Listening with an open mind. Writing about what I hear. Do you have something interesting you'd like to share? Write Mick at thasoundblog@gmail.com. Twitter @thasoundblog
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| Image by Michael Salisbury |
A couple of weeks back I got to talk with Chicago-local hip-hop artist Defcee for the CHIRP Radio Artist Interview Series, where we talked about his new single "Learning Gravity," went into the weeds on his inspirations and sources of gratitude, and what we can learn from watching The Sopranos. You can listen to our conversation here, or below:
Listen to "Learning Gravity" produced by Blockhead
More shades of delight are available from Colorfield Records.
A concrete, thick pour of feedback can help cover up the deficiencies of an otherwise unremarkable song. Everyone knows this. It's why shoegaze bands proliferate in many DIY scenes like bad decisions after bar close. But when there is something worth chiseling through that coarse stratum to retrieve, the extra effort makes the candy core, once reached, all the more delightful. Seattle's Spiral XP is just that kind of shoegaze and they prove it on their engaging EP It's Been a While. Shaving off the slowcore of their earlier release, the band has tuned up a kind of rough and tumble, Pains of Being Pure At Heart-esque soft rumble style powerpop that is as twisty as it is toe-tapping. They produce the kind of noisy, articulate, and rushing romp that resembles the trembling aches of having the wind in your face as you coast along the gutter on your skateboard on a blustery day, a highlight reel of your past triumphs and humiliations rotating in your mind- leaving you both directed and confused, and further, unsure if you're tearing up because, at that moment, you feel alive, or because you're almost certain that you're going to die alone. One of the things that Sprial XP demonstrably has going for them is their strength in writing emotional, hooky tunes, but it's almost as impressive how particularly colorful these songs come across as well. Each track is like a mane of static-collecting peels, unify around the spiral currents of their brash, concerted pounce, the hooks lunging forth like a frilled lizard bursting through a bouquet of tropical flowers in a cork-screw motion to snap a piece of brightly colored confection from between your own loosely biting teeth. Tuff-textured grooves intertwine like the conduction-resistant coated guts of a ticking time bomb, with the payoff of each melodious wind-up being just as consistent and kinetic as the analogy implies. If you are looking to level up your sneaker-surveying game, Spiral XP might just be the wild patch upgrade you've been waiting for.
I didn't have much of a reference point for Anatolian rock before I encountered Altin Gün a few years back... now I'm not sure how I ever had a developed sense of music taste without it. A calmly rhythmic and serious-minded folk hybrid, it possesses a distinctly invigorating and distant allure, like the scent of perfume wafting in from an adjoining room, or the aftertaste of melted caramel trailing down the back of your tongue and throat as it mixes with your saliva. I'm glad that I'm somewhat familiar with the style now, as it enhances my appreciation of German ensemble Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek and their latest album Dost 2 all the more. Led by (you guessed it!) Derya Yildirim, they have an overall more patient and grounded approach to Anatolian retro revival, one that draws out the intimate potential of the tradition without surrendering its swaying, breezy tussle. Dost translates to English as "Friend," and it is difficult to avoid the impression that the imploring posture of the Turkish language vocal performances on "Gümüş" and "Odam Kireç Tutmuyor" aren't being sung to you directly with some personal regard. Elsewhere, tracks like "Mola" have as their focus the conversive, serpentine curvatures of Derya's composed saz playing, which works as a beautiful counterweight to the fully developed psychedelic funk of "Bal." Possibly the most evocative and intimate moments on Dost, though, are the hypnotizing cover of the poet Aşık Mahzuni Şerif's "Darıldım Darıldım," and the closer, where Derya's aunt Ayşe gives a solo performance over a studio loudspeaker, beckoning you to contemplation and communion with a higher sense of being. Where ever you are, you can always find the warmth of a friend in Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek.
