Released in September, New York noise band Uniform’s fourth album on Sacred Bones Records is a masterclass in guilt and self-exorcism. Though keeping their tradition of fuzzed out guitars and glitchy, sinister noise elements, the recording quality of Shame is a departure from that of their previous albums.
Shelter should be understood in the context within which it was conceived and captured: it was recorded entirely live in the kitchen of a studio apartment in Central Maine. Featuring only Liza Victoria’s vocals and accompanied guitar, it’s almost as instrumentally scarce as a record can be. In the best way possible.
New West Records’ Pylon Box compiles a new de facto history of the Athens art punks, finally making accessible the sounds and filling in the narrative blanks of the oft underlooked group. In step with examining Pylon’s legacy among their musical peers, the retrospective box set’s insightful, 209-paged companion booklet.
Guff in the Garden tells stories, totally subjective content-wise. Each track is more like a situation, with all the strange stuff Max Goldstein (drums) and Adam Bosse (guitar) toss together swirling around miasmatically for you to come wade through coughing and incorporate into your day’s dull manifold however you feel impelled to.
Johnny, the second full length effort from the New Orleans group Lawn, is a sprawling album with continuous shifts in dynamics that surprise the listener as the two main songwriters trade turns showcasing their distinctive but harmonious styles of songwriting. It’s an album of contrasting styles, at once pop and post-punk influenced.
Songs To Yeet At The Sun is the opposite of a cerebral experience. It’s instantaneous and immediate. You either get it or you don’t. If you want to do a deeper interrogation, all the lyrics are there for you on the Bandcamp page. Soul Glo is at its peak when the vocals become an instrument against the hardcore cacophony.
Gibbs has been on an incredible run, releasing at least seven great albums in the last decade, if not more. Alfredo certainly stands with the best Gibbs has ever released, and the same goes for The Alchemist. Few rappers have kept pace with Gibbs in recent years and few producers have been as prolific and consistent as The Alchemist.
If music is supposed to take one on a journey, this idea is something that Super-X takes literally. The Melbourne post-punk noise creators - composed of brothers Harrison and George Ottaway and drummer Kaelan Emond - take their listeners on a frenetic and buzzing journey around the world on their self-titled debut album
With their compact arrangements, short run times, and impressive musicianship, the tracks on Tower Of Age offer a refreshing return to form for post-punk. While the record may harken bands like Gang Of Four and Wire, the music they make never feels like a rehash of the acts that came half a century before them.
Joyer are brothers Nick and Shane Sullivan who are quietly making some of the finest recent slowcore music. Their latest album, Sun Into Flies, is their third full-length and the first not to be self-released, instead being issued through Z Tapes, the Slovakian label run by Filip Zemcik which has become a byword for quality lo-fi releases.
Wendy Eisenberg’s reputation as a fixture within overarching New England DIY from the punk-adjacent Birthing Hips to hip compositions for the guitar and banjo have enshrined them with a singular maverick quality. Auto makes good on all those pieces, coalescing them into a dense sonic universe that you could fill a book about its pieces
Good Time is a record that shows all of what Teenanger have learned from the past decade and continues to explore a bit of a newer direction from the earlier days of the band. The urgency and wise cracking are still evident, but there is more time to stretch out and explore musical territories and influences on a greater scale.
Cordoba is a group of politically and socially driven individuals committed to radical social change in resistance to the oppressive systems in place. The six-piece jazz fusion group formed at University of Chicago, but has since breached the bubble of higher education by connecting with like-minded musicians in DIY spaces.
