Aska Út Við Sundin Grá LP (Galakthorrö)
Praise be, another gloomy dispatch from Galakthorrö, the globe’s finest purveyor of gothic industrial electronics. This one comes from a new artist, Iceland’s Aska, whose Discogs bio describes the solo project as “obscure electronics”. I’m not sure that the gear Aska uses is particularly hard to find, as the sounds he makes are direct genetic matches to the rest of the Galakthorrö roster. I’d be much more inclined to describe these electronics as “lonely” – seriously, these songs sound like tear-stained transmissions from the farthest ends of the Earth, the final pleas of the final human, who in this case happens to be a pale goth man with a pageboy haircut. In case it wasn’t clear, I love this stuff – Aska’s synths churn slowly and provocatively, as though they are on one-percent battery life and trying to conserve all remaining energy. It’s all very much in line with the bleary, hopeless romance of November Növelet, if perhaps less likely to ever verge on traditional synth-pop. On the insert, Aska’s thanks-list is simply “thanks to the people in my life for understanding”, as if him being Aska is some sort of shameful affliction that cannot be resolved any other way than by devoting himself fully to miserable cold-wave music. I like that.
Blawan Soft Waahls 2×12″ (Ternesc)
Now that it’s officially dark out constantly, there’s no better time to dig into a hefty new double EP from British techno royalty Blawan! As long as he keeps releasing records, I’ll keep checking them out, and while some hit harder than others, Soft Waahls is a worthy addition. These six new tunes scan like a tour of Blawan’s studio, full of the crispy hi-end percussion cracks and grotty low-end kicks I’ve come to expect and cherish. I can easily picture Blawan giving us a casual tour of his various synths and hardware configurations, pointing out which bass tones leave the deepest welts and which vintage synths add those unexpected squiggles of color that he loves to toss in unexpectedly. As a whole, Soft Waahls carries that relaxed sense of sonic brutality, as if these tracks flowed naturally from his fingers in real-time as opposed to being meticulously picked apart in a software program over the course of days. My favorite is the opener “Justa”, in no small part to the distorted spoken-vocal line that repeats – Blawan is a master of many aspects of his trade, and ear-grabbing vocal samples is surely one of them.
Bridge Of Flowers A Soft Day’s Night LP (ESP Disk)
Yup, that ESP Disk! Crazy to me that the label still exists somehow, but crazy in a cool way, particularly as they aren’t simply coasting on their legacy with endless reissues and instead have chosen to release hard-to-file freaks like Pittsfield, MA’s Bridge Of Flowers. This is definitely modern-day loitering-hippie music, a rock band where it seems like only half of its members have verifiable employment at any given time. Reminds me of Meat Puppets at their most gratefully dead, or Eat Skull covering Flipper, which I am fairly certain has actually happened. Kind of New Zealand-y too, in the way that these shambolic rock songs seem to have no particular place to go and don’t seem to mind the aimlessness one bit. For as much as I also enjoy hanging around and playing hackysack (I’ve got an incredible Statute Of Liberty shoulder-stall move), A Soft Day’s Night doesn’t really grab me all that strongly, but that doesn’t seem to be its intention anyway. Why aspire for big-time success when you can just chill with your friends and enjoy each other’s company for free?
Bunzinelli Godspeed 12″ (La Rama)
Vienna’s Neubau label is a buy-on-sight situation for me, so when I saw that they had a 12″ in the works for someone named Bunzinelli, I had to investigate. Turns out he’s a producer out of Montreal, and just released this fresh new EP, so I picked it up and yep, Neubau’s endorsement continues to pay dividends. If you aren’t familiar, that label deals almost exclusively in low-BPM techno of a greasy industrial vein, and Bunzinelli fits right in. These four tracks are at the slow end of the dance spectrum, a sweet spot that lends EBM synths and propulsive techno grooves a relaxed allure. “Call In Blue” drops a vocal snippet with hypnotic aplomb; it’s as if Magazine 60’s Italo-disco classic “Don Quichotte” was redesigned for a secret dance party in one of Montreal’s underground tunnels. There’s nothing about b-side opener “Nova” that particularly signifies goth or BDSM or whatever through its chosen sounds, but when robust techno grooves are deployed at such a slow speed, they can’t help but take on sleazy and sensual qualities your average 130 BPM track does not. Been jamming this one a whole bunch around the house, so taken am I with Bunzinelli’s grooves. Can’t wait for the Neubau release!
C.I.A. Débutante Music For Small Rooms 12″ (Ever/Never)
Most bands can’t get any record out without an eight-month wait, and here’s C.I.A. Débutante releasing two of them at the same time: a new album for Siltbreeze and this 12″ EP for Ever/Never. Makes one wonder if they don’t have an insider connection to some sort of nefarious government agency! Anyway, don’t chalk that up as a complaint, as I am particularly endeared to their low-hanging murk, a mostly-guitarless rendering of post-punk that lingers in the shadows once populated by the early formations of Cabaret Voltaire, Severed Heads, Clock DVA and of course Throbbing Gristle. Synths burble like tarpits, drum machines take an egg-shaped orbit and the mild-mannered vocals of Nathan Roche are seemingly impervious to it all. Roche often sounds like a man in a suit lost in a hall of mirrors, though apparently unbothered by his psychic defeat – it’s a nice fit for these warbly synthetic backdrops. Six tracks here, all of which are excellent, but “Sinkhole” is probably my favorite, answering the question of what Suicide would’ve sounded like if they had access to acid-house in 1976.
The Dents 1979/80 LP (HoZac)
Man, how many weird punk bands did Ohio have during its first wave? A million? HoZac recently unearthed these two soundboard live sets from Cincinnati’s The Dents, a band who apparently had no records released in their day. Judging from these sets, I’m surprised they didn’t, as their jumpy new-wave punk certainly could’ve worked well with Clone, Gulcher or any given Midwestern punk label run out of a shoebox back then. The songs themselves are fine, kind of middle of the road for first-wave punk, but it’s the way they play them that really catches my ear. The Dents are clearly well rehearsed, not only in playing their songs but in rocking the crowd, a skill that I hope hasn’t fallen out of favor with our current “bedroom project that doesn’t play shows” musical environment. The lyrics are frequently meant to agitate, talking about sex and masturbation, insulting someone’s smell and working a song title like “You Burn Me Up (I’m A Cigarette)” with glee. There’s just no way this crowd isn’t sweaty, drunk and falling into each other while The Dents hold them by their shirt collars, as far as I can tell. I miss great shows, and I bet The Dents do too!
Dridge Curing LP (W.G.M.)
