Surrender Your Poppy Field, Guided by Voices’ first release in the 2020s, marks an important point in the band’s history. As their 30th studio album, one might expect the band to rest on their laurels as unofficial royalty among the indie crowd and phone it in. Instead they remain true to themselves and put out music that sounds fun, all while finding ways to build upon it and stay fresh.
Louder, thornier, and more unreservedly aggressive than their past EPs, Total Restraint offers a title that skews paradoxical at first blush. Dig deeper and the title holds some weight. Total Restraint and, by extension, Tosser, understand the value of additional room and have found a way to weaponize its effect.
What’s Tonight To Eternity, the third full-length project under the name, maybe Cindy Lee’s most fulfilled and fulfilling record yet, with moments 1950s and ’60s-tinged pop fighting their way to the surface of feedback and abstracted noise, poignantly investigating the intertwining nature of love and hurt, beauty and horror.
Mush’s 3D Routine reads as a living credo for the contemporary slacker-class malaise. The Leeds foursome deftly balances personal with political, at the same time toeing the line between id-driven punk and a little headiness for good measure. Their debut LP is music for millennial drifters, art-rock nerds, and disillusioned leftists all alike.
Demonstrating Visible Differences of Height is the latest release from indie project Babehoven— a Philadelphia-based duo of songwriter/vocalist Maya Bon and coproducer/multi-instrumentalist Ryan Albert. In context of their past pair of EP’s, the release establishes Babehoven as a prolific project with remarkable consistency for quality songwriting amidst lots of changes for the band.
New Petal Instants is what the Traveling Wilburys might have sounded like if Wilco and the Meat Puppets were on board alongside Bob Dylan. It’s fitting for there to be an undercurrent of anxiety in an album released by an American band in 2020. Arbor Labor Union addresses that while expertly offering a solution simultaneously.
0 Stars is the brainchild of Mikey Buishas, and the latest of many beloved musical projects the New York City-based songwriter has been a part of in recent years. The debut album Blowing on a Marshmallow in Perpetuity, released on Babe City Records, contains many facets of Buishas’ unique style that listeners can expect from his brainy brand of guitar-forward music
Richard Dawson is a folk troubadour for all times. His last album, Peasant, was a concept album about Medieval England. With his newest album, 2020, he blasts into the future with an exploration of contemporary England. The riffs are heavy, the tone is dark and Dawson proves himself to be an adept observer of our present condition.
Live ’19 has that special historicity in spades. It is, in a sense, a greatest-hits compilation for a band eight years into the global fight for psych-garage supremacy. They waste no time in introducing you to all the tools in their toolbox: their rhythm section locks in, acting as a springboard for the guitars, which trade in their trademark bright tones and West Coast country fretwork.
After almost half a dozen years, Habibi have released their highly anticipated second full-length album, Anywhere But Here. The record represents a culmination of several years of songwriting and even revisits some of the band’s earliest, unfinished creative output in a way that explores new territory while staying true to what they do best.
Their latest and apparently last release, Little Curly/boy is a Bird, is a collage of harsh glitchy noises, choral singsong, crying woodwinds, warm synths, unhinged vocals, and commanding programmed drum hits. Held together by seemingly-random motifs and bookended by the ramblings of a strange character known as “Gampy,” this album highlights both Beverly Tender’s songwriting chops and ear for aesthetic.
Maybe it’s because of the title, but this most recent record feels like the flip-side contraposition to the sunny, surf ambience that surf tunes usually convey. Night of the Worm Moon conjures images of an empty beach beneath a bright and starry sky while soft winds gently blow ocean waves to a foamy shore.
Pop melodies, grunge tones, folk fingerpicking, and post-punk song structures are patched beautifully and darkly into a cohesive record on Treadles’ And the Rocks…. Each track unpredictably runs the gamut of sound, tone, and emotion, never staying in the same place for long, making the album a unique and rewarding listen.
Good Big is a debut record laden with meticulous riffs, built on rhythm and supplemented by a constant drive. The label describe it as “top-notch egg punk,” with nods to Minutemen and Suburban Lawns. It stops, starts, and speeds up. With a fade out, you’re able to catch your breath before being catapulted into the next track.
It'll scratch your itch for punk and power-pop from top to bottom, but when Personality Cult push outside genre boundaries on their second album, New Arrows, the results turn electric. Packed with driving beats, there's not a slow moment until the finale, and with nary a song longer than two minutes and thirty seconds.
En Attendant Ana's Juillet is another absolute gem of an album released by the mighty Trouble in Mind. This is the second full length from this fantastic fuzz pop band from Paris. It is an album of triumphant swells, hooks, and horns marked with lyrics urging one to figure out that thing you are trying to figure out and move forward.
