Portland’s Lazy Legs are one of those bands who gracefully blend heavy sludge, doom pop, shoegaze, and slowcore to create something sonically immersive and oft-gorgeous. The duo are set to release their sophomore album Moth Mother on November 15th, an excellent record for anyone who misses the dog days of shoegaze.
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.
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.
“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.
Pacific Notion, released back in 2017, found Seth Engel reinventing a selection of Options’ songs with a synthetic and electronic beauty, void of his usual rock band formation. Two years later, he’s at it again with Pacific Notion II, a project that finds Engel diving headfirst into the digital world with blissful results.
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.
For Brooklyn’s Franklin Ligh, better known musically as Karaoke Mood Killer, he’s not into Stranger Things and he’d like you to stop trying to change his mind. Set to release (the fittingly titled) Demos on November 8th via Spirit Lust (Should’ve), the eight songs were captured in his Bushwick basement studio on a Tascam digital 8 track.
“You Fall Away” combines two of Henry’s songwriting instincts, the melody-forward songwriting of Bob Pollard/Guided by Voices and the effortless grace of Big Star, into a pitch-perfect rock ballad. Tthe guitars and vocals capture the restless youth of mid-90s, crackling with a coiled energy that erupts in a final-minute solo.
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.
Full Body have never heard of the sophomore slump as evident on their album, Always There. The twisting and turning post-hardcore band have sharpened the edges of their attack, the vicious parts are more vicious and their emo pop influences as sticky sweet as they come. It’s the contusion of them that they’ve been welding together.
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.
Post-Grunge Revival, the trio’s first release since 2017’s Die Alone Pt. 2, is a big step forward sonically, an enormous and primal EP full of buzzing riffs and left-field shifts. Chelsea Ursin's songs come to life with an added heaviness, digging into monstrous riffs with a quirky charm on songs about cow’s giving birth, graceful weirdness, and beyond.