Every Moment of Every Day is the second LP from Pittsburgh emo band Short Fictions. As a mark of authenticity, and almost a right of passage for many an emo musician, their lead singer and guitarist, Sam Treber has a degree in English, which he is not using to write the next great American novel, and instead serves his muse piecemeal by penning collections of short punk songs with his band. I'm almost certain that this fact is the source of the band's name (although, I haven't bothered to ask or investigate this notion at all). It's amusing because I'm also at least 90% certain that the subject matter Sam is singing about is entirely autobiographical. A recent college grad singing songs about missing someone in another city with lines like, "I never thought at 23 I'd feel this bad," are a dead giveaway in that department. On that note, the songwriting hasn't changed that much in quality since their first LP (Fates Worse Than Death), but this newer album sees the band more comfortable playing faster and more aggressively (especially on the "The Great Unwashed," which is basically a hardcore song). And while it might be anathema to emo as a genre, the band sounds less depressed here, to boot. I get the impression that they've matured as people quite a bit since the last release, and that they're now just able to process their emotions in a way that lends itself to poppier, peppier performances. Not to say that they've solved all their problems and don't feel the bite of loneliness from time to time (what would it leave them to write about if they did!), but in general, Every Moment of Every Day sees the band appreciating life a little more than they had in the past. I'd be happy for them for that alone, but I'll take a powerfully good time as well if it's on offer.
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| Image by Ash Dye |
Had the opportunity to talk with a phenomenal Chicago-local singer and songwriter this week for the CHIRP Radio Artist Interview Series. Anna Holmquist of Ester has self-released a double single Red Rover / Change is Allowed, and we unpack those songs, as well as talk about the role of humor in their music and our mutual love of early Snow Patrol. You can listen to the full interview on CHIRP's site here, or below:
Trouble's Afoot is one of the many outlets of Queens-based musician Jordan Cooper. His LP Woke Up Dark was released in May of 2022, but it's been gestating for quite a while- longer than the band has existed, apparently. Parts of the album (the drums in particular) were recorded in 2009, close to a decade before the project's debut LP Looking For Parking (released in 2018), and the two albums draw from some of the same recordings sessions. This fact (and others, like the guitars having been recorded in a circular-shaped farmhouse, and the vocals having been captured while Jordan was suffering from a condition that caused his throat muscles to squeeze around his voice-box) give the impression that the Woke Up Dark is the product of accident as much as intention, opportunity as much as skill, and helps to qualify and contextualize the jerry-rigged bindings, anxious allure, and wishful conceptualization that holds it together. The angular and barbed bits and chips that comprise the album all feel like shards swept together from different shattered mirrors, and when you finally piece them all together, you'll be shockingly confronted with an image of yourself from different eras of your own life, somehow all fused together to reflect you, standing there, in the present. This "you," by the way, is the version of yourself listening to the record, discovering slivers of yourself shifting between the spaces of its tightly drawn chords and high-register harmonics. You, and the album, are both here, for worse and wear, and that's kind of the point. Bearing the bruises and warn edges of the long road and the many steps that it took to bring Woke Up Dark together helps to bring out the peculiar character of its songs, most of which are idiosyncratically allied with lean art punk of XTC enacted through the wistful, confessional style of the Eels. It's funny too. Funny in that undersold, wry, and irreverent manner that They Might Be Giants or Violent Femmes are lauded for, where the absurd subject matters explored (like driving one's car into a lake in a dream ["Woke Up Dark"], a father fighting with his kid over how unpopular they are at school ["The Greatest Dad In The World"], or celebrating one's own sadness and alienation ["Suck it Up"]) matched with an exaggerated and campy presentation beget a revolving carousel of unflappable existential amusements. Don't know what I mean? Well, give Woke Up Dark a spin and maybe you'll see the light.
EP is the first release by Manitobian musician Megumi Kimata under the name French Class. It has a charming and unruly quality typical of home-recorded, solo-electronic projects, but with an uncommon sense of structure that is almost masked by its intense (and intentional) adolescent aura. It's prickly, sweet-like-sourpatch-candy, and unwilling to relinquish the sense of imaginative possibility that the transition from pre-teen to post-pubescent tends to narrow. At the point at which EP dropped (Q3 of '19), Megumi didn't seem ready to give up her toys, which accounts for not only the pointy, polyurethane molding of the album's blunt and forward grooves but also its apparent weightlessness. Like time has been suspended for Megumi while she completes a magical quest. An adventure akin to soaring over a fairy kingdom, catching plumbs of marshmallowy smoke drifting up from villagers' cabins and molding them like wet clay into sweetly textured goodies for your ears. Her's is a process capable of constructing many timeless objects of fascination, from the bodacious beat-assemblage and sugar-dough roller "Robot Tune," to the electro-polka pogo and bulging balalaika bungee of "Clown City," as well as the ricocheting, Lego-cosmonaut soundscan "About Moon landing." As of last year, Megumi started working with a full band, making more formal-sounding R'nB and pop music, but you can still hear the imprint of her earlier playground antics on the disco-themed title track off the recent Hot Girl Summer EP, as well as the gabby and irreverent bounce of "Bon Bon Bon" from the same album. It's pretty clear that Megumi is going places with this project, and has progressed quite a bit in the last few years. Still, it's worth looking back to admire her past work, especially EP, as that is where it all started. Better jump in now if you want to take advantage of early enrollment, because French Class will only get more popular from here on out.
