Album Review: septemberistheonlytimeidontthinkofyou - scars like kimberly

Just to flip the script a bit, I planned to write about scars like kimberly back in September. "Like, yeah, it's September, and guess what, I'm thinking of you!* What are you going to do about it, baby?" Being on the road all that month, though, left me with about as wide a gap in my schedule for writing as the shoulder of an overpass overlooking the Dan Ryan- so, about the width of a DoorDash cyclist's mustache, and then I'm roadkill. Not a lot of margin to mess around, is what I'm saying. Fine, fair. No complaints. Pour out the whine; it's cider season anyway. I'm not here to mess around, after all, and neither is septemberistheonlytimeidontthinkofyou! Shades of light, shades of dark, mixing and mingling, opposing and dependent, painting portraits of pain and regret, dodging dilution while remaining virtuosically permeable, pungent. Raw emotion, welling as if to replenish the empty dissonance of an abandoned opera house and displace the stale air of its interior with stratified sheets of tears tinted with the charcoal tincture of crumbling black eyeliner. Scraping and screaming like a skateboard deck grinding off the rust-dusted rim of a dumpster and into the windshield of a parked suburban Subaru while its operator is elsewhere purchasing kneepads for their preteen pest's intramural pastime- the immediacy of their blend of mall screamo and metal melocore is instantaneous, clangorous, and intrusive, even if its impact on you isn't fully cognized until you've had a talk with your insurance broker. Like Saosin shaved into helical streamers of unpolished steely corrugate and woven into a chainmail wailing shroud, or Pierce the Veil applying a splash of lip gloss at the end of a glowing-hot brand which a witless bystander attempts to smother with a lap of acetone- it's resiliently melancholy and iridescent in execution- a rebirth through the carnage of cesarean, dragged from the womb through still-open wounds carved in past selves. Needless to say, I will be thinking of this one tomorrow, the day after, and every day, well into the next year, and all the way to next September (or however long it takes them to conjure its sonic next of ki(m)n).

* "You" being... well, just keep reading... or look at the title of the review. Whatever!

Interview: Celebration Guns

Photo courtesy of We're Trying Records. 

What everyone loves about emo music, myself included, is the ability that its players have to dive into their own turmoil, traumas, and emotional tempests and surface with blindingly relatable insights into their character and personage, which, when conveyed to the listener, feel like they might as well have been scraped from the bedrock of their own soul. Observant of this tradition, Celebration Guns has flourished as peaceful cultivators of many plots of thorny yet lovely desert roses, cultivated from the cradle of self-recognition, to be nurtured in the crepuscular gold and yellow beams of the observer's sympathetic apprehension of the lacerations and petals of their own delicate and damaged, wild and badly pruned interior fernery. Yet, despite the pain, the blood that runs from one's palm when they grip a rose, Celebration Guns keeps returning to the nape of their nursery, and beckoning us to follow in their sometimes maudlin, often exuberant footsteps. For as much as inquisitions into the heart are often harvesters of pain, their stinging intuition is irrefutable evidence of the proof of our existence, and the shared context of the human condition. What Keeps Us Coming Back is Celebration Guns' second LP, first for We're Trying Records, and nearly a decade down-the-road, and a distant ancestor to their 2018 LP (Probably) Worth It. Where earlier releases pondered why, their latest LP affirms eternal reasons for their return. Need I say more? I think not, as vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, and founding member Justin Weir has plenty to say for himself...

What Keeps You Coming Back to Celebration Guns over a decade into your career as a band...

Playing music is the only thing that I know and the only thing that I occasionally feel like I’m good at. I started playing in bands in 1997 when I was 15 years old. From there, I played live in at least 20 different bands with genres ranging from pop punk, ska, metalcore, post-hardcore, indie, dance punk, orgcore, and, of course..emo. Most of these bands lasted a year or less, the longer running ones maybe 2-3 years. Celebration Guns was the first band where it felt like we were actually reaching the ears of a few people (this may have a correlation with the rise of streaming and social media, etc, around 2013) and we were receiving consistent positive feedback locally. Another factor in keeping this train rolling is that the genre of emo hit me really hard around 1999 (Jimmy Eat World’s Clarity played a big part in cementing that for me), and it never fully left me. In many of the other bands I played in, I found myself trying to force an emo song or at least a part into those bands’ songs. It was the style that I knew and felt best, so the songwriting came more naturally to me.

...and why was this selected as the title for the new album?

The embarrassing but honest answer is that for a year or longer I had been hoping to come across a phrase (or even just a random collection of words) that sounded interesting enough to use for an album title. I finally found it while I was reading The First Bad Man by Miranda July, where protagonist was explaining to an unrequited love that she felt she knew him in a past life. His album title worthy response was “What keeps us coming back?” I initially took What Keeps Us Coming Back to mean coming back to a past relationship or life situation that clearly wasn’t meant to be. I just really like that it can take on multiple meanings. Like your question above, I kind of hoped everyone didn’t immediately read it as “why is this band still putting out music?” but if they do, fair question.

