Top 10 Releases of 2017: Part 2

7. By the End of Summer - Laughing
(2017 Sango Records)

It's easy to forget that emo's emotional breadth can extend beyond sadness: you're only reminded of what the genre can do when you hear it pushed to its fullest potential. Cap'n Jazz could do it back in the day, layering sheets of ruddy-cheeked chords and lyrics about "kitty-cats" over punk-rock blast beats. Empire! Empire! did it too, centering around their honest and nostalgic storytelling. Kyoto's By The End of Summer's Laughing EP is one of the more recent installments in the "emotionally diverse emo" canon, bridging the gap between TTNG's wonky math-rock riffage and the teenage adventure of early Blink-182.

The four-song EP is addictively immediate. BTEOS arrangements roar to life without introduction, hurling riff after riff at the listener while frontman Miyazaki's voice cracks in surges of bittersweet catharsis. "Even Now", which takes its instrumental cues from late-80s skate rock, is the standout cut of the bunch, featuring enough hooks and swooping chord changes to fill an entire album in just two minutes.

BTEOS isn't flashy: like Cloud Nothings before them, the quartet pounds out raw, quick tracks that hit right in the sweet spot. The feelings are real and the lyrics are grounded.

"regret and remembrance / it's completely changed around here / the old vending machine / the running children / they were gone"

6. Playboi Carti - Playboi Carti

(2017 Interscope)

If Young Thug's the Cocteau Twins of mumble rap (at least according to this semi-popular Tumblr post) then Playboi Carti may well be the sub-genre's answer to Galaxie 500. Like the now-defunct Cambridge trio, he has a penchant for two-chord instrumentals and staccato melodies, haunting these dronescapes with dreamy phrases that roll off the tongue like December sighs: in a cloud of vapor.

Maybe it'd be even more accurate to compare Carti to The Velvet Underground. From the playful experimentation of his self-titled tape's interchangeable cover art to his penchant for lyrics that are iconic and intentionally shallow, he's a Warholian figure: a fourth-wall-breaking protagonist who's as fascinated by stardom in the conceptual sense. "I'm a rockstar," he asserts in the intro to lead single "wokeuplikethis*". Somehow it makes perfect sense. It's intrinsic. 

He's William Carlos Williams, too, neatly filing syllables into their perfect instrumental slots while offering just enough information to convey the outline of an image. The aesthetic's executed best on opnener "Location", in which Carti drops a fragmented series of interjections and descriptions that avoid do their best to dodge verbs: ("tats on my neck on my arms" ad nauseam). It's ideogrammatic, exchewing the third-person perspective images that the written word conjures in our minds for the swirl of sensory stimulus that passes through the cortex on the daily. Also, the Harry Fraud beat that carries the track is incredible, especially at 1:31 when its (dare I say) vaporwavey guitar sample screeches to the forefront of the mix. 

Carti is everyone that shaped rock 'n' roll and he's all the ideas that let it fall to trap music. Effortlessly, he became the zeitgeist. At least for the 50-minute duration of his mixtape, that is.

 
5. Girls Rituals - EMERGENCY!
(2017 Visual Disturbances)

Speaking of Warhol, Girls Rituals' EMERGENCY! does 21st century Pop-Art better than any Dean Blunt/Vektroid/Ferraro project I've heard in recent memory, and she does so by just being herself. Like its creator, the record's a product of low-brow mid-00s internet ephemera: Soulja Boy's early MySpace material, DeviantArt's amateurish digital paintings, the neurotic/hyberbolic humor of imageboard sub-cultures, and pretty much anything tangentially related to Newgrounds. 

Unlike many of the other "post-internet" artists that populate Bandcamp and Soundcloud, Girls Rituals isn't adopting this aesthetic ironically. The musical and aesthetic ideas she appropriates are borrowed out of sincere appreciation. On "xXx DNA xXx", the west-coast hip-hop synths are squelchy and out of tune because they want to be, in a way that's legitimately pretty. Girls Rituals' murmured vocals tame the bombast: she's a languid calm in a dissonant storm, just barely missing her notes. It's hypnotic. Strangely soothing.

According to nearly everyone who's reviewed EMERGENCY on Bandcamp, "Black Crow" is the cream of this 17-track crop. I'm inclined to agree. Painfully dysphoric lyrics, delivered dryly as usual, are paired with a carnivalesque arrangement of 16-bit riffs that moan and squeak like the Earthbound soundtrack. How do you feel listening to this? How can you feel? "Dig and dig and dig," she sings. "I smash and curse this skin." Breezy chords prop up a melting melody. "I'll be a black crow in my next life flying over an office park."

Review: Hypoluxo - "Taste Buds"

Hypoluxo - Taste Buds

(2017 Broken Circles)

Every time I've played Hypoluxo's Taste Buds on the aux cord, I've received the same reaction from my fellow passengers:

"Is that Beach Fossils? No, wait; that guy sounds like the dude from The National! Or Ian Curtis..."

Their confusion's warranted. It's not often you'll hear post-punk's signature monotone/baritone vocal delivery paired with shimmering, melodic guitars that sound this radiant, brushing up against surf-rock beats. The contrast between frontman Samuel Cogen and his backing band is stark, but it's one that pays off. Each of the four songs that make up the Brooklyn quartet's sophomore EP is its own emotional alloy, plucking sonic inspiration from the feelings that tangle in your head as you perform rote tasks like taking out the trash or showering. The songs don't descend from intense, unshakable events. They're comfy, but full of mystery.

It's more organic that way. Though Cogen's lyricism fluctuates from slight surreality to the familiar backdrop of everyday life, he remains firmly rooted within the sphere of real, human thought sans embellishment. Track 1, "Sometimes", doesn't mince words (or orchestration for that matter). The band rattles off extremely hummable guitar riffs, glistening with reverb and twang, as Cogen drips off-the-cuff sentiment into the mic: "Sometimes I get nervous / I get nervous when you yell at me / You can be so scary get so angry / At the things that I don't see."

Following the final verse, the song's bony fingers of melody unclench, opening the track up to no-wave improvisation. A thread of white noise knots through knucklebones as dissonant harmonics wriggle free. Cogen mumbles fairly decipherable syllables into the brew, as if reciting some evil incantation. 

The following song, "Cowboy Poet" is, as its title suggests, Taste Buds' most flowery offering. Conflating the anonymity of city life with the old west's gritty individualism, the band strikes up an equine gallop that morphs into a mechanical chug. Guitars sizzle beneath synthesized lens flares. Vocals soar over gloomy basslines. Closer "Dog Park" is my pick of the bunch, dropping droning chords over a four-on-the-floor thump. It's a breezy, free-associative piece that expands from its titular canines to memories of Cogen's mom's house. The song is aimless in the best way: as ambling as life itself. 

At 14 minutes, Taste Buds is a charming diversion that packs some memorable hooks and thought-provoking poetic license. It's a very replayable effort, and one that's timbrally unique enough to pop into your head from time to time. Even though the record's just a few months old, it already feels like a trusted friend. 

Review: DJ Lucas - "Lucas' Mansion III"

DJ Lucas - Lucas' Mansion III

(2017 Dark World)

Weighing in at a beefy 22 songs, the latest project by Massachusetts native Lucas Kendall finds the rapper/producer oddly wedged in the crevice between laissez-faire Soundcloud experimentation and the inventive, Garageband-sourced sound that's landed him production credits for arthouse emcees like Wiki, Antwon, and even the wildly prolific CHXPO. 

