The Fat Angel Sings

Despite punk being my genre and being relatively tapped into the music scene I must confess, it was only this year that Turnstile came onto my radar. I saw a video clip on Instagram of one of their live shows, and although the word “raw” is dreadfully overused for this genre, that was the energy that struck me and made me stop in my scrolling tracks. Wagering it must be some kind of archive footage from an old band I was surprised to find this was, in fact, present day punk. Since then, I’ve committed to being somewhat of a superfan. The band’s latest album “Never Enough” has been in heavy rotation for me this year. It’s blend of soaring, melodic vocal hooks and punching hardcore break-downs are frankly irresistible if not outright addictive. This record doesn’t shy away from shoegaze, ska, pop, ambient, flutes, yet it never feels scattered. Each song flows with intent, giving it coherence and allowing the moods to shapeshift ensuring that you stay within its musical orbit for the full duration without being kicked into the no mans land of silent space.

The most common criticism levelled at Never Enough is that it sounded too much like Glow On, which was probably brought on even more so by an opening track/lead single that sounded like an intentional rewrite of Glow On‘s opening track/lead single. But six months later, you don’t have to squint very hard to see this album’s unique identity shining through. Two of its best and most widely-loved songs sound kinda like The Police (“Seein’ Stars,” “I Care”), and Turnstile prove they can swing the pendulum all the way in that direction and still find them for some of their fiercest, fastest hardcore punk songs (“Birds,” “Sole,” “Sunshower”). “Never Enough” is loaded with some of the sharpest left turns in Turnstile’s catalogue; the Latin horns and reggae-ton beat in the otherwise heavy rock song “Dreaming,” the transition from headbanger riffs to club beats on “Look Out For Me,” and the explosive mosh part after the A.G. Cook-assisted sound collage in “Dull” still sound surprising even after you’ve heard them dozens of times. In classic Turnstile fashion, “Never Enough” finds them focused on pushing the catchiness, the experimentation, and the heaviness to new limits, and doing so their way and no one else’s. 

It’s not a demanding record, all it asks of you is to dream, head bang, sing along and occasionally punch the ground. I’m sure there are some crusties out there who would not categorise this as a punk album: too produced, too many mixed genres, vocals too honeyed, but they’re wrong, this is ultimately a punk album and a really f**king good one. 

“Sounds Like…” is as grand an upgrade that any ruckus-throwing batch of troublemakers like Florry could make. The sludgy accoutrements of “Waiting Around to Provide”—which hocks a phrase from Townes Van Zandt—wink into a big country stomp, with Jackson Browne’s melodicism splattered atop the humid parables of Drive-By Truckers. Harmonica puffs tattoo the air, while an organ hums like a guitar chord. “Say Your Prayers Rock” would have nestled in with the sensual and staggering looseness of the Rolling Stones‘ Exile on Main St.’s third side. Van Zandt swings back into view on “Dip Myself In Like An Ice Cream Cone,” as Francie Medosch turns into a gas station poet serenaded by a wah-wah talk box rippling like a bassline. But don’t mistake “Sounds Like…” for some phony imitation game.

This music—part hangout chatter, part guitar solo rummage sale—is a persistent, euphoric choogle. The door-kicking riffs and road-worn fables come free of charge. “Hey Baby” finds Florry’s full-band sound growing ten-fold, with Medosch’s influences of the Jackass theme song and country-fried Minutemen serving as a raw-hemmed, honking template for her and her crew. “First it was a movie, then it was a book” is a sentence-case dream of rollicking gravitas. Medosch and Murray’s guitars collide into each other, stretching two-ton riffs around organ, pedal steel, and homespun, jammy crescendos. 

“Sounds Like…” ends in “You Don’t Know,” a skyscraper song flirting with the 8-minute mark. It’s a doozy, waltzing into view like a scorned lover with a tail caught between their legs. Medosch stresses every syllable, coiling her accent around every vowel. 

Even in a year in which “indie-country” was everywhere, Florry album stood out. On “Sounds Like…“, they come off like a lo-fi garage rock version of Crazy Horse, the Grateful Dead, and Bob Dylan & The Band, a true “road album” following the campfire singalong vibes of 2023’s “The Holey Bible“. But it’s not all ramshackle jams. The sentimentality of songs like “Hey Baby” and “Pretty Eyes Lorraine” tug at the heartstrings like the best country tearjerkers.

