The era of climate change is upon us, and this is what makes The Weather Station’s new record Ignorance so important. Tamara Lindeman has created a record unique to our time of impending climate disaster. She shares her experience with personal grief, loss, love, and joy through the lens of her climate anxieties.
Having spent over a decade playing together as a duo, the Bay Area’s Street Eaters have gone and done the unthinkable, they’ve added a guitarist to the mix. While sometimes less is more, in the case of Street Eaters’ upcoming EP, Simple Distractions, the guitars are a welcome addition, bringing new sonic heights to their sound.
One of the most wild and beautifully exploratory albums released in 2020 came from Population II, a psych-rock trio based out of Montreal. À la Ô Terre, comes to you from powerhouse psych label Castle Face Records, and is the soundtrack for a journey in and out of the chaotic edges as galaxies collide.
Lifeguard’s debut album, Dive, caught the attention of noisy music fans with an ear to the ground including the fine folks at Chunklet Industries (Shark Toys, Honey Radar, The Apples In Stereo). The Atlanta based label is set to release a limited hand-cut 7” single with two new Lifeguard tracks, Receiver b/w Sun Ra Jane.
On their debut full-length Tell Me I’m Bad, Editrix shifts through permutations of metal and punk faster than you can throw subgenre descriptors at them. For a solid thirty minutes, the lean and loud Massachusetts trio twists and turns through mathy riffs and pummeling breakdowns, phasing in and out of pocket grooves.
The Nashville trio Styrofoam Winos have no lead songwriter, no “front” person. The band’s voice, styles, and inspirations are collective, with each member pulling equal weight, from songwriting and vocals to their own personal styles of reflection. It all comes together wonderfully on their well conceived self-titled debut album.
The Fragiles are the brainchild of songwriter David Settle, a busy man who holds down multiple bands and releases albums worth of material every year. On and On is a wonderfully chewed up and fuzzed out record, whose lo-fi palette can almost keep the excellent pop songwriting at arm’s length, almost.
Lina Tullgren has reunited with their first instrument, the violin. While featured in fleeting moments on Free Cell, Tullgren instead recasts their fate with the instrument in the form of veracious improvisations. It imparts a new language of sound, moving through the few crystalline zones with a tenderness and curiosity.
With half of its four tracks being remixes from 2019’s De Facto — and the other two sounding like they actually were on it — Lorelle Meets The Obsolete’s Re-Facto, released in 2020, was intended as a companion piece EP to the former. The previously unreleased songs drive home the point that they are independent sisters who are even better together.
Shortly after the release of Emphatically No., the ear catching power-pop filled and extremely quotable second full length from Cheekface, the band sat down for a chat via Zoom. They discussed life, methods of distraction/survival during a national pandemic, achievements and joy in music, and what venues might look like going forward.
I Had Everybody Snowed is a celebration for Skylar Sarkis, the songwriter behind the project Growing Stone. Its release date, November 30th of 2020, marked three years of sobriety for the musician. The seven year journey of conception to completion shows ten separate scenes, letting the listener come to their own conclusion.
Baltimore duo Caution are getting ready to release their self-titled sophomore EP. Due out this coming Friday, February 19th, via the great Born Yesterday Records (Moontype, Dummy, Stuck), the pair have created an album that is pop at its core, but buzzing with fuzz, noise, and psychedelic shoegaze swells.
On All Fours, from London based Goat Girl, dials up the danceable grooves under the floating psychedelic flourishes that were ever present on the previous recordings. There is a more pronounced musicality on display here with flowing rhythm and elastic bass providing a more fluid base for a new form of musical exploration.
Stay Gone, a record the band describes as five years in the making, sees the band leveling up, finally giving their songs the treatment they deserve. Everything is at the exact right levels. The guitars are huge and the vocals sound clear, but it doesn’t come at the expense of the drums, the instrument that is the driving force for the band.
Last year’s Yalc Nitsua Mailliw found Yalc123 taking on a new approach to songwriting. By writing melodies first, followed by lyrics, then chord progressions, they worked from top to bottom, essentially working “in reverse.” We were able to catch up with Yalc over Zoom about their creative process, musical inspiration, Texas and more.
Titled Somewhere, the album’s lyrics form the “somewhere,” produced by the emotional gravity marked by important places in a person’s life. The album gives off the distinct feeling of being on a journey, not simply changing of locations but being in transit due to the ever-quickening passage of time.
