Ulrika Spacek - "Compact Trauma" | Album Review
How do you sort the recording of an album when everything seems to be shutting and places feel alienated? Ulrika Spacek’s latest album, Compact Trauma, arrives as a sharp, psych-blowing, krautrock-flavored manifest of a band coming back to surface after a self-imposed banish and overcoming the strangeness of its own ethos.
@ - "Mind Palace Music" | Album Review
What started as a collection of iMessage demos sent back and forth between the two in 2021 eventually became a full-blown collaborative effort. While easy to describe as “timeless,” there’s a subtle modernity poking through nearly every moment of the ‘70s inspired homespun folk songs on Mind Palace Music.
Blonde Revolver - "Good Girls Go To Heaven, Bad Girls Go Everywhere" | Album Review
Good Girls Go to Heaven, Bad Girls Go Everywhere is the full length debut from Melbourne punk sextet Blonde Revolver, an album rife with venomous jabs and unabashed innuendo and ribald. The record has a ferocious bite and a relentless energy through ten songs that weave through touch points with passion on all fronts.
Mulva - "Seer EP" | Album Review
Comprised of members of Kal Marks, Bethlehem Steel, Baglady, and Ex-Breathers, the Providence quartet is a unique configuration of hard-hitting super-indie rockers. What Mulva have done — expertly split the difference between ambient and sludge diffused through an indie rock filter — is wildly compelling.
Tha God Fahim - "Iron Bull" | Album Review
Tha God Fahim, for the authentic rap fanatic, is an established name: the Atlanta emcee and producer has claimed his spot in the underground and, in many ways, has had a heavy influence in its direction over the years. His latest solo effort, Iron Bull, is about having the first word on that legacy: one that is still wet yet cementing by the day.
Tee Vee Repairmann - "What's On TV?" | Album Review
Bleary Eyed - "Bleary Eyed" | Album Review
Indie-gazers Bleary Eyed have released their latest four track EP after signing with Born Loser Records, a Philly music staple. Bleary Eyed can be seen as an “evolved” sound as it contains familiar shoegaze undertones from the band’s prior release Guise, combining with the new EP’s indie-pop choruses and dreamy synths.
Screaming Females - "Desire Pathway" | Album Review
On Desire Pathway, Screaming Females pull absolutely no punches in their riffy, hard hitting approach to songwriting, with Marissa Paternoster's enigmatic, distinctly dense vocal performance taking center stage. They hold onto their powerfully driven brand of rock writing, while breaching a level of relatively new accessibility.
Kate NV - "WOW" | Album Review
Perennial - "In The Midnight Hour" | Album Review
In the Midnight Hour is easily CT band Perennial’s most fully realized offering in a discography getting to be full of high concept, high energy punk rippers. They retain everything that made them great previously – incendiary performances, huge sounding riffs with teeth, an interest in the studio – and tightened it up to surgical precision.
Abi Ooze - "Forestdale Sessions" | Album Review
Abi Ooze is the recording project of Jade Baisa, an alumni of the NWI underground scene, Baisa continues to churn out records among the most genuinely melodic in punk. Forestdale Sessions, released by Rotten Apple, balances between rambunctious and intimate. This is power-pop for basements, alleyways, sidewalks, and bedrooms.
Nyxy Nyx - "Anything" | Album Review
Sightless Pit - "Lockstep Bloodwar" | Album Review
Lockstep Bloodwar is the second album from Sightless Pit. The first featured a third collaborator, Kristin Hayter (Lingua Ignota), who split from the group on good terms between installments. Now a duo, Lee Buford (The Body) and Dylan Walker (Full of Hell) sought to fill the void left by Hayter with a dizzying array of guest features.
ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Mach-Hommy & Tha God Fahim - "Notorious Dump Legends: Volume 2"
Mach-Hommy released his first new record of the year in the form of Notorious Dump Legends: Volume 2, a collaborative album together with Tha God Fahim. They are a great duo, whose voices fit together with aural perfection, melodic, focused, slick, raw, with their stream-of-conscious rhymes capturing a spark in each other.
Grocer - "Scatter Plot" | Album Review
Philadelphia’s Grocer have resisted the unconscious urge toward homogeneity that afflicts so many weird, unique bands. Quite the opposite – with each release they become even more themselves. On Scatter Plot, the trio lets their freak flag fly, experimenting with song structures, curious chords, and sonic textures.
Jordan Holtz - "Not Close For Comfort" | Album Review
New Hampshire feels particularly positioned as the sort of place that’ll seep into its inhabitants' expression. It’s beautiful, strange, flawed, and quiet - the perfect place to spend too much time inside your head. On Not Close For Comfort, the debut EP from Dover based singer-songwriter Jordan Holtz (Rick Rude), this sort of mood is abundant.
Pure Adult - "II" | Album Review
II (out on FatCat Records) is pure fuel. Pure Adult’s brand of imperfect-yet-pitch-perfect ‘noisymusik’ is nothing short of a tonic in days that feel ever-more apocalyptic, a propulsive journey that rewards a keener ear. The first listen gives you broad strokes and satisfying noise rock, but second and third listens reveal secrets, layers, wheels.
Swim Camp - "Steel Country" | Album Review
Steel Country, Swim Camp’s fourth album, is easily the Philly-based project’s most sonically confident album yet. Actualized by Tom Morris in 2015 as an outlet to learn guitar, Swim Camp is now two years shy of a decade old this year, and one will find it difficult to listen without feeling a little proud of how far the project has come.
Oozing Wound - "We Cater To Cowards" | Album Review
Oozing Wound are a heavy band born from the fertile stomping grounds of Chicago’s DIY scene and have a penchant for delivering albums chalk-full of songs too heavy to have made In Utero. We Cater to Cowards is something of a departure from previous releases, albeit not one as drastic as some of the discourse has made it out to be.