October 28, 2024 at 8:29 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
WE ARE WINTER’S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN: “NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER”
by a new project featuring Efrim Manuel Menuck from Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Mat Ball of BIG|BRAVE, this is somewhat similar to various incarnations of A Silver Mount Zion, but much noisier and dronier. Menuck’s trembling vocals and apocalyptic poetry are set to throbbing vibrations and glimmering synths. The effect feels similar to witnessing a divine heavenly light in a cathedral, while being sheltered from a violent thunderstorm. The title track sounds particularly bleak and ravishing, while the uncommonly beautiful “Uncloudy Days” is a much-needed glimmer of peace, driven by the message that “there’s no good but the good we make ourselves”. The longest track begins by referencing the time Michael Jackson dangled a baby over a hotel balcony, singling out one specific weird moment in popular culture which was amplified by the sensationalist media system that’s only gotten more unbearable since then. The verse is relatively short, then the music swells up into a great cacophony, and all you can do is just sit in the middle of it and FEEL, there’s no way to fight yourself out of it. It’s magnificent.
October 27, 2024 at 3:06 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Rich Pellegrin: Topography
Pianist Rich Pellegrin recorded
this album in a church over the course of a few sessions, along with saxophonist Neil Welch. All of the songs are titled after different natural locations, with some specifying whether they’re taking place during day or night, so they’re all like snapshots or scenes. They’re also conceptualized by Pellegrin, sometimes written, sometimes internally, but still improvised by the players. It’s all very intimate sounding, especially Welch’s playing, in which you can hear every breath stroke and movement, though there are also times where he seems a bit distant, or on the periphery. The gentle piano notes during “Stream” are what my brain keeps coming back to after putting this album on late at night so many times, there’s just something so calming and assuring yet still mysterious about that part. “Field (day)” is both one of the more rhythmic and melodic pieces, it creates more of a sense of traveling than the others. Both “Canyon” pieces fittingly have a vastness to them, but the “night” one does so in a particularly haunting way. Final track “Marsh” somehow meshes the parts of the album that feel comforting and eerie.
October 21, 2024 at 9:18 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Matt Robidoux: m e s h s o n g s ep cassette
After releasing an album showcasing a touch-controlled aluminum synthesizer shaped like two corn cobs, Matt Robidoux presents a
short cassette of compositions featuring MIDI accordion, pedal steel guitar, baritone horn, and e-drums. Maybe other instruments or sound sources are involved too, because there’s lots of other sounds and textures to be heard. Opener “Dream Window” is filled with sharp pinging tones, footsteps, knocking, and objects rolling on the floor, ending up as a flurry of glitches, pops, and waves. “Gum Loop” has a warm, rolling guitar loop, processed horns, shimmering patterns, and sporadic drum bursts. “Snail Shell of Rust” starts out with harsh refractions and zaps, surprisingly ending with sparse, intimate piano notes. “M e s h s o n g” is a sort of glitchy, unstable piece that ends up being the most playful, even funny track here (the backwards drum hits at the end seem comedic somehow). “Two Shapes” starts with more reversed sounds and light fluttering, along with glitch-delayed guitars, then turns into eerie melodies drifting into the sunset.
October 19, 2024 at 12:34 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Meadow Argus: Zoom tape
The
newest Meadow Argus tape focuses on one thing and one thing only: organ-based drones. No field recordings, no childhood memories, just cheap organs recorded to cassette tape and looped to infinity, occasionally revealing imperfections or subtle manipulations. The second part feels more expansive and horizontal than the first, though there’s some very distinct warbles and deliberate-sounding shifts and curves. The third part stretches out towards its own form of zen, and then the final part feels a bit more corrupted and burnt out, but somehow in a comforting way.
October 13, 2024 at 4:27 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Sir Tad: Two Walkers tape
mixes samples from self-help tapes and home recordings with drowsy keyboards set to quasi-dub rhythms. With songs like “Path to the Dutchie”, we get something that sounds close to a homespun Mad Professor. “Homestake Pass” starts with some goofy kid noises but ends up being a serene, floating-down-the-river melodica drone dub. “Mondo” is a pleasant psych guitar loop thing, the melody reminded me of Galaxie 500’s “Fourth of July”. “What a Jerk” is some playful tomfoolery with kids’ voices. “Year of the Dragon” is just a bright, gleeful keyboard melody, then “Off the Boo Hoff Trail” is just so slow and gloriously out of wack that it feels healing. “Tynan’s Theme Song” is a simple, engrossing melodica melody which ends the album as a proper sendoff, even with snippets of a kid saying “bye bye now”.
