October 16, 2016 at 6:48 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Friendships: Nullarbor 1988-1989
Friendships are an Australian duo who make dark, punishing, paranoid music which embraces jungle, grime, ragga, R&B, and spoken word. All of the tracks on this album are wildly different from each other, but it all holds together, and it’s incredibly exciting and eye-opening. “Big Farm in the Sky” and “Paradise” are jungle tracks with heavy bass and insistent breakbeats, and they’re both astounding. “Purebred Dogs” is a hyperspeed garage/grime track, while “Pedal to the Metal” is more of a club-focused track with Latin and Middle Eastern influences. “Spit/Flesh/Splinter” alternates between vulnerable R&B and harsher industrial textures, and it’s got “Ha” stabs. “Jerramungup 1988” is a spoken word interlude which leads up to “When I Feel Like Killing I Murder”, a dubstep-ish track which hinges around the last few lines of the previous track. “Move (Fast)” adds ragga vocals to the pummeling beats, and after “O.O.O. (Eat Your Flesh)” the album gets more distant and abstract. Following another spoken word piece, there’s the aggressive drum workout “The Roof” and the album ends with a detached piano drone called “Keep Smiling at Me Like That and You’ll Be Picking Your Teeth Up Out of the Gutter”. An absolutely deadly album, and probably the biggest surprise of the month, if not the last few.
October 16, 2016 at 5:36 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
starRo: Monday
I saw starRo at SXSW a couple years ago at an outdoor show with Giraffage, and his proficiency at sample-chopping made for an astouding set. I haven’t listened to any of his recordings until now, and at this point he’s gone beyond simple beatmaking to writing fully-fledged pop songs. Almost every song here has a guest vocalist, and they cover a wide range. Opener “A New Day” is one of the few tracks without guests, and it showcases starRo’s abilities for Prefuse-style sample glitchery, but the other tracks are a bit more smoothed out and R&B-sounding. “Runaway” is an easy standout, with excellent vocals by Joyce Wrice and just a bit of contemporary electronic production weirdness. Of the dancier tracks, “I Wish” is kind of like a family-sanitized version of The Weeknd, and “My Oh My” (with Machinedrum collaborator Jesse Boykins III) is more Disclosuresque. “Can’t Take It Back” and “Do You Still Want Me” are a bit more downtempo with pretty straightforward, pleading lyrics. “Yams” is pretty silly and gets really annoying really fast, but songs like “Kiss Kiss” are more affecting and the slow, whispery “Song For Me” winds things down nicely. Available on
Bandcamp.
October 16, 2016 at 4:36 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Tay Sean: Leavings
Seattle-based producer/vocalist Tay Sean is one of the founding members of hip-hop collective Cloud Nice and the group Kingdom Crumbs, and Leavings is his debut solo effort. His brand of spacey, futuristic hip-hop often comes close to the orbit of nu-jazz or broken or beat, dipping into neo-soul with the Badu-esque “Um Tryin”. He does rap, but his voice is often covered in trippy echo or other effects, and it seems like the vocals are just one small part of what’s going on here. Very off kilter and exploratory, with unconventional rhythms and song structures, but still very easy to get into. Lots of scorching guitars, some video game sound effects, and some excellent beatwork, especially on the drum’n’bass-leaning “Pisces Twilight”. Mostly very hopeful and optimistic, but the self-explanatory “FML” reflects the confusion and disappointment of everyday life. It’s nearly impossible to not compare this artist to Shabazz Palaces, but I think this album reaches toward a much different star, and I’m way more into it. Preview/purchase at
Bandcamp.
October 16, 2016 at 3:29 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Telementals: Universal Burst tape
Jordan Collingridge has been helping to keep Far House active as a venue since Eric Stephenson moved to Chicago. He’s also been recording his own music there, as part of a few bands as well as his solo project, Telementals. This is his first album under that name, and a pretty solid collection of fuzzy home-recorded garage rock with guitars, drums, and synths. A bunch of it has its more Castle Face-like psych-leaning moments like “Black Magic” and “Hidden Sun”, but there’s also more straightforward driving punk-ish songs like “Crash N Burn”. “Plastik” has a drum machine and hints at a more electronic side, but it isn’t really fully explored here. “Life Is Strange” ends the album with a long, dark trip down the spiral. Available now through
Bandcamp.
October 16, 2016 at 2:53 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Storm Ross: Welcome, Sunshine LP
Following 2014’s incredible
The Green Realm, local musician Storm Ross returns with second album
Welcome, Sunshine, which is described as “A Plea In Ten Parts” on the back cover. His first album was a hard-to-describe mix of doomy guitars, pounding drums, and noisy electronics. This album is far more urgent, with upfront rhythms and soaring guitar melodies. Opening track “We Need to be Fugazi Now, More Than Ever” sets the tone, building its easily hummable guitar melody up along with crashing drums and wailing sax. “Please Don’t Kill My Family” is noisier and fearsome, and it segues into the hypnotic, electrically charged guitar solo “Benzie County Farm Fire, 1973”. The bluntly titled “You Will End!” has busy drumming and frantic guitar work. “A Life of Passwords” and “Lamentation” are both more ethereal, with “Lamentation” filled with a forest of strange noises and nearly coming close to sounding like early His Name Is Alive. “Atheon” is a long, steady, slowly building centerpiece with more scorching guitars and Krauty electronics. “I Will Try To Be Better” is another reflective guitar piece, and “The Smiler” returns to splashing drums and bubbling electronics along with the fiery guitars. “Hold Your Head High In The End Times” has another tricky rhythm, and its cheery demeanor in the face of tragedy makes it the album’s “Always Look On the Bright Side Of Life”. Triumphant as well as vulnerable, this album is a much different beast than
The Green Realm, and it’s no less powerful. Also I’m thanked on the back cover (along with former WCBN MDs Aaron Smith and D. Alfred Lyons)!
