Ruban Nielson’s Unknown Mortal Orchestra are band that always moved between psych-rock, frenetic sonics and oddball funk. Sex and Food finds a bit of everything of the band’s established sounds in there along but perhaps with everything pushed to the fringes or testing the limits somewhat. So there’s the aggressively-charged distorted rock of ‘American Guilt’ alongside the positively ’70s yacht rock tracks ‘Ministry of Alienation’ and ‘Everybody ActsCrazy Nowadays’. “When it comes to rock, I want to get into dodgier territory.”, is how Nielson has talked about the album.
Nielson’s voice remains as the peculiar whispering floating timbre. It’s a little creepy, a little laconic, and totally unique. With influences drawn from places he visited like Reykjavík, Seoul, Auckland, Hanoi and Mexico, away from the Portland home that informed much of his 2015 breakthrough record Multi-Love, Sex and Food ultimately, is like a patchwork of their sound to date.
Unknown Mortal Orchestra – “Everyone Acts Crazy Nowadays” from the album ‘Sex & Food’, Released April 6th, 2018 on Jagjaguwar.
Absence sounds like cacophony on Lavender. Nandi Rose Plunkett wrote her third album in the wake of her grandmother’s death. That loss, compacted with a rigorous touring schedule which made it feel like there was no real place she could call home, influences the wandering and foreboding atmosphere that inhabits Lavender. Plunkett utilizes snapping beats and dramatic piano flourishes to ground her celestial pop songs. All of the anger and frustration that simmers beneath the surface makes these songs sound claustrophobic, but also endlessly beautiful and cathartic.
This album is so lyrically compelling and touching in so many ways. The careful composition of each song is beautifully crated. Every track is unique ‘Lavender’ really displays Half Waif’s musical talent. This album is also such a treat to see performed live. Nandi Rose Plunkett is an extremely expressive and fun performer it makes you see the songs in a whole new light.
Big Red Machine was a decade in the making, starting with the sketch of a song The National’s Aaron Dessner sent Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon for the Dark Was the Night charity compilation and culminating with recording sessions with a host of friends. Anchored by Dessner and Vernon, their guests include vocalists like Lisa Hannigan, Phoebe Bridgers, This Is the Kit’s Kate Stables and Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, and string arrangements from Rob Moose and Dessner’s twin brother Bryce. In all, it includes more than two dozen contributors from the minimalistic PEOPLE music platform created by Vernon and the Dessners to encourage collaboration and sharing. Side projects like this often seem tossed off, but Big Red Machine feels like the opposite—something remarkably ambitious, a labor of love that sees two of indie rock’s most talented and creative minds pursuing a passion without pressure, or limits.
The resulting music can sound at times like a National album with Vernon’s echoing, manipulated falsetto serving as a stark contrast to the warm, intimate baritone of Matt Berninger, and at other times like a Bon Iver album with more complex and inventive chordal patterns and rhythmic structures. It’s experimental but affecting with Vernon’s snippets of heart-on-sleeve vulnerability popping up screaming from a cloud of otherwise opaque lyrics. You can hear the influence of Vernon’s work in the hip-hop world in both the underlying beats and his vocals on tracks like “Gratitude” and “Lyla.” Polyrhythms and the odd time signatures Dessner loves to employ with The National abound, and combined with Vernon’s recent sonic exploration on 22 a Million and sometimes incomprehensible word salads, immediate accessibility isn’t really the goal here. But those complexities and sonic risks are also where the music is most rewarding. Neither The National nor Bon Iver does “happy music,” and the themes running through Big Red Machine are rarely uplifting, but there’s unmistakable joy in the music here, a deep care and love for what they were creating and how they got to create it—among friends who also happen to be overflowing with talent. Fans of either band are likely to share in that joy.
Big Red Machine is a project born out of love for downsized collaboration from two architects of stadium-sized indie-rock bands. Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) and Aaron Dessner (the National) have on this project for years and 2018’s self-titled release is their most expansive recorded output. This is an ethereal listen, straight up; a record to get lost in. You’ll gravitate to new territory upon every subsequent spin, and you’ll certainly hear connections to their day jobs. Vernon is front and center with his penchant for complicated, programmed textures, and Dessner paints around his partner’s vocals with flowery, delicate soundscapes.
For the first minute and a half, Nearer My God sounds like a lot of indie music that comes out nowadays. There’s a pulsing synth, electronic handclaps, an R&B-inspired falsetto — you know, the kind of thing you’re basically guaranteed to hear if you turn on Alt Nation or show up to some band’s set at Lollapalooza. And then Conor Murphy screams “I’m Shock Collared At The Gates Of Heaven,” live drums come in, and all of a sudden you’re listening to some of the most crushing post-hardcore to be released this year. It’s a sudden 180, but it’s also the same kind of post-genre experience that many internet-era listeners arrange for themselves anyway. Do you like The Blood Brothers, but also TV on the Radio, but also Radiohead, but also M83, but also Frank Ocean? It’s not that weird to answer yes, and if you did, then Nearer My God is for you.
