SUMMER CATCH (UP) Part 1

Eric Angelo Bessel - Mirror At Night [Lore City]

You may have heard this one before: If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? How about this one: Does a mirror at night give a reflection? That’s one for the philosophers, but Eric Angelo Bessel’s LP Mirror At Night does posit that said mirror makes a sound. Over 12 ambient pieces, Bessel dunks you in the deep end of the reverb tank. You don’t know left from right, up from down, right from wrong, and you definitely won’t know what he’s playing. Was he wailing away on a pipe organ during “Snow Globes”? I don’t know, seems possible, but maybe he stumbled upon particularly resonant pots from his grandmother’s cabinet. Perhaps a few disused marmalade jars as well. The wavering, greyscale frequencies are a perfect match for Bessel’s photography adorning the jacket. I’ve heard enough harsh noise CDrs in my day to instantly perceive the color-drained black & white visual palette as “bleak” but that’s not really what Bessel is after. This is certainly not ambient music in the ethereal, florid sense, nor is it dissonant and haunting; Mirror At Night situates itself in a kind of droning purgatory, reveling in the mystery of pure, neutral existence. For instance, the highlight “Headlamps” is as sprightly as it gets, evoking an ambivalent carousel revolving round and round, feelings of centrifugal glee buffered by the comprehension of interminability. With so much ambient music nowadays bloated with wow & flutter plugins and other shortcuts to “nostalgia”, I can admire Bessel’s restraint from directing the experience of The Listener, instead letting listeners gaze into the Mirror At Night themselves and see what appears in their reflections, even if it’s nothing at all. 

Ned Collette - Our Other History [Ever/Never]

I’d never heard of Ned Collette before this cassette but he sure does have friends in high places with Byron Coley and Will Oldham singing his praises in the promo materials for his album Our Other History (plus appearances on the album from, among others, both Mick Turner and Jim White—of Venom P. Stinger fame in this household but also Dirty Three, etc.) 

One would generally categorize Our Other History as a folk record, but Collette bucks tradition at various turns without being showy about it. One highlight, “Endtimes Boogie”, approximates a late 60s ambling country pop jam, yet it’s fleshed out with a jazz guitar solo (hm??) and sampled (or otherwise synthetic) horn stabs in the denouement. Subtle surprises like these emerge throughout Our Other History. The album has a rather stately veneer but every so often an idiosyncratic line catches me off guard, reminding me of someone like Benjamin Dean Wilson. Whether lyrically or sonically, these little twists and sprouts of new ideas keep the album exciting. “Little Hans” takes a lounge jazz angle (“Saxophone, oh saxophone/You make me feel nice and alone”), relaxed and mellow in the beginning and gradually building tension so tightly coiled the song is on the verge of fracturing. One of the main contributing factors to this consistent quality is that the group of players Collette has assembled to back him up are nothing short of stellar. For instance, the beautiful cello on “Athens”, “Blue Rooms” and “Bridges of Sunlight” really helps those songs bloom. 

I always admire when artists stick their longest track right up front (doesn’t hurt when it’s also the best) and in the case of the title track, it’s a whopper, clocking in at something like eight minutes. There’s generally an easygoing, wandering spirit to the arrangements on the album (such as album highlight the meandering not-quite rocker “Shot Through”) and that’s no more apparent than the title track. The arrangement supports the song and Collette’s slender voice, while creating lots of movement and shifting textures over the eight minutes. It’s a song I could imagine Leonard Cohen (surely an influence, though Collette makes no attempt at imitation) singing in his deep weary voice, particularly the piercing conclusion: “I’m feeling lucky, feeling sad/I’m feeling lonely, feeling glad/I’m feeling anything I can/‘Cause when tomorrow comes, limping through the dark/It’s going to take all that I have to be a man”. The only disappointment on the album is that “Friendly Fucker” is an instrumental!

(Our Other History is also available on CD (from Ever/Never) and LP (from Sophomore Lounge) achieving the now-rare physical media hat trick.)

Jake King - Rock & Roll [The New Disposable]

Many have lamented the 21st century’s landscape of lazy irony but Buffalo, NY’s Jake King is here to implement his own form of market correction: his cassette Rock & Roll is none other than actual rock & roll! Five songs (plus an unlisted solo drum excursion), none reaching the two-minute mark, crammed on a spool of tape no longer than a roll of used wrapping paper at an estate sale. Jake King’s rock and roll seems steeped in the 00s garage rock revival (Ty Segall and the like). All blistering feedback, hot guitar leads, rollicking rhythm section and incomprehensible blown out vocals reverbed to heaven and back. From what I can tell, there is only one Jake King and he played all the instruments yet there is the remarkable feel of a live band stuffed in a utility closet, the way this shit oughta be done. King has calibrated just the right about trash for max sizzle and singe without betraying the party in his pop heart. Whether he’s relentlessly pounding on giant oil drums (just a guess) on the title track, bopping to the chug-groove of “Last Call” or hissing his way through the surf-alien vocal and hot-shit guitar solo on standout “2026”, King is an IV drip right to the very heart of rock and roll. 

Midnight Mines - Since My Baby Left Me [Minimal Table Stacks]

I remember reading about Midnight Mines in Terminal Boredom many years back, having dropped some impossible to get UK-only debut LP (as well as some cassettes which I didn’t get my hands on either). I was intrigued because the pseudonymous duo of Baron Saturday and Private Sorrow was an outgrowth of the recently (at the the time) defunct Black Time, a “garage rock act” with a full-throated passion for blistering, beyond-the-red recording fidelity (not unlike Pussy Galore a couple decades earlier). I own a handful of Black Time records, some very memorable (New Vague Themes) and some less so. What piqued my curiosity was that Midnight Mines supposedly pushed beyond noisy garage rock into a realm of abstracted rock-inflected noise. I was imagining/wishing for a trajectory like the first Hospitals LP to Hairdryer Peace, a prospect so mouthwatering I took the opportunity to check out Minimum Table Stacks’s collection of Midnight Mines tunes.

Since My Baby Left Me is a re-sequenced and vinylized version of a 2017 tape on The Loki Label which itself compiled tracks from three cassettes released on the duo’s Mystery Plane label in 2013-14. Attempting to wriggle themselves from the garage rock collar immediately, the LP opens with “Begging for Love” which is clinking and plonking on a drain pipe, slow motion bass wiggle, slipped under droning vocals nearly swallowed up by feedback, and sporadically punctuated by waves of white noise crashing on the shore. This try at friendmaking is promptly followed by “Midnight Sound” which earns the prefix in the avant-garage tag with cheek-pinching blasts of red-needle tape-splice static and concrète slabs walloping you on the back of the head for minding your manners. Midnight Mines wait until the third track before presenting something that could (loosely) be described as a “rock song” (“Insect People”) and naturally it lasts for about a minute. “Needle Points” is awesome; finding perfect consensus between big-drummed psych-rock bravado and the sonic chemical peel their acidic production methods encourage. (Midnight Mines themselves state that it’s their “bombastic stadium rock song” in the liner notes.) 

The quasi-eponymous “Midnight Mine” is their shot at a token ballad I suppose, because every art-noise evisceration needs one. To my ear, it sounds like only three elements at play: voice, guitar and drums, given space to breathe instead of the usual onslaught of signal obliteration—priming you for an extended jam to follow. The sonic palette isn’t super wide (though hard to tell when you’re livin’ in the red, baby) but it shifts from track to track, modulating the feel of Since My Baby Left Me. (Live drums guide “The Planet Drifts Into Random Insect Doom” while a drum machine seemingly drives “Needle Points”.) The finale “Here Come the Waves” has a bit of atmosphere which is nice, but I like the Mines best when they’re rev’d up like on highlight “Cuntsville USA” which sounds like The Red Crayola and Suicide simultaneously covering the same song on opposite sides of the venue while being absentmindedly captured on a Dictaphone in the backpocket of an onlooker. The duo has clearly never met a transistor they couldn’t overload and I salute them for it. 