One thing I’ve wondered, is in this era of an apparent band-name shortage, why don’t more bands make up new words entirely? Why be the second notable hardcore band named Fury or replace a W with two Vs when you can just call yourself Dridge? It’s making me think of dirges, bridges, and dredging a river, all of which seem to fit the group’s sound either directly or abstractly. The cover’s one-eyed swamp monster (courtesy of artist Perry Shall) seems to understand this as well! And as for their sound, it’s an interesting one, borrowing plenty from the ’90s but not the same ’90s artists everyone else is borrowing from. I’m reminded of groove-heavy subversives like Helmet, Big Black and The Melvins, but it’s no direct rip. It almost seems as if Dridge took Nirvana’s Bleach as their starting point and completely moved away from any semblance of pop toward a weirder, very West Philly-sounding zone, the sort of style that is both crusty and punk but never quite crust-punk (and also vaguely black-metalish). Big kick drum, Metal Zone pedal with Crate amplification (or at least a reasonably similar sound) and evil screamed vocals that are enunciated enough to be intelligible. If Amphetamine Reptile was more interested in pursuing new bands to further the label’s legacy than endless batches of limited Melvins collectibles, Dridge would be well suited to carry their banner.
The Embarrassment Death Travels West 12″ (Last Laugh)
Last Laugh continues their series of Embarrassment reissues with Death Travels West, and I’m not mad at ’em! This band is truly great, as I’m sure many of you know, and this 12″ EP, their third and final release during their brief existence, makes me wish they stuck it out a little longer. Relaxing into mid-tempos, The Embarrassment were as wily and slick as ever, resulting in an energetic and memorable dash of proto-indie rock. Their form of talky, melodic post-punk still sounds fresh, reminding me of the very heralded Parquet Courts, another band who takes an economical approach to guitar-pop songwriting and has no shortage of grievances to air in their words. Kinda crazy to me that original copies of Death Travels West aren’t three-figure affairs just yet, but I suppose the same can be said for certain classics from Mission Of Burma and The Feelies as well, two other indie pioneers I’d feel comfortable placing The Embarrassment alongside. And this faithful, handsome reissue is cheaper still!
James Fella & Gabriella Isaac CCTK Music LP (Gilgongo)
I found myself immediately endeared to this new LP when looking at a picture of the album cover on the promo sheet, which is a cell-phone shot of someone holding up the red cover, their hand and face clearly reflected in the pic. Is it wrong that I find this blatant amateurism appealing? I want to listen to records by artists, not skilled promotional designers! Anyway, this one comes from Gilgongo head honcho James Fella alongside laptop noisemaker Gabriella Isaac, and it’s a satisfying sonic decongestant. The a-side features a real-time collaboration, with searing metallic tones, fuzzy scrapes and general harsh-noise components grazing into each other. It’s all but impossible to determine where Fella’s tapes and Isaac’s laptop begin or end, which is how I like my collaborative scalding noise baths. The b-side is a collage of six reference lacquers of the a-side, and I think I like it even more, opening with a Dilloway-esque sewer stench before wandering into a corridor of unsafe working conditions, with chlorine and bleach splashing up against tarnished scrap metal, or so the sounds would lead me to believe.
First Boy On The Moon First Boy On The Moon LP (Manic)
When Malmö, Sweden’s First Boy On The Moon sent in their debut single, I was picking up the scent of The Killers, but on their full-length debut, it’s become clear who I’m really hearing: U2! Singer/songwriter David Pedroza is giving off severe Bono vibes throughout this record, and while I realize that it’s probably a controversial position to enjoy the vocals of Bono (I personally do) and even more controversial to not mind those whose voices bear overwhelming relation to Bono, I find it to be pretty charming here. Maybe it’s the fact that this seems to be a self-released, labor-of-love sorta thing, which leads me to believe that Pedroza and company are doing this because they love it and mean it and not because they aspire to squeeze between Cage The Elephant and Maroon 5 on some robotic IHeartRadio playlist. While a few songs aim for a vague emotional bombast in league with U2 and Coldplay, they mostly dwell closer to Earth, with subdued grooves that recall Spoon or The New Pornographers. Yes, it’s all very overground underground styles, and perhaps First Boy On The Moon won’t be the First Boy On Spotify’s New Rock Playlist, but I remain happy to have heard them.
Future Kill Mind Tasters Floor Wasters LP (Big Neck)
There’s never a wrong time for mutated garage-y noise-punk, but the current atmosphere feels particularly apropos. Good thing then that Fresh Kill recently formed, hailing from Salt Lake City with a clown car’s worth of auxiliary band members scattered around. This debut is a bubbling pot of future-primitive noise, songs that slosh back and forth like barf on a school bus. The biggest reference is surely Chrome, the way in which Future Kill lock into stoner riffs and blast them to smithereens in post-production, covering everything in distortion and effects. Mind Tasters Floor Wasters has me envisioning Timmy’s Organism without the arena-rock bombast, Kilslug on acid, man and FNU Ronnies covering The Cramps, which comes further into focus upon realizing that FNU’s Jim Veil is apparently a Future Kill band member credited only with “various, fun maker”. There’s also a studded punk rocker named Kevin Neal on sax, and two different members named Jon Boi and Mikey Blackhurst who, by virtue of their band photos, appear to be the same person. Very peculiar, but in a way that is perfectly suited to this oily, trippy batch of gruesome proto-punk slogs.
Dave Graw Abandon Hope LP (Syncro System)
Years from now, if someone asks me what the general tenor of the adult-oriented musical underground was like in 2021, I could do far worse than to pass them a copy of Dave Graw’s Abandon Hope. Check it out: an album of hazy ambient tone-float and smoothly-groovy kraut-rock recorded at home in the throes of the pandemic. In a time of such terribleness as this, I can’t blame neither listener nor artist for wanting to sonically retreat into the womb a bit, to seek a calming sense of warmth that much of Abandon Hope provides, title be damned. When Graw’s friend Josh Machniak plays bass-guitar on certain tunes, I’m picking up a Spiritualized / Sonic Boom vibe – angelic rock n’ roll glory that extends for miles, whereas the lighter tracks have a delicate new-age vibe strongly redolent of the Music From Memory label. This seems to be where many talented un(der)paid musicians have set their aesthetic sights in the past couple years, and while I’m sure the expiration date on this sound is forthcoming much like it is on a pint of artisanal oatmilk, Graw’s clearly got a knack for pulsing harmonies and melancholic melodies. We’ve all gotta deal with real problems at some point, but for now I’m going to let Graw convince me that I’m actually Nicolas Jaar flying Sigur Rós’s plane high above the clouds.
Will Guthrie & James Rushford Real Real World LP (Black Truffle)
Happy to share that I discovered two great percussionists this year, Valentina Magaletti and Will Guthrie. As Guthrie blew my barn door open with his recent Electric Rag album with Jean-Luc Guionnet, I peeped his solo People Pleaser Pt. II online (and loved it too) and picked up this attractive duo outing with James Rushford while I was at it. I saw it in a physical record shop, and had almost forgotten how thrilling a random unexpected purchase in real time can be! Anyway, Real Real World is a lovely outing of free improvisation, though also my least favorite of his records I’ve heard thus far (the others are simply too sick). I suppose I enjoy it most when Guthrie is at his most unhinged, utilizing speed and intensity over caution and delicateness, and Real Real World is more of a pensive, quiet-time noise record. That said, it’s still pretty damn great – Guthrie conjures a wide range of textures and timbres, and Rushford flushes the room with quizzical sounds of a presumed live nature alongside hazy notes that drone and wheeze. At times, it sounds like they’re rolling pens and pencils across a tile floor as a nearby furnace chokes on its own smoke, but very much in an FMP sort of way, as though it’s consistently a playful non-verbal dialogue between the players. Han Bennink would surely approve. And though the majority of the album is consumed by lurking tonal drift and slow-moving sonic detritus, Guthrie fires up his kit on “Slakes” before settling back into the creeping marsh gas of “Blue-eyed Boy”. Wolf Eyes would surely approve, too!