Tyler Flanagan, who designed our album and single art, came up with the idea of putting a house on the cover (likely not meant as a reference to the popular “house on the emo album cover” trend, as he isn’t necessarily in that scene). He also came up with the man running into the building, a reference to the album theme of coming back to a bad situation. Keeping this in mind, it could also apply to Celebration Guns running back to the genre where having a house on an album cover is all the rage (we did it with 2021’s The Visiting Years)

Do you consider What Keeps Us Coming Back to be part of an anthology with any of your other releases, or is it more stand-alone and self-contained?

What Keeps Us Coming Back is very much a stand-alone and self-contained release as it is our first album with an all-new lineup (besides me). The only anthology to speak of is the fact that we had plans to record LP2 two other times between 2020 and 2022 that turned into 4 EPs and 2 Splits*

*Starting in 2018 we recorded 9 songs with our 2 nd of 3 drummers Peter Coleman Jr., but only half of the songs were finished by the time COVID started, so we released those songs as 2 Eps: …on aging gracelessly (2020) and The Visiting Years (2021). Similar with the 12 songs we recorded in 2021 & 2022 (original drummer Timothy O’Brien back in the band) we decided to spread the songs out between Midlife Vices EP (2022), Split with A Place for Owls (2023), The Ultimate Emo Album Split with Swiss Army Wife and Avec Plaisir (2024) and Enough Already EP (2024). So, in the sense that we have been attempting to release a proper LP2 since 2020, all 32 of those songs may work as a sort of an anthology of LP2.

What was the hardest song to write on this album, and conversely, which was the easiest?

The hardest song to write was "Regrets, Regurgitated." It was originally written in 2018 and felt a little outside of the fast-paced, mathy and chaotic music we were trying to write around that time, so I never introduced it to the band. While trying to think of old demos to go with the new songs we wrote for this album, this song came up and the rest of the band had a good feeling about it.

The band wasn’t thrilled with a meandering riff break I had written later in the song, so I changed that into a more dreamy/dark section with vocals added (right after the 1st chorus). We also decided to change the guitar only intro to piano, which was mostly complicated in finding the best way to capture the sound and make it blend with the decidedly heavier approach this song has compared to the rest of the album.

The easiest song was likely "Magpies in Disguise." It is one of the more straightforward songs we’ve ever recorded. I started playing that palm muted part and was hearing Frightened Rabbit type vocals over it (the song was called “he frighten dagnabit” later shortened to “dagnabit” until a while after we finished recording it), and for once I decided to stop myself from overwriting the music and focus my attention on the lyrics. I hope I got one of those 2 things right. Did the track "Maudolin" get its name because of the mandolin parts in it, or did you add those parts because of the name? Either way, I'm pretty curious about the intersection of the themes of this track and the mandolin parts, as I (I think others probably as well) don't typically think of it as a somber or lacermuse instrument, but it does take on these qualities in your performance to a degree.

I’m not sure why I chose to include the name of the instrument that features heavily in 2 of the songs on the album, directly into the song title (Vibraphone for the Perpetually at Home is the other). Yes, the fact that the foundation of the song was written on mandolin plays heavily into that title, but I also felt like the lyrics were a bit maudlin at time. And I like puns that aren’t quite funny or clever, so here we are.

The self-pitying, lonesome and hopeless feelings in the lyrics do feel a little disparate from the mostly upbeat and happy feeling of the song. We made sure to throw in a gloomy bridge and a weepy sounding outro to balance things out. We have a song from (Probably) Worth it aka LP1 called Move On that uses the mandolin in a similar way, wringing all the joy and sadness out of it throughout. So when we went about finally writing songs for the true LP2, it felt like it was time for a second mandolin song.

What is a "Why Detective" the going rate for someone considering a career pivot (potentially in middle age)?

The song has everything to do with making assumptions about why a person doesn’t like you back the way you think they should. It’s not you, it’s me?? You don’t have to tell me twice! But I need to know more: was it my looks? My neurotic personality? My repeated questions? I need to know why. I was considering working “lie detector” into a silly sounding phrase, but instead I went with a Justin classic: a bad pun involving a rhyme.

Also worth noting: this is one of three songs on the album that was arranged around some fantastic noodly guitar parts that Johl wrote (the other two being Johl Rides Again and Here’s the Thing). Johl refuses to comment other than to answer your original question and say: “Why Detecting isn’t free: it pays a buck o five.”

What is your favorite bird-related conspiracy theory, and how does it relate to "Magpies in Disguise"? On a more serious note, how does the symbolism of the magpie emerge as a metaphor in the lyrics of this track?

