Mt. Surreal acts as an amalgamation of their previous work while journeying into something completely new. It’s an album of ambitious instrumentals and even more ambitious ideas. An album that wastes no space and never falters in its attempts to be what it’s trying to be, the best Disco Doom album yet.
On their third full length, Nicks and Grazes, Palm fully lean into expanding their electronic and dance urges while the conversational guitar skronkings and creative rhythm section embellishments bubble underneath. The flexibility that they continue to expand upon and the language they all speak between each other is astonishing.
“I want it to,” Eliza Niemi begins, little rattle, chucking her limbs to stay underwater–except the water is the present around her, its depth the curt end of her fingertips. Staying Mellow Blows is her third album; it is inside of her. She is a child the way Fiona Apple is a child: She is right. What she says is true.
Musically and lyrically Preoccupations has always been a band which focuses on the impending doom that will befall earth and humanity and Arrangements continues that dark manner of thinking and perhaps takes it even further. The bleak lens that Preoccupations view the world with has an even darker tint to it.
Julia Jacklin’s songwriting can be so intimate and direct that it can be, at times, discomforting for the listener. She gives voice to many of our own unspoken thoughts. We mistakenly assume we’re alone in our feelings, but when Jacklin hits an emotional nerve, we’re reminded that many of our suppressed thoughts are universal.
Sick Day is a hard working band and they also happen to be fronted by a thoughtful and introspective songwriter who isn’t afraid of being brutally honest with herself, or with you. Olivia Wallace is a visual artist and songwriter who has been active in Chicago for long enough to know how it feels to work.
Unfold is a lost album, recorded right after her debut with Tame Impala's Kevin Parker, who co-produced and played along with Prochet on the seven songs. Whatever the reasons were to delay the release of this album are irrelevant now, as all the seven tracks here show that she has her ear on the essence what psychedelic pop should sound like.
As an object in itself, the album feels utterly unstuck from time. It’s evocative of the Laurel Canyonites of the late sixties, sure, but it refuses to paint within those lines. What sets it apart are Marina Allen’s voice and the landscape which surrounds it, and it’s in the interplay of these that a third, intangible thing emerges.
While “Moonburn” and “Aspirin - Slight Return” would make for a stellar 7-inch, two additional cover songs really make this cassette an essential listen. Clocking in around fifteen minutes, Moonburn still captures the expansive vibes of earlier TFS albums like Braindrops and Deep States—records for a long drive down a lysergic highway.
Michael Falcone writes deceiving melodies reminiscent of numerous 90's era callbacks and emotional slack but with an extra bite from blurring guitar squeals or frenetic drum fills. The trio has a wit about them that is quite appealing and a sense of levity keeps everything from getting too deep into the encroaching gloom.
Alex G is full of questions on God Save The Animals but intentionally avoids easy answers. It’s a record filled with anxiety but finds solace in the fractured nature of change. It’s a record with a whole lot of references to God but finds sanctification in the chaos rather than the structure of religion.
They Are Gutting a Body of Water and fellow Philly band A Country Western throw a barrage of different sounds at the listener and all of them stick. This five song split is ambitious in its transitions between styles and continues in the same vein as TAGABOW’s 2021 split EPCOT, which oscillated between shoegaze and breakcore.
Having played their final show on September 18th, Yucky Duster should be remembered as one of the most happy-go-lucky, ambitiously melodic, and vocally harmonic bands today. They created a brand of twee-pop with genuine fun – like conversational rants in between verses fun – along with utterly standalone and versatile melodies.
Earth Visions Of Water Spaces is grounded in an elemental ethos while retaining the band’s likeness for entertaining celestial questions. As on their previous showing, they again display a knack for transforming simple phrases into hypnotic mantras and restrained instrumental passages into tempered progressions of mystifying proportion.
Judy and the Jerks have survived long-distance communication and being in numerous other bands to release their second LP. Despite half of the band moving to Atlanta mere months before COVID hit, they’ve stayed the course with a few tape releases between now and their previous LP release, Friendships Formed in the Pit.