Heavy Metal Live At The Gas Station Fighting The Devil LP (Total Punk)
Since their inception, Berlin’s Heavy Metal have come across as a punk band full of nihilist humor that refuses to allow the listener to laugh along with them. Riddled with in-jokes and delivered with insouciance – this isn’t a live record, for example – I have difficulty determining where the piss-taking starts and the sincerity ends, or if they aren’t somehow managing to be both snide and earnest at the same time. In lesser hands, it could fall apart in a meaningless pile of snark, but Heavy Metal’s abilities as a punk band make for a pretty desirable concoction. While their sound has veered all over the place in the past, from pub-rock to electro-punk to early punk to Residents-style sketch comedy, Live At The Gas Station mostly sticks to a traditional path, running through classic punk moves ala Cockney Rejects, Johnny Thunders, The Users and The Rezillos. That said, the vocals continue to walk that fine line between serious and ridiculous, and of course they’ve also included a track like “Centipede Venom (In My Eye)” which is closer to Men’s Recovery Project than anything on Raw Records (and a welcome change from the trad-sounding punk that bookend it). Sometimes the punkest thing of all is not playing punk, and sometimes the punkest thing of all is playing punk, and Heavy Metal continue to offer us both.
Hyrrokkin X Merzbow Faltered Pursuit 12″ (Sleeping Giant Glossolalia)
Merzbow is cool as hell, we all know this, but one of my favorite things about him is that he’s this decades-long legend that is also probably down to collaborate with anyone, no influential cred required. Just send him an email! I mean, no offense to experimental post-rock trio Hyrrokkin, but this band from Yellow Springs, OH isn’t an underground icon on par with Merzbow, yet here they are, violently jamming with the Japanese noise master. With the addition of Chuck Bettis (of All Scars and Meta-Matics) on “throat and electronics”, the two a-side cuts are massive and relentless, with frantic free drumming resulting in some sort of avant grindcore not unlike an arrhythmic Black Pus. I think I like “The New Economy “Seemed” Suddenly To Dissipate Overnight” best, as the instrumentation is a little more pronounced – the dizzying bassline reminds me of Sightings while the rest of the band behaves with the same heavy noise improv feel of White Suns, all while Merzbow lurks somewhere, twisting his knobs with furious mischief. Rob Mazurek blows things to smithereens on his b-side remix, a furious discombobulation of sound that calls to mind the rapid cuts and throw-it-all-into-a-blender style that Merzbow has employed throughout the years. My salutations to all parties involved!
Laughing Gear Freak Lemons LP (Heavy Machinery)
Doesn’t seem like the vinyl shortage has really hit the Australian market the same way it has here in the States, but regardless of the struggle (or lack thereof) experienced by Melbourne’s Heavy Machinery, I’m pleased they’ve shared Laughing Gear with us. They’re a new duo, featuring one guy from the underrated (and xylophone-centric) Brando’s Island, and they’ve got an aggressive dark-wave thing going on. Nothing romantic or gothic here, these electronics are moody and aggro and the vocals of Bryce Sweatman strongly remind me of Uniform’s Michael Berdan, as they share a pained exhaustion delivered with a smidge of echo and distortion. I appreciate that, in spite of their analog electronics and drum machines, Laughing Gear feel more like a gloomy punk band, as though they have more of a spiritual connection to Flux Of Pink Indians than Ceramic Hello, and perhaps help bridge that gap. Certainly similar to High-Functioning Flesh, or perhaps if DAF were mortal enemies of each other instead of best friends and/or lovers. My favorite cut is probably “In A Tank”, because Sweatman repeatedly explains that he’s in a tank and a messy guitar “solo” brings it on home.
Men & Health Heroin On Reality TV 7″ (Levande Begravd)
In the spirit of so much antagonistic punk for antagonistic punk’s sake, Copenhagen’s Men & Health open their EP with “Heroin On Reality TV”, a lunkheaded anthem that repeats the lyrics “they should give heroin to people on reality TV” over and over. File next to The Rotters’ “Sink The Whales, Buy Japanese Goods”, any given Taco Leg single and The Queers’ “Kicked Out Of The Webelos”, assuming you file your dumb n’ mean punk obscurities separately. The rest of this EP isn’t quite as directly stupid, but it comes close, with songs about getting up at noon (“Getting Up At Noon”) and cold temperatures (“Freezing Cold”), the latter of which reminds me of Folded Shirt or Knowso in its simplistic twang. As a trio comprised of two guitars, a bass guitar, and a drum machine, Men & Health’s sound splits the difference between full band and solo project… rather than sounding like one guy in his bedroom, this sounds like three guys crammed into a bedroom, which is cool. And by cool I of course mean stupid.
Moritz Van Oswald Trio Dissent (Chapter 1-10) 2xLP (Modern Recordings)
Quick recap: I loved the first Moritz Von Oswald Trio album for its graceful and understated live-action dub-techno, thought the second was cool if mostly more of the same, and kind of fell off paying attention until I heard that Laurel Halo joined the trio for this new one. Halo’s Dust is sincerely one of my favorite electronic albums of the last decade, so her mixing it up with the German techno maestro Moritz Von Oswald was something I had to hear. Unfortunately, Dissent has come up short as far as my personal hopes and expectations are concerned. It certainly fits the default MVO3 mode – feathery electro/jazz/dub fusion – but there’s very little to grab onto here. Were I to hear this album playing in a leather-seated sushi restaurant in a downtown metropolitan area, I’d tear into my edamame with pleasure, but that’s because this album feels more like sonic wallpaper befitting an overpriced restaurant last remodeled in the late ’90s than forward-thinking transmissions from the upper vanguard of modern electronic music. I’m sure Halo was simply following Von Oswald’s lead here, but each of their discographies has literally hours of groundbreaking and essential music; this one comes in low on the list.
