Whimsical, reformed in 2015 and our 3rd full length album, “Bright Smiles & Broken Hearts”, self released on November 5th, 2019. Whimsical plays “Blissed Out” Classic Shoegazed melodies with ethereal female vocals floating over the top. Gazers will be mesmerized by this latest offering. Krissy’s vocals simply soar on this release. Neil’s composition and sonic construction is near flawless. Stellar Production all the way through.
Like many important bands, Seattle quartet Versing got their start in college radio—Tacoma’s KUPS. The group’s main songwriter/guitarist/vocalist Daniel Salas served as alternative music director there, where he met guitarist Graham Baker, drummer Max Keyes, and bassist Kirby Lochner. Now Versing are poised to spread their coolly combustible brand of rock on those said airwaves…and beyond if the world knows what’s good for it.
Baker, Keyes, Lochner, and Salas have risen through Seattle’s competitive rock ecosphere with nonchalant élan. They cheekily titled a previous album Nirvana, but never mind the bleach: Versing isn’t emulating Sub Pop’s most famous artist. Rather, these four twenty-something aesthetes are forging an exciting sound that finds a golden mean between lustrous noise and ebullient melody.
“Tethered” is the lead-off single from Versing’s full-length album “10000”, out May 3rd 2019 on Hardly Art records.
With Versing, songwriting is obviously crucial, but much of the pleasure in 10000 comes from its guitar textures. They’re swarming, yet also spiky and agile. Gently chiding the Seattle music scene’s self-seriousness while acknowledging Versing’s playfulness and irony, Salas says, “There’s a ‘let’s just fuck around and see what comes out,’ aspect of what we do, which I think is uncommon for Seattle bands.”
“Whoosh is a silly word,” says Gus Lord of the Stroppies. “There is something completely nonsense about it, especially when removed from any kind of context. For me it conjures up images of something absurd and transient – two things fundamental in the experience of listening to or making good pop music.”
“Whoosh” may indeed be a silly word but it almost onomatopoeically captures the sound and essence of The Stroppies first proper debut album, one that breezes along with boundless energy, a refrained pop strut, infectious grooves and the sort of jangling guitar melodies that sound like a prime-era Flying Nun band.
Between them, the Melbourne-based band – currently comprising of Gus Lord, Rory Heane, Claudia Serfaty and Adam Hewitt – have been in countless bands such as Boomgates, Twerps, Tyrannamen, Primetime, Blank Statements,The Blinds, White Walls, See Saw and Possible Humans. The band formed together around a kitchen table in 2016 with a heavy focus around the essence of collaboration and a DIY ethos. This led to an acclaimed cassette release of lounge room recordings, which was then pressed onto vinyl to more acclaim. The Stroppies next step was then taking their DIY approach to home recordings into the studio to make a transitional leap to what would become their proper studio debut. “Whooshis our first concerted effort to make something with a bit more sonic depth,”says Claudia Serfaty (the bands other primary songwriter). “It was an attempt to take working processes that had been established in a home recording setting and build on them with a broader musical palette in the studio in order to push the band into new territory without compromising what made initial releases so endearing.”
Endearment is something that the Stroppies have no problem retaining on Whoosh. It’s a record that possesses all the spunk and gusto of a young band hurtling forward yet also knowing when to take their foot off the accelerator. It’s an album that simultaneously feels young and fresh but wise beyond its years. “Whoosh is the most robust sounding release we have ever recorded,” Serfaty says. Combining taut post-punk rhythms, indie jangle, seamless melody and sugary pop, it’s a record that Lord says is influenced by: “All sorts of things – life, work, relationships, old cartoons and the last 60+ years of guitar-based pop music in some form or another. This includes everything from Bill Fay to the Clean to Stephen Malkmus.”
