Listening with an open mind. Writing about what I hear.
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This may be one of the most underground artists I've written about.* Benjamin has a lot going on, mostly in his head,** allowing his naturally abundant discharge of nervous energy to cascade over the layered plateaus of technical expertise traumatic experinces he's cultivated over a twenty-year career** (that only seems to be accelerating****) to finally manifest into a self-titled exhibition- a solo album, he's dubbed The Stalker. The title is fitting, given the densely claustrophobic atmosphere of the record, as well as the sort of agitated paranoia it projects, almost as if it is mirroring some psychic battle with a vicious, unseen force lurking on the opposite side of the clairvoyant curtain that separates our conscious reality from a maelstrom of negative energy. His fits and righteous screeds on this album kick up a whole lot of dust to the tune of crooked, junk-yard rhythms, jagged jangle-pop grooves, and raw, barbed, and bendy guitar chords that alternate texturally between that of close shave with an aluminum knife and a large bird tangled in a net of sparking telephone wires. The whole thing comes together like the chemically burned son of Mojo Nixon renting space on the 13th Floor of a municipally condemned Byrd-house and surviving on an exclusive diet of canned Beefhearts and Chocolate Watchbands - there is a bit of Zeppelin in there too, if you're listening for it as well. It's a wild listen as far as contemporary garage rock records go, and I respect the hell out of it- something I say freely, and of my own volition, and not because I'm afraid that Benjamin may be hiding in my bedroom closet, ready to karate chop me in the neck if I said otherwise.****
* Judged purely on the number of Spotify listeners this project has, which as of this writing is exactly 0.
** You could even say that Benjamin has be'n jamin' for over two decades...
** He's been diagnosed as bipolar and also has schizophrenia.
*** He has released 50 albums in the last 5 years under various project names.
**** All joking aside, this is a sincere opinion. This is a fascinating and fun record.
I think the guitar line from the opening track "Morphe Sun" off Pink Must's self-titled LP rearranged my DNA somehow. I've always enjoyed tight, reedy riffs that follow a bendy melody, but this particular set of chords carved me up like CRISPR etching a new flavor into an otherwise bland strain of peaches. It made me feel very pliable and ready for what came next. That's the thing about Pink Must; there is a delicious softness that draws a reciprocal, sympathetic squishiness from the listener. You can feel them molding to your mood, as you, in turn, are shaped by their complementing presence. I think this has a lot to do with the way that they bridge musical forms while embellishing the natural fondament of the combined forms they've elected to experiment with. They have a penchant for baroque string arrangements that cut into and congeal with playfully pocket-sized triphop beats, often with a crunch layer of bubblegum-pop chord-crackle spread between. In addition, the languid melodicism and eletocnic enhancment of the vocals has this elastic longitude to it, where it feels very close and determinately distant at the same interval, causing you to always feel like you are traveling with the music, being carried by its movement and passage to destinations both anticipated and unknow, like your a lucky, dog-eared Pokémon card in the singer's back pocket. It's the gentlist headtrip this side of a warm bowl of kava root. I don't see Pink Must's LP as just suggested listening in 2025; it's a (Pink) must hear!
Portugal's Junkbreed intrigued me when I encountered them back in '21 when their debut Music for Cool Kids dropped in my lap while writing covering metal for a rock magazine. I dug that they were a European group with a bit of a sense of humor, who seemed to be leaning into the renaissance of "junk" culture going on at the time- playing nu-metal adjacent post-hardcore with rap-rock elements and even going so far as slapping a Yolandi Visser look a like on their cover. Fittingly, their vocalist Miranda sounds little like Casey Chaos of Amen trying his hand at some more graceful melodic aggression ala Cedric Bixler-Zavala- a fact that helps cement the "California Babylon" themes sprouting from the lyrics, which often present their subjects as badly negotiating with their circumstances with the aid of drugs, deception (self-and-otherwise), and general delusional thinking. I mean, they're called Junkbreed, is it any wonder that they're mostly going to write about "garbage people"? Cheap Composure is the group's second release, a seemingly transitional EP that keeps a lot of the energy and themes from their first LP alive, while making the leap from more groove metal territory to approach more contemporary hardcore by beefing up the buzzy energy and a putting a greater focus on riffs as a complement to the vocal melodies. It's really amazing how close they come to sounding like Turnstile in some parts of this record, especially when they jump into the "run-you-down-grooves" of "To the Lions," which make you feel like you're being pursued by a pack of wild dogs. They haven't totally nixed their roots though, opener "Dipsonamaniac" has a topsy-turvy, Faith No More-esque bombast to it, while "Automatic Drills" sounds like Converge wringing all the adrenaline they can out of messianic iguana, and "Casual Anger" slaps and bullies its way through a Botch'd batch of Scratch Acid. How the band plans to follow up their latest act, I couldn't say, but I do know it's going to be tough keeping my composure while I wait to find out.
