Interview: The Eradicator

Listen up, pusshead! You ain't nobody unless you're somebody on the squash court! It is the ultimate game of manly endurance, speed, agility, and intelligence. A test of will and fortitude on a magnitude that rivals the myths of ancient gods. Two men enter the court; one man leaves... and shortly thereafter, the other man, having declared himself the victor, also hits the showers. Sure, it's the same showers that the loser is using, and yeah, he may have to ask to borrow a towel and some deodorant from the loser, and he might have forgotten his wallet so he can't pay for a cab or the train and will be hoofing it back to the office that morning, but that just makes the triumph all the sweeter. The stains on his collar and in the pits of his suit jacket when he arrives in the lobby of his employer's building are the laurel rings of a champion, and no one can erase their golden glory- as much as one might try with a Shout stick or other name-brand stain remover. No one knows the perspiration of perseverance and the stink of success better than The Eradicator, aka Andy Slania, the demon of the D Squash Ladder, banshee of the back courts, the phantom of the point-a-rally, the shaitan of sweat- in short, he's your worst nightmare... and the latest guest on this podcast!

Check out The Eradicator's latest LP You Can Hate The Eradicator: 

Album Review: Sistema de Entretenimiento - Arcade Punk

Chongqing, China, one of the largest municipal districts in the world, may rightfully have laid claim to the title of Cyberpunk Capital, earned through its advanced technical sector and neon-future landscapes, but the soundtrack of the nigh-approaching total-techno dominion is transmitting across sea and air, out of the leaky boiler rooms and dank basement dens of Barcelona. It's the future, baby! ...of a distant past. What Spanish FM synthesis and electro-punks Sistema de Entretenimiento are excavating are already decayed and tarnished remnants of tomorrow in the ashes of today. Squaring the freshly freed angst of the post-Franco '80s into a pixelated, soft-tooth buzzsaw of oscillating lo-fi disco puntazos, they construct with sound a virtual vision of the 21st century from the vantage point of far-flung yesteryear that is more advanced and exciting than the one we find ourselves mired in the depths of, but nevertheless, just as desperate and disquieting. A prophetic fever of fortress-like, chrome-gleaming skyscrapers so tall that they literally pierce through to the void of space and are in constant threat of colliding with satellites; widespread commercially available cybernetic anatomical augmentations and back-alley butchers licensed to install them for bottom-barrel prices; rogue killer androids; flying cars; android spouses and electric sheep- their oneiric implications nearer and auspicious promises farther away today than they were when the now-diseased circulars of mass-market paperbacks and VHS OVAs articulated their conceivable emergence- at least on the Western half of the globe. I guess that's why EPs like Arcade Punk seem so prescient; they're paving the night with percolating neon-noise-tinted excess in anticipation of a future that will never arrive, but is somehow already receding in the rear-view mirror.

The United States has the highest carceral rate of any country in the world, and yet Prison Records is based in Spain. Curious...

Album Review: Chuwi - Tierra

Apparently there is a fair amount of hype around Puerto Rican electric plena quartet Chuwi, and it stems in part from their inclusion on a Bad Bunny track last year. I haven't heard it. Probably won't either.* I know about Chuwi because I Shazam'd one of their songs while waiting for a sandwich at a Cuban restaurant. I'm an organic music forager, it's true. Chuwi's second EP, Tierra, has a noticeably breezier quality to it compared to their first EP, Pan, released two years prior, with its haunted scans of dizzy disquiet and uneven sense of crawling across a steadily eroding incline. This more recent EP instead draws forward the more outwardly tropical aspects of their sound, diverting it through riven veins of pooling electronic diffusion, like channels cut in the sand allowing fresh water to flow inland where it can replenish parched lips and cleanse calloused hands. The teetering sway and lapping melodies could easily be mistaken for a resort accompaniment at times; its accommodating abundance and ebullient affection for its subject matter are certainly pliant enough to appear insouciant at a brush and even offer overhangs of respite for tourists. But Tierra at bedrock is a carta de amor and homenaje to the group's home, a land in unsettling limbo- swallowed whole, chewed up, and regurgitated back in place in an increasingly unrecognizable form by the cold logic of commerce, the callow capitulation of corruption, and a naturalization of neglect, the compounding conditions of colonialism which, together, conspire, among other insults, to perpetuate a vampiric attrition and wringing out of the island's lifeblood: its people. What is a land without its people? At best a desert, at worst an empty crypt. Balmy as it is sonically, Tierra is an echo of the unheard, one that manages, at times, to land sweetly on the ears, but which smuggles into the open the indisputable certitude of a sour state of affairs.

