Review: Blithe Field - "Face Always Toward the Sun"

Blithe Field - Face Always Toward The Sun

(2016 Orchid Tapes)

When he isn't crafting surreal pop soundscapes under his own name, Chicago's Spencer Radcliffe paints equally strange ambient abstractions as Blithe Field. The project's latest full-length effort, Face Always Toward the Sun is a scattered pile of auditory Tinker Toys - though its quivering breaths of tinny synthesizer and nervous field-recorded clatter fit together like square pegs into square holes, Radcliffe continually finds new ways to play with these building blocks of sound, coated with chipped layers of tertiary-toned paint. 

Standout cut "Milkshakes In The Rain" is a simple construction, sturdy and symmetrical. Sprinkled with tape hiss and vinyl crackle, it forms a solid scaffolding of twangy guitar picking strong enough to support the elegant canopy of vocoder harmonies that drapes itself atop the composition as comfily as melted cheese on a burger or a housecat on a throw blanket. The track occupies the same musical territory populated by Reedbeds and Stars are Insane: it's impressionist sound painting. The closer I get to the thick dabs of pasty guitar and glistening Fisher-Price chimes - the more times this ambient carousel orbits my room - the more formless they get. A once-clear painting disintegrates into abstract brushstrokes that form new shapes.

I'm unzipping a soft, navy blue lunchbox in the cafeteria, reaching in and producing a plastic-wrapped 6-pack of impossibly orange peanut butter crackers. I feel thirsty. Or maybe I watch raindrops embrace and cascade down the van window. It's dark out. In the back seat, I strain my eyes to read the greyscale panels of newspaper comics and the night's chill makes my arm-hairs stand on end. When I get home I'll tear the foil off the baseball cards I slipped into the shopping cart at Target. This sound is pure - I feel like a child and I want to fumble at some sort of packaging with my fat fingers.

Radcliffe builds towering, avant-garde structures too. Pebbles of crunchy ambience shower onto a quiet, creeping piano riff - somewhere between Carpenter's Halloween score and an Erik Satie piece - looped ad infinitum. Gradually, this piano loop becomes completely buried and Radcliffe begins to employ heavy machinery to dig it out. Atonal synths rattle like chains and grind like rusty moving parts to pierce the stillness. "Secret Soda Machine" snakes along on an off-kilter rhythm, piping glassy bubbles into the undulating contents of a fishtank. Face Always Toward the Sun is brimming with tactile, evocative sounds, each tone a holder of childhood memories in this dusty musical attic.

Single Review: Shivering Window - "Days I've Lost"

Shivering Window - Days I've Lost 7"
(Juniper Tree/Rok Lok 2015)

Shivering Window's migration from the cozy confines of cassette tape to a record's vast, wax plateau is a bold move, but one that gives the Californian bedroom act's funereal songcraft some much-needed room to breathe. Those familiar with the project's prolific tape-ography will instantly recognize Matthew Gray's tenebrous blend of dissonant riffs, echoing vocals and itchy tape hiss, but will find it tough to ignore the slight upgrade in presentation. It's as if Gray has snowblown the top layer of lo-fi murk from the tinny hits of drum machine that poke through his droney wefts of shoegaze - a bassy field recording that resembles a school bus' morning grumble is the only cushion between voice, percussion and minimally arranged guitar meanderings on the single's A-side. 

Perhaps Shivering Window's most melodic effort to date, "Days I've Lost" patiently pairs a jittery, goth-folk verse with a surprisingly confident chorus that bears the vaguely folky twang that might haunt a Real Estate record.  It's subtly catchy stuff that might worm its way out of my subconscious and into my mind's radio one lazy summer afternoon a few months from now, sending me tearing through my record collection in hopes of remembering the title of the tune I just can't shake. 