Split Apex - Thoughts in 3D [Ever/Never]

Last time I checked, all those genealogy websites i.e. personal data merchants are still not doing anything useful like mapping the music genome. If they had, we’d be able to mark the exact point in history that the lineages of Sightings and The Shadow Ring intermingled chromosomes (possibly the result of an arranged marriage) forming a genetic recipe responsible for this debut LP Thoughts in 3D by Split Apex. To approximate the sound of Split Apex, you might imagine the sparse sonic intensity of Sightings but any and all urges to rock out have been surgically removed. Or you might envision stripping out The Shadow Ring’s stream-of-conscious collage reflex but retaining their environmental insouciance, from the era when they asserted they made “songs” and you kinda believed them.

Featuring a Finn and a Mosquito (of the UK Mosquitos, part of Sightings ancestry in their own right), the Split Apex duo spills forth like a 10 gallon bucket flooded by an unattended hose. Heavy, slow and drippy. The killer opener “Peninsula” bashes you head-on with a looped distorted pulse as a bass guitar starts thumping around in search of a groove and spoken vocals address the public, echoing in their failed intelligibility. Shit gets real when the scraping commences. The loping title track is practically an amputated take on a nursery rhyme (“red yellow blue” is a repeated lyric). A zither-like synthesizer casts a rapturous shower of cosmic sprinkles over the kids in the audience. Closing track “People, Nerves” (two ingredients that belong together) might be the heaviest, not in any subservience to the metal genre but in terms of sheer sonic girth. The bass frequencies seem more oppressive, to resonate a bit longer than anyone desires like a drunken friend in your living room who hasn’t realized the party ended hours ago, all amid the grind of a distorted guitar zooming in and out like a pre-Super Bowl flyover. One of my favorite moments comes in “Crux Machine” when, after many monotonous repetitions (“Circle around my [various body parts]”), the voice unexpectedly reaches into the high end of its range before returning to the same routine cadence. The repetition sets up anomalies for max impact.

Aside from “Cast in Light” lacking some of the same conviction as the other tracks, Thoughts in 3D is a solid album of grey area “rock music”. As proprietor of many records by the aforementioned Mosquitos and Rider/Horse, not to mention CIA Debutant, Ever/Never seems to have the market cornered on this family tree. If you’ve got a hunger for it, there is no mystery as to where to get your bread buttered, Split Apex being the latest pasty yanked from the E/N oven in this tortured metaphor.

ROCKTOBER 2025

Donna Allen - 2nd Song Diary: Atom-ic Citizen of the Dying Empire [Ever/Never] 

Don’t know if you’ve also been a fan of Chronophage for the past seven years or so, but, if not, they’re well worth checking out. (I’ve written about them some HERE). In that span, Chronophage has shifted from SST-ish outsider punk to something else I’ve seen described as peace punk. I’ve never been enamored with punk sub-sub-sub-genre hairsplitting and, contrarily, subscribe to the notion of “punk” being an extensive, infinitely inclusive descriptor of attitude and approach to making music—dating from the present to at least as far back as The Sonics (if not farther). This is a discursive effort to explain that I have no idea what “peace punk” is and have no idea whether Chronophage is or is not it. What I do surmise, having heard 2nd Song Diary: Atom-ic Citizen of the Dying Empire, the second solo release by Chronophage’s Donna Allen, is that Allen was probably a proponent of the band’s shift toward the gentle and more approachable. I mean, there is mandolin on this record, which is only punk in the sense that it’s the least punk instrument you could put on a punk record. 

The hectic cover artwork belies the altogether pleasant sonic footprint of the record. Emblazoned with “Free Palestine!!”, Atom-ic Citizen is not so much ardently political but ardently human, without a snarl in earshot. I’m not the guy you want dissecting and deconstructing lyrics, but Allen’s songs are rife with longing, wonder and curiosity, richly rendered through religious language on nearly every track (and with the admirable bravery to include allusions to fast food chains right alongside it)—illustrating that the personal and the celestial are one and the same.

The aural palette often consists of acoustic guitar, new agey polysynth, occasional pedal steel (always welcome on my stereo!) and in lieu of d-beat you’re more likely to hear one of those wooden frogs you scrape with a stick, peaceful sure... (Though I must note that the lovely synth instrumental “Embrace of the Embassy” features martial snare drum rolls.) Atom-ic Citizen was cleanly recorded by Sasha Stroud; it sounds very “nice”. “Nice” sounding production is admittedly a stumbling block for me at times (give me ragged and tattered any day) but the record’s sincerity is its greatest strength and the virtuous production is the right choice for Allen’s songs.

The album reaches its highest point early on in “Candle-Watching”. The melodic hook (guitar sublimely doubled by a female voice) is properly gorgeous and its brevity leaves you yearning to—please, please, please—just bask in its presence for a few seconds longer. Brevity is a tool Allen uses to great effect throughout. Of the 12 tracks on Atom-ic Citizen, only two reach the three-minute mark (and one hits three minutes exactly on the dot); many songs hover around or below two minutes.

Among other highlights are the grounded buoyancy of “Telescope Heart”, the country-tinged opener “Tip of an Angel’s Wing” replete with glistening pedal steel courtesy of Ed Allen, and the restless, stirring “Spirits in Flight”. The casual fingerpicked folkiness “Of Our Very Own” reminds me of Allen’s first song diary, which I very much enjoyed. (Still in print, nab one!) Though, Allen can jaunt with the best of them, whether the ambling sort (“Naked, Biological, Free”) or with propulsive rigor (“Nightmare of Dawning”). The album ends on a comparatively blah note with the hazy, cluttered instrumental “Flowers Blossom in the Heat of the Moment” but it's no great splotch on the pristine fabric of Atom-ic Citizen of the Dying Empire. 

Eyes and Flys - All the Tigers in Texas [Record Beach] 

All in all, Eyes & Flys head insect Pat Shanahan self-released eight(!) 7”s and one LP between 2019 and 2023. (Yeah, you are correctly remembering there was a global pandemic for a little while there too.) And, well, with a resume like that Shanahan was bound to get hired by some enterprising label out there. He was hired, sure enough. By himself! And he's the best man for the job, at that. That’s right, now Shanahan’s efforts making calls to pressing plants, waiting in line at the Post Office and paying invoices on-time will now be rewarded with the prestige of saying “I run a record label.” The name of that label is Record Beach. I guess moving from the frozen tundra of Buffalo, NY for the sunny docks of Long Beach a few years ago has given ol’ Pat a new lease on life letting him daydream of a paradise where beaches come fully stocked with records. Certainly the kind of beach that I’d want to hang at. 

But how hard is it to transition from DIY maven to Los Angeles (County) record executive? I may never know but Shanahan makes it look easy. When you ascend to upper management they say: delegate, delegate, delegate and Shanahan was paying attention in those seminars, having delegated vocal duties in Eyes & Flys to Dominic Armao (Sweet Harm, Anxiety Spree). It’s a surprisingly seamless transition. Shanahan’s tough, burly shout (he could probably unwittingly cuddle a kitten to death with his muscles) gave the Eyes an identity, but with Armao in front of the mic, the band retains a lot of that same appeal with a little more swagger. Jumping from the speakers like a sly “Ballroom Blitz” re-write, “All the Tigers in Texas” finds Armao letting loose with his swift sneer preventing things from getting too power-pop in the basement, except the dude tinkling on the glockenspiel at the end who missed the memo. “Seabird” fills out the B-side and it slips into my favorite Eyes & Flys mode, that is homespun fuzz-folk. Vocals retain their brawny heft which makes for a lovely juxtaposition with their soft surroundings. Semi-jangling acoustic guitar tries to stay afloat in a sea of trickling static. Rather than using a drum kit to lead the dynamic shifts, blistering overdubbed electric guitar leads the charge to great effect. Reminds me a bit of Chris Heazlewood or when Grifters went full four-track mode (see: “Dead Already”). One of the best E+F tunes yet! 

