Laura Glipin’s powerful poem “Two-Headed Calf” inspired Rodeo Boys’ first single from Junior, a raucous heartbreaker of an album that has staked a claim for one of my favorite albums of the year. The Lansing, Michigan-based band self-describes as “the sound of a quiet rebellion of a queer, blue-collar heart” and “what happens when the Miller High Life gets legs and starts walking around”, and this is apt. Junior‘s bending of blue-collar rock to its own will is fresh and thrilling. Fans of Mannequin Pussy, Wednesday, Destroy Boys, and the Hold Steady take note. Junior could be your new favorite record.
Lead singer Tiff Hannay’s got a classic rock front-person voice. Their vocals tie this collection of songs together beautifully. Every crack of…
Category: indie
Kenji Kariu’s songs land oh so lightly. The lyrics (in Japanese) are barely breathed. The melodies waft through gentle arrangements like dandelion fluff. The songs refer quietly to other songs — opener “And Then There Was Light” has the ineffable bossa nova lilt of, say, “The Girl from Ipanema,” while breeze-y, beachy “Umbrella,” borrows a sing-song-y tea dance tune from 1920s Broadway — but don’t over rely on them.
Keyboards twinkle, percussion shuffles, the artist croons, and all is weightless, well-lighted and faintly unreal.
This is Kariu’s fourth album, following a stint in OWKMJ. It feels a bit less fragmentary and experimental than 2021’s Sekai, with stronger melodies and lusher (though still quiet)…
Cameron Knowler is a guitarist, composer, and educator who mines the deep veins of Americana. His Rural Guitar YouTube channel and Instagram account offer a wealth of guidance and information. As a flatpicker, he has mastered Norman Blake’s unhurried precision, and his recordings and instructional materials show his engagement with figures ranging from Riley Puckett to Tut Taylor to the fiddler James Bryant. On CRK, he weaves these strands together into an exquisite homespun tapestry.
The opening track, “Christmas in Yuma,” sets the stage with an homage to Knowler’s hometown featuring a recited poem over minimal guitar. The other tracks are instrumental, and all but one seem to be original compositions.
Eyes Like Predatory Wealth, the debut album from avant-garde drone trio Apparitions, was shaped by external constraints. Guitarist Andrew Dugas, modular synth player Igor Imbu, and drummer Grant Martin recorded their parts in isolation, deliberately walling themselves off from the racket made by their fellow musicians. The three songs on the album were to run for precisely 10, 20, and 30 minutes, respectively. The players agreed on general outlines but were otherwise left to their own improvisatory devices. The result was one of the bolder formal experiments to come out of heavy music in recent memory, a fiercely modernist collage of Sunn O)))-indebted guitars, yawning synth drones, and gnashing drums that, somehow, managed to cohere into satisfying songs.
For a dance music producer, Anthony Naples has always made albums with unusually broad appeal — the kind that even your coworker who went to a Four Tet show once might appreciate. Each LP has some kind of unifying theme or inspiration, like ’90s downtempo on Orbs, nighttime radio on Fog FM, or the surprising inclusion of live instruments on Chameleon, an experiment in writing music, rather than producing it. Scanners stands out for its lack of context or backstory. Even the accompanying note on Bandcamp merely says that it features “ten new songs.” The New York artist’s sixth album is his most straightforward yet: ten new songs indeed, exploring a subtle and spacious take on dance music with polished surfaces and just the right amount of melody.
Naarm/Melbourne four-piece Press Club evolve and expand their sound on To All the Ones That I Love while retaining their core essence.
Opening track ‘I Am Everything’ is edgy shoegaze, a more contemplative start that will be a surprise to anyone who has listened to the previous albums which are loaded with punk rock. To be clear it is no less for it. To open with to a more nuanced, considered song demonstrates a band not afraid to evolve. The vocals of Natalie Foster are given an opportunity to shine.
Press Club are a group of friends first and foremost. Formed in 2016 they started jamming a couple of times a week in Iain’s Macrae (guitar) Brunswick garage. Once they had some songs they cut their teeth in Melbourne’s vibrant live…
On her fourth album, the ambient folk artist Satomimagae imagines a world without names, lines, or borders — anything that could distinguish one thing from an absolute whole. What we might call “leaves” on “trees” here are simply shades upon shades. Every difference is negated. Listening to it feels like waking up from anesthetic, an experience in which there is no delineation between self and other, inner and outer.
Taba, the album’s title, is a Japanese term for bundling and sheafing, gathering material together. True to its name, the album sounds as though Satomimagae has extracted all the world’s resources and fed them into a juicer on quiet mode. Other than the rich open voicings of her guitar — the only distinguishable instrument…
Turnover emerged in the early part of the 2010s, quickly outgrowing their emo and punk roots to create a more introspective sound that incorporated the lushness of dream pop and the tender melodies of indie pop. 2015’s Peripheral Vision marked the beginning of their transformation as it dialed down the distortion and added touches of shoegaze haze and summery vocal harmonies.
Celebrate a decade of Turnover’s iconic sophomore album Peripheral Vision with this Deluxe Anniversary Edition. This three-disc box set includes Peripheral Vision in full alongside two bonus tracks (“Humblest Pleasures” and “Change Irreversible”) on disc one. Disc two features a completely instrumental version of Peripheral Vision’s original eleven songs.
It’s hard not to feel a sense of place when listening to Eli Winter’s music. From his first solo effort to his myriad collaborations, Winter often evokes bucolic landscapes with his precise fingerpicking and lilting major-key melodies, conjuring up panoramic vistas and cascading streams with preternatural ease. A Houston native and self-taught wizard of the American Primitive style of folk music, he feels particularly freed from any overwrought sense of tradition or constrictions that fellow adherents can often fall prey to. There’s a certain frontier spirit, a Western sense of exploration and adventure rather than a hidebound historicity, to his particular approach.