The birds are spies, they report to the trees is one of my favorite band names. That name feels like a big conspiracy theory that explains itself in one sentence. Johl actually came up with the song title “Magpies in Disguise”, but when I asked him to elaborate, he declined, claiming that explaining song titles is “for the birds.” 

On behalf of Johl, I will say that magpies in disguise was a saying I was not familiar with until he suggested it. It refers to magpies being easily distracted by shiny things. The song is based on my real-life marriage (spoiler – there was also a divorce) and the wedding that took place, and how we were both excited and attracted to the ultimate big shiny object of marriage: a beautiful wedding. As we all know, there’s a lot of work to come after the wedding and that’s where myself and many others have been unable to follow through. So, I guess that would make me one of the magpies. That’s deep.

What machines are replacing guillotines, and how does the enterprise-level adoption improve efficiencies headed into Q4? Big picture, what kind of social implosion as spectator sport are you describing on this track, and what do you hope the takeaway is for the listener?

The song name Machines Replacing Guillotines is a play on the name of a post-dance-punk band I played in from 2005 called Machines Replacing Teens (https://machinesreplacingteens.bandcamp.com/) My original plan was to make every song name on this album a pun around some of my prior band names. Thank goodness I didn’t follow through on that one.

Lyrically, I was thinking about how I have consistently failed at trying to master the art of social media as a way of connecting within a music community or promoting our band. We first started kind of reaching people and bands outside of AZ around early 2020 when we started working with Chillwavve Records (now defunct: https://cwrecords.bandcamp.com/). When I was in my early 20’s, in the early 2000s, I was all over the message boards and confidently being ridiculous and outgoing. Bringing that energy to 2020 and beyond at the ripe old age of 38 was a different story.

I almost didn’t want to put this song on the album because I didn’t want anyone to mistake it as an “anti-cancel culture” type of thing. It’s just a straightforward explanation of how I kept wanting to be bold and post thoughts and ideas along with promoting the band, but I came onboard this scene when people were being SUPER CANCELLED daily. Mostly for very valid reasons, but we all know that occasionally people get “cancelled” on the same level for saying something-off putting or offensive receiving basically the same level of cancellation as the worst offenders would. So, the machines acting as guillotines are, I suppose, social media – public execution by cancellation type of thing. Yeah, a little embarrassing. But it’s also kind of catchy? I don’t know, don’t cancel me over this 

I'm really feeling the dusty, alt-country amble of "The First Strut Is The Deepest"? Do you listen to a lot of country/folk? What were the inspirations for the stylistic framing and execution of this track? Addendum: are you referencing the original or the Sheryl Crow cover?

This song was written back in 2008 and was the first full song that I ever wrote and then recorded using a computer. I used my college graduation money to buy a 2007 MacBook, an acoustic guitar and a midi controller. I packed this first song full of every single fake instrument I could fit from the selections on Garageband on that midi controller, and it turned into a cute song to sneak onto the end of mix CDs I made for crushes over the years.

We attempted to recreate the song using real instruments this time, including: acoustic guitar, a cajon kit, banjo, Suzuki flute recorder, melodica, stylophone and I’m sure I’m forgetting something. It’s the only song where Johl and Justin both did back up harmonies and we are pretty happy with how it turned out. I like how it really stands out as something different for this album

Regarding the song title, I think I’m referencing the Rod Stewart version. I don’t know if that song was around more in 2008, or if I was just in denial about the Sheryl Crow version, but back then I would randomly belt out the chorus in my best Rod Stewart impression. The song title pun was what I saved the Garageband demo file as: it was literally my first “strut” at recording my own music, but was it the deepest? Time won’t tell.

You're free to choose how you want, but if P.P. Arnold doesn't win this thing I'm going to be very disappointed.  

Are your chord progressions mostly inspired by other rock and pop music, or do you have influences outside of these as well? If so, how would you say they manifest?

A lot of our songs don’t have actual chords in them, it’s just a whole lot of riffs dancing around each other with bass guitar and drums creating a driving force to keep everything moving. On the occasions that we do use chords, or if we’re just considering the general sound and feel of the riffs or guitar tapping in our songs, I’m sure you can point to bands like Maps & Atlases or TTNG as an influence.

Generally, writing a Celebration Guns song starts with one riff or repeating chord sequence, looped in Garageband. At that point, I will start adding more parts: bass guitar, another guitar part and a general idea of what the drums should be doing.

Once all of THAT is in place, I will start over with another riff, and keep going with this process until I have 3-4 loops that hopefully fit and flow together nicely. When Johl contributes guitar parts, the sections of the song are built around those. Vocals start out as a melody with placeholder lyrics, which I will later try and fit lyrics over.

Are mathy chord parts antithetical to more traditional pop structures, or how do these overlap and complement each other in your mind?

