Zoh Amba Eyes Full LP (Matador)
Zoh Amba has built up an impressive resumé as an out saxophonist, but Eyes Full is a hard turn down the dirt road of rockin’ Americana. Why not? Their vocals on Jim White’s “I Don’t Do / Grand Central” were a highlight of my 2025, and while Eyes Full is far more straightforward singer-songwriter fare, it showcases Amba’s rambunctious style nicely, passionate bordering on volatile. On the acoustic guitar tracks, Amba channels Bob Dylan in an Appalachian setting, picking and strumming with callus-building abandon; if we needed someone to flip the dreaded stomp-clap whoa-oh into music worth listening to, I’d nominate Amba for the job. It’s not all campfire rollicking, though – they dip into slackerish indie-rock befitting the Matador seal of approval as well, plugging into some road-worn cabs with the boys. “Dead End Street” (which, like many of the songs here, features Jim White on drums) certainly exists within Pavement’s universe, “Odd Jobs” behaves like Sheryl Crow on dollar Coors night and “Thousand Years” could’ve found a comfortable home on any of Mudhoney’s last few albums. I’ll concede that electric/acoustic rock music isn’t the trickiest sound to find one’s way into, but Amba is naturally, immediately comfortable on Eyes Full, their jeans worn down ragged over time, not factory distressed. I’d love it if Matador could finagle this into a full-scale genre exchange program – we might finally get the spiritual jazz album that’s been lurking under Kurt Vile’s MF Doom trucker cap all these years.

Anadol & Marie Klock Manivelles LP (Pingipung)
The connection between Istanbul’s Anadol and Holving, France’s Marie Klock continues to bear fruit. Weird-ass fruit, mind you: think of a pawpaw, something that looks like a pear, tastes like a banana and scratches like a mango on your tongue. Their initial collaborative release from 2024 delighted in its made-up world of oddball retro-pop, and Manivelles moves onward in delirious good nature, as pleasantries have been established and their friendship has solidified. Anadol is still on the control board, swirling together Turkish pop, French chanson and German krautrock with ease, kooky joy and unfiltered cigarettes. I’d love to see all of her keyboards and synths, because the sounds they conjure are uncommonly vintage, recalling anything from the original Nintendo Entertainment System, Switched On Bach, Stereolab and Klaus Schulze, often at the same time. I continue to resent my linguistic failures, as I really wanted to know what Klock is on about here – the title translates in English to “Cranks”, a funny self-dig in line with Klock’s brazen playfulness. Lucky for me, English translations appear on the inner-sleeve (and accompanying Bandcamp page), and I’m not disappointed. “Rentrer à la Maison”, for example, describes familial neurosis from the feminine perspective with a chorus of “whenever you go home / you start off with great intentions / and then shove ’em up your ass / nice and deep, nice and deep”. Now that’s a universal language I’m sure many readers can share: the annoyance in dealing with well-meaning yet clueless parents.

Container & Will Guthrie FERN 10″ (Cave12)
With safety in mind, I put on my coveralls and oversized goggles prior to spinning this new collaborative EP from American noise-techno juggernaut Container and Australian percussive polymath Will Guthrie. Neither of them are known for stepping lightly – while their typical sonic modes differ, the sense of being vigorously shaken by the collar comes part and parcel with their respective bodies of work. Of course, neither are beholden to satisfying preconceived expectations either, as FERN is textural, nuanced and playful, not the full-throttle squash for which I was prepared. Opener “Murky” lives up to its title, with Guthrie running through an array of percussive elements over a notably placid buzz from Container’s box of tricks. “Sifting” is a quick splash of Container’s Fort Thunder influence, replete with intercom-squawk voice and emergency buzzer, whereas the second shortest track, “Maybe”, paints layer upon layer of drum-roll cacophony like a Sissy Spacek seven-inch. “Tablecloth” is the rightful centerpiece, and closest to what I expected from these two: after a purposely slow start, Container builds a restless groove and Guthrie cooks it to a crisp, reminiscent of Mindflayer but also just, well, better. I don’t want to say that the zero-dynamics wall-of-sound is beneath them at this point – routine sonic enemas are good for one’s health – but Container and Guthrie have too many ideas, and too many tools with which to realize them, to take such an easy route.