Review: Khotin - "Baikal Acid" 12"

Khotin - Baikal Acid
(1080p 2016)

Adorned with a silicone sonic pallet and Clip Art-core visuals that eerily resemble the cover art of Dean Blunt's The Redeemer, Khotin's Baikal Acid is a hypnotically amorphous slab of greyscale house that will keep your noggin bopping at 120 BPM while hammering out your last research paper paragraph to the light of a desklamp. Buffing out any of the lo-fi abrasion that marked his ultra-dreamy back catalogue, the Canadian producer pipes airy synths into artificially-lit, sterile soundscapes; his new effort feels as pure as bottled water, a McDouble fresh off the assembly line or warm paper ejected from the copy machine - it's as if he takes an evening's post-thunderstorm chill and converts it into processed, digitized sound. Post-consumer transubstantiation. 

A-Side "Recycle" (followed by an ambient "Drift Mix" of the same cut) is the record's strongest showing, orbiting subtle puffs of spacey sound-debris about its axis - a creamy, catchy melody and a tumultuous bassline that dribbles over hats and flurries of claps. The title track pairs a more sinister, yet minimal, arrangement with a rhythm section that wraps the listener in 16th-note chain mail. Though it's tough not to groove to Baikal Acid, it's a record that seems primed for doing so in solitude - the synth arrangements that accompany Khotin's recent work are as calculated and somber as Gregorian chants. But it's that very ascetic aesthetic that makes them so charming and irresistible. 

Review: Wild Nothing - "Life of Pause"

Wild Nothing - Life of Pause

(2016 Captured Tracks)

Having undergone more identity crises than an angsty high-school sophomore over the course of his sonically diverse 6-year discography, Jack Tatum finds his once scrappily charming solo project in a state of cozy repose. Though as tinged with shimmering chorus and as bathed in reverb as ever, his appropriately-titled new record, Life of Pause, resembles the descent into a long-deserved nap, shedding the colorful bombast of 2014's Empty Estate and jittery jangle-pop tension of Gemini for a pair of 70's soft-rock pajamas. Tatum's tunecraft is lower in tempo, but noticeably at its most confident, draping towering mid-tempo scaffoldings in gaudy glam-pop orchestration and a sense of twangy warmth that recalls Fleetwood Mac. Even without the strength of hooks as instantly catchy as those found on "Summer Holiday" and "Golden Haze" before it, Life of Pause dazzles with lush instrumentation, more complex song structure and a veteran's keen patience.

Picking up where the Talking Heads-inspired flamboyance of Empty Estate left off,  Life of Pause is teeming with new ideas and timbres. Right off the bat, Tatum opens intro cut "Reichpop" with a thin fog of guitar feedback, penetrated only by a rainfall of marimba that could be taken as an homage to Toto's "Africa". Cuts like the piano-laden "Woman's Wisdom" even hearken back to Todd Rundgren's early 70's output, its funk bassline and meandering synths leading up to a Bee Gees chorus. "Japanese Alice", with its nimbly strummed, trebly chords and motorik rhythms most resembles Tatum's earliest work, but still manages to stay fresh on the strength of tight production and a breezy refrain that introduces the album's most predominant lyrical theme - "wax museum / uncanny valley", he whispers above glistening arrangements. Tatum, like many artists I've been taking a look at lately, is exploring the boundaries between reality and our digital semblances of it: "TV Queen" is a love song written to a figure behind the screen while "Alien" seems to deal with the distortion of personality/appearance that social media allows us. It's the aforementioned "TV Queen" that serves as the Life Of Pause's creative peak, lacing sultry strings and eerily echoing guitar riffs above the sort of grrovy basslines that are extremely prevalent throughout the record. It's punchy, melancholy and strangely entrancing. While it likely won't gain as many new fans as the sleek, accessible Nocturne before it, Life Of Pause is sure to be a treat for diehard Wild Nothing fans who have come to love Tatum's terse lyricism and crisp arrangements.

Announcing Half-Gifts Radio!