When we last saw Lucas in late July, he'd turned in Unleash These Bangers, Too, his most polished and accessible effort to date. Outsourcing much of its production to fellow New England beat-makers, he paired his conversational storytelling and ear for dissonant, autotuned melodies with an incredibly diverse array of timbres. On "Arm/Leg," he reflected on his rural "farm kid" roots to the bounce of west-coast percussion. He was an emo R&B singer on "1 Phone Call Away," and a malfunctioning robot spitting over wonky Wii Sports jazz arrangements on "In My Element."

Sacrificing a bit of his populist appeal, Lucas takes almost total control behind the boards on LMIII, approaching sound design with his signature genre-twisting, iconoclastic attitude while dipping deeper into autobiographical waters than he has in the past. Early single "New Gear" laces a funky bassline with trills of slide guitar, imbuing the beat with a weird folk-rock flavor without delving into the gimmicky country-rap aesthetic one might have imagined based on my description alone. Lucas' blends of sounds don't often sound great on paper, but in practice they just work because they're true to his experience. The arrangements here are hazy and nostalgic: the perfect complement to Lucas' memories of basketball practices, summers spent growing up around UMass' campus, and his love for the local scene of weirdo-rappers he's held together as Dark World Records' unofficial figurehead. 

The record's most impressive cuts find Lucas playing the role of an indie rock songwriter, taking after his father, who fronted a few jangle-pop outfits in the 80s and 90s. While contemporaries like Lil Peep and Mackned are content to exclusively cull their samples from midwestern emo records, Lucas' production feels more akin to The Strokes' wiry guitar-pop. Despite its 808s and tinny hi-hats "One More Day" is a sundae-sweet love song that swells with hammond organ samples and malt-shop sentimentality. It's another track that's bizarre in theory, but plays out naturally: even as his voice warbles against wavering pitch-correction software, Lucas effortlessly draws an ooze of melancholia from his breezy chord progression, and the lyrics are just simple enough not to sound forced. It's far from his most technically proficient work, but it stands out as a truly unique composite of musical styles. 

Even the classic Lucas ethos sounds fresh on LMIII. Free-jazz tune "Pretty Please" feels like a collage of quips cut from text messages, some of them too personal or esoteric to understand, others hitting home on a lovable, down-to-earth level. It's the sort of cut that makes you feel like you've been close friends with the artist for years -- die-hard Dark World fans will be all-too familiar with Lucas' desire to be a small-town hero, his baseball references, and his off-hand allusions to unexplained events from his past that we're not meant to know about. There's always some suble/mundane/charming aspect of his character to excavate from the lyrics: it's the kind of songwriting Genius.com was founded for.

Lucas' Mansion III is currently my second-favorite installment in the DJ Lucas canon, but it's primed to take the top spot soon. It's an effort meant to grow on the listener, concealing subtly brilliant lines and hooks that take patience to get into the groove of. Even if the consistency of the songs can be a little off sometimes, it's tough to get bored bumping his music: he's always tinkering with new sounds and packing them with honest, intelligent lyrical content.

Review: Smut - "End of Sam-Soon"

Smut - End of Sam-Soon

(2017 Broken Circles)

The last time I caught a Smut show, I was a freshman English major with bad skin, an asymmetrical haircut, and a taste for sweatshirts with sleeve-prints: the archetypal SadBoy. Mingling with the hazy smell of grilled peppers—the gig took place in a now-defunct anarchist taco joint—this newly-formed shoegaze outfit heaved to life like shifting tectonic plates, grating against continental drifts of distortion to the mid-tempo rhythms of mid-90s college rock. Taylor Roebuck's menacing vocals pushed through the fuzz like the cries of a human-guitar hybrid, adding their own layers of sediment to a heap of sound. There were guitar solos that resembled those videos of "crazy sounds in the sky" that you'll always find in the weirder subsections of Youtube. The sound was interplanetary; I could feel gravity's pull weakening in Tacocracy.

Afterward, the guitarist and the bassist showed me their Magic: The Gathering cards.

I've shaved my head since then, and it appears that Smut's trimmed off some of their noise-pop grime too. Though the trebly chords that inhabit the quintet's debut record, End of Sam-Soon, are tinged with some obligatory grit, there's a welcome spaciousness here that I hadn't heard on previous efforts. Roebuck's vocals do more than echo from the floor of a post-punk abyss: they're front and center on the new record, saving you a trip to the lyrics sheet and driving Smut's hefty hooks home.

And I'm not kidding when I say there are some killer choruses on this thing. "Blush" hits particularly hard, initially emerging with a Goo-era Sonic Youth stutter, slowly stretching like a rubber band until unsustainable levels of potential energy are reached. The resulting refrain feels like a succession of dramatic chord changes strung together like some sort of chord conglomerate, culminating with an an alt-country-fried guitar solo that sounds like Dinosaur Jr covering Uncle Tupelo. Roebuck's odd meters and poetic devices make the tune all the catchier: "all slipping and screaming and scrambling to shelter," she speaks, distantly, "the sweet summer swelter."

"Video Cell" houses some of my favorite guitar riffs on Sam-Soon. As Roebuck sings "eyes so sweet, just like TV," a static-y melody catches the hairs of your wrist like you've pressed your open hand to the television screen. It's crackly and cold, like Crunch bars in your pumpkin bucket. Like orange foliage underfoot. Like Burger King receipts on the station wagon's floor mats.

"Shuteye" is pretty great. too. It's the kind of song that tricks you into thinking it's sloppy and chaotic on the first listen, lacing a lumbering chord progression with screamed storytelling before revealing its inner viscera: delicately-plucked arpeggios coated with that classic 4AD tone. Smut's at their most traditionally punk here, but they're still able to let their distinct blue-purple dreaminess bleed through.

Smut it often billed as a post-punk band, but the shimmery, college-rock sounds on Sam-Soon are what keep me coming back for more. The record's solid balance between gothic gloom and twangy melodicism make this my favorite local release of the year. Keep Cincy music crunchy. 

Review: Earth Boy - "My Sword Was My Devotion"

Earth Boy - My Sword Was My Devotion

(2017 Self-Released)

Earth Boy shares a name with one of the standout tracks on DIIV's debut LP, Oshin, only it bears a space dividing Zachary Cole Smith's original titular portmanteau. Though the two projects share a penchant for staccato guitar riffs and exorbitant amounts of reverb, it's that all-too-important space between "Earth" and "Boy" that separates their sounds. Despite watery mixing techniques and sleeptalk vocals, DIIV's songcraft stands firmly entrenched in post-punk grime, stomping divots into loamy bass as it charges forth in a permanent beeline towards nowhere in particular. It strives for kinetic beauty, inherently present in motion, dissolving as quickly as the band stops to catch its breath. DIIV's boy and its earth are in constant contact, even if they're not aware of each other.

Earth Boy's relation to the planet is more peripheral -- the Washingtonian singer-songwriter floats in the exosphere, surveying the terrain below and doing his best to translate the blurred topography to sound. Guitars, keyboards, and creaky drum machine loops each occupy their own niche in the space between artist and globe, orbiting loose rhythms like a ramshackle solar system. The best tracks on his latest EP, My Sword Was My Devotion, accentuate that disjointed atmosphere, eschewing lo-fi genre conventions to create chilly soundscapes that feel like cold fall days. "I'm Sorry I Misunderstood" sounds like a late-90s Aphex Twin track covered on toy instruments: sampled snare breaks scramble into position while sleepy keyboard chords rise from their sleep, stretch, and yawn across multiple bars, woken up by churchbells in the distance.