Crown Flash Crown Flash LP (Union Editions)
Union Editions takes a modern approach towards being an underground, avant-garde record-label. Rather than simply release records, the label exists through a variety mediums: records and tapes, sure, but also apparel, posters, patches, books (both art and written publications), silkscreens, football scarves… I can only assume perfumes and tinned crudité are in the works. It’s a cool approach, building out their own aesthetic community through limited-run physical objects, and one of the label’s latest offerings is the debut album from Crown Flash. The duo of Filippo Brancadoro and Francesco de Figueiredo have pursued the fringes of noise, psych and experimental music separately since the pre-Covid age (remember Heroin In Tahiti?), and as Crown Flash they offer a suite of stylish, gallery-ready electronics, keyed up to troll any narrow-minded audience. Their music is techno-informed but experimental in nature – any chance of a straightforward beat is lovingly tweaked and prodded into forms too antagonistic or abstracted for dance crowds. “Trauma Plot” is a good example: a cool break-beat dominates, though they can’t help but manipulate it into twists and overlay bizarre vocal manipulations. It’s mildly sinister in a way that shows a reverence for the IDM forms they are manipulating and distorting, somewhere between Aphex Twin, Amnesia Scanner and Vanity Productions. In Crown Flash’s hands, no ambient passage is safe from harsh disturbances, no sleek runway groove free from the possibility of being abruptly ripped off-grid.

Devon Rexi Meets John T. Gast Breathstep LP (Accidental Meetings)
John T. Gast has been like three steps ahead for years now, even if those steps often lead to strange, enigmatic places few people will ever aspire to wander. You just never know what the guy is going to do, only that it will be worth hearing, and this new collaborative album with equally inscrutable (though lesser-known) Dutch trio Devon Rexi is case in point. Breathstep combines richly international AutoTune vocals with early dubstep beats – a selection of alternate musical histories aligning towards a hazy future. I’m going to assume Devon Rexi are actually doing the Farsi vocals themselves, though I’m not ready to rule out the possibility that they simply swiped some of them from secret YouTube channels and pirate radio stations on the opposite end of the globe, and it often sounds like Coki remixing early ’00s Damian Marley tracks with the voices and musical signatures of electro-shaabi. Lots of clean dub sounds and dirty effects, with the sense that MIDI sampler keyboards small enough to fit into backpacks are the primary culprits. It reminds me of the adventurousness I’d find on labels like Bokeh Versions and Heat Crimes, cryptic and fascinating music that doesn’t offer an obvious way in – you have to run your fingers across the ornate hardwood door until you find the little notch that clicks open to the secret chamber beyond. “2furious (Liberate Mix)” is a great way to start your search: a dark-sided dub with jammed frequencies and wet-echo vocals wedged in every open gap.

Feeble Little Horse Bitknot LP (Saddle Creek)
When Feeble Little Horse cancelled their big summer tour in support of their 2023 Saddle Creek debut, I felt their pain without bearing direct witness to it. For as long as I’ve been around, there’s never been a harder time to be a cool young band in America than right now (nepo babies and private-school millionaires excluded); Feeble Little Horse’s Bitknot, poppy as it may be, flashes those warning signs of fatigue, frustration and malady. It’s also inventive, charismatic and catchy as hell, and while I need to go back to their first two to make sure, I’m gonna go wild and say that this is their finest yet. As with prior efforts, they continue to scrappily re-imagine poppy emo indie (ie. Horsegirl, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Wednesday, etc.) through a post-100 Gecs, post-Sophie digital frame of reference. They’re a real band, and they take their real guitar hooks, sugary vocals and immaculate drum fills (the drums are so good!) and jam them all into a sticker-covered laptop through a frayed USB cable, digitizing and crunchifying the sound of bedroom-basement live action into something uncanny yet human. I’d probably enjoy their sound as a thrown-together mess, but it’s evident that Feeble Little Horse’s wild choices are deliberate, simply because there’s no way they’d end up with this captivating, smoothed-out-slappy sound by sheer luck. If your head isn’t bobbing and swaying to the tweaky hooks of “Poison” and “Dior”, I’m going to assume you’re wearing a neck brace – let’s hope you heal up in time for their substantial tour schedule this July and October.