Rider/Horse - Matted [Ever/Never] 

The first two Rider/Horse LPs were sick slabs of 2020s noise rock and the duo-now-quartet shows no sign of slowing down on their latest LP Matted. Despite the lineup additions (full time bass player and a previously featured-turned-full time pedal steel player, sweet!) there is no radical shift to the Rider/Horse sound. Thick, thumping, Big Black-but-with-a-real-drummer grooves, alienated, needling vocals, and even the opening song is about horses (“Combing the Horse”) just like the first record! If anything maybe they’ve mellowed? I noted that their second record, Feed ‘Em Salt, moved away from treble frequencies and general spikiness (the guitars didn’t feel like sandpaper rubbing against my cheeks anymore!) and doubled down on human-mechanical grooves. The trend continues.

While not particularly cordial in any way, the band doesn’t sound like it might open up your chest with a switchblade anymore. See “Run the Rabbit”, 100% content to just cruise on a killer melody. Maybe it’s the fact that I just typed c-r-u-i-s-e but Girls Against Boys comes to mind (Cruise Yourself naturally). By no means a one-to-one match, but the vaguely threatening aura, the theoretical funk with all blood drained and replaced with motor oil, the background in head-busting noise and hardcore. Maybe all this time Rider/Horse has been the 21st century Girls Against Boys (that doesn’t actually sound like Girls Against Boys), no wonder why I dig ‘em!

Sometimes another instrument takes the lead (guitar provides a potent melodic counterpoint on “Bored by the Infinite” and “Headache Powder” throbs like an overtaxed heart thanks to a relentless distort-o-bass riff) but Matted is about drums first and foremost. The drums often seem to thud and thwack louder than anything else in the mix (see: “Empty Boxes” or any number of other examples). “Overdressed” is ruthless in its groove, so ruthless that it’s immediately followed by one of a scant few stretches without a groove battering down upon you. That might seem like relief initially but it’s not like “Toen (Restored to Glory by the Light)” is a respite; the track ultimately results with the biggest steamrolling you’re apt to receive over the whole album. “Comb the Horse” is sensational. The bass drops this kind of de-choogled choogle, staccato and robotic, the groove’s ghost lurking somewhere within. The new bassist Jared Ashdown is the secret MVP of the album, whether driving a track or gluing it together, he always seems to be doing exactly the right thing at exactly the right time. Matted’s biggest departure is finale “Small Animals” which makes fine use of that pedal steel to cast an unnerving pall across the drumless space. Don’t put it past Rider/Horse to find a new way to make you feel uneasy just as you’re finding your footing. 

Saint Black - Brown Velvet [Semi-Permanent] 

The extent of my Saint Black knowledge is the last couple releases (as reviewed in these pages), are there more than these two releases? Has Saint Black been releasing music for two-plus decades? A simple web search would (probably) answer this question, but I prefer to live in mystery, and I have a feeling the Saint does as well. Some artists are out there “trying to be understood” but Saint Black just seems to be going about his business whether anyone’s paying attention or not. For my money, that’s how artists ought to be living their lives. Communication is overrated!

A couple tracks really lean into Black’s Calvin Johnson doppelganger presence on the mic: “Two Play” is one of my favorite Saint Black tracks to date and the Calvin thing sticks out even more on “Peculiar Dream Logic”. It sounds like Saint Black was listening to the first Halo Benders LP (an AuxOut favorite) on repeat before laying that one down. Plus, Saint Black manages to give even less of a fuck than Calvin. Bravo!

Elsewhere, you get grunge-metal recorded in a shoebox (“Brown Laughter”), unplugged monotone ditties (“Swim Eagle Swim”), a lullaby so drunk it can barely stand (“Father Goose”), not to mention “Cam Jazz” which is actually melodically plucked acoustic guitar. Unquestionably, the most pleasant moment of any Saint Black recording. “O Word” is another great tune. Acoustic guitar, drum samples, an electric guitar lazily feeding back, and Saint Black putting more effort into actually singing since I can remember.

Don’t catch yourself thinking that Saint Black has gone soft though. While “Bi Tiyjr” may not actually be the Scandinavian black metal muck the title might conjure, it is a recording of Saint Black watching childbirth on Youtube while semi-absentmindedly singing a tune. He actually pauses for a bit to watch the video before resuming playing his song. It’s almost like he's in the process of writing the song… hey, wait a second! Is this some Graham Lambkin-y concept recording, ya know, “the birth of a song” or whatever? “Peculiar Dream Logic”, which is naturally a different song from the other song on the album called “Peculiar Dream Logic”, ends on repeated refrain of “It’s a waste of time”. Music is the greatest waste of time we’ve been given, and the mysterious Saint Black knows that better than most…

The Sheaves - Excess Death Cult Time [Moone/Minimum Table Stacks] 

At the end of 2023, I wrote about some of my favorite bargain bin finds of the year. One record I wrote about was Love It to Death and I mentioned that Phoenix, AZ wasn’t ready for the sounds of Alice Cooper which lead to their white flight into the open, blue-collar arms and ears of Detroit. Well, I hope things have changed in the desert over the past 50 years because if The Coops couldn’t make it in Phoenix, these poor Sheaves don’t stand a chance.

The Sheaves do their part, continuing the DIY lineage that we must never allow to die, following in the footsteps of contemporary era practitioners like The Pheromoans and The Shifters (without The Shifters’ cunning pop sense) and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re buddy-buddy with Famous Mammals either. Sung (in the theoretical sense of the word) with a raspy, requisite “British-ish” accent, The Sheaves Sound is about as authentic as can be made by 21st century historical interpreters. (You’re only truly authentic if you recorded your single in 1980 Scunthorpe or Stoke-on-Trent anyway. I don’t make the rules.)

Like any underground rock lobber worth its salt, The Sheaves press the word “puritan” into servitude. Oddly enough, “Puritans Ignore Them” (and “Mid-English Perversion”) remind me more of the drifting ballads of early Dead C than the UK’s puritanically-preoccupied usual suspects. Elsewhere, “Saturation Induction” features clear Pink Flag bloodlines and “Good Health” indulges in an inappropriate keyboard solo which seems like something Reptile Ranch might’ve done if they walked a kilometer in Sheaves shoes. So rest assured, those UK-import smelling salts were well used. 

“Program Fantasy” sounds like The Sheaves decided to write a song and changed their mind mid-way through, and that should tell you all you need to know. At the end of “Lariat Slung”, singer Eric Mudd’s voice is played backward and you realize it doesn’t actually sound any different than his normally sloshed cadence. As evidence of their canny commercial-mindedness, they save their catchiest number ‘til the last moment with the appropriately titled “Hit Silly”. I get the sense that the bass player showed up to band practice raving about a great new band called Bauhaus, and all The Sheaves collectively cried “let’s try sounding like that!” It worked.

In a win for consumers everywhere, Excess Death Cult Time was later released on vinyl by the intrepid Minimal Table Stacks in addition to the cassette by Phoenix’s own Moone Records in 2022. Choose your own analog adventure! 

Linda Smith - Till Another Time [Slumberland] 

Continuing AuxOut’s occasional mission (okay, digression) to highlight great 90s Slumberland singles that are still in print (see: Beatnik Filmstars), Till Another Time is a three-songer from hometaper Linda Smith. Smith has been in operation since the 80s releasing her music on the likes of Shrimper, Slumberland (obviously) and her own Preference Recordings imprint. In the past several years, Captured Tracks has taken up the mantle reissuing some of her music. I’m no Linda Smith scholar (although that would be a pretty cool thing to be) but I do enjoy this little record.

Recorded in 1993, listening some 22 years later, Smith still easily laps the many modern-day bedroom pop practitioners that have come in her stead. The A-side titled “Till Another Time” is lonely, soothing, and draws blood all at the same time. Some kind of mechanical buzzsaw dream pop overdose, a glimpse of heaven via alternating current. A stunner!