October 8, 2024 at 9:14 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
His Name Is Alive: Underground River Of Black Electricity 7″ EP
His Name Is Alive rarely play live these days, as Warren Defever is busy working as a mastering engineer at Third Man Records in Detroit, and he’s also been playing as part of the group Infinite River, making new age and meditative music, and making art. But 4AD released a tremendous box set of the first 3 HNIA albums with bonus material, so the band played some live gigs. I caught the Detroit show at El Club, and it was mindblowing to see the current version of the band play early songs like “How Ghosts Affect Relationships” and “There’s Something Between Us And He’s Changing My Words”. And then they played songs from the more recent albums (the ones the current band members played on) and of course ended with “This World Is Not My Home”, into “Can’t Go Wrong Without You” and then back into a for-real singalong of “This World Is Not My Home”. This record was for sale at the merch table, along with Cloud Clocks, which were basically repurposed clocks bought at Target which they painted, signed, and charged $100 for. But this record is a mix of Warren’s new age stuff, thanks to the harmonium and tanpura droning, as well as some of HNIA’s newer psych stuff, with the Mellotron, though it’s not proggy or heavy. There’s gentle guitar waves and a current of dreaminess. The second side has drumming by Steve Nistor, who regularly plays with Infinite River, and it’s closer to the more drifting side of Krautrock, eventually gaining some percolating synths and a choppier, increasingly more complex rhythm. Not quite Warren solo, not quite Infinite River, not any previous version of HNIA, but it’s still HNIA all the same, and like any HNIA record, it takes me somewhere I can’t identify and never expected to go.
October 5, 2024 at 11:48 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Meadow Argus: Arboreal Frippery CDr
Switching to the CDr format for a moment rather than cassette, Meadow Argus continues plundering past memories with
Arboreal Frippery. The album’s pieces are based on microcassette recordings from a 2009 hitchhiking trip around the West Coast, and they fold a multitude of strange voices and sounds into endlessly rolling drones, approximating train rides across the country, with memories of some of the more unique characters and situations replaying in one’s head while traveling through pastures. Two tracks collectively take up more than half of the album’s run time, and they both seem to best encapsulate the album’s aura. “Every person contains a universe” loops what sounds like an irritated cow mooing, while “Trainwreck Tunnel” distorts voices to an almost wacky level of graininess. Elsewhere, there’s calmer, harmonium-like wheezing (“Different during the day”, “409”), a jocular backwoods conversation between lovers (“Balloon”), and almost dubby levels of noise and reverb (“Monkey Wrench”).
October 1, 2024 at 8:19 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Bumbo’s Tinto Brass Band: V2 7″ EP
I confused
Bumbo with Jimbo Easter. They are not the same person, but Jimbo was on this band’s previous release, and it’s a similar sort of local avant-garage rock. This isn’t quite as unhinged as Jimbo, but it does have a Theremin and an offbeat sort of rawness to it. “The Post Modern Dance” and “Sinkholes and Peepholes” do end up being pretty weird, and “Honey Don’t” changes things up by featuring a spoken word appearance by Asha Vida (though I’m not sure if that’s the same Asha Vida as the Michigan space rock band from the ’90s).
September 24, 2024 at 8:21 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Cassie Ramone: Sweetheart
Vivian Girls’ Cassie Ramone returns with
an album of hazy late-night garage pop that’s just as good as the more hyped albums she was making a decade ago. There’s lo-fi synth pop like Beach House but better (“Joy to the World”), noisy bummed-out rock (“He’s Still On My Mind”, “They Hide Their Eyes”), hopeful songs with a heavy ’50s pop influence (“Together”, “Sweetheart”), and slight silliness (“Dilly Dally”) following heartbreak (“The Only Way I Know How”, which features Mac DeMarco). A super low-key release, but it’s not lacking in quality.
September 23, 2024 at 8:43 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Dren McDonald: Oceanic
San Francisco-based video game composer Dren McDonald (polyheDren) wrote
this suite about underwater life, utilizing several different techniques, from processed field recordings to triggered modular synths. “The Kids”, which drifts out to 12 minutes, is easily the most aquatic-sounding track, resembling an underwater equivalent of Daniel Lanois’ spacious Americana. “Physeter Coda” has light kosmische arpeggios, while “Oceanlight Meditation Vis” is the darker, submerged flipside of “Beachlight Meditation Vis”, with both utilizing gong-like ringing tones. “Delphinus Bursa” has expansive melodies and burbling sequences. “Dusklight Meditation Vis” is an eerie comedown which either features manipulated bird calls, or synths imitating them.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 