"Untitled" acts like an extended bridge in the center of a larger, unheard song: it gives the listener a peek at scrapped grandiosity while sticking to the cozy smallness that makes My Sword so charming. Here, a sluggish guitar refrain navigates undulating waves of bedroom pop fuzz, proceeding slowly on a limp. It's tempting to make comparisons to Pavement, but I'm most reminded of Yuck -- especially their brief period fronted by Daniel Blumberg. Earth Boy's falsetto sounds like a faraway cry for help and a whisper in your ear at the same time, and the lyrics are just as emotionally ambiguous: "I don't want to go out / I want to stay inside my house / without you I don't know if I'll be alright".

Maybe it's even possible to make comparisons to Earl Sweatshirt's last LP. Both Earth Boy and Sweatshirt revel in their hermetical lifestyles, nestled in a protective layer of tape hiss. And both keep their songs brief, frugal with the syllables and heavy on emotion. My Sword clocks in at just 6 minutes, but it doesn't skimp on the impact. It's an innovative effort that's texturally brittle but packs a punch.

Reviews: Dent May / Kei Toriki

Dent May - Across the Multiverse
(2017 Carpark)

It's been 4 years since I caught Dent May's set at the now-defunct Boomslang festival, hosted by the University of Kentucky's campus radio station WRFL. I'd only recognized the singer-songwriter's name from the back catalogue of Animal Collective's (also extinct) record label, Paw Tracks, but I trusted the judgement of the imprint's founders enough to give the guy a shot. 

The eighty-or-so attendees and I -- heads still swimming in residual reverb from performances by Fielded and Idiot Glee -- spilled out onto the balding lawn of Al's Bar in time to see May, dressed in a floral button-down and John Lennon shades, wander onto the stage flanked by his three-piece backing band. The music that followed them seemed to flow from some hidden source behind the platform: impossibly complex and otherworldly. Aqueous keys trickled through a funk-rock sieve as the frontman paced the stage like an active sleepwalker, climbing to the top of stacked amps as he waxed Brian Wilson about rent money and party dresses. The spirit of chillwave, ready to ascend into the subgenre afterlife, was housed in that lawn -- it was a sermon of the mount, the mount in question taking the form of a pillar of amplification equipment. Unsuspecting passersby broke out into dance. I'm not the biggest live music fan, but I can say with certainty that what I experienced was just a hair short of magical -- I still think about it to this day. 

And as soon as the presence was with us, it was gone. All that was left was the humidity on the back of my neck. That, and the copy of his then-latest LP, Warm Blanket, which I snagged from CD Central before heading home. It had its transcendent hooks and its haunting Beach Boys melodies -- it worked its way into car-trip rotation and became one of my favorite records of the year ¹. It still never quite lived up to what I took in that summer Saturday though. Warm Blanket lived up to its title, not to the tropical climate he brought with him to the stage.

Evident in the design of his new album's sleeve, which happens to be the work of Boomslang poster painter and Kesha cover artist Robert Beatty, May's attempting to recapture the palm tree sway of his live sound, or at least to hearken back to the hardbound surfaces of Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks.

Definitely some stylistic resemblance here.

Across the Multiverse at times comes close to doing so: it's a mixed bag of decent, yet too-familiar tunecraft and some very high points. The record's title track, a collaboration with Frankie Cosmos(!), is its loftiest offering. The pair distantly mutter their lines into italo-funk arrangements, pausing to let strings and horns rattle off a few dreamy phrases. The song's squelchy little synth solo taken into consideration, it's the sort of track that'd sit nicely in a Katamari OST: upbeat, esoteric, and twee.

"Take Me To Heaven" is pretty tight, too. With its stuttering piano chords and falsetto vocals, I can't help but think that it's an attempt at writing an Elton John song with gratuitous synthesizer slathered on top. Weird stuff, but it works.

Though I respect that it samples the screech of a dial-up modem, I can't really get into "Picture on a Screen": the concepts of transhuman love and uncanny valley are starting to feel played-out, especially when Wild Nothing's done it better in a similar style on "TV Girl". May feels more at home stretched across the heavens of the physical realm, looking at the breadth of the Earth from above on "I'm Gonna Live Forever Until I'm Dead" or declaring love for celestial spheres on "Distance to the Moon".

May's lyrically always reaching for a cosmic largeness that's always beyond his reach, just like I feel looking back on the improbable beauty of the 2013 setlist. Until time-travel or interplanetary transport are feasible, this record will do for each of us. It's pretty and idealistic -- simple and wide-eyed -- lovely and worth your time.

Kei Toriki - Childhood Memories EP

(2016 Otherman Records)

Though it lacks vocals and traditional song structures, it could be argued that Kei Toriki's 2016 Childhood Memories EP contains atmospheric/idealistic cues comparable to Dent May's. Simulating wonky math-rock rhythms with sampled drumbreaks, the guitarist plucks his way to cinematic heights, aided by wails of chiptune synth. Smash all these elements together, and you've got the hyper-melodicism of Anamanaguchi married to Explosions in the Sky's somber tunefulness. Childhood Memories hustles its way to stone-faced nostalgia, tossing in some headbop-inducing percussion and catchy riffs along the way. 

Texturally, intro track "Blue" is my favorite offering here. It leans more Toriki's post-rock tendencies than his affinity for ambient IDM, delicately weaving electric leads into looped, glistening chords. "Muqaevi_Oqulivi" takes the top spot overall, though. It's laced together with staccato jazz solo and filled out by some suprisingly tasteful future-bass backing. 

On the B-side, Umio's remix of title track "Childhood Memories" is a memorable showing. A high-school music classroom's worth of backing adds timbral depth to Toriki's work: a metronome and xylophone lead seamlessly into a farty hardcore drum-and-bass groove before the composition comes up for air. Piano enters the fray, then bassy swells of brass, and, finally, some strings and the aforementioned malletted percussion. 

Though the remixes make for fun playlist-fodder, the meat of the EP is a legitimately cool conceptual experience taken as a whole. It's great stuff to listen to while playing video games, if you're the type of person that prefers to provide their own soundtrack to a title. Download here.

1 May also inexplicably won "Best New Band" that year at China's Huading Awards. The only other international laureates of Huading Awards that year for anything other than film were Adam Lambert and Carly Rae Jepsen. The title of "Best New Band" has yet to be handed out again.^↩

Review: ОРУЖИЕ - "Quiet Facts about Angels"

ОРУЖИЕ - Quiet Facts About Angels
(2017 velcroheadrecords)

"No real modus operandi," reads velcroheadrecords' mission statement. "No hope, no refinement. Record it live and put it out on tape." 

There's urgency embedded in the Montreal-based imprint's creative process, but the finished product's anything but hasty. Composed entirely of improvised jams, the debut full-length tape by label founder ОРУЖИЕ (Russian for "weapons") is a meditative -- sometimes mindstate-altering -- effort that acts as a translucent eggshell, clouding our view of some violent chemical activity taking place within.