That spirit also finds a more distinct sense of place in his adopted hometown of Chicago,…
“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” the 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson quipped. The Golden Dregs’ fourth album, Godspeed, is a paean to London, specifically to the people who make up the city, whose existence is its pulse, and whose stories, whether good or bad, reflect the city. In other words, Godspeed is a blessing, a blessing for the denizens of London.
This is the second Golden Dregs album to fore- ground a city — On Grace & Dignity (2023), their first and last record released by the British label 4AD, is in part a condemnation of gentrification in Cornwall, as locals found themselves priced out by wealthy individuals buying holiday homes. Godspeed tells the story of ordinary people experiencing ordinary moments in London.
“Hard to be happy when the world is getting heavy.” This line arrives during the refrain of the final song — “Big Doink ”— but honestly, it summarizes the world’s need for Pet Symmetry’s latest album, Big Symmetry.
Sure, it was born out of a different year’s tough times — namely 2021’s COVID pandemic and the interruption it inflicted upon touring — but feels like it was recorded yesterday because, well, we could all use an infectiously celebratory album about love right now.
Such genuine positivity is new for the band. The more power pop-leaning side project from emo veterans Evan Weiss (Into It. Over It.), Marcus Nuccio (Ratboys), and Erik Czaja (Dowsing), Pet Symmetry has a long history of planting…
“If you give me another chance, I’m probably gonna fuck it up anyway” — now that’s some admirable self-knowledge. The Toronto punk boys in PUP are veterans by now, going strong on their fifth album Who Will Look After the Dogs? Twelve years past their frantic, funny debut, they still crash through their tunes with frantic guitar overdrive, as Stefan Babcock’s snotty one-liners break out into brotherly dude-unison sing-alongs. But Pup are taking on tough adult emotions these days. Babcock speaks for us all when he asks the philosophical question: “Always feeding on the rotting corpse of goodwill and what’s left of humanity/What the fuck is wrong with me?”
Last time, these guys were working hard to prove they could mature and evolve as musicians,…
Voices on Eli Keszler’s latest self-titled record are rarely plainspoken. It begins with a gasp, and gives way to words whispered, uttered and beamed from another place.
The composer and percussionist doesn’t so much centre vocals on this album – whether they’re his own, his collaborators’, or of undefined origin – as he does allow them to mill about and live in the gaps in these songs’ walls. That can be a comfort and a jump scare.
The album is unmistakably indebted to the imagination and soundscapes of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti. The sultry Sofie Royer-sung numbers open the curtain to the red room of Twin Peaks, while the jittery, noirish avant-jazz elsewhere conjures the unseen extended lineup…
James Krivchenia is a multifaceted artist who, whether you realize it or not, has made his way onto your playlist at some point.
From his session work with pop sensations like Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, to drumming and producing for Grammy-nominated folk titans Big Thief, Krivchenia has his hands in many pots, none of which can prepare you for his phenomenally complex solo material.
On Performing Belief, his daring, abstract solo LP that shimmers and pulses with electronic blips, atmospheric field recordings, and raw percussion prowess.
The spiritually fulfilling and oddly danceable eight song LP is a labor of love dedicated to the artist’s tirelessly free approach to dance music.
Just when you think you know what you’re going to get from Dope Lemon, here comes Golden Wolf. Less than a year after the last Angus & Julia Stone album and less than two since Kimosabè, Angus is back at it, delivering yet another solid record.
…Golden Wolf marks a step away from Stone’s youth, instead exploring what lies ahead. With Dope Lemon’s sound being heavily influenced by classic rock as well a reflective state of where Stone is at that particular point of his life, this new album invites its listeners to enjoy the journey of life with that familiar groovy, psychedelic sound, bringing you the perfect summer feels album, that just keeps getting better with every listen.
The almost Fontaines D.C.-esque opener “John Belushi” is a great way to kick off the album.
On the follow-up to 2020’s Thunderclouds, indie cult hero Louis Philippe and his latter-day collaborators the Night Mail create an impeccable pop bouquet, infused with gentle melancholy and the quiet wisdom of time’s passage. Philippe is one of those rare artists whose music felt distinctly grown-up and sophisticated, even in the earliest part of his career. His references were hip and often outside of the pop/rock mainstream — jazz, bossa nova, classical, French chanson.
Throughout his multi-decade career, he has remained something of a musical magpie, utilizing the choicest bits from all genres to decorate his intricate, layered pop songs. With its graceful chamber pop arrangements, lush vocals, and clever chord sequences, The Road to the Sea…
Scott Morgan, the Vancouver electronic music artist who works under the name loscil, leads a quiet life; the kind of patient, dedicated figure who desires neither cultural omnipresence nor promotional shortcuts, but rather a respectable long game played on fields that tend toward the timeless: graceful ambience, chamber drone, dub-inflected electronics. And while there’s plenty of change across his catalogue, Morgan’s thumbprint has remained distinct.
You can usually tell a loscil production through several compositional and production tics: the thickness of the textures; deft layering and arrangement that affords each sound its own presence in the field; juxtaposition that never feels awkward or ungainly; careful balance of…
You can see why Model/Actriz’s 2023 debut album Dogsbody attracted a lot of approving critical attention. In an era when rock music largely leans towards familiarity – where originality has essentially come to mean rearranging recognisable sounds from the past in a relatively fresh way – here was a band who genuinely didn’t seem to sound much like anyone else.
The Brooklyn quartet had released a handful of noisy singles pre-Covid, which attracted vague comparisons to the notoriously challenging clangour of the late ’70s no wave movement or the frenetic dance-punk of Liars, an outlier band on the far left field of the early ’00s New York scene that gave the world the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But on Dogsbody they honed…