Pulp always were the most Continental band of their generation, joining the dots between seedy Sheffield spiel and Gallic torch song. Left to his own devices as a solo artist, Jarvis has enjoyed mixed fortunes over the past two decades. Now, though, he is back in his natural habitat, still channelling Jacques Brel by way of Mike Leigh and Alan Bennett. More is an eloquent re-statement of all the qualities that made Pulp great in the first place. While some of their contemporaries seem content to trade on nostalgia, they are still scaling new artistic peaks. And at a time when the Britpop era is undergoing a critical reevaluation, it reaffirms their place in the musical firmament.

Artists who saw their biggest success three decades ago are enjoying a genuine renaissance—though few more triumphantly than Pulp. Their sublime new James Ford–produced album “More” arrives 24 years after their last full-length, “We Love Life”, and stands as arguably their strongest work since the iconic “Different Class” from 1995. Primary songwriterJarvis Cocker remains a master of narrative lyricism, pairing sly wit with poignant observations about life’s smallest details and heaviest burdens.

“I was born to do this / shouting and pointing,” Jarvis Cocker sings on the opening track of Pulp’s first album in 24 years. Cocker has continued to make shouting and pointing an art form in his post-Pulp projects, but somehow it all just hits better when he’s with the band that made him famous in the ’90s. There are plenty of expectations attached to a comeback record, and Pulp managed to over-deliver, mixing great new songs with a couple of unused oldies polished to perfection, alongside lots of signature moves — sexy whispering, horny lyrics, disco — and a few surprises. (When Jarvis drops a raised-eyebrow “are you sure?” during “Grown Ups,” it’s fan service in the best possible way.) A lot has happened since the last Pulp album, including the death of bassist Steve Mackey in 2023, which ultimately led to the creation of “More” as part of a “choose happiness wherever you are” outlook Jarvis has since adopted.

That brings wistful ruminations on mortality, filtered through Cocker’s distinctive worldview, but also an ease, camaraderie, and sense of fun that has been largely missing from Pulp records since “Different Class”. “I am not aging, I am just ripening,” Jarvis sings later on “Grown Ups,” adding, “and life’s too short to drink bad wine.” 

“More” has already aged well in the six months since its release, and it deserves to be savoured. 

Now nearing senior-citizen status, his musings carry the ache of aging, tempered by the clarity of experience, all of which is delivered with his signature sauciness. Reflecting the album’s maximalist title, Cocker and core bandmates Mark Webber, Candida Doyle, and Nick Banks have expanded to a nine-piece, incorporating strings, electronics, and auxiliary percussion. These additions fill out the band’s live sound and elevate “More”, lending the album a richness and polish that’s as sleek as Pulp has ever sounded. From the Bowie-esque grandeur of “Partial Eclipse” to the disco-Western flair of “Got to Have Love,” the wistful “Spike Island” to the cheeky, self-referential “Tina,” Pulp are back with a vengeance—and how we’ve missed them.

It was back in 2018 that David Berman called Ryan Davis “the best lyricist who’s not a rapper going,” but somehow it took until this year for Davis to really get his big breakthrough. He’s a real wordsmith, and “New Threats From the Soul” is nearly overflowing with his nimble witticisms and canny references. It also just rocks: The Roadhouse Band’s brand of shitkickin’ country is tempered with a little indie rock, horns, and subtle electronics, but it’s enough to get anyone’s cowboy boots tapping along, not to mention the soaring harmonies from luminaries like Will Oldham, Myrian Gendron, and Catherine Irwin. For all the wordplay contained within “New Threats From the Soul”, my main takeaway might be that I can’t get its songs out of my head.

A lot of album covers catch your attention by foregrounding weird, psychedelic shapes, but “New Threats From the Soul” works kind of inversely: its intricate structure is oddly pleasing to the eye before you start noticing its eerie, supernatural details, the kind that also creep into Ryan Davis’ deceptively straighforward music. The singer-songwriter, who did the artwork himself, explained in an email: “I initially had something completely different in mind for the general direction of the “New Threats” record cover. When I went to pull out an old drawing pad to get started on it, I saw a very roughly pencilled-in version of the artwork that ended up being what we did use for the album art. It was something I had started years ago but had apparently lost the vision, which isn’t entirely common for my art practice these past 7 or 8 years. I like to finish what I start, it’s an important part of the process, just in terms of my own internal satisfaction…”

“But anyway, upon rediscovering, I stared at the sketch for about 45 seconds and that’s all it took to feel like this weird abandoned sketch of a psychedelic fish tank or whatever it was supposed to be at that stage would in fact be perfect, thematically speaking, for the overarching and/or underlying vibe of the songs therein,” he continued. “It took some digging in and carving out and slow refining of said themes, but in the end it felt and still feels pretty spot-on in its loose portrayal of a micro-environment for id, ego, and earthly nature to overlap and inhabit congruently. I don’t know what or where the image is supposed to be, exactly, but it feels like a window into the soul, or some sort of supernatural petri dish. There’s a bit of an aquatic-life motif throughout the songs on this record as well, which adds to the overall weight of the image. I’m pretty stoked with how it all came together.”