God’s Hand Police Lorry / Wind-Up Toys 7″ (Hard Art / Illiterati)
Cover art of the month goes to God’s Hand, delivering some sort of heavy-leather furry police fetish that I didn’t know existed (and I’m not just saying that to misdirect you from the heavy-leather furry police outfits in my closet). The photo is credited to “BULLCOP 54″… do I dare google? On second thought I think I’ll leave them be, and while I wish Sargeant Bulldog Officer was in the band, I’m content to imagine him singing “Police Lorry”, a fine slab of British street-punk from Iowa City (where else?). It’s melodic and un-intimidating in a UK Subs sorta way, perhaps akin to Pork Dukes if they stopped trying to be so crude for two seconds. “Wind-Up Toys” isn’t too far off, sounding like The Dickies or The Ruts or something aspiring to them, first-wave Chuck Berry-inspired punk that makes its way to a fun shout-along chorus, something to rev up the boot-boys in the back of the pub. It’s certainly more straightforwardly punk than God’s Hand’s debut EP (also reviewed in these pages), and while it doesn’t elevate beyond the confines of the well-established form, God’s Hand still has a powerful ace up their sleeve: that damned rubber-fetish cop-dog on the cover. He’s still lurking out there somewhere, I can feel it.

It’s A Setup It’s A Setup 7″ (Two Two One Press)
With their debut EP, Spokane’s It’s A Setup throw it back to the time before things all went wrong for screamo. Their sound hearkens back to the dirty, spastic hardcore offshoot of the late ’90s, one still inherently rooted in DIY ethics, where the term “screamo” itself was a self-deprecating shorthand for hardcore that integrates emo’s quiet / loud dynamics, metal-core’s chaotic patterns and the blast-beats of grind (often with song-intro samples that sound like they were taped off the TV, also found here). Were it 1998, It’s A Setup would’ve had the same shot at making it to No Idea, Sound Pollution or Hydrahead, but most likely would’ve just released their seven-inch themselves, stuffing a manilla envelope sleeve with inserts. I’m hearing Ottawa and MK Ultra in particular in this self-titled EP, where stoner-y intros lead into frantic blasts and voice-cracking screams, all with community college production (and that’s not a diss – this EP was recorded at Spokane Falls Community College). Amazingly for the style, they aren’t old folks reliving their youth, but apparently young enough to write a song like “21+ Punk Show Is An Oxymoron”, bemoaning clubs that deny teenagers at the door. Relish these days, fellas! It’s all downhill from here!

KiMiMi ИМА LP (Calax / Conatala)
One thing that happens when I write all these record reviews is I subject myself to the threat of overexposure: take a thing that I enjoy, overload myself with way too much of it, and then notice as the dislike or resentment starts bubbling up. I feel like that’s happened to me with music in the “random field-recordings” style, either as an embellishment or central motif, but as I sit here now, batting my eyelashes with infatuation at Shinya Ohno’s KiMiMi project, I realize that a great record can cure all negativity in a heartbeat. An AI overview might explain KiMiMi as “experimental folk over a backdrop of construction field-recordings”, and while I required a mere gallon of water to type that myself (I’m a thirsty guy!), ИМА is far more beautiful than that basic description implies. The construction sounds (recorded on site at the “Arimasuton Building”, an improvised(!) building primarily of reinforced concrete) are near and dear to Ohno, having a personal relationship with its inhabitants and creators, and his music, majestically orchestrated, mirrors that gentle intimacy. The instrumentation is dazzlingly vast – melodica, ukelele, gaida, guitar, flutes, organ, xylophone, and more – and almost falls backward into the children’s ball-pit bordered by Phil Elvrum’s early work as The Microphones, the domestic strum of Tori Kudo and the avant-garde experimentation of Robert Ashley. The sounds of chatter and distant drilling help triangulate a physical space, one that KiMiMi fills with tenderness and warmth. I forget whoever originally made that “dancing about architecture” line, but I invite you to look up pictures of the Arimasuton and tell me it’s not architecture that dances to the dulcet sounds of ИМА!