Join me every Friday at 3PM EST for an hour's worth of Half Gifts Radio. Each week I'll be spinning lo-fi, post-punk and shoegaze tunes while briefly discussing new album releases with my co-host Kyle Root. Episode 1 airs February 19th - don't miss out! FRIDAY // 3-4PM EST // norsecoderadio.com

Review: Flanch - "Flanch"

Flanch - Flanch

(Darling Recordings 2016)

Scaling the lofty construction of recent post-internet epics like Arca's Mutant and Bjork's Vulnicura down to a more intimate, livable scale, Flanch's self-titled debut is a terse tape inhabited by brittle, misshapen synths, a Lynchan atmosphere and an unshakable pop sensibility that glows like a neon pink lava lamp in the furthest corner of its grim, digital hellscape. Though a starkly artificial record teeming with frighteningly foreign laptop-generated textures, Flanch feels oddly organic, like a Folkways compilation of field recordings brought back from an alternate reality - of campfire songs, hymns and the occasional 16 bars worth of CLIPPING-esque hip-hop penned by virtual reality pioneers. And perhaps that feeling doesn't stray too far from the truth: the record's lengthy list of credits suggests it's the product of a web-based collective rather than a single individual. This multitude of voices and instruments give Flanch the sonic properties of the Catholic liturgy - the lachrymose string arrangements of "Hal0" and the tinny piano tones that flood "Ble$$ings" could easily draw comparisons to the music of the Mass. There's even the semblance of a southern gospel service in the delicate call-and-response of "Pretty Girl". Blending the steeliness of synths and 808 drum patterns into the warm intimacy of worship music, Flanch is the chaotic soundtrack to a post-human communion of souls.

In that same vein, the project is a quiet, calculated antithesis to the frenetic discographies of artists like SOPHIE and A.G. Cook - though they too revel in digital abstraction, there's a sense of Bacchic ecstacy, a hyper-pop shimmer, that's completely missing from Flanch, and that's what makes it such a fascinating record. Though opening cut "Graace" borrows tropes and timbres from mainstream trap, its minimal construction and eerie sense of dissonance negates the genre's inherent sense of danceability and surfacey fun, replacing it with a stoic sense of beauty that resembles a cross between 80s goth supergroup This Mortal Coil and Kanye West's post-2010 material. Though forward-thinking and futuristic, Flanch is by no means afraid to look to the past and present for inspiration; the fruit of their efforts is an exciting of what's to sprout from the seeds of Death Grips and Oneohtrix Point Never.  

Review: Phargo - "Rende's"

Phargo - Rende's

(2015 Ozona)

Sneakily concealing a surprising amount of depth beneath its ramshackle crust, Rende's is the sort of Bandcamp release that takes full advantage of its lo-fi, underground autonomy. The debut full-length effort of Louisiana quartet Phargo takes listeners for a county fair thrill ride's worth of whiplash-inducing twists into new ideas and genres - its first ten minutes contain a jazzy lattice of midwestern emo guitaristry ("The Opening Scene In Tokyo-3"), a riff-riddled slacker-rock anthem that recalls Yuck's melodic sludginess ("Cool Guy Has A Chill Day"), a funereal garage ballad that slowly builds up to a cinematic post-rock crescendo ("Who's Line Is It Anyway?") and an undulating waterbed of gloomy guitar noodlings ("Untitled"). No matter what texture or emotion you're in the mood for, Rende's diverse menu of flavors is sure to offer its own twist on your order, swaddled in a batter of noise, reverb and unabashedly pop-punk vibes - it musters the dynamic range and theatrical bombast of Mogwai's Mr. Beast and condenses it into a manageable 33 minutes of memorable hooks and teen angst. Despite this terseness, Rende's offers quite a bit of replay value in the form of outliers like the incredibly dense "Thanks, Kojima!", pummeled with flange pedal psychedelia, and the Velvet Underground-esque minimalism of "Josh Zirkle's Dosh Circle". As hip as its laundry list of sonic influences and as lovably geeky as the video games and goofy YouTube videos it references, Phargo's debut is a timeless emo record for all seasons, for all ages, for all feelings.  

