The Green Child began as a long-distance collaboration between band members Raven Mahon (ex-Grass Widow) and Mikey Young (Total Control, Eddy Current Suppression Ring). Shimmering Basset finds the duo now united in Rye, Australia. The results of their newfound proximity are some of their strongest and most distinctive work yet.
Songs From Another Life, the latest album from Spanish/Swedish supergroup The Boys With The Perpetual Nervousness, is one of the first Bandcamp-core albums in recent memory to properly embody power pop’s platonic ideals. The album exists in an alternate reality where ‘60s worship and alt-rock sensibilities never cross-pollinated.
Recorded on May 1st, 2019 as a radio session for Aire Libre 105.3 FM in Mexico City, all but one of the tracks are from their fifth album, 2019’s De Facto. 01052019 is unceasingly intense. A description that already fit the duo well, it does even more in this performance, with the band joined by Fernando Nuti, Andrea Davì and José Orozco.
The era of climate change is upon us, and this is what makes The Weather Station’s new record Ignorance so important. Tamara Lindeman has created a record unique to our time of impending climate disaster. She shares her experience with personal grief, loss, love, and joy through the lens of her climate anxieties.
One of the most wild and beautifully exploratory albums released in 2020 came from Population II, a psych-rock trio based out of Montreal. À la Ô Terre, comes to you from powerhouse psych label Castle Face Records, and is the soundtrack for a journey in and out of the chaotic edges as galaxies collide.
On their debut full-length Tell Me I’m Bad, Editrix shifts through permutations of metal and punk faster than you can throw subgenre descriptors at them. For a solid thirty minutes, the lean and loud Massachusetts trio twists and turns through mathy riffs and pummeling breakdowns, phasing in and out of pocket grooves.
The Fragiles are the brainchild of songwriter David Settle, a busy man who holds down multiple bands and releases albums worth of material every year. On and On is a wonderfully chewed up and fuzzed out record, whose lo-fi palette can almost keep the excellent pop songwriting at arm’s length, almost.
Lina Tullgren has reunited with their first instrument, the violin. While featured in fleeting moments on Free Cell, Tullgren instead recasts their fate with the instrument in the form of veracious improvisations. It imparts a new language of sound, moving through the few crystalline zones with a tenderness and curiosity.
With half of its four tracks being remixes from 2019’s De Facto — and the other two sounding like they actually were on it — Lorelle Meets The Obsolete’s Re-Facto, released in 2020, was intended as a companion piece EP to the former. The previously unreleased songs drive home the point that they are independent sisters who are even better together.
I Had Everybody Snowed is a celebration for Skylar Sarkis, the songwriter behind the project Growing Stone. Its release date, November 30th of 2020, marked three years of sobriety for the musician. The seven year journey of conception to completion shows ten separate scenes, letting the listener come to their own conclusion.
On All Fours, from London based Goat Girl, dials up the danceable grooves under the floating psychedelic flourishes that were ever present on the previous recordings. There is a more pronounced musicality on display here with flowing rhythm and elastic bass providing a more fluid base for a new form of musical exploration.
Stay Gone, a record the band describes as five years in the making, sees the band leveling up, finally giving their songs the treatment they deserve. Everything is at the exact right levels. The guitars are huge and the vocals sound clear, but it doesn’t come at the expense of the drums, the instrument that is the driving force for the band.
Titled Somewhere, the album’s lyrics form the “somewhere,” produced by the emotional gravity marked by important places in a person’s life. The album gives off the distinct feeling of being on a journey, not simply changing of locations but being in transit due to the ever-quickening passage of time.
After six years without an album, German 'indietronica' band The Notwist return with Vertigo Days, their best effort since Neon Golden. Allowing their influences of krautrock bands such as Can or indie pop groups such as Stereolab to shine through, the band is able to make something very special here.
The album that this EP accompanies was one of 2020’s most unexpected successes, a collaboration between differing shades of alternative metal that dovetailed excellently. The unique match-up between Rundle and Thou was so strong that the best compliment that could be paid to The Helm of Sorrow is that it’s able to stand on its own.