One of my favorite things about Celebration Guns is the challenge of taking songs that rarely have an obvious foundational chord structure and trying to mold them into something catchy (which would likely be influenced by traditional pop structures). We tend to have brighter and “happier” sounding songs more than dark or gloomy sounding songs, although we have occasionally found ways to make our math pop bops into math aggro-bummers (see: "You Aren’t the Only One" from 2018’s (Probably) Worth it aka LP1)

Photo courtesy of We're Trying Records

What are your thoughts on personal growth and the necessity of change?

My thought on personal growth is that it’s a nice idea but super difficult in practice, at least for me. It’s something I write about, read about it, think about, but have a tough time manifesting into everyday life. Instead of growing, I think I do a lot more ruminating on the things I need to grow from. In this way, the lyrics on this album and many of our other songs are my form of therapeutically telling myself “You know what you need to do, buddy. You just need to go ahead and do it. Any day now, pal, just go ahead and get started on that growing”

Change is necessary when there are patterns in life that are preventing you from achieving what is important to you, or potentially harmful or self-sabotaging. I don’t always think change for the sake of changing is necessary. Sometimes it feels like the only way to feel like we are succeeding in life is to prove that we have changed over time and can prove it to that person we know 15-20 years ago when we run into them at The Gap (the only place I like to run into people from the past) or when they take a quick glance at our online presence to confirm whether we are still the same chump they knew back when. Ultimately, change if you need to change for survival, but not for the sake of proving something to anyone but yourself.

Do you think it's possible for a person to change their nature, or do you think they will always be essentially the same?

Human nature sounds to me like something you are born with, something that you’re stuck with unless you do some growing via your natural progression through life or by working to influence a change in yourself. I think there are some aspects of a person’s nature will stay essentially the same, and there are times that trying to deny your nature will feel false to yourself and those around you.

If there is something in your nature that is holding you back or making you feel stuck in a pattern, I think it is (hopefully) possible to shape it into something better. I also worry that trying to force change away from the person you are could do more harm than good, depending on whatever the intentions may be behind pushing for that change (i.e. not being authentic or true to the self that makes you who you are).

In the film Hamlet 2, Steve Coogan's character Dana Marschz in an attempt to encourage one of his young thespian students states, "...you're going to have a magical life. Because no matter where you go, it'll always be better than Tucson." In your opinion, what is the worst place in Arizona, and why?

I saw that movie soon after it came out and all that I can remember, unfortunately, is wishing it was a lot funnier than it was. I probably had the wrong expectations. Johl did say he thinks about that quote a lot but declined to further comment because of the time Steve Coogan refused to autograph his Hey Arnold! backpack when Steve “The Cougar” Coogan visited Johl’s community college a few years ago.

I don’t think the Tucson hate is warranted at all, and the only popular culture refence I will accept related to that city is What We Do in the Shadows “Tucson, Arizonya”.* The worst city is Scottsdale, particularly Old Town. Why? Come to AZ and spend a weekend there and you’ll see for yourself.

Spoiler from Hamlet 1. Sorry...

Editor's response: Classic! However, the best bit in that show is clearly the Jackie Daytona arc. Who doesn't want to start over in a new town where you open a bar that you eventually burn down for the insurance payout? This is what we call the American dream. 

What do you love most about the place you live?

The fall and winter seasons are kind of perfect here. As I respond to this, the expected high temperature today is 107 with 48% humidity, so you really caught me at a bad time to answer this. I’m not a huge desert scenery guy, but at the same time some of the mountains are nice to look at.

One important thing that people need to know about Arizona: there are areas about 1.5-3 hours away from the hot desert that have forests and cooler temperatures to escape to. I guess I’d have to say those are my favorite parts of Arizona: Prescott, Payson, Flagstaff, etc.

Do you have any midyear resolutions?

Our resolution is to finally get this album released! September 18th is when the full What Keeps Us Coming Back album comes out.* We’re working on an album release show locally on October 23 rd where we will have vinyl, CDs and tapes to sell in person, but you can get them online as early as September 18th via We’re Trying Records. Also, we hope to get on the road early next year. Oh..was this
question not meant to be a space for self-promotion?** I’d say my resolution to get better at self-promoting, but who am I kidding. We’re 13 years in and I’ve always been awful at it.

*Note: This interview was conducted on August 4, 2026. 
**Editor's response: Oh no, it most definitely IS! Good job! You're well on your way to a better you. 

What Keeps Us Coming Back arrives via We're Trying Records (might have mentioned that already, I don't know). 

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.