Breaking: Florida duo from Gainesville decode that city's decades-deep tradition of cranking out catchy garage rock and pop-punk and re-upload it with a fresh chiptune-emo patch. That's it. That's my take. That's what Fangface has accomplished on their EP thank your lucky stars, and while it might seem rather matter of fact, I still think it's worth celebrating. Sometimes the heartbreak we experience, or recall from our years of indiscretion, are best reconstructed in a sonic grotto, one with the texture of well-loved, plushy zoological specimens and dotted with spongy input switches reminiscent of turn of the century consumer electronic devices- a safe place of reflection where one can bounce off the walls without risking life, limb, or lasting emotional damage and it's the belly from which Fangface is disgorged. The group cracks the shell of their hermitage and releases the fresh gasp of "Anti-Trust" as the EP's opener, a rattly review of lost confidence that sounds like a musical genie attempting to jam its way out of a Gameboy Color while it reconciles past mistakes and squandered boons of faith. Continuing in this rough but generally rock-oriented vein, the next track "what would i know?" is a beautiful, if desperately humble tumult, followed by the cuttingly emotive and claustrophobic melodic fray of "ouroboros" and the dislocated down-tempo groove kit of "nail polish remover." Diving one level deeper, the group permits themselves room to articulate their more progressive songwriting tendencies, starting with "revolutionary," a rebounding expedition that sees them climbing to the heights of basement pop excellence as well as diving into the deep coves of the low-resolution digital underground in search of forgotten treasures and discarded sympathies. The final two tracks represent a refractory cool off, blitzing through the buzzy turmoil and sizzly sting of the first half of "cigarette burns (death of the author)" to then transitioning into a course put comforting confluence of melodies that tranquility floats a cranial collapse and outburst of poetics which rolls neatly into the closing, self-titled track. No matter how persistent the heartache, you can thank your lucky stars that fangface is there to match the bitter tempo, beat for beat.
Harper Kill Ichiban! Their debut EP, A Taste of..., first-press you could even say, is as smooth and refreshing as they come. Hailing from Grand Rapids (and Illinois, because why not have band practice over Zoom- it's the 21st Century for crying outloud!), Haper Kill are one of those bands who can drop a hook that immediately sinks about three inches into the folds of your frontal lobe and makes a home there, burrowing in like a little musical badger, until you either call a doctor to cut it out with a laser, or learn to live with it homsteading on the curveture of your cortex. I'm in the latter camp because after cohabitating with A Taste of... for about a year, I'm starting to wonder what my life was like before it got its catchy little claws into me. For such a young group, they've already coalesced into a very dependable and practiced, classic sorta punk sound- one that gives off unmistakable notes and nods to their influences, without deluding their own distinctive flavor. Take "Death and Taxes," whose churny, buzz-saw surge and anxious circleback approach to building up hooky payoffs obviously couldn't have existed without Green Day having blazed the way for this particular kind of slacker-germinated melody stacking decades prior- still, the actual construction of the song and its premise (praying for death so that you can finally relax and escape the crushing debts and overbearing burdens of modern life) rests on a very sturdy sonic substratum one that is pinned in place by a wry dynamic that is both bitterly earnest and tenderly ironic. Similarly, you could pick up on some Bouncing Souls-esque melo-core croon and riff pile-ups on "Chinese Restaurant," but accompanied by a satirical drag that rolls back the tempo, allowing the riffs and punishment-magnet lyrics to punch well above their assigned weight class. Then there is the sensibly tender drift of the unrequited anguish-bomb "I Swear," the nervy and defiant skate-a'billy bombing run of "Daguerreotype," and whimsical and harsh, power-pop bubble-burster "BLOAT" to cap things off. The whole album has the vibe of a definitive Gilman St band but with the buff-and-scruff of downtrodden midwestern charm that polishes well-worn conventions into genuine rock gems. Just A Taste of Harper Kill is all you need to know that you need more!
I had initially resisted listening to Asian Glow until this year, when the hype became essentially unavoidable. The main reason was their name. For a Korean artist to christen themselves Asian Glow felt somewhat ridiculous and reductive to me, and I didn't want to dignify it. Really, imagine if I started a band and went around calling myself "Celtic Neon," or "White Lumen," or "Western Filament ," or... Actually- all those go pretty hard. Hmm....kind of wrote myself into a corner here, didn't I? Whatever, the lesson is: never judge a book by its cover. To that point, if there were ever an artist who was more than they appeared on the surface, sonically at least, it would be Asian Glow (known on the street as Shin Gyeongwon). Far beyond any binary or restrictive procedural output, their latest album 11100011 embodies an approach to shoegaze, noise, and emo that drastically exceeds the imagination of their peers, both at home and abroad (except possibly Weatherday, with whom they mingled their talents to make an EP in '22). For example, tracks like "Feel All the Time" are suffused with a heavy sort of electricity that tints the air and discolor it with tension, like the atmosphere on a muggy summer day just before a big storm, it comes pouring out of the speakers like a Biblical flood and there is no way of packing it back in to avoid drowning in its afflicted, neo-romantic discharge- you just have to let it take you. This weighty pulsation of cloudbursting potential is reflected in the pained and unrequited ebb of that track's rhythms and the anguished flow of its lyrics, which seem to usher forth through shellacking eyewalls of composure bracketed by a partially camouflaged, but overall keening disquietude. This cool, phantasmagoric swelter also beautifully binds together the disparate traces of the gothic-leaning "Jitnunkebi (Winter's Song)," securing into a singular continuity a rich, glistening fabric of baroque pop, vampy Italian psychedelics, and tortured third-wave emo grandure into a neon redux of something like the Black Parade. Subtlety isn't necessarily the key to what Asain Glow accomplishes on this album, as much as their triumphs are manifest in the total integration of disparate signifiers, presenting the opportunity for the strange to marry the ordinary in a kismet of cross-pollinated chaos- like when a bounding twinkle-hook takes on the quality of an MBV-esque brainpeeling feedback ripple subsequent to a saturated and smoke-choked Manners-era Passion Pit riff on "Out of Time." Other analogous and admirable amalgamations can be located on none-other-than the title track, where a maladjusted indie groove tarantellas in a stop-start wincing progression as if stumbling through a dancefloor full of thumbtacks while wax sculptures of Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser of MGMT burn in the background, as well as the gorgeous conflagration of "Camel8strike," which sounds like Cocteau Twins melding with Team Sleep as they molt and become reborn like a two-headed phoenix in the pit of a haunted and abandoned LA recording studio, set ablaze by faulty wiring coming into contact with a capsized liter of Coca-Cola. There appears to be even more below the surface on 11100011 that I could hope to cover in a review even three times as long as this one is at present. That's alright. If I can pique your interest enough for you to give 11100011 a spin, then I've done my job. The album is a magnificent enigma, waiting in a state of troubled magnanimity to be decoded by an open ear concomitant with an open mind.