Quarantine Agony LP (Damage United)
I still can’t get over the fact that the band Quarantine started in late 2019, and somehow played their first show like a week before Covid officially hit. What did they know and when did they know it?? I’m not much for conspiracy theories but when it comes to this band, I’m pretty sure the truth is out there. And while I’m asking questions, how did they get to be this killer so quickly, and during a global pandemic no less? I guess it’s clear that this isn’t the members of Quarantine’s first rodeo (they feature personnel from Chain Rank, Twerps and Bad Side with the almighty Chris Ulsh on skins), but I’ll be damned if this isn’t the most potent and devastating hunk of ‘core these guys have ever produced. Reminds me of early Corrosion Of Conformity, The Boston Strangler, Poison Idea and The FU’s with a vocalist reminiscent of John Brannon circa-now on vocals (which are somehow, paradoxically, intelligible). Absolutely pummeling drums (not that you’d expect anything less from Ulsh) with bloodthirsty vocals and songs that constantly threaten to boil over into chaos, like a snarling Rottweiler on a leather leash that’s about to rip. They verge on manic Scandi-crust d-beat at times but pretty much always sound like an American hardcore band, ie. clearly a band who has never experienced universal health care and never will. All this and they use a live band photo on the cover, a classic practice that more bands should opt for instead of skulls (though there are also twenty-five skulls on the cover, proving that Quarantine really is a hardcore band that has it all).
Emily Robb How To Moonwalk LP (Petty Bunco)
Next time I see Emily Robb on the street somewhere, I’m gonna subtly check out her fingertips to see if they’re as burnt-to-a-crisp as the music of her solo debut How To Moonwalk has led me to believe. This record is one fuzzed-out lava slide of guitar, sounding as if my stereo isn’t merely replicating what came out of her amps but rather is trapped deep inside them. No vocals here, no additional instrumentation (beyond a couple layered guitar tracks here and there and the occasional percussive thud), just free-range guitar jamming to and fro. It certainly has a sound ripe for Petty Bunco’s picking, a pre-colonoscopy cleanse of classic hard rock riffage and soloing delivered without irony or consideration of sensitive ears. I’d file it next to fellow Petty Bunco family member King Blood, as well as Tetuzi Akiyama’s essential Don’t Forget To Boogie, though Robb seems more interested in Chuck Berry and Greg Ginn than ZZ Top (not that the leap between those three is prohibitively wide). Bill Nace helped record and mix the album, and while he’s not the type to lay down too many riffs, Robb seems to share his interest in sustained anti-harmonies and the use of guitars as primitive weaponry. Next time I need a guitar assassin, I know who to hire!
Schizos Come Back With A Warrant 7″ (Sweet Time)
Opening with a burp, the new EP from Nashville’s Schizos features a Lynyrd Skynyrd parody cover and includes a poster that advertises the band on a pack of cigarettes, which comes pretty close to summing up their general demeanor. As for the music, this ain’t no classic Southern rock – Schizos play garage-punk with the fury and aggression of hardcore. I’m strongly reminded of Easy Action, or perhaps New Bombs Turks if they were ever recorded in a basement with their tails on fire. If singer Dale Schizo doesn’t choke himself out while rolling around on the filthy floor at least once per show, I want my money back. Pretty solid stuff, if not necessarily revealing a unique distinction within Schizos – there have surely been hundreds if not thousands of bands of sweaty men screaming into drunken punk rock oblivion before, during and presumably after Schizos’ existence, and I’m not certain that they have developed their own signature within the field. That said, if you want to see a band chase the pop-country hopefuls off their barstools and out of a Nashville saloon within the first song, I can think of no better choice than Schizos.
Soursob Soursob 12″ (HoZac)
Grouchy and rigid, this Scottish post-punk band is not the sort of thing I’d normally equate with the HoZac aesthetic, but who can resist such a style? Alongside semi-recent bands like Good Throb, Sniffany & The Nits, Scrap Brain and surely dozens more, the UK knows how to deliver dour and simplistic post-punk, bands that sound like it’s their first time ever being in a band (and all the better for it). Soursob certainly fit the MO as well, with bile-spat vocals, struggling drums and slow-paced punk riffs. At times, I find that their energy dips pretty low; as a listener, it’s contagious, and I wonder if they might’ve benefited from a more aggressive playing style, or at least some sense of urgency. That said, some of these songs are amusing in what must be a mean-spirited way… the chorus of “Shoegaze” goes “shoegaze is not a joke, this is serious” and the chorus of “Berlin” goes “this is not Berlin”, delivered as if they’re reading some lame band’s Facebook comments back in their face. How can you not love that? Sadly there isn’t a lyric sheet, so I’ll just have to listen closely to see if the less-than-favorable parts of this review ever make it into a song, spat back at me too.
Steve Summers Generation Loss 2xLP (L.I.E.S.)
There’s a longstanding quality to the music of Steve Summers (aka Jason Letkiewicz) that I appreciate in particular: he’s been pursuing the same general aesthetic for so many years now that a track from 2011 can sound as fresh or distinctive as something from 2021. The same can be said about another American techno fave of mine, Beau Wanzer, who records with Letkiewicz as Mutant Beat Dance, because these guys aren’t ones to sit idly by and not collaborate. But anyway, Generation Loss is his first album as Steve Summers, and its tracks span various years, not that I could pick up on that by listening. Rather, this is all expert lo-fi (but not too lo-fi) Chicago house music, analog hardware pumping out grooves that provide universal dance-floor satisfaction with crispy hi-hats, rugged kicks and squirrely leads. If you listen to enough techno and house, you can learn to differentiate what it sounds like when someone is making their first few dance tracks, and when they are making their ten-thousandth, and the cuts picked for Generation Loss are clearly the latter. These dozen tracks were surely plucked from a larger selection, the cream of Summers’ crop from X number of years cranking out these unfadeable hardware-guided bangers.
Urin Afekt 7″ (Iron Lung)
“Completely fucking mental raw D-beat” is Iron Lung’s description of Urin’s second EP, and while the bar for completely fucking mental raw D-beat has been set incredibly high by Horrendous 3D earlier this year, Berlin’s Urin are no slouches either! Essentially what they do is take the practice of songwriting out of the equation; hell they practically remove guitar riffs from the equation as well, leaving only a wild caterwauling echo chamber of noise, distortion and feedback. The drums dutifully stick to the D-beat script, but otherwise things fly off the handle quickly, much to my delight. Opener “Uwaga” sets the stage nicely with a messy hardcore-punk song that replaces what would normally be a guitar solo with what sounds like a riding mower run through a Kaoss Pad. Why even try to sound like you’re playing tuned string instruments when the purpose of your band is to replicate the eventual nuclear fallout society is screaming towards? It’s very much Lebenden Toten in that nature, though not quite as otherworldly (or as unabashedly trebly)… tweaked as Afekt may be, no punk worth their salt would deny Urin their props.