The second side offers two more tracks. “I Just Had To” draws on NZ-esque charm pop with ghostly vocals that would have convinced the 4AD school admissions board to grant Smith entrance with full scholarship. Such loveliness rattling away upon the cheapest drum machine money can buy (if any money was exchanged at all for the junker). "I Just Had To" is my least favorite track and it's still undeniably great! The finale “In This” is an absolute delight. Some kind of Marine Girls joining forces with Dolly Mixture fantasy taking place in the mind of a genius. The earworm guitar lick hooks me every time and then Smith tortures me with a long detour in the middle of the song making me wait ‘til the end to hear it again. Yet I keep coming back for more. There is no earthly reason not to own this. CLASSIC. 

Somerset Meadows - Recycle Your Dreams [Brain Genius] 

Normally when bands opt for a half studio/half live situation, I think it’s a bad idea. I don’t often get hyped about live albums and generally ignore the live half of the record (see: (Untitled) by The Byrds) and petulantly whine about them not putting their energy into another studio effort. Well, Portland quartet Somerset Meadows have gone where no band has gone before: they’ve put out a half studio/half live record where I actually much prefer the live side. Recycle Your Dreams (great title) is pressed on White Powerade-colored vinyl (special Arctic Shatter limited edition?) with Somerset Meadows symmetrically slapping on six songs per side, all but inviting a duel between the recording environments.

The studio side was recorded on “an exploding 8-track tape machine” which implies a much more dangerous or fucked up sounding recording. Without this note, however, the somewhat staid sound of the recording would’ve led me to believe that the tape machine was in perfect working order! It sounds fine and has its moments (the shredding guitar solo of “Just Another Lifetime”, the almost hypnotic rhythm of “Wide Open”, the uptempo pep-in-the-step of “The Waterfall”) but the band instantly gets a shot in the arm when you flip the record over to the live side. “Roll Out!” slashes out of the gate like a classically trained punk, fist-raised, and “All Summers Now” recalls the post-hype live GBV sound, all drum fills, chunk riffs and warbling vocals.

I’m genuinely curious about the spoken introduction to “Spotlight” which is: “This next song is the ninth song on our new album.” (Yes, “Spotlight” is the ninth song on the record.) Causing me to wonder if there was a predetermined concept here to record the first half of the album in the studio and the second half live, all with a pre-sequenced track order? Bold move, if so! The album ends with some of its strongest material. All feature some great guitar work, the rollicking “I’m Going to Break You Down” (my favorite), “I’m So Tall” (cool opening lick) and the closing title track about moving on from one passion to make room for a new passion to enter your life. A worthy message we can all stand to hear once in a while. Now, is there a new opening for Somerset Meadows to dream of making an all-live record? We shall see. 

T.T.T.T. - I Saw You on the Bloody Floor [Record Beach] 

Ah, the rarely employed quadruple consonant acronym band name. Has anyone else been successful with that paradigm aside from C.C.C.C.? Has anyone else even tried? Well, Buffalo’s T.T.T.T. is fearlessly throwing its hat in the ring, and while the title I Saw You on the Bloody Floor would certainly encourage the thought of a C.C.C.C.-style feedback-ridden onslaught, its debut 7” goes down like a spoonful of sugar, comparatively speaking.

The title track volleys between the psych-groove-hypnotism of that initial Wooden Shjips 10” and the Echoplex’d-to-death garage-crush of early Comets on Fire. Favorite moment? The half-hearted, possibly inebriated closing drum fill. A.I. could never pull that off! The first half of “Mountain King Killed My Car” is a little ho-hum but when it shifts to the second act, it gets real badass right quick—I realize it's a carefully plotted bait and switch! A sinister surf bassline kidnaps the song and all the drums and guitar can do is try to keep up.

Despite being slated as the B-side, “On the Sleigh of the Damned” gets its own side to stretch its limbs. The track has a great late 60s strung out deathgroove, maybe a touch like Sex Church but with a far better chance of landing a soundtrack spot in a miniseries about the Manson murders. My favorite of the bunch! The problem here is I don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to pronounced “T.T.T.T.”. Am I really supposed to say “Tee-Tee-Tee-Tee” out loud when guests at my next cocktail party ask me where to find new blasts of burnt out psych squall?? 

V.Vecker - Hololine [Drongo Tapes] 

I know they’re out there (just like the truth) but I must confess I haven’t been keeping tabs on the cosmophonists lately. I was a big Radiant Husk guy back in the day (still am!) and this cassette by V.Vecker recalls that fellow celestial sax voyager. Hololine is split into two pieces “Holo” and “Line” (imagine that), the former being self-recorded and the latter being recorded north of the border by the illustrious Chris Dadge. “Holo” is heavy, dude. I don’t know what V.Vecker’s process is. A live improvisation? Multi-tracked affair? There’s such depth of sound that there must be (at minimum) loops orbiting (whether prepared or improvised) resulting in enough gravity to shift some planets out of alignment. Whether a honk, screech or a bowel-agitating motif, V.Vecker wrangles a range of sounds from the horn in a drifting vacuum of inevitability. (Please don’t run any of those metaphors by an actual physicist.) “Line” is calmer, more melodic; more of an exploring the cosmos full of wonderment type of affair rather than a gradual planetary implosion like the first side. Vecker surfs along amiably until being swallowed up in self-generated feedback and escaping just quickly enough to see what’s on the other side of the wormhole. The two sides resonate well together, sweet and sour, yin and yang. If you’re up for interstellar sax travel, get your ticket. Thumb up from me.

ROCKTOBER 2024 (DELAYYYYED)

Blood Rhythms - Horror Pilation [No Part of It] 

With the presence of “blood” and “horror” in the artist and album names, you’d be forgiven for bracing yourself for a harsh, Hospital-ish onslaught. You might even be forgiven for expecting rhythms, as well. Yes, you are forgiven (Pete Townshend voice) of all those sins because Blood Rhythms traffics in smooth, almost glassy tones. Blood Rhythms is a duo of Leslie Keffer and Arvo Zylo, two mainstays in the noise underground, and this Horror Pilation disc compiles the two sides of the Horror Pilation LP (the first in a six(!) LP series by the duo) in addition to material culled from other LPs in the series. Horror Pilation isn’t minimal (it has no problem flooding the room with frequencies) but it is gradual. With no obvious melodic structure in play, you’ll ask yourself: has this been changing constantly or has it not changed at all? As always, the truth lies somewhere in between. The two “sides” don't seem like an exact continuation but both sound like they are cut from the same session; to my ears, the second sounds like it’s had a light layer of frost wiped away but for all I know my mind is playing tricks on me and the two are sonically indistinguishable. As far the “bonus” material goes, the lesson might change but the essence of the message is the same. The tracks sound different than the first LP material, but are grown within the same parameters. All in all the disc runs 74 minutes, at seven bucks, it’s a real valu-pak of drones! Patient and budget-conscious dronehounds take note. 

The Blorp Essette Gazette - Volumes 3 & 4 [Gilgongo] 

Now here is a real doozy. Embarrassingly, I have to admit that I’m not that well-versed in LAFMS (that’s the Los Angeles Free Music Society, if you’re even less well-versed than I am), a seminal, intrepid collective of sonic explorers that have been scouting for the edge of the universe since at least the 1970s. The recordings on this double-disc set, compiled by Ace Farren Ford and Ju Suk Reet Meate, range from the 1960s to 2020s, that’s 60 going on 70 years of recorded music in one place! As you can imagine, this is an overwhelmingly eclectic couple hours of music making taking you on a deep sonic safari. 

The beginning of Volume 4 (disc 2), perfectly illustrates the range of imagination on display. It first starts with a 2003 recording of Lynn Carey reading her 1988 poem “Jazzpoem (my life in music… unf.)” a rumination on jazz and sex. Then slips into “Summer’s Day” by Collide Burger with Chicken Larry and Patrick Lubow, a 1978 foray into old timey folk ditties. After that, you get “Sydney and Cleo” by Electric Bill Robinson in 1990 which sounds both like a cartoon radio play and an avant-garde sound ensemble. (Sounds much different than Robinson’s hilarious hippie folk tune “No One as Gentle as You” which appears on disc 1.) Bet you can’t guess what comes next. Well, if you guessed a free jazz-rock goof-off Jefferson Airplane cover by Dr. Amazon (titled “Silly Rabbit” naturally) where the “singer” tries to clear the room by exhorting in the most strained vibrato imaginable, then give yourself a gold star because that is what comes next! 

