Curse Word - "Your Name" | Album Review
Your Name is Curse Word’s debut record, full of slightly angular and aggressive guitar work and a rhythm section that bobs and weaves around each other with aplomb. There are moments of bright pop that appear intermittently, but also a tension that ebbs and flows and keeps itself lurking wherever the melodies go.
Great Grandpa - "Four of Arrows" | Album Review
Horror Movie Marathon - "Good Scare" | Album Review
Horror Movie Marathon is the project of Will Rutledge, a Connecticut-turned-New York musician, and Good Scare is his debut album. It wouldn’t be fair or accurate to call Horror Movie Marathon a solo project, however, as Good Scare features Alex Molini (Philary, Stove, Pile) and Will Ponturo on piano/keys and drums/percussion respectively.
Pictorial Candi - "Secret Salts" | Album Review
Secret Salts drips with isolation, but of a different sort. Through cresting synths and bare drum sequences singer Candelaria Saenz Valiente embodies sadness as though falling apart, no yearning or desperation. Loneliness doesn’t even do it justice. Emptiness. Fragility. Stepping up to the plate regardless. Unwinding.
Tomb Mold - "Planetary Clairvoyance" | Album Review
“Dig deep and destroy yourself” Max Klebanoff growls on album opener “Beg for Life”. Over the next 40 minutes you can do just that. Planetary Clairvoyance is the band’s most interesting, layered, and tightest album to date. It’s a bright light in a slew of killer death metal records in 2019. One you’ll find yourself returning to again and again.
Corridor - "Junior" | Album Review
Lightning Bolt - "Sonic Citadel" | Album Review
The madness that is Lightning Bolt have returned with another LP titled Sonic Citadel. The noise-rock duo from Providence, Rhode Island have a signature sound that accompanies their performance style. On Sonic Citadel, they continue to do their thing with a little bit of a higher production quality.
Jen Kwok - "Songs For One" | Album Review
Sun Organ - "Sun Organ" | Album Review
Sun Organ has managed to churn out yet another magnetically creepy, satisfyingly chunky stew of tracks with their latest self-titled release. What sets this release apart from the rest of their catalog is its ability to juxtapose heavy darkness and ethereal beauty, a contradiction that nullifies either extreme discomfort or overt ease.
ESSi - "Vital Creatures" | Album Review
The duo’s volatile punk uneasily clamors like Shimmer and Brainiac, but aesthetically revels in the wake of Pill’s malaise and the radiant aura of No Age. ESSi mimic the latter-most group’s ability to sound much more than a two-person group, as Jessica Ackerley’s bottom heavy guitars flesh out ESSi’s strikingly atmospheric low end.
Gatecreeper - "Deserted" | Album Review
Deserted stakes up easily against its predecessor in the band’s discography, 2016’s Sonoran Depravation in both mastery of form and devastating impact of execution. The most distinguishing factor between the two is the slightly clearer production on Deserted, which is not surprising given who was involved in the post-production.
Angel Olsen - "All Mirrors" | Album Review
On her fourth album and fourth great evolution, Angel Olsen accompanies an instantly classic outpouring of artistic expression with gothic-synthesizers, some horns, and a colossal assembly of strings. An immense, dramatic, and shattering retrospective on feeling, All Mirrors is massive in both its presentation and statement.
Cloud Rat - "Pollinator" | Album Review
Cloud Rat, after 10 years, still finds ways to make music that is instant and familiar. If you were to listen to their S/T record in 2010 and then to Polinator, it wouldn’t feel too dissimilar. There is still that chugging low end guitar sludge, barreling up against frantic drums that anyone would call grindcore.
Thurston Moore - "Spirit Counsel" | Album Review
Thurston Moore, in line with his experimental impulse and illuminated by improvisation, builds in Spirit Counsel a test that is pure light, full of freshness. He digs into atmospheres ranging from Sonic Youth to pure black metal. The movements of the record are complex, abstract but extremely coherent with the live experience.
Horse Jumper of Love - "So Divine" | Album Review
Gong Gong Gong 工工工 - "Phantom Rhythm 幽靈節奏 (幽霊リズム)" | Album Review
Beijing-based duo Gong Gong Gong are exporting their stoic strain of hypnotizing punk through none other than Brooklyn’s Wharf Cat Records. The band relays their hammering psychedelic blues from the back of a tireless nag, rhythmically blurring borders between styles and scenes across their excellent full length debut Phantom Rhythm.
Chastity Belt - "Chastity Belt" | Album Review
The album’s success hinges on its open embrace of experimentation, vulnerability, and the creation of art for art’s sake; those are the places where the work shines the brightest, in a perfect blend of form and function. From start to finish, Chastity Belt is both a reclamation of the artistic process and a damn good record.
Sweet Williams - "Where Does The Time Come From" | Album Review
On Where Does the Time Come From, the third full length from Sweet Williams, Thomas House primarily forgoes his elongated blues-y dirges of previous releases, for a tighter almost claustrophobic feel. House still uses his space wisely with well placed guitar lines knifing through pounding drums and insistent throbbing bass.
Kal Marks - "Let The Shit House Burn Down" | Album Review
Kal Marks know how to stir up a racket, to put it mildly. Never has that been more apparent than on their latest EP, aptly titled Let the Shit House Burn Down. Impossibly rivaling the intensity of their heralded tinnitus-inducing live shows, the recording finds the trio fully exploring the enormous range of their established sound.