Sasha Vinogradova & Alina Anufrienko Oko LP (Hidden Harmony)
Starting to feel like I’m surrounded by experimental-ambient field-recording albums these days, and I can’t tell if The Algorithm has simply figured me out to a T, or if there simply aren’t as many intriguing records of other styles being physically released, or if I’m simply acclimating to my newfound state as an old codger. Whatever the case, I’m not mad at all the weirdly palliative electronic music that’s coming out, even if the import price-tags continue to make my eyes pop out of my head. So anyway, let’s get to Oko from electronic musician and vocalist Sasha Vinogradova and cellist Alina Anufrienko. It’s lovely, kind of dreary yet soothing… there’s a Constellation Records vibe in the way that it sounds like old abandoned factories merging back into nature once again, but with a distinctly Russian bent (okay, it’s the Russian vocals that give it that). Tracks take their time, and are generally more musically-inclined than much of the “soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t exist” music that comes from similarly-minded artists. Makes me want to find a patch of bright green moss tucked away in some frost-covered Soviet hinterland, take off my boots and rest my bones for a spell.
Why Bother? A Year Of Mutations LP (Feel It)
One cool aspect of many of the original Killed By Death-comped bands is the various dart-on-a-map towns they lived in… I’m thinking of random municipalities and townships that barely had electronic traffic lights, let alone punk shows. It follows suit then that decades later, Why Bother? share a similar punk aesthetic (wonky synths, lobotomized vocals, vaguely trashy sci-fi themes) and a similar unheralded locale of Mason City, Iowa. I love picturing these outcasts wandering past endless acres of farmland, carrying their snare drum and practice amps to play a “show” booked by their friend with the biggest barn. Of course, it’s quite possible Why Bother? don’t wear the neon-green leather jackets and ostentatious sunglasses I’m envisioning, but these songs certainly invoke images of anti-social pariahs who have no choice but to wish death on their enemies through punk rock songs. I’m reminded of The Spits and The Child Molesters in particular, though there’s an undeniable Midwestern quality at play here close to Dow Jones & The Industrials, The Gizmos and basically any band that ever called themselves The Rejects (or The Rejektx) or The Defects (or The D-Feks) and lived at least twelve hours from any given beach. Truly classic stuff, too classic to ever go out of (or in) fashion. Why Bother? wear it well!
Had a recent realization that I need more fresh electronic dance music in my life… been feeling malnourished in that department. Good thing there’s Anz then, coming through with this highly satisfying two-track EP. “Unravel In The Designated Zone” is the a-side, and it’s the hit for sure, a smooth-yet-bouncy cut that you’ll want to call back immediately. Try to imagine if Drexciya were from the West Coast and linked up with Too $hort’s Dangerous Crew in a heady beat-making session – I swear this cut sounds as fabulous as the hypothetical I just laid out. When that leading synth hook hits, it feel as good as a swished three-pointer, and it hits frequently! Reminds me a bit of those Silkie 12″s I loved like ten years ago too, back when he was trying to call his genre of music “purple”, a move I still support. “Morphing Into Brighter” is the flip, and it blends funky drum breaks with a supple 808 kick, an intrepid mix of ’90s rave and ’90s electro updated and rebooted for our immediate future. Good driving music, and excellent dancing music, though I can’t imagine any situation that wouldn’t be enhanced by the inclusion of “Unravel”‘s impeccable synth-work. A+ for Anz!
There are two things I love, record covers with pictures of people underwater (from Nevermind to Batteaux’s self-titled album) and new-agey techno bliss, and this new record on Stroom offers both. Apparently Sofie Birch and Johan Carøe had a significant pile of Moog and Roland equipment at their disposal during a residency at Sweden’s Andersabo last summer, and they made good use of it with these cozy and inviting tracks. Much of it shares the warmly-melancholy feeling I’d associate with the Giegling label, but Repair Techniques mostly avoids beats; it has the feel of techno without any sort of powerful kick or rhythmic propulsion. This of course allows their swooping chords, chiming leads and soft ambient drones to flutter and expand in all directions, like rich drops of watercolor paint on cotton paper. Interestingly, instruments like cello, pump organ, clarinet and chimes are also credited, but even at its most acoustic Repair Techniques resembles ambient electronic music more than anything organic in nature. Like much of the Stroom catalog, many of these sounds could successfully soundtrack early ’90s Lifetime movies, but it never feels like a throwback so much as a tastefully modern interpretation of emotionally-poignant instrumental mood setting. The most hygge record of the month, no doubt!
How many sound artists does it take to tweak big wooshing noises out of a synth? The answer here is “three” apparently, care of this new 12″ on Sydney, Australia’s Hospital Hill label. With the accompanying text from Julian Day, Very Fast & Very Far can feel more like someone’s post-grad thesis than a 12″ single meant for public enjoyment, but I suppose there’s always going to be a sanitized whiff of academia on records like this. Which is to say, this is a record of little more than widescreen synth drones, which come in a variety of shapes and colors. It can sound like Thanos clutching the Infinity Stones for the first time, or air leaking out of a punctured tire, or the Northern Lights if they could speak; very much in the spirit of twentieth-century electronic composers and the GRM. Kinda crazy to think that major labels once funded this sort of heady electronic sound exploration, which is now about as well-funded as meme research. There will forever be an interest in pushing high-powered synths to their highest heights and lowest lows, however, and though I cannot account for specifically whose thumbs and forefingers did the majority of the knob twiddling recorded here, Bruniges, Day and McGuigan offer another fine glimpse into the limitless electronic void.
I recently read a comment from C/Site head honcho Stefan Christensen that he took great inspiration from Twisted Village, specifically the way in which the label fostered a local scene while peppering in some international communiques as well. Twisted Village looked to New Zealand on occasion, with artists like A Handful Of Dust and The Garbage And The Flowers, and now C/Site has its own inscrutable New Zealand lo-fi unit with Claypipe. I hadn’t heard of them before, but like any home-recording duo from that charming island, they have a handful of cassettes, CD-rs and lathes under their belts, delivered sporadically and without the slightest hint of professional aspirations. Sky Wells certainly sounds how you might expect it to sound after reading all that: acoustic guitars playing nothing in particular; the airy hiss of the rooms that these songs were recorded in; an inexplicable piercing tone that wanders in for a full song; murmured vocals that border on useless. Maybe I haven’t been in the right mood whenever I’ve put this one on, but rather than being charmed by the sound of errant strings being stretched while the motor of a car recedes down the block, I find myself kind of listless and wondering why the spark of magic that makes Maxine Funke or Gate so special is lacking in what I’m hearing from Claypipe. Maybe you just have to be really, really into hermetic New Zealand DIY pastoral noise-folk to fully appreciate this one, whereas I’m not quite on that evangelical level. 
Cold Cave has shifted its shape throughout the years, though always firmly ensconced in black leather, opaque sunglasses and a shadowy heart. Now with Fate In Seven Lessons, it seems bandleader Wes Eisold has entered the domesticated-and-in-love phase of his life, and following so many years of beautiful despondence and poetic misery, it’s a shift that suits Cold Cave well! What better time for a goth king to be happy than the most depressing era most of us have ever known. These songs are poppy and befitting the cover’s alluring bouquet, with dark synths lines bouncing in the glaring spirit of Depeche Mode and New Order (see “Night Light” and of course the cover art) and bass-guitar recalling a cowboy-hatted Sisters Of Mercy lost in the desert on their way to Vegas. Very classically goth stuff here, far removed from the cold-wave noise of Cold Cave’s early years and pretty distant from the bombastic maximalist emo-goth of Cherish The Light Years, which the group recently performed in its entirety. These songs seem to be written for goth fest headlining slots, to be one of the few traditional synth-pop goth bands to get their name in a decent-sized font that didn’t release their first record before 1990. Who better than Cold Cave?
