, the nearest escape hatch, pry it open and drop out of sight. I don't know what Japanese, now ported to America, digital-sound artist Emma Aibara is ducking, cutting, and cantering to avoid, but I feel the angst and instinct to evade one's fate on her LP u:phobia like it was a knife pointed at my own throat. The synthesized heroine framed by the album, a projection of Aibara herself, is much like a partially formed butterfly struggling to free itself from the chamber of a cocoon that seems to be getting tighter, and more anaerobic the longer she gestates in its interior, and who runs the risk of being digested by the thieving stagnant ambiance of her crystalline cell- where it should be fortifying her future, it has become a straitjacket, repressing the exigency of her transformation. Flight is the only option, even on stunted and malformed wings, even where the key to one's salvation is tied to a kite of delusion; when the dilemma is survival or suffocation, escape is sine qua non. To that effect, sound serves as saving-grace: digital-hardcore grooves and loops collide in glancing scrapes off of cracked and shard-yielding percussion; long corridors of syncing effects suddenly shorten and invert their referential dimensions, leaving the listener uncertain as to the nadir and the direction in which gravity is compelling them; fae-formulated harmonizations narrowly evade being clipped by flourishes of shrapnel from caustically kaleidoscopic busts of acerbic beats; and overheated sequences scald and liquefy supple human hardware like a flash flow of magma carbonizing and dissolving the superfluous padding of the architecture of the soul's prison and allowing flitting pearls of internal light to squeeze through the open cracks and ascend heavenward. What shadows Emma Aibara is staying a heel and a jump ahead of is not clear from my vantage point, but I can see the crest of dawn illuminating the path before her. I know not where she is absconding, only that wherever she is headed, I want to be there too. I don't know what Japanese, now ported to America, digital-sound artist Emma Aibara is ducking, cutting, and cantering to avoid, but I feel the angst and instinct to evade one's fate on her LP u:phobia like it was a knife pointed at my own throat. The synthesized herione framed by the album, a projection of Aibara herself, is much like a partially formed butterfly struggling to free itself from the chamber of a cocoon that seems to be getting tighter, and more anaerobic the longer she gestates in its interior, and who runs the risk of being digested by the thieving stagnant ambiance of her crystalline cell- where it should be fortifying her future, it has become a straitjacket, repressing the exigency of her transformation. Flight is the only option, even on stunted and malformed wings, even where the key to one's salvation is tied to a kite of delusion; when the dilemma is survival or suffocation, escape is sine qua non. To that effect sound serves as savior, digital-hardcore riffs and loops collide in glancing scrapes off of cracked and shard-yielding percussion; long corridors of syncing effects suddenly shorten and invert their referencial dimentions, leaving the listener uncertain as to the nadir and the direction in which gravity is compelling them; fae-formulated harmonizations narrowly evade being clipped by flourishes of shrapnel from caustically kaleidoscopic busts of acerbic beats; and overheated sequences scald and liquefy supple human hardware like a flash flow of magma carbonizing and dissolving the soft superfluous junk of the architecture of the soul's prison and allowing flitting pearls of internal light to squeeze through the open cracks and ascend heavenward. What shadows Emma Aibara is staying a heel and a jump ahead of is not clear from my vantage point, but I can see the crest of dawn illuminating the path before her. I know not where she is absconding, only that wherever she is headed, I want to be there too.

Album Review: Flesh World - Into The Shroud

Named for the infamous illicit-content periodical from Lynch's primetime soap Twin Peaks, Flesh World are a bit like a spinning strip of a Kenneth Anger reel, projected on an abandoned nightclub's wall, and emerging into phantasmagoric flesh and sonic dimensionality like a cursed, sensual inversion of that one A-ha video- put more concisely, they play a foggy, tense, and dry strain of pop-punk, inspired in equal parts by the Velvet Underground, The Associates, Section 25, and The Smiths. The band revolves around the songwriting collaboration of Jess Scott, who also sings for summery shoegazers Brilliant Colors, and Scott Moore of confrontational and queer-forward hardcore punk outfit Limp Wrist. The resulting sound is more reminiscent of the cool and acerbic Negative Scanner (throwback! catch!) or Sextile than either of the principals' respective branching projects. Into the Shroud is Flesh World's third LP, and probably last, as the band hasn't updated their Tumblr since 2017 (the year this album was released)... and yes, they had a Tumblr (double throwback! I'm getting whiplash here!). Good points of entry for this LP are "Into the Shroud" with its urgent, weaving chords, dreamy harmonized vocals, and jittery vibrating hooks that lay the foundation for the chorus, "Problem in the Youth Bulge," which rides stiff and jutting Gang of Four-esque riffs through its gang-vocal chorus and slips into leaning, reverb-laden chords for the verses, and "This Great Cheap Face," with its desperate, dark, and spiny riffs, bobbing sarcastic chorus hooks, and knotted chords that tie together the bridge. With the obvious (obligatory for some) Lynch references, Velvets obsession, and Vice co-signs (among others), it's all very 2014, culture-bumming, precious-depressoid, Millennial le-sigh-wave, which is completely washed as an aesthetic at this point, but hey, I run a Blogspot, so who am I to throw stones from a glass menagerie? Uncs like this one with fuzzy feels for the late '10s are an easy pickup-and-roll for Flesh World's shtick, and that's fine- I don't mind not curving toward the mean here for once, folks. Also, if Gens Alpha and Beta don't come to resent Millennials too much for being their parents and/or landlords (possibly simultaneously), they might even pick up the vibe for stuff like this, and we could see a queer-coast-cold-wave-bleak-psyche-dark-punk revival in about 15 years, and just like that, Into the Shroud (and this review) will become relevant again. Hey, I never said I wasn't playing the long game (non-game) for cultural significance here, although it's been mostly implied up to this point- under the shroud, so to speak.