The level of ambition it takes to pull something like this off, and getting it right nearly destroyed Foxing. But, with help from producer and former Death Cab For Cutie member Chris Walla (who calledNearer My God “one of the bravest and best records I’ve ever been a part of”), they pulled it off like experts. It’s an innovative, risk-taking album that cares about accessible pop appeal as much as it cares about schizophrenic prog-punk fury (“Gameshark”) and long stretches of meditative ambience (“Five Cups”). It’s an album you can rock out to and scream your lungs out to as much as it’s an album you can spend alone time with and really pay attention to the many intricate details.
It’s less common than it used to be to get indie rock albums with this level of masterful ambition, but it doesn’t feel right to tie this album in with a past era. Nearer My God is looking nowhere but forward, and there’s hardly anything else like it.
Even though there’s some debate about it within the music critic/thinkpiece world, there is obviously still a thirst for hard-edged rock music. Bands like Foo Fighters and System Of A Down still draw gigantic crowds, Greta Van Fleet is getting weirdly famous — the interest is there, but most of rock radio sounds like Maroon 5 and indie rock tends to either go in a lighter slacker rock direction or an electronic/R&B direction. That latter two styles have produced plenty of great music, but if you’re feeling like you’re missing tasteful rock bands who rock out, rip guitar solos, and write super catchy songs, you may have just not heard Windhand’s Eternal Return. They throw Black Sabbath riffs, Seattle grunge, trippy psychedelia, and folk songs in a blender and they’re experts at all of it. Dorthia Cottrell is an increasingly killer singer, and her voice is more in the forefront on this album than ever before. She used to bury hints of Layne Staley and Chris Cornell beneath all the noise; now she writes choruses that rival their classic work. Still, Windhand’s music is a bit more challenging than the radio-friendly grunge era.
Eternal Return has a few concise standouts (“Diablerie,” “Red Cloud,” and the folky “Pilgrim’s Rest”), but it mostly favors long songs that lock into heavy, hypnotic grooves. The long songs never drag though; stuff like the eight-minute “Halcyon” and the seven-minute “First To Die” can suck you in so deeply that you lose all sense of real time and just let them take you over.
With Australian garage-psych group The Drones on hiatus, Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin joined forces with drummer Lauren Hammel (High Tension) and guitarist/keyboardist Erica Dunn (Mod Con, Harmony) to form Tropical Fuck Storm, who had only started to write/practice when invited to tour North America with King Gizzard and Band of Horses. A record born on the road, A Laughing Death in Meatspace picks up where The Drones left off and instantly goes in a dozen new directions. “It sounds like it looks,” Gareth wrote on Facebook when TFS revealed the LP’s vivid, psychedelic cover art. Everyone sings in the band, which gives them a unique energy and, sometimes, a poppier side than The Drones. It’s a big, bold and brash LP, putting a post-apocalyptic spin on politics, our screen obsession, or recounting chessmaster Garry Kasparov’s 1996 match against a computer. Not subtle, but neither are these times.
Just another day at TFS HQ, captured on cellulite by the Fellini of Thornbury, Chris Matthews, AKA Flagz of Defero Productions. You Let My Tyres down is from the soon to be released debut album A LAUGHING DEATH IN MEATSPACE (Released MAY 4th).
Recommended If You Like The Drones, Nick Cave, Dinosaur Jr., Iceage, Protomartyr. The phantasmagorical debut album by Tropical Fuck Storm, A Laughing Death in Meatspace, delivers a fraught vision of algo rhythmic apocalypse. The debut dive-bombs into the realms of mortality and immortality, moralizing and amorality; the passing of time, and how little we have left.These are lurid songs, urgently told through Gareth Liddiard’s barbed and byzantine lyricism, abrasive guitar slashes, drum adrenalin, raunchy bass and electronic undercurrents. They’re raging, rapscallion, and funny, lyrically delving into everything from internet shaming to the kuru “laughing death” disease of the PNG highlands to Russian chess great Gary Kasparov’s portentous loss to an IBM computer. Live, Tropical Fuck Storm are a force of nature, conjuring chaos at every blistering performance, with zero shits to give for corporate music hegemony. “Kneel down by the advertising, don’t you make a single false move” calls out the female chorus of Fiona Kitschin and Erica Dunn echoing the dismay of our time as we bear witness to the sinister seductions which social media surveillance has entangled us. A Laughing Death in Meatspace doesn’t show us the way out of this situation, but it howls along with us as we peer into the maelstrom ahead.
