The twelve track record is described as the punk dynamo's "most searing and personal album to date," and was penned "in the wake of the #metoo movement and the weathering years of the Trump Administration" as a means for Ray to work out years of personal abuse. It'll shake you to your core with glamor and violence in equal measure.
In a literal sense, as a veteran touring musician with her band Moaning and as a sometimes-live-player with acts like Cherry Glazer and Girlpool, Stevenson is well-acquainted with performance and presentation. On Scrutiny, she draws on that musical experience to show its falseness as well as its potential to reveal deeper, darker truth.
Prior to relocating, Deliluh made brooding post-rock, with all the requisite guitar noise and deadpan spoken word lyrics it entails. The lineup change gives Deliluh the opportunity to diversify their pallet, embracing aspects of drone, industrial rock, and ambient, where Knapp’s poetry is able to shine more prominently.
By the time Swimming Feeling, the new album from Seth Engel’s Options, reaches the point of it’s slinking finale, we’re fully engrained in his world, with slow drawn guitar buzz, rhythms that are always locked into service of the songs themselves, and a forlorn sense of melancholy feeling almost second nature.
Waste permeates the language of the album - trash covering room floors, skunks scavenging through garbage, half-eaten food, split ends of hair inside a plastic bag. This conflict between the lightness of letting go and the hard-won significance of sitting with disorder lingers at the corners of many of the songs’ impressionistic sketches.
The time has come for Spirits Having Fun to bring Two on the road, and their tour, together with the amazing Floatie, begins this Friday, June 17th (complete dates in post). A dream pairing of two bands we’re beyond eager to see live, Spirits Having Fun are celebrating the momentous tour with a new video for Two album opener, “Silhouette”.
A Face in Your Life is their third full length and on this record the music continues to smolder with shockingly complex songwriting and a wonderfully flexible approach. There are tinges of early-mid 90's Dischord Records influences here but with a little more apparent vulnerability, interesting textures, and jazzy moments that spring up unexpectedly.
“Out With The Bangs. In With The Twangs” reads an ad for the latest Angel Olsen album, Big Time. Country music enthusiasts will be thrilled to hear one of Indie’s best songwriters bring her talents to the genre, while fans of her music will be pleased to know that this album is not simply an Angel Olsen album dressed in western trappings.
Dendrons are a Chicago five-piece who make spindly, propulsive post-punk that doesn't shy away from a bit of brawny catharsis. "Wait in Line," the second single from the band's upcoming sophomore album 5-3-8 - their first for Los Angeles label Innovative Leisure - mines the rich vein of krautrock to catchy and dynamic effect.
Whatever Elizabeth Still and David Hand did musically before they moved from the bustling city streets of Liverpool to the hills of Shropshire was probably different (they say it was much louder) than what they came up with as Haress on Ghosts. The move also prompted a kind of musical collective, with Haress contracting and expanding.
Editrix Goes to Hell is such a compelling listen. There are always multiple things going on, sometimes the complete opposite of each other. Sometimes the album is sinister and other times it's sweet. It can be rough around the edges while still feeling completely polished. It never falters a single step, never wastes a single note.
In the five years since the last Weaves album, former bandleader Jasmyn Burke’s future has seemingly only opened even wider. Her solo debut solo In The Wild is out now, with production by John Congleton to augment her talents for obliquely catchy melodies and theatrical vocals. Burke spoke with Post-Trash about the process of discovering herself as a solo artist and developing the eight-page visual manifesto that guided the project.
Their third album on Ordinal Records, Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ‘em Up sees Wednesday tackle songs from Roger Miller, Drive-By Truckers, Hotline TNT, Vic Chesnutt and Smashing Pumpkins. There is an array of different genres and the fuzzy swelling distortion we’ve grown to love is ever-present, making for a fun listen.
Enjoying Thou is very easy—it sounds right, it feels right. Thou is an irrefutable blend of metal, noise, punk, blackness, rock, doom, and experimentation. The music can be violent, it can be meditative. It’s caustic, but it is somber. Myopia, the collaboration made in secret with Mizmor for Gilead Media, is all of the above.
Cult of Dom Keller’s latest album, released last year on Fuzz Club Records, grabs your attention with punchy, gritty, experimental sounds that escape this universe entirely. They Carried The Dead In A U.F.O is a psychedelic album that emits a feeling of uncanniness by incorporating crunchy vocals and extra-terrestrial sounds.
The Salt Lake City by UK songwriter holds her own, and “These Days” is a sunny, 70s pop doozy. All the melodies hit easy - they take the turns they lean into. Fonteyn’s songwriting sensibility is on full display and her patience and nuance is palpable; the key change in the last twenty seconds is tasteful and the opposite of gimmicky.
Versions of Modern Performance, the new album by Chicago’s Horsegirl, is a noisy introduction to a band that, based on the strength of their debut, is bound to be a fixture in the future of guitar music. Any time spent with the album is likely to call to mind melodic noise pioneers like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr, and that’s not entirely a coincidence.
billy woods referred to Aethiopes as “one of the more complex ideas [he’s] ever tried to tackle.” That complexity is borne out in forcefully-delivered verses that criss-cross the globe and the time-stream. After the release, woods spoke to Post-Trash to shed some light on the record’s dense imagery, and since Aethiopes is his 10th LP, we also discussed its place in the arc of his accomplished career.