Andy Loebs is the first goocore artist I've interviewed for this blog's podcast (but hopefully not the last). I'm very smitten by the luster of his incredibly imaginative and dream-like productions and it was very cool to finally have a chance to talk with him about his process and his latest album Cercopithecoid (SIR-koh-pi-THEE-koyd). It is out on Orange Milk, the gooey-ist label of them all. Check out our convo below:
Bluesy, denim-shrouded, intergalactic mercenaries The Sword are on a planet-hopping crusade to boldly go where many machismo rockers the likes of ZZ Top, Thin Lizzy, and Blue Cheer have totally been before, but maybe with less dark irony. Armed for the voyage with a stockpile of industrial-grade glowing alien ganja, a traveling black tie caller full of Southern Comfort, and a thrifted library's worth of maliciously annotated, dog-eared Philip K. Dick paperbacks for the trip, they're bronco busting the outer limits of our star system looking for a good time, or at least a place that isn't lousy with Daleks and dick-noses. Used Future (shorthand for the gritty, lived-in, futuristic aesthetic of 70's classics like Star Wars and Alien) is the sixth album from these Austin space-junkies to deliberately crash-land into some seriously cushy, laid-back vibes. You will be hard-pressed to find a more immediately digestible, effortlessly exotic blend of southern rock, sludge metal, and mystic psychedelia this side of Andromeda. With environmental degradation, xenophobia, and late capitalism pushing civilization as we know it to the brink, the future seems bleak, but with a soundtrack like this, it still might be a place we can call home. The Sword doesn't have all the answers, but they're game to let you hitch a hike on the fin of their rocket as they cruise the cosmos.
Alsarah & the Nubatones has been around for more than 10 years, elegantly matching North African music with a lively cross-stitching of neo-soul and R'nB- unsealing the potential that this harmonious integration contains to embody history and the patterns of global migration. Seasons of the Road is the group's third LP, and likely takes its name from the constant state of motion through which the well-traveled and tour-forged crew has earned their reputation. It may also reference the sense of alienation that being witness to a world that is unremittingly committed to tremendous acts of violence can engender in a person not yet ready to forsake their humanity. When horror is commonplace, living with a feeling of placelessness inevitably becomes normal. While Alasarah's resplendent vocal prowess and fluid sense of melody, and the band's overall accomplished sense of rhythm and composition, can, and often does, lend itself to some extraordinarily intriguing and accessible acoustic folk hybrids, the fact that they're willing to embrace a kind of futurist outlook to their radiantly retro style makes each listen that much more engrossing- almost like your encountering a backdoor into an alternative past, one that is more abundant and gracious than our own- an envelope of possibility where brutality of the present was not inevitable. "Fa3el Fi Eldawam" begins the album with a suitably restless rhythm and poly-percussive pastiche of caravan craft, which moves in consonance with Alasarah's wondering, plaintive bawl. "Bye Bye" is more stripped-back and playful, ridding a reticent, shuddering chord progression on a star-catching offering to the seizing draw of spellbound devotion. "Disco Star" feels like a nomadic astral march through a needle's eye of chance and determination, while the evocative textures of "Tendo" feel like being baptized in the ocean. There will always be rough road ahead, not just a season, but a whole lifetime, and when conditions are inhospitable underfoot, something lovely in your ears can be a balm for the pain of our pilgrimage.
Since reviewing JER's Bothered / Unbothered earlier this year, I've dispelled the curse of nerves that had been put up to barricade me against enjoying ska and raggae and have started to revisit some semi-recent favorites, such as 2018's Rockstone,the sophomore LP from Minnesota-born reggae artist, Jr. Thomas, aka Thomas McDowall. The project got its start when Thomas joined forces with former Aggrolites guitarist Brian Dixon with the intention of creating a tribute to the classic, honey-toned reggae of artists like Jimmy Cliff. The title Rockstone is a reference to the fact that we memorialize things we adore in stone so that they last long after we are gone. Hence, the album is a love letter to not just Jamaican music, but also Thomas’ wife, family, friends, and band mates, a tribute to humanity’s boundless capacity for love and drive towards unity. “True love,” as Thomas notes, “cannot be defeated.” A good entry point to this album is “What A Shame” with its warm organ-led melodies, skipping syncopation, and heartfelt vibe. “Til You’re Gone” has a earnestly smitten doo wap feel, while “Rockstone” is a monumentally subdued close-dancing lullaby, and “Second Time Around” is a perfectly balanced slow-jam that could easily pass for a hot Maytals single circa ’68. Rockstone, it's as stready as they come.
