Boy Harsher Get Mean LP (Atlantic)
Their bio still reads Northampton, MA, but Boy Harsher have gone fully Los Angeles in every other way. With a fresh major label contract (they still make those?), film and television syncs all across the Hot Topic t-shirt wall from Chucky to Terrifier 2, a 2024 Coachella appearance, their own erotic-horror movie A Lonely Woman (starring Chloë Sevigny, FKA twigs and Sturgill Simpson!), and top placement on every wannabe health-goth’s playlist from Violet Chachki to Kendall Jenner, I’m a little shocked that they appear to mostly have the same faces in their new promo photos as they did two years ago – maybe they were waiting for the Atlantic check to clear before calling Dr. Paul Nassif. Whatever the case, it’s been quite a while since Boy Harsher hit us with any new actual club bangers. 2019’s Careful was more sensual atmosphere than pop functionality, and I started to wonder if they weren’t quietly transitioning from a band into a music supervisor firm / merchandising company hybrid. Get Mean sets that record straight by aiming straight for the dance-floor and delivering the goods: twelve compact, ready-to-wear cuts of mercilessly sexy, retro-’80s dark-wave. It’s what made us fall in love with them to begin with – Boy Harsher remain the best modern interpreters of “Blue Monday”, “Enjoy The Silence” and “Tainted Love” – and they remind us that they have yet to be dethroned through catchy new morsels like “Jeans”, “Tough Luck (When You Don’t Call)” and “Hard Beat”, alongside slight formulaic diversions such as “Bleed”, whose rock-bottom anguish calls to mind November Növelet, and the Daughn Gibson-esque “Pray 4 Me”. If you had any inkling to enjoy their music in the past, the designer leather gloves of Get Mean will pull you right back onto the dance floor.

The Carp Tangled Up With The Two Tailed Rat LP (Total Punk)
Leave it to the Cruelster Extended Universe to charm us with an origin story of “We started this other band when one of our bandmates was late to practice”. At least that’s my understanding of how The Carp got started, the Cruelster-related band voted Most Likely To Shave Its Head. Cruelster’s Make Them Wonder Why from last year still has me wondering why, but in the meantime Tangled Up With The Two Tailed Rat is a pleasant addition to this crew’s ever-expanding catalog. Nate Ward’s vocals stick out like they always do, though the songs are less hardcore, more poppy street-punk-inspired, suitable for filing somewhere between Vulture Rock and Taang!. If one of these guys’ bands ended up on a Give ‘Em The Boot comp, it’d be The Carp, and they’d be thrilled! Sure it’s a little silly, just like everything these guys touch, but also really good. (Being great bands also seems to be part of their joke.) The hooks have plenty of time to shine in these punchy mid-tempo rhythms – you’ll be raising fists to “Fuck Alex Karp” and skanking with your two-toned sweetie to “I Crave The City”. With the way we’re siloed out now, it seems unlikely that Tangled Up will reach many audiences beyond Total Punk’s underground bonafides, which is a shame because there’s clearly a large swath of youth (I’m talking real live teenagers) paying to see Black Flag, Circle Jerks and Dead Kennedys when they would be much better served by The Carp, whose punk rock is fully primed for rowdy, wise-assed fun.

Curbside Lambsear Put Rings On All My Fingers To Weigh Down My Hands 12″ (Scenic Route)
Convincing evidence that all the great band names haven’t already been taken! London’s Curbside Lambsear falls on the right side of twee, ready to mix it up with the rest of London’s art-minded, post-post-punk milieu. Ex-pat Austrians Magdalena McLean and Annabelle Mödlinger have been busy with their respective musical pursuits caroline and The Umlauts, but I’d love if they focused on Curbside Lambsear for a while, as the results of this initial session are compelling and cool indeed. It’s incredibly easy to enjoy this debut five-track EP, each song markedly different from the next. Opener “No Ordinary Word” is part Dry Cleaning / part Bark Psychosis, though the exquisite violin (McLean’s primary instrument) leaves me feeling like Moin just remixed Dirty Three. “Jjochstubn” swings quite slower, vocals effects-pedal-warbled like early Duster for six minutes of ash-in-the-air hypnosis. “Man The Door” is a lattice of pretty jangle, delivered within a DAW-crafted facsimile of reality. I’ll do the last two tracks too! “Avril” sounds like a measured European response to what Kim Gordon’s been up to lately, and “Uneasy” finishes with a seductive glitch and manic, out-of-nowhere drums. True to its namesake, Put Rings On All My Fingers To Weigh Down My Hands is a cozy nook, soft to the touch as it blooms beside a functional concrete form.