“Whoosh” is a record that combines a natural sense of urgency with a thoughtful approach. Something that the recording process itself was emblematic of. “Budgetary restrictions meant that we had two days to lay the foundations,” Serfaty recalls. “So it was axe to the grind: burning through live takes interspersed with tea and Turkish food from the local kebab shop, which culminated in twelve half finished cuts, rough and ready.” That was the urgent part, what then followed was a focused and labour intensive approach to get the most out of the bare bones of the record as possible. “We spent hours building up, stripping down and mixing the work that had been recorded the month prior, throwing everything we could think of at the songs to see what would stick. We utilised whatever was on hand to pull sounds, including but not limited to vintage synths, rain sticks and an old door frame that we used for percussion.” This was done with Zachary Schneider, a friend of the band, budding producer and established musician who is most notable for his guitar work in bands such as Totally Mild, Free Time and Full Ugly.
By the end of that period the band got so absorbed in the record that they almost lost sight of it. “I’m still a little too close to this record for it to evoke anything in particular,” Lord says. “Except for perhaps dull anxiety. Towards the end of recording I felt like I was drowning in the process and lost all clarity on what it meant or it’s value. Kind of like saying a word over and over again – it starts to lose all meaning.” Although with time comes clarity and even amidst the fog of making a record that has taken over his life, Lord knows the band has made something special. “Reflecting on the process I feel really proud of the album.”
After a two-year hiatus, Froth are back with their most fully realized work to date, ”Duress”. Co-produced with longtime friend and collaborator Tomas Dolas (Oh Sees/Mr. Elevator) at his analog-focused Studio 22 in Cypress Park, CA, the record is unapologetically experimental yet undeniably accessible – combining some of the band’s strongest hooks with left-field sounds and unexpected flourishes of electronica. Joo Joo Ashworth has matured into a talented producer in his own right, communicating his singular vision through studio technique as much as his angular, Verlaine-inspired guitar sound. As always, the rhythm section of Jeremy Katz and Cameron Allen displays a tightness and sense of mutual understanding only achieved through years of friendship and extensive touring.
“Duress” sees the band stepping outside the shadow of their influences and into something wholly their own. It’s an impressive and self-assured statement from a group only just entering their prime
Band Members
JooJoo Ashworth- Guitar/VOX
Jeremy Katz- Guitar/bass
Cameron Allen- Drums
Gnoomes, the Russian outfit who blend a potent mix of psychedelic stargaze, kraut techno and kosmiche pop return with a brand new album, MU! their third for Rocket Recordings.
Since the release of their last album Tschak! the three piece has turned into a quartet with synth player Masha Piankova joining the band. And it was the success of their tours in the UK and Europe that subconsciously created a template and tone for where the band would go next with this new album; to capture that surging drive and throbbing assault of their pulverising live shows. “We decided to make this record more live and less electronic,” Sasha, singer and guitarist from Gnoomes said. “We were thinking about how to make it sound more dynamic.” Masha’s introduction was a key one, with her replacing Sasha on synth bass whilst he moved over to second guitar to add a fuller and more impactful sonic crunch.
MU! has been part recorded in the same old soviet radio station where the band recorded Tschak! part in a professional studio and then part at home. This was to ensure the best capture of Gnoomes live assault. The results brim with a magnitude and sense of coherence that belies some of the environment it was created in. Fuzz-driven guitars shift in engulfing waves, resembling shoegaze giants at their most ferocious, whilst elsewhere layered vocals stack on top of one another, weaving between pristine melody and augmented discordance. Whilst the glacial electronics and coldwave tendencies that soaked much of their previous album may be more absent here, this record pulses with an electronic tinge that bubbles more subtly under the surface of immersive guitars.
Holly Herndon operates at the nexus of technological evolution and musical euphoria.
On a record of countless voices (both human and AI) and instruments (both real and virtual), Holly Herndon fused the ancient and futuristic to form a hopeful vision for our present. There are crystallizations of her club music on “Alienation” and “Eternal,” stunning chorales like “Frontier” indebted to both gospel and Medieval church music, breathtaking electro-acoustic sound design on “Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt,” and remarkable snapshots of Herndon’s process with glimpses at the AI’s “live training.” At a time when machine learning is viewed mostly with fear, Herndon depicts it more accurately as something young and innocent, something we created — in need of guidance, community, and, yes, love. mind-bending arrangements and ideas that really test the stretch of the imagination.