Up from the shadows (Dark Entries Records)!

Album Review: Cross Record - Crush Me

Loss is inevitable and superfluous. Everyone will lose someone, and everyone's loss will be felt by another. Dismal as this unavoidable destiny is for ourselves and those we love and leave behind, it is only one phase of a cycle, one that brought us into this world, and one that will indubitably lead us out. As it is so certain, is it to be feared? Or is death to be celebrated?* The Irish seem to think so. Their wakes are as festive as New Year's Day (it's apparently their weddings that they observe with undemonstrative regard), while slightly further south, Ghanaians see the dearly departed off in elaborate, hand-carved coffins, shaped to signify the dreams, achievements, and soul of those they bear like a flashy jewelry box for their freshly discarded wares, and across the ocean, Mexicans welcome their ancestors back each year, as shadows grow longer and the air chills, guided back by candlelight to receive the renewed blessings of their still-breathing kin. Emily Cross knows a little something about the gaps, gauges, and gestalt of life and death's gamut, working as a death doula when she is not memorializing her moods and observations of the obscure through her recording project Cross Record- a shifting ambient variety of warm chamber pop that is both subtly haunting and pleasing to the ear, similar to Low's Double Negative or Broadcast's The Noise Made by People. Crush Me is her sixth LP, first since relocating to Cornwall in the UK, and proceeds with a quiet ache of susurrus florescence pervading the spellbinding itch and prickle existential reflection and calm, a hushed and grassy weave of fertile insight and lucidly tenebrous quotations that run from Emily's tongue to your ear like an excess of ink streaming down loose parchment to pool in a basin, smelling of dusky perfumes and ground, exotic flowers as it flows. Conversations with the departed over late-night coffee and cigarettes, notations on the living as if arranging an anthology collection, jarred emotions set free like a cloud of fireflies swarming to mingle in the camouflage of twilight and the shadows of the Milky Way. Crushed, packed, steeped, and sipped as if it were warm liquid-light and the dew of dissipating fog, Crush Me is cast in living observance of all those things that are too vast to hold, undeterred by the enormity of being and unbeing alike, it is a jubilee that sways the human nidus as it persists in naive ecstasy, suspended in a strange dignity above the gracious depths of the infinite.

Incoherent Italian Babble (Ba Da Bing) Records.

*Well it is in some cases. Smell ya later Stinkball! Hope you're having a gay old time in hell! 

Album Review: Coilguns - Odd Love

The raw angst and measured execution of 2018's Millennials easily made a thousand-strong fan out of a single man like such as myself, meaning I had elevated expectations heading into 2024's Odd Love. After only a few riffs met my ears, I immediately knew I wanted to say something about it to my audience, and so I pulled up the band's biography to sift out the facts, and lo, there it was: FFO Mars Volta, Converge... which *checks notes* was exactly what I was going to say (in so many words) as my opening hook. It's almost a relief as a music writer when a band is like "Hol' up! I got you fam," and you can skip the foreplay and plunge straight into the 4/4 (or whatever time signature these songs are in [what do I look like, a mathematician*?])! Written primarily by guitarist Jona Nido, and later arranged by compatriots vocalist Louis Jucker, guitarist Kevin Galland, and drummer Luc Hess, Odd Love embraces the strangeness of existence and the mystery of the interpersonal connections that form despite its inherently alienating premises. Leading off the procession, "We Missed the Parade" explodes like a balloon full of black confetti and thumbtacks, erupting in a recursive pattern of null-navigating grooves that burn to an angry cinder on contact with the ears like gunpowder ghosts. After the smoke clears, "Placeholders" stamps its imprint on your senses with a chilling backswing and a clean, mincing chopper groove that gins up the tension like a webby clump of flesh-colored cotton candy before dispersing its energy in a fine pink mist that frosts the walls with a fixed luminance of spectral carnage. The smoldering "Caravel" descends with a patient observance, like the captain of a ship hobbling down from his quarters to meet the icy bath of the sea, as his ship, ablaze, takes a groaning bow in submission to the wrathful chasm of Poseidon's kingdom. With "The Wind to Wash the Pain" sweeping the slate with a shivering breath of callous comfort and devout disconsolation, which waits for the heart it kited up to the sky to be returned in cherished condition, knowing full well that it was pierced by an apoxed arrow and devoured by vultures many moons ago. Curious condolences for treacherous times ahead.

