Australia-born, Brooklyn-residing noise artist Charmaine Lee has committed to a three-month tour wherein she performs in all fifty of these United States before returning home. It’s surely an achievement as arduous as it is glorious, and oddly enough, one that was also completed by Boston hardcore group Haywire earlier this year, whose Philadelphia show I also witnessed back in July. Perhaps they should’ve made the trek together? Lee decided to inaugurate her tour on a Monday evening in Philadelphia, hosted by Partners & Son, an underground comics / comix shop that has been a lynchpin of Philly’s hand-drawn / hand-printed scenes. No sooner had I forked over my ten bucks did the gracious host fill my hand with an ice-cold seltzer (Acme brand), and like the other show-goers, I thumbed through the various art-books, riso prints, graphic novels and periodicals while waiting for the music to commence.
Frances Cordie was the perfect person to open the show, as she is not only a practicing musician but a cartoonist as well, whose thick graphic novel On A Cute One is hoisting up my to-read pile (and for sale at Partners & Son). Seated in front of a large keyboard, laptop angled within clicking range, she opened with a richly-filtered set of arpeggios, a harshly kaleidoscopic rendering that had me thinking of Fennesz’s Endless Summer were it performed in real-time on a single synth. Across segments that casually stretched out, Cordie’s lush chords hit like pastel-colored boxing gloves, reminiscent of that debut Molly Raben album that recently came out, or Colleen’s great A Flame, A Frequency. I’ve yet to hear any of Cordie’s recordings, but I can say that if her music were captured through a creaky old intercom system, it would be ripe for a Discreet Music release; if produced in a fancy studio, Editions Mego might be interested. Her final piece was different from the rest, some sort of chipmunk simulacrum of a ’90s R&B torch song. There were drums, and chords, and even vocals, all processed through what sounded like a thousand sheets of multi-colored cellophane. I don’t care if it turns out it was all pre-recorded and Cordie simply clicked the play button – I’d love to hear more of that.
Up next was another local performer, the ever-busy Anne Ishii. I first heard of the writer / program director / translator / musician because of a performance she did back in 2023, also at Partners & Son, that involved something like her aggressively narrating hentai over harsh noise? I’m probably remembering some detail of that wrong (and I sadly wasn’t even there to witness), but it’s the sort of gossip of which I make a mental note. As I had walked by but unfortunately missed yet another of her performances a few blocks away the prior weekend, I was excited to finally catch her in action. For this evening, she sat with her back to the audience, facing a guitar laid flat on an amp. For the next twenty minutes or so, she persistently tapped her guitar with drumsticks and mallets, the pitter-patter rolls of her sticks being the main audible component. There was a soft and constant groaning from the guitar, which somehow didn’t seem to alter much with her hits. Her performance was quiet enough that the opening of a beer can back near the entrance was disruptive, but Ishii was completely in the zone – after maybe five minutes or so of tumbling, playful rolls, she locked in to a simple drummer-boy roll on the guitar, never breaking momentum, only shifting in intensity. One of those pieces that gets better the longer you’re stuck in it, the shock of Ishii’s neon-yellow bob stared us down until she softly reduced her drum-roll to zero, paused, and switched off the amp. I kept thinking how great it would’ve been if when she finally turned around, she revealed Wes Borland-style face-paint and colored contact lenses (maybe a facial prosthetic too?), but I’m not here to tell anyone how to do their job. With no music or art to peddle, Ishii was selling homemade kimchi, with the profits going to the South Philly Food Not Bombs. We are lucky to have her among us.
Thus we are ready for the final act of the evening, Charmaine Lee. With her tour also acting as an informal introduction to the record label she’s debuting alongside producer Randall Dunn, Kŏu Records, she pointed out that Partners & Son was an ideal location, as Kŏu is proceeding with a mission that also centers visual artists, and in fact, two of the four inaugural releases feature the work of Philadelphian artists. With the artists contributing both front cover art and artist portraits on the back, it’s a theme I look forward to following.
The room was certainly on Lee’s side as she provided us with that brief introduction, although she didn’t need any goodwill to immediately suck us into her peculiar world of sound. With essentially no breaks in forward motion, she jumped into a vibrant and virtuosic performance of the mouth. Raspberries, ASMR clicks and pops, jump scares, jabbering, blathering, cooing and sighing… if the human mouth was capable of creating the sound, there’s a good chance it was in there somewhere, Lee ripping through it like an Olympic athlete. Phil Minton and Jaap Blonk are obvious forebears (and, I suppose, John Moschitta Jr. too – you know, the guy from the Micro Machines commercials), but I see no basis for filing away Lee as a tradition-keeping student of the craft – her moves were too vibrant, too inspired and dazzling. With the use of a mixing board and a contact mic taped to her throat, her voice was frequently manipulated in real time, resulting in distorted volleys, swept-out caverns of sound and high-speed, on-the-fly remixes. You’d probably assume that a voice-based noise performer would feature plenty of screaming, but amazingly, Lee pretty much never screamed at all, a power-move in avoiding any obvious or rote concepts of “experimental” sound. About halfway through, she started integrating a handheld black box, shaped like a small drinking flask. It clearly had some sort of microphone component, as Lee managed to really whip up a wild storm of confusing sound with it. It looked like a mass-produced piece of equipment, but what was it, and what else could it be used for, if not Lee’s chaotic vocal improvisations? I still don’t know. I had plenty of time to ponder this as a late-arriver posted up directly in front of my seated view for the last five minutes or so, swaying out an enthusiastic noise-dance as it is meant to be done – in a shifting time signature only understood by the dancer themselves.