For the album, she assembled a contemporary ensemble of vocalists, developers, guest contributors (Jenna Sutela, Jlin, Lily Anna Haynes, Martine Syms) and an inhuman intelligence housed in a DIY souped-up gaming PC to create a record that encompasses live vocal processing and timeless folk singing.
Can’t get enough of this album. Holly is a true innovator, and this is one of her most innovative releases.
At first listen, “The Practice of Love”, Jenny Hval’s seventh full-length album, unspools with an almost deceptive ease. Across the eight tracks, filled with arpeggiated synth washes and the kind of lilting beats that might have drifted, loose and unmoored, from some forgotten mid-’90s trance single, The Practice of Love feels, first and foremost, compellingly humane. Given the horror and viscera of her previous album, 2016’s Blood Bitch, The Practice of Love is almost subversive in its gentleness—a deep dive into what it means to grow older, to question one’s relationship to the earth and one’s self, and to hold a magnifying glass over the notion of what intimacy can mean.
As Hval describes it, the album charts its own particular geography, a landscape in which multiple voices engage and disperse, and the question of connectedness—or lack thereof—hangs suspended in the architecture of every song. It is,an album about “seeing things from above—almost like looking straight down into the ground, all of these vibrant forest landscapes, the type of nature where you might find a porn magazine at a certain place in the woods and everyone would know where it was, but even that would just become rotting paper, eventually melting into the ground.”
“Look at these trees/ Look at this grass/ Look at those clouds … Study this/ And ask yourself/ Where is God?” Leave it to Jenny Hval to open an album with words that could’ve been lifted from a self-help mindfulness exercise and turn them into an existential reckoning. The Practice Of Love grapples with all kinds of questions, as any of Hval’s work does. But at the same time as Hval remains thought-provoking, she’s now housed these meditations in futuristic pop songs like “High Alice” and “Ashes To Ashes,” locating an accessibility and infectiousness we might not have ever expected from her. The Practice Of Love is a thing of shimmering beauty throughout, but perhaps this is its most moving takeaway: constant searching leading to new thoughts and new sounds, history and memory and life lived stoking yet another evolution.
From ‘The Practice of Love,’ out September. 13th, 2019. Sacred Bones Records
“Covert Contracts” rule our world: manipulative relationships, encoded social norms, opaque technologies. “With a covert contract, the trick is that the agreement is only known by the person who makes it,” says Ali Carter, singer and bassist of Philly post-punk trio Control Top. “The other person is oblivious. Consent is impossible. A void of communication opens up a world of misunderstanding.”
In an era of such impossibilities, Control Top—Carter with guitarist Al Creedon and drummer Alex Lichtenauer—rip open space for catharsis. Their explosive songs are a synthesis of varied interests and backgrounds: Carter’s innate sense of new wave melodies, Creedon’s sirening noise guitars, Lichtenauer’s feverish hardcore drumming.
On their debut full-length “Covert Contracts”, the songwriting is fully a collaboration of Carter and Creedon. Carter’s voice thumps and screams and deadpans while her driving, hooky basslines play out like guitar leads. Creedon, also the band’s engineer and producer, balances composition and chaos, equally inspired by pop and no-wave.
With her lyrics, Carter responds to feeling trapped and overwhelmed in a capitalist patriarchy, offering indictments of wrongdoing and abuse of power, odes to empathy and ego death, as well as declarations of self-determination.
These songs hit even harder when you consider how close this band came to not existing at all. Despite being involved in underground music communities for years, Carter didn’t start Control Top (her first band) until age 25. Disillusioned by punk, Creedon had all but abandoned guitar. But Control Top felt exciting, a chance to experiment: to rethink the relationship between guitar and bass and use samplers to add new dimensions. Meanwhile, Lichtenauer had quit playing drums after an abusive situation in a previous band that had ruined playing music for them, and joining Control Top was an opportunity for rebirth.