Maybe it's more effective to think of it as an old TV monitor's screen, sending pinpricks of static through your fingers as you press them against the glass, protecting observers from the greyscale horror beamed by its cathode ray tube. Distant enough from the camera to appear small, the foggy outline of a human form moves from pinky to middle finger, ducking beneath your palm and then slowly peeking through the empty curve between the thumb and forefinger. Its face is like smoke -- a mass of billowing darkness against the floral wallpaper of the living room it inhabits.

Quiet Facts about Angels resides in a middle ground between David Lynch's sputtering The Big Dream and the often-atonal drum machine grooves that John Carpenter composed for Assault on Precinct 13. That's to say that despite its minimal atmosphere, throttled by lo-fi crunch, the record is downright cinematic in scope. Since much of the music here seems to have been made on the fly, the songs on Quiet Facts are structureless, gathering grime and abstract narrative as they hustle forth at approximately 120 to 130 beats per minute. Layers are laid down and shaved off one at a time, flirting with climactic releases of tension but never reaching them.

The top half of ОРУЖИЕ's playlist is loaded with gritty low-end thump that all but drowns out the clattering rhythms that bloom from it. "hornets" sways side to side on its crushingly-dense trunk of growling synth, leaving just enough space for glistening pads and a post-punk guitar riff to push through the surface -- it's all pretty reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle, though maybe more danceable (in theory). It's followed by a welcome intermission in the form of "autumn (diary ii)" before "batteries (1.1)" usurps the soundscape. The cut girds its four-on-the-floor kick with syncopated lashes of steely snare while standard house hi-hats keep the rhythm regular. Dissonant bell-chimes ring in the distance, indicating an off-screen ritual held in some post-apocalyptic wasteland that formed mid-Industrial Revolution. Though it appears early on, this 3-track sequence is the heart of the album, showcases its full array of textures and moods.

"saturn 1.01.0" ushers in the tape's more traditionally pretty second half. Phase-shifted synths trickle down sheets of nearly-lifeless horn samples. Save for slap-bass, the beat's fairly hollow, staring at the listener stone-faced, yet picturesque. It's the most upbeat song on the tape, but it's tinged with a sense of defeat, sprawled out on a couch and covered in sweat as it catches a much-needed nap after a hard day's work. "In Dust" is a solid ambient closer, undulating sultrily as a Badalamenti score while taking on the corroded quality of a silent film's score.

Instrumentally, Quiet Facts is a huge step into new territory for the former frontman of early Bandcamp emo duo Jackie Trash, but aesthetically, it's not. Just like any Linus Taylor project, ОРУЖИЕ finds a delicate balance between hushed beauty and rowdy dissonance, making for an effort that's sometime's sleepy, sometimes unbearably aggressive, but always engagingly weird. 

Single Review: Routine Death - "Demo Tracks"

Routine Death - Demo Tracks

(2017 Self-Released)

What makes Austin, Texas such a hotbed for Gothic sounds? With average temperatures sitting snugly in the mid-90s all summer, the Lone Star State doesn't seem like the ideal place to dress exclusively in shades of black. To my knowledge, -- which is admittedly limited to Google searches -- Austin's not architecturally dominated by grotesque or Bauhaus aesthetics. Even on a historical level, I associate the city more with the mid-00s post-rock produced by Explosions in the Sky, This Will Destroy You, and Balmorhea than anything remotely similar to what Factory Records produced in its heyday.

Maybe it's just a coincidence that many of my favorite Goth releases of the past few years have emerged from Austin's local scene. Two darkwave-y bands that have fared quite well on my year-end top 10 lists call the city home. Captive, whose Black Leather Glove LP wheezes with pneumonic synths and clattering snares, have been quiet as of late, but still regularly find rotation in my iTunes library on the strength of cuts like "The Fool" and "Endless Lust". Sacred Bones signees Institute are more prolific, effortlessly churning out classic post-punk records that feel equally indebted to Minutemen and Joy Division. If shoegaze duo Routine Death drop some studio material as strong as the two demo cuts currently hosted on their homepage, they might very well earn a spot among my favorite Texan gloom-slingers. 

A-side "The Impossibility of Paying Our Debts" spins like an early Captured Tracks single, winding a looped guitar riff -- soggy with reverb -- around trashed percussion. Lisa Zozaya's vocals ring out as if they were shouted into the depths of the sort of absurdly spacious sewer tunnel only seen in video games and cartoons. They're tinny residue molding on steel walls; clinging to the blank space between chords. Every tone in the track feels more implied than perceived. Maybe you've peeped them through a veil, or eavesdropped with a cupped ear pressed against the door. 

Flip-side "Star Alliance" is -- as its title suggests -- even more spaced-out than its predecessor. Fried melodies pop and sizzle like bacon grease against droning chords, sounding something like the Velvet Underground blasted on a Beats pill by a discourteous passenger on the bus. Zozaya stretches syllables across several bars, sending wriggling noodles of human emotion out into the cosmos. The song never really works its way into a discernable groove, but doesn't need to: "Star Alliance" is a space unto its self, its boundaries and levels of gravity shifting like tides. Don't try to find your footing. It isn't there.

Looking for a perfect solar eclipse-viewing soundtrack? Prepare for this Monday by streaming and downloading the single here.

Review: Sweat Enzo - "Full Grown Cats"

Sweat Enzo - Full Grown Cats

(2017 Self-Released)

Sharing a hometown with seminal proto-grunge outfit Dinosaur Jr., Amherst, Massachusetts' Sweat Enzo taps into their native city's aural wellspring, tucking twangy chord progressions into a sheet of tape-hiss so warbly you'd swear Sweat Enzo time-traveled to 1985 to record in Lou Barlow's basement. Full Grown Cats is the trio's 12th official release and their most streamlined pop effort since 2015's Talking Rock. For first-time listeners, it's the best intro to Sweat Enzo's sound you'll find on their Bandcamp page.

Intro cut "Deer In the Headlights" gallops along to the limp of its rhythm guitar before transitioning into a country-fried solo that hearkens back to Dinosaur's pre-Jr. discography. Frontman Elliot Hartmann drags his raspy vocals through plots of distortion like a tiller takes to soil, upturning residual fuzz in his wake. "Living in the Moment" sits on deck, ready to raise the tempo and trade in its predecessor's dissonance for jangle-pop warmth. Here, Sweat Enzo tap into the jittery folk-rock groove splattered across the surface of Meat Puppets' Too High to Die, sprinkling their own splashes of mumbled harmony and funk organ into the brew. It's by far Full Grown Cats' catchiest tune -- one that I can't help but skip to when bumping the record.

"Alright, Casey" is a look at Sweat Enzo at their most instrumentally solid. George Gerhardt and Gage Lyons lay down a peppy stadium-rock rhythm to make room for Hartmann's parabolic swoops of guitar. There's a glimmer of J Mascis' groaned chorus on Dinosaur Jr.'s "Start Choppin'" that peeks through the track's muddy mix, but Sweat Enzo's chops and knack for songcraft shine just as brightly.

Though it lacks a single as immediate as past hits like "Questions" and "Leavin'", Full Grown Cats is Sweat Enzo's most consistent release to date. If you're seeking more of the sunbleached tones wielded by Barlow, Galaxie 500, and Guided By Voices, look no further.

Review: Unable to Fully Embrace This Happiness - "The Morning Sun + The End of the World"

Unable to Fully Embrace This Happiness - The Morning Sun...