Interview: Swiss Army Wife

Photo courtesy of We're Trying Records

Get a wife. I'm a wife advocate, and my advocacy is aimed at everyone getting a wife. ✅ house wife, ✅ work wife, ✅ goth wife, ✅ crane wife, ✅ mid wife- fuck it, why not, sister wife... alright, pump the brakes. They're handy and nice, and you can count on them to spot you at the bar and bear and raise your children; they're better than a best friend, and hopefully just as loyal (one would hope... but maybe you're into that sort of thing). A wife is good, a wife is gracious, a wife is steadfast and wise, and depending on your proclivities and preferences, you can even pick up a special variety called a hubbo- a type of domestic companion who tends to have a high skill base for opening jars and reaching objects on high shelves, and can often even be counted on to do dishes and laundry- although these talents are far less likely to be attributed to them, and are often treated as occulted, like the mythic secret menu at Taco Bell. If you want to access the options on his chore tree, you have to ask first. There is also a very confidential variety of wife known as the waifu- this is a wife you never meet but whom you adore in private (sometimes a person, but more often just like, Reze, or something), but if you ever deign to reveal the full extent of your adoration for this sort of wife, or make her picture your avi on social media, you will immediately be excommunicated from the human race and cast into a lake of fire- it is a cruel world we inhabit, but a just one nonetheless. Of course, one of my favorite varieties of wife, and the one that has inspired my present flurry of determined activism, is the Swiss Army Wife- a rare, one-of-a-kind model out of Portland. This particular instantiation of wifehood is particularly musically inclined, writing and producing phenomenally authentic and captivating contemporary emo-core and pop-punk, while reflecting on the travails of being reared in a remote part of the country, blending nostalgia with a pyrrhic wish to see it all burn, and embracing the emancipation of forming one's own identity within the wilderness of hostile convention and countervailing headwinds, driving long into the night to greet an uncertain, yet seemingly brighter future. I was able to take inventory of Swiss Army Wife's long journey and hopeful horizons following the release of their second LP, I Love You, But I Hate It Here (out on We're Trying Records [the current reigning champ of everything emo and underground!]), a compelling sequel to their 2023 debut, Medium Gnarly. You can enjoy my exchange with Ellie and Kade below:

 

Who do you love, and why does it hurt to love them?

Ellie: Jesus, buy me a drink first. I think there is a degree to which love is inextricable from pain. There’s pain in the fear of losing loved ones, of not being who you want to be for them. Exposing that fear is a huge part of what the album is about.*

* Interesting and thoughtful answer. Thank you. But the correct answer is Pete Wentz b/c Pete Wentz. 

What are the standard features and applications for a Swiss Army Wife? Follow-up: how does a Swiss Army Wife differ from a Swiss Army Man (other than a general lack of Daniel Radcliffes)?

Kade: The only one that I am aware of is Swiss Army Wife (the band TM) from Portland, Oregon featuring: 

• 3 guitars

• Impassioned yelling

• Sadness

• Big riffs 

• Lyrics referencing dead philosophers

• Medium, sometimes small riffs

• Impressive average member height

I think the second one is a movie about a dead guy so that’s pretty different. 

What was your favorite part about making this record ie I Love You, But I Hate It Here?

Ellie: The moments when things came together easily and spontaneously in the room. "It Used To Snow" and "Emergency Contact" both were written this way. Obviously we tweaked parts and agonized over things, but there are few things as exciting as being in a room with that kind of collective energy.

Kade: Getting to spend so much time working on something I truly care about with people I care about even more. (and Ellie making me cry in the studio performing the bridge of "Elliot.") 

When did you know this record was done and ready for our eager ears?

Ellie: When Jack Shirley finished mastering it. As soon as I heard the masters, I knew that we’d made something special. Unfortunately, I can never fully let go of anything I make, so I’ll forever be thinking about all the little things we could have done differently. That feeling was pretty overwhelming up until Jack did his thing, but afterwards I felt as ready as I ever could be to let these songs out into the world

Kade: I could keep working on this record forever, but this has been the most satisfied I have been with a project at the point of stasis. 

What city is featured in the background of your cover? Also, please unpack the imagery of two horses traveling towards a spotlight in the far distance. How does this imagery overlap with the themes of the album?

Ellie: The city in the photo is Asbury Park, New Jersey. I was on tour last fall playing in Home Is Where for their Hunting Season tour. Before leaving, I decided to pick up a little point-and-shoot film camera and took a ton of photos all over the country. When I was putting together the artwork, this felt like the obvious photo to use. There isn’t any thematic significance to Asbury Park in particular, but the photo had a kind of loneliness that felt like it evoked the album’s themes really well. I’ll leave the question about the horses to our resident horse girl.

Kade: Resident horse girl here. I grew up in a little farm town with a pair of horses that have become emblematic of my time there as well as the best of what remains of it in my memory. I think they represent the longing I have for a version of a place that never really existed.

So 3D vampires sound pretty frightening. How do you defend yourself from such a creature? In all seriousness, though, "3D Vampire" sounds like a hell of a breakup song. Can you share the story behind it?