October 16, 2016 at 1:10 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Ryan Huber: Kholstomer CDr
Ryan Huber continues to evolve his sound through his steady stream of limited CDr releases. While several years ago he was doing something in the realm of doomy post-rock, at this point he’s doing a permutation of noisy, droney techno. This one starts off with a short, eerie piece with flanged echos and growling noises. “Sanhedrin” is the first of many tracks with a beat. Huber’s techno-ish tracks favor droney repetition, but on some of these ones it seems like there’s more of a clearly definied build and release. “Amarkhan” in particular is a piledriver. The title track starts out with rhythmic ticking and gradually gets washed out at sea, sounding distant and buried under waves at the end. “Macedonia” sounds more ecstatic, but it prefers to stay stuck in the moment for most of its duration. “Raytheon” is far less immediate, starting out as a tense vibrating drone, but eventually a calmer, non-4/4 beat emerges. “Duress” is the opposite, starting out with a jittery beat and then switching to weightless drone for its second half. “Returned” is another repetitive, stuck-in-the-moment track, but its beat pattern, while constant, switches the beats around so that it seems more sporadic. The track seems to end a minute before it actually does, but the beat pattern continues to be very muted and subtle for the last minute. Available on
Bandcamp.
October 12, 2016 at 11:46 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
The Miami Dolphins: Perlite 7″ EP
Following their pretty awesome 2014 debut LP
Becky, the Miami Dolphins (who are actually from Minneapolis) are back with a new EP. The group still have a spazzy, convoluted sound reminiscent of Deerhoof and Melt-Banana, and they seem to balance a cartoonish playfulness with utter panic. The record comes with several colorful stickers and a huge booklet which includes various games and tidbits including a crossword puzzle, maze, and horoscope, as well as the lyrics, which are appropriately fragmented. “Quail Birth” includes the line “a mix of despair and bliss” which sums the band up perfectly. The song ends with the accusation “you worthless pig” followed by some snorks. The EP’s highlight is the nervous breakthrough “Scarlette”, which is followed by two minutes of guitar riffs which sound like unfinished ideas for songs.
October 12, 2016 at 11:18 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Morricone Youth: Night of the Living Dead 12″ EP
Morricone Youth is a name I haven’t heard in about a decade, as they haven’t released any albums since 2005, but the NYC-based group have spent the last few years composing scores to old films, and they’re planning on releasing recordings of several of these. Among the first of these is their score for the all-time classic zombie flick
Night of the Living Dead. They don’t try to make something that would’ve been recorded in 1968 along with the original movie; instead, the synths and guitars sound more influenced by the subsequent generations of horror soundtracks. It’s a bit closer to Goblin’s brand of prog, which makes sense considering they scored
Zombi/
Dawn of the Dead. Musically, it’s a bit of a retcon, but it still sounds good. “Traumatized” is the most thrilling moment, with crazy synthesizer work and a bit of screaming thrown in. “Barbra” and “Beat ‘Em or Burn ‘Em” are both longer epics with spiralling arpeggios. “Another One for the Fire (End Title)” is appropriately slower and moribund. Unless you’re really hung up about authenticity, or whatever, you’ll probably enjoy it if you’re into horror soundtracks, regardless of context.
September 26, 2016 at 10:40 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Nephew: After School Special tape
This mysterious tape from an Ann Arbor-based label contains over 2 dozen short pieces, most of which are fragments of glitching, crackling, scrambled radio transmissions, and sweet, sugary drone bursts. Sometimes there’s some crashing drums, and maybe a spare melody or rhythm here or there. There’s some moments reminiscent of old school musique concrete, but it’s futuristic and updated, without sounding like it’s in line with any current trends in music. Even with the track titles in front of you, it’s almost impossible to follow along (listening to the tape at is, listening on
Bandcamp might make more sense of it), but that’s beside the point. What matters is that this is a curious truly sublime little twisted sound-world. I’m glad I was dropped into this world somehow.
September 25, 2016 at 7:59 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Cyber People: Void Vision – The Album
Cyber People’s “Void Vision” has always been one of my go-to Italo-disco tracks. Giorgio Spagna released two other tracks under the Cyber People name, “Polaris” and “Doctor Faustu’s”, and they’re both pretty similar to “Void Vision”. Uptempo beats, arpeggio basslines, sunny melodies, really awesome, detailed arrangements, and some vocodered vocals. There was a 4th Cyber People single, “Digital Signal Processor”, but it was basically by two members of Hipnosis (including one who was also in Black Box). It definitely has the Cyber People sound, it’s actually hard to tell that it was created by someone else than the first 3. These 4 singles were everything Cyber People ever released, but the singles all had remixes and alt versions, so that’s what rounds out this CD. The “slow version” of “Void Vision” is pretty killer, otherwise the rest of the remixes aren’t too different from the others. Well, the “Swedish” mixes of “Doctor Faustu’s” add an extra fluttering synth line. Anyway, if you don’t already have the songs on Italo comps, here’s an entire CD collecting them all.
« Previous Page —
Next Page »
The Answer Is In The Beat 