(2017 Self-Released)

Though the full title of UTFETH's first official album can't be contained by the horizontal confines of this blog post, the Austrian powerviolence trio seems to have no trouble squeezing 14 tracks' worth of scorched imagism/existentialism into an 18-minute timeframe. The Morning Sun rises from a series of split-releases and compilation tapes, spackling over any breathing room or vain experimentation with fast-drying static. Every square inch of aural space that exists within UTFETH's trusted dictaphone recorder is clogged with noise. The listener stands at the other side of a steel wall, peeking through a porthole as the band's gelatinous aggression presses against the glass, writhing as if undergoing a chemical change -- sometimes the mass adopts the vague lumpiness of a chugging blast beat or is tinted the pale green of a sickly clean guitar riff, but it always maintains its thick, uniformly ferocious texture. Think of bread dough so yeasty that it rises uncontrollably, threatening to burst out of the oven.

Thematically, the record is much less unified. Tounge-in-cheek song titles intentionally clash with their more somber lyrical counterparts: autobiographical vignettes syllabically frugal enough to have been clipped from John Porcellino's King Cat Comics, Hopper-esque snapshots of UTFETH's native Klagenfurt, and the occasional imagined premise for a sci-fi novel. The band is at their best when they freeze striking-yet-simple images in time. Case in point -- the stuttering cacophony of "I Quit My Job So I Could Play More RPGs" tempered by a surprisingly tender verse. "Forming a crucifix while riding my bike / without using my hands". You'd never be able to parse that together just by listening, though. It's the impenetrable sound of the record that sends you scrambling for a lyrics sheet, luring you into intimacy with the listening experience. 

"The Happy End Overshadows the Forthcoming Drama" is the most ambitious offering here, knitting two sheets of black metal chord-mashing together with sampled audio from Twin Peaks' second season, a funeral procession of fingerpicked arpeggios, and drum machine handclaps that are so out of place that they're somehow welcome among the brutality. The cloud of sound formed here is so opaque that I can't help but be reminded of Jules Feiffer's drawing of the Awful Dynne -- a demon from The Phantom Tollbooth that feeds on dissonant sounds. Ironically, the song's about silence, narrated by a hermit. "The only interactions are while grocery shopping", they screech. "Speechless forever.

The Awful Dynne

"Thank You Very Much For Gathering Today" is The Morning Sun's strongest instrumental showing, stripping away some scuzz to reveal its chord progression (which kinda sounds like something The Cure would've cooked up in the early 80s) before ripping into its hardcore beatdown. Closer "Just When I Thought I Was Done Being the Mediator" is a close second best, flirting with post-rock melodrama atop sparse splashes of percussion. Even the pair of sub-30 second songs hit hard enough to satisfy. Only "The Journalist" fails to really sock me in the gut, but even so, its lyrics are pretty evocative, weighing the possibility of a livestreamed suicide before presumably choosing not to. ("Fourteen pages by the end of the week / You never know what this server will spawn)

I've written about UTFETH in the past, and continue to listen for good reason. Smashing their impressive chops into a harsh lo-fi filter, they're as subtle as a brick wall and just about as heavy as one too. 

Review: Great Grandpa - "Plastic Cough"

Great Grandpa - Plastic Cough
(2017 Dbl Dbl Whammy)

Great Grandpa's poppier than the sum of its parts, and all the more striking for it. According to their press kit, the quintet is the product of a "mututal love of noise and math rock", but the instrumentation of their inaugural LP, Plastic Cough, shows more fondness for the former. Hailing from Seattle, the band is often likened to the sound their home city's bygone grunge scene -- their towering fuzzscapes, however, shed the dissonance of Sub Pop's early 90s output for anthemic surges of determination. More indebted to Broken Social Scene than Nirvana, Great Grandpa whisk dollops of optimism into their bummed-out snarl. "In due time, I'm tryin' my best", offers Alex Menne atop a sizzling chorus, perhaps to make amends for the twangy desolation that prefaced it: "Got caught up in loose ends / All my friends are almost dead".

At its best, Plastic Cough goes for broke, tossing every hook, riff, and vocal acrobatic it can muster at a rumbling wall of distortion. Opener "Teen Challenge" is a case study in this kind of noise-rock maximalism. Revving its sonic engine on some Weezer-esque dissonance, the track's muted power chords gather enough energy to launch into a menacing chorus, allowing enough space in its static for Menne's yawp-y delivery to jut through. Imagine Crying's Elaiza Santos with a case of the hiccups that somehow manages to keep her on key. Subtract the band's chiptune melodies for an extra layer of bass that envelops everything in its path. Tack on a guttural guitar solo for gnarled emphasis. Whether or not you care to invite it in, "Teen Challenge" bores its way into your memory like trepanation. It commands attention.

The band's forays into higher tempos are also quite successful. "NO" earns its capital letter, splattering clashing colors of harmonic paint across a canvas of snares. The intro to closer "28 J's L8R" waxes midwestern emo before melting into a slogging gob of bubblegum sludge metal. "28 J's" is by far Plastic Cough's most impressive feat, fiddling with rhythm, dynamics, and spaced-out improvisation -- all the while lyrically indulging itself in corny humor and B-movie horror theatrics. Most of the record hits hard enough to re-visit many times, but it's this coda that I can't stop spinning. Here's to more a wildly experimental (yet still fun) Great Grandpa in the future.

Plastic Cough doesn't always hit the nail exactly on the head. The brief "Grounded" marches to an off-kilter beat that should pay off, but doesn't quite do it for me. "Pardon My Speech" winds itself through so many melodic contortions, you'll need a map to navigate them. Despite these rough patches, though, the album is often a blast to listen to -- occasionally, (especially on tracks 1 and 10), it flirts with classic status.

Review: Agjijer - "demo"

Agjijer - demo

(2017 Self-Released)

Math-Rock's a fun genre tag to toss around in a music review -- it's a cute classification that lends itself perfectly to numerical metaphor. Unfortunately, it's also a pretty imprecise way to describe music. Think about it this way: when I use the term "Math-Rock" without any given context, what springs to mind? Frenetic instrumental fret-mashing? Distorted screamo recorded in someone's basement? Bittersweet weaves of American Football-inspired noodling? Most musical mathematicians fall into one of three of these sonic categories. In the case of Tokyo's Agjijer, though, the band's untitled demo tape falls into each of them, spanning their timbral and compositional breadth over the course of seven short minutes.

Opener "henteko" channels the jittery jazz-punk of fIREHOSE, volleying dissonant chords off a wall of digital hi-hats like a tennis player practicing their returns. Bass chases the rhythm guitar as it zig-zags its way through impressive contortions before unfurling into a spacey psych-rock solo. The track shows off the band's technical proficiency while getting the brainy weirdness out of the way early -- it's a good choice for an opening track, and the demo's most replayable offering. 

Track 2 cranks up the speed and the volume, transitioning a screeching peal of sci-fi synthesizer into a burst of black-metallic thrash. At 66 seconds, "kowabali" is tough to process on an initial listen. Textures supercollide against driving percussion, masking the record's only vocals (barely-decipherable yowls) beneath a shade of overcast clouds. The audio cuts out mid-verse. It's a flash-flood, a torrential downpour that quickly dries up in the summer heat. Intense, but gone before you know it.

