Bound By Endogamy Steamy Highways Have No End LP (Pinkman)
Go on, I’ll wait while you look up what “endogamy” means… I know I had to! I can’t say it brought me any closer to understanding what this Swiss duo are on about, though their shared language of industrial EBM synth-wave is borderless and universal. Steamy Highways Have No End is a stylish, cosmopolitan affair (I spy lyrics in at least three different languages) but avoids ever feeling passive or hollow as an unoccupied Bottega Veneta boutique might. Full of hostile drum programming and overactive synths, the album is sleek enough that the fog-shrouded ballads (“Krematorium”, “Never Wake Up Again”) are crucial elements within the black PVC tapestry Bound By Endogamy have unfurled. When they really get banging, one can’t help but notice the similarities to ADULT., Dopplereffekt, Marie Davidson and Front Line Assembly (vocalist Kleio Thomaïdes even resorts to screaming on “March To The Drums”), but they feel like a natural extension of those shared properties rather than pastiche. It’s never not serious, but it’s also awfully fun – how else can Thomaïdes get away with a line like “wake up, eat, fuck, oh yeah, if you don’t fuck you’re finished”? The programming is attention-grabbing and hectic, though any half-firing brain on the dance-floor will immediately connect with its primal, body-moving energy. If Dais and Sacred Bones aren’t squabbling over the North American distribution rights for the next Bound By Endogamy album, I’ll choke on my croissant!
Burned Up Bled Dry Next Stop… Dead Stop… LP (Prank)
The rumors are true: Arkansas’ finest hardcore export (at least until Chelsea Clinton’s d-beat band releases a demo) Burned Up Bled Dry are back! Of the many groups ostensibly inspired by His Hero Is Gone in the ’90s (I’m looking at you, My Hero Died Today), Burned Up Bled Dry were a cut above, leaning into shorter song-lengths and the fist-on-brick power of hardcore-punk as opposed to extended harmonic d-beat passages or the oppressive atmospheres that Neurosis taught us (who, well what do you know, are also back). Prank Records is a perfect fit, having been in the anti-commercial hardcore mix both then and now; it’s a crusty class reunion with significantly fewer white-guy dreads (we can only hope). Burned Up Bled Dry arrive as if freshly thawed from 1998: twenty-six(!) tracks, the majority under a minute, blast-beats and thrash beats and moshable dirges all chopped into fragments and re-glued into new configurations of hardcore brutality. I’m hearing touches of Tear It Up, From Ashes Rise, No Man’s Slave and of course the immortal echoes of His Hero Is Gone (who I commend for being one of the few greats to not come back for their victory-lap reunion, box-set promotion and/or giant check), which is to say, the music of Burned Up Bled Dry really hasn’t aged in any discernible fashion. I wonder if they can say the same about how they feel when they get out of bed in the morning.
CIA Debutante Trespass LP (Siltbreeze)
Trespass is CIA Debutante’s fourth full-length LP for Siltbreeze, and I’m already eager for four more. Their particular concoction of chilly post-punk mechanics, fractured, glowing electronics and deadpan spoken vocals is wide open for unexpected possibilities, with plenty of room to grow, and pretty much exactly what I want to spend my free time listening to. The chemistry between Nathan Roche (vocals, guitar) and Paul Bonnet (everything else) really pops here, Roche’s calmly considered voice and flustered guitar comfortably nestled amongst Bonnet’s reliable electro-rhythms, warbled pulses and even a woodwind or two. The similarities to Cabaret Voltaire and The Shadow Ring are evident sonically, but also in the group’s willingness to follow through on any idea no matter how bizarre, with the sense that no convention or dogma could ever constrain them. For example, the menacing beat behind “Flesh Microchip Repair” recalls Suicide, though the repeated rhyme of “Hieronymus Bosch / McIntosh” is without easy explanation – it just works! The same intrigue runs through the halogen-burn of “Cergy Prefecture” and the Matthew Bower-esque guitar squall of “Spill” – it’s enigmatic, it’s infatuating, it’s CIA Debutante.