* Someone who can count. 

Album Review: Sweat FM - Every Day Is Valentine's Day

I wish I had known about Sweet FM's mix for "Death to America" off of Every Day Is Valentine's Day this past Fourth. Bumping it would have been the apogee of an unceremonious commemoration of a culture and country in decline, which has remarkably endured 250 years only to capsize as an indecorous kleptocracy- Adieu, salaud. However, I stumbled over it on the 5th while checking out some local line-ups at the Bottle, so I'll have to cue it up for next year's barbecue—provided we all don't get baked to radioactive baklava on account of a global nuclear conflict in the interim. Assuming you're not going to spend the next year hoarding beans and fuel in a fallout shelter (and even if you are, why wouldn't you hook up a Wi-Fi router and/or wireless speaker down there?), you can bask in the discernibly hunky, raw-sync romance of Sweat FM's LP, which crossfades (or rather, gracefully camel-clutches maybe) pop-hit-perfection with deep cuts of nuanced new wave and sleaze-greased indie into a collar-elbow tie-up that affixes these disparate genres to rare, neon euro-splash electronica, finding inspired intersecting reciprocation between the Soft Boys, Rilo Kiley, and Rod Stewart on "Emptied" in one instance, while interjecting new shades of blue into Eiffel 65 with a dose of the Cure and binding them in the slimming anaconda-patterned grip of a Mix-a-Lot-anointed beat on "I Can Only Go Too Far," and using Backstreet-born harmonizations and a smear of swampy Sanford sneer to light up ol' glory on "Death to America." It seems certain that Sweat FM's producer provides some original vocals to these mixes, splicing in SoundCloud-rap-quality chants and croons (non-derogatory, merely descriptive) for emphasis where needed, making this electro-consortium of unlikely bedfellows a spiritual extension of the presently reposing-in-power electro-punk project, Real Dominic. Some of the transitions in these mixes are a little on the clunky side and could use some smoothing out, but as is, the compartmentalized flow gives breathing room for the listener to attempt to retrace the process of inspiration and unravel the meaning and intention behind the interspersed layers, while the blockier nature of these syncs is aesthetically invariant with the visage of the DJ himself, a bronzed human canvass of chiseled contemplation. Whether you're out cruising for a rail to ride or pressing for a clutch of confectious currents to crunch in the curve of your sonic sweet tooth, Every Day Is Valentine's Day will hop you up on what feels like a sugar high with no requisite crash until the needle runs out of groove to tickle.

Album Review: Crucifyre - Post Vulcanic Black

Crucifyre is a Swedish death metal band comprised of frontman Erik "Tormentor" Sahlström and members of Shelter, Afflicted, Nasum, and Goddess. Surprisingly, they're not an Entombed rip-off or a grindfest, preferring mid-tempo doom-beats that only occasionally turn up the heat to approach a blast-beat roil. Lash these mean beats to some thrashy chain-link grooves, ashy black metal production, and throaty madmen vocals à la Possessed, and you have a rock 'n' roll rager to light up a party at the end of days. Post Vulcanic Black is Crucifyre's third LP and picks up where their second LP, Black Magic Fire, left off. This is one of those cases where if it ain't broke, don't mess with it too much. Tormentor and crew know how to write a savage death metal serenade, and that's all you need in your life sometimes. Additional possible selling points? They're aggressively, and amusingly, anti-Christian, in the "we're Satanists and declare war on Christ" sorta way that American heshers should be fairly accustomed to after two-plus decades of Deicide, but which comes across as more of a Venom-esque, "we're the villains of this story, and damn does it feel good to be bad" kinda camp in practice (it's less annoying the Ghost's schtick, trust me). You know the type. Lots of big blasphemous, tongue-in-cheek proclamations of mendacious intent, little to no actual church burning (thankfully!).

Practice what you Pulverize (Records).