The cover of the Indianian screamo/skramz/weird emo project Calendar Year's EP A Life Cycle is too cute. I don't know that it is humanly possible to see that little Oreo-colored cat hiding in an old Pepsi cola box and not be curious about the music that it is acting as the mascot for. Unsurprisingly, the quizzical and sweet nature of that cover photo is infused throughout the record, chiefly worn by the cozy, warm, and domestic quality of the record's guitar tones. This is further reinforced by the nuzzling rub of the record's use of cotton-fiber caliber synths chords, which interact with the adjoining guitars, SFX, and playful percussion (both live and electronic) as a protective garb and insolation. A source of reassurance, wrapped tight around its precious frame to keep it from becoming overwhelmed by anxiety- kind of like a thunder vest you'd put on your dog for parties... if your dog was a shapeshifting alien and its psychological accessory could meld to its constantly mutating persona. Despite the record's hominess, it retains this fizzling, explosive spark, that is forever burning down until its subsequent combustion and reformation. This minor-atomic reshuffling surfaces in the record's many feedback experiments, forays into noisy electronics production, and in vocal excerpts from video games and anime, and various hip-hop artifacts, demonstrating the font of culture that its creator (Blake Mawhorter, also of Lights Strung Like Stars) is submerged in. Also, and most importantly, the record's bursting energy is portrayed through the doused and muted quality of the shrieking vocal performances. These vocals, much like those of your arms are my cocoon, earn the album its "screamo" bonafides, sounding like they are bubbling up from under the decaying peat at the bottom of a brimming rain barrel. The shy and obscure nature of A Life Cycle, as well as the way that it was unceremoniously released to Bandcamp, may give the impression that the album and its creator are attempting to hide from you. But if you are attuned to their intentions, you'll recognize that these furtive dodges are actually a not-so-secret invitation to come along and play.
It makes perfect sense for a dance-pop artist to eventually produce a space-themed album of some sort. Club lighting resembles stars and cosmic rays reflecting off the super-massive structures of the cosmos, only drawn in and wrapped around a crowd like the drapes of a baldachin, under which a fog of ecstasy can condense into an antigravity field, through which you can swim up and grasp the tails of passing comets. UK singer Rose Gray is practiced at capturing and bottling this intoxicating ether, but what's particularly delightful about her latest EP, Higher Than the Sun, is that even when she is punching through exosphere, she never renounces the physicality her sound is rooted in, nor the tactile desires of the people who receive it. Through out the album, Rose permits herself to become passionately entwined in heady and fleshed-out forms that have their own distinct scents, temperatures, and saturation points, coming alive in a moment of concentration with the potence of each presence in order to commune with them like a lover, like a fighter, and like a friend. The grooves on Higher spread through the extremities in a manner that is almost skeletal, teaching your body how to move and predicting the patterns of your feet before you've even acknowledged your own drive to dance. This powerful and persuasive mentorship is undoubtedly present on opener "Ecstasy," as well as the circular pressure sweep of the disco-divinity cascade "Prettier Than You" with funky blushing basslines and tugging beckon of moody vocal inflections. "Promise Me" has a touch of escapist glory to its plunging and breaching melodies that sheers upon a rosy shimmer like dolphins racing at dusk through a lapping veneer of open water, and "Sun Comes Up" is an easy unwind of a closer, where a soulful whisper of melodic tresses and a soothing massage of therapeutic house grooves relieve you of any tension your body retains after a full night on the dancefloor. Higher Than the Sun might not be exactly out of this world, but it most definitely contains more joy than one planet could possibly handle.