Matthew Dear New Drug 7″ (Salon)
Detroit tech-house wunderkind turned homesteading family man Matthew Dear has graced us with some real gems through the years. My personal favorites include the sweat-soaked techno erotica of his Audion alias (that Suckfish album!) and the sultry dance-pop of Black City (my 2010 album of the year, a designation that probably still holds true). Dear’s output in the 2020s has been scarce, however; a seven-inch for the French Salon Records label is clearly not a publicist-savvy, algorithm-grabbing maneuver, which endears me towards him even further. I got a little worried when he started dabbling with generative AI “art” a couple years ago (it seems we all have a friend like this), but fear not – this new single is an outstanding treat for those who catch notice. “New Drug” takes a Perlon-esque minimal-techno compulsion and relaxes it into a self-assured saunter. It’d be a barrel of fun as an instrumental, but Dear shines it into a future-pop gem with his uniquely weary multi-tracked vocal. Overtly digitized and compressed, Dear sounds like an old wizard trapped inside a dying GameBoy Advance, and when the astringent synth leads add a touch of melody a couple of minutes in, I’m starting to wonder if he isn’t our generation’s Martin Rev. Glorious! On the flip, “Head In The Clouds” is a gentle come down, an instrumental nu-disco loop ala The Field accessible for any engaged dance crowd. “New Drug”, though, goddamn – let’s hope this is a sign of Dear to come.

Gapeseed Lo Cell LP (Silver Girl)
On the insert’s photo montage, there it is: an illuminated marquee confirming that Gapeseed once had the honor of opening for Foreskin 500. Tell your grandkids! Below it, a different photo shows a stack of cardboard boxes with “GRAPESEED CD’s” written on them, which attentive readers will notice is not the name of the band. Such were the silly indignities of playing indie-rock in the ’90s, the era in which Manhattan’s Gapeseed bounced around. Lo Cell was originally released on the dignified compact disc format in 1994 by Silver Girl, and with the label recently reanimated, now it’s on vinyl, too. Gapeseed were clearly not a band that could be your life, but I appreciate the unheralded role of fameless, fortuneless first-wave indie-rock bands that kept used CD stores afloat with their individual spins on underground guitar music. You can tell that Gapeseed were moved by peers like Sonic Youth, Sebadoh, and The Flaming Lips, and who can blame them? Their hook-averse, experimental-dabbling nature sounds as fresh here as our current wave of like-minded artists, though the use of walkie-talkies and vibrating pagers on guitar pickups in “Watermelon Bread” was comfortingly of its time. Maybe I shouldn’t put it out into the universe that Foreskin 500 have yet to reunite following their 1997 break-up, but if they were to, can you think of a better opening act?

Intensive Care Unit Waste Fraud & Abuse EP 7″ (Active-8)
Glory be! Boston’s Intensive Care Unit finally grace us with their first widely-available slab of vinyl, following a comedy of lathe-cuts, tapes and rejected test pressings (upon rejected test pressings). This is hardcore in its purest, noblest form, as if dictated verbatim from The Book of Tony Molina. Self-released vinyl with a modest digital presence that you’ll have to seek out on your own, no multitude of deluxe “colorway” editions, no front-facing promotional videos where the band members are forced to rank their top five favorite shoegaze albums, none of this un-punk crap we’ve all passively accepted as “the way things have to be done”. Instead, ICU delivers a fourteen-song(!) seven-inch EP with Letraset fonts, a couple different folded inserts and all the requisite hockey imagery you’d want out of a Boston hardcore EP. It’s in their sound, too – ICU sounds like Negative FX covering Siege, short shocking bursts of fast-beats / blast-beats with Ban Reilly’s vocals providing the creatine to their meat-based purée. Reilly sang for Boston Strangler, of course, who were basically the Turnstile of 2012 (you know, before YouTube taught an entire generation of kids how to incorrectly mosh). Let’s hope some of those kids are paying attention to ICU instead, so that the flames of genuine, unadulterated hardcore-punk might continue to burn unabated.