There are nearly 30 tracks here so it’s not feasible to dig into all of them but rest assured that each one is quality in its own unique way. I’ll pick out a few notable highlights. An instant favorite is Dan and Letha Rodman Melchior’s musique concrete jam “The Purple Pill Redux” about penile growth and hot dogs and burgers. (Anyone hungry?) Bizarre and utterly fun. As is “Describe Again” by Testing Vault, which fits clearly into The Shadow Ring or later-Scott Walker avant-soundworld-song thing but without sounding derivative of either. Deranged sonic perpetrators Kommissar Hjuler und Frau Mama Baer contribute the catchiest number they’ll probably ever make, sounding a bit like an early 00s NYC freaky groove band (Gang Gang Dance and the like). Portland, OR’s Million Brazilians continue that vibe as well. Also from Portland, Lee Rockey’s late 60s violin-based rocketblast “Soundcraft” appears in two versions. The gleeful weirdness of “Light Bulb 2.1” by {AN} EeL is infectious. Donkey Flybye, James Dewey and Eric Zann set your house on fire with “JBE” using aluminum foil anti-charisma guitar and devices. “Kettleday” is excellent field recording/non-music/tactile rattle and clank from GX Jupitter-Larsen & Ace Farren Ford. Epic home-fi ditty “Down in the Dungeon” by Mr. Foon (“I’m just down here reading my science fiction/You know it’s real bitchin’”) is quite pleasing, particularly when the song is scuttled for a sophomoric shred sesh. Trance Farmers’ sample-based garage rock/drone collage “Gas Can” will keep you popping that rewind button. Concluding the set, Erica Rawlings contributes a reading of her eventful short story “Bloody Very Little Good Happens in Autumn” which I just might agree with. 

A true, and surprisingly listenable, kaleidoscope of the outer fringes of audio art. Recommended to those that can handle it. You know who you are! 

Cyanide Tooth - Sixth Dimension Vacation [Flat Plastic] 

The latest tape from NYC’s Cyanide Tooth (also one half of Maximum Ernst) jets down a neo-early-industrial track. Reminding me of the likes of early 80s Cabaret Voltaire, somewhere in that soft nexus of electrical alienation and mutant dance floor innovation. See “Clank City Club”, for instance. Obliterated recordings of some non-Western reed instrument bleat over the incessant thumps of a stalled engine. On “Chartered Trip”, grooves lurk but cascade on top of each other, weaving an itchy (but not abrasive) blanket. What sounds like 40 superimposed field recordings of Mr. Tooth’s 10th birthday party at the local laser tag outpost form a thick, crusty coat of frosting on top. On the second side, “Radio Eater” brings a little more heat with jagged static grind and high frequency penetration pushed right up to the fore. “Lo-Hi-O” latches onto a vocal fragment and blasts off into the syncopat-o-sphere. “Transcendental Llama” (featuring electric baglama—yeah, I had to look it up too—by Roy V) makes for a true change of pace. Dare I say “ambient” classification might be on the table, if it weren’t for the rapid, relentless, uneven strumming that underpins the affair. I’ll be honest, on first listen, I kept waiting for the Holy Molar to jump out from behind a bush and jab a feedback icepick in my ear, but lo and behold he’s content to surf the sonic sea, one with the spirit of the universe. Might this noisenik be mellowing as he matures? We won’t know until the next cassette drops! 

Tori Kudo John Dieterich Caleb Dailey - Tough Darts, Tender Nights [Moone/Kids and the Occult]

Now here is a fun little lathe from a trio of collaborators Tori Kudo, John Dieterich, and Caleb Dailey, entitled Tough Darts, Tender Nights (brought to the physical realm via Moone Records and Kids and the Occult). Kudo (Noise, et al), Dieterich (Deerhoof, et al) and Dailey (Moone Records, et al) being best buds and all decided to play a little game of voice memo round robin. One member recorded a song on his phone, then sent it to the next member who listened and then recorded his own song in response on his phone, then sent his song to the next member… and the wheel turns. After a few cycles the group was happy with the material that they generated (ranging from lonesome cowboy tunes to unidentifiable field recordings to pointed noise prickles) and compiled and edited it into a flowing collage of their collective conscience. The end result is entirely strange and beguiling, but eminently listenable and soothing as well. Rocking back and forth between country and blues traditions and the avant “traditions” of tape music, or Graham Lambkin, or Kudo himself! The way the recordings all leech into one another generates an impressive, personable web of tones, where the multiplicity of approaches initiates a singular, breathing machine, limbs coordinated as they stretch in opposing directions. Even more importantly: Tough Darts, Tender Nights forms an intimate, sonic product of friendship, and, gratefully, the listener is gifted a momentary portal inside. Recommended! 

Flower Festival - Age [Moone/Anxiety Blanket] 

One of the pitfalls of writing about music is that you have to write. Listening to music is great, but writing? Ugh. Sometimes, you put something on with an open word doc waiting and the honest intent to jot down notes. But then, you listen, and listen, and when it’s all over and done with you realize you didn’t jot down a goddamn thing! Infuriating. Case in point is this here LP, Age, the third full-length by Flower Festival but first for me, I keep listening but not actually writing anything. There is something so warm and comforting about it that it disabuses me of the notion that I need to be writing about anything. I should just relax and enjoy. Yes, my shortcomings in the productivity department are the music’s fault. Now that I’ve put my own head in a vice until I reach 200 words, how shall I go about describing this? Broad strokes first. It’s clearly a pop record. A soft one at that. But not an ordinary one, and never dull. 

I’m gonna wager a guess that Micah Dailey, Mr. Flow Fest himself, is a member of my generation, spending teenage years with the music of the early 00s. It reminds me of something that might have appeared at that moment in time, though without any mediation through a nostalgic lens. Flower Fest doesn’t sound like either of these bands, but there’s an ether of friendly sonic detritus reminiscent of The Books and Califone. (Well, the instrumental opener “Predictify” does kinda sound like The Books.) Sounds drift in and out, dissolve into one another. But that makes it sound like some shoegazey dream pop record and it’s not really that (although it’s not not that either). There are structured songs and crackling drums (such as on “Lunatic”), there is wonderful clarinet on “The Well”, alternately insistent with a chant-like rhythmicism or squirrelly and squawking, contributed by Seth Kassleman (Warm Climate), there are bent strings strangled out of tune perched prominently against sheets of plush falsetto coos on “Pedestrian”. Nothing is played straight, jagged and smooth peacefully coexist, all decisions are made with a deftness and confidence that’s obscured by the leisurely execution. The rhythms, the melodies, the voices in “Get Over It” all seem to trickle down like water in a brook. They may not all move at the same pace but they do so in collective unison. “How Wonderful” is the most straightforward (country-tinged) pop song on the record with its flowing pedal steel and drum machine pumping away underneath a blanket. It recalls something Daughn Gibson might make if he ever felt content and filled with romance, which I reckon has probably never happened. 

Dailey is joined by a sizable corps of contributors too long to list (though it does include Lonna Kelley who sings her own composition on “Behave” which seamlessly ingratiates itself with the rest of Dailey’s songs) and much like Micah’s brother Caleb’s last LP, there is a sense of community on display, adding a unique breadth and depth to each arrangement. When Dailey ends “Pedestrian”, with the spoken proclamation “I’m going to start my own nation” it doesn’t seem that far-fetched. 