It's important for me to memorialize Vacation Vinny in some way as we near its 10-year anniversary. Released in 2014, it was the Grass is Green's last album, but it stands as one of the better examples of its era. Example of what you ask? It's hard to explain, but there was at one point a genuine counter-weight to the types of indie bands whose music was used in commercials and who received high marks from, now, bizarrely, dominant media publications (none of whom I will name here, because, frankly, I don't need to). The Boston band felt like they were, intentionally or not, a part of that thoroughly necessary corrective force- a weird, almost indescribable, confluence of post-punk, post-hardcore, and freaky hippy energy, that favored tons of feedback and a plug-in-n-play, casual garage rock ethos. The culmination of a hard underground approach and an ethereal blending of aesthetics that was sustained by fellow travelers like Krill, Gnarwhal, Two Inch Astronaut, and My Dad, and which found a home on the ever-exploratory Exploding in Sound. I listened to Vacation Vinny a lot when it first came out, not really realizing that the era that it came out of was either significant (at least to me), or that it might turn over at some point and dissipate. All I knew at the time was that I preferred what Grass Is Green was doing to anything that the "people in the know" were telling me I should be listening to. All the weird phases that opener "Sammy So-Sick" ripples through still astonish me- building up steam with a little Mid-West jangle and cooling down with a drift of mellow surf-psyche before steadily lashing out in increasingly soggy, murky, and discordant fits of intense relapse and nervous convalescence. "Disjoint" tags in as the follow-up, and wastes no time hurdling itself down the short corridor of the tracks run time like a man attempting to escape a straightjacket by propelling himself through the neck as if he were a gasping fish leaping through a porthole and back to the sea. Later "Scattering Ram" wriggles and protests as if it's avoiding an uncomfortable subject (like alimony payments or its parent's divorce) only to covertly counter with its own forceful rebuttals and accusations, in a hot flow of feedback and evasive but cogent grooves that resemble Pavement peeling out in the spirit of Drive Like Jehu. That heated exchange is then followed by the one-legged loping of "Spore," which proceeds through a series of languid swells and small bursts, with purposefully placed guitars and percussive splashes dispursing as if they were mushroom glands erupting in slow motion, staining the air with plumbs of sticky fragrances, deciduous hues, and earthy blots. There are still plenty of bands doing creative and exciting work, but few could qualify as being as willfully or colorfully obtuse as Grass is Green. Even after all these years, Vacation Vinny is a welcome escape from the ordinary.
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| Image by Katlyn Sansone Wentzel |
Had the pleasure of speaking with man about town, Tommy Kessler for the CHIRP Radio Artist Interview Series this week. Tommy is one of those guys who has an effortless ability to realize the vision and intention for his work and he's amassed an impressive catalog after moving from St. Louis to Chicago as a result. We mostly talked about his solo work, particularly his double EP Mortal Love, but also got into the history of his solo work and the comp of local artists that he assembled and produced to benefit local, community non-profit Brave Space Alliance. It was a fun conversation and I'm fairly happy with the production job on the final cut too. You can listen on CHIRP's site here, or below:
Listen to Mortal Love here:
Check out the Wiener Tape Comp here:
Don't Trip was supposed to be a five-song EP. It still has a kind of humbleness to it. The kind that you might expect from a smaller, transitional release, but it's not modest in scope. The humility and conscious humanity of the album flows from the recognition that it stands atop the mantel of many courageous and talented souls and traditions, all of whom Lance Sampson (as Aquakultre) pays due respect to over the course of the album. From the classic house dwelling R'nB of opener "I Can Wait," to the g-funk bust and scratch of "I'm For Real," the smooth neo-soul hip-swing of "It's All Good," and the Southern seasoned shimmy of "Africvillean Funk," there are histories here that are not just acknowledged through sound and practice, but recognized and reproduced in a continuance of their essential creeds. Mostly joyful, sometimes painful, the album presents each track as another opportunity to give thanks to forebearers as one looks toward the future. Don't Trip is not just a celebration of music and musicians, although it is that as well, but a chance to honor those from whom one draws strength, and vice versa, in a fabric of interwoven relations. The album was conceived during the lockdown while Lance was beginning a then-new relationship with his current partner. The remnants of these origins can be found in songs about long, conversant lunches (literally, the aqua-disco dive "Lunch") and earnest exchanges of reassurances and promises (represented by the sincere sway of "Don't Trip," whose grooves dip like they are bending to catch during a fall). However, the project inevitably expanded as the world began to reopen into a cross-continental collaboration with friends from around the globe (there are around 20(!) guest spots on Don't Trip), one that recognizes the need for kinship where ever one finds themselves, especially when that place is under threat of disappearing. Bringing it back home to Lance's native Canada, the slinky jam "Africvillean Funk," pays tribute to Africville in Bedford Basin, Halifax, Nova Scotia, an underserved and rapidly evaporating, predominately black community, that is envisioned as defiant and unified in the face of a tidal surge of money, neglect, and racism that are aligned against them. Don't Trip, in all its modesty and enthralling levity, devotion and mirth, manages not to be too small an endeavor that it can be simply stumbled past and overlooked, not too large and ambitious a work that it overshadows the subjects of its homage, and ultimately, just the right size to find a place in any heart that has an opening for good tunes, better vibes, and a rejuvenated sense of place and community.