After the set, Lee and Dunn sold LPs and t-shirts to the eager show-goers, myself included. I couldn’t help but take notice of how perfectly coiffed their hair was, freshly washed, dyed, combed and styled (and in Dunn’s case, pomaded), and wonder what they’re gonna look like after their final, 65th show of the tour, set to wrap on November 16th. Will Lee’s throat survive this epic test? Will they evade bloodthirsty polar bears in Alaska, and the deadly Portuguese Man O’ War in Hawaii? Or perhaps most perplexingly… will they be responsible for the first cool show in the history of Newark, Delaware???
David Bales is a guitarist, and he’s offering up some solo guitar compositions the proper way: on a self-financed, self-released vinyl album with a picture of trees on the cover. The album is sub-titled Meditations, Rituals, Dances, And Love Songs, though I get the feeling that the various intentions of these songs are personal to Bales in a way the rest of us won’t understand. (Still, I wouldn’t mind watching him dance a little.) In proud private-press fashion, Bales provides a detailed explanation as to the where, why and how of his music on the back cover. He wrote and recorded these pieces following a health scare, a universal human misfortune that inspired no fewer than thirteen different tunings in his music. Acoustic and electric guitars were used, both handpicked in a post-Fahey fashion. I’m picking up more wintry ECM vibes than autumnal Folkways vibes – it’s those high strings that Bales lingers in, melodies that I’d imagine would rank high on the Spotify Wrapped of crows in snowy fields. Some tracks are more enchanting than others – “Before I Became You” is appealing in its beckoning sadness – but the full album should allow you the time to brew one incredibly robust cup of tea and consume it. I’m not suggesting you opt for some pre-packaged Twinings, though – I’m talking various pieces of bark, hand-ground spices and dried leaves solemnly mulled to leave a dark brown ring inside your mug. 
The relationship between The Bug and Relapse Records is my own personal Travis Kelce / Taylor Swift affair. What do you think The Bug and Relapse talk about when they’re out together?? Does Relapse just smile and nod when The Bug talks about dancehall sound-system culture? Does The Bug suffer in quiet resentment when Relapse insists on playing Red Fang in the car? Whatever the case, they’ve been working together for a while now, resulting in some of the ugliest bass music around (last year’s Machines I-V boxset is straight-up gobsmacking), speaker cones going screwface as The Bug pushes his sound to its physical limits. This new EP is another imposing statement, with choice guest vocals in typical Bug fashion. “Bury Dem” features Logan over a slow-motion chug so heavy as to imply goriness, a real crime-scene of a beat with Logan haranguing as heartless mob-boss. “Deep In A Mud” refuses to be upstaged, with Magugu spitting over a beat so prehistoric, murky and pressurized that only one of those horrifying hydrothermal-vent microorganisms could possibly survive within it – “Deep In A Mud” indeed. Both tracks are paired with their dub versions for added disorientation, to the point where the lack of an obvious warning label aimed toward those experiencing pregnancy or heart conditions seems like a legal liability Relapse should’ve considered. They need to book The Bug at the next Beer & Metal fest though, if only to have a sea of craft IPAs exploding in unison in the hands of a few hundred tattooed beardo metalheads. No refunds!
Philadelphia’s ragingest aesthetes return for their third album, continuing the creative tear they’ve been on since their inception. You don’t normally get a rock quartet where each member is deeply committed to their specific craft, and that’s okay – maybe even for the best, in a lot of cases – but it’s a real thrill to encounter the work that Carnivorous Bells put in, from the creepily telepathic rhythmic interplay and David Vassalotti’s striking guitar lines to not only the words and yowls of Matthew Adis but the distinct touch of his artwork as well. These are continued themes since Carnivorous Bells first arrived, but on Beacons In Limbo the band engages further with turmoil, unease and opacity, stretching songs out like ghosts departing corpses. In that way, they’ve shifted ever so slightly further from their hardcore-punk backgrounds towards a poisonous form of art-rock in league with Sun City Girls at their operational peak (Torch Of The Mystics and Dawn Of The Devi, let’s say), though there are no traces of sarcasm or tomfoolery here. Vassalotti’s playing in particular is adventurous and inspired, often conjuring images of Omar Khorshid and East Bay Ray dueling at moonlight. Like the rest of the band, he relies on his own melodic ingenuity to make it pop – there really aren’t many / any unusual effects happening here, as if they could plug into anyone’s borrowed gear and still sound the same. Adis, traditionally (and elsewhere still) a hardcore vocalist, continues to be pushed by his bandmates to re-imagine what it means to scream and shout. There’s occasional double-tracked spoken-word, certain staccato phrases that have me thinking of Cedric Bixler circa In/Casino/Out, and my personal favorite moment, when he shape-shifts into a bloodstained vulture on “Unsaid” through the line “surface does not protest the ailing tide”. It’s grisly, but I can’t look away!
Across four EPs, Guy Alexander Brewer’s Carrier project has made an impact on whatever you wanna call the post-techno scene, where the reverberations of established styles (minimal techno, industrial, dubstep, noise, glitch, jungle) are chased out of their comfort zones. Carrier is a hard beast to classify, which is not only fun for music dorks who love to classify things (present company excluded… I hope?), it’s exciting as hell to listen to. This new EP on Modern Love’s ambitious seven-inch single series is another winner. “The Fan Dance” is the first Carrier track to link up a vocal, this one coming from Gavsborg of the mighty Equiknoxx. Over an electric twitch and a single reverberant bass string, Gavsborg repeats “I’m sexy when I’m mad, I’m sexy when I’m moody” with deadpan intonation, and by the time you realize you can probably shake your ass to it, the beat drops and it sounds like someone urinating in a metal bucket. Might be Carrier’s finest work yet! The b-side is an instrumental dub, and kind of unnecessary considering I can’t imagine a situation where I wouldn’t want to hear Gavsborg’s sensational vocal, though it does offer a chance to reflect further upon Carrier’s meticulous sound design, a dancehall beat stripped down to its ligaments, as frightening yet beautiful as a shark giving birth. 