Los Microbios - Cognitive Thinning [no label] 

Los Microbios, a project of Lance Jones based in the nether reaches of Vermont, has been making tunes at home since the 90s according to Jason Henn of Honey Radar, and he even taught Henn how to operate a 4-track. (A little nugget afforded by internet research, true journalist at work here.) Cognitive Thinning is a lo-fi record, and I mean a lo-fi record. This isn’t a “is it or isn’t it lo-fi?” conundrum people like to ruminate on. This is a low-fidelity recording; the instruments (except vocals, sometimes) are churned together into one mass of smeared frequencies. 

For a good chunk of its runtime, Cognitive Thinning wears it influences on its mildewy sleeve, whether that be the punk twilight between the 70s and 80s (“Trained to Follow” is a lowest of the lo-fi take on second album-era Suicide—with maybe a touch of Daniel Johnston as well, “John’s Amp” sounds like a budget boombox Joy Division demo and “A City is Not Science” is a clear doubletime reworking of “Blue Monday”) or the outgrowths of the British Invasion (an enjoyable cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Child of the Moon” and an epic rendition of “Oh Yoko” that crushes all the composition’s nimble maneuvers into overdriven, mis-biased oblivion). Elsewhere, there’s “Not Even a Pandemic Can Bring Us Back Together” a deep voiced keyboard ballad buried under a pile of fiberglass insulation and “Walls” a frantic, out of character 44-seconds of abrasion. The closest RIYL that came to my mind, evident on tracks such as “For Us”, is early Pink Reason when Kevin Failure would dabble in pop moves once in a while. There is an additional similarity in the sort of heaving, guttural quality to their baritone voices too. For all I know, Jones taught Kevin how to use his 4-track as well! 

Meadow Argus - Arboreal Frippery [Chocolate Monk]

Meadow Argus - The Chameleon’s Dish [Aural Canyon]

A couple new joints from Tynan Krakoff’s Meadow Argus project, one very focused and the other sprawling over an hour. First up is the sprawler, Arboreal Frippery released by the legendary UK label Chocolate Monk (I recently saw Cannonball Run for the first time and that has to be the etymological inspiration behind the name, right?). Culled from seemingly decades of tapes, including microcassettes recorded by Tynan on a late 00s hitchhiking jaunt with his brother, Arboreal Frippery goes here and there and whatever place it damn well pleases. My favorite piece is one of the longest, the finale “Trainwreck Tunnel” which finds a perfect symbiosis among its tape loops and chord organ drones. Elemental drift. “Every Person Contains a Universe” achieves ominous stasis over its 17 minutes. Is that a cow? That’s a cow, right? Mournful moos punctuate the undulating tape loops. That may sound quaint but not too much later you’ll hear someone confess “I’m afraid I’m going to kill somebody. Just by not knowing what to do.” “Balloon” is much more frenetic as a conversation plays with voices stepping over each tripping through a tangled bed of looped groans while “Ladybug” resonates with tape-garbled peaking autoharp plucks (I’m making a guess as autoharp is mentioned in the list of tools employed).

Arboreal Frippery might be a journey but The Chameleon’s Dish is an uneasy guided meditation. Consisting of two sidelong pieces “Color Wheel” and “Air to the Rock”, and beginning with the direction to “pick a spot, any spot” from our unnamed hypnotist. The Chameleon’s Dish sets up a juxtaposition between the intended tranquility of our speaker and the dilapidated grind and hiss of the loops spinning beneath his voice. Eschewing the conventional, round, smooth new age sound clichés usually associated with meditations, loops are sped up or slowed resulting in unsettling pitch evolutions. Are those gnawing bass frequencies relaxing or unnerving? Is that distant tinkling the product of chimes in the wind or a machine stamping carburetors? Are you meditating? Are the clouds beginning to part? Oops, tape over.

People Skills - Gunshots at Crestridge [Blackest Ever Black]

Apropos of nothing, here is a brief mention of a favorite discovery of Fall 2024. The People Skills name (the nom de plume of Jesse Dewlow) has been rattling around for a decade or more I feel like. I know I heard bits of Dewlow’s cough syrup slurred dirges here and there over the years, and nothing ever clicked. Still, I couldn’t let go of the fact that in-the-know folks like Siltbreeze, Digital Regress and I Dischi Del Barone had been deep in the People Skills pocket. Was I missing something, or were they? Who do I trust? Smart, tasteful people like them, or …myself? I know whom I’d put my money on, and it’s definitely not myself. So when the opportunity came to purchase the second “proper” People Skills album, Gunshots at Crestridge (brought to the public by the reputable Blackest Ever Black imprint), I said “fuck it, let’s find out what I’ve been missing.” Turns out it was a lot! 

Gunshots is a killer record. When listening, my head was swirling with all these elements I’ve loved from other artists and here they were, glued and stewed together. Banana Head’s slo-mo surf pop, Pink Reason’s bomb shelter ballads, (early) Yellow Swans’ love of aggressively present drum machines, or the ascendant ghost of Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart after his body was smeared on the motorway releasing all traces of his hyperventilating histrionics into the ether. There’s even some hints of Smog’s Wild Love (one of the finest records ever made), a downtrodden troubadour trying to mesh incongruous pieces of his life together, figuratively and sonically. But as with all the truly good ones, People Skills doesn’t sound that much like any of those. It can’t be anything but itself—enduring in an environment all its own, songs and non-songs seamlessly coexisting. Gunshots at Crestridge is a home (or a hole, depending on your predilection) to inhabit for 45 minutes at a time. Take a visit, I recommend it!

Shop Regulars - Shop Regulars [Merrie Melodies]

Now here is a real good thing. Picked this up at a show recently where Portland, OR’s Shop Regulars shared a bill with Famous Mammals from Oakland (by-way-of-Cheltenham) and my current fav Oregon band The Lavender Flu. The ol’ Regulars here are giving the Flu a run for their money though. Not that they have that much in common, although they both probably like The Velvet Underground given that they’re still playing guitars and drums two decades into the 21st century.

Speaking of the Lord’s messengers (ya know, the message of rock & roll), the VU riff-repeat template features PROMINENTLY in the Shop Regulars’ debut LP but instead of the usual honking, ripped speaker grooves, new life is breathed into that aged physique via Television-ish prickly plink plonk. The Regs’ tinnitus-inviting live incarnation that I witnessed was two guitars, one bass and two drummers, and it sounds like the same thing was happening when they rolled tape. (Though there’s a list of like 12 disciples that played on the record, headed up by Shop manager Matt Radesovich.) In the live environs the rhythm section was humming like a finely tuned jalopy engine, Radesovich smashed one chord at hummingbird speed while another guitarist plowed into staggering arpeggios.

The LP recalls post-Y2K double guitar angle attacks ranging from the first Ex Models’ album to the first Strokes’. The context has been reshapen though. Did I mention that there are some long songs on this record, and there’s only five of them? (Come to think of it, that’s a lot like the last Ex Models album.) So what’s happening on top of all the downstrokes? Radesovich's drawling, semi-somnolent vocals, that’s what! I’ve spent a long time trying to place it. I was thinking maybe Lee Ranaldo’s speak-sing thing, but I really think it is an American-accented Ben Wallers that he’s reminding me of. 

Okay, okay, all this talk about New York City bands (and whatever bog Ben Wallers crawled out of) but what about my home state of California? Oh yeah, that’s right, there’s some fuckin’ Creedence running through the Regulars’ veins too. CCR wasn’t shy about dropping a 12-minute head nodder/guit-grinder on Side B and neither are the Regs! ‘Xcept when the Regs do it, they call it the “Emerson Run Down”. Emerson Run Down on the corner, if ya know what I mean. (Fuckin’ zing!) While his lackeys are locked into a perfectly-practiced hustle-trance, Matt R’s voice is fed through some kind of bizarre mid-humped EQ or bandpass filter, pinging around the marbled walls of heaven; he’s a mic swallower without even raising his voice. He intones “go tell it on the mountain” “row your boat ashore” and you realize these really are trumpeter angels spreading the gospel of redemption through rhythm and riffage. And that’s just one of the five holy mantras of rock & roll on this record. Get it. Get zen. One of my favorite things about 2024! 

