by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)

Welcome to FUZZY MEADOWS, our weekly recap of this week's new music. We're sharing our favorite releases of the week in the form of albums, singles, and music videos along with the "Further Listening" section of new and notable releases from around the web. It's generally written in the early hours of the morning and semi-unedited... but full of love and heart. The list is in alphabetical order and we sincerely recommend checking out all the music we've included. There's a lot of great new music being released. Support the bands you love. Spread the word and buy some new music.

*Disclaimer: We are making a conscious effort not to include any artist in our countdown on back-to-back weeks in order to diversify the feature, so be sure to check the "Further Listening" as well because it's often of top-notch quality too.

BLACKLISTERS | “Leisure Centre” EP

The critics are calling Blacklisters’ new EP “an irresistible good time,” at least this “critic” is. Leisure Centre, the first in a planned series of EP releases from the Leeds band, captures all the things that Blacklisters such a great band and then throws them a bit off their axis. The band’s signature piercing distortion is met with the sludgy low end, a menacing and enrapturing mix of atonal attack and rubbery grooves… but then there’s the saxophone. Guest Rob Mitchell adds some truly wild sax to both “Why Deny It” and “Wrong Way Home,” throwing the songs into a tailspin, with sax shredding up and down the mix, adding to the already impossibly thick chaos. Recorded live over the span of a weekend, it captures the band in their natural setting, heaving and collapsing, entranced and explosive, always keeping us on our toes as the band seem to combust with little notice. As always, Billy Mason-Wood proves to be one of the best vocalists of our generation, with slurred and demented howls taking the self-serious to task, offering the proverbial “piss in the punchbowl” throughout each track.

GODCASTER | “Diamond’s Shining Face”

There’s a seismic shift happening on Godcaster’s upcoming self-titled album. The Brooklyn band seem to have traded their more exuberant and whimsical inclinations for something much more relentless and harrowing. Gone are the carnival-esque acrobatics, replaced in turn with crushing rhythms and an apocalyptic dread. Let’s call it a sign of the times, but in the hands of Godcaster, even the dark sounds radiant. Due out March 10th via Ramp Local (YHWH Nailgun, Sea Moss, Kolb), lead single “Diamond’s Shining Face” sets the tone, a track that’s tense and brooding at its inception only to explode in a fiery wreck as it evolves. The sextet have always made the most of their progressions, tangling together music both haunting and intricate, and they sound like a well-oiled machine here, convulsing their way into the demented scourge of the hook. Sliding forward like the ground beneath them is giving away, Godcaster is pulling from the grit of the Bad Seeds with their own deranged tales of abandon, and giving it the sonic density and brash unpredictability it deserves.

GUT HEALTH | “Electric Chrome Party Girl” EP

The unbridled post-punk disco energy of Gut Health’s debut EP has arrived in full and we’ve been hooked like bait since we first heard “Inner Norm,” a true song-of-the-year contender. Electric Party Chrome Girl, released this past Friday via Marthouse Records (Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice, Heir Traffic, It Thing), is oozing with vitality, set in place by thick elastic bass and drums, cementing the immediate groove, operating as both the backbone and immediate core of their sound. Influenced by queer and non-binary rave culture as well as the no-wave scene of the 80’s, there’s definitely some James Chance and Blondie to be found within Gut Health’s music, built upon taut punk songs flooding your senses, punchy and sparking with passionate yelps. Athina Uh Oh is the perfect front person for the band, bending colorful vocal melodies and expanding syllables for nuance, throwing in the ever impeccable “whoop whoop” that you’d never guess you needed, but can now never live without. Everything congeals into a tornado of dizzying dance punk bliss on a sure fire debut.

RICHARD DAWSON | “The Hermit”

The music of Newcastle’s Richard Dawson encompasses a world all its own, a destination not quite past, present, or future, but some weird hodgepodge of all three, where baroque folk music and broken down prog reside with forays into electronic soundscapes, the use of open ambient space, and controlled dissonance. It’s in Dawson’s music that we can step outside of reality and simply exist within his sound. The Ruby Cord is third in a trilogy that began with Peasant and 2020, this time focusing on the future, but not necessarily our future, rather the idea of the future and the disconnect from reality with our embrace of the virtual. Themes aside though, it’s a stunning work of brilliance, built on patience and understanding, warmth and comfort. Sure, “The Hermit” is 41 minutes, which to some is going to be an impenetrable obstacle, but for anyone willing to experience the moment, to close themselves off from the outside noise of the world, and allow yourself to be pulled into Dawson’s orbit, it’s worth every last moment. Opening with detached strings, plucked and bowed in time with gorgeous brushed rhythms, and some soft washes of piano, it feels meditative, with each resonate note fading into the ether. As the song progresses, Dawson’s signature vocals spin tales like a traveling bard from medieval days, presenting a world part surreal but situated in the nature of this reality, from grand mountains to mushrooms and moss. By the time we reach the song’s coda, with choir intact, we’re adrift on a boat out to sea, centered between smoke and rainbows, a life both destructive and beautiful. A taper of rainbows, faintly aglow, forever.

WEYES BLOOD | “And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow“ LP

The latest Weyes Blood album is astoundingly beautiful and yet it takes its narrative arc from the opposite end of the spectrum… doom, despair, general dread found in the here and now. As suggested in the title however, And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow, may derive from the epicenter of bad times, Natalie Mering reminds us that we’ll pull through, that the time for being afraid has passed, and we’re in a world where we must shape our own future, with lightness and heart among the core principles. The orchestration of the album picks up where the phenomenal Titanic Rising left off, built on sweeping strings, gentle pianos, acoustic guitars, soft woodwinds, and layered arrangements that pull every embittered and beautiful emotion together, progressing simple folk songs into grandiose movements. As always though, It’s Mering’s voice that so often steals the show, its power and beauty giving sentiment to her words, lilting and wavering, often layered and harmonized with Laurel Canyon era perfection. Even as her songs mostly stretch toward and beyond the six minute mark, there’s an immediacy to her reflections, captured in her vocal delivery, as we’re invited into her thoughts, both intimate and with concern for humankind.

BONUS:

KRILL | “Alam No Hris” LP (Reissue)

It’s rare that we highlight a reissue within the “Fuzzy Meadows” column, but then again, Krill were a rare band. The band’s debut album, Alam No Hris, was always as scrappy as they came, a blistered and warbly recording that captured the essence and spirit of the trio as much as it did the actual recorded output. In celebration of it’s tenth anniversary, the album has been reissued by Sipsman, a new label founded by Mike Caulo, an integral part of Krill history. This isn’t your standard remastered reissue… this is a mastered reissue, as the original album we all know and love was never actually mastered in the first place, one of its many endearing qualities. It’s a time capsule to the origins of the band’s existential questioning and their delightfully knotted progressions, part garage punk, part prog, residing in a world raised by Don Caballero as much as Arthur Russell, but perhaps most importantly, the DIY communities that surrounded the band. The band always knew how to write great songs, giving tenacity and dexterity to intellectual thought, and then rattling it out in raw bursts of sheer brilliance and decidedly ungraceful grace. Krill forever (but also be sure to check out Knot).

Further Listening:

Fuzzy Meadows: The Week's Best New Music (November 14th - November 20th)