Late February, 1992: Nirvana’s Nevermind has been out for six months, quickly ushering hair-metal into an adult-living facility and introducing moshing and Flipper to every teenage child in America… and Cheater Slicks are out there playing CBGB’s to a small assemblage of downtown NYC dirtbags on a Friday night. They were a relatively new band at the time, yet their trashy garage-rock denizens were already too hardened and jaded to care about Nirvana or Winger or anything that wasn’t the cigarette in their hand. In that way, Cheater Slicks have embodied independent rock n’ roll for as long as Sub Pop has existed, unwavering in their burning-wire-scented garage-punk through to the present day. The fidelity of their studio recordings often matches the quality of a hand-held recording, so in that way it makes sense that there is such an abundance of live Cheater Slicks material available. I count three live albums already out there, and it seems that Almost Ready and Morbid Web have something like three or four more in the pipeline (including this one), treating Cheater Slicks like the garage-rock Grateful Dead, which maybe they kinda are. It’s a noble pursuit, and I’m having fun spinning Live At CBGB’s, as the guitars are particularly spirited, ripped and torn in a manner on par with Steve Turner and Larissa Stolarchuk, both of whom surely had at least one chance Cheater Slicks encounter in their days. Maybe I’ll meet them someday before I pass on, too – seems pretty clear that Cheater Slicks will outlive us all at this point.
If we’re looking at Instagram handles as official confirmation, it would seem that Cruelster (AKA “Creulster”) are the musical focus of the Cleveland gentlemen who also comprise Perverts Again (and separately play in all sorts of other acts, like The Hell, The Carp, Piss Me Off and Knowso). They’ve been trying to make us wonder why for a few years now, and have finally memorialized it with their first official full-length since 2018 (back when Lumpy Records was still in business). For those of us cool enough to eagerly anticipate Make Them Wonder Why, our patience is rewarded with a wealth of material to enjoy. That’s sonically and visually, as the album packs in twenty-one tracks and comes with a squint-worthy lyric sheet and four-panel color poster, plus a thick OBI strip and an atlas(?) that I haven’t seen in person (but am willing to trade big for). They’ve always been a fun punk band, willing to play the fool for the sake of a good joke, though the funniest joke of all is that Cruelster is actually better at hardcore than the majority of brown-haired white-men playing it in the US today. There’s a lot to love here, including what is far and away the best song this group of friends has ever written, “Jerks” – the main riff is the perfect amount of complicated, like a Negative Approach graduate study, but the chorus busts into this enormous smiley Dropkick Murphys-styled shout-along that no one could’ve seen coming. There’s a great music video for it (which I recommend watching more than once), and there are various other Murphys-isms throughout Make Them Wonder Why for their entertainment as well as ours. Mercifully, they put the disgruntled-straight-man freestyle-rap YouTube clip at the very end of the record – they clearly aimed to punish us with that one, and mission accomplished, guys. 
Someone more prestigious than myself needs to chart the musical history of Jordan Darby in rigorous detail, as his discography is full of entertaining twists and turns. Even though he willingly disregards any form of spotlight, he’s due. His ’00s hardcore band Dry Rot insisted on doing things their own way no matter if no one else understood, and while I’ll save the rest of the historical account for the aforementioned non-existent prestigious biographer, we are now blessed with two new solo offerings on his Hissing Objects label. I’ll highlight Dangerous & Holy Memories In The Very Theater Of Salvation, as it’s the more approachable of the two, a tender, acoustic-driven singer-songwriter record with a rich melodic complexity and appropriately ponderous lyrical themes. While by no means a precise sonic equivalency, I’ll bring up the names Robbie Basho, Richard Bishop and Jeremy Enigk here, three other American-original guitarists who arrived in editions of one. Darby’s playing reveals a comparable knack for mastering the guitar with his own specific intents, and his lyrics are direct while reaching for the profound, a plainsong delivery of ecstatic religious fervor. Be forewarned: you might end up believing in God, or even loving him (err, excuse me, “Him”), if you listen on repeat. Darby’s other album, Follow Me Up, has the superior cover art, but exhibits entirely different behavior with tweaked n’ layered guitar noodling to spring the most outré of Systematics recordings reworked for a Glands Of External Secretion jamboree to my mind. And wait, both albums are apparently free, you just have to write him and ask for copies? I’m telling you, Sasha Frere-Jones and Jim Ruland and Jessica Hopper, this biography is going to blow minds.
Philadelphia’s finest (phinest?) purveyors of leather-jacket pop-punk do one thing, and they do it so well that you’ll never want them to learn a second thing. Highway To The End is Dark Thoughts’ fourth full-length and the second to graphically reduce a classic Ramones album cover, which is surely no coincidence considering their sound. Guitarist / vocalist Jim Shomo enunciates like a proud Joey Ramone acolyte, mushmouthing his vowels to perfection (check out how he says the word “mirror” in “Bubble’s Gonna Burst”, for example). You could easily look to Green Day’s “Burnout” as another cornerstone of Dark Thoughts’ aesthetic, which is great news for fans of excellent punk rock, particularly as the time of decrying Green Day’s sellout status has long since passed. The upbeat melodic bop of “Sparkling Water” recalls The Queers’ at the peak of their pop-punk powers, and I hope that the lack of obscure references clues you in to how easily-beloved the music of Dark Thoughts is, no matter what stage of your personal punk-rock journey you’re on. Dark Thoughts aren’t dead, millionaires or cop-supporters, though – they’re actual punks writing about their own crumbling world and giving you plenty of reason to pogo about it, with hooks that take longer to dissipate than the weed in your system that’s bound to show up on your employment-mandated drug test next week. Go ahead, get fired for being an idiot! Dark Thoughts have been there too. 