Available via Colemine Records (Not Coalmine Records. Can you imagine a record label going by Coalmine in 2025. Cringe. smdh.)
More Michicagn emo! That's what I need at the moment, and No Problemo! (out of Lansing), wet behind the ears, and with a Spanish 101 under the bench-seat in their van, are fit and decorously determined to deliver. Year Of The Frog is the group's debut EP, hopping up to snag the spotlight a full 6 years after the band formed as a result of a friendship kindled on r/emo.* Their six-song seminar on living your best life, vengefully, and spitefully, online and otherwise, is light enough in tone to float on a lily pad without sinking into the mire below, remaining buoyant while not neglecting substance in terms of lyrics and managing to supply some incredibly crunchy riffs, all of which crinkle and pop deliciously, like deep fried bullfrog served up as the premier repas at a greasy French eatery. The gang gets twinkly on the ruefully optimistic opener "Gas Station Joe Jonas" and follows it up with the slingblade guitar sway of "r/Emo Drive," a quiver of cyanide-laced best wishes unleashed to rain down on a deserving pariah (or just some subreddit mod). The rhythmic interplay on "On My Glob" is easy to get tangled up in, even while the vocals steep you in a dint of bile and top-shelf vinegar. The chaotic energy of the prior track is a fair counterweight to the grungy, second-stringer angst and pushy reverie of growing pains embodied by the simply titled "MVP." The penultimate number, "twitter is a beautiful place & i am no longer afraid to die" is nothing if not grandiose- following a brief prolog of spoken word poetry it confronts the listner like an emphany upon realizing that they've been stood up on a date, causing a whole universe of aniscedents to converse on a single painful point of clarity, while managing to wind us up perfectly for the bubbly, down-and-out closer, "Mr. Pibb Ain't Quite Flyin' Off The Shelves, Todd," a track which match the vehemence of it predecessor as it hauls ass all the way back to twinkle-town, a return to the starting line of the EP that nips at its own toes, demonstrating the band's flexibility one last time by tying the album into a proper emoroboros.
* Surprisingly, this is not a more common origin story. That said, there is more to life than updoots.
Provoker is such a strange creature to me. The LA group replicates cyber-punk aesthetics to package downtempo pop and R'nB, which always seems to be in the process of sinking into its own shadow, like a prehistoric tiger proudly drowning in a tar pit. They remind me a lot of The Weeknd if he sobered up and hired Drab Majesty to back him up on an album. I'm obviously not put off by the group's more accessible inclinations, but what keeps me coming back to their records is the subtly alien and arrestingly rawboned quality of their grooves, especially the guitar work, which has this ugly and lonesome jilt to it, like its violently shrugging away from a reassuring hand on its shoulder or some similar extension of human warmth. Their 2018 debut EP Dark Angel is particularly good at giving this wanton sort of cold shoulder to the listener. Opener "Flinch Awake" is a drizzly veil of nightmare-gaze, whose clawing chord progressions absolutely give the impression that you are being stalked through the entirety of its run time. Much later, the possessive closer "Body Vehicle" revels in an oppressive sort of sodden angst, like someone had seeded a cloud with annotated sheet music transcribed from The Cure's early-80s oeuvre, and now it's pouring buckets of melanocytic acidic tears all down our backs. Then there is the title track, which begins by writhing with stark and sinister assurance before settling into a plaintive, heart-breaking dalliance while bladed riffs pierce its back and sides like the proverbial Saint Sebastian- a martyr for its ill-fated passions. Provoker still has a lot to offer these days, but they really tapped into something dire and divine on Dark Angel.
Time for some wholesome woodland jams, from a guy who lives in *checks browser tab* ... Minneapolis! .... I mean, suuuuuure... why the hell not- Minnesota is a very forested state and I could imagine myself needing to live out a scene or two from Gary Paulsen's Hatchet if I ventured farther than a minute off a paved road there, so screw it, everybody who lives there is a basically a druid as far as I'm concerned. Including JJ Sweetheat, a decidedly modern sort of persona, but one with enough grit under his nails and sifted into his aesthetics that you'd swear he spent just about every night with nothing but his own hot breath between him and the open, starry sky. Big Things is JJ's conspicuously titled debut EP where he serenades your innocent ears with an ashy style of campfire-huddling wyrd folk that echos and wails like a diminutive cyclone rising like a dancing prophet from the hollow of a dead tree. "This World" welcomes you into JJ's realm of dusted soles and dusky dances, escaping the press of urbania with drops of electric-country guitars and the insistent, hypno-viper rattle of tambourine percussion. Next "Feral Feelings" draws you further into the updraft of his psychedelic bonfire with its darkly dreamy affect, where you are then tossed up and spun like a dandelion pappus on a cool September current on the mortius-minded fluster-tumble "Too the Grave." The spicy-sweet stroll of "Cinnamon" is wound around a cluster of suitably sticky hooks and gooey guitar rips, while closer "Heart Medal" is a delightfully overheated but subtly starting evaporation point from which JJ can make his exit into the dark night air like smoke escaping a dying ember. You can lose your map, lose your shoes, even lose your mind, but as long as you keep your ears open to Big Things, you'll never be totally lost.