Avalon Emerson & The Charm Written Into Changes LP (Dead Oceans)
Avalon Emerson’s evolution from peak-time American DJ in Europe to outdoorsy dream-pop sensation has been a fairly straightforward one. For as big-tent as her musical ideas tend to be, she’s always moved with sincerity and thoughtfulness, one of those artists whose interviews I read in full because there’s always some insightful kernel of wisdom to be gleaned. I’m not sure her music with (or perhaps more appropriately, as) The Charm will deliver the same goosebumps as “The Frontier” on a physically-fit sound system, but as for sugary, feel-good pop? This is pretty much where it’s at. Emerson’s voice shares the same uncanny crystalline delivery of james K and ML Buch throughout (new ML Buch album when?), alongside upbeat re-imaginations of baggy trip-hop, ’00s mall pop, the lighter side of MTV alt-rock and so on. It’s kind of where everyone’s heads seem to be these days, this nostalgia for a kindler gentler Y2K that may or may not have actually existed (Len’s sunshine has most certainly been stolen by now), discarding the parts that aged poorly and streamlining it with the studio wisdom of today’s top production teams. I’m reminded of Matthew Dear’s Bunny, Caroline Polachek’s playlist toppers, Madonna’s Ray Of Light and Carly Rae Jepsen’s deep cuts, teeny-bop music not for teenagers but hip city-dwelling young adults who have decided a cute dog beats having kids. I’m not sure if Emerson will reap the same rewards as some of her fellow dance-y indie-pop travelers, but she’s got the record-selling behemoth of Dead Oceans behind her – who better, and when better, to swing for the fences?
Fcukers Ö LP (Ninja Tune)
With a reputation for rebellious party-starting and a purposefully eye-catching name (I hope they’ve got a sponsorship deal going with French Connection UK by now), Fcukers are poised to level-up with Ö, their debut album for electro powerhouse Ninja Tune. The NYC duo (or occasional trio?) have taken the commercially-aspirational steps of enlisting Grammy-winning engineer Tom Norris, wild-card trendsetter Dylan Brady of 100 Gecs and producer du jour Kenneth Blume (don’t you dare call him Kenny Beats anymore) to craft Ö, and I’ll admit, it brings me some speck of happiness to see that big-budget pop upgrades still mostly suck. No part of “the music biz” from twenty years ago resembles whatever is happening now, so it’s a precious small comfort to listen to the phoned-in dance-pap of Fcukers and be reminded that joy can only be sparked naturally, not gamed into existence by the business-vampire simulacrum that ingests and distorts it. Of course, Fcukers were never about sincerity or politics or emotion – vocalist Shanny Wise has always sounded like her mind was elsewhere, a sort of Julia Fox Jr. that can make the worst fits look cool due to the invincible combination of youth, arrogance and New York City. It’s party music for club goons, the soon-to-be-cancelled and friends of friends of Xaviersobased, and while I respect music that speaks to a re-imagined “indie sleaze”, I want it to be slutty, shocking or otherwise unforgettable, rather than the safety-gloves, focus-grouped equivalent I’m hearing here. Ö hits like a Flo Rida x Liquid Death collaboration, when it’s PFFR x Sparks that I’m after.
Foote/Dickow High Cube LP (Geographic North)
The genre of “two electronic musicians jamming in a room together without forethought for a concise period of time” is ripe for collapse (laziness, lack of ideas, lack of coherence, etc.), and yet each time one of these new collabs hits my desk, I find myself enthralled. That Multiples album is great (Speedy J and Surgeon) and now this new one from west coast alt-techno mainstays Brian Foote and Paul Dickow has me wondering why anyone ever bothers rehearsing their downtempo techno in the first place. There’s just something special about the immediate spark of an idea that infuses electronic music’s compassionless hardware with heart and soul – Joey Beltram was recently talking about how he recorded his classic tracks live – and though Foote and Dickow maintain a calm demeanor throughout High Cube, their human presence is squarely felt. I’m reminded a bit of another American experimental dub-techno duo, Protect U, on a track like “A Dragon’s Treasure Is Its Soul”, where rhythms swerve and luxuriate over sparkling thrum and dub-fried effects in a manner that lightly disorients. It’s never overstuffed, and the two years-long friends are clearly listening to each other as much as you and I, volleying patterns and overlaying synths with the loving care a parent shows their sick child. I’m not sure I’d even recommend standing upright when High Cube spins – this is deep couch music, the listener’s inner balance playfully tested as if on a cruise ship voyage.