*You really have to drag me like I'm a mule over a mountaintop to get me to listen to anyone big enough to play the Super Bowl (an unfortunately annual exhibition of the crassest excesses of commercialism and a monument to human sacrifice and wasted potential). That said, I don't have a negative impression of Bad Bunny himself, and I think he has a nice mustache, but the vibe I get from the obsessive celebrity cult around him is that his stuff is probably not for me. Who knows, I could be wrong... First time for everything. 

Album Review: Forever ☆ - Second Gen Dream

Wake up! There is a party raging on a cloud, and it's finally dipped low enough for you to hitch a ride. Kansas City's Forever ☆ have charted a course for a nearby rainbow-paved cumulus kanibaru due North, and they're only making a single pass through your block, so if you want in on the action, you're going to have to pick out the brightest star visible from your vantage point and make a wish so big that they can't help but collide with it as they cruise the air currents overhead. If you can cut past the strong-arming bouncer of your own inhibition, then you might just find yourself in the catbird seat of a souped-up Second Gen Dream, punching the gas and hewing through a gossamer bastion of club-commingled claps of restorative feedback, golden waves of frosty jungle heat, and hot cycling jolts of drum 'n' bass palpitations with enough surging electricity to burst half the street lamps in Manchester and turn them into teeming dispensers of flaming confetti. As of this writing, it is Thursday, August 27 at 02:14 UTC, and Wednesday, August 26, 21:15 local time. Nowhere on Earth is it Friday night yet, except for right here, right now. You, this magnificent Missouri duo, the molten kiss of brassy loops, and the bladey purr of an acid-peeled groove, making the city your personal music box, pummeling the pavement and cruising the small hours into a vaporous spectacle of bluff and beguile, escaping from the day-walking world into the waxen reel of a city painted in moonlight and balmy eros, hinged on an easy-rolling centripetal spindle-fount of starry-eyed felicity. Forever. The night is forever, so long as you're dreaming. 

Why choose when you can have it all, à La Carte (Records)?

Album Review: Shirley Scott - One For Me

One for Me is literally One for Her, her being Shirley Scott, soul jazz pioneer and organist, and one of the few female bandleaders of the '60s. One for Me (originally released on artist-run-and-focused Strata-East Records in 1975) was recorded in 1974 with saxophonist Harold Vick and drummer Billy Higgins, a continuation of her preferred trio ensemble arrangement, and came along a few years after her divorce from saxophonist Stanley Turrentine, with whom she was a frequent collaborator. Culminating during a lull in a very storied career, one which saw Shirley releasing albums on the NYC-based Prestige and Creed Taylor's Impulse! Records, among others, the impetus for a solo record of this kind was a shade of enterprise directed towards vindication and edification: a conviction to utilize the talents she had honed for others to precipitate a performance that reflected her unaltered vision, without deviation or compromise- the indulgence of a satisfaction that was her own, and a pleasure that topped off her chalice before cascading into the waiting cup of another. Shirley's handling of the Hammond B-3 holds court somewhere between God's house and a smoke-saturated subterranean saloon, a crossroads of Gospel and bebop that is as heavenly as it is heavy with pensive purple dreams and cerulean introspection. Despite it all, there is a gaiety and an ebullience to the ambiance that spills out from Shirley's moody sonic exposition, one that gives it the airy din of laughter; there is a posh sort of rapture in this run, almost as if it were her very soul stroking these keys and pedals rather than the work of human hands and feet.