Curious name, Deck In The Pit, but it makes sense (in a way) once you learn that it was a short-lived project from one of Brisbane’s most interesting punks, Glen Schenau. Apparently Deck In The Pit came about after Per Purpose but before his current solo career, and it certainly fits right in, a power-trio of angular circuitry, guitar skronk and early no-wave moves. I’m reminded of artists as distant as Captain Beefheart and DNA and as close as The Pink Noise, the way in which these songs cycle through their wonky riffs… they roll onward, but with the curvature of an egg or a football. Lotta twang on the guitar, as is Schenau’s consistent style, and he rants and raves at seemingly random intervals over these songs, as if Television were panicking inside a stalled elevator. On paper, it’s right up my alley, and in practice I like it even better, as Deck In The Pit are excessively charming for a musical style that generally clears at least some substantial portion of the audience out of the room. Will there be a more satisfying post-punk ten-inch to be released this year?
“Reliable” might not be the trait most post-punk bands look to achieve, but I’ll be damned if that doesn’t suit Melbourne’s Exek. Four albums in six years, all solid, all sticking to the same basic template with just enough wiggle room to keep things interesting. If you’re not familiar, their sound is a narcoleptic sort of dub-centric post-punk. No agitation, no angularity, but rather a devotion to deep melodic bass and hazy guitars and a drum set that sounds soaking wet, so precise is its reverb-laden recording. Still reminds me of that great first Anika album, though at this point Exek have earned the right to claim this sound as their own. For such a simple execution, things move around nicely here, with melodies and progressions that defy standard one-two one-two post-punk without feeling pretentious or overly complicated… the band has clearly grown into, rather than grown out of, their established aesthetic. Which is why the extended dual guitar leads of “The Plot” work so well in a musical context that would generally find itself unwelcoming to such musical feats.
Seems like everybody loves Honey Radar, a band I should spend more time with myself, and now I’ve learned that there’s also Fake Nudes, featuring Armen Knox of Honey Radar (and Nina Scotto of another Philly indie band, Queen Of Jeans). Much like Honey Radar’s scattered discography of small runs and limited editions, this 7″ is one of those Chunklet lathe cuts limited to a scant fifty copies, but MP3s are free and everywhere, so it’s not like you can’t hear it if you really want to. Anyway, about Fake Nudes: they’ve got a low-budget, pop-centric garage sound, reminding me of the recording quality of the first Purling Hiss records and the songwriting of the studio-recorded Purling Hiss albums. Or maybe Dinosaur Jr. as translated through one of those static-laced live Velvet Underground bootlegs that populate the finer Philadelphia record shops? Post Cinnamon World sounds kind of anonymous, or at least lots of bands are doing this same sort of thing in probably a very similar block radius even, but that doesn’t mean the unkempt guitar soloing of “Better Billy Joel” doesn’t bring a smile to my face whenever I hear it. If they don’t have a tape on Petty Bunco by the end of next spring I’ll eat my hat!
New San Franciscan duo Flowertown named their vinyl debut Time Trials, but don’t expect any speedy strum or structural brevity from these two. If anything, this record seems to go as slowly as possible; it’s easy to picture Flowertown as two kids who intentionally walked the mile in gym class, unconcerned with obtaining the Presidential Fitness award. (Am I dating myself here? Does gym class still exist?) They consist of a member of Cindy (Karina Gill) and a member of Tony Jay (Mike Ramos) and Flowertown exists along that same musical spectrum, though perhaps quieter, softer and more intimate. At times, I’m reminded of the earliest Dum Dum Girls bedroom recordings, Floating Di Morel, Crystal Stilts with tears in their eyes, Sandra Bell through a boombox down the hall or any other roundabout way of describing this understated brand of lo-fi Velvets-inspired primitive jangle-pop. This music feels precarious and lightweight, as if the slightest change in the wind’s direction could knock over their amps and send Flowertown home for the day. It might be a little too soft in that regard for my finnicky tastes, particularly as they seem to favor mood and aesthetic over more traditional pop attributes (audible lyrics, earworm hooks or melodies, etc.), but there seems to be a big audience these days for lonely-in-the-city-on-a-rainy-day DIY indie-pop such as this and I’m certain that Flowertown will find it.
I love grindcore, but I’ve shied away from much of the current generation – the kids have kind of gotten too good at it, which dampens my experience listening to it, you know? All those pro ‘tudes and Olympic feats of musical dexterity can kill the heart and soul, if you ask me. After that Insect Warfare album dropped in 2007, it almost felt like there was nowhere else for grindcore to go, so righteous and extreme was that album. I hadn’t heard Full Of Hell before, a band I understand that plays big metal festivals and whose t-shirts sell really well, two qualities I don’t look for in my grind. But I’m checking them out now, and I dunno, for as precise and overloaded as these songs are, there’s really no denying the powerful and wretched sounds they’ve got going on here. I’m imagining modern Pig Destroyer collaborating with Sickness or Bloodyminded, as Full Of Hell twist from pummeling metallic grind to impenetrable walls of junk-noise with ease. They’re far from the first act to meld grind and noise, but they mix the styles expertly, allowing the songs to blast with the furious technicality of Devourment while the noise interludes gargle blacktop and defecate broken glass with the quality and craftsmanship of The Rita. Even though a slickness persists in spite of all the harsh and heavy sonics, I don’t find myself minding it… either I’m loosening up, or Full Of Hell are too sick to deny.
No, not Jeff, wiseguy! This Goldblum is comprised of Michiel Klein of Lewsberg and Marijn Verbiesen (aka Red Brut), so if you’re thinking this might be an oddly-catchy form of experimental sound-collage, you hit the nail on the head! It’s certainly got me smiling, as this vinyl debut is often charming, occasionally harsh and always entertaining. Most tracks comprise of some sort of loop, and “A Face Appeared” might be my favorite of those, sporting a heat-warped soft-rock loop ala early Daughn Gibson. A few tracks later, “Fata Morgana” moves from wheezing harmonicas to full-on tape destruction not unlike the master Aaron Dilloway, and that’s followed by another richly down-pitched loop, the self-explanatory “Alpha & The Omega”. Of Feathers And Bones shares partial sonic fingerprints with artists like Neutral, Dirty Beaches, O$VMV$M, Severed Heads, Monokultur and Glands Of External Secretion, which is the sort of fantasy playlist that might finally lure me to Spotify if I knew they were offering it over there. Goldblum have graced us with another twisted exploration of old music made new and new noise that sounds old, and it’s a stellar specimen at that. 