Glasspack Double For Horse Dancer LP (Gateway Gardenia)
Keep honking – I’m currently trapped in a transcendent inter-dimensional pathway thanks to Glasspack’s Double For Horse Dancer! They’re a relatively new duo comprised of Henry Birdsey (of pastoral New England drone unit Tongue Depressor) and Ian McColm (of CT avant-psych trio Nagual), and though their iteration of that trendy bumper sticker does not yet exist, I continue to succumb to their long-form electronic re-compositions, gladly in fact. Double For Horse Dancer takes organic source material (Birdsey’s bagpipes for sure; what else I’m not exactly certain) and re-chains its base chemical compounds into extravagant double-helixes. Glasspack bridges the gap between the left-field drone experiments found on Bill Nace’s Open Mouth label (Matt Krefting, John Truscinski, Jake Meginsky et al) and the minimalist-drone practitioners of yore like Terry Riley and Steve Reich, though it’s not a large gap, comprised more of institutional funding than anything else really. There’s a rich and worthy conceptual framework no matter how you slice it here, and Glasspack speaks the language fluently – these tracks are full of strobe-light sparkle, richly churned low-end and a sense of vastness as entertainment, like when you’re sitting in a planetarium and the show begins, galaxies whizzing across the dome so as to induce a light flutter of motion sickness. Closer “Fort Lee Double Rainbow” yanks the quantum physics e-brake and throws these celestial drones in reverse, black holes giving birth to white dwarfs. It’s about time someone spiced up the space-time continuum.
Lost Air Cloudmirror LP (Framework)
Something profound seems to have happened to Ryan Taylor, and if I’m to offer a guess, it was either the birth of a child or the death of an elder. You may recall his work in Boston hardcore rippers like Exit Order and Brain Killer, but under his solo Lost Air guise, Taylor pursues a dark-ambient form of post-rock, perfect for contemplating life, death and the horizon where the sea meets the air. (The gloomy cover image offers precisely the latter.) Cloudmirror is at least his first public attempt at longer-form instrumental soundscapes, and while there isn’t much in the way of risk-taking or uncharted territory here by the genre’s established forms, it’s a proper working document of curlicue drones, spacious ambient drift and patient melodic touches. The “haunted attic” quality reminds me a bit of Leland Kirby, whereas some of the elementally-rumbling forms position themselves similar to the ground-level textures of a Godspeed You! Black Emperor track. It’s not as cinematic as other genre practitioners, but I appreciate the home-spun feel, an effective way to communicate dark emotions where words may fail. And if you somehow miss those feelings, titles like “Home Pain”, “Indoor Fog”, “Into Wind” and “A Crawling Mist” nudge you toward their path.
mclusky I Sure Am Getting Sick Of This Bowling Alley 12″ (Ipecac)
Like a bad rash or a successful horror villain, enduring noise-rock jokesters mclusky keep coming back. At this point, modern first-world life has caught up with (and surpassed) the depressing absurdities found in a typical mclusky song, but I can understand why they’d feel compelled to keep their high-wire noise-rock act going: what else is there to do? Following last year’s proper comeback album The World Is Still Here And So Are We, this new six-song EP confirms the blokes are older and thriving, if not in fighting shape then at least capable of shaming their opponent with a well-timed zinger. I’m not sure this is a band that ever felt like they had “something to prove”, but it’s clear that even if those were once their intentions, they’re clearly only here to amuse themselves, which by proxy works well for those of us eager to enjoy antagonistic post-hardcore riffs led by a singer who refuses to fall in line. In “I Know Computer” and onward, it’s not just Andy Falkous’s voice that sneers – his guitar, Jack Egglestone’s drums and Damien Sayell’s bass all seem to be jeering at us, well-deserved schoolyard jabs with a lingering sting. “I Know Computer” has me wishing A Frames would finally come back too, while the rest of the EP navigates a zone from IDLES to The Fall to Cake, with plenty of over-the-top vocal affectations and catchy pop hooks dressed up in an abrasive noise-rock disguise. If you’re not having fun, they’re not having fun… but it sure seems like they’re having fun.