"somemore" is Agjijer's most traditional track, but also its prettiest. It's a mid-tempo groove in the vein of TTNG, lavishing gently strummed open chords on its chilled-out arrangement, then leaping headfirst into an Explosions in the Sky crescendo. It's a solid, serviceable counterpoint to its predecessors that makes for a decent conclusion.

Though not entirely cohesive, Agjijer's demo is a showcase of the band's versatility and knack for setting distinct moods. With the potential on display here, the Tokyo math-rock outfit could very well have the ability to drop an innovative, genre-bending LP in the future. I'm looking forward to seeing what's in store.

Single Review: Chivo Carnada - "Choxxo/Koyote"

Chivo Carnada - Choxxo/Koyote

(2017 Self-Released)

It takes bold, iconic cover art for a project to stand out in an 8-by-5 column of Bandcamp releases. Among the spacey purples and blues that orbit the streaming platform's 'ambient' section, Chivo Carnada's sophomore single does just that. It's a small flash of earth the color of baked clay, disrupting the gloom of the cosmos: an Unidentified Terrestrial Object. Sketches of South American flora and fauna inhabit the sandy square, which seems to imagine what NASA's Pioneer Plaque might have looked like if it were doodled on by a New Yorker cartoonist. 

Like L Bosco, who I reviewed about a month ago, Chivo Carnada is a solo project based in Guadalajara with little social media presence. C.C.'s nom de plume Google-Translates to Goat Bait, a name well-suited to describing his gritty, organic folk meditations. Swaggering acoustic chords lay out an arid terrain on "Choxxo", the A-side of his new digital 7" record, painting a flat landscape for slide guitarist Pedro Snake to sprout prickly pears and succulents that lazily harmonize in the sand. Imagine a more sluggish, twangier version of early Beach Fossils, or their similarly-christened contemporaries Dirty Beaches. The comparison extends to Carnada's lyrics too: poetic and cozily mundane. From what I can gather, "Choxxo" is about taking a late-night trip to the convenience store and deciding what to wear based on the weather. Is it too cold for shorts? Maybe, but C.C. doesn't mind. 

B-side "Koyote" is a cover of a mid-90s cut by Babasonicos -- an Argentinian psych-rock quintet. C.C.'s version of the song is compositionally faithful to its source material, but more baroque on the timbral end of things. Sinister guitar riffs are tempered by chiming plinks of piano that seem like sonic bystanders: tonal pedestrians just passing through. 

Though primarily a folk release, Choxxo/Koyote is ambient in its approach to instrumentation. C.C.'s arrangements lope towards the horizon, unobstructed by a flat landscape. The record is a short journey into the distant beyond, reveling in its desolate vastness -- ideal listening for long walks or poolside sunbathing.

Review: Johnny Utah - "Small Dogs"

Johnny Utah - Small Dogs

(2017 Bangkok Blend)

 "Okay, why do little kids always draw the sun with a smiley face?" asks Johnny Utah, halting the folk-pop lilt of "deli platter". "We don't know where it stands, emotionally". 

The Philadelphian singer-songwriter's an inquisitive guy with an eye for detail. The five tunes that make up his debut EP, Small Dogs, are carefully and intricately pressed into a Communion-wafer-thin canvas of sound, then inked with wheezes of acoustic guitar that seep sloppily into their host. Like Sentridoh and Julia Brown before him, Utah uses the fragile frame of his lo-fi soundscapes to create punchy contrasts. The aforementioned "deli platter," for example, toys with its levels of volume and saturation. flooding its initially parched heave of acoustic chords with a cool gulp of bass. Properly watered, the song's soil is fertile enough to cultivate steady thwacks of percussion and buzzing, three-part vocal harmonies. Occasionally, Utah presses pause on the cut altogether, interjecting with bits of director's commentary before hurtling back into regularly scheduled programming. Though one might expect a hiccup like that to disrupt the rhythm of a track, these interruptions are timed precisely enough to enhance the groove in progress, like a roller coaster's well-placed bend, yanking its passengers awake. 

The following track, "angst", is another textural feast. As percussive chords throb out a 4-on-the-floor beat, Utah belts out mumbly bars of Alex G-inspired melody like signal flares fired through the canopy of a thick forest -- barely made out, but understood on a fundamental level. Drum fills are fashioned out of an overturned bucket, tickling the inner ear while hearkening back to The Velvet Underground's "Heroin". This is as poppy as Utah's songcraft gets, riding sweeping chords like waves that gradually increase in size. 

"rhino mountain" closes Small Dogs with its most satisfying effort. A spoken word piece dissolves into pluckings of acoustic guitar before coming to a boil. A simple drum machine rhythm bubbles at the surface, dragging Utah's groaned lyrics through murky tape hiss. Twangy riffs tie knots around the arrangements to hold them in place, only to let things unravel into a climactic eruption of noise. Fade to black.

Johnny Utah's debut effort is best when it's at its weirdest. He's an eccentric with a calculated method to his madness, giving each experiment or jarring timbral shift its own purpose that adds to the album as a whole. Already a solid effort in its own right, Small Dogs gives me hope for even more lo-fi whimsy in the future.

Single Review: Starship Emo - "(side a)"

Starship Emo - "(side a)"

(2017 Self-Released)

Cincinnati's a humble city, littered with the quirks and charms of any good metropolitan era, yet too insecure about its own draws to tout them. It's where the Reds -- the country's first-ever professional baseball team -- have called home since 1846, rooting themselves so firmly into local culture that Opening Day is considered an unofficial city holiday. It's where "ghost signs" -- advertisements from the 30s and 40s painted onto brick architecture that have faded into spectral obscurity -- haunt urban decay like attractive birthmarks. It's where natives swear by noodles, hot-dog chili, and shredded cheddar cheese, all layered together in the same bowl.  It's where -- for whatever reason -- most folks care more about where you went to high school than what you did afterward. 

Cincinnati, Ohio is an emo city. It's the emo city. It's wrapped up in its own, personal nostalgia, one that seems impenetrable to outsiders -- the sort of history one can take pride in, but can't extol without having to explain why they put chili on noodles or what they find so compelling about a ball club that hasn't won a world series in 27 years. The truth isn't self-evident, and neither is Midwestern emo. It's complex, introspective, and pretty, once you've entered the proper state of mind.

Starship Emo's grimy lo-fi soundscapes peel from brick like withering paint. They're their hometown's distilled spirit, wired through an old Casio and pummeled with 808 kicks. The duo's latest single, "(side a)", is a hip-hop cut as fresh and unassuming as the morning's cool haze of condensation and avian chatter. Keyboard chords stretch out their creaking limbs across the muffled thump of low-pass filtered percussion -- each snare hits with the force of a thrown pillow. This is music to hit snooze to, cool and inviting as laundered bedsheets beneath the AC unit. 

Jacob Miller's distorted vocals top the beat like fondant, likely powdered with a tasteful pinch of autotune. The gloomy blend of mumbled melodies and crackling production borrows cues from both Teen Suicide's "haunt me" and Ski Mask the Slump God's "Gone", trimming each down to its most whispery elements. What remains is a hieroglyphic impression of sound -- not a ghost sign, but a ghost song. "Don't hate me", pleads Miller, more out of habit than in a fit of passion. Those words stretch out across the factory's weathered siding, once splayed in vibrant orange, now wilted. The phrase spans the windshield of your car just long enough to register, marinating in your head. By the end of your commute, they too will fade into the memory of a tune worth replaying -- a landscape snapshot of the city skyline. 