Are there any hardcore-punk labels left out there who haven’t put out a metal record by now? It’s the forbidden fruit, this fantasy land of flame-engulfed skeleton-monsters, long hair and pointy Jackson guitars, that punks find increasingly irresistible for some reason – maybe real-life has gotten too heavy? So here’s SPHC delivering the full-length debut from Finnish hessians Dart, which arrives with an iron-on band-logo patch in a showing of a band that understands its audience. They play an increasingly-typical form of Venom / Hellhammer-derived speed-metal, though to Dart’s credit, they play it a hair or two faster than mostly everyone else, and with the occasional Boston-esque organ flourish. File it next to Total Hell, Witchtrial and a bunch of others whose names I’ve promptly forgotten. In an effort to not be a total hater, let me make it clear that this form of music is as glorious and righteous as a fast-break slam-dunk, it’s just that I am finding diminishing home-listening returns from many of its newer practitioners, who seem more comfortable upholding the standard traditions than breaking out into anything fresh and inspiring. That recent Manat LP was cool in how ugly and possessed it sounds, and while more of a hard-rock affair, I could listen to my Hällas records on repeat, for example! And if I find myself Oulu, Finland on a wintry night, I’d hope that Dart would let me into the humble tavern they are rocking to hell, though I understand if I’ve just blown my chance. 
Seattle’s Lysol are no more – the group now goes by the name of Fan Club. I don’t know the specific details behind the switch, though it feels safe to say that punks are ill-equipped to skirmish with Big Air Freshener and its many corporate tendrils. Regardless of moniker, this group ripped it up when I saw them in their hometown last year, and this new EP is a fierce consolidation of their manic punk rock sound, five songs that Tokyo Drift on by. The riff technique and recording fidelity both veer towards the garage side of the spectrum, though Fan Club do the right thing by playing these songs way too fast. It’s like they’re going at it with the same intensity as their Olympia neighbors Physique, a physical crasher-crust approach applied to a songwriting sensibility in league with The Saints and Dead Boys. That gives the proceedings an accidental first-wave-hardcore vibe akin to Middle Class’s Out Of Vogue, but tighter and more streamlined and less teenaged overall. That said, the singer of this band also walloped someone in the crowd with a mic stand during their first song and continued to complain about the audience’s lack of physical response through their set’s duration, so don’t expect any pleasantries or proper manners from this crew. Had I been standing in the wrong place, it could’ve easily been my skull that was thumped. 
This, the sixth(?) full-length from unkillable Florida garage-punk troop Gino & The Goons, offers an intimate look at the group’s gear on the cover, featuring an indoor-sunglasses-wearing Gino standing proud in a shirt that appears to have been swiped from the victim of a fatal stabbing. This group always kinda felt like the nameless dirtbags that Charles Bronson would waste in a pool-hall halfway through one of his Death Wishes, bringing that sort of low-level scum energy that fits the group’s primal garage-punk well. Even if one of The Goons decided to snitch, they’re still about five layers below anyone with any actual responsibility in the criminal organization. As you can tell, I could fantasize about these guys for quite some time – their Stooges riffing, combined with mid-tempo and unschooled drumming, makes any sort of cold alcoholic beverage slightly more meaningful, even if it’s a (clearly right-wing) can of Surfside. I have a penchant for rock songs about guitars, and will happily add “My Guitar Almost Killed Me” to the running playlist that exists only in my head. As an album, not necessarily essential, but as a cultural aesthetic, integral to my personal well-being. 
London DJ / producer Hannah Holland clearly had a tremendous time with Last Exit On Bethnal, the resulting soundtrack for Lydia Garnett’s film of the same name. Both were crafted as “unapologetically for dykes”, bursting with dark and sensual visions of a mythic nightlife where the sleaze has no limit and the border between pleasure and pain dissolves. Holland approached the task with some appropriately hard-hitting electro, full of sex-club bass-lines, John Carpenter-esque tension, propulsive mid-tempo rhythms and the requisite sampled whips / chains / laughter. The Dominatrix doesn’t sleep tonight, she hangs out in a back alley revving her motorbike (which runs on the spilled blood of her male adversaries). As is common for a soundtrack, these tracks feel aesthetically unified but offer different emotional qualities – I haven’t seen the film, but I can picture “Coming Up” sequenced against a moment of conflict or chaos. Even that paranoid track can’t help but evolve into a throbbing groove of its own, as Holland clearly respects the mission with Garnett to honor underground queer cinema with music that refuses to be sanitized or edited to fit the mainstream gaze. It’s almost a shame that Bandcamp doesn’t request age-verification – you should only be able to access this album by walking up to a neon-lit video-store counter and asking the slimy clerk to buzz you into the smut-cave in back. 
Managed to sneak in my order for this one mere hours before that stupid-ass tariff-based mail stoppage took effect. It’s an appropriate album for the moment, as Infinity Quartet whip up a wild maelstrom of noise guaranteed to obliterate any earthly concern, or really, any thoughts at all. The quartet are a bit of a Förlag För Fri Musik showcase, featuring Erik Nystrand (Capers), Dan Johansson (Sewer Election), Per Palmqvist (Slow Exit) and David Valleryd (Schakalens Bror) in free-noise blowout mode: electronics, guitar, drums. The room is nice and boomy, sounding like a vacant music hall where one of those early live FMP performances would’ve taken place, and they absolutely destroy in a manner akin to Borbetomagus, Hair Police and Hanatarash. I’m also reminded of that excellent recent-ish double LP from Wasteland Jazz Ensemble, as both groups take the basic concept of full-throttle free-jazz and pursue it via the harshest possible noise sonics. It’s glorious, but the drums really steal the show here… they’re frequently granted space for extended solos which are somehow just as blown-out and corrosive as the harsh electronics. Not sure who was behind the kit, considering I know Valleryd as a guitarist and the other three dudes are known for their table-top noise effects… maybe it’s Johansson? If he ever finds his way into a ‘real’ band, my thoughts and prayers go out to the other members in their efforts to keep up.