Moya Moya Hol Newland LP (Permanent Residence)
Let’s not leave Perth out of the Australian indie-punk conversation, however geographically isolated it may be. I’m forever in that city’s debt for both The Victims and The Scientists (and, alright, Extortion too), and I suppose I should find some space in my heart for Moya Moya as well. They’re described as an “art-punk” band, though it would seem that their preferred artistic mediums are improv theater, comedic writing and surreal sketch comedy: you know, the nerd’s domain. Over forceful indie-pop and anxious post-punk melodies, the lead vocalist – I’m not sure if it’s guitarist Liam MacFarlane or bassist Jaydn Kempe – rants and squeals in an overly-affected tone. Seeing as many of the lyrics are delivered sarcastically, this exaggerated vocal style helps ensure there is no misinterpreting the sentiment behind “Habitat”‘s opening line, “Who gives a fuck about destruction of habitat”. It’s far from my favorite vocal delivery – this loony, vibrato-dipping characterization that falls somewhere between Jello Biafra, Vintage Crop’s Jack Cherry and (gulp) Geordie Greep – but I suppose in this era of bad faith misunderstandings, it’s wise to exercise caution when conveying your strongly-worded sentiments. I’m certain that I fall on the same side of the political fence as Moya Moya when it comes to racism (“Wacist”), the environment (“Habitat”, “…Aramup”), and class (“Holiday Home Pt. 1”), so cheers to solidarity… I’d just rather hear these clever lyrics gargled by the caustic throat of Extortion’s Rohan Harrison.

1-800-MIKEY In Yun LP (Goner / Ragnar)
Starting to worry about the youth… do they really not know how many digits are in a phone number? I guess since our “phones” are primarily synthetic dopamine replacement devices occasionally used to ignore spam calls, this societal loss was inevitable. Sydney’s Michael Barker is the one responsible for this 1-800-MIKEY alias, and I’m not gonna be too tough on him, because really, it’s not like we want PhDs writing our poppy punk rock, do we? Dee Dee Ramone could barely spell “Dee Dee” and yet we love him dearly. As a punk rocker, Barker gets most of his knuckleheaded kicks in the band Gee Tee, one of Australia’s finest egg-punk exports, but as 1-800-MIKEY we witness his softer side – Barker’s Anime cartoon rendering on the cover is apt. This is cute, chorus-driven power-pop in the modern underground style, proudly demo tape fidelity with big-swinging guitar moves and saccharine, gentle vocals. The melodic hooks are tender in a Raspberries sorta way, performed with the urgency of punk rock and bedroom-rockstar grandeur – I can picture Barker on his bed, high-kicking like David Lee Roth to an audience of stuffed animals. The feel-good, Sheer Mag-esque guitar leads are a satisfying touch, and Barker’s emerging songwriting craft is evident, though the finished product hasn’t totally drawn me into its private chatroom. There’s a good chance this particular aesthetic strain of power-pop simply isn’t meant for me, though – I’m one of those dinosaurs who prefers texting words over emojis.

7FO ひろった石が割れた LP (EM)
Dub remains a fertile and vital medium for outsider viewpoints, restricted only by the creative limits we impose upon ourselves. I thought the finest Japanese dub music I’d hear all year was Mermaid’s latest full-length, but this album from 7FO, while drastically different in sound and aesthetic, deserves strong consideration. ひろった石が割れた is my first encounter with the Osaka-based producer, and I see I have a big pile of older stuff to check out, leaving me curious to understand if this album is an outlier or if previous fans knew what they were in for. Let’s see if I can explain: 7FO’s sound spectrum is scruffy and patinated, the digital dubs of the 1980s mixed with an imagined digital dub sound of generations long past. Dusty organs wheeze and cough in half-time skanks as traditional Japanese melodies and old-timey bells and whistles spurt and fade like the sooty toots of a coal engine. It’s really great! I’d like to send you to “Madoromi (まどろみ)” in particular, a prime example of 7FO’s unique approach – I’m hearing a ghost-ship docked at Kingston Harbor with a bunch of formal-wear dignitaries slow-dancing in the faded ballroom, oblivious to the fact that they drowned a century ago. “Haunting” tends to imply spooky minor-chords and anxious fright, but 7FO’s ghosts are cordial and amused, maybe even a little inebriated. If it turns out the soaked strings and deformed bass of “Dōgubako (道具箱)” is already a signature 7FO technique, no more messing around – I’ve got to buy all five previous 7FO albums at once.

