Härvest, Poison Ruïn’s second album overall (depending how you look at it) and first record together with their new label, retains the band’s flair for the medieval, distilled in the toil and struggle of the era’s poor and working class, a sentiment that hasn’t changed all that much in modern times.
While Meyhem Lauren will forever represent Queens, Champagne For Breakfast, comes as a historical West Coast moment, the first collaboration between Madlib and DJ Muggs. A meeting of undeniable giants, the legendary producers work in unison together to design the wavy elegance and the minimalist psych-laced blueprint.
Deerhoof are sparked by the power of imagination, picturing a better world and doing their part to bring the rest of us along. This is what Miracle-Level, their nineteenth album is about, focusing on the daily miracles of life, the small details, attempting to see the beauty of human life that operates in resistance to corporate control, war, and hatred.
After five long years, the trio return with Neither The One Nor The Other, But A Mockery of Both, a new EP, surprise released without fanfare via 12XU. The title, a reference to the fact that the record was re-recorded several times over the past few years, is a gift of their debased sense of humor, a sign that the years haven’t left them embittered.
Shana Cleveland described her third solo record, Manzanita, as “a supernatural love album set in the California wilderness,” a succinct description that sets both scene and mystifying tonality. The natural essence of the woods, mountains, rolling hills, and open skies, are apparent not from setting but from sound.
Best experienced in full, Compact Trauma is an evolution for the band, warping and weaving through loungy psych and fragmented art rock to create something glowing and evergreen. It’s detailed in inner struggle, fighting demons of self-doubt and addiction, wrestling with defeatist mental issues and finding its place in the world.
Mach-Hommy released his first new record of the year in the form of Notorious Dump Legends: Volume 2, a collaborative album together with Tha God Fahim. They are a great duo, whose voices fit together with aural perfection, melodic, focused, slick, raw, with their stream-of-conscious rhymes capturing a spark in each other.
Pile have never quite released the same album twice, yet remain almost impossibly consistent. The ability to constantly change and progress their sound while still remaining unequivocally true to themselves is a testament to the strength of their songwriting and their collective performances. All Fiction is their biggest leap into new territory thus far, and yet it feels like the Pile we’ve always loved.
The sextet have made an essential punk record, full of charm and attitude, with songs both serious and undeniably fun, from tales of youthful hi-jinx to furious odes of female empowerment. The band blend together synth punk and hardcore in the process, resulting in a set that’s tough as nails, wonderfully askew, and impressively catchy.
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.