Great Grandpa’s “Patience, Moonbeam” is as multi-layered as a dream, fully-realized yet open-ended. Though the process behind it was collaborative, the artwork was made during a particularly solitary period for singer Al Menne. “The artwork for patience moonbeam was a welcome point of focus on a tour where I traveled entirely alone for about three weeks,” he told us in a statement. “On long drives I imagined something mystical as I listened to what then existed of patience, moonbeam. I went back and forth on whether the moon imagery was too on the head. I landed on: ‘there’s gotta be a moon what are you crazy?’

My method for the album art was as piecemeal as the creation of the actual music. I drafted the idea over and over. Squeezing water colour paints from their small metallic tubes. I hand painted and collaged layer after layer. At a certain point I printed out, and painted over the top on printer paper. I did that a few times until I got the texture I desired. I wanted something to feel abstract, but whole. Like a dream where some things are the outline, and some things are solid like the moon.”

“Patience, Moonbeam” comes over five years, an Al Menne solo album, and an unannounced hiatus since 2019’s very good “Four of Arrows“, and the time away suited this band well. It’s the band’s best album by a mile, a melting pot of indie folk, grungy climaxes, and Radiohead-esque art rock that takes one delightfully unexpected left turn after the next. It has one of the year’s catchiest hooks, so catchy in fact that they sang it on two songs: “Emma” and “Doom.” Some songs are growers and others jump right out at you. Some are minimalist interludes and others are multi-part epics. It’s got plenty of playlist-ready highlights, but it’s also crafted and sequenced in a way that makes “Patience, Moonbeam” greater than the sum of its parts when it’s heard from start to finish. In an era in which too many albums are intentionally front-loaded, this one gets better and better as it goes on.

Dan Wriggins loves a slow burn. His band Friendship (whose members also play in 2nd Grade, Hour, and MJ Lenderman’s touring band The Wind) is an increasingly important staple of the current American DIY indie rock scene, but they don’t announce themselves with the types of big choruses that so many of their peers do. Instead, the songs on “Caveman Wakes Up” slowly unravel, with hypnotic guitar patterns and plainspoken lyrics that gradually build to climaxes that sound more satisfying with each listen.

In the spirit of artists like Phil Elverum, David Bazan, and David Berman, the calmness in Wriggins’ singing and song writing is always deceptive. It ever seems a little too mellow, the unrest is about to sneak up on you.

It’s an album for sleeping and waking, walking and driving, hunting and fishing, for loitering outside a roadhouse on the haunted tundra. Okay in elevators, not great for dinner. On “Caveman Wakes Up” ,Friendship’s second album for Merge Records, the band’s historically capacious definition of country music grows wider still. Shambolic guitars are offset by flute pads, bleary poetry is set against a Motown rhythm section, a song about Jerry Garcia and First Lady Betty Ford fades out with a drum solo, like if Talk Talk came from a dingy Philadelphia basement and was fronted by James Tate.

Songwriter Dan Wriggins’ ragged baritone cuts through eleven murky, swirling country-rock songs with profound lyrical substance and sincerity. Like an alarm clock incorporated into the edge of a dream, “Caveman Wakes Up” belongs equally to the conscious and subconscious mind, fraught with background, steeped in reference and experimentation, delivered casually and as a dire warning, dedicated, above all, to music’s creative soul.

An album for sleeping and waking, walking and driving, hunting and fishing, for loitering outside a roadhouse on the haunted tundra. Okay in elevators, not great for dinner. On “Caveman Wakes Up”, Friendship‘s new album and second for Merge Records, the band’s historically capacious definition of country music grows wider still.

Like an alarm clock incorporated into the edge of a dream, “Caveman Wakes Up” belongs equally to the conscious and subconscious mind, fraught with background, steeped in reference and experimentation, delivered casually and as a dire warning, dedicated, above all, to music’s creative soul.

Over the years, dedication has paid off. Friendship has become a kind of reverse supergroup, wherein the band itself and each individual member are located centrally in an increasingly prominent scene of young folk and country musicians and songwriters.

