Earlier this year, Los Angeles noise pop band Dummy shared their debut release, “Dummy EP”, via Pop Wig Records. Now the group has put out their second release “EP2”, Last month, they shared “Pool Dizzy”—the first taste of EP2. Their debut was rooted in krautrock and synth-laden noise pop, and they even threw in a foggy folk tune and an eight-minute new age-esque closer. EP2, on the other hand, leans more on hypnotic synths than driving guitars—apart from “Pool Dizzy.” The track’s throbbing beat, murky guitars and retro keyboards are rejuvenating, and their heavenly, overlapping vocals are the cherry on top. It’s the sound of droning pop euphoria.
Dummy returns five months later with “EP2”, their second release of 2020. Featuring a mix of screeching feedback-laden pop songs woven with non-sequitur ambient soundscapes, “EP2” sees the band further developing their drone-pop style with inspiration taken from kosmische, Japanese ambient, new age, and video game music. Recorded mostly at home using freeware and a smartphone, the six tracks forgo polished production in favour of a kaleidoscopic collage of improvisational sketches.
Available on cassette from Born Yesterday Records.
Dummy – Dummy EP2 Thursday Morning 00:00 Pool Dizzy 04:35 Nuages 07:31 Mediocre Garden 10:38 Second Contact 14:52 Prime Mover Unmoved 17:04
When it comes to volume, Sarah Tudzin likes to keep listeners on their toes. “Kiss Yr Frenemies”, was her debut album as Illuminati Hotties, playfully leaps between a variety of decibel-dictated sonic moods from the indie-pop canon. Hushed acoustic reveries give way to knife-sharp stabs of guitar; contemplative, finger-picked tranquility crescendos to giant slabs of post-rock feedback and trumpet fanfare. “You only like me when I’m sad,” she sweetly sings during a quiet interlude on “Pressed 2 Death,” an otherwise boisterous rambler that’s dotted with kiss-offs.
Tudzin—who is technically Illuminati Hotties’ sole permanent member, although she records with a full band—is a veteran studio rat, and it shows in the album’s dynamic sounds. In addition to working as a production and engineering assistant to big-time indie producer Chris Coady (Beach House, TV on the Radio), she’s logged studio time with acts ranging from Porches to Macklemore and worked on the sound design for the original Broadway cast recording of Hamilton.
Her expertise gives her own tracks a funhouse-like quality, with an eruption of noise, six-stringed squeal, or purposely lo-fi effect around every corner. Even without knowing that additional vocals on the album are credited to “Everyone at Jesse’s Party,” you get the sense that she had fun making this record. Tudzin describes the sound of Illuminati Hotties as “tenderpunk,” and that feels right. Every emotional abrasion and pang of longing on Kiss Yr Frenemies is conveyed with just the right mix of sadness and acerbity. On the single “(You’re Better) Than Ever,” she confesses, “All the baddest words I knew came pouring out/When I heard you feel better/Better than ever.” Along with stylistic forebears Los Campesinos!,
Tudzin’s sound sometimes recalls indie-pop lifer Rose Melberg’s many projects, as well as 1990s Vancouver punks Cub—all acts that have regularly challenged the common notion that indie pop is all cloying sentiments and bookishly restrained instrumentation.
Mike Krol is a band/idea out of Los Angeles, with additional members in Minneapolis, Madison, and Seattle. This Thursday at 9pm ET, the one and only Mike Krol will premiere his “Halloween Deadstream” concert on NoonChorus this week. Fans both old and new can expect all the hallmarks of a Mike Krol live performance: his full band in costume, strobe lights, smoke machine, distortion, and more! With a 72-hour rebroadcast of the performance.
Krol has also announced a CD reissue of the seasonally appropriate Mike Krol Is Never Dead: The First Two Records, out January 29th, 2021. The 3-CD box set includes Krol’s first two albums—I Hate Jazz and Trust Fund—housed in miniature-sized reproductions of the original album tri-fold wallets, and an additional disc filled with a comprehensive selection of outtakes, demos, and B-sides from that era.
Most listeners were introduced to Mike Krol in 2015 with the release of his Merge Records debut, Turkey. Few knew at the time that Turkey was actually Chapter 3 of the Krol saga, and that he had self-released two records years earlier. To the delight of his new legion of fans, Merge reissued those early albums as the 2017 collection “Mike Krol Is Never Dead”. With that release, “I Hate Jazz” and “Trust Fund” found new life, and the inclusion of digital-only rarities led to fresh demand for this CD reissue.
Self-released on LP in 2011, “I Hate Jazz” was the opening salvo of World War Krol. Only 500 copies were pressed; they were given away to anyone who showed interest (and many who showed none whatsoever). Including Krol classics like “Fifteen Minutes” and “Like a Star,” the record had long been unavailable. Trust Fund followed in 2013; its 500 LPs sold out on the ensuing tour, fuelling a mini-mania that would elevate it to cult status.
Here’s Krol take on the new CD edition: One of the most frequent questions I get on tour is “Where can I get your first album on CD?” (second only to “So… do you actually hate jazz?”). As a Compact Disc lover myself, I always assumed we were a dying breed, and that manufacturing this music on plastic would only fulfill the personal satisfaction I’d get from having my full discography lined up on a shelf. But over time, the fans have spoken and demanded I make these albums available on CD. So here they are, with the rarely-seen-in-person full album art intact. Completists, rejoice!
originally released July 14th, 2017.
All songs written and performed by Mike Krol With the help of
Phil Mahlstadt – Bass on all tracks Michael Sienkowski – Keyboard, Tambourine, Whistling Elliott Kozel – Lead Guitar, Organs, chord changes for “Locker” Erik Duerr – Heavy Metal Guitar, Janitor Andy Brawner – Nothing
From the album Mike Krol Is Never Dead: The First Two Records, out July 14th, 2017 on Merge Records.
