Cloud Rat, after 10 years, still finds ways to make music that is instant and familiar. If you were to listen to their S/T record in 2010 and then to Polinator, it wouldn’t feel too dissimilar. There is still that chugging low end guitar sludge, barreling up against frantic drums that anyone would call grindcore.
Thurston Moore, in line with his experimental impulse and illuminated by improvisation, builds in Spirit Counsel a test that is pure light, full of freshness. He digs into atmospheres ranging from Sonic Youth to pure black metal. The movements of the record are complex, abstract but extremely coherent with the live experience.
Beijing-based duo Gong Gong Gong are exporting their stoic strain of hypnotizing punk through none other than Brooklyn’s Wharf Cat Records. The band relays their hammering psychedelic blues from the back of a tireless nag, rhythmically blurring borders between styles and scenes across their excellent full length debut Phantom Rhythm.
The album’s success hinges on its open embrace of experimentation, vulnerability, and the creation of art for art’s sake; those are the places where the work shines the brightest, in a perfect blend of form and function. From start to finish, Chastity Belt is both a reclamation of the artistic process and a damn good record.
On Where Does the Time Come From, the third full length from Sweet Williams, Thomas House primarily forgoes his elongated blues-y dirges of previous releases, for a tighter almost claustrophobic feel. House still uses his space wisely with well placed guitar lines knifing through pounding drums and insistent throbbing bass.
Kal Marks know how to stir up a racket, to put it mildly. Never has that been more apparent than on their latest EP, aptly titled Let the Shit House Burn Down. Impossibly rivaling the intensity of their heralded tinnitus-inducing live shows, the recording finds the trio fully exploring the enormous range of their established sound.
The four-piece’s third full-length record, Patience, is an effortless display of femme power, unbridled rage, and candid introspection. Despite its short 26-minute runtime, the album is a diary of sorts that sees guitarist and vocalist Marisa Dabice explore past memories and possible futures in a bid to figure this shit called life out.
Listening to Seattle’s The Berries for the first time will place you in an intersection of nostalgia, mood, and genre. Their latest ten-track LP Berryland, released via Run For Cover, continues with the band’s bending of orthodox spheres of music, hinting at mid-1990s alternative rock, a touch of southern twang and Americana.
Can’t Talk, Being Chased is densely layered, complete with tasty country flourishes like fiddle, lap steel, and horns, but still feels appropriately rough around the edges. You could imagine the band honing the album highlight “Mute ‘Em All” in a Philadelphia basement, adding every possible overdub to try and make it sound like it wasn’t honed in a Philadelphia basement.
Fire-Toolz’s Orange Milk debut is a dense amalgamation of maximalist prog and quantum physics, the holographic principle of glitched jazz fusion. Field Whispers (Into The Crystal Palace) is Marcloid’s experimentation with calculated mayhem, as the producer jukes fluidly through acerbic breakdowns and splintering blast beats.
This collection of new work by iji's Zach Burba feels like a homecoming. It's a collage of home-studio tracks for which Burba casually incorporated friends and absorbed their worlds. It takes a bevy of styles and moods and places them under the same warm haze. Your Music lends credence to an embrace of process, method, and habit.
Upon the 20th anniversary of Robert Pollard and Doug Gillard’s Speak Kindly of Your Volunteer Fire Department we get a remaster of one of the shining moments in Pollard’s never-ending discography. This record was birthed from Pollard sending Gillard songs he had written for Gillard to compose music for separately which Pollard would add vocals to later.
This record strikes one as the confident expression of a band very solid in what they’re making. If one looks at the liner notes, they can see another expression of this: their previous full-length was credited as being written by Rebecca Ryskalczyk, while Bethlehem Steel credits the band itself as writing the songs. This is a band hitting their stride.