K Wata Give U Space 2xLP (Short Span)
Emptiness never sounded as gorgeous as it does on K Wata’s full-length debut for Short Span, Give U Space. Short Span’s covers are consistently attractive, but I don’t think any of them have fit the music as perfectly as what we see here: an antiseptic 3D rendering of “a room” at its basest level, something I’d imagine the initial 1992 digital sketches of Doom might resemble. K Wata’s music revels in its behind-the-eyelid colorlessness, a dub techno that feels like it was vigorously disinfected before being allowed entry into the open world, yet teeming with cinematic intrigue. The beauty is that the disinfection was incomplete: there are voices, scratches, unexplained motions and swerving tension within these downtempo grooves… imagine a pond’s flat brown surface with an assortment of predators lurking below. I’m reminded in ways of Space Afrika’s murky elegance, Jan Jelinek’s cut-up clicks-in-dub and also those earliest Hyperdub EPs, the immediately pre-dubstep era when artists like Burial, Kode9 and The Space Ape knew they wanted to make melancholy electronic music that spoke to the impending social digitization and were still figuring out how. While like-minded in many ways, K Wata drafted his own template here, soft enough to fall into and disorienting enough to keep you from climbing out.

No You No You LP (VP Texi)
No You is the pairing of Davy Kehoe and Suzanne Kraft, arriving with this fully-realized album right from the jump. Davy Kehoe is responsible for introducing AutoTuned harmonica to the world on his solo debut Short Passing Game (one of 2017’s very best!), whereas Suzanne Kraft (real name Diego Herrera) left his fingerprints on all sorts of cool productions over the last few years, from chill-wave to Balearic to downtempo house and so forth – there’s even a killer Soft Rock For Hard Times single. I can sense a little nervous, first-date energy on No You, resulting in a somewhat conservative display of the duo’s talents. No You falls closer to rock than techno, though it’s certainly not either – think more along the lines of downtempo synth-wave, electronic music that favors rock instrumentation if not its harder-edged stereotypes. Both Kehoe’s penchant for staccato krautrock rhythms and Kraft’s pastel haze are all over the record, but it kind of plays out like a testing of the waters – you can sense that the duo want to jump in with an obnoxious cannonball but decide to calmly use the ladder instead. There’s no shortage of ideas – certain songs have me remembering Blank Dogs (and their penchant for burying the vocals in ten layers of effects), others strut upright with a Pender Street Steppers vibe, and then there’s “Invisible”, a blatant My Bloody Valentine tribute that pretty much nails it, guitars swirling and percussion absent. I’m going to keep spinning it for now, and hope that this is the inception of a long and productive relationship.

Storm On Earth Storm On Earth 2 12″ (Storm On Earth)
In an excellent feature on the First Floor newsletter, René Pawlowitz AKA Shed goes into a few dozen(!) of his various aliases and explains what they signify or aim towards with regard to the music he creates under them. He describes his Storm On Earth project as “peak-time techno tools with no soul … hard drums and repetitive grooves with no bigger ideas behind it”. I was already deeply endeared to the man, but I find this coldly-stoic (and extremely German) admission of Storm On Earth’s “no soul / no bigger ideas” deeply satisfying. I know that he means it, and isn’t self-negging in hopes of praise, but the four tracks found on this new EP are masterful in their hard-charging brainlessness. “Stale II” hits like an anonymous Hard Wax purchase from any of the last three decades (this is a positive thing), and “Fish” is briny house music, ready to dislocate the wrists of any hardcore voguers trying to keep up. It’s absolutely nothing special, but as we now know, “nothing special” is admittedly by design – if you love the discrete elements of pure techno music and want to bear witness to a master building, layering, tweaking and orchestrating them, Pawlowitz takes you straight to the source as Storm On Earth.