Earlier this summer, Etta Friedman was visiting her family in Yerington, Nevada, when she crashed her cousin’s motorcycle and broke both wrists. “I let go of the clutch on the bike and popped a wheelie,” the 21-year-old musician says. “And then immediately went and went into the front of my aunt’s trailer and crashed directly into it.” Friedman was taken to the local hospital, where she was wrapped in splints. “They gave me this really old-school-looking baggie full of Percocet,” she adds. “I was like, ‘Very cool.’” With a sound that stems from the duo’s love of Veruca Salt and the Breeders, is a welcome throwback to the Nineties, built on Friedman and Weingarten’s syrupy vocals that fuse together on each track.
The core of LA indie/alt band Momma is dual guitarist/vocalists Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten. With super catchy and fun verse-chorus-verse reminiscent of some of our favourite 90’s act, the band’s new music picks up where their previous album (which we loved here at BTR today!) left off and makes it bigger, brighter, and even hookier.
The highlight is the three-track sequence of “Stringer,” “Double Dare,” and “Carny,” which tell the dark tale of a news stringer on the margins of society. “If you’ve ever seen or on Netflix, it’s about people that chase car crashes and film them and then sell it to news stations,” Weingarten says. The character encounters a fight at a fair (“Double Dare”) and then abandons his lover (“Carny”). “Said goodbye to my sweetheart, or he might’ve been,” they lament on the latter song. “Warping his portrait, he’s a sideshow kid.”
“Two of Me” is an ambitious concept album by the budding grunge four-piece, Momma, made up of fictional vignettes dealing with morality, youth, and punishment, that songwriters Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten have populated with tragic heroes from their imagination. “The Bug House represents this sort of underground purgatory or hell that people are sent to as punishment,” Weingarten explains. “Two of Me’s songs are about coming to terms with the side of you within yourself that is maybe capable of darker things.” Momma’s second full length unfolds like a small town drama, where characters like video stringers and young lovers experience poetic justice in carnivalesque settings, detailed through Friedman and Weingarten’s illustrative lyrics.
On Momma’s sophomore album, the band explores some of their heaviest sounds to date, creating dense arrangements to match their complex storytelling. Two Of Me’s opener “Bug House” sets the stage for the record, with its expressive guitar tones and brooding mood. The album’s more abrasive moments like “Derby,” which alludes to the anxiety of a Jockey in a fixed horse race, are balanced by melodic ballads like “Double Dare,” which follows a romantic pair pining for a world away from their violent hometown. Inspired by songwriters like Kim Deal and Elliott Smith and bands like Ovlov and Throwing Muses, Momma has mastered their own dynamic song writing and gripping lyrics on Two of Me, creating a record that feels both familiar and intriguing.
Yerington is a small town with a population of roughly 3,000 people. Friedman, who grew up outside of Los Angeles, has been visiting her relatives there for the last few years, along with her bandmate, Allegra Weingarten; the isolated locale helped inspire Two of Me, the recently released album from their band, Momma. “[It’s about] the glorification of a small town and all the secrets and gossip that happen
The band: Guitar and Vocals Performed by Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten Drums by Zach Capitti Fenton Bass on all tracks besides “Biohazard” Performed by Sebastian Jones Bass on “Biohazard” Performed by Yarden Erez
“Two of Me” is out June 5th, 2020, on Danger Collective Records.
Milly is a rock band from Los Angeles fronted by songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Brendan Dyer. Their sound melds together elements of classic shoegaze, slowcore, and lo-fi indie rock, coalescing into an intense, singular musical impression. Milly began as Dyer’s home recording project in his hometown of Bristol, Connecticut before finally taking its current form as a band in Los Angeles. “Star Thistle Blossom,” from MILLY’s new EP ‘Wish Goes On’ coming 2021.
The band is fresh out of the gate, running at a fast pace with two singles being released from their contribution to the Microdose series via Dangerbird Records.
Milly also recently announced that they have been picked to support shoegaze/dream-rock veterans Swervedriver on tour. In support of this exciting news, Milly are releasing a cassette comprised of their two Microdose singles, the sonically shape-shifting “Talking Secret” (with entrancing B-side “Crazy Horse”), and their first-ever two songs, including the hypnotically droning “People Are Forever”.
This cassette EP will come out on November 6th, and in the meantime we are pleased for the premiere of the video for “People Are Forever”, a track that showcases the budding potential of this young group.
The video (and the song as well!) is a dreamily yearning, slowcore treat, focusing at the start on Dyer and a girl he seems to be interested in. He moves through a market, gazing at a plethora of items for sale while she picks out a particularly yummy-looking ice cream cone to munch on. The video lens soon fades on those scenes and shifts its attention to the band performing in someone’s living room, conjuring up laid-back ’90s indie rock vibes. The footage then alternates between these two environments, spotlighting the music life of the outfit/Dyer, as well as life outside the sometimes insular world of being in a band.
released October 9th, 2020
Written and performed by Brendan Dyer, Spencer Light, Yarden Erez, and Zach Capitti Fenton
As the world continues to literally burn, The Paranoyds return with a much-needed dose of musical levity. It’s been nearly a year since the Los Angeles-based outfit released Carnage Bargain, their debut full-length, and this their new release, is a two-song seven-inch, is a total embodiment of their every influence. Their identity — a band, fuelled by campy horror movies and garage rock — is more evident than ever on this seven-inch, beginning with the organ-fueled opening of A-side “Pet Cemetery” Featuring the sounds of off-kilter keys alongside a chugging guitar line, and expansive experiments, “Pet Cemetery” has become a staple of the band’s