It all started one peaceful day, the day that everything changed... (Arc Records). 

Album Review: Volatile Ways - Perfect Dark

Commencing their warpath as a birthday gift from bassist Lewy Glass to vocalist Emily Beekmans, the group lives up to the premise of their name on their second LP, Perfect Dark. Favoring low, grinding grooves that scrape the surroundings like a spinning wheel of devastation appended to the arm of a Bagger 293 Bucket Wheel Excavator, they're metalcore in the transmissibly threatening pathogenesis of The Acacia Strain- slow, crushing, unsparing- a patient form of ruthlessness that builds on its own momentum to ensure the thorough defilement of the listener's imortal (yet soon to be tarnished) spirit, ascending in the darkness in an eclipsing invocation of perdition that blots out the sun in a warmthless grey quilt of gloom. Can you believe this stuff is inspired by Dark Souls? I ask rhetorically, because if it wasn't, I'd be completely at a loss. "God Will Be Cut" causes St. Peter's gates to quake on their hinges, exploding like a meteor burning up in the atmosphere, spreading a deafening violence and upheaval in the wake of its sonic boom, while "Pink Mist Wish List" tallies up its dead pool winnings with the lash and rip of saber-shaped riffs, and the claw-and-gnaw of gruesomely carnivorous grooves that mop up the scene like a tiger licking the floor of a slaughterhouse to a gleaming, polished, refective radiance, and "Perfect Dark" initiates with a turgid, undulating trawler of a riff before cracking into a yarble pitting chop and tilted, aggression-laden blade pitch, mincing with equal measured precision and patient ferocity whatever resistance you have left to the gravitational haul they exert to impel you into the density of a white-searing void. Now you have perfect knowledge of Volatile Ways dark methods. This is my gift to you. Do with it what you will.

Bereave in God Records... that's actually the name of the label. They're doing my work for me now!