Spread Joy III LP (Feel It)
Right as we were running low, Feel It’s squeakiest post-punkers return with a third installment of joy. There’s no shortage of extremely extroverted singers on the Feel It roster, but Briana Hernandez might be the kookiest of them all. For one thing, she never shuts up, and secondly, she sings her lines like a drunken Mary Poppins, her loopy melodies rising and falling so rapidly that weak-stomached listeners may want to pop some precautionary dramamine. It’s one of those potential dealbreakers, so overpowering is her personality, but I’m here for it – why sing in a band if you want to pretend like you’re not interested in singing in a band? If you can make it through the sped-up chaos her vocals bring to the conclusion of opening cut “Abolish Chance” without flinching, I want to welcome you to the club. The boys of Spread Joy give Hernandez plenty of taut n’ funky music to wildly enunciate over, a twice-as-fast Parquet Courts raised on B-52s music videos, now well-versed in all those 99 Records classics. Spread Joy love to dance, but “Pygmalion” skips to egg-punk’s lou with the best of ’em. If the Chi Peps were forced to donate “Give It Away” to another band due to an actuarial error caused by the sale of their catalog, I know who I’m nominating…

Sun Within Sun Within 7″ (Exotic Fever)
Katy Otto should be a familiar name for anyone who ever thumbed a coffee-stained copy of HeartattaCk on a dumpstered porch-couch while waiting for the potluck vegan stew to heat up for the touring band who just arrived off a twelve-hour drive from Arkansas or Saskatchewan to perform for a basement audience of fifteen. She’s been in tons of bands across multiple decades now, and has been running the Exotic Fever for essentially as long. Otto gets to enjoy both with Sun Within, her newest trio. The trends may change but Otto’s tastes haven’t – Sun Within perform emo-grunge in an authentically late ’90s way, far from the pernicious grasp of corporate tentacles. “Luminous Events” is part Hole, part Spitboy, though they’re mature enough to realize how to temper those wildfires accordingly. I hear the same thing in “Synthesis + Realization”, and wish there was a third or fourth song to see how long they keep it up. Sun Within finally release the tension with the b-side’s backing-vocal-chanted chorus, a punk alley at the intersection of Lungfish, L7 and Major Stars. With even the smallest bands behaving like desperate commercial brands, lots of listeners are pushing back against it in search of something real and roots-oriented, so I ask, which of these ethical touring bands is going to pay Sun Within a fair wage to open a tour for them? Sun Within already know what that vegan stew tastes like… they probably even enjoy it.

Otto Taimela Cheap Ingredients LP (Cudighi)
Let this be my first encounter with Cudighi Records but not my last! There aren’t many labels as likely to release Dan Melchior and Little Wings as left-field Finnish electronica; keeping track of the few that exist seems like a suitable purpose for my quaint little life. Otto Taimela is a Finnish producer with a whole lot of production credits over the past eight years, most recently to include Cheap Ingredients. If you’re at all tapped into the Warp / Planet Mu electronic-music expanse, you’ve heard sounds like Taimela’s before, but that doesn’t make the experience of Cheap Ingredients any less pleasant. Much like Aphex Twin, Taimela engineers multi-layered beats and protects them in cushiony bass and sugar-crusted chords – imagine a sharp-edged robotic skeleton surrounded by a thick outer layer of marshmallow. There’s probably a Pokémon that looks exactly like the creature I’m imagining when Taimela’s wriggly techno constructions appear: big round booty, smiling duck-bill, adorable little T-Rex arms. Break-beats and four-on-the-floor techno thumps are equally time-tested and Taimela is no stranger to either. In “New Life”, you get a taste of both, a fluttering trance experience ready for your next Kawaii-themed rave. Can we get a Dan Melchior remix next time?

The Truffle Pigs Lanes And Lanes And Lanes LP (Docklands)
Shoutout to Glenn Donaldson’s blog for tipping me (and now us) off to this exquisite pop charmer from Al Montfort and Amy Hill (aliases Sleeper and Snake), whose names you might recall from Total Control, UV Race, Constant Mongrel, Primo!, Terry… the list continues to gloriously unfold. Here they’re linking up with Stephanie Hughes (of Dick Diver, Boomgates, et al), and as such, a comprehensive heap of top-notch Aussie underground sounds are already tucked under The Truffle Pigs’ collective belts. Where do they go from here? Why, they dial it down and pull you in close with some charming, acoustic-driven ditties. I’m reminded of those early post-punk acts who wanted to flip the ideas of their favorite ’70s folk artists into something they could call their own: Tall Dwarfs, Felt, Swell Maps and The Kiwi Animal all come to mind. Unlike many of the records that pass through these pages, though, Lanes And Lanes And Lanes doesn’t seem to aim for a specific historic era so much as it’s alive here and now. These are old, trusty tools used by wise craftspeople to express themselves in the present moment. You’ll sway to “That Can’t Be Right” and “Celine” like you do with your favorite Mojave 3 songs after you check the credits of “Wild Rose” to see if Townes Van Zandt wrote it (he did not). These three are DIY pros, whose most oddball inventions (“73339”) compliment their most refined (“Insane Pics”). Thirty-six bucks for Australian shipping is never pleasant, but in situations like these, I don’t see any other reasonable choice.