At once anthemic and chilling, Covert Contracts puts words to today’s unspoken anxieties. Brimming with post-punk poetry for 2019, it’s the sound of agency being reclaimed.
CONTROL TOP is: Ali Carter – bass/vocals Al Creedon – guitar Alex Lichtenauer – drums
As on Side 1, the mics open up into the moment preceding the music, letting our ears wander into the room seconds before the song starts. The light that was dappling on “Morning Is My Godmother” is seen from higher up at the top of the flip, as Bill gives us an airplane song in the grand tradition of Lightfoot and Denver, Chuck Berry and Steve Miller. “747” slips easily into cruising altitude, a staunch full band collaboration, while Bill wanders absently through yearning visions of selfhood before landing us on the moon, “like flies on a mule.” The baby’s head first appears here. “Watch Me Get Married” fills in the patchwork like we’re flipping through a scrapbook. This particular marriage is to cosmic oneness (always the best bet to avoid the divorce courts) sounding like the swelling of true happiness, with the gentlest of oom-pah-pahs suggested in the backdrop. Throughout the side, the twinklings of the firmament are represented by instrumental comings and goings, adding shading and color on an almost line-by-line basis. Never one to dwell overlong on a sweet moment, Bill‘s attention turns to “Young Icarus”, whose fate we thought we knew. Here, the story sounds similar to what Bill once wryly termed “the pornography of my past” or, even further back, the tale of “a teenaged Smog.”
Odd details and signature changes trace this path, a synth flashing peripheral commentary as the old ways of “Ballad of the Hulk” are glimpsed in their death poses. The brevity of these melodies are a microcosm of the album; flowing moments of honey that turn, smoothly abrupt, into other sweet moments, leaving a track in the listener’s mind that grows wider with time. Suddenly, dark clouds blow in. Like a flashback within a flashback, “Released” cracks and groans with mounting angst, a struggle in vacuous space, with Bill spitting out a sharp and disgusted “get fucked” as he silently watches the horsemen of the Apocalypse advance on their trail of corruption.
The acoustics palpably breathe: keyboards suddenly appear, hang translucent in the air, then wink out, and the stretching and crackling of skin acts as a part of the arrangement. At 2:22, this would be the shortest song on a Bill Callahan album, but on Shepherd In a Sheepskin Vest, it is one in a series of epic miniatures; small moments composed of even smaller moments, all fluidly sliding into the next. Bringing us to quintessential side-ender, and one of the barest moments on the album, “What Comes After Certainty.” Over a guitar duet, Bill ruminates on love, lyrically revolving on a carousel that touches on his honeymoon and the dreams of his life and career, opining that they are not magic, but a part of unknowable destiny, and adding, “God’s face on the water/though plain to see/still hard to read.” When the honeymoon is over, this is what we’re left with at best. And for anyone who’s married well, it is very good.
Released in mid-August, Oso Oso’s third full-length could not have arrived at a more opportune moment, brilliantly evoking the lazy afternoons and blazing dusks of a coastal summer’s waning days. Occupying either the lo-fi end of the emo spectrum or one of pop-punk’s scuzzier bandwidths, Jade Lilitri’s songs meander through gorgeously tossed-off chord progressions before settling in as inescapable earworms. The luminescent album intro gradually builds into “The View”’s glorious melody, submitting “Basking In The Glow’s” coming-of-age touchstones. Lilitri’s lyrics capture a young man trying to figure things out at his own pace, and his writing nestles earnest portraits within a relatable universality.
In the title track’s hooky punk there are shades of Ocean Avenue, if Yellowcard were from the tri-state area and less self-pitying; “Dig” conjures early Death Cab, if Death Cab were less self-impressed. The record’s unobtrusive engineering sands down Lilitri’s nasally voice, lending the effect of a vocalist slightly more grizzled than his twenty-six years. “A Morning Song” is perhaps the track which best captures the greater album’s wide-eyed yearning, but in Oso Oso’s case, the journey appears to be the destination.
Oso Oso’s ‘basking in the glow’ is out everywhere.