Start. Stop. Zurück. is the third album from the extremely German duo of Isolationsgemeinschaft, all of which have been reviewed in these pages (I’m menacingly diligent when it comes to cold-wave). If you told me this group hatched out of a large egg filled with dry ice, sent via time-portal from 1983, I would have no choice to believe you, as their classic cold-wave synth-pop offers few signs that it was created in our current century, let alone decade. Much like their other albums, this one stays the course with no deviation in style and theme, though certainly some deviation of a dark personal nature. For as long as I’ve been going to clubs, goth-wave has been huge, but it somehow feels even bigger than ever, thanks to the younger generations adding Boy Harsher and Molchat Doma tracks to their eyeliner-application TikToks and the widespread availability and affordability of black vinyl PVC clothing (though don’t blame me if that $8.99 pair of pants gives you a rash). Isolationsgemeinschaft don’t seem to have anything particularly new to add to the aesthetic conversation, though I’ll cop to only Google translating a couple of their songs (sung in their native German for added dourness). The people crave content, though, and if you’re wearing out your Void Vision and Xeno & Oaklander records (not to mention your OMD, Human League and Visage classics), there’s nothing preventing you from adding Start. Stop. Zurück. to the stack. 
Basque artist / musician / conceptualist Mattin has a number of useful skills, but I’d like to point out one aspect that isn’t often acknowledged: he is so good at getting people to release his crazy-ass material. Some of his sonic concepts are outrageously unpleasant to experience – I dare you to spend a weekend listening only to Seize The Means Of Complexity and Expanding Concert (Lisboa 2019 – 2023) – yet there always seems to be some punk label, art foundation or noise collective ready to print and sell (or try to sell) his newest offering. That includes Al Karpenter, who is a person named Al Karpenter who’s also part of a band called Al Karpenter (y’know, like Alice Cooper). Mattin has been a crucial element within Karpenter’s work, from contributing guitar and drums to the band’s earliest garage-punk material through to the present day’s deeply unhinged Greatest Heads, released by the reputable Night School label (or, as their logo puts it, NIGSCH HTOOL). One could turn to that label for the finest in underground electronic post-punk and its various relations, so Greatest Heads might come as a shock to fans of Frankie Rose and Molly Nilsson. These songs are fully deconstructed and rearranged with a giddy disregard for cohesion – it’s like a factory-fresh sedan taken apart piece by piece, the various parts stacked in a rickety pile. Certain moments remind me of Sudden Infant’s penchant for unsettling sonic shocks, but then there’s the asthmatic party beat of “Mundo Chabola”, and the ASMR folk of “A Brand New Astraphobia”… we have no choice but to classify Al Karpenter under “unclassifiable”. 
Jonathan Kirby’s “This Is Your Song” arrives fourth in the Soft Rock For Hard Times series, also its first original composition. They’re not running a charity over there – your freshly-written tune has to stack up against the private-press soft-rock greats for the SRFHT crew to take notice, but one spin of “This Is Your Song” is all it takes to get your arm-hair standing up straight, so captivating is Kirby’s unguarded, after-hours emotion. The story as I understand it is that Kirby wrote and recorded the song late into the night (with his aging dad sleeping in the next room) after meeting a special someone, and you can hear that precious optimism in his rocky vocal melody, which rides alongside a trusty bossa-nova pulse and supple, understated keys. It shares the simmering atmosphere of Schoenherz’s “Sultry Nights”, splayed out on a bearskin rug, all shirts unbuttoned. Call me crazy but Devin Dare’s “Dusk Mix” on the b-side might actually best the original, Dare swapping out the drum machine for a tasteful trip-hop trap-kit, bass-guitar and enthusiastic backing vocals from Vivienne, resulting in an adult-alternative pop groove that could’ve made the jump from Ninja Tune to MTV had it came out in 1998. If coffee shops with big lumpy brown couches and offbeat local art all over the walls still existed, they’d be playing “This Is Your Song” and baristas would be falling in love with each other all over the place. 
Jessy Lanza wrote “Slapped By My Life” in response to her husband’s chemotherapy treatment, though you wouldn’t know that from listening. Co-produced by Pearson Sound, it’s a fizzy club track ready to peak with confetti cannons and multiple bachelorette parties colliding together. After all, Lanza’s always been a bit more sophisticated than your typical main-stage pop vocalist, but not at the sacrifice of taking big swings in the name of universal satisfaction. The drum programming is fast and intricate, and she maintains her composure even when pogoing on those “miss you when you go (go go go go)” lines, but could Flo Rida bring it into one of his live shows without distressing his middle-of-the-mall audience? He certainly could. I could’ve gone for a couple more tracks like it, but the b-side only offers an “Essential Mix” of the original, chopping up the vocal and maintaining the drums’ frenzied approach in a manner that reminds me of the equally stylishly-modern Cowgirl Clue. Apparently Lanza’s husband loved the track, but how could he not? Laughter as medicine is overrated; a killer beat with a sweetly sighing vocal melody is homeopathic bliss. 