What's a better surprise than a "new" California Cousins LP? A fresh 10-speed bike for your birthday? A crisp $100 bill from a relative on your highschool graduation? California Cousins's LP Secret Footage has at least one advantage over either of these- longevity! It's been at least six months since the album dropped (released June 7, 2022), but it's still certifiably fresh! Recall how long it took for that new bike to wind up in the undercarriage of your Dad's car because you negligently left it in the driveway the night before, or how many Monster Energy drink runs to 7-11 it took to deplete that hundo to pocket change, and you'll see what I mean. Unlike these other, lamer, less dependable, more easily destroyed gifts, you can enjoy Secret Footage for as long as it's hosted on California Cousin's Bandcamp page (provided you purchased it [and honestly, only so long as their catalog isn't bought out by an investment firm, who pulls their records as leverage in rate negotiations with another streaming platform... so about a decade]). Until that fateful day, though, you will be able to jam along to and shout along with the gallantly progressive grooves and personal prose that tumble out of the ragged, loud-quite-loud bluffs of the unorthodoxly cut "Patterns" and the amped-up, scaling flight of "Already Peaked," which along with it's poppy-accents, has the structure of a frantic rope-climb where you become more tangled in its slack the higher and faster you ascend. As is California Cousin's preference, many of the tracks of Secret Footage feel like delightfully magnetic pop-punk songs that have been cut up and rearranged by someone who is more familiar with multi-part saga structure of post-hardcore- but with more sparkle-dork fan service (in a good way!). "Sleep City" has a drunken quality to its trembling groove patterns that makes it feel like the song is struggling to stay on its feet while the forward stumble of the vocal hook eggs it onward, "The Fire" playfully tilts between tindery chord combustions and blustering grooves that fan the flames of its final exhaustion, and "Tinnitus" feels like it's trying to referee a boxing match where the combatants lob waves of '90s-inspired indie rock distortion at each other instead of punches. It's one of those albums that you want to share as soon as you hear it due to its unique take on familiar sounds and the enthusiasm that the bands has for their own material- it's a gift that keeps on giving in a cycle and repetition of gratitude and gratification. You might even say, that Secret Footage is as reel as it gets.
Pocket Fantasy could be either a dream come true or the worst nightmare for someone with synesthesia. Dream because it is an uncanny but simple parade of delights. A nightmare due to the relentless motion of its sunny apprehensions. The album is restful in its mooring at the center of these pivoting symptoms of emotion, time, harmony and humanity. For those who are especially sensitive to its messy, permanently inchoate structures, it must be like drowning in their favorite flavor of ice cream. For the rest of us, it might be as close as we come to understanding the subjective shades through which those lucky few experience sound. Listening to the traveling, wonder-band Mamalarky's second LP is like observing an expressionistic painting rendered in mid-air. Melodies twirl and splatter in flight, colliding and blending, exchanging pigments in passing, before slushing onto the canvas of your ears in interpretive swashs and globs. A rorschach of honey and hue that displaces the border between the real and the imaginary with a rainbow bridge to a boundless psychic festival that unfurls outward like a fast-blossoming orchid. "Mythical Bonds" explodes in ripples of manifold, LED-like patterns that tug you forward, as if by a spell, into the wrapped embrace of the one who you dare to dream might willingly receive the warmth of your heart. "You Know I Know" contains a crushed, yellow and gold palette that fragrantly smears itself on your face and clothes as you pass through it as if it were depositing evidence of a headlong charge through a field of tall flowers. "Building Castles" is cut through with piercing beams of purple and white rays, like city lights bouncing back from the camouflaged hull of a spaceship that hovers high above the skyline- a giant hidden disco ball of extraterrestrial origins. As a track with one of the more muscular grooves, "Shining Armor" repels with its chrome-blue coating any wary impore against its advancing acceleration, rotating with an absolute absence of resistance until it is virtually levitating in the throes of its own defiance. Turely a wondrous find, Pocket Fantasy joyously stains all that it touches.