Tara Clerkin Trio Somewhere Good LP (World Of Echo)
Like many of today’s interesting new groups, Tara Clerkin Trio don’t invent a brand-new aesthetic so much as offer an exciting combination and refinement of pre-existing styles – a few base familiarities to guides us into the new. “Curation” is kind of an ugly word, but I can’t help but hear that in the music of Tara Clerkin Trio, that this is a group of deep music heads who have the talent and good taste to mix and match a range of stylistic elements until arriving at a distinctive Tara Clerkin Trio Sound. Prior releases had established the trio’s general parameters, and Somewhere Good is now their finest effort to date. Within, you’ll find the post-jazz / math-rock fusion of late ’90s Thrill Jockey; Bristolian trip-hop; the contemporary jazz of downtown NYC; indie-pop; psychedelia; dub. These are all very good things, and Tara Clerkin Trio are so at ease with each other that a sharply-cut guitar loop, twinkling keys and fat techno bass pads flow together into charming pop song with the complementary timelessness of screaming over a blast-beat. I’m reminded of Antena and The Xx, Dido and Astrid Sonne, K Freund and Valentina Magaletti, sometimes at the same time, other times separately, mixed up so vigorously and joyously that it all turns the color of Tara Clerkin Trio. Which, betraying their deeply British origins, is so bright you’ll want to wear shades.

Timmy Vulgar / Jimbo Easter Timmy Vulgar & Jimbo Easter 7″ (Celluloid Lunch)
Detroit is full of real ones, but Timmy Vulgar and Jimbo Easter are two of its realest. (The last time I saw Timmy Vulgar, he was laughing maniacally in a parking lot about my band’s rider as we drove away… a tale for another time.) You’ll surely recognize Vulgar from his work with Human Eye and Timmy’s Organism (among countless others), whereas Easter has done time in The Piranhas and Druid Perfume (among his own wooly assortment of bands, projects and criminal charges). Their paths have naturally intertwined through the years, this most recent check-in taking place on one brain-blasted seven-inch EP. It’s free as free can be, two guys with guitars, synths and at least one functioning drum-machine swinging wildly out of orbit. Trying to make logical sense of it is a fool’s errand (and you’re hearing from one now), but from what I gather, Vulgar composed the three a-side tracks and Easter led the charge on the flip. The a-side is full of acid-soaked guitars and gook of a gobbeldy nature – it sounds like Electric Eels and Dan Melchior licking every last toad in the swamp (which, incidentally, is literally what Vulgar is singing about on one track). The six(!) b-side tracks are even less formalized, zonked-out caveman damage befitting the cover image of Vulgar and Easter as obelisk-gazing primates. They’ve already written enough formal songs to last us a lifetime – Vulgar and Easter delved deep into the primordial source here, and they didn’t even have to shine moonlight into their anuses to get there.

David Watson & Bill Nace On Bats LP (Amish)
For your newest bi-monthly Bill Nace offering, I submit this collaborative album with bagpipe player David Watson, released care of the Amish Records label. I sense that Nace is at his most energized when performing alongside someone who can match his sustained, fiery tones with a prominent level of their own, and that’s certainly the case here. Watson unleashes those familiar, soul-stirring bagpipes into incensed and dazzling new configurations and Nace wields his taishogoto as both sword and shield. With the bagpipes more or less a constant sonic presence in the air, Nace has decisions to make: does he plow straight through, carve out a serpentine detour, or remain in place while hopping on one foot? As a collaborator, Nace is a keen listener – all paths are considered, and they squeeze a whole lot of juice out of their relatively simple setup. “Wishbone” in particular lets it all hang out, with some of Nace’s fastest finger-work yet handily matched by Watson, like two sprinters who set their best times when racing each other. It’s crazy to me that there is some other band calling themselves Geese when the moniker is far more befitting the racket that Watson and Nace have conjured here, a ferocious battalion of honks, squeals and electric sighs.

It’s taking every fiber of my being to avoid starting this one off with a “TAKAAT Tuesday” joke, but it appears I’m already too late. Spring has full-on sprung, so what better way to spend a warm weekday evening than in the naturally-temperate nave of the Calvary Church in West Philadelphia? It was my first time seeing a show there, though a buddy in attendance mentioned that the last time he was there, he bore witness to the hardcore assault of Total Fury and Paint It Black. West Philadelphia is a magical place!