The Tubs Hard Life LP (Merge)
This fantastic Welsh quartet makes a hard life sound easy… downright seductive, in fact! Hard Life is The Tubs’ third full-length (and first for big American indie Merge), and if they aren’t feeling smugly proud of themselves for delivering such an eye-wateringly beautiful album, that just shows what a class act they are. If you aren’t already a fan, this is the perfect time to get on board, as The Tubs have never sounded better, equal parts The Jam, The Housemartins and The Gin Blossoms. Frontman Owen Williams continues to wield one of the most distinctive voices in modern indie-rock, forthright and vulnerable and capable of twisting a single syllable into a melismatic heart-punch. Williams has also mastered the ability to sound extremely happy and sad at the same time, and he uses that skill to devastating effect on the first five songs here, an impeccable run of Northern soon-to-be classics. If you ever wished you could dance and sing along to the Friends theme without tarnishing your social reputation, I offer you “Stoop To Me”; “Who’s Gonna Love You Now?” is the song that Cameron Crowe could base the entirety of a modern Singles reboot around. (The boy works at Cafe Oto, the girl works at Rough Trade… can their budding romance survive??) And did I mention there’s pitch-perfect use of Chris Haigh’s fiddle throughout? Whatever your current ailment, I’m certain that Hard Life is the appropriate remedy.

Xanny Stars Take Shape 7″ (Just Because)
Roughly one year after their debut EP, Cleveland’s Xanny Stars offer up four more grunged-out pop-punk noogies. I’m kind of starting to like the fact that most record shops don’t acknowledge the existence of new seven-inches, or have a reasonable place to put them – at least ones that aren’t accidentally-ordered Record Store Day rubbish – as the format itself is quietly reverting to a true underground status. As it should be! It sucks that they’re no longer five bucks postage-paid, but the same could be said for literally any other physical commodity (I say it on a daily basis in fact), and if you’re going to splurge on a vinyl record, why not go for the DIY appeal of Xanny Stars? They nail that regional pop-punk sweet spot, ready to light up the local VFW hall after loitering the hell out of a Speedway parking lot. Much like their debut EP, I’m hearing similarities to Jobber, Screeching Weasel and The Muffs, albeit on an unsigned scale. By the time “See Right Through” hits, I find myself transported to a suburban supermarket loading dock, wearing a Big Drill Car t-shirt and a Sinkhole hoodie, drinking a gallon of Rosenberger’s iced tea while attempting to land a solitary kickflip. Xanny Stars didn’t intend to send me into a nostalgic seizure, but what’s the harm in putting a smile on a sad old man’s face, one last time?

The presence of R5 Productions is so solidly baked into Philadelphia’s underground music scene at this point that it becomes easy to take for granted. The company’s independent spirit has offered a guidebook for other local promoters looking to make cool things happen, where a passion for artists they’re excited about and a pursuit of legitimately cool events trumps corporate synergy, profit maximization and show-goer discomfort / resentment. They purposely booked the once-feuding Oxes and Arab On Radar on the same bill just to see what happened (if I remember correctly, not much), and they’re probably the reason why I’m shocked when I’m at a venue in some other city and discover that the security team are dicks and there’s no vegan ice cream (or casual BYOB brown-bagging).

R5 built its rep booking shows in a Unitarian church basement (against all odds, still going strong!), and that zeal for unconventional show spaces has led them to the Harrison Auditorium, a hundred year-old circular stone auditorium on UPenn’s campus. They gazed upward into its elegant coffered dome and thought, “We should get Bill Nace and Grouper in here” – it happened earlier this month! But first, R5 treated us to hotly-tipped Danish singer/composer ML Buch and eternally-fried North American outfit Excepter on one of this summer’s many flood-watch evenings.

