Knowing no melodic bounds, the Peacers’ exceptionally expansive musical palette is apparent, painting in a spectrum of refined subtlety, hypnotic grace, and plangent adventurism. This panoply of hues presents itself in a microtonal, blue note fashion, with chromaticism and a generalized uniqueness of twists-and-turns.
On Picnic in the Dark, Zeiguer does not hesitate to whisk her listener away to a lush, reverberant world of her own design. By blending contemporary indie pop’s structures with vintage drum machines, old Hollywood strings, and dalliances into bossa nova territory, Zeiguer’s become the architect of her own memories.
Mother is The Milky Way is not quite a collection of songs and not quite a soundtrack. Rather, it is a twenty-minute meditative experience in an unambiguously Broadcastian space, with equal parts journey through pastoral psychedelic meadows and whiplash-inducing descent into some of the darkest spaces the band has dared to curate.
Palm Friends’ music has an easy sound to the ear, with each song stepping into another direction, while keeping it recognizable. It’s a hard thing to do across two or three separate releases, let alone within a single EP. Yet, that is exactly what the Minneapolis quartet have done on The Delivery, their latest record.
The tape features reworkings of hit bedbug tracks spanning six years that make the most of classic four-piece rock band instrumentation. While the halcyon bedroom pop days of multi-tracked guitars and fuzzy synths may be behind the project, there is no need to mourn; bedbug’s singular approach to diaristic songwriting suits indie rock well.
Process, the latest from Pinch Points, shows the band have a caustic take on the modern world and its many ongoing societal issues. The band’s sound has become a little more developed and although there is a strain of anxiety and anger that runs through everything here, there is also an excitement that is equally pervasive.
PLOSIVS is a modern day So-Cal alt-rock supergroup, helmed by the twin guitars of John Reis (Drive Like Jehu, Rocket From the Crypt, Hot Snakes) and Rob Crow (Thingy, Pinback, and many, many others). This pairing of prolific San Diego powerhouses sets expectations high, and their self-titled debut does not disappoint.
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?