Wait a minute… it’s Shutaro Noguchi with the Roadhouse Band, not Ryan Davis?? Imagine if The E Street Band followed up Live 1975/85 with Max Weinberg on lead vocals, because that seems to be what’s happening here, with Ryan Davis not only complicit in this decision but also as a participating member of The Roadhouse Band. It’s weird to witness an artistic community governed by friendship instead of commerce, isn’t it? Noguchi is clearly the captain of the ship this time around, performing his own original material alongside songs written by Roadhouser Axel Cooper, and taking the Roadhouse Band in a significantly different direction than Davis. Billed as his “farewell” album (Noguchi returned to Japan after twenty years living in these wretched United States), the vibe is communal and convivial, with plenty of lush keys and melodic interplay, a big band with no sharp edges but plenty of places to comfortably lounge. Noguchi’s pop sensibility is retro-chic, music for living rooms with conversation pits, Sottsass ice buckets and Jacobsen Egg chairs, copious piles of coleslaw and Jello served on primary-color plastic trays. These tracks easily get away from Noguchi, with extended exploratory city-pop and psychedelic-lounge fusions, though they’re all relayed with his loving seal of approval. If I ever move out of this country, can I get The Roadhouse Band to back me up too??
Feel It has enough colorful zany punk bands on its roster to fully populate a children’s television network at this point. Like Artificial Go and Self Improvement, No Peeling also feature bouncy femme vocals with a British accent, though unlike those other two, No Peeling actually reside over there in the UK (Nottingham, to be precise). They go pretty hard on this seven-song debut EP: you wouldn’t be wrong for filing it under Suburban Lawns-inspired egg-punk, though their manic energy, oddball synth bloops and abrupt endings point to wilder, woolier zones. The synths are distorto 8-bit in a way that reminds me of Neon Hunk, and now that you’re reading me saying it, try to make it through all of this self-titled EP without thinking of Melt Banana at least once. Even with those scratchy, sniffy predilections, there’s a pop tunefulness to the vocals and a holographic-print new-wave penchant for hooks that even the most scatterbrained rhythmic change can’t refute. “Can I Pet That Dog?” deserves the splendidly crappy-on-purpose music video made for it – it’s the hit – but I’m just as drawn to “Bank Holiday”, which blends the mania of a crowded tube station with the thrill of avoiding tides of jellyfish at the beach. Pretty sure the vocalist rhymes something with “Sephora” on that one, though it whizzes by in under a minute, and if you were able to focus on any one element of No Peeling’s maximal glo-wave, I’d love to know how you did it. 
Can we agree that Baltimore rules? I dunno what it is exactly, because lots of places have that gritty “underdog spirit” happening, but Baltimore has always treated me right through the years (except for that one bodega where I asked for a Snickers only to see multiple mice playing around in the bulletproof plastic wall from which it was procured), with an extremely high per-capita rate of thrillingly singular artists. John Waters is the city’s icon that’s printed on their promotional mugs and t-shirts, you know? Anyway, that’s a long-winded intro to get you hyped for Nourished By Time, a new Baltimore artist whose big-time XL album is doing wonders for my soul. I like that it’s basically just one guy (Marcus Brown), but he has a grammatically awkward beatdown-hardcore-style band name (like Result Of Choice or Pain Of Truth), and his songs are unabashedly new jack swing updated for today’s Fader-friendly audiences who listen to acid trance, Japanese city-pop and kraut-rock with equal enthusiasm. Nourished By Time fits into pop R&B (and house, and electro, and Mount Kimbie-esque post-punk), but with a free-wheeling style, mostly in service to Brown’s stand-out vocals. He switches like every tenth vowel to a British accent, otherwise tending to enunciate with his tongue down in a style somewhere between RuPaul and Eddie Vedder, with the amazing ability to hit every note directly on its head. He’s a star! Maybe Autre Ne Veut is a good comparison, ie. sideways R&B that is catchy as all hell, only Brown’s voice is remarkably excellent, not just remarkably strange. “Max Potential” and “Automatic Love” are huge tunes, plus he’s got the charisma to flip a song called “Idiot In The Park” into a heartstring-tugger full of its own weird prismatic beauty. Love it I love it I do!
Of all the records reviewed this month, Marianne Nowottny’s Marzanna is the lucky odd one out, though I get the impression she’s perfectly comfortable with not fitting in. If I’m understanding things right, “Marzanna” is Marianne Nowottny’s alter-ego, but it’s also the album title, and an alter-ego that… covers songs by David Bowie, Billie Holiday, The Beatles and Kate Bush. Oh, and Einstürzende Neubauten and Klaus Nomi, too. See what I mean? This has all the markings of a pop-obsessed kook who doesn’t play by the rules, whose self-finagled records either get dumped in a thrift store and forgotten for all eternity or dumped in a thrift store and discovered decades later, becoming highly-coveted collector’s items in the process. In that way, I’d file Marzanna next to Jandek and Lewis, but also next to Kevin Koplar (see April’s reviews) or anyone in one of those “American Idol Weird Contestants & Auditions” YouTube videos, fans of popular music whose personal artistic interpretations will never be taken seriously by the corporate mainstream. Her overly emotive vocal delivery and dramatic musical arrangements fits the likes of Kate Bush and David Bowie’s mystical presences, though I could just as easily picture Marzanna on The Gong Show, Rip Taylor making a funny face as Faye Dunaway gongs her off. It’s an album of determination and self-belief, and no matter who listens or doesn’t, Nowottny succeeded the moment she released Marzanna (and Marzanna) unto the world. 