Ellie: Well, it isn’t a breakup song. You can’t really defend yourself from a 3D Vampire, because you are the 3D Vampire. The song is about feeling trapped and helpless, stuck in the patterns of everyday life while horrific things unfold around and within you.

Kade: If it was a breakup song it would maybe be about breaking up with the idea that you can continue to live a normal existence while the world is tearing itself apart and instead grappling with the desire to slowly shut yourself off from it and everyone around you. 

Who is your "Emergency Contact," and who are you singing to on the song with that title?

Ellie: My emergency contact is my mom :)

Kade: My partner Rachel 

You seem to be blazing a lonesome path on "Cowboy." Give us some insight into the thoughts and emotions running through that track.

Kade: Anger, fear, and resignation all feel pretty central. Inherited violence is something that never leaves your body even after the abuser is gone, and watching someone experience it from the outside creates a unique form of helplessness. 

How much time do you spend in Idaho? Do you have any good/harrowing stories from there?

Ellie: I am transgender. Every time I’ve had to pass through Idaho has been harrowing. Idaho is at the forefront of the states who are determined to erase people like me from the world. They will not succeed, but it’s impossible not to feel afraid there.

Kade: Spent my first 18 years there. It is mountainous and beautiful and took two of my closest friends from me and is slowly killing my mom who still lives there. It’s not a place that is hospitable to me anymore. Going back is hard but I make the trip once a year to see her. 

Who is "Elliot," and why did you name a song after them?

Kade: Elliot gets its namesake from Elliot Page the actor. Gender is a difficult messy thing to navigate as I think is portrayed by how messy and painful that song is for me to listen to even still. He was the first person whose experience had a profound impact on me when it came to self-discovery. 

"Heartland" doesn't necessarily paint the most welcoming picture of small-town life. How did experiences of life in a one-horse town inform your art and perspective on life?

Ellie: I grew up in a very isolated town in rural Alaska. Literally an island in the middle of the wilderness. You had to get there on a boat or a plane to leave. Less of a one-horse town and more of a no-horse town. Growing up in a place like that as a queer person trying to figure herself out was pretty isolating. I think because of that, I sought out art made by people experiencing their own kinds of isolation. I gained an appreciation for environment as an active subject rather than just scenery. I think on a musical level, that translates to a fixation on harmony. On a purely aural level, that’s the environment that melody, rhythm, lyrics, timbre, and whatever else exist within. That definitely came out in my contribution to these songs. I was always trying to fiddle with chord progressions figuring out what kind of substitutions we could use to create the environment of these songs.

As for my perspective on life, I think it made me appreciate communities that are accepting. The place I grew up rewarded conformity to a certain lifestyle that I knew from a very young age I could never be happy with. Long before I figured out that I’m transgender, my first experiences with that kind of euphoria were in meeting people who I could just be a weird fucking kid with and not feel judged for it. Often, those interactions were happening in musical spaces. It all just kind of fed back into itself.

"God's Favorite Country" sounds like the retelling of a road trip/tour that has really gone off the rails, or is careening towards utter failure. What is the inspiration behind this track, and what are some of your best/worst road trip/tour memories?

Ellie: Umm. Interesting interpretation, but no, not quite. That’s ok though, we do have a pretty good tour story. Our first ever tour was an amazing time right up until, while driving from Phoenix to Boise for the last show of the run, the van’s transmission very suddenly gave out just outside the Great Basin in Eastern Nevada at 4pm on a Friday. We ended up getting a tow about an hour north to the nearest town with any services, Ely. Mind you, it was February, which is not a fun time to be in Eastern Nevada. 

We found a room to stay in at a Ramada Inn hotel casino while we tried to figure out what our next step would be. After calling around, it became apparent that we would not be able to get the van into a mechanic until Monday, so we started trying to figure out other options. We quickly learned that there are no rental car agencies in Ely. Nor are there any bus routes that pass through. No trains. No airport. If you drive in, you better be able to drive out. We could not do so. 

The closest thing we could find was a UHaul location that had exactly 2 trucks, one of which was rented out for the next 2 weeks, the other of which was currently being rented but was expected back on Sunday. Until the reservation ended up being repeatedly extended. So we were still out of luck. We spent our time drinking expired beer (turns out, even the orange flavored beer is NOT supposed to have pulp in it), watching whatever was on small town Nevada TV, making trips to Safeway and the dollar store for food and swimsuits so we could kill time in the hotel pool. I also went undefeated at Pokemon singles against Kade. Important that the world knows that part. During this phase we overheard a woman at the Safeway checkout telling the cashier how her car’s transmission had died here in town a year ago and she ended up just never leaving. Later, one of the women working at the Safeway deli warned us that the town’s sewer was backing up into their water system. Bleak stuff.

