Using manipulated tape sounds and vivid swirls of melodic dissonance akin to Mega Bog or Helvetia’s earliest output, Ouch is a fantastic album that truly gets better with every listen. Originally released last summer as a digital download, Art Of The Uncarved Block are set to reissue the album on January 25th with an expanded cassette and two bonus tracks.
Camp Counselor is ready to release another EP, Scabs, due out January 15th via It Takes Time Records. Their songs are personal and bare, with an emotional tone that never hides itself in production or abstraction on an EP that deals with “letting your wounds heal and leaving behind the ones you no longer need.”
The long-running band (whose members also play in C.H.E.W., Options, etc.) have a dynamic sound that feels compact and dense, carefully constructed and ready to burst upon exposure. There’s a painstaking quality to the way each song is built, the guitars weaving between rhythmic heft that’s somewhere between crushing and dreamy (often in both territories at once).
Earl has always had something to respond to and Some Rap Songs is no exception. Despite the fact that most of it was written and recorded before the death of his estranged father, South African poet Keorpatse Kgositsile, the beauty and pain of Earl’s music has never felt more apparent, more on his sleeve, more honest.
Set to release OGFIL at the tail end of the year via Super Wimpy Punch Records, their latest is a shift in delivery, though a slight one. Instead of the band’s usual approach to letting the vocals peak way into the red with yelps and carefree ramshackle melodies, Johnny Steines opts for a story-telling approach, weaving colorful observations and an active sense of humor into spoken word.