Hot post-punk alert! Or perhaps extremely cold post-punk alert is more appropriate, as I can practically see my breath indoors while spinning Gotou’s debut. They’re a trio from Sapporo, Japan, and their sound is both very cool and very cold, but not because of any aesthetically goth signaling so much as the tone, shape and delivery of their songs. Bass usually grounds any rock group, but here’s it’s often the only thing you can hang onto, which works well through their bluntly hypnotic melodies, often little more than a short slide up or down the neck. The drums are rigid and sinewy, the guitar scrapes like a skeleton’s hand across a window, and the vocals are appropriately disaffected and urgent – sung mostly in their native Japanese, I may not understand a word but I certainly feel what they’re trying to communicate. The label references Mania D and Malaria! as bearers of similar sounds, and while I agree with that assessment, I’m also reminded of The Xx (it’s that spacial distance between guitar and bass used to create the groove) and the early ’80s Japanese no-wave / experimental punk scene. Gotou certainly would’ve fit in amongst RNA Organism, Mad Tea Party and Salariedman Club on the Awa 沫 Foam compilation, which is not to say that they sound like a retro act so much as that their spindly post-punk sounds as fresh today as those luminary post-punk artists still do. Great stuff!
Yikes! That was my first reaction to the opening moments of Electric Rag by improvisers Jean-Luc Guionnet and Will Guthrie, and incredibly, that sentiment has sustained itself throughout the entirety of this record. This is absolutely magnificent percussion/noise improv, a scalding bath of atonal abrasion and rhythmic dexterity. I truly love it! I’m reminded at times of Aufgehoben’s use of jazzy time signatures deployed via in-the-red explosions, Sightings playing at Orthrelm speed, or Bill Nace if he were attempting to claw his way out of a psychotic grid. Guthrie is the “drummer” and he locks into dazzling patterns of raw and cantankerous percussion, what sounds like crusty bells and shopping carts ramming into each other more than any traditional trap kit. Guionnet plays organs, electronics and saxophone, which is incredible since it often sounds like Hijokaidan’s guitars or walkie-talkie transmissions from the inside of a jet engine. For as harsh and intense as these tracks are, they’re equally as intricate and fascinating and distinctive. An easy year-end top-tenner for me, no doubt about it.
Gonna air my pet peeve on this one first: I have had it with records that are completely devoid of information on the cover! White-label dubplates aside, if you’re printing a cover, do you just expect it to never be sold in an actual physical record store when you neglect to legibly share the band name, album name, label name or literally anything at all on the cover? I blame Ulla for being the most popular underground artist committing this crime today. Anyway, this one comes from Iris, a project of presumably European origin that I know nothing about, but as far as the music is concerned, it’s a deeply satisfying trip. This group (or person?) goes in a deeply bent, organic krautrock improv mode and the resulting series of tracks are tickling my eardrums nicely. I’m hearing plenty of Mike Cooper’s exotica-ambient (there are a variety of acoustic-sounding guitars here), the freak-folk outer-zone of artists like Jackie O Motherfucker and No Neck Blues Band, and the most uncommercial Conny Plank endeavors (there are enough weird synthetic bubbles popping to conjure images of Moebius and Plank giggling behind a massive mixing board). Can-like rhythms pop up from time to time as well, though I feel like, for better or worse, Speah answers the question of “what if there was an instrumental Animal Collective record that was really really good?”. I’m simply full of gripes, yet Speah continues to choogle my blues away.
It’s a striking image on the cover of Celestial Blues: King Woman bandleader Kristina Esfandiari alone in a black void with long fetish gloves, a lit cigarette and bloody wounds from the presumed removal of her angel wings. If you told me in 2001 that this was a new rival character to be introduced in the next season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, I would believe you, which I dig! However, that sort of over-the-top camp doesn’t extend to the music of Celestial Blues, which sticks pretty close to the understood intersection of doom-metal and shoegaze. Picture Metallica’s “The Unforgiven” as performed by Asunder, coat it in the brooding emotional murk of heavy shoegaze and voila. It’s a trusty aesthetic with lots of eager fans, no doubt. The personality of the cover shot offers a splash of colorful camp to what is otherwise kind of a monotonous sound, no matter if the band is rolling through an aggressive denouement or slowly strumming an acoustic guitar as the smoke clears – the mood remains static throughout. If it seemed like King Woman truly believed vampires and angels and demogorgons existed, and they wrote their music accordingly, I’d probably find myself fully committed, but for now they’re just alright.
Y’all like stoner rock? If so, I can’t imagine you’ll have any problems with J. Lansdowne’s debut; in fact, I think you might find it to be a suitable trip through the storied land of weed smoke and blues riffs. This is highly simplistic and highly satisfying music, strongly reminiscent of Nebula’s slower material, Purling Hiss at their most Black Sabbath-on-Vertigo sounding, and Flower Travellin’ Band lying down on the couch. Lansdowne and pals (he’s got a drummer and an occasional second guitarist as he handles guitar, bass and vocals) laid this one down on a Tascam 388 and it sounds positively crispy. Each instrument thuds along with the factory grime of Crushed Butler, and the guitar solos are extended, plentiful and never too out of control… there are moments where it feels like Lansdowne may have contemplated rocketing into High Rise’s orbit but it never reaches that level of wanton speaker assault. Honestly, these riffs must’ve been played a million times by a million people by now, but I’ll be damned if they don’t sound exceptionally good, right here right now, played by little ol’ J. Lansdowne down there in Atlanta.
Seems like everyone and their mother loves Low these days, doesn’t it? I haven’t peeped these “slow-core” legends since the early ’00s or so; I was kinda turned off by the whole Christian thing (let’s face it, Low would be notably cooler as a Satanic band), but I could no longer deny the praise heaped upon them and peeped Hey What. Turns out everyone wasn’t wrong – this is a cool album! Definitely a weird one, too… the guitars are massive, and edited in such interesting and weird ways, big throbs of guitar looped or reversed or chopped up in brutalist fashion, heavy and melodic and an unusually appropriate base for Low’s gospel-esque vocal harmonizing. So much post-rock feels rote and ho-hum, but Hey What strikes me as an album that truly fits the genre tag, as Low’s music transcends genre tropes into highly original territory without the expense of becoming inscrutably experimental or unlistenable. If you played me a snippet of this album back in 2001 and told me this is what radio rock was going to sound like twenty years in the future, I would’ve believed you, as this album is both accessible and artistic, like the best possible result one might get from searching “interesting new music” on NPR.org. Totally appreciate what they’re doing, even if I can’t help but think they’d sound so much sicker if they switched out their church-like vocals for some gnarly Layne Staley impersonator instead. Maybe their next record? Maybe I am he?