After two albums of Mumfords-y folk rock, Lord Huron scored an unexpected hit with “The Night We Met” after it was used in Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why, and it landed the band their first major label deal. And instead of capitalizing on the sound that made them famous, Lord Huron took a daring left turn and made their most creative album yet. (They also did a superior re-recording of “The Night We Met” featuring Phoebe Bridgers.) Maybe the major label budget helped them achieve their most ambitious musical dreams, but luckily it didn’t affect their process.
Main member Ben Schneider produced the album himself, and he brought in Flaming Lips collaborator Dave Fridmann to mix it. The result is their most psychedelic and their most rockin’ album, and Schneider still came armed with an arsenal of sticky hooks. The album still has a couple folky ballads that recall their earlier work (“Wait by the River,” “Back from the Edge”), but for the most part this is an entirely new and improved Lord Huron. “Never Ever,”“Ancient Names (Part II),” “Secret of Life,” and the title track were some of the year’s best driving rock songs, while the droning, krautrock-ish “Ancient Names (Part I)” and the sleepy “When The Night Is Over” were some of the year’s best psychedelia. And even as the album genre hops, the artistically slick production keeps it sounding cohesive.
Schneider’s recognizable voice of course ties everything together too, but there weren’t many indie rock albums this year where the production style and the rhythm section were just as distinct as the singer. Vide Noir didn’t score Lord Huron another Hot 100 charting song like “The Night We Met,” but it’s packed to the gills with could-be hits. It’s one of those albums where, once you’re into it, your favorite song will probably change over and over again. “Ancient Names” and “Never Ever” are the early standouts, but once you outplay them, that nice little nugget of a closer (“Emerald Star”) starts getting really addictive.
Oh little darling/don’t you look charming/here in the eye of a hurricane – well you know, with a good hat, soft lighting and the right amount of blusher, anything is possible. Upbeat, up-tempo, lots of gee-tar: my top twenty sort of needed this – and the album is an overlooked gem of 2015.
Beginning life as the solo project of vocalist Emily Braden, Neighbor Lady were formed when Emily realised she was too nervous to get up on stage as a solo artist,“so I asked my friends to play with me”. Now based out of Atlanta, the band originally formed in the musical hot-bed of Athens, and it is perhaps unsurprising, considering that location, that the sound of their debut album, Maybe Later, was built on the twin pillars of country and indie-rock.
From the opening bars of the first track, Let It Bleed, the intensity in Neighbor Lady’s music and the quality of Emily Braden’s vocal are both laid out for the listener to admire. The echoing, lightly distorted guitar ebbs and flows as pounding snare hits, clattering cymbals and nagging, propulsive piano chords, give the track an intensity and a drive. Atop all that wonderful noise, Emily, in her voice, the middle ground of Patsy Cline and Jessica Lee Mayfield, paints a picture of casting off whatever is weighing you down, “you said you’d do anything for me. But you hardly even know me”, Emily sings, before cathartically declaring, “I let it bleed”, atop a particularly wonderful crescendo. If Let It Bleed was the perfect introduction to Neighbor Lady’s sound, across the rest of the record they demonstrate they are no one trick pony; Oh Honey is a strutting Natalie Prass like slice of classic pop, I Wish Nothing dials up the country influence and delivers a perfect two-stepping rhythm, while Silent Separately adds a Shadows-like twang and a flamenco strut.
A beautifully produced and performed record, Maybe Later, is a new take on an old style, one of the year’s finest new voices, delivering a stunning, sumptuous record, in which to get lost, and charmed, time and time again.
Vocalist, Christina Michelle, comes with a deeper introspection on struggles with mental health, not holding back with this incredibly personal outpouring. Guitarist, Mick Ford, brings a dissonance to their sound that separates the listener from what could be expected while the rhythm section made up of Tyler Forsythe and Tommy Cantwell (who together play in the Good Fight Records band Axis) aggressively keep the songs in place.
In their first release via hardcore stronghold Deathwish Inc., South Florida four-piece Gouge Away ply their side-winding skirmishes with jangly fits of punk noise. Kindergarten teacher-turned-mighty-frontperson Christina Michelle burns through reflections on myriad social anxieties with searing conviction. “Hurt is a commodity,” chants the full band in “Subtle Thrill” — swept clean by the dusky undertaker of a bass line in the following track, “Ghost.” And just when you think they’re about to capsize from the sheer momentum of their fury, Gouge Away find equilibrium in the brine.
Breakout star Erin Rae sophomore album, Putting On Airs, which came out this summer, but really took on a life of its own after her live shows highlighted the work. Erin and her songs, her golden, hushed feel of the record. “Listening to it, you hear a natural reverb, a sense that it was made somewhere big and echoing and timeless,” . Full of nostalgic, piped-in piano, up close and personal steel guitar, and Rae’s effortless, feathery alto, this record is like a sweet, warm wind, rushing through your window just when you need a reminder of how beautiful and breezy life can be