Album Review: Gun - Neo Notown

It's hard to overstate the mythic position that guns have within the contemporary imagination. Sources of power and dispensers of fear, they are implements that set their sights on the hinge points of history, striking them and spinning them on their axis; an exchange of smoke and blood in incalculable magnitudes; the trajectory of countless pivotal, piercing brass streaks tear through the tomes of time like a bullet through butterfly wings, rewriting the course of human affairs in their wake. One of the enduring legacies of the Mongol incursion into Europe, it was the gun that changed the tides of the Sengoku period when Portuguese traders washed up on the Southern rim of the Japanese archipelago, bringing this violent innovation full circle and changing the nature of conquest in East Asia 400 years after gunpowder was introduced to the West by the great horde. Every revolution in the modern era has leaned on this tool as both agency and arsenal, justice and deliverance, while every uprising that has seen itself smothered was choked out in a haze of hot, chalky blue residue coughed out by the same. Then there is America's specific relationship to these instruments of grandiose annihilation, a pillar and totem of popular political strength; they mostly serve as playthings for the socially marginal and declassed for performing toothless tantrums in provincial wooded areas, and as the means for settling petty grudges and satisfying venomous resentments in a litany of tragedies recounted across timelines and news feeds, landing in the lap of the public with little more than a resigned sigh. Few would aver to embody such a disputatious and complex legacy, or don such a heritage of revolution and ruin by choice, and yet New York City tetrad Gun have proven so bold. On their second LP, Neo Notown, the group compresses their insurgent energy into a progressive message of hope broadcast across a desaturated techno-surveillance dystopia, not unlike the Big Apple of present-day, or any other collapsing megacity one can find themselves slowly crushed by across the globe. A jet-set soundtrack that twists early '00s alt metal, industrial rock, noise punk, and funk into a riffled cylinder of steel by which to discharge a burst of pure adrenaline to your cortex in a colorful splash of heat-ignited, reactive rebellion. They sweep and stun from the outset on the groove-swagger slugfest opener and title track, before bouncing the turnstile and grinding the rails on "Laser Gun," directing fluctuating phaser fields of pitch-shifting guitar fluctuations to power a Cypress Hill-summiting royal with a panged, determined, and desperate trust in the direction of Stabbing Westward. Wacked-out grooves rebound off brick facades, flickering streetlights, and past spying doorway portals on the clandestine cylinder slide and delayed sizzling payload of "Bullet Town," while "Walking on the Sun" sprays straight from the hip, letting the trigger slip as they carve a full-metal manifesto in the air, bars whirling in a ballet of carnage like spent cases spinning south of heaven, all while grooves claw at the seams of sonic propriety, prying away the varnish in a torquing separation of flesh from its fetters. "Star-Crossed Fighters" brings a knife to the fray, one large and sharp enough to rive the roof clean off a Buick, surprising the interior of the cabin, and your skull, with a glistening bath of uninvited sunshine, a high point which leaves room for the downshifting reprieve of "The Armory" to follow. Once fully recharged and resupplied, Gun takes aim and empties the clip on "Ready, Set, Action!" - a rich and chewy serving of lead salad with a side of gut-ripping riffs and stomp-steady grooves that will reduce the brawn of the unworthy to a pliable pulp, a fine-grain pâté suitable for the palate of the discerning sewer-dwelling vermin, it is a triumph that is preceded by a sweeping procession of closer "Victory" a track that rolls over the vanquished with light-footed, moonwalking grooves and a Richter scale-busting beat. You've heard voices of previous generations tell you to load up on guns and bring your friends; well, presently, you and your pals just need one to seize the day, and this is it- point-blank and in your face. Fill your hands, you son of a bitch, and show what grit you've got to give! Neo Notown or bust! 

Album Review: Forests - That's Not Very Mid-Century Modern Of You

Alright, what have we got here? Epic fantasy setting. Hell in space, or maybe an open-air dungeon sunk into the inner rim of a volcano. Antagonistic, voyeuristic extraterrestrials en route. Cal-Art-injected pastel hardcore fonts. ASCII Miffy art. Midwestern emo and gang-vocal pile-on pop punk with a conspicuous familiarity with Melt-Banana. Singapore... Yeah, none of this is very Mid-Century Modern, which was a design philosophy popular in the immediate post-war period in the continental United States, which emphasized bold curvatures and defined contours, emphasizing truth in structure and materials, and intrinsically forbearing superfluous embellishments- That's Not Very Mid-Century Modern Of You is as inverse to these principles as the sun is to the moon's shadow. While earnest in intention, Forests are almost fully defined by their embrace of the extraneous, including text art in the lyrics for every track and utilizing children's mascots, obtuse musical genre litmus tests, ubiquitous trans-Atlantic technological fatigue, and bit-tune techno to elevate sonic texture and textual ballast, and uplift gleaming pop grand jetés to reach a suitable height in order to bathe the atrium between your ears in an acute overflow of stained specular reflection. It's colorful, it's consistent, it's heartfelt, and it's awesome- Forests doesn't bow before a single aesthetic idol; they've built their own atelier, as mysterious and deep as a jungle nestled in the belly of a gorge, one where they hold all the keys, and can unlock a door in the trunk of any tree they choose, bounding up their rings like great concentric staircases, toe-gripping branches in a sprint and hopping off the apex to belly flop onto another buoyant epiphany as it drifts on course toward the canopy- rising above the conceits of critics and dogmatists alike and bridging a gap that feels narrow in retrospect. Midwest corridor, corn country, to the Strait of Malacca- the distance is shorter than you think.