Worship the Weird is the debut album* from Chicago doom metal band, Sacred Monster (from 2019, a very popular year for rehashing stalwart tales of cosmic horror for whatever reason). They perform a muscular blues-riff anchored interpretation of classic NWOBHM and doom grooves ala Pentagram, with vocals that run the gambit of strained reptilian cries interspersed with the clean ring of King Diamond-esque salvos. The contents of their songs are mostly homages to classic horror and sci-fi, presented with an appropriate measure of Cryptkeeper camp. Like the stomping Twilight Zone tribute "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet," the uncanny Clutch-worshiping stutter-groove retelling of an '80s cult-classic "Re-Animator," and the superb, pugnacious knuckle-duster and Dark Tower homage "Face of My Father." The vampy-er tracks tell original stories, with "The Wraith," depicting a story of revenge from beyond the grave with a burning Orange Goblin-esque bridge, and the epic Candlemass-meets-King Diamond haunted asylum tour of "Waverly Hills." Embrace your weirder side and give this a spin.
Bottna is the Slowcraft Records debut of Stockholm electronic duo Johan Kisro and Petter Lindhagen, known to us as Dött ljus (if you know any Swedish, this is your chance to turn to a friend, who is presumably reading this review simultaneously with you, in the same room, and tell them, "'Hey, Dött ljus' means Dead Light in Swedish," which I am positive will impress them and make them feel more warmly about you as a friend).* Bottna is a brief but impactful listen, submerging its audience in abidingly subtle textures and generously affected moods, that amasss in a gentile swell of nostalgia-priming motifs, as if the chain of memories that laces the quotidian turns of your life into a cognisant pattern were to materialize into a clear, babbling brook, which covers and rushes over you, wetting your face and hands like a baptismal font while eroding the grief and rueful dolor that weighs you to pitted, the sandy bed where your body is stretched prone. Sharp, interposed, and intently articulated beats tickle your ears like the nipping claws of hermit crabs come to whisper a lonesome tale to you in your sleep, accompanied by the soft clattering music of their shifting shells. Breathing sonic architecture contorts and molts like a chrysalis paroling its delicate ward into the catching breeze, while birds comprised of insulated copper and painted aluminum scourer for scraps of tinted vinyl and strips of celluloid to bump up the Boho of the nest they've made in an weathered and sagging willow tree they share with a family of kodama. There is no ceiling to the heights of experience which Bottna contains, only a bedrock of vivid, transformative sound.
I've been a fan of Pete's work with artists since the start of this blog. His work with Colorfield Records is completely in line with the ethos of my own blog, and in encountering his discography, it made me realize that I am not alone in championing the deserving but underrecognized talent of the world. He gives session musicians and unsung studio heroes a chance to really test their limits and craft music that is challenging to make but easy to enjoy. There are far too few people doing what Pete is doing, but the world is made much more interesting due to his efforts. Check out the interview below:
Featured in this interview is music from Nicole McCabe's recent Colorfield Records release, A Song To Sing. Check it out here:
This episode is, in part, dedicated to the great George Lowe, one of the greatest comedic voice actors of all time. Leaving us far too soon, he's returned to his home (Cartoon) planet for a well-deserved rest. RIP (1957-2025)
Shadowy cinematic psychedelic pop out of Italy, that could have been written for a David Lynch film with ambitions for mainstream crossover appeal. Combining light oaky percussion, with ghostly synths, ambling guitars, and sultry vocals, the dusky ye-ye duo known as WOW cut an evocative and haunting sonic silhouette on their fourth album, Come La Notte. This is an effortlessly cool record that can be easily slotted into a late-night rendezvous with a good book or a long evening drive for an indelible interjection of je ne sais quoi. Opener “Come La Notte” has a somber spaghetti-western vibe to it, “Nina” adds some lush sweeping vocal harmonies to the mix, while “Morire Per Amore” has a timeless ‘60s psych-R’nB quality, and “Occhi Di Serpente” casts a deep and alluring spell with its trancey saturated bassline and tide-rolling melody. A truly strange and delightful listen.
Deploying a sonic barrage of culture-jamming ballistics from the savanna of perdition that is Neo-Melbourne, ESP Mayhem is the EVP of the ghost in the machine. On a day like today, and in an age like our own, we are all plugged in like flesh transistors neuralinked into a info-validating supply chain that stamps the leveled realities and hyperreal phantasms auto-generated by smiling maskless faces acting as temporary receivers of a transient silicon-threshed symbolic order with the briefest of imprint of our consciousness before consigning these bubbles of fleeting joy to the abyss along with a fragment of our souls- like gum smeared on plywood. ESP Mayhem extends themselves through the gates, ports and check-passes of the nauseatingly manifold mirage of digital excess and unclarity that define the quicksand-like qualities of the concrete world to bully the leveler pullers and burst the tension of the spell that's been cast over us- finding salvation through sublation and recuperating their humanity through agitated accelerationism. Their latest EP Cyber Bully emerged in 2024 to shake down crypto nerds and relieve them of the burden of their hallucinatory lucre while reshuffling the static of stultifying overexcitement that snow blinds our perception in the hopes that a dose of the right kind of chaos can produce an epiphany of eschatological significance... that and they really just like to fuck shit up. You can check out my interview with the band below; it reads a little like the manifesto of a terrorist sect that Johnny Mnemonic might have had to rely on in a pinch for information and logistics. It gets giga-gonzo, you've been warned.
Who participates in ESP Mayhem, and how do they contribute?
Bruce - Synth; Clock - Vocals; K@rrl - Synth; Klown - Synth; Ralph - Drums. We might change the names and/or people around in the future.
What is the thesis or animating logic behind the group?
