Grass Jaw share “Enough (To Feel Bad About),” a song that feels personal but relatable. It’s bleak, reflecting on death, life lived, and how we spend our days. With backing vocals from Huan-Hua Chye and trombone from Steve Zielinski, this one really swells into a place of grandeur, the song steadily building.
PALS is a great example of what a debut record should do. It provides an introduction to a band that is clearly hungry to break out and show what they can do, while still being incredibly well produced, funny, catchy, and succinctly and tightly played. The musicianship and creativity here holds a lot of promise.
Meg Duffy and Gregory Uhlmann have recorded an album under the name Duffy x Uhlmann. The project is a tranquil folksy wander, just the two of them playing simple hypnotic interlocking lines that develop a warm and welcoming atmosphere. It rarely feels busy, even if there is subtle virtuosity in their musical chemistry.
There’s a real shimmer to her songs, sweet and charming, with attention to tonality and the detail in her warped and weaving recordings. Set to release a new self-titled album on September 27th via I’m Into Life Records (Open Head, The Lentils, Jolee Gordon), the album is great from start to finish, it’s shape in fluid motion.
When the band go from making music to trying to make a grander statement -- as the two halves fully represent -- everything clicks into place. The record as this living entity shifts from mostly good to having depth and personality. The layers in that second half find them building on their influences with courageous abandon.
Sadie Dupuis and her crew are BIG on sonics; they played about fifty different guitars, through over a hundred effects pedals and thirty amps at Rancho de la Luna and Sonic Ranch for Rabbit Rabbit. The band has always had a guitar focus, and the riffs have continuously been hot, but engineer Sarah Tudzin, brought added heat.
With their latest album, Hand Is Bad, out September 29th via Amish Records, the band seem to have peeled things down to a place somewhere between no wave and ambiance. The songs are as much about texture as they are anything abrasive, with room to breath, room to wander. It’s clean but lurking in the shadow.
With widescreen guitars that encapsulate everything like molasses coming down a mountain, Mums play it loud and heavy, but slow dripped and soaked in primal melodies. Guitars threaten to come apart at the seems, the fuzz blistering in all directions, recalling the joy in sustained decay and raw pop that we’ve come to associate with bands like Part Chimp, Torche, and Cherubs.
GBMystical was releasing bedroom pop, garage rock, folk rock, and indie throwbacks. Genre, it seems, is as fluid as water, for Munawet. However, by no means would one expect him to set his sights on tried and true sludgy, thrashy, groovy metal for his next project. Yet, that is exactly what The Mantis is - crunchy, pummeling and speeding.
Given that it has taken a number of years for this new album to appear, one could read I Was a Thing of Beauty as a make-or-break moment for the band. Clearly, they possess enough patience to wait for songs to come together. Like their esteemed influences, they seem content for the time being to revise their sound as it suits them.
After the release of Decay, Fatboi Sharif spoke to Post-Trash about the fine line between good and evil, plus the snack bowls and synesthetic visions that powered the album. When he says he smells blood and fire in a beat, believe him. When he says he cried tears of joy hearing a finished track for the first time, believe that too.
Nate Dionne turns musical conventions into personal diary entries, referencing characters and moments only intimately known by the narrator. The past is oppressed with naivety. A bleak economic landscape looms over the narrative, of personal worth now being dictated by futile lottery tickets and faceless hierarchy, rather than family.
Having previously released albums under Corinna Rose, Corey Gulkin, a songwriter based out of Montréal, is leaving the guise behind, opting to release their music under their given name, shedding old habits to begin with a new mindset. Half Moon, out October 6th via Anything Bagel Records is an intricate and personal record.
London indie outfit Girl Ray are back — and from the sound of it, they’re having more fun than ever before. The group recently released their highly-anticipated third full-length offering Prestige, a groovy, disco-pop concept album that serves as a love letter to ballroom culture. The sparkling twelve-track project is a joyous outing from top to bottom.
Known for the seminal hardcore band Whipping Boy and later Oxbow, Eugene S Robinson is in perpetual motion. He’s a journalist whose work has appeared in GQ, The Wire, LA Weekly, among many others. He’s also a bodybuilder, martial arts expert, LSD evangelist, and gun enthusiast. His new memoir, A Walk Across Dirty Water and Straight into Murderer’s Row, touches on all these polymathic aspects of his wildly eccentric life, from his childhood in 1970s Brooklyn through his touring days in Whipping Boy. During our interview, Robinson is nothing if not candid. He’s quick to laugh and easily spun into a yarn. Having a conversation with Robinson is akin to being swept up by a narrative tornado.
With Lost four months old and a handful of dates together with Pile kicking off early next month, Life In Vacuum are set to release “Lately,” the first in a string of Lost b-sides. “Lately” touches on the band’s most caustic side, the heavy riff and the skronky density of the rhythm balance between a pop sheen and bouncy sludge.