Appropriately elevated to podium-height were Heavenly Bodies, a trio of friendly locals who I tend to see hanging out at a variety of guitar-centric gigs more than I see assembled as Heavenly Bodies on stage. I knew from prior shows and recordings that they were going to slowly melt a block of psych-rock ice this evening, and that’s precisely what they did. Drummer Shaun Bailey embodied a patient restraint, lightly sprinkling his floor tom as Dustin Burrows looped and layered the delicate meanderings of his guitar. Dustin’s sister Ashley Burrows soon joined the conversation, plucking decisive, resonant notes from her bass, as sedate as the late-night SEPTA schedule. They built up from a sleepy din into a blustery storm, Bailey giving those crash cymbals a pounding as both Burrowses unleashed the full capacity of their instruments. It was a severely incremental process, stretched out so far that any chance of assigning “Point A” and “Point B” to the music became impossible. After the initial deluge, Bailey fell into an upbeat, neo-motorik groove, and the guitarist Burrows stepped up to sing, only for his voice to be effectively inaudible to the audience as well as the rest of his band. He glanced over to the sound-person for a little sonic first-aid, but their head was hunched over, either deeply zoned out from the soothing vibes of Heavenly Bodies or actually asleep. The minor kerfuffle drew a big wide smile out of his sister – even on stage, siblings remain siblings. When a friend casually dismissed their performance as an “anyone can do that” act of amateurish simplicity in the following intermission, I felt myself bristle internally, suddenly aware that I was on Team Heavenly Bodies all along.

Shortly thereafter, TAKAAT unraveled their dual pedal-boards on the floor directly in front of the pulpit, still warm from Heavenly Bodies. With a small container of ear plugs directly in front of their gear, a few attendees sheepishly wandered over and helped themselves in direct refutation of Keiji Haino’s “no one should wear earplugs” dictum (source: The Wire, issue 488). Was it going to be that loud? TAKAAT is essentially Mdou Moctar’s rhythm section, the pared-down duo of Ahmoudou Madassane (guitar) & Mikey Coltun (bass). Drummer Souleymane Ibrahim wasn’t in attendance, though an inconspicuous rhythm-box lurked amidst Coltun’s pedals, ready to fire off a groove.

Coltun opened with some tidal-wave-shaped bass chords, a mighty backdrop for Madassane’s introduction. From the jump, he chose to shred excessively, establishing the dominant mode of unrepentantly glorious guitar. With all the available white wall space, someone should’ve projected an AI-generated remake of that giant battle scene in 300 where the Greeks and Persians are replaced by armies of Jimi Hendrixes and Randy Holdens, if only I had thought to request it sooner. The duo bounced between drum-loop tracks and percussion-free passages of psychedelic Tuareg desert-rock, a style that even NPR has probably told you about by now. They took turns amping up the energy and lulling us back to safety – I think it’s the same general principle behind water-park wave-pool regulations where they have to turn off the wave machine every fifteen minutes. I’m certain that the promoters weren’t properly insured for the occurrence of an entirely dance-oriented setlist.

And speaking of dancing, in an interesting flip of live-music norms, the crowd that gathered beyond the immediate seated area started to dance after a couple of songs, an inverse of the mosh-pit’s typical stage-relative location. The outer-rim dance party continued to grow in strength and number as TAKAAT played on, eventually spilling out directly in front of the band for the final, thrilling number. It was heartwarming and also a little funny, watching this crowd attempt to dance in 3/4 time with any sort of groove; no fewer than two different people pointed out to me the crowd’s likeness to the classic Peanuts dance scene (as a sign of endearment rather than derision, of course). With whatever idiotic “travel ban” is currently in place in this stupid fascist scam country, we shared a collective understanding that there was no straight answer as to when Madassane might be able to return to the US after this tour, or if he’d even feel compelled to do so under the increasingly extenuating circumstances. The preciousness of the moment was not lost on this appreciative crowd, as I weaved past the sizable line to the merch table on my way out.