Review: Jannen Hengentuotteet - "Huonoa Duuria"

Jannen Hengentuotteet - Huonoa Duuria

(2017 Hulina)

A good portion of my current music intake comes in short bursts. When online streaming platforms like Soundcloud and Apple Music are your main resources for finding and consuming music, it's easy to treat individual songs like tiny serving-sized boxes of cereal lined on the grocery store's shelf: you expect them to court your palate with eye-catching cover art and promises of flavors primed to hijack your levels of serotonin and dopamine. While sound can't carry the sugar or artificial sweeteners that a miniature box of Golden Grahams can, it can draw potential listeners in with abbreviated track lengths and repetitive structures. When plucking tunes from their albums and shuffling them into playlists is the norm, there isn't always room for subtlety or patience -- acts all over the creative spectrum like Alex G, Playboi Carti, and Quarterbacks are all excellent examples of artists that create bold, brief and memorable tunes that explore unique textures while keeping things concise. 

I don't think that's a bad thing, though. I like the ability to hop from one idea to another at a moment's notice. Stirring several genres into a single listening session helps keep my ears fresh, and often lets me make unexpected connections and comparisons as a reviewer. Just like convenience food, easy access to music is comfy and readily available, but, in the end, it's still best to incorporate more wholesome options into your diet too, as I've learned over the past week. 

I finally earned my driver's license on Tuesday, and have been taking the opportunity to re-visit some old cassettes with the help of my station wagon's deck, letting full albums play as I drive to work. There's something freeing about spending fifteen minutes isolated in a two-ton exoskeleton with only the company of a good record. It's making me appreciate lengthy pieces of music again: post-rock jams, cohesive concept works, compilations, and just about anything that challenges my attention span. 

Jannen Hengentuotteet's new 38-minute single, Huonoa Duuria ("Bad Major Key" in Finnish), is a release perfect for long drives, and I'm tempted to make my own cassette version of it if the project's label doesn't plan to do so. Pasted together with a fluttering hi-hat rhythm, the tune traverses its dense weaves of guitaristry as effortlessly as cars seem to glide across the interstate while percussive breaks in the road's yellow dividing line punctuate the drive. 

The record makes its Krautrock influences known from the start. Twangy, drawn-out chords are draped over an off-kilter beat before a few staccato riffs knit them in place. The guitar is joined by translucent keyboards, lavished on the arrangement with little restraint. Here, it resembles a chopped and clumsily re-assembled version of Mac Demarco's "Chamber of Reflection", saturated with watery tones. Maybe we're not driving at all, but actually waterskiing on a crest of reverb.

As Huonoa Duuria works its way into a more danceable groove, the keys lend their echoing jackets of residue to the guitars, which begin to sound as jazzy as they do shoegazey. This is, in my opinion, the composition's strongest movement, pulling the key elements of Hengentuottet's sound together while never holding to firmly to form. Though much of the record is likely improvised, Huonoa Duuria never feels like the work of a "jam band". It's a bit closer to the post-rock of Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky, minus the grandiosity. 

That's what makes the record so listenable: despite its lofty ambition, Huonoa remains pleasant, focused, and humble throughout, even as it devolves into a folk-rock dronescape and then eventually into an amorphous blob of dissonant strings. It isn't until the last few minutes of the piece that Hengentuotteet reaches its climax, slowly coating its tense piano rolls with horns, synths, and theremin squeals. Though it takes a full 37 minutes for Huonoa Duuria to blossom into something vast and hard-hitting, it's the process of getting there that makes it worth the price of admission. Next time you're on a road trip, leave this playing on the aux cord -- this is a record best played in the background, lulling you into complacence before gripping you with a dramatic tonal shift. 

Single Review: Sleepwalk - "Shine // Vertigo Zoom"

Sleepwalk - Shine // Vertigo Zoom

(2017 Emma's House)

Sleepwalk's label may be named after a particularly influential single by The Field Mice, but their new virtual 7" single released by Mexico-based Emma's House Records bears only a slight resemblance to their rodent forebears. Listening to the Chicagoan quartet's latest work is like experiencing "Emma's House" on an IMAX screen, headrest titled back with a greasy bag of popcorn at the ready.

A-side "Shine" opens humbly, pitting a filtered rhythm guitar against a needle-sharp thread of feedback that primes the listener for the amplification to come. The stray screech of fuzz becomes more unstable as it travels, tumbling and vibrating like a firework set to burst before ushering in a fat bassline, stadium-rock percussion, and proto-grunge riffage bendy enough to have been used on Yuck's debut record.

"Shine" is the sort of track -- like Swervedriver's "Duel" or Ride's "Vapor Trail" -- that shares shoegaze's love for spacious, dreamy chord progressions and driving rhythms, but sheds some of its distortion to hatch into a punchier, more hummable sound. Sleepwalk's towering melodies can stand on their own without copious amounts of reverb to prop them up. It isn't until a flange effect throttles the band's guitars two-thirds of the way into "Shine" that the pedalboard's role becomes noticeable, but the textural transition still melts seamlessly into Ryan Davis' repeated plea to "say no" to dwelling on the past. Sleepwalk borrows sonic cues from the nineties, but they return them in better condition than they were left: well-mastered and streamlined to pop structure.

B-side "Vertigo Zoom" is more of a slow climb than its predecessor. An infectious lead riff hopscotches across tom drums and kicks, leaving room for Davis to whisper atop gurgles of bass. It's like a juiced-up version of DIIV's "Oshin": here, Sleepwalk builds up confectionery harmonies, and melts them down around the meat of a whirling chorus. While "Shine" is powered by twinkly aggression, "Vertigo Zoom" runs on psychedelic energy. Together, the two sides nearly span shoegaze's boundaries and then some. Shine // Vertigo Zoom is a record that explores its full potential while still staying tethered to its roots. 

Review: Playlab - "lastleg"

Playlab - lastleg

(2017 Self-Released)

No matter what search engine is at your disposal, the keyword "Playlab" will fetch a predictably trendy lineup of digital-age concepts. Your query might gather a non-profit program meant to teach youngsters to code, or perhaps it'll lead you to the parodically-sparse homepage of a trendy New York creative firm that has -- among other things -- released a collection of photos cleverly titled Friendzone that captures football players in greyscale embrace. There's also a Bangkok-based mobile app developer with this same name, cranking out cutely-designed, pay-to-play Candy Crush clones. 

These three examples are just the tip of the cybernetic iceberg. "Playlab" is the sort of vague, jargony phrase that sits comfortably among the grandiose lingo of other uniformly sleek tech startups. It's practically begging to be plastered in Helvetica font on a small office in a gentrified cranny of the city, sharing the block with a craft brewery, or maybe a bicycle repair store. 

It's an aesthetic prophesied by Jeff Koons' 2001 exhibition EasyFun Ethereal, (note esp. the quirky portmanteau of a title), lampooned by PC Music, and deconstructed by the Cincinnati drum-and-bass outfit whose name I've spent the last couple paragraphs discussing. Playlab's lastleg LP exists on the raw, gutter-punk outskirts of the 'corporate techno-minimalist' ethos pioneered by Apple and appropriated by countless imitators. The record's synth textures are as squeaky as latex and often rounded at the edges for safety -- the sounds used here are IDM's equivalent to toy pianos and plinks of xylophone. Rattled off at inhuman speeds, these primary-colored tones scramble to form pointillist harmonies diluted only by their squelchy canvas of trashed snared and gabber kicks. 