Review: DIIV - "Is the Is Are"

DIIV - Is the Is Are

(2016 Captured Tracks)

Chugging krautrock grooves; Cocteau Twins-ian dream-pop drones; patchwork scraps of failed jams and studio outtakes; polished pop gems familiar to their rabid fans who scour the barnacled surface of Youtube for distorted peeks at new material; no-wave freakouts that channel Sonic Youth's ectoplasmic waves of static... 

Is the Is Are, pressed nearly four years following DIIV's critically-acclaimed debut, Oshin, more closely resembles a retrospective compilation than a sophomore effort - a proud demonstration of the myriad textures and hooks frontman Cole Smith and Co.are able to assemble with impressive frugality - over the course of 17 tracks, the Brooklyn quintet vividly illustrates a half-decade's worth of frustration (arrests, addictions, severe cases of writer's block) and 30 years' worth of post-punk innovation with a few choice brushstrokes. Is The Is Are is a beautifully monochromatic record, a grey Rothko canvas lavished with rough, charcoal distortion, impasto layers of gooey reverb and a shimmery coat of chorus-pedal lacquer.

The brighter side of the grey spectrum is occupied by Oshin throwbacks like twangy opener "Out Of Mind" or the blisteringly pretty "Loose Ends", its summery lead riff a trickle of butter through gloomy lumps of mashed potato clouds. Though fans will likely find such tracks quite structurally similar to their 2012 predecessors (staccato melodies layered carefully atop wefts of wiry guitar), Smith's vocals are more confident and expressive than ever, the rhythm sections noticeably more propulsive and arresting. Is the Is Are's darkest moments are just as compelling - "Dust" slowly pulls listeners into a void - a downward spiral - of funereal bass and keening peals of lead guitar while Smith hacks spoken words into the microphone like pneumonic mucus. The song is pale, sickly and surprisingly catchy, a last-ditch burst of life-force leading into closing cut "Waste of Breath", a formless, aqueous shoegaze tune in the vein of Slowdive that lies somewhere between a buildup of nervous tension and the closure of release. It never commits to either side, concluding on a curiously ambiguous note.

It's this grey area of greyness where DIIV seems most at home, most satisfying - the counterbalance of somber arpeggios and cozy trills played high on the neck of guitar on "Healthy Moon", the title track's bassy rumblings, Sky Ferreira's Kim Gordon-esque incantations atop "Blue Boredom" - Is the Is Are is full of murky confusion, a the fog that conceals hidden nuggets of beauty and catharsis. Highly recommended and a major improvement over the already-solid Oshin. 

Review: Orange Cake Mix - "At The Record Shop"

Orange Cake Mix - At the Record Shop

(Why the Tapes Play 2016)

It's the grade-school notebook you find rummaging through your dresser drawers, riddled with absent-minded doodles and penciled tessellations that meander across its wide-ruled pages. Mostly improvised and scrawled onto 4-track tape, Orange Cake Mix's At the Record Shop is a gallery of charming song sketches, terse and skeletal, that revel in their own raw spontaneity. Recorded at the turn of the millennium, Jim Rao's lo-fi transmissions sound neither dated nor overly hip - they instead lie in a snug middle ground between Sentridoh's percussive folk strummers and the emogaze of Teen Suicide - the tape is chock-full of tinny lead guitars that melt atop warm vocal harmonies. Imagine the fusion of a higher-fi Barlow and a twangier Mac Demarco: Orange Cake Mix is timeless, unobtrusive and perfect for zoning out to in the late evening.

Fuzz-soaked space rock drones like "Movement of Light" and the woozy "Space I'm In" are the tape's best first impressions, but lately I've been returning to the handful of new-agey synth-scapes that litter the record. "Theme From Certron" crackles with retro sci-fi fuzz, sending aqueous tones out into a reverb abyss while "Casio Drone" swirls with Atari sound effects like a Van Gogh night sky. Acting as the glue that holds At The Record Shop together, these atmospheric meditations give the listener room to breathe admist the smattering of fractured ideas. It's a beautiful mess that's a joy to traverse.