“Nuke Watch’s new album, Grave New World, is their tenth since beginning the project in 2020.” When you’re hot, you’re hot, I suppose, as the duo of Chris Hontos and Aaron Anderson have located a Wolf Eyes-circa-2008 prolificness with their project of abstracted fourth-world improvisations. This new album shares the title of everyone’s least favorite Discharge record, and it’s broken into nine individual tracks, though I often miss when one ends and another begins. Perhaps I’m not listening too hard, but it’s also probably because of the nature of the music itself: a dizzying, hallucinatory flow of pitched percussion and wind instruments (both organic and MIDI) performing unexplained jazz-fusion experiments. From the effects processing, familiar sounds frequently morph into the uncanny, giving me visions of Marshall Allen playing his EVI while seated atop a pink elephant strutting across one of Saturn’s rings. I appreciate when they go a little mellower, like the jazzy, Sam Gendel-esque “Time Against Mind”, though Nuke Watch seem to be at their peak when caught up in cascades of sound from all angles, an aesthetic approach (if not genre match) that reminds me of Edan’s brilliant Echo Party. Easily the most fun you’ll have awaiting mutually-assured destruction all year. 
Kinda feel like Sleeping Giant should start a “Legends” series, what with that recent Bastard Noise split LP and now this newest full-length from UK industrial-noise pioneers Ramleh. It doesn’t seem that Ramleh have ever really “broken up” since their early ’80s inception, but they do like to take reasonable breaks, which I respect. Hyper Vigilance is the group in technologically-enhanced power-trio mode, with Stuart Dennison on drums, Gary Mundy on guitar and Anthony Di Franco on bass and synth, the latter two sharing vocal duties. With a crisp studio recording – even the harsher sonics that open “New National Anthem” are more soothing than grating – the trio look towards greying skies on these thunderous goth-rock epics. If it wasn’t for the persistent martial drumming and lack of startling spoken-word samples, I could be convinced that I’m hearing some unreleased Godspeed You! Black Emperor at times. There’s no break in Ramleh’s ominous atmosphere, that’s for sure – you turn the corner past one crumbling cement building only to be met with a post-punk dust-cloud charging straight for you. These tracks are long, which allow for moments of relative tranquility amidst surging build-ups and frightening climaxes, long stretches of instrumental extrapolating and staunch, militaristic chanting, forebodingly occult in a secular way. I can’t say you’ll feel particularly hopeful about the future of our world after listening to all four sides here, but there’s a good chance you might feel newly cleansed, a goth-industrial Ice Bucket Challenge of the soul. 
Bitter Lake Recordings reissued Sacrifice’s Total Steel in an elegant vinyl pressing back in 2020, and now the same treatment has been given to the Japanese metal band’s final album, Tears, originally a CD-only release from 1992. When it comes to reissue labels that dig deep into the annals of barely-known and unheralded underground music, I like to extend some grace when it comes to judging the music against the well-known and celebrated. Those K2 reissues that Bitter Lake just did sound great, for example, but the context helps makes them intriguing documents. Sacrifice’s Tears, on the other hand, requires no explanation or in-depth frame of reference to enjoy – this is bulldozer, moshworthy thrash metal operating at peak levels. I find myself frequently reminded of Iron Age’s modern classic The Sleeping Eye in the way that the riffs crush with restrained complexity, as if they all took a big swig of Cro-Mags-brand protein enhancer before sitting down to write. You get the sense that each member could physically crush their respective instrument in their bare hands, but instead of doing so, they simply flex hard on tracks like “Broken Heroes”, a memorable highlight of Tears. Even the faster, upbeat songs are heavy in a way that can’t be fabricated, like Attacker and Destruction if they actually attacked and destructed. Don’t look at yourself in the mirror if you’ve only listened to Tears once – it’s gonna take a few spins for those physical gains to start showing.
Less than ever is needed to be a band – just like those AI-slop producers from Bangladesh who manage to upload thousands of Facebook videos per day through outdated flip-phones, Snarewaves has found a low-performance, high-yield method with their particular brand of egg-punk. Take for instance this white plastic sheet, which bears the grooves of four Snarewaves songs on one side. You could also get to know the group by logging onto the official Snarewaves website, which features a unique smiley-face cursor, a website hit-counter and multiple band logos, unclickable and apparently just there to admire. Visually, it hearkens back to a pre-social-media / pre-politicized form of internet brain-rot, a peaceful time of pointless personal websites overloaded with browser-crashing animated GIFs. Sonically, it sounds like a Coneheads side-project if you muted everything but the guitar (which you cranked all the way up), with vocals and snare-drum bleeding low through the four-track mix. The riffs are speedy and interesting enough to stand on their own, which is good because it is practically as guitar-centered a record as Phase 3: Thrones And Dominions, just on the exact opposite end of the drug spectrum. It buzzes by in a jiff, which is wise as a full album of these subtle variations on a theme may demoralize the listener. By themselves, these four songs are as rejuvenating as a handful of jalapẽno-flavored pop-rocks. 
If you want to hear some deeply unhappy post-punk, why not go straight to the source: Berlin! Splizz are new and ready to keep your frown upside-down with their head-bobbing death-rock. They go the chorus-pedal route, opting out of traditional distortion in favor of queasy chords, cymbal-averse / tom-heavy drumming and a singer who sounds like a drowned woman who recently crawled out of her watery grave only to terrorize the local townsfolk who previously ignored her desperate pleas. Imagine The Cure on Zickzack in 1982, but with any of the intriguing or idiosyncratic angles that might imply sanded down into typical genre fare, right down to the eyeliner (applied at a traditional forty-five degree angle). Considering the vast quantity of music that’s currently being pumped out that sounds like this, there has to be a significant audience eager to receive it, but my tolerance for unexceptional gothy post-punk acts started low and hasn’t gotten any higher. Maybe I just need to hang out with different people. At the very least, Splizz could’ve amused me by calling the album Energie or Athletico Splizz 80 but I had to come up with those all by myself. I realize fun is probably not the point here, but then what is?