Much of lastleg plays like an SNES game scored by Aaron Dilloway. At the album's best, Playlab whisks its arrangements with free-jazz rhythms: cuts like "Mouse Love" and "midipet ver0 jam 2" do this best, violently sending stray flecks of instrumentation splattering onto the kitchen countertop with little regard for tidiness. Despite its sugary components, the music seeks to make a ferocious mess of itself, producing peals of grating noise that emerge from their simulated dust cloud. Playlab's arrangements may do battle, but their combat is limited to cartoon violence. Fun is always at the forefront.

lastleg's latter half contains a few attempts at traditional songcraft. Pop single "I Put it All Online" is a dissonant new-wave groove indebted to both Ariel Pink and David Lynch, pairing text-to-speech software with flailing 808s and throaty keyboards that threaten to implode between each iteration of the titular chorus. "Can You Hear Me?" employs a variety of artificial voices to body its constantly-evolving beat, which slyly transitions from happy hardcore to footwork to trap.

This isn't the kind of release meant for listeners to return to for comfort's sake. It's more or less the tree you're not to overlook the forest of Playlab's discography for. Like Guided by Voices, CHXPO or Lil B, the project's overwhelming stream of output is just as big a draw as the content itself. With around 100 tracks dropped over the past 30 days, the best way to enjoy Playlab is to dive in headfirst, sifting through the roughage to uncover nuggets of improvised brilliance. 

Double Feature: Foliage - "Silence" // Beach Fossils - "Somersault"

Foliage - "Dare"

(2017 Spirit Goth)

If it weren't for their Bandcamp bio, it'd be easy to assume that Foliage frontman Manuel Joseph Walker lived somewhere in London or Manchester, circa 1980. Spiking Another Sunny Day's jangle-pop gloom with the tense punk shuffle of The Clash's "Lost in the Supermarket", the San Bernadino-based solo act's latest single, "Dare" synthesizes the best sounds to emerge from Britain during the decade-long Thatcher-era. Walker has stripped away much of the reverb that saturated his 2015 debut record, Truths, filling in the empty space with distressed kick drums and meatier bass. Backed by melodica and an uncredited vocalist, he feels as indebted to My So Called Life's soundtrack as he does to Wild Nothing -- there's something vaguely folky that possesses the sustained "oooohs" snaking through the new track, adding flesh to the more skeletal compositions of their earlier work.

Beach Fossils - Somersault

(2017 Bayonet)

The discography of Brooklyn's Beach Fossils (who, until recently, I assumed had disbanded) has taken a similar turn for the tidier. Their fourth LP, Somersault, is the band's first release in as many years, representing an exodus from their former cakes of movie-theater buttered beach pop. It's lighter fare, consisting of their usual layered, staccato riffs -- only here, they're lightly salted with hints of smooth jazz and 70s soft rock, intensifying their flavor instead of drowning it. Somersault is a tasteful outing, proving that for better or for worse, Beach Fossils have aged alongside the fans who've closely followed their 8-year adolescence.

"Tangerine" is an early sign of evolution. Featuring a wispy verse sung by Slowdive's Rachel Goswell, the band's guitars take an unexpected backseat to Jack Doyle Smith's loping basslines and the occasional splatter of strings. Where Beach Fossils once resembled the early hardcore hustle of Descendents -- their walls of trebly fuzz shoved along by blast-beats -- they could now be mistaken for the Byrds, glistening with Paisley-patterned psychedelia. "Closer Everywhere" nearly eschews six-stringed instruments altogether, opting instead for harpsichord and melty threads of baroque orchestration. As much as I'm loath to make a comparison to The Beatles, I'd be lying if I said the track doesn't evoke the backmasked intro to "I Am the Walrus", tightly winding screwball harmonies about a barely-there rhythm section. 

"Rise" guides Somersault into totally unfamiliar territory, cloaking a spoken word verse by cloud-rapper Cities Aviv in washes of Rhodes piano and saxophone. Out of context it sounds like a jarring sonic swerve, yet sandwiched between the Real Estate riffage of "May 1st" and "Sugar", a downtempo shoegaze tune, it makes for a seamless transition that's one of the record's most replayable moments. 

Despite a couple tracks that fall short of Beach Fossils' usual standard, like the anemic "Down the Line" (which is redeemed by the verse "I really hate your poetry", delivered with frontman Payseur's uniformly breezy disinterest), the band has returned with a record original enough to shake off their countless Bandcamp imitators while staying true to their effortless pop ethos. The aptly-titled "That's All for Now" caps things off with Somersault's best offering. It's a compositional nod to the trio's self-titled debut, polishing its daydreamed vocals and sun-bleached melodies. A few concluding licks of country-crossover slide guitar hold the door for listeners, as if to promise more surprise experimentation in the future. 

For a band that's been silent for four years, Beach Fossils sound fresher than ever.

Review: L Bosco - (demos)

L Bosco - (demos)

(2017 Self-Released)

L Bosco's humble collection of demos may have been released quietly to Bandcamp without as much as a link to social media or a back catalog of material for context, but that's not to say that the Guadalajara-based shoegazer's debut release is an understated effort. The four instrumentals that make up the EP are constructed with cinematic scale in mind, piling hefty post-rock riffs atop spacey Peter Gabriel soundscapes. 

Slowly emerging from the Oxford Blue haze of a hollowed-out drum machine loop and slide guitar, "Prelude" beams filmy searchlights of guitar, their glow revealing the silhouette of a massive ocean liner creeping towards the listener. It's the sort of tense climate Robin Guthrie might create in his post-Cocteau Twins career: implying a greater, more solid sense of magnitude while working exclusively with misty textures. As acidic droplets of guitar slide down Bosco's lens - streaking and forming tinny globules - one can feel this ominous figure moving more clearly into frame before slinking back into the depths, leaving just clattering drums in its wake. Like many of my favorite post-rock acts, L Bosco hints at crescendos that never come. He forces you to take note of each compositional nuance, prepping your nervous system for the endorphin rush held in front of you like the proverbial carrot, a tidal rhythm section settling for the role of stick. 

"Piensas" deconstructs the Scottish drone of Mogwai and The Twilight Sad, piping warm mumbles into a cloud of delayed guitar pluckings and muddied analog synth. It's humidity clinging to the hair of your forearms, hanging heavy as you push through the summer heat like walking through the swimming pool.

"v nus" is the outlier of the bunch, whisking spirals of digital arpeggiation into IDM soundscapes. With a couple breakbeats thrown on top of it, the 7-minute track might fit snugly into a compilation curated by The Worst Label. On its own, it feels like the theme music meant to accompany a dystopian skyline. Or maybe it's the background music to a futuristic puzzle game sold on the App Store. Whatever image it conjures in your mind, "v nus" radiates equal parts bleakness and wonder. It's as evocative as Kraftwerk, but perhaps more indebted to 80s new-age music.

Outro cut "The T I/O scene" is a composite of all the sounds L Bosco toys with on this demo tape, and it's the most solid of the four. Fizzy snares stumble against sizzling guitar distortion, coalescing in pools of smooth jazz reflection. The tape as a whole feels more like a mirror than a picture -- passively created for active listening. Bosco keeps his art minimal so that you can apply your own vision to it. (demos) evolves alongside you.