The cassette edition of the album comes in a sturdy cardboard sleeve, hand-painted polka dots gracing its cover. You can grab your copy here! 

Review: Chocofriendz - "hi ANGEL"

chocofriendz - hi ANGEL
(2015 Self-Released)

I've reviewed quite a decent portion of Chocofriendz's prolific output over the years, and for good reason: the warm, woolly textures that seep from his keyboard speakers blend impeccably with his skeletal compositions like a sweater over a friendly ghost. Acutely minimal and intense, his songcraft resides on the fine line between powerful emotion and lovably cornball sentimentality that transports me back to my early childhood, more specifically reminding me of the sort of books and VHS tapes that would have filled me with a strange mix of sadness and warmth at the time (Where the Red Fern Grows, this weird Christian educational videotape about talking donut puppet, the Sesame Street Christmas Special...). Imagine a less cynical/angsty take on Teen Suicide's "Haunt Me (3x)" and you'll get the picture - there's something scarily pure and honest about Choco's music that makes it difficult, yet rewarding, to confront.

His latest effort, hi ANGEL, is a musical take on the Magical Realist literary tradition, carefully cutting heroes and anthropomorphic creatures from the modern Western mythological canon - (children's literature, cartoons, video games) - and pasting them into an eerily barren simulacrum of suburbia. To the tune of glassy keyboard drones, Fritz the Cat, Maisy Mouse and characters from Sailor Moon materialize like cel-shaded phantoms, haunting the "empty swimming pools" and "abandoned golf carts" of Choco's hometown. Jean Baudrillard suggests we visit imaginary worlds like Disneyland to create a distinction between the imaginary and the real - to reassure ourselves that the world outside its borders is free of the childishness of our past selves. hi ANGEL acts as a reverse-Disneyland of sorts, a pair of magic goggles that let the juvenile flights of fancy jammed deep into one's conscious free from the junk drawers they were left in. If the puerile bedroom pop of Beat Happening and Daniel Johnston appeals to you, you'll adore this record.

Single Review: Suicide, Part 2 - "SP2"

suicide, part 2 - love letters drenched in gasoline
(Self-Released 2015)

Much of my blog's content to date has been plucked from the murky depths of Bandcamp's "new arrivals" section, an imposing wall of data that convenes a ragtag bunch of polished full band recordings, solo demo tapes and half-hearted vaporwave records alike. The listener may sift their search for hidden gems through a filter of genre tags, but the quest for new and exciting sounds is mainly left up to the internet archaeologist behind the keyboard: Bandcamp's biggest limitation - its tough-to-navigate search function - is actually what brings me back to the site day after day for another plunge into the abyss. Thinking about it that way, perhaps my Bandcamp habit stems from the same crevices of the brain that fuel a gambling addiction. The new morning brings a department store window's worth of album covers to scrutinize, each a portal to a miniature universe that orbits around its creator, the artist, and to select one over the other is a gamble. Some expeditions produce little result, and some uncover hidden works of concentrated beauty. The thrill of the hunt is just as satisfying as the discovery of art, yet perhaps a bit more fleeting.

In recent months, however, I've been more drawn in to the world of Soundcloud when tracking down material to quench my thirst for new art. While Bandcamp is mainly inhabited by mid-fi cassettes pressed by suburban garage bands and 4-track recordings slaved over in upstairs bedrooms, Soundcloud offers a glance at other colors on the spectrum of self-released music. Side by side sit sleek remixes of pop tunes, fuzzed-out song sketches strummed out on acoustic guitars often recorded to cell phones and an unbelievably enormous glut of cloud rap mixtapes. While Bandcamp's appeal lies in its seemingly infinite yet impenetrable wealth of material, a trip to Soundcloud offers a more fluid search for music (albeit one that focuses more on singles than full records) - an explorer of the site can search through tunes that an artist has liked or reposted in addition to their uploaded sounds. A look through my friend Aaron's "liked" tracks, for example, can lead me to the woozy, grime-influenced hip-hop production of London-based beat-maker MISOGI, which in turn introduces me to Suicide, Part 2, his twee-pop project that blurs the distinction between hi-fi and lo-fi. 