In our view, extreme music is an arms race. It's a race that can never be won because the escalation will never stop. The goal is to make the most unsentimentally rageous [sic] and mechanistically horny music we can. Even if we do something that reaches the goal it’s already history because it’s just a matter of time until it’s surpassed. The only options are to go even further or give up. Hyperextend until you explode.
How did you settle on your name?
We decided our logo should combine a metal band’s logo and a logo from outside that world. The combined logos had to form a phrase or word that worked as a band name independent of the source material, and the component logos had to have finger-snap recognisability. There was a very short list of bands, brands and logos that worked. We appropriated Mayhem and ESPN as a graphic shorthand for sonic extremity on the one hand, and the sublimation of violence through spectacle on the other. We chopped “ESPN” down to “ESP”, in the sense of “Extra-Sensory-Perception”, to underline the psychic dimension. Hence ESP Mayhem. The name means no distinction between our music and everything else in the product-scape, no brakes on our out-of-control hubris, and no limits on what we’re prepared to steal.
Why grindcore?
Grindcore is obsessed with aggressive hyper-velocity, instantaneity and disposability. It’s also very information-dense, lots of notes in a hyper compressed burst. Tension, information overload, everything moving too fast - those are the only things in our lives anyway so it’d be dishonest to fuck around with anything else. It’s no accident that mass-entertainment is taking on more and more grindcore-like proportions and gestures. Because everyone feels and thinks this way now. It’s basically the most realistic music of all time.
Are you inspired by the work of other metal performers, or do your influences lie mainly elsewhere?
Melbourne has produced some great grindcore bands so we were lucky to see the style played by some of the best to do it. That’s the foundation of how we understand fast music and how we think it should feel. But we always want something more absurd and more brain-cracking. So we also plagiarise from the most antisocially jacked up, hyperactive dance music - speedcore, anything out of Newcastle (NSW) etc. There’s some worthless computer-world dross mashed in as well, nightcore and ear-biting 8 bit arpeggiation, high-fructose trash sounds designed to fry your pleasure centres [sic] into pouring more money/time down the shitter. Other than that, we just regurgitate the rising tempo of the sensory pummelling we’ve endured our entire lives, in the same way you might make yourself throw up after ill-advisedly eating a mysterious wrong-address delivery meal you find on your doorstep. IE an unpleasant but necessary action to avoid shitting yourself later on.
Was it a deliberate choice to exclude guitars from your ensemble, and if so, why?
It was an accidental, revelatory, bad, great idea. We happened to plug a synthesizer into a guitar amp and discovered you could make noise that lands like a tungsten cube dropped from orbit. No nuance or warmth, just pure force. But none of us had any experience playing electronic music. We don’t really understand how the instruments work, and we’re all intellectually paralysed from too much high pressure/low duration media (grindcore and grindcore-ized media in general) so it’s nearly impossible for us to learn. But synthesizers are just too loud and we’re addicted to power so we can’t stop. If someone accidentally bumps their instrument it instantly blows everyone’s ears out and we all scream in pain. It’s awful.
What was the thought process going into your latest release, Cyber Bully?
We wanted it to sound like Megatron trying to auto-fellate and accidentally machine-gunning his own head off. More piercing sonic aggression, more jarring speed-to-dance transitions, more blatantly ripping things off, more gleeful mockery and disrespect, just more. There’s no point or really any possibility of subtlety or thoughtfulness now so we always want to go as far and fast in the wrong direction as we can.
What are your thoughts on the circularity of time and history?
Time and history are circular, but also linear. We have no evidence to back this up, we just infer it from the overall feeling of constant upheaval combined with total inertia.
How do the contradictory but intersecting modern phenomena of stultifying boredom and constant excitement and/or agitation play out through your work?
Things are so continuously exciting now that excitement itself has become experientially boring, because it never lets up. Like when was the last time you didn’t feel angry, horny, scared or otherwise wound up. And it’s not just you, everyone is sitting there in a state of private agitation. But it’s not like you can opt out of the situation, so why not go further. There’s an episode of the TV show Max Headroom, where watching a high speed advertisement is found to spike the viewer’s nervous system to the point that they spontaneously combust. Ratchet up the boredom, ratchet up the pressure until the whole thing explodes in media-induced, self-obliterating tedium. You should be trying to cross that line, one way or another. Extreme boredom makes extreme music.
How does your work draw attention to the invasive nature of technology and underscore our intimacy with it?
Our band setup is like reverse-cybergrind, we kept the drummer and replaced all the guitars with prosumer electronic equipment. IE more unwanted and unasked-for change for the sake of it masked as “innovation” and “development”. It’s like what we see with technology, but even more stupid. People don’t really want it but we keep pushing it on them and eventually they give in. A few people might say it’s good, they don’t really think that, we just shoved it in their faces til they thought they did. After we convince them, it's not too long til they think they convinced themselves. But unlike the technologists we make no claim to be improving anything. We’re making things worse and more difficult, so perversely actually making things better.
How do you think our interactions with information technology, particularly social media, transform and augment our sense of identity and place in the world?
The Self As Asset has been realised through social media - the kipple machine that crushes everything into advertising, as it simultaneously crushes advertising into everything. The term Personal Brand used to get thrown around but you don’t hear it now cause the concept has become so internalised that it’s redundant - of course a person is a brand, why bring it up. Between Personal Branding and Corporate Personhood a circle is completed - on the one hand people take on the characteristics of brands, and on the other corporations take the characteristics of people. We’re encouraged to understand ourselves through the language of therapy but we should use the language of marketing instead, it’s more accurate.
