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.
Yesterday was that day I’ve been waiting for. I saw Unwound live for the first time in my life. With expectations unreasonably high, the band laid waste to those lofty expectations, furiously locked in and sounding as though they never stepped away over two decades ago. This is a letter to say thanks.
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.
A perennial underground favorite for nearly a decade, Sun Organ have been reshaping their sound in a constant state of sludgy pop expansion. With Candlelight Showertime, due out May 5th via Julia’s War and BLIGHT. Records, Jordan and co. continue to expand their pallet, adding a deeper sense of subtlety and a stronger emphasis on detailed lyrics.
Waste Man have moved. Originally mainstays of the NOLA scene, this tight-punk trio have made the move to NYC – and have a brand-new self-titled EP out on Feel It Records. It’s a re-positioning of its own, re-stating the central premise of their heavy-hypnotic sound, with a new framework and a laser-focus on what makes them special.
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.
For London’s Moreish Idols, music is in constant evolution, growing upon new ideas, pulling threads to watch their framework both tighten and unravel. “Between These Ears” manifests itself without aggression, it’s tangled but calming, a piece of delicately jazzy art-rock that works atmosphere into post-punk density.
Over the last three years, babybaby_explores have grown their reach beyond the local noise scene and a leak of Food Near Me, Weather Tomorrow earned them a deal with Angus Andrew’s No-Gold. The trio sat down with Post-Trash to talk about their scientific methods, folk-goth aspirations, and their policy of saying yes to every dress.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Glittering Insects and their debut album take the Mind Meld concept further, bringing together Atlanta’s Greg King (GG King, Carbonas), Ryan Bell (GG King, Predator), and Josh Feigert (Wymyns Prysyn, GG King) for a collaborative effort. While they all play together in GG King, Glittering Insects is assuredly something different.
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.
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 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.
On the non-album live favorite “Engine,” Neutral Milk Hotel frontman Jeff Mangum rolls through “endless revisions to state what I mean.” This line is probably the best summation of the full-discography box set that Merge Records has released to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their breakthrough record, 1998’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea.