Drummer Michael Cormier O’Leary leads the instrumental collective Hour and, along with bassist Jon Samuels, runs Dear Life Records, home to friends and peers who count Friendship as a major influence including MJ Lenderman, Florry, and Fust. Guitarist Peter Gill’s band 2nd Grade records prolifically.

Wriggins began writing the songs of “Caveman Wakes Up” on a downtuned classical guitar of Lenderman’s and finished on a barely tuned piano in an apartment he shared with Sadurn’s G DeGroot.

In the summer of 2023, Wriggins had just left the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where his love for poetry and mistrust for the academic poetry world grew in tandem. A relationship fell apart, and Wriggins crashed for several weeks at Lenderman and Wednesday’s Karly Hartzman’s home in North Carolina, where he recorded the first demos of “Resident Evil,” “All Over the World,” and “Love Vape.”

Wriggins returned to Philadelphia, and the band got to work on new ideas, finally tracking the album in five days with engineer Jeff Ziegler. Wriggins recorded vocals with Love the Stranger engineer Bradford Kreiger, and organ, violin (Jason Calhoun), and flute (Adelyn Strei) were recorded by Lucas Knapp in a West Philadelphia church.

Lyrically, “Caveman Wakes Up” covers familiar Friendship ground – the sacred is profaned and the profane sanctified. Characters complain about work and marvel at love. Here, however, we get Wriggins‘ first real confrontation with depression, in “Hollow Skulls,” “All Over the World,” and “Resident Evil,” where the soul wages its perpetual war against darkness and stagnation. It often loses.

The verses of “Hollow Skulls” are punctuated by passages of musical emptiness, a single suspended chord, and brushes on a snare drum. When Wriggins complains about a roommate, shouting, “Who’s that shithead in my living room/ playing Resident Evil,” it’s abundantly clear there is no roommate, that the evil resides within.

“Caveman Wakes Up” showcases Friendship‘s particular genius for visionary arrangement, indebted equally across generations to the folk-rock canon of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and Emmylou Harris, to indie stalwarts like Yo La Tengo and Merge labelmates Lambchop, to contemporaries like Lomelda and ML Buch.

As a work of music production, “Caveman Wakes Up” is Friendship‘s most advanced yet, another testament to the band’s devotion and care. This band is so good, it’s everything I love, with hints of David Berman, Okkervil River, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, or Vic Chestnutt.

Prewn is becoming a master of ugly beauty. The Izzy Hagerup-led project’s sophomore album “System” picks up where their great 2023 debut LP “Through the Window” left off and only improves upon its formula, putting a jagged edge on this otherwise-gorgeously-arranged batch of freak folk songs. At the core is Izzy’s gentle guitar and otherworldly voice, a voice that stops you in your tracks and truly cuts through the sea of indie rock singer/songwriters. And that core is fleshed out by warped cellos, rickety drum machines, and speaker-blowing grunge riffs.

Its juxtaposition of dirty and delicate leaves me reminded of cult fave albums like Joanna Newsom’s The Milk-Eyed Mender, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Mitski’s Bury Me At Makeout Creek, and Hop Along’s Get Disowned, and I hope that one day we’ll all be talking about this album the way people talk about those albums now.

We’re older; Katie and Allison Crutchfield are older, 36 now. The surprise album Snocaps captures the growing pains, in bouncy, sometimes-country-fried, sometimes-punky, sometimes-elegiac songs. Broadly, the album is about the nostalgia of past mistakes turning into sage advice about aging. Specifically, it’s about cars driving down numbered roads, restless pride, loud bars, muses, being thorny girlfriends, addiction, big dreams, and toxic friendships. This is what well-rooted and courageous music sounds like. “Wasteland” welcomes a hailstorm of danger: “I’m running hot on empty, firing off some willful bottomline / Gave it everything I had, I am hazmat, I am radioactive / Caustic car wreck, off the rails and rude and ruining your life.” “Doom” ought to be one of the biggest damn things Katie’s ever done. Because her writing is so trenchant (“We may fall back into fiction / Know I always do / Make stale of me / No one’s immune”), a splashy arrangement would sound out of turn here, which is why Lenderman’s guitar pageantry comes with just the right amount of humidity.

Two other recent collaborators are rounding out the band this time, MJ Lenderman and Brad Cook. Together they pull from Katie’s country-inflected Waxahatchee material and Allison’s aptitude for punchy indie rock via Swearin’, and split the difference. Like so much of their material both together and apart, the results have the feel of an instant classic. 

