Primitive Man’s latest release, the EP Insurmountable, builds on their brutal foundation over four tracks spread out over forty minutes. At no point does the EP prove to be an easy listen, but inflections of groove and harmony offer a little bait-and-switch that leads listeners right back into the pit of chaos that the band curates so well.
Kieres Agua is straightforward enough to speak volumes about its intent. These songs feel like individual statements, a series of "installations" that you can spin through while grappling with how the record at-large will land within your life. Not every path is as interesting, but it helps you explore your biases and favorites in a way that all great art should.
On Soul Chateau, Dimples’ often defines the experience of looking at natural phenomenons. The songs dip listeners into a blue pool of vibration, guitar twangs and a creeping beat. Where “the night is young and the road bends,” Dimples’ psychedelic obscure-rock compositions give dusty and warbling landscapes.
Love is Yours’ is a much less angular sound than we have come to expect from Flasher. Priding themselves on collaborative songwriting, losing a member was always going to affect the musical direction but what’s resulted from that tectonic shift is some infectiously catchy music with signature vocal unison and harmonies.
Flickering i is a strange and addicting album. Listening feels like watching as someone makes a thing piecemeal in front of you. Listening is like the feeling of being tailed by your own ghost. These metaphors for Flickering i may sound esoteric, but they’re reasonable descriptions after a few listens.
The music is rich, anciently fresh, maybe altogether timeless, at least in its ability to capture a certain presence - an aesthetic dripped in honesty and the fruits of happy moments. What memories might be hashed in with a time of more relative freedom, surface in the emotional reaction, none-the-less.
The twelve track record is described as the punk dynamo's "most searing and personal album to date," and was penned "in the wake of the #metoo movement and the weathering years of the Trump Administration" as a means for Ray to work out years of personal abuse. It'll shake you to your core with glamor and violence in equal measure.
Prior to relocating, Deliluh made brooding post-rock, with all the requisite guitar noise and deadpan spoken word lyrics it entails. The lineup change gives Deliluh the opportunity to diversify their pallet, embracing aspects of drone, industrial rock, and ambient, where Knapp’s poetry is able to shine more prominently.
Waste permeates the language of the album - trash covering room floors, skunks scavenging through garbage, half-eaten food, split ends of hair inside a plastic bag. This conflict between the lightness of letting go and the hard-won significance of sitting with disorder lingers at the corners of many of the songs’ impressionistic sketches.
A Face in Your Life is their third full length and on this record the music continues to smolder with shockingly complex songwriting and a wonderfully flexible approach. There are tinges of early-mid 90's Dischord Records influences here but with a little more apparent vulnerability, interesting textures, and jazzy moments that spring up unexpectedly.
“Out With The Bangs. In With The Twangs” reads an ad for the latest Angel Olsen album, Big Time. Country music enthusiasts will be thrilled to hear one of Indie’s best songwriters bring her talents to the genre, while fans of her music will be pleased to know that this album is not simply an Angel Olsen album dressed in western trappings.
Whatever Elizabeth Still and David Hand did musically before they moved from the bustling city streets of Liverpool to the hills of Shropshire was probably different (they say it was much louder) than what they came up with as Haress on Ghosts. The move also prompted a kind of musical collective, with Haress contracting and expanding.
Editrix Goes to Hell is such a compelling listen. There are always multiple things going on, sometimes the complete opposite of each other. Sometimes the album is sinister and other times it's sweet. It can be rough around the edges while still feeling completely polished. It never falters a single step, never wastes a single note.
Their third album on Ordinal Records, Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ‘em Up sees Wednesday tackle songs from Roger Miller, Drive-By Truckers, Hotline TNT, Vic Chesnutt and Smashing Pumpkins. There is an array of different genres and the fuzzy swelling distortion we’ve grown to love is ever-present, making for a fun listen.
Enjoying Thou is very easy—it sounds right, it feels right. Thou is an irrefutable blend of metal, noise, punk, blackness, rock, doom, and experimentation. The music can be violent, it can be meditative. It’s caustic, but it is somber. Myopia, the collaboration made in secret with Mizmor for Gilead Media, is all of the above.
Cult of Dom Keller’s latest album, released last year on Fuzz Club Records, grabs your attention with punchy, gritty, experimental sounds that escape this universe entirely. They Carried The Dead In A U.F.O is a psychedelic album that emits a feeling of uncanniness by incorporating crunchy vocals and extra-terrestrial sounds.