A-ha! I figured out that Roadhouse is none other than Sophomore Lounge head honcho Ryan Davis, which explains why this is the second Roadhouse album on the label in as many months to cross my desk. More labels should sign record deals with themselves! Anyway, the first Roadhouse album was more of a beat-driven affair, albeit one clearly crafted in the woodshed out back, and Supernatural XS follows with even less dedication to what anyone could rightfully call “dance music”. This plays out more like a curious romp through Davis’s hearty selection of gear, moving from synthesized beats to sample-collages and straight-up freaky keyboard plinking – “Nude Descending A Fire Escape” sounds like something that’d soundtrack a crude Looney Tunes short, for instance. I prefer the tracks that seem to have taken a little more effort, as Roadhouse displays a knack for folding loops on top of each other like a tasty submarine sandwich, each layer complimenting the other. The eventual acid squiggle that appears in “Bangin’ With The Ancients”, for example, has me imagining Jamal Moss writing music for release on Load Records. Who knows what next month’s Roadhouse LP will be like!
In Spring is such a classic jazz album title, one that fits this sprightly four-song EP of Bristol’s finest avant-jazz-pop purveyors. Their 2019 debut was a sweet revelation of art-pop composition through today’s post-everything lens, and these four songs follow nicely, piano-led minimalist groves of sound. Understated looping locks “Done Before” into motion; low-temp cello and unfurling woodwinds are reminiscent of both Steve Reich and Arthur Russell without feeling out of place next to The Raincoats or fellow younger-generation Wire magazine darlings Still House Plants as well. Very talented players at work here, as clearly evidenced by the inventive piano lines, trip-hop beats and dubbed vocals of “Night Steps”, which feels like a collision of Portishead and This Heat onto a pile of pillows. It has the same dreary British feel found in Burial and Young Echo, but sunlight is bursting through these cracks, mostly in the form of Clerkin’s soft and floaty vocals. They seem to really push their music forward, experimental in the sense of “strikingly interesting new musical combinations delivered by skillful musicians” rather than “crazy weirdness for crazy weirdness’s sake”. Recommended!
In case you were wondering what the guys in Page 99 and City Of Caterpillar were up to, I’m sure some of them are craft-beer-loving dads on the couch at this point, but not all of them! Four of them comprise Richmond’s Terminal Bliss, who debut on Relapse with Brute Err/ata, sounding very much like a spastic hardcore band who knows what the hell they’re doing. It’s a frantic maelstrom of riffs, breakdowns, feedback-y interludes and throaty screams, as wild and fast-moving as Failures and Repos at their most energetic. I’d imagine there’s plenty here to be enjoyed by fans of Agoraphobic Nosebleed and Converge as well, not because Terminal Bliss particularly resemble those other groups musically (they’re definitely dirtier/punker) but because they deliver their songs in a similar fashion: the moment you think you can slap your thigh along to a hardcore gallop, they’ve dropped to a quarter-time doom dirge, and before you can fully extend your arms in riff appreciation, they crack into a three second chaotic breakdown before the song is over. Pretty cool that these guys are almost certainly in their 40s, but playing crazier hardcore than they did in their 20s. Let this be a lesson to us all – there is a path to old age in underground music that doesn’t involve buying synths!
At first, I thought the fine folks at Dirty Knobby were making up for the fact that they missed my birthday this year and sent me an original copy of the Vains 7″, a Seattle Killed By Death classic. Sadly not, but they did reissue the sucker in true-to-form fashion, a move as normalized in this era as releasing new punk records. Not a bad choice though, I’ll say that: Vains were snotty teenage punks to the max, and they deliver their frustrated delinquency with panache – if you are into local-level first-wave punk, this sole Vains single should either be on your want list or your shelf. Plus, it’s cool that guitarist/vocalist Criss Crass went on to drum for The Muffs, and dare-I-say cooler that the bassist was none other than Duff McKagan, who famously went on to play bass for The Fartz a year later. Then he apparently wrote a memoir, but how much is there to really say about The Fartz? Guess I’ll steal it from Barnes and Noble and find out… it’s what Vains would have wanted.
Perfect for the autumnal season, here comes the Ukrainian artist Dmytro Fedorenko and his Variát project. It’s kinda like dungeon-synth without the synth, if that makes sense? In place of any obvious keyboards comes bass guitar in an extremely heavyweight form, often bristling at the edges with digital distortion and speakers vibrating beyond their capacity. They’re not riffs so much as sustained brutal notes, somewhat in the school of Swans, though I’m also reminded of Leda’s avant heavy metal repetition and the rich depths of sonic sludge that Black Mayonnaise liked to trawl through. I think there’s also some sort of occult vibe happening with I Can See Everything From Here – that sure is one scary eyeball on the cover – but I’m generally kind of oblivious to the mystical dark arts or black magic or whatever. In a horror movie, I’d probably be the first one to go, that random non-believer who disappears before things barely get started. When it comes the deep ominous drift and poisonous klang of Variát, however, I’m happy to stay put for the full duration.
It’s a trip, being around for both the initial and subsequent-reissue phase of certain bands and scenes, such as this, Warmer Milk’s sprawling 2008 Soft Walks now on double LP with an attractive gatefold sleeve. Warmer Milks were an outlier among outliers, operating loosely in the noise scene but certainly not sounding like Mouthus or Double Leopards or Mammal, whose Animal Disguise label first released Soft Walks on compact disc. They were undoubtedly doing their own thing at the time, a thing that has only gotten progressively trendier since 2008, one where indie-rockers take their time through extended Americana jams with nods to The Grateful Dead and The Burrito Brothers instead of Pavement and Guided By Voices. One could easily point toward Neil Young or Will Oldham in Warmer Milks’ sound here, but unlike so many of the one-guy-in-a-cowboy-hat bands that have followed them, Warmer Milks seem to be deep in a world of their own discovery, as opposed to rehashing classic Crazy Horse moves for the appreciation of younger generations. They’ll throw a stately rock groove up against a swirly sitar experiment (or the eventual manic computer noise that arrives halfway through “The Turth” (sic)), and not because a good portion of their audience was also buying Prurient records but because that’s simply how they felt like doing it in the fertile valleys of Kentucky. 
Yup, “Z.B. Aids”… your guess is as good as mine with that! This artist has multiple other aliases, some human sounding and others clearly not, but the one thing I’ve been able to confirm is that they used to be in Minitel, a French deconstructed noise-rock group who released a 7” on Bruit Direct what seems like a lifetime ago. (I loved that record!) So chalk this one up to French synth solo-project weirdness, presumably working with one of those inscrutable live tabletop setups of tiny fancy synths, rudimentary boxes of electronics and a guitar that stays unplugged for basically the whole duration. Patterns emerge in Gestalt, but rarely in any sort of organized formula… a warbling chase-scene arpeggio might drown out a ring-tone, only to have some other warped transmission butt up to the front of the speakers, and then, what do you know, the whole thing devolves/evolves into a fairly rudimentary acid-house track, if only for a few minutes. This sort of electronics-derived techno-noise has been filling my record shelves for years now, and while I continue to enjoy it, the standouts have become fewer and further between, as things usually tend to go. I’m perfectly content listening to Z.B. Aids’s aimless, semi-psychotic experimental electronic music this very night, but I’m not certain I’ll recall it in the morning.
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