Workers Comp - Workers Comp [Ever/Never]

Baltimore’s Workers Comp had never entered my radar and I’m ever grateful to Ever/Never for compiling their first three tapes (with a new “bonus” track tacked on, naturally) on a single LP, the eponymous Workers Comp. There’s no irony in the name. “Pressure Today” finds lyrical fodder in hex wrenches and conveyor belts, industrial decline and decay. The record is brimming with tales of dreary toil: “We all could use a break/From the shovel and the rake/And when boss says ‘How are you?’/You say ‘Surviving the dream…’” Workers Comp is the voice of the people. 

The Workers’ approach is so simple that it’s hard to describe. It feels a little rich to uncritically accept that this music was made only a few years ago. It just as easily sounds like it could be a 47-copy private press run from ‘76 by a trio of college dropouts-cum-working stiffs in Missouri documenting their life’s work, airing their grievances from the factory floor on “Gilt Rig”, steeped in the methods of Blue Ӧyster Cult. The inclusion of “Alley-Oop (1996)” ruins that fantasy for obvious reasons but I don’t care because it’s fucking beautiful. The fidelity, the performances, they’re perfectly imperfect. Not amateurish, just imperfect. The songs though, every single one, now those are just proper perfect. Workers Comp has either stumbled upon or finely honed (don’t care which) a twitchy, twangy Heartland version of UK DIY.

Throwing a curveball from the jump, the LP kicks off with a country tune “When I’m Here”, loose and entirely credible. But it’s a prelude paving the way for the ass kickers “Pick and Choose” and “High on the Job”. “Job”, in particular, pops in my head constantly with its guttural vocal hook. If you’ve held fond feelings for any David Nance tune in the past decade-plus, this tune is a must as Workers Comp match or surpass every Nance tune I’ve heard save for “Leather in the Box”. I could say the same about Mordecai. “Good Luck” and “Shoot” with their plinky guitar lines and nerved-up rhythms might’ve even been hits in “The Great Garage Revival” of my youth, but alas they’re a few decades too late. Such is life.

A unique element of the record is that four different singers take the lead at various points. Joshua Gillis handles most vocal duties (and he’s a damn fine frontman) but “Never Have I Ever” brings in a ringer on vocals, Anna McClellan, and borrows half of the Shop Assistants’ peppy “Safety Net” bassline. McClellan’s guileless, Mo Tuckerish-presence on the mic is a welcome change of pace from the hollowed-out bitterness that leads the charge the rest of the time. Luke Reddick sounds like punk rock Mark Hollis on “Peel Away” hollering over top of a sick guitar melody but on the depress-o-matic ballad “It’s Fine” he sounds truly shell shocked. The only comparison I can come up with is watching this drunk old man singing karaoke to the slowest country song I’ve ever heard at The Crab Bowl on Barbur Blvd. Heartrending stuff. Meanwhile the “bonus” track “Basic Values” surfs along on searing guitar leads and is sung by Ryan McKeever (also of Staffers fame), and it’s one of the best tunes on the LP!

You probably haven’t watched DIG! 100 times in your life like I have but there’s this random dude at a NYC subway station that says about the Brian Jonestown Massacre: “I was there in the 60s and these guys have ‘it’”. I wasn’t there in the 60s, but Workers Comp bloody well have “it”. 

My favorite 2024 release? We’re nearing the end and Workers Comp is in pole position. I’m scared to investigate if this is a memorial compilation or if Workers Comp is still a going concern, because if they are, Workers Comp is my new favorite band. I’m so in love.

Late Spring 2024 (Part 2)

Al Karpenter - The Forthcoming [Ever/Never] 

Al Karpenter & CIA Debutante - Al Karpenter & CIA Debutante [Ever/Never] 

When something cool finds its way to me from Spain, there’s a good chance Mattin is involved somehow (see La Grieta) and Al Karpenter is no different. Much like Alice Cooper before him, “Al Karpenter” is both the name of the bandleader and the band. On The Forthcoming LP released by Ever/Never, Al Karpenter (the band) is rounded out by Marta Sainz, Enrique Zaccagnini and Mattin, of course. The participants don’t stop there. Ever the collaborator, Al Karpenter (the band) is joined by one or more of the following on five out of six tracks: Triple Negative, Suni Kim, and Dominic Coles. The Forthcoming is a calculated mess, and a pleasant one at that. The earth is ever shifting beneath the listeners feet but Al Karpenter never assaults nor overwhelms. There is a surprising amount of space given the number of humans who had a hand in the birth of these sounds. Karpenter’s fragmentary lyrics find air to breathe amid rumblings of double bass, frayed guitar chords, left-channel jazz band ruminations, bleep-bloops and shhhhzzkkszzz of digital sandpaper. Just about everything is at Al Karpenter’s disposal to form these fractured fairy tales. There’s little in the way of suspended sounds, which makes the sustained tones that rear their heads on album highlight “Happy B-Day! (with Dominic Coles and Suni Kim)” all the more arresting. And when you finally arrive at the epic closer “Drood (Can You Hear Me Now?)” you know for sure that Mr. Karpenter kneels at the altar of St. Scott (Walker) and everything becomes clear as a stained glass crucifixion. Pulling from eras as far ranging as dada, beat poetry, underground rock and software-derived sound design, Al Karpenter brews a cauldron of complex and complimentary sonic scraps. 

The collaborative spirit lives on with the eponymous debut of Al Karpenter & CIA Debutante (also on Ever/Never), who likely found each other to be their only match on whatever dating app is popular with European avant-rock outfits these days. In my prior experience with CIA Debutante I mentioned the fragrances of The Shadow Ring and Excepter, and I’d say based on those comparisons alone you can hear the influence of CIA Debutante right away on “Born Dead’. A slow, queasy crawl of comatose drum machine and drifting oscillators. Does CIA Debutante make Al Karpenter weirder, and vice versa? At what point do you just hit the max weirdness brick wall and no amount of multipliers can push the weirdness an inch further? “What’s left of the village?” Karpenter repeatedly intones on “Ruined Map” the most blearly-eyed and quietly antagonistic track on the record. I’m pretty sure the villagers fucking left, dude, you were just too weird. I don’t think they took kindly to your insistent performance of “Fuck You All To Fade No More” in the town square, with all the unappreciated frequencies flyin’ at ‘em. “For Your Love” is, unfortunately, not a Yardbird’s cover. Come to think of it, that probably would have overweirded the weird wall. Instead, it’s the occasional filter sweep, someone rustling around in the kitchen for that goddamn missing saucepan, a distressed woman hollering and Karpenter showing up at the end to chide us: “You have to leave a lasting impression”, he says. Indeed. 

The supergroup attempts to make a hardcore record and a Mark E. Smith tune at the same time on “Public Scaffolding” with Al Karpenter seemingly doubling its typical tempo. The arrangement shifts imperceptibly at first sounding like a theoretical rock band then an industrial appliance testing facility by the end. Every anti-rock & roll record has got a party tune, and “Medieval Cocaine” is the party tune here (fans of Budokan Boys’ I’m So Broken Up About You Dying oughta take note). Feel that bass curling up your belly making you want to freaky deaky? It wraps with a plunderphonic D’n’B jam just to keep you on your toes. Perhaps most disturbing of all are “Put On Your Mask” and “This is an Invisible Song” which are the most harmonious moments of the album making them somehow more deeply unsettling than the cacophonies. I think it's pretty easy to figure out whether Al Karpenter or any of his/its collaborators are for you. 