With the help of his friend Teddy, (who uploads cloud rap and Spooky Black-esque R+B to his own Soundcloud), MISOGI is able to seamlessly introduce the textural ideas explored in his previous work to the shambolic c86 punk of Boyracer. "Dead By Christmas", the first of the two halves of their debut self-titled EP, starts with an initial layer of growling power chords and mumbled vocals that are gradually buffeted by crisp, vaporous bass and minimal digital percussion. Deceptively simple, the cut manages to construct a catchy single of anthem proportions out of a small handful of carefully crafted musical ideas. A trebly lead guitar riff (which sounds as if it were recorded to an old Nokia TracFone) joins the fray a third of the way into the song, adding a beautifully fragile layer of crunchiness to the nervous ball of musical potential energy. The combination sparks a chemical reaction - "Dead By Christmas" explodes into a powder of shoegaze dreamdust - the result is frission-inducing.

B-Side "Love Letters Drenched In Gasoline" fuses a guitar riff strangely reminiscent of Blink-182's "What's My Age Again?" with the glistening, glassy production of Wild Nothing's Golden Haze, resulting in a hard-hitting take on old-school gothic pop - the lead solo that concludes the song is wonderfully expressive, triumphant yet tinged with melancholy.

Melodic, well-produced and infectiously catchy, DS2 will delight cloud-rap diehards and shoegazers alike.

Review: unhappybirthday - "Schauer"

unhappybirthday - Schauer
(2015 Night-People)

They may share a name with the second gloomiest track on Strangeways Here We Come, but this German jangle-pop trio much more closely resembles the sinewy punch of New Order than the Smiths' somber rockabilly grooves when it comes to their Manchesterian influences. Wafer-thin layers of grainy synths and percussive, shimmering guitar chords add a delicate contrast to blunt, sturdy basslines, all glued together by detached vocals that recall Robert Sumner's stoic mumble. Filtered through the trebly hiss of an old four-track recorder, unhappybirthday puts a unique, crunchy spin on 80s dream pop - the same consistency as a handful of Pringles and just as easily consumed. Schauer's interestingly brittle mix is quite reminiscent of Sarah Records' Field Mice - perhaps the record's even closer in tone to late 80s twee pop than to post-punk? Unhappybirthday make the already blurred lines between the two virtually indistinguishable. 

Despite its uniform coat of reverb-laden twang and wobbly bass, there's a wealth of ideas and rich songcraft throughout Schauer - there are straightforward strummers like "Taipeh" that resemble the soupy shoegaze of Minks' 2011 debut Beyond the Hedge, kaleidoscopic neo-psych transmissions ("Keanu") and even "Elephant", a slow burning alt-rock tune à la Yuck or Smashing Pumpkins. Despite one or two missteps that fall flat, this tape is loaded back to front with infectious riffs and lovely impressionist textures. 

Review: Earth Boys - "Welcome 2 Earth"

Earth Boys - Welcome 2 Earth

(2015 1080p Collection)

Don't get it twisted: there's nothing noticeably terrestrial about this collaboration between minimalist graphic designer Julian Duron and "techno fantasy" producer Michael Sherburn. That's not to describe it as "atmospheric", though. The four cuts of austere normcore house pressed to the  vinyl grooves of Welcome 2 Earth are plenty grounded, rooting sublimed vapors of smooth jazz and gooey keyboard chords to a surface of prominent and slightly lo-fi, (but by no means grimy), break-beats, four-on-the-floor kicks and lumbering basslines - combined, the resulting product is a conflation of chilled surreality and blunt percussion that prevents the listener from drifting too far off into dreamland.