MM/KM Velours 12″ (Kimochi)
Some of you I’ll have on board with as little as “dub techno incoherence”, others will be tempted once I say “pressed in a sparse limited-edition with hand-painted covers in typical Kimochi style”, and the remaining few who still aren’t impressed? I will light a candle for your hardened souls. I’m already starting to reflexively cognize “KM” as Kassem Mosse when I see it, paired up here with Mix Mup for a brief foray beyond our comprehension into fields of baffling dark matter. At first, it makes sense: “Ford Sierra In Dub” (song title of the month) stares bloodshot into the after-hours with a bed of skittering hi-hats and a persistent low-key thump, akin to Kyle Hall’s inscrutable techniques. “Gedanken” follows with startling signs of decay: the track consists solely of some farty little bubbles all by themselves. The title track then captures those bubbles and slaps them onto a vast and empty grid, resembling something Actress would dare to dream. It’s the ten minute “Delphinpanik” that is the greatest cause for concern, however; “ambient” in the sense of an empty supermarket after close, Mosse and Mup test out some gear in the loneliest corner of Guitar Center until they get kicked out. It’s not dance music so much as the alarming lack thereof, a bold piece of art that only gets bolder once you realize they actually sent it to Kimochi, Kimochi actually approved it, and a record pressing plant actually manufactured a couple hundred polyvinyl chloride copies for commercial sale. They all believe in it – do you?
Opal Sunn Liquid – Phases I – III 12″ (Test Pressing)
Remember Red Bull Music Academy? If Sketchy Ketamine Music Academy existed, Alex Kassian and Hiroaki Oba would be tenured chairs for their work as Opal Sunn. “Liquid – Phase 1” is deep, deep Balearic house, a dance cut that confuses the psychic borders separating total exhaustion and insatiable horniness. What’ll it be, sleep or tantric sex for the next forty-eight hours? Might as well dance while you decide! When the godlike voiceover hits, I feel like I’ve joined a polycule based on that picture of Sting and his wife in a candlelit boudoir (please, quickly google if you haven’t already been blessed by this image). “Liquid – Phase II” is a proper dub rinsing, a sensual orbit that affirmatively answers the question of “can humans be seduced in outer space?”. If any of your particles remain untitillated, “Liquid – Phase III” delivers the faintly glimmering embers of its proceeding phases, a reflection pool that reveals your newly nourished, post-Liquid self. You can buy as many expensive serums and organic cleanses as you want, I support that, just understand that nothing will revitalize you quite like a private session in Opal Sunn’s Liquid flotation tank.
Bill Orcutt Last Days LP (Fake Estates)
Many Bill Orcutt fans made the pilgrimage to New York for his recent weekend-long showcase at Roulette, and I regret not being among them. It seems to have been a new career highlight for this American guitarist who, in his sixties, probably still hasn’t peaked just yet, but I find these snarky computer-composition albums, released on his Fake Estates label and never performed live, to be just as thrilling in their own way. I’m not sure he’ll top A Mechanical Joey (a minimalist new-music piece comprised of a counting-off Joey Ramone), but Last Days is immediately up there with it. The concept is equally stupid/brilliant: take the first eight notes from Slash’s iconic “Sweet Child O Mine” intro and flip, layer, rotate and loop it across two fifteen minute chunks. There’s nothing more (and nothing less) to it; Slash’s beautiful harmonics, once in the shape of a three-dimensional prism, are refracted through spools of diamonds, a thrill bordering on madness. Undoubtedly, it’s only a matter of time before whomever you’re with asks you to turn Last Days off – Orcutt loves nothing if not testing one’s patience – but it can be a handy way to measure that person’s tolerance of blinding beauty, their willingness to fully submit to objectionable, crazy art. I’m not sure I’d want to spend time with anyone who can’t tolerate a full side.