(blouseusa) - Stimulus Overinclusion [Drongo Tapes] 

Now something for the techno-hippies. At its core, the first side of Stimulus Overinclusion is about sparking up some incense and summoning sonic spirits under the sullen night sky. However, that tuneage is thoroughly electronically molested by the hands of the 21st century media gods. What I dig about (blouseusa) is that it’s not a folktronica act. Some delicate acoustic plucks, a little skittering tick-tick-ticka-tick. Snooze... That act expired almost immediately upon birth and it was only the truly inventive ones (or ones with really good songs) that got any mileage out of those rather docile, barren “soundscapes”. The great Blouses of America, however, avoid that trap (beat). Most of the time they’re mingling their dalliances with acoustic and non-acoustic realms so that they form one thoroughly merged sound simulation. Take for instance the “drum solo” that opens the second side of the tape (the title track, naturally). Perhaps that drum solo was at one time played by a human but what you’re hearing is not just a human playing a drum solo. It’s edited, refracted, though not enough for the distracted ear to notice. It’s defiantly not a drum circle either, the lux blouse has left all that hippie shit on Side A. The real surprise here is “Digable Kale”, which features an unspecified contribution from Nathan Smurthwaite and recalls the bygone era when the youth cared about smashing their faces to bands like Polvo and 8+ minute complex rock & roll tunes. How’s that for a left turn? Oh yeah, Stimulus Overinclusion wraps on a 90 second Tangerine Dream-damaged sermon. Tons of ideas on display here, most of ‘em good, and no real unifying element. A cassette for those who like surprises! 

Kingbird - Kingbird [no label] 

Released in the dying light of 2023, this eponymous debut LP by Kingbird appeared out of the blue on my doorstep earlier in the year, in the middle of a city-debilitating ice storm no less. I was unexpectedly perplexed that the United States Postal Service even bothered to drop by in such dire circumstances, let alone that the proprietors of the aforementioned Kingbird acted on the notion of scrawling my address on a cardboard box. As though I was not already a recipient of great generosity from strangers, I was blessed to find that this mysterious Kingbird who nested on my welcome mat was actually quite good! Not so mysterious after I read the back cover that delineates the responsibilities of Kingbird’s two members, Patrick Crowson and Josh Allen. There are several wonderful qualities at play, one being that I can’t pinpoint a perfect analog to compare it to. Hall of Fame or early Caethua came to mind. Califone maybe, less the electric tricks. And wasn’t “kingbird” in a Califone album title? (It is actually Heron King Blues, you buffoon Ed.) Perhaps Mickey Newbury’s art-country opuses on the blissful mist of “Healed Already”. But none of them are right. When you fail the comparison test, that’s a pass in my book. The sound is rustic. A touch old timey, but not full revivalism a la The Wandering Stars, and the tunes are delivered in 21st century fidelity so this isn’t a past-fixated duo. Songs often just seem to linger, hover, gently existing. Open but intimate. A hummingbird is moving even when it's still, apparently a Kingbird is part of the same genus or phylum or whathaveyou. There is a pleasing amount of rust on Crowson’s pipes, and his raspy croon sells each one of the LP’s tunes. Take a trip to the pond, float on your back and gaze at the leaves on the trees for a while. Kingbird is a nice place to be. 

Power Strip - Nothing Yet [Drongo Tapes] 

What a great name. Power Strip. I’m amazed I haven’t come across someone else using it. I’m ashamed that I didn’t come up with it for my list of generic utility product names that have no bands attached. Nothing Yet, the second PS release for Drongo Tapes, is a handful of songs in the solo “shoegazey” dream pop vein that grows ever more popular and I become ever more suspicious of. But, hey, not only does Power Strip have good taste in names, Power Strip has good taste in tunes. Power Strip a.k.a. Nellie Albertson has a lovely voice and paces Nothing Yet quickly (perhaps a little too quickly at times) so things don’t get boring, or sound especially derivative. Sounds like she’s a fan of the full 4AD roster rather than copying a specific band. Nothing Yet is fragmentary, light not weightless, conjuring a vague apparition once or twice of the easy listening version of The Goslings’ sludge dreams. The obvious centerpiece here is “Fog Bath” which feels like it takes up half of the tape’s runtime. Albertson manages to move the song gracefully through various permutations, never once stepping wrong. However, the finale “Hole”, delivers the only misstep according to my rulebook: the appearance of a cheapo drum machine. It’s a bit of a buzzkill but the song is strong enough to succeed anyway, with Albertson freely showing off her pop prowess. All in all, a promising tape.

Tyvek - Overground [Ginkgo] 

In the not too distant past, I had a dream where I somehow invited myself into Tyvek, then convinced everyone in the band to record a Christmas song that I had written “in the style of Tyvek”. The song was really good, naturally. Some months later, I had a sequel dream where this classic Xmas recording not only still existed but was popular enough that I was gallivanting around my undergrad university being chased by campus police, ostensibly for the shooting of a music video. A true rebel. So, last December, when I was completely caught off guard that Tyvek had dropped their first LP, Overground, in 7 years—a Christmas miracle in my mind—I guess I shouldn’t have been. The Lord had been speaking to me the whole time: “I shall summon forth a new Tyvek and the world will rejoice.” 

Tyvek breathlessly tears through seven songs on the A-side, tried and true behavior replete with bashed strings, bashed drums and rapid fire plosives. “What Were We Thinking” already feels like it’s been a Tyvek classic for years. (The twin 50s rock & roll guitar leads are not to be missed.) I can say the same about “What It’s For”. It's like a Tyvek tune I’ve known all my life. Except there’s honking sax all over it. Oh yeah! Did I mention that the band has a full-time sax player (Emily Roll) on the LP? How cool. Kevin Boyer, Tyvek President & CEO, has been the preeminent master of turning the quotidian experiences of daily life into rallying cries and he reveals another “Low! Tumble Dry! Low! Tumble Dry! Low! Tumble Dry! Low!” on “Going Through My Stuff”. And effortlessly turns “I’m seeing U-Hauls everywhere” into a singalong chorus on (you guessed it) “U-Hauls”. 

Overground really blasts off on its second side. “Rhythm/Pattern” is the frantic, syncopated highlight of the record. Paired perfectly behind it is the comedown,“Trash & Junk”, grooving like a caffeinated Velvets jam. Speaking of… Tyvek venture to the outskirts with their own “Gift”, the loose limbed, free flowing title track. It’s killer. Up there with the great Tyvek experiments like “Underwater 3”. Boyer ruminates on the weather, and poses inward questions like “Is it too late to be stateless?” as the band unfurls the groove around him. What more to say? Nearing the two decade mark, Tyvek are living legends at this point. 

What - The Unconscious is a Machine for Operating an Animal [Eiderdown] 

When pedal steel, “incidental percussion” and test equipment appear in the list of credited instruments my ears always perk up. What is a duo Alan F. Jones, the steel player, and Dave Abramson, the percussionist. I’ve got a solo disc somewhere from Jones (he records as A.F. Jones) and a Sloow tape with Abramson in duo mode with Wally Shoup (R.I.P.) but this is the first time I’ve heard them join forces. Going through my memory banks, I think the only other recording I own of this pedal steel+drums configuration is the wailing splatter of The Rocker by Jailbreak (the duo of Heather Leigh and Chris Corsano) and What generates vastly different results. 

The Unconscious is a Machine for Operating an Animal is meditative at times but always a little scary. Alienation via vast emptiness. Jones can make the pedal steel sound like an air raid siren or a shadow falling across a rock face, depending on mood. Opener “Mesopause” is as perfect a statement of purpose as I can imagine. The sounds positively fill the room, harrowing haunt-factor well-intact. The album title is taken from a scientific essay by Cormac McCarthy and I can’t say that I’m surprised that that’s where these guys’ heads are at. The title track is the most serene moment on the tape, as the pedal steel is let loose to indulge in the unbridled beauty of the instrument’s endless tones. Alternately, “The Charm of Crisis” sounds as if it’s nearly a solo percussion piece yet the atmosphere is as thick as ever. “Sun-Bleached Mandible” seems similar from the outset with lots of space (not silence) with massive thwacks raining down from the heavens every so often. Almost imperceptibly, the scattershot ambiance settles into a serious groove. Not funky in the least, in fact it’s pretty unfunky, but totally hypnotic with spastic bouts of free drumming dappling the pulsating surface. A tastefully minimalist trip to the kosmische-zone and What’s best track. There is such a mindmeld between Jones and Abramson that it’s frankly jaw dropping that Animal is only What’s first release. These guys were born to play together.