The Answer Is In The Beat

Fire-Toolz: Breeze (self-released, 2024)

August 20, 2024 at 8:47 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

The new Fire-Toolz album comes after Angel Marcloid’s move to a nice house by a lake an hour West of Chicago, and it feels like an interpretation of what happens when a weirdo from a busy city moves into a safe suburban neighborhood. You can almost imagine the visuals of someone in a full corpsepaint black metal outfit mowing the lawn and planting flowers in the yard, greeting the old lady who lives next door. There is something of a domestic, controlled atmosphere to these songs, yet there’s also a heavier presence of death metal growling and crunchy guitar shredding. “Window 2 Window 2 Window 2 Window 2 Window 2 Window” starts out sounding almost like Jesu with extra IDM glitches, then Cole Pulice’s sax smooths it out. Breaking from the metal-inspired intensity of most of the tracks, “Sibling Sun, Sibling Moon, White Concrete Steeped In Celestial Light” flows between dark ambient, new age, and eventually cosmic Americana. “A Considerate Amount of Pining” throws noise-bombs and rattling breakcore drums onto the ground, and drifts away from rhythm, ending up one of the album’s more sprawling, body-escaping tracks. “The Pain-Body (Child Synergy Tears)” also has a bit of a Jesu vibe at first, before it escalates into an emo anthem. There’s just an amazing duality throughout this album, it’s chaotic and destructive and outwardly expressive but still controlled and balanced in its own way.

Earth Ball: It’s Yours LP (Upset the Rhythm, 2024)

August 18, 2024 at 5:49 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

British Columbian group Earth Ball are a quintet who play heavy, noisy, improvisatory music that doesn’t feel constrained by any category. Opener “Moon FM” is like a Bardo Pond-style heavy psych jam but with skronking saxophone replacing some of the distortion. And then “Antifreeze” is the type of free jazz where it’s like a spirit is making the musicians contort their bodies to force all these erratic sounds and movements out, before a swarm of noisy guitars take over, along with some almost shamanic shouting. “Through & Through” doesn’t get as intense, it kind of stalks and scorches but doesn’t combust into chaos. “A Need to Cool Down” seems like it’s meant to throw your brain multiple directions at once. The drums stumble and collapse, the panned guitars sound like machines being smacked and they’re constantly shooting out sparks, and both vocalists are bounding at you and trying to corner you. And then it rides into this peppy garage rock rhythm, taking flight after it seemed like it was going to fall out of a tree at first. “Flash in the Pan” seems to land on its pounding rhythm after flailing around in a swamp, and ends up with this squonky sax-drenched “Poptones” groove. “Hollowgrama” is another barely contained free jazz splatter which eventually does manage to settle down and make sense of itself. Earth Ball’s unbounded, free expression deserves to be played at the highest possible volume so that their unnaturally high energy levels are felt by your entire body.

Charlatan: Vapor Tides (Debacle, 2024)

August 11, 2024 at 6:02 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

The first track from this album, “Introduction to a Vulnerable World”, was used as the intro for a Foxy Digitalis podcast for a while, so it had been burned into my mind and I was looking forward to it finally getting a proper release. This is what the Brad Rose project sounds like in aquatic, somewhat psychedelic synth mode, and it’s just a lovely wash of lovely prismatic sounds. It seems silly to remark that already this sounds like a flashback to around 15 years ago when neo-new age synth music sounded fresh and new. Anyone who’s been into that stuff has heard so much of it by now that it doesn’t seem like there’s much that can be done with it that’s still different and exciting. Nevertheless, this one is just incredibly refreshing, the water sounds and textures meld together to form this perfect aqueous flow. Inevitaby Science of the Sea comes to mind, but this doesn’t feel like a plunge into depths of the ocean. Instead, like its title, it’s more of a gentle tidal mist, but it’s still an immersive one.

Moth Cock: HausLive 3: Chicago Twofer (Hausu Mountain, 2024)

August 6, 2024 at 8:14 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

The first Moth Cock release I ever heard was a live recording, and that left a pretty big impression, so I feel like their energy is always going to translate best when it’s an in-the-moment document. The newest HausLive volume is two entire concerts by the duo, and it makes it seem like the duo just have a faucet of weird energy that they can turn on and off at any given moment. You could imagine them just doing a 6-hour marathon and they’d still keep hitting on weird sounds and frequencies, and they wouldn’t feel the need to stop. The way the beats constantly mutate can bring to mind Autechre’s live jams, but that duo could never replicate the type of frenzy whipped up by Moth Cock’s mangled sax/trumpet squonking. The last 10 minutes of the May 6, 2023 gig at Not Not are particularly mind-melting, twisting absurd voices and gelatinous basslines, then stuttering noises into speedcore blasts. The other gig (at DADS, December 15, 2023), goes stupid hard for a show where one of the musicians was laying on a recliner.