Turnstile – Glow On [Roadrunner 2021]
Don’t think about it too hard, these Baltimore hardcorer’s bread and butter is energy. Pulling from those late 90’s funk-metal bands who transitioned to reggae or alt by the turn of the millennium their biggest strength is their physicality – which here means the music’s ability to affect one physically – that doesn’t add much substance to what purportedly is a call to carpe diem. Best for highway driving. 3.1/5
100 gecs – 1000 gecs [Dog Show 2019]
Say what you will about genre mashup or how they’re similar to Mr. Bungle or Life Grips, it doesn’t matter. This shit is funny. Outrageously pitched up vocals funny. Death growls followed by a dog barking funny. “Hey there you little piss baby” funny. Dylan Brady and Laura Les are a duo from the Midwest who sincerely make music that ironists love due to its perceived esotericism (read that again). But its charm is derived from that sincerity since that’s what prevents it from being meretricious. That and its brevity. 4.0/5
Low Cut Connie – Get Out the Lotion [lowcutconnie.com 2011]
Whether or not all of Piano-Man Adam Weiner’s tunes get stuck on loop in your head is a hit or miss affair, but once the catchy ones move in, they pay utilities as well as rent. The sound is lo-fi because of budget not aesthetic but that doesn’t stop it from adding to the subject matter. If the man isn’t a scuzzball (in a nice way) he’s sure as hell their pied piper, barding tales of homoerotic Rio trips, cream, thighs, the point when you get bored waiting for a text back – all in a way so grimy you’re thankful he reminds audience, himself, and fellow scuzzballs to “Shit, Shower, Shave”. Come to think of it he uses the first person a lot. 4.0/5
The World is a Beautiful Place and I am No Longer Afraid to Die – Illusory Walls [Epitaph 2021]
This band had started very messy sounding which is why it was still a shock that Always Foreign sounded so streamlined even though they were obviously hemorrhaging members. A community of emo/post-rock/folkies from suburban CT has now been reduced to a Philly 5 piece, hold the spicy mustard. And yet, somehow the word that most applies itself here is overwrought. Cramming prog and metal into the sound to somehow help fight for the working class while jettisoning the previous community-based influences re: emo/post-rock/folk not only robs accessibility and convinces the white bloggers giving this thing raves a lie that they can tell themselves – “They’re stronger than ever” – it makes everything heavy and ugly. If comparing the last two minutes of “Fewer Afraid” to “Getting Sodas” doesn’t convince of the sterilization, please take note of the clunky poetry that misses “Queen Sophie” and the first half of “Infinite Josh” but is present literally everywhere else. Correct politics is one thing, but this calcified attempt at informing and galvanizing is so ready to re-hash old perspectives for theatricality that it can hardly be called substance. 2.1/5
Indigo de Souza – Any Shape You Take [Saddle Creek 2021]
Twenty-Four year old biracial queer Southerner laments the destruction of love using guitar attacks invented a few years before she was. Add her to the list of Sad Gay Girls with Guitars and remember that they’re usually much funnier and less self-serious than the doods who lament about the same thing. Once a sound arrives in the hands of people who didn’t have it before, new experiences are felt, which is why this’ll be a revelatory introduction for those born after 9/11 who never though someone could articulate such a breakup so viscerally. For the rest of us it’s fine. 3.2/5
Phoebe Bridgers – Stranger in the Alps [Dead Oceans 2017]
Slow, staid, and sad with a sigh of a voice that can work wonders when it focuses on melody instead of drama. 3.0/5
Cosmic Hero 