Poison Ruïn Hymns From The Hills LP (Relapse)
Sketches of a new world could be gleaned from 2023’s Härvest, but Hymns From The Hills offers a detailed rendering of Poison Ruïn’s alluring realm. It cracks open a Middle Earth filled with punks and skins in place of hobbits and orcs – the hand-drawn map detailed with craggy, mist-shrouded mountain ranges, mysterious caves and circle pits of unknown origin sadly doesn’t exist, but the spirit of Gary Gygax remains. Instrumental passages redolent of Manowar, Blue Öyster Cult, Asunder and the Poison Ruïn dungeon-synth side-project Shadow Knell fill every porous surface with color (or should I say cölör), but no one is gonna want to hang too long if they don’t have the songs worth sticking around for. Poison Ruïn have sharpened their songwriting blades as well, sounding less like anyone else and more like themselves (the New Kings of the Four-Minute Punk Song), which inhabits a fairly wide stylistic range, from blackened, doomy punk ala Raspberry Bulbs to the heathen strum of The Wipers, the bloodstained aggression of Tank and whatever “Lily Of The Valley” is… pub-punk from a pre-Christianity Ireland, before the snakes got chased out? Mac Kennedy’s voice is commandingly large, gruff and weathered in a similarly-different way to Dickie Barrett and Shane McGowan. The group even flexes their black-metal muscles on closer “The Standoff” for a moment, if only to ease into another mid-paced spiked-gauntlet fist-pumper that rallies the righteous. For a shout-along chorus to work, you need the people behind you, and Hymns From The Hills is filled with moments that shatter the passiveness of social etiquette and rouse folded arms up into the air.
Poison Suckers Charmer 7″ (Transistor 66)
One of the distinct signifiers of modern punk is its fluidity between band, solo- and studio-project. It used to be that you had to hang out with three other degenerates, even if you didn’t really like them (or they didn’t like you), for the opportunity to create parent-torturing rock n’ roll, but now all you need is an internet connection (complimentary at Tim Hortons) and you can whip up something worth posting online. I can’t quite tell if Winnipeg’s Poison Suckers qualify as a ‘real band’ or what, as these four songs feature Joe Warkentin handling drums, guitars and vocals with Jo Jo Rodriguez on lead vocals, but at least as a duo, they’ve got the photoshoot charisma and yards of animal-print fabric worthy of a gander. I prefer the trash-rock garage of “Slash Tires” and “I’m A Zero” to the slow-dance ’60s pop of “Charade” and the Canadian rockabilly of “Viper Winds” (I’m still recovering from Orville Peck PTSD), but the whole thing is recorded crispier than tavern-style pizza and satisfies just as simply. I love a snare that sounds like pebbles inside a washing machine, and alongside Poison Suckers’ winged-eyeliner and mustache combo, it’s making me want to order the filthiest cocktail at the tiki bar and drink it in one gulp, dry ice included.
whitepicketfence whitepicketfence 7″ (Exotic Fever)
Don’t let the reissue-fication of emo fool you – it wasn’t always bespoke box-set packaging, clearly delineated recording specs, half a dozen 180-gram vinyl variants, well-written yet rose-tinted essays, collector-squeezing pricing tiers and some deeply implied sense of importance. No, it was kids (and eventually, adults) making something by hand in their basements and garages that looked, sounded and smelled like it was made in their basement and garages by hand. It was entrusted to and distributed through a network of likeminded (and mostly unpaid) people, not a distribution conglomerate, and it looked and sounded quite a bit like whitepicketfence. Their debut EP is barely on Bandcamp – each of the four songs has their own separate release page (why!) and there’s no obvious way to buy the record (double why!) – and I’m delighted that they didn’t seem to know any better when it came to designing the package, too: a sleeveless clear vinyl record (like that Sleepytime Trio one) in one of those plastic picture-disc sleeves that will eventually off-gas a muddy haze onto the grooves. While fully grown adults, the guitar/drums duo of Chris Lauterbach and Katy Otto continue to bash on their respective instruments and sing from deep within their hearts as they’ve done in numerous bands prior. It’s messy like Frail, moody like The Evens and abstract like The Dead C, with amplifier radio-interference for atmosphere and melodic vocals sung in unison over fuzz-pedal guitar. This is unself-conscious, imperfect and DIY music from people who deeply believe in it – in other words, emo.
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