The sound of Meadow Flower isn’t confined to the boundaries of genre so much as it is marked by high-energy. Drawing from elements of garage, punk, and bits of surfy riffs, Star Party compose fuzzy, hectic textures inscribed in undeniably fun hooks. Meadow Flower is imaginative and catchy as it raucous.
For W, the companion piece to 2020’s NO, the rowdiness is dialed back towards an icy, dreamy landscape with movements that make the listener feel so weightless that one has to wonder if the record has medicinal properties. W is still just as intense as its predecessors, but the intensity manifests - and thus affects - in a transfixing way.
Throughout The Lurch, the band repeatedly pulls the proverbial rug out from the listener. The album is a thing in constant motion, always changing. Noise, thrash, speed, bonkers time-changes, The Lurch has it all. Contortionist riffs and sprinting rhythms double back on themselves like ascending switchbacks on a mountain pass.
forever music, Dey’s fifth proper solo release, sees the Melbourne experimental pop artist taking a bold new approach. As her first self-released album, she sheds much of the vocal filtering and overlapping tracks that defined her earlier work, often feeling more intimate than the previous album’s already open-hearted art pop.
Sometimes it is hard to connect the title of an album or EP to the music enclosed, but that is not a problem here. In these excruciatingly hard times, Babehoven’s Maya Bon asks an equally hard question that connects all the songs here - what if we decide to exclude ourselves from everything that makes it so hard?
Bodega welcome 2022 with their third full length, Broken Equipment, carrying on their acerbic and pointed songwriting full of anti-capitalist sentiments and nervy energy that wriggles and bounces all over the place. On this record, front person Ben Hozie slightly softens the songwriting approach of previous releases.
Last year was full of a lot of metalcore releases, with new stuff from Converge, The Armed and the final release from Every Time I Die leading the charge. Vein.fm’s This World Is Going to Ruin You shows that 2022 is looking like another promising year for the genre. The album wears its influences on its sleeves.
Primal Matter was worth the three-year wait. The Cincinnati-based post-punk band continues their minimal wave impulse and leans heavier on melodies and grooves to elevate the songs into a tremendous sonic aerospace. The drum and bass have more direction, while the production creates a polychromatic musical feast.
Nyokabi Kariuki’s Peace Places: Kenyan Memories is an EP worth thinking about in regards to the language of the abstract. Over the twenty eight minutes, you never hear a synthesizer. In its place there are voices harmonizing melodies, humming out a scripture of its own accord, communicating in languages that tie Kariuki’s six songs.
Kenny Becker remade Goon with new members and recorded Paint By Numbers, Vol. 1, their most cohesive release to date. Made in the style of early Goon – on a tape machine in Becker’s apartment and their rehearsal space – PBN1 may harken back to Goon’s developmental phase in spirit, but the songs are forward-thinking.
It’s been almost three years since the Brooklyn electronic trio released their second LP, Duo Duo—the strongest expression of the group’s krautrock, art-pop and occasionally post-punk sensibilities thus far. Deep Break is three songs long, which according to the band’s Twitter were taken from an aborted full-length album.
Curtis Godino is sort of both mastermind and middleman here, as the album is billed in the form of Curtis Godino presents The Midnight Wishers. Although full of Godino and Kramer's touches, it’s The Midnight Wishers who act as the medium to present the ideas of transporting the sound of iconic girl groups into the left-field modern age.
Archive Material is a tidy 38 minute grab bag of influences that ultimately adds up to something unique. For a relatively short album, the individual songs often feel longer in the best way possible. In the landscape of dour post-punk, it’s nice to have a band stop by, roll down the windows every now and then, and let some sunshine in.