How does the concept of "junkspace" relate to your approach, outlook, and output?
Neo-Melbourne is a quintessential junkspace. It’s like living in a big cardboard box full of print-on-demand neon signage. All lowest-bid-contract dross stretched over the skeleton of a failed plan. Nothing rings true here and things don’t work out for the good. So ESPM makes something else from the junk. We grab whatever we like and use it however we can to advance our project. You see the bare bones of everything we ripped off and how starkly we smashed it all together, a junkspace aesthetic. But it conforms to our logic now. The incongruities made sense all along, we are just stacking the pieces up in a way that makes the pattern reveal itself.
What is the value of novelty in popular culture at this moment? Is it still attainable, is it worth pursuing?
It’s not attainable but it’s worth pursuing. With pop culture It’s more straightforward and more rewarding to repeat things, and in life it’s easier to do nothing at all. But tomorrow will arrive whether you want it or not. And you have to put an idea forward if you don’t want more of the same. If we have to live in a bullshit future then we’re gonna try and make it our bullshit, not someone else’s, stinking the place up. And everyone else’s bullshit is ours now anyway. Intellectual property is theft and anyone bristling at their art/bullshit being stolen is dumb for imagining they’re losing something and a cop for caring. All we have ever done is lift so many touchstones from the manic ends of popular culture and music scenes into the one mix, so there’s nothing really new. But on paper ESP Mayhem is a novelty act because of what we steal and why. We would go further and say that now, every act should be a novelty act, and this is the only way to stay ahead of the kipple machine. Realise your own delusions or steal ours and turn it into something else, we don’t care. But you are either a novelty act or you enter the kipple factory, that’s the choice.
What if any, are the beneficial and ethical uses for AI in art and creative endeavors at this stage of its technological development?
There’s no ethical use for AI because it’s a big machine for ripping things off. ESPM is in direct competition with AI in that regard. And we are winning. With all the money and raw intellectual horsepower sloshing around in the AI industries it should be the other way around but no, we can rip things off faster, more totally and more fluently than the stupid AIs. That’s where we’re at, historically speaking. The great white hope of technological advancement has been outperformed by a synthgrind band from the Cleveland of the southern hemisphere. It’s a grim outlook.
What does the term "cyberpunk" mean to you in relation to your work, if anything?
“Neo-Melbourne” alludes to the idea that all those old Cyberpunk stories have been more or less realised in our present day. But the term cyberpunk is historical now, it makes sense as a pinterest moodboard but doesn’t quite capture the flavour of this moment. We need a new anachronistic portmanteau to describe a world of grinning human sharks swimming upstream in a sea of techno-garbage. It should keep the “social technics vs music subculture” form of “Cyberpunk”, but instead blend the relentless pumping of uptempo hardcore, with overblown CCRU-style net-mysticism. Something like Xenodonk, or Deus Ex Makina.
What is the most dystopian part of living in Melbourne?
Smelling the countryside burn as you walk past 3-million-dollar townhouses in your old neighbourhood.
Admitting this will likely make me sound completely unhinged, but whenever I order a drink at a restaurant or a kiosk, I have an irrational paranoia that the person preparing my order is going to bleed in it. This has never happened in experience (as far as I know), and it doesn't cause me much anxiety, but whenever I watch someone pouring coffee or dispensing juice, I can't help but think, "If they got a nosebleed right now, there is only about a foot between their nostrils and my beverage, and then my drink could end up with an extra-iron supplement in it." I can't account for this aspect of my psychology. It could be the result of some starved desire for affection (not that my conscious mind is aware of such a deficit) or the rendering down of the literal transaction occurring (me buying a coffee) into base biological terms (there is a fluid transfer from the barista to me in exchange for currency). Whatever it is, the reality of someone adding their own brand of syrup extract to my morning joe probably wouldn't be that bad for me- the iron would help me maintain my own hemoglobin and might even assist me in warding off restless leg syndrome. Now that I've put this out into the world, someone is probably going to pass me a pink lemonade that they flavored themselves just to vindicate me and my anguished fixations for no reason other than I was foolish enough to say something about one of my mild phobias in public. Oh well, I can always use more viscera to liven up my day- I seek it out in movies, video games and music, why not in everything I consume? Sometimes I think it's the lack of carnality that keeps me from celebrating the shoegaze "revival" as much as others. It's not that I never write about shoegaze bands... It's just that it can be a challenge to get excited about release after release of nearly indistinguishable waves of distortion and weightlessness, inconsequential vocal deliveries that all too often define the genre. D.C.'s Pinky Lemon feels like they are headed in the right direction on their 2024 EP, Pinky Hell, though. I would certainly describe the group as part of the footgazi resurgence taking hold in the corridor between Philadelphia and the Capitol at the moment, but like Soft Body 2, the distortion and feedback that they rely on is slightly more crystalized and concretely compelling than what you might find elsewhere, helping to further focus the sharply toothsome rhythms that they employ. The interplay between groove and texture is a very important sight of exploration for the band, with many moments on Pinky Hell conjuring for me something akin to the spooky, danceable crisis of an early '00s witch house mix, one that reinterprets My Blood Valentine as a sort of lost media artifact, reconstructed from scrapes and slivers extracted from the detritus of an abandoned vaporwave YouTube channel. Opener, "Floodgate" sounds strikingly blown out, saturating the senses with dreamy chords that cluster around the ears like stray daydreams, emitting strobes of brilliant variegated thunder before dissipating into a mist of nectarous talc. The following track, "1 MIL" confirms the overall embodied nature of the album, a suitably urgent pop-punk pounce that skitters on its nails like a cat on ice through portals of elegant clarity- a struggle for preeminence that it can only glimpse before collapsing back into its fleshy confines, and ultimately stumbling over the border of safety and into a discordant gap of mechanical cardiac cycles that is "Reuploading." The reverent plunge of "Cheer" sounds like the band slow-motion crashing a space cruiser they boosted from an Ultra Deluxe album's lore, only to survive their mishap by ruggedly reverting to a post-amplified state of acoustic punk, that graciously molts into a blossom of dissident Deftones inflected tweecore on "i died // nvm." Through all its changes and transgressions, Pinky Hell ultimately settles into its final form on "2 MIL," a breakbeat-backed soul-scrubber that feels like it's exfoliating a deep region of your essence with its raw, contorting chords and cooling scrapes of glassy-glinting synths that ends as abruptly as a title card reading "To be continued...". A sanguine parting note for one hell of an album.