Album Review: Craft - White Noise and Black Metal

Craft was quiet for quite a while before this. Granted, they've been quiet since as well, but at least there is a precedent for it now. After drummer and founding member Daniel Halen quit in 2005, the band briefly considered breaking up, with the ultimate fate of the group remaining unclear even after 2011's Void, where Dirge Rep of Enslaved filled in behind the kit. White Noise & Black Metal was Craft's first album in seven years, heralding their triumphant return to a Darkthrone-devoted cleave of severely sharp and acerbically aggressive black metal, an invigorating blast of arctic misanthropy and cosmic angst that exhumes the genre's simple, bleak, and world-wearing forecast for humanity and serves as bait for the rotten, scale-shedding eels that squirm in writhing heaps below the surface tension of the soul- carving up the frost-fortified ramparts into intricate etches and runic arcs, a tormented intercourse of vesica piscis through which dark auras pulse and old grudges flow to attain a ripe bloody luster. WN&BM is a cleaner-produced album than its predecessor, the platework here acquiring the polish of an unnatural and sickly shade of silver- in spite of this turn towards refined, translucent shades of mayhem, there is a surprising live-recording quality to these tracks, making it possible to imagine yourself in a dungeon-like practice space submerged beneath a barn in the Swedish rurals, petrified and dragging oneself across the floor as these riff revenants raise a sigil-scrawled, phantasmal citadal of white-burning annihilation from the blackening earth of a cellar floor with the adumbral iridescence of their sinister symphony, the gust from their amplifiers coursing cold down your collar like the breath of a sky-swallowing wolf, and the thump of their grooves reverberating through your chest like a hammer striking iron. Honestly, I had a lot of fun with this release when it came out in 2018, not just because it rules in an ontological sorta way, but because at the time I was working with an incredibly annoying washed-up hipster who dropped out of New York to settle in Chicago as a sort of "Plan B" and settlement with his own ambitions. He was the kind of guy who "liked a little bit of everything," so long as "everything" was something approved by that month's flavor of byline-boasting shitshovelers, more commonly known to the public as "tastemakers." We were in a shared workspace, and I knew I could always throw it on to piss him off, especially when he suggested that we listen to something like Deafheaven or the like. It is ingrained in my lobes how this record never failed to carve a grimace across his perpetual five-o'clock shadow, deep enough to threaten to crack his gaunt, frail jawline intwine. I learned then that Craft is capable of casting a dark cloud over all of the right kind of people, and for that, they will always have my respect.

The Season of Spite (Mist) is upon you! 

Album Review: Paul Coleman - The Weather Man

You don't have to dig much to pry up stories about artists getting screwed sideways in the music industry. The frequency and severity of the repercussions reaped from advances taken and recouped in mythic levels of psychic damage, or the prevalence of general business chicanery, became almost a rite of passage for alternative artists in their dealings with the vampiric patronage of major label syndicates in the '90s- souls were reaved and dreams were decimated, scarring a whole generation of rock star wannabes- but you don't have to hunt down the survivors of the first wave of grunge to fill your ears with the horrors that circle the periphery of the lime light like a school of dagger-toothed piranhas- just buy any DIY musician a Pabst or treat them to a Yerba, and they'll unspool a yarn that will leave you hanging by the collar in despair over their dealings with the industry and the backstabbings, cross-stabbings, and bag-nabbings that define even the dive bar, dreg-scraping levels of the industry. One fine fellow who certainly saw his fill of it was Chicago's Paul Coleman. Originally of the (ironically) fatally fleeting funk ensemble Rasputin's Stash, and the pristine but untimely tarnished soul-pop quartet Crystal Winds, the enterprising keyman was presented with the opportunity to create a soundtrack for the newly launched Weather Channel sometime in the early '90s- a potential windfall that came his way because an executive at the channel was dating fellow Crystal Winds bandmate Corky Brown's (aka M.C. (Morris) Brown) sister. Writing the entire repertoire over a sleepless two-week marathon, the final cuts were accepted by the programming director and played on air, offering a refreshingly buoyant complement to the dry business of local forecasts and barometric reports- none of which ended up benefiting Paul though, as his whimsical climate compositions were tossed out with a sudden change in ownership, and he was never paid. It's always painful to witness talented people crash headfirst into the realities of corporate acquisition and power plays, like moths disappearing into a mass of goo as they intersect with a sedan windshield screaming down the Eisenhower, but as the fates preserve, Paul's recordings have been salvaged and repackaged for modern listeners' vindication under the title The Weather Man. The selection offered by this project presents a lighter side of funk, a crisp and invigorating, lean and balanced portrait of elegant simplicity that invites interpretation and absorbing contemplation, just as passing clouds compel the earthbound to divine galloping signs and symbols in the sky and place perspective on our relative position in a large, interconnected globe. Softly textured and accommodating, The Weather Man teems with a mist of optimism and a belief that all things will find a site of affordance to brace against the tempest and find one's fortunes in the fronts of simmering, silver-lined clouds as they swirl and billow about us. Hopefully these tracks bring you more luck than their maestro, or at least remind you to get everything in writing before you commit your heart and soul to it.