As we filed in from the spitting rain, it was clear that this was an ML Buch crowd. Walking through ticketing check-in (punks scribbling Sharpies on wrists), there was a secondary, lengthier line of people in the foyer. It took me a second to realize it was simply the ML Buch merch queue, no shortage of fans eager to settle up their purchases prior to the performance. I can’t claim to understand how musicians get popular anymore – like all manners of mid 2020s existence, it has to be algorithmically-assisted, though I’ve come to believe that things can still unfold organically (or at least not nefariously). I know that when I first stumbled onto Suntub from some semi-old fashioned way (reading about music online), the appeal was instantaneous. ML Buch’s music speaks as much to wildly talented rock / folk enchantresses of the ’70s as the digitally-pristine isolation chambers of today, and the crowd bore this out: some elders who spent their young-adulthoods prancing in a pre-internet landscape were peppered in among a majority of twenty-somethings with fresh stick-n-pokes and bachelor’s of arts.

Regardless of demographic and prior experience, we were all treated to a rare appearance from Excepter, one of the more inscrutable (and longest-lasting) groups from the outer orbit of Animal Collective’s original social network. Back when Fusetron was the best experimental / noise / avant-garde email distro around (I guess twenty-plus years ago?), Excepter’s records were deeply idiosyncratic and plentiful. I can’t think of any bands who were making sun-warped, narco-dub space-jams in the same register prior to Excepter’s arrival, but I can certainly think of a few who came after. Their run of activity was hectic in the ’00s and petered out by the middle of the next decade, though records like Debt Dept. and Sunbomber defy time’s constrictions entirely. Maybe they came out in 2006, or 2036? Now streamlined to the core (and wedded) duo of John Fell Ryan and Lala Harrison Ryan, they bore the lackadaisical confidence of weirdo-synth vets. With Fell Ryan accessorized like Hunter S. Thompson’s stunt-double and Harrison Ryan distributing flowers across the stage’s edge, they moseyed into the first of three lengthy tracks. The two Ryans built neon pyramids of synths, the building blocks of single-note bass throbs, stereo-skittering cymbal-sounds and melodic leads falling into place like Tetris at beginner speed. They sounded great (and loud!), working a Moog and a Prophet (my gear specs sadly stop there) like Call Back The Giants on a tropical cruise. Taking turns, Fell Ryan babbled into an old-timey announcer microphone and Harrison Ryan sang like she could see the ghosts in the room; each of their deliveries enhanced the pleasant trance-like state I found myself in. I saw more people taking pics of the venue’s ceiling than of Excepter, which makes sense when you understand that the audience’s eyes were closed for most of their set (third eye excluded).

Right at 9:00 PM came ML Buch, in a Ms. Frizzle skirt and a David Byrne jacket. As is the case with her studio recordings, Buch would be performing all of the music herself. A hush quickly fell over the crowd, common when a large audience is excitedly anticipating something for the first time (this being Buch’s first Philadelphia performance). Within the first couple minutes, she flubbed a guitar line and said “Shit, I have to start over” into the mic, a charming emotional icebreaker. (I was reminded of another R5 show more than twenty years ago: Mark Kozelek in the Unitarian Church sanctuary, who used his angelic voice to ask, “Can you turn the lights down? I have all these zits and shit on my face”, long before I had any reason to suspect he was a creep.) With no new music to promote, Buch ran through a number of highlights from Suntub and Skinned: “Pan Over The Hill”, “Working It Out”, “Can’t Get Over You With You” and “I’m A Girl You Can Hold IRL”.

Buch was simply fantastic. I was amazed at the crystal clarity of her voice, unmuffled by the limitations of a typical PA system in a large stone room. Is this what Joni Mitchell was like at her peak? As is now typical (and perhaps still a bit unsettling for us old-timers), Buch’s music was frequently pre-programmed, sometimes in minor part and sometimes almost entirely, to include guitars, keys, programmed drums and melodic leads. I have no qualms here – it makes sense in many logistical ways – but it reinforces how truly remarkable it was the first time James Blake rolled through town (2011 – another R5 production of course), performing his electronic music live with Rob McAndrews on guitar and electronics and the astonishing Ben Assiter on MIDI drums. Maybe, like Blake, Buch’s transition from indie-electronic darling to major-label deal with financial tour support isn’t far off. Her guitar-playing was a thrill to witness in person as well, so fluid and expressive and casually dazzling. Her riffs are brooding yet conversational; imagine if Jerry Cantrell released an album of solo guitar compositions for the ECM label in 1992 at the height of his creative powers.

I can’t believe I’m about to call a forty-minute set “brief”, but that’s certainly how it felt when she announced her last song. Following a standing ovation from the seated crowd, she graced us with a one-song encore, took a few more bows and smiled with the sincerity of someone who truly had a wonderful time playing music for a full, hot crowd on a humid summer evening. If she was happy, we were downright ecstatic.