Ails was the second phase of vocalist Laurie Shanaman and guitarist Christy Cather’s life work of reshaping the American metal scene. The duo first played together in the phenomenal black metal band Ludicra, where they advanced a fresh take on the acidic hail-storm of second-wave blast-beats and tremulous, while adding a momentous sense of atmosphere and vamperic folk-rock, complemented by Shanaman’s amphibious growl and the occasional clean singing segment. Ails on their LP, The Unraveling, is a less straightforward rock project than their previous band. Here they double down on bleak, damp atmosphere, not in a metal hipster, “ambient” or shoegazey kind of way, instead embracing elements of death-doom a la Hooded Menace, while striving to write serrated, alienating riffs that fulfill the eldritch covenant of their Nordic forbearers. The harsh whirlwind of cresting tremulous, coiling grooves, acid-plaque feedback, and wounded female vocal squalls may not be welcoming to the uninitiated, but given a chance, these tortured missives can be a cathartic departure for you and your more adventurous listeners.
The Unraveling is Ails’s debut LP released by the practitioners of dark, inscrutable sound curation over at The Flenser, and unfortunately, it may also be their last as it was released in 2018, and they have yet to produce a successor. Another vibrant alternative metal project, cut down in its youth by expositio, or maybe lack thereof...
I'd be very surprised to learn that any of the guys from Atlanta's Michael Cera Pallin could see another country from their house- even if they were to stand on their roofs and hike up on their toes. Atlanta's pretty far removed from most internationally recognized partitions, unless there is a micronation nearby like Petoria that I'm oblivious to.* But who am I kidding (Not you! I'm nothing but honest with you!), being part of a scene and a subculture can be like being a member of your own private nation in some ways- there are customs and borders, anthems and sites of worship, ambassadors and refugees, etc...- so I guess you could say that they see another foreign provenance from their place of residence after all, observing the clueless barbarian roaming around the city gates of their polity, blind to the riches concealed from their line of sight. If you could count yourself so bold, curious, and gallant, then maybe you could find yourself an honored guest, or at least an unmolested tourist, within their domain. Personally, I'm taking MCP's debut LP We Could Be Brave, as just that, a summons to a world beyond my provincial purview. Take, if you will, the stocky punch and roll of opener "Feast or Famine," which mediates the strummy affectedness of Mom Jeans with an overhanded volley approach to PUP venerating melody, dipping around your defenses and rocking you with a stunning ploy of earnest reflection and whiplash-hooks- it's almost too insistent that you give into band's steering command- lassoing you with elastic rhythms and reeling you into a zone of near claustrophobic catharsis. The next track is even more emphatic, acting like a cyclone that siphons the grief, pride, and fervor of the Mid-West and Great Lakes regions and funnels them into a concentrated etching tool that the band uses to carve their debts and deficiencies into the sands of time, only to witness them being washed away by the ripples and tides their own presence produces in the waters of Chronos- wiping the slate as if it were marked with mere chalk and not the fragments of past selves. Elsewhere, a rain of fluttering portraits showers from above, scattering and plastering themselves against burning pillars of searching clarity caught in counter-currents of amplified distortion and clashing social principles on the flea-bitten stinger "Murder Hornet Fursona"- the high points of which are met with, almost like the repetition of a poem, in a variation on mood, in the audacious and post-punky dip and drag of the justifiably discourteous, twinkle-spark scan "Gracious." Later down the line, we encounter "Despite," which sounds like the afterthoughts that bubble up out of the slick of mud that's been washed off a clear conscience, followed by the bashy balancing act "Broken Face," which teeters on the margins of both self-help and self-implosion without any apparent indicators as to which demarcation it would prefer to land. It's fitting, but rarely encountered that an album will conclude with the title track, almost like a final curtain drop after the listener has been pulled up on stage to take part in the closing bow- this bow lasts for 11 minutes though, and transitions through several fiery build-ups and busts, making the conclusion of the album more like an obstacle course you run with friends rather than a soft breathy kiss goodnight (not that it doesn't contain an appropriate air of finality- the band just seems to have trouble letting you go by the end after having spent so much time to get to know you). There are those who are could be brave enough to be themselves and seek out kindred souls, and then there are those who are brave enough to step fully into such a commonwealth of kinship- I think, despite their modesty, Michael Cera Palin can be counted as the latter.