Destination is only excuse for the journey (Athens of the North).

Album Review: Demon Eye - Prophecies and Lies

In about 2017 or somewhere around then, all the little shops by me that are run by like one girl and sell mostly Sears catalog jewelry they picked up at estate sales, a selection of three interchangeable blouses, and tour shirts from the '90s at a 1000% markup also started offering nazar amulets in various guises and trinkets. I don't know why, but other girls who couldn't afford to run stores with a lower daily sales volume than your average yacht broker really seemed to dig it and pushed those purchases per diem up into the double digits. Presumably, the idea was that these concentric blue circles would protect you from the premonitional gaze of a roaming malocchio and help them find a boyfriend who is easily bullied or land a promotion to superintendent at the non-profit orphanage for wayward Victorian dolls they work at, but I actually think there was more to it. Calling yourself a witch became popular around the same time, and rather than warding off evil, I think decorating oneself with these charms was meant to place the world on notice that the forces of evil were at her command, that the maleficence of the world bent to her will. What's a bigger power play than flipping a reverse card on Father Brimstone himself, making life a game of Faustian Uno where the objective is to make the devil your bitch? As a metal fan, I understand this impulse. Metal musicians are adept at adopting the iniquitous and vile to lend power and potency to their sound, whether it be naming themselves after an unholy disease or giving their albums and songs the titles that align with various curses- evil flows through metal like blood through the gasping pumps of the human heart. More to the point of donning a malignant gaze to publicize one's perihic influence is Raleigh, North Carolina's Demon Eye. On their most recent (as of 2017) LP Prophecies and Lies, the group proudly performs a nostalgic and measured homage to Black Sabbath, with flashes of Iron Maiden's guitar heroics and Blue Öyster Cult's playful, psychedelic mysticism. This is very familiar, fuzzy, hooky, and muscular metal that is unavoidably charming in its brash display of unself-conscious depictions of might and wizardly wickedness. Early into this misadventure, the group tiptoes up to the altar of doom-shrouded Hecate before barreling over into Sabbath swagger on "In the Spider's Eye." Their outlandish outlaw nature takes on new dimensions of depravity on the blues bruiser "The Redeemer," and later the mystic, Deep Purple-worshipping "Vagabond" glides on a pungent lilac-tinted cloud as it scrapes the countryside in an endless quest for invigorating brushes with budding chaos. Is the sweep of el mal de ojo the harbinger of great misfortune, or a tiger yet to be tamed? For each of us, the answer is different, a rejoinder whose verdict rests solely in the eye of the beholder.

Souls are like Pokémon cards, the money is in the margins (Soulseller Records).