But what’s most impressive is how good her sister Allison sounds in that same environment for the first time, her singing taking its most-distinctive shapes on “Avalanche” and “Brand New City,” the latter’s riffs and harmonies fluent in P.S. Eliot’s looser indie-rock language. Allison’s musicality has always served Katie well, and it’s refreshing to hear her become fully uncorked on “Over Our Heads”—an 8-foot tall pop-rock song dotted with cursive riffs and a crack of twang. No singles, no music videos, no interviews, no problem: Katie and Allison have brought us a world of good-sounding miracles.

Hannah Cohen’s first album in six years serves as a love letter to the Catskills, where she and her partner Sam Owens moved prior to the release of “Welcome Home”. The album cover for “Earthstar Mountain” sees the singer-songwriter, donning a blue suit in the middle of an 1882 lithograph of the Catskills. “I was trying to find an image to use for the album or something close to it,” she recalled in interview. “My mom works in the book art world, the antiquarian print press, and she said, ‘You should reach out to the Institute of History and Art in Albany. I bet they’d have that in their collections.’ And of course, they did.

So we reached out to them, and they gave me permission and licensing to use the image. I just fell in love with it. To me, the record cover has these little vignettes, and I felt like those could be a song each. I think about a song being like a window into someone’s life, a little keepsake, so I felt there was some synergy there.”

Named after a beautiful but inedible mushroom near her Catskills home, Hannah Cohen’s fourth album is equally otherworldly but far more digestible. “Earthstar Mountain” draws from lush ’70s textures, from Fleetwood Mac–ish opener “Mountain” (featuring Sufjan Stevens), to a Dusty Springfield homage filtered through Minnie Riperton and Buckaroo Bonzai, to a sumptuous take on Ennio Morricone’s “Una Spiaggia” with Clairo on harmonies and clarinet. Glittery standout “Summer Sweat” hints at disco-inflected futures.

Though guests abound, this is firmly Hannah’s show, and “Earthstar Mountain” marks a new plateau.

“Set My Heart on Fire Immediately” was the title of Perfume Genius’ 2020 studio album, and of course, there’s always the fear of burning out. ‘It’s a Mirror’, the confident lead single from his astounding new album Glory that marked a shift from the diffuse grooves of 2022’s “Ugly Season“, still bows down to the feeling of “a siren, muffled crying/ Breaking me down soft and slow.” But if there is a weariness seeping through the familiarly lush and vibrant tapestry of “Glory” – which reunites Mike Hadreas with producer Blake Mills, while elevating his backing band of Meg Duffy (Hand Habits), Greg Uhlmann, Tim Carr, Jim Keltner, and Pat Kelly – it’s not at the expense of catharsis, freedom, or indeed glory.

The album is tender-hearted and open-ended, loosening into a level of directness that not only feels new for Hadreas, but gives even its heavier subjects a weightless air. “My entire life… it’s fine,” he sings on ‘No Front Teeth’. The affirming going to keeps hanging in the silence.

“Glory” has a pristine surface and a tender, roiling underside. Mike Hadreas’ seventh album is muscular, filled out by his partner in life and songcraft Alan Wyffels and longtime producer Blake Mills alongside the fiercest band Perfume Genius has ever assembled: guitarists Meg Duffy and Greg Uhlmann, drummers Tim Carr and Jim Keltner, and bassist Pat Kelly. These players marshall their power, and Hadreas his macabre imaginings and gallows humour, to humane ends. Perfume Genius pries open a mildewed den full of alienation, longing and desire and lets it bask in the sunlight. 

The record’s central conflict, says Hadreas, is the “back and forth between internal and external.” Promoting his string of beloved, increasingly ambitious albums during the past decade and a half—touring the world, dwelling in the public eye—clashed with his innate impulse toward isolation. For Glory, he discovered a new song writing process because he welcomed the dynamics of a group, leaving room in his compositions for his friends to flesh out the arrangements. As Hadreas says: “I’m more engaged with the band and the audience. I’m still on some wild tear, but there’s more access and it’s more collaborative, in a way that makes it better, but also scary—because it feels more vulnerable. 

Lyrically, these 11 concise tracks reveal uncanny situations that we can just barely discern, scenes of domesticity and desperation projected through an idiosyncratic, queer prism. Each cut is a character sketch at its core, and Hadreas assembles a whole cast: Dion, Angel, Tate, the familiar Jason we recognize from his eponymous number on 2020’s Set My Heart On Fire Immediately and Hadreas’ last release “Ugly Season“. These figures float through an abstracted landscape even as Perfume Genius pins them down with a novelist’s specificity. The result is mesmerizing and life-affirming, a bonafide singer-songwriter record that’s both the most lyrically deft and musically eloquent statement of his career.”