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| Photo by James Werner |
Listen to his album Phew below:
I can't tell you where Stay Inside is headed, but I can tell you where they're at. The Brooklyn band released their debut LP Viewing in 2020 on No Sleep and it made a worthy impression on me. It showed that the band could write some memorable melodies, but it underserved the thematic punch that they seemed to be striving for throughout. A sense of cohesive emotional reality and urgency, the expression of which bands like mewithoutyou and Cursive have seized as their raison d'être. Their 2022 EP Blight, despite its name, feels more alive in contrast. Addressing some of the too-shy-softness of its predecessor, Stay Inside have sharpened the edge of their guitar work to enhance the dynamics of their performances with a heightened sense of atmosphere and piercing earnestness. These improvements are further accompanied by a willingness not just to pour out their lovelorn and vintage sentiments, but to crack the bottle open and drink from the shard of its neck, reingesting and further refining their catharsis at its point of escape. It's a process that sees them fearless in the face of their shadow selves, willing to reach into the void of their own recesses and expose the squirming arches that help them maintain their essential form in spite of themselves. Blight is an easy listen as well. Its overall smoothness and roomy interiority is reminiscent of the memorializing, interior conferencing and detailed external texturing of Pianos Become the Teeth, but its frequently encountered relief spaces and quietude do nothing to diminish the flush and immediate forcefulness that Stay Inside prevail in throwing themselves into. In doing so, they exhibit a prying kind of interventionism that could hardly be more exacting if it drove to rip and poke at your ribs like one of Birds in Row's barbered murmurations. Blight sees Stay Inside at their most healthful, vibrant, and fearless. Hopefully, it is the first yield of many boon years to come.
Detriot instrumentalist and instigators Will Sessions have proven their skill and tenacity over the past decade after debuting as the backing band for an Elzhi-fronted rendition of Illmatic. Something which they rewired to sound like the old record that inspired the original. Their latest release, Electromagnetic Reality, is calibrated to vibrate at a different frequency though. The album doesn't preoccupy itself with new wardrobes to dress up old moves, instead sees the band going through a transmogrification of enlightened, retro-curious futurism. Drifting through the fibers of a shag rug nailed tight over a decommissioned dance hall floor- the band drop, splash, and drizzle their way through a desalination process that filters out all the baggage of the last 50 years of funk, allowing their sound to condense into something separate and timeless. Part of the freshness of the ensemble's approach this time around is their crocheting together of like threads in a way that feels unselfconscious of any precedence or potential resistance- klieg light bathed soul instrumentals swirl under the clap of stormy jazz formations churned by whisking currents of perfumed and funky slipstreams. The chop of its soothing tides seems to anticipate hip-hop's cut-and-scratch approach to production but without having to rely on the listener's familiarity with such techniques to make sense of its circadian clip. The result is robust and strappingly rugged without yielding the ingrained intimacy of its tender intentions. Through its candid alliance of form and steady voltage, Electromagnetic Reality snatches the blinding heat of stage lights from the air and permits them to dance on its fingertips without singeing its nails and skin, a ballet of brilliant, commanding motion comfortably cooled and iced by a haze of aerosolized, coca-cola-sweet grooves and star-nebula resonating synths that ensnare and encircle the aloof allure of the distant cosmos, shrinking it down to the inviting dimensions of a wading pool sized champagne chiller. Pop the cork and let that electric gold flow!