In the end, we did get the van into a mechanic. After spending a couple of days working on it and updating us with increasingly astronomical quotes for fixing it, they offered us a cleared mechanic bill and $80 to scrap it. We had been in Ely for nearly a week at this point. Eventually, Tim’s roommate, Adam, ended up renting a van in Salem, and driving 15 hours overnight through a snowstorm to come rescue us. I was convinced until the moment we pulled into my driveway back in Portland that the spirit of Ely was trying to make us stay. To be honest, I’m still not convinced it wasn’t, and for this reason I will try my absolute best to never step foot in Ely, Nevada ever again.*

*Okay, definitely not a road trip/tour from hell type situation, but in a weird way, this extended curfuffle almost sounds fun. Phew! Glad they got away, though.

Photo courtesy of We're Trying Records

What do you get up to when you have time to horse around, ie what are your hobbies other than music?

Ellie: I have a completely normal degree of interest in Pokemon. I am extremely normal about Pokemon. If anyone says I’m not normal about Pokemon, don’t listen to them. I’m normal about Pokemon.

Kade: Building computers, magic the gathering, and losing to Ellie at Pokémon :/

Have you ever ridden a horse? Assuming the answer is yes, was it a terrifying experience, or did you find yourself bonding with your equine pal?

Kade: I had two horses growing up, Blue and Stormy. I rode them in 4-H and FFA and every week as a kid and miss them both dearly. Blue would always sprint across the pasture to come and greet me in the morning even when I didn’t have carrots for him and I think that was a rare and special kind of love. 

Ellie: On a spiritual level, I’ve accepted that horses and I are opposing forces.

What are your connections/coincidental overlaps with the band Joyce Manor?

Ellie: We started working with our longtime mixing engineer Alex Estrada because of his work on Joyce Manor’s self-titled album, which was a huge influence on our first record. If I remember correctly, Alex recommended Jack Shirley, who produced Joyce Manor’s Of All Things I Will Soon Grow Tired, for mastering. We’ve worked with Alex on pretty much everything we’ve released since then, and came back to Jack for mastering on the new album. Also, by pure coincidence, I just moved into an apartment that’s only a few blocks away from The Alibi, which is a karaoke tiki bar here in Portland that is the setting for (in my opinion) the best Joyce Manor song, "Last You Heard Of Me."

Did you ever finish Oregon Trail as a kid, or did your entire party end up dying of dysentery and snakebites?

Kade: Attempted many times without success. I usually starved because hunting the buffalo made me too sad. Also crashed trying to ford a river a few times. Perhaps dysentery will be the thing that takes me from this life. 

If you owned a farm, what kind would it be and where would you want it to be located? 

Kade: I do not think I am cut out for farm life but if I were to return to it probably some kind of twee organic berry farm in the Oregon wilderness. 

Somewhat surprised by the lack of Pretty Derby references on your social media, in the lyrics of your songs, visible tattoos, etc. Do you believe this will change in the future?

Kade: I was originally just a humble Haru Urara fan but since the Quarter Horse EP release have since been inundated with requests to watch it as I am told she makes an appearance. I will be mandating a band watching experience on our upcoming tour. 

Gold Ship Uma Musume GIFfrom Gold Ship GIFs

Alright, that's it! Check you on the flipity!

PS Be good to your wife!

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. 

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!

Album Review: My Point of You - This is My First Heist

What can be said of you, from another's point of view? What is another from your standpoint? Overlapping and distinct prognoses that nonetheless form a consecrated whole- you are a shape in the world, a totem of recognition, a symbol, a limitation, and a reflection in the sighted pools of those who sit opposite yourself, and they in turn are that thing which forces a recognition of the self as a self, in the recursive tension between the awareness of the perceived and perceiver, at once in two parts, and yet one and the same. My Point of You exercises the blessing of the penetrative interchange of human consciousness, to create beautiful sounds that intercept your distant orbit, bridging profound barriers of distinction, discernment, and dimensionality, to steal you away from the unstable sequester of alienation, providing a path that extends as a peninsula of positive confirmation that noise is good, and it's good to be nervy enough to know the right kind of noise. Emerging from the static like a seashell revealed in the sands by a receding tide, the harmonious rapture and regeneration that their debut EP, This Is My First Heist, extends into and expands within the marginless terrain of perfect freedom and therefore absolute annihilation, for which their outstretched aura represents a salvatory vein of Mineral wealth which enriches the interior life of the observer, exercising through Lemuria the geists of acidic sequester. The only crime would be not letting them crack the vault of your heart and bathe the inner chamber with the light of sound, beholding yourself in their graceful intrusion, and affirming them in the unfurling communion of the self.

