We’re Still Here, boasts a truly impressive roster of collaborators. With contributions from collaborators such as Melt-Banana, Thou, Marissa Paternoster, Shirley Manson, SOUL GLO, Sunrot, and Gouge Away - just to name “a few” - this record sets out to platform the voices of as many individuals and identities from the scene as possible.
“$5 Cover,” the record’s third single, isn’t the Fugazi tribute you might be hoping for, but rather a loving homage to band’s own musical community forged around the DIY space East Williamsburg Econolodge. The song is pulsing with dirgy bass and punchy vocal melodies, seething in the shadows one moment but vibrant and hooky the next.
Coast 2 Coast, the band’s fourth album and first for Stones Throw, documents the band’s journey from their former home in Florida to their current in LA, building a surrealistic odyssey of video games, ocean front beaches, and fantastical bliss. Pearl & The Oysters use their daydream psych to bring a sense of the majestic to the mundane.
Maximalist and controlled, Pearl & The Oysters have created a fully formed concept and sense of self. Far from Brave New World, this album quite nearly suggests there is no dystopia (or utopia) in the human being-toward-technology. It just is and the party is happening no matter what. You can love this fate and join in the dance.
Crispy Crunchy Nothing is the latest album from PACKS, the nom de guitare of Toronto DIY rocker Madeline Link. The fourteen song, thirty minute LP is clearly indebted to the larger ‘90s alt/indie rock movement, but it celebrates that lineage with a renewed sense of passion, efficiency, and inventiveness.
Härvest, Poison Ruïn’s second album overall (depending how you look at it) and first record together with their new label, retains the band’s flair for the medieval, distilled in the toil and struggle of the era’s poor and working class, a sentiment that hasn’t changed all that much in modern times.
We Know the Sky, the sophomore full length album from Yours Are the Only Ears (aka Susannah Cutler), provides the listener with heartfelt melodies and intensity, manifesting itself through nature and vivid imagery. Cutler's songs are full of spirit and tender ruminations on the travails of love and the ever changing world around us.
Last Friday saw the triumphant return of Leeds based trio Beige Palace, the band joining together with London’ Cassels for a new split 7”. Out via Human Worth and God Unknown Records, “Waterloo Sublet” breaks a four year absence for Beige Palace, their first new music since the gloriously unnerving Leg LP.
With his debut album Embarrassingly Hard due out April 20th via Tallahassee’s RIP Records, we meet Vincent Reese aka “Vicious Vinnie,” a project that’s as much sketch show as it is punk band. Drawing influences from Beastie Boys, Le Tigre, and Viagra Boys, there’s a sordid comedic sense to his stoned brand of anything goes charm.
Musically, The Window is the Dream, is a tightly woven textile, with minute intricacies. Vibraphone, bass, guitars, and synthesizers all cooperate or battle with Jana Horn’s voice to illuminate her images via purposeful poetry. The phrasing and delivery of the lyrics is laconic; her poetry is delivered as such. It is magical, uncompromising.
Can’t Make Any Promises is Radiator Hospital’s first new record in four years. Their fifth album for Salinas Records (Quaker Wedding, Freezing Cold, Vacation) comes exactly twenty years to the day of the label’s first release, and if that ain’t reason to celebrate, the music is. Recorded in their Philly practice space, they’ve never sounded better.
Following a string of singles and EPs, Philadelphia’s Ruah are set to release Ruwa, the project’s brooding full length debut. “Synthesized Skies” is the record’s second single (following “Guidance”), a song that slinks and crawls along a creaky bed of analog carnage, grinding bass, and atmosphere so thick it threatens to strangle it all.