I hate to be the one to share the news… egg-punk and NWOBHM have mated. Scientists weren’t certain it was possible, what with their different reproductive biologies, but Steröid is living proof of this illicit union. Yet another solo-project-turned-live-band, Steröid is the spawn of one Gordo Blackers – he used to play in Gee Tee, and if I’m understanding it correctly, there’s some personnel overlap here with RMFC’s live formation as well. That explains the predilection for all the tiny-sounding guitars that whizz along to the artificial-sounding drumming full of precise fills and speedy hi-hats. It might also explain the decision to go with cartoon-squirrel vocals, surely to be the most controversial of Steröid’s brash aesthetic choices. The vocals do a fine job of emasculating the sort of warrior vest / leather codpiece attitudes that usually come with guitar riffs such as these, but I’m not sure to what end… it’s cool to hear Tank and Maiden riffs subverted and undermined of their typical context, but Steröid fully infantilize the vibe in the process, too. Chalk it up to the endless nerdification of any / all subcultures, where the loudest geeks in the room seem to get their way, or more charitably, some garage-punk jokers seeing how firmly they can connect two unrelated styles that share an appreciation of larger-than-life personas and make-believe imagery. 
A variety of distinctly British elements are at play here with Tutu Ta’s newest EP, but don’t worry – nary a banger or mash in sight. The West London producer / vocalist maintains a confident swagger across these four contrasting tunes, produced like club tracks but clocking in at concise, playlist-friendly run-times. The title track is a serpentine dub, Ta’s vocals recalling the dearly departed Spaceape as it chugs like a dying turntable playing a Green Velvet record at half the speed. “The Hills” would be overtly sinister if it wasn’t for Ta’s animated singing, coming across like Alan Abrahams’s vocal tracks with Portable had he raided the Robitussin closet. “Samurai Igloo” picks up the pace with an instrumental dubstepping beat, and “Seen Better Days” is the potential single, a post-punk-minded take on modern electronic pop (ala King Krule’s Mount Kimbie guest spot “Blue Train Lines”), complete with the most British pronunciation of the word “weather” I’ve ever heard (typing out whevough doesn’t do it justice). Cool ideas, though it feels like Tutu Ta is still in the refinement and development stages, not quite ready for the Hyperdub contract yet… but maybe that’s one of the long-gone old traditions? 
It’s not a band name you can easily forget, so I can say with certainty that I had no idea this Seattle group comprised of ex-Murder City Devils and Area 51 personnel existed back in the ’00s. As far as recorded material goes, it seems they were pretty active in their day, and as far as a posthumous introduction is concerned, Millon Sellers provides a nice overview of a band that remains difficult to pin down. They seemed to operate in the loose, open space that followed emo’s late-’90s metamorphosis into screamo but was very much not screamo. If anyone were to transcribe the music of Triumph Of Lethargy, it wouldn’t look like much on paper, as they seemed most interested in communicating surges of stilted emotion in an unfiltered manner, without any dazzling melodies to possibly interfere. That’s what enables a track like the five-minute “Big Bed” to resemble a collaboration between I Hate Myself and The Dead C. They also like to plink and plonk on the guitars in a way that reminds me of early Modest Mouse (whose Dann Gallucci was a member of both groups!), sometimes hitting V3-levels of indie-pression. Seattle has always been a safe-space for dreary thoughts, but this group wasn’t afraid to make the listener work a little, whether by holding strong through intentionally sparse passages or keeping one’s cool through uncomfortable emotional outbursts. Like one of Kurt Cobain’s cheap mohair cardigans, it’s worth the discomfort. 
“Punk And Underground Sounds From Ohio’s Queen City (1982-1988)” is the subtitle to this second volume of oddball Cincinnati punk and new-wave acts, and it’s not foolin’! Feel It Records may be heralding the current Cincinnati renaissance, but this weird little city has proven to be fertile ground for generations of outcast rock n’ roll, as evidenced by this being the second of HoZac’s Cincinnati collections. Eighteen bands are showcased here, one track a piece with the exception of BPA who appear with “No Heat” on the first side and “Bus” on the second. My tastes lean towards the faster, harder and maladroit, so of course the teen straight-edgers Sluggo are nice to hear, as are Mexican Pig Torture’s “I Love Kmart” and SS-20’s “More Government Now”, both tracks soaked in goony sarcasm. The sounds are generally diverse though, with skinny-tie bands butting up against snarling folk-rock, harder-edged bad-attitude-rock and goofy pranksters. With no concerns of ever obtaining one of those big New York or Los Angeles record deals, these bands worked hard to amuse themselves, and if possible, their local audiences too. I’m not trying to live on Memory Lane, but We Were Living In Cincinnati Vol. 2 is a fun regional time capsule. 
What’s For Breakfast? delivers some harmless fun here with a locals-only comp EP: four Chicago bands delivering four self-titled tracks. I’ve always admired the concept of songs that share the name of the band (though have never been bold enough to pull the trigger on one myself), and it seems like enough of an enticement to check out some bands that might have otherwise flown under the radar. Watermelon acronymize themselves with “W.A.T.E.R.M.E.L.O.N.”, a buzzy chant-along pop-punk tune that doesn’t actually spell anything out, much to my disappointment. Nightfreak squawk their name under the influence of a Motörhead-y “punk goes metal” style, and Doomzday Slutz step in some cheese, their pop-metal pushing into parody territory. 96 Cougar get serious with some twangy garage-pop, and before you know it, it’s time to turn on the house lights, clean up and go home. While I can’t imagine any of these bands will catch on with a worldwide audience, that’s not the point of every band, nor is it the only noble goal to pursue. Maroon 5 and Cage The Elephant are celebrated worldwide, but we all know they are completely worthless. The moral of the story is to go out and meet some people and have a good time, even if you encounter a Doomzday Slut every once in a while. 
Back to top