When I say that the record isn't terrestrial, what I do mean is that the planet that gravitationally holds Earth Boys' music together only resembles the planet pulling us towards us core to a certain degree - a flawed imitation of sorts. Perhaps this quatrain of narcotic club jams refers not to the Earth that's likely pulling you towards its core, but to a close virtual simulation of it. Welcome 2 Earth wouldn't feel too out-of-place in the background of a Sims game, suave but non-threatening; inviting, yet sinister in a lonely, empty sort of way. Maybe it's a distorted reflection of the Earth, viewed through the retinal mirrors of the two Boys in question à-la Neon Genesis Evangelion. The sphere on Welcome 2 Earth's cover is too vague and colorless to tell for sure. But it's this strange ambiguity that gives Earth Boys' sound such a strangely fascinating aura - it exists in grey areas, in the shadows of emotion and feeling. The pretty trellises of saxophone and pointillist synth melodies on "Spring Fling" feel more hollow than morose. "Catch Life" resides somewhere between intensity and spaciousness. There are no real absolutes. The emotions evoked by Welcome 2 Earth are frightening, but at times relaxation-inducing. What they are not is familiar, however common the sounds that construct them may be. If you're down to feel some post-human gloom and zone out to some grade-A old school techno, give Earth Boys' new material a spin.

Half-Gifts Issue 16 + New Year's Comp OUT NOW

Buy Here

Includes an in-depth look back at my favorite records of the year and a handful of guest retrospectives done by my friends.

Review: Chestnut Bakery - "Diaries"

Chestnut Bakery - Diaries

(2015 BoringProductions/Full Label)

The internet has mysterious ways of bending the dimensions of time and space, most interestingly in terms of culture/subculture - in the realm of music it offers such a glut of material for enthusiasts to chew on and digest via Bandcamp/Soundcloud/Discogs that the areas and ideas within this cultural dominion that I focus on seem to be in a constant solvent state. This acidic breakdown encourages scenes to fracture into tiny pockets of influence, creating an accessible space for bold individuals to experiment with new sounds and letting fans get to know band members better as individuals (to the point where New England jangle-pop outfit Real Estate houses three solo artists who released material this year). Rapid as this solvency may be, there is always a gluey, adhesive force of equal power that scrambles to attach the scattered debris back to the Cultural Web, building infinitely smaller, more niche nodes within the web's outer border, keeping its fluctuation of size in check. This regeneration forms fascinating, small-scale collectives like Full Label, a Cantonese digital-only imprint dedicated to reviving the elegantly fragile indie-pop of early 90s UK-based label Sarah Records. The latest (and most polished) twee transmission from the Guangdong province is Diaries: the debut effort of Chestnut Bakery that's as warm and feathery as its cover art and band's name suggests. It's western-influenced guitar pop that's actually a  improvement over its British source material - a modern marvel that it exists and a greater on that I'm hearing it from the comfort of my own home a hemisphere away.

The quartet hails from Shenzhen, China's equivalent of Silicon Valley, and has dubbed themselves "the most 90s shoegaze band in [the country]", a claim that they back up with substantial evidence: Diaries acts as a sampler platter of late 20th century dream pop textures. The band uses a generous hand with reverb on "Saturday Afternoon", flooding the atmosphere with glistening guitar while letting its nimble basslines handle the brunt of expression - the gentle twang of strummed six-strings paired with frontwoman Rye's hushed delivery recall a creamier version of The Sundays' prickly punch of c86 pop. 7-minute centerpiece "Moon Palace" explores the dreamy psychedelia of Slowdive - perhaps even Julee Cruise(?) - slowly building from a muffled, phase-shifted drone to a post-rock fireworks display of explosive lead guitar theatrics. "Tunnel Party" and "Cream Soda" ratchet up the distortion, crafting Melberg-ian punk soundscapes. Though much of Diaries is noticeably derivative, I find the amount of the Cultural Web's surface area that it covers to be quite impressive: though Chestnut Bakery holds firm to a single guitar tone and overall aesthetic, no two songs of theirs sound quite alike. That's what makes Diaries such a satisfying and polished debut. Definitely worth a listen and multiple replays.