Album Review: Tequila Mockingbird - You Always Felt Lost

Harper Lee wrote that it is a sin to kill a mockingbird because of its inherent innocence. To snuff out a mockingbird is to silence a creature whose only earthly desire is to sing. Fair enough. But what about getting one drunk? Would it be wicked or winsome to party with a mockingbird? Is a mockingbird a shy drunk, or a surly one? After pounding un par rounds of Patrón, is a mockingbird going to drop the singing bit and start roasting my ass like a little feathery Triumph the Insult Comic Dog (Hey, where did he get that cigar?) Of course, none of these pressing moral quandaries are answered on Tequila Mockingbird's LP, You Always Felt Lost. Taking their name, I presume, from the 1977 album by the late jazz pianist and legend, Ramsey Lewis, the Lansing-based group generally runs the exposed raw nerves of mid-'00s post-hardcore through the pasta-roller of 5th-wave emo, cranking out kinky, rough-grain, and discernibly heavy guitar-pop, which translates abstract caterwauls of rebellion into plainly personal insights that peer down the narrow halls of depression, loss, and a diminishing sense of purpose, often name-checking peers and guiding confidants such as Hot Mulligan and Michael Cera Palin in their song titles and lyrics, and drawing direct influence from them in constructing their sound. The lyrical delivery of vocalist Joseph adds that extra density of circuitry and connectivity that makes the sensibilities of this passionate kinetic ordinance of sound combust and resolve like a mile-long string of firecrackers- pain and perseverance mixing in a smear of splattering, effusive elocution that brings the strength of a wild cataract to a single shuddering tear. You Always Felt Lost is a sonar beacon to locate the like-minded and lonely in the depths of the perpetual winter of stifled sentimental solidarity. Now if only they could tell me whether or not God will condemn me for getting his favorite flighted crooners plastered, then they'll have basically provided me with all the answers I need in this life and beyond. 

Album Review: Lobsterfight - My Coat Hanger Is A Necklace

My Coat Hanger Is a Necklace because I'm always just hangin' around. It's not uncommon to be mistaken for a piece of furniture. A backrest to throw a jacket on, or a stool to heave a pair of loafers over. Sometimes everyone's invited to the party except you- a troubling epiphany, especially when you're the host. Drunken renditions of songs you remember from high school, about boys coming of age and recognizing themselves in the beautiful, sleek visage of swelt, prowling jaguars from National Geographic posters hung up in the science lab. Colorfully plumed creatures sing their own praises, nearly slurred, the words already half-forgotten, in a chorus of gaily varnished martins, and the whole world sings with them; even the armchair hums a few bars, vibrating a hushed resignation to the whims of the crowd, wishing someone would perchance tilt their solo cup full of Kool-Aid and Captain Morgan over its cushion so the nauseating concoction can seep in and soak up some of the social torpor and relieve the inertia that has relegated it to mere rear support in this crowded den. Souls rise and fall, and the wind of jolly bluster goes out through the gaps in this creaky old house. The band plays; they invite a racket; they bang on all manner of things, and it makes a melody as sweet as amber scraped from a royal Egyptian apiary while they sing of dancing blades twirling in the clouds, dead men walking, dreams of misfortune as accosting as a traipsing shade, and close passes with the devil. A lamp is decked off a table; sparks course through the hot, swirling air and conversation; a flame creeps up the wall, out the window, and is hoofing on the roof before anyone is the wiser. By daybreak, the soirée and socialites are little more than a charcoal bed, still glowing, still laughing, still hot but hushed now to a crackle, inert but pensive, anticipating the day when St. Vitus will descend to their resting hearth. On that morning, the now-skeletal band will reskin their drums, stretch their own singed tendons to restring the chords of their piano, and strike up a tempo as these scorched merry bones carole in a train, off and over the horizon. And still I'll be hanging here, wondering when it will be my chance to join in this danse macabre to celebrate my so-called life. 

Interview: Michael Torres of Beers with Bands

It might shock some of you all to learn this, but I almost never listen to music-related podcasts, and I'm specifically averse to artist interviews. I know, right? Here I am about to plug a podcast where I interview someone, and right out the gate I'm saying, "yeah, I don't listen to this type of 'ish." There is literally only one exception to this, though, and that is Beers with Bands. The reason for this is that Michael Torres has great music tastes and manages to talk to bands I care about. The other reason is that he comes across as a down to earth guy, with no agenda but the love of talking with people who make great music. Points on the board. Man after my own heart. Whenever I look up a DIY band to figure out what their deal is, Michael's already right there, sharing a Hamm's with the dudes on his couch. A suds-soaked shepherd through the sounds of the underground. So, of course, I had to talk to him and see what he's all about! Turns out, Michael is as cool in person as he appears on tape and is twice as fun to share a brew with. We tossed a few back* with some time in February when we talked about his podcast, what albums he has in rotation in his car, and where the best Mexican food in the Twin Cities can be found (hint: it's in a gas station). Check out my interview with Michael of Beers with Bands below:

For more of Michael, check out his YouTube channel.

*I did end up getting drunk during this interview. Hopefully, it's not too distracting for you, my dear, dry and pious listener. 

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

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