There is a line from an animated anthology of Matrix tie-ins (The Animatrix, © Warner Bros. Home Entertainment (2003)) that's been hard-coded into my brain: "To a machine, all reality is virtual." I always took this to mean that when a being is running entirely according to a program, its existence is defined by probabilities rather than choices, and it can't have a personal stake in any outcome. This might be fine for browser plug-ins, electric sheep, and sentinel drones, but not for creatures of a makeup and constitution like our own. As humans, we are bound by consequences and the definition that our actions deliver on to us. Depending on how you look at it, this can be the utmost meaning of freedom or the domain of total tyranny. I think the ease of navigating the internet and the degree of anonymity it can afford allows an escape from this dichotomy to a degree. Our adventures spelunking through the wake pool of the web have the potential to trap us in nihilistic feedback loops and dissociative disorders, but just as likely, these excursions can lend us the opportunity to examine ourselves from an appropriate and critical distance, or even grant us the space to try on new roles with a great degree of flexibility and on a graduated learning curve. Maloo is just such a vehicle for Canadian singer and producer Maylee Todd. She is the title character of Maylee's latest album, as well as a real avatar that the artist designed for a virtual experience that aims to help people develop better approaches to their mental health. Despite the open possibilities of the world wide web in which its titular character inhabits, Maloo is actually one of the more constrained albums of Maylee's discography. It is very "internety" in that it can appear on the surface to be born out of one of the untamed new agey segments of a Fire-Toolz album, but the wild variance of jazz and folk styles that you might expect from Maylee's work are here mostly funneled into subdued echos of rinsey synth stirs and R'nB with the textural form of a ripple in a reflective pool that had just caught a plummeting bead, shook free from a floating crystal chandelier. This is not to the album's detriment as Maylee's consistency of approach on this release is characterized by a persistent and assured engagement with a limited tool kit which has the effect of unlocking the full magnetic potential of her elective gadgetry. In other words, she does a lot with a little, and proves that a little can go a long way. The economical dreamscape she has seeded and cultivated is captivatingly unreal and liberatingly weightless without severing its umbilical relations to the realm of incarnate humanity in all its triumph, fear, folly, and fealty. The digital dimension is a plane of bright, even blinding shadows. It can help illuminate the world you inhabit, but it can never fully displace it or supersede the life that you have been given to explore it with.
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| Image courtesy of the artist. |
Talked with an up-and-coming rock star for the CHIRP Radio Artist Interview Series this week. Ryan Nolen is Footballhead, a one-man band writing and recording some of the most impeccably grand and immediate rock music I've heard in a minute. His Kitchen Fly EP dropped last year and he's already working on a follow-up LP which I'm sure will make just as big (or bigger!) of a splash. If this wasn't all cool enough, he also already lined up opening slots with the likes of Dazy and even put my own knowledge and taste of '90s cartoons to shame during our conversation. This last one really blew me away (I watched a ton of cartoons as a kid/young adult/full-ass adult). You can check out our convo on CHIRP's site here, or below:
Listen to the Kitchen Fly EP here:
I appreciate the logic of a thematic album set on an island having an expansive and spacious sound. Windswept Adan, the seventh album by Japan's Ichiko Aoba doesn't concern itself with the limits of geography or boundaries defined by the roil and temper of the ocean. Instead, Ichiko creates reservoirs that flow inward, soaking in the influence of her surroundings, creating a passage into the vast tidepool of the imaginary. In this manner, she manifests within the scope of the project an ever-growing sense of outward spiritual awareness- like a thundercloud swelling with accumulated rain, or a tree that has been growing on a hill for a thousand years- every strain of its evident advance makes way for a more complex and potent affinity between life and the conditions on which it depends. Ichiko was respected as a solo guitar player and singer prior to this release, but her efforts in collaboration with producer Taro Umebayashi have cultivated an abidingly lush and narrative form of chamber pop on Windswept Adan, one that presents a hushed momentum in awe of the triumph of time and the cycles that define it. It speaks, in deliberate, quiet dialog with unseen, edifyingly persuasive forces. Its voice is indistinguishable from the softest breeze, but its power will retrieve what is lost from this world as the sea laid claimed to Thonis many millennia ago.
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| Photo by Payson Power |
Thanks for Coming's first LP with Danger Collective is steadfastly and deceptively modest as a direct corollary of its delicate nature. These mostly DIY recordings were selectively fished from singer-songwriter Rachel Brown's cascade of Bandcamp releases (numbering 79 in all!). The collection is dubbed You Haven't Missed Much, a bemusing title as it contains songs from the artist's formative high school salad days while tracing their trajectory through the threshold of a collegiate training in film. It is also ostensibly meant to be an introduction to Rachel's oeuvre for a fresh crop of ears after joining their current label. One impression that the title makes is that there isn't much to be gleaned from the artist's past catalog and that it might be rightly overlooked. But I don't agree. I don't think that's quite the case. I'm not a Thanks for Coming scholar by any means, but any assemblage of work that contains both the oscillating and winking shot of starlight that is the synth-derived ode "Belief in a World of Doubt," and the kitten-whisker soft cuff and dashingly befuddled declaration of teenage admiration that is "Yr Kind of Cool," is worth every second of time invested in it. Opener "Stephen Hawking's Goldfish Analogy" is a more recent single, originally released with a disposable plastic bag on its cover, a fitting splash of iconography for a wavy scrabble of submerged and pebbly progressions anchored in the vantage point that all things fade, except the things you wish wouldn't. The uncluttered instrumentation of many of these songs leaves a respectable sphere of motion within which Rachel's unguarded and sleepy vocal presence can rove and stretch itself into nervous combinations of light pageantry. "My Name" has the elastic rustle and pull of a Tegan and Sara penned projection of longing, while "U R Not Sick, Yr Electric" is a rawly recorded confession that places a gauging stressor on the melody of each line causing them to bunch up at the tail like Rachel was smearing a ball of clay with their thumb, or rather like Mal Blum squeezing the juice out of a moldy peach pressed between their chin and breastbone, ringing free a chunky drizzle of emotions in a messy but cathartic act of applied pressure. I can feel Rachel reaching through the bars of these songs in a generous extension of their warmth and humanity, but I'm afraid to take their hand less the added strain of bones and flesh gripping such a gift should cause the perfect tension that suspends it to shatter. Still, it is an affront to the spirit to deny such an offer. To experience their gesture returned to them is likely their intent and why they feel compelled to extend themselves in the form of songs in the first place. Their gratitude is presaged- it's in their name. They've already lauded your presence, the least you can do is relax and enjoy all they have to offer.
I had heard rumors of Louisville's Belushi Speed Ball and their misdeeds and misadventures for many a year. It's honestly kind of shameful that I didn't take the time to listen to them until about three weeks ago. From what I can tell, they've been around since at least 2014, doing a kind of sonic parody thrash-punk hybrid in the vein of Lich King, who are themselves more of a "fun-guy-at-a-bar-fight" blending of VIO-LENCE and S.O.D. I anticipated a party band with some riffs. I did not anticipate that Belushi could convert some semblance of a shenanigan-fueled jamboree with any sort of life-like fidelity to a record like What, Us Worry. I'm struggling to find parallels with other "funny" thrash bands like Gwar and Ghoul, because as much as those other bands commit to the bit, they lack Belushi's raw (and even, at times, distressing) sense of spontaneity. I am encountering a kind of delightful consternation with this album. I want to shout, "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!?" about every three minutes. But I am counseled by the sage advice which the album's title evokes. Honestly, you kind of have to be along for the ride with this one. All the knuckle-scalping, side-winding riffs that you'd expect from a modern thrash album are here, but the wild energy and genre-twisting antics of What, Us Worry is without a genuine pear, plunging like a trust-fall mixed with a head-first stage-dive into the jaws of death, they bungee between biceps-flexing hardcore and pickled-brained ska, while somehow still managing to cram in an entire grindcore album worth of material into the last four minutes of runtime. I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that there is song length riff on a Spongbob bit, too... and it kind of slaps. This album also contains some of the weirdest fucking skits I've ever heard. Like, they kind of have the structure of psychotic episodes or mass delusions. It all seems to work because the band makes you feel like you're in on the joke, which beyond the musicianship, is a true feat of showmanship (or possibly a sign that I'm susceptible to professional-grade malarkey [Or both!]). My poor brain and my liver feel bruised and abused after imbibing to this record multiple times, and yet I still feel obliged to recommend it to you. Is it possible that I've become such a glutton for punishment that I'm compelled to divert the overflow of my anguish downstream to you? Or maybe, just maybe, Belushi really is just that fucking good at what they do. Either way- THINK FAST! 'cause here comes a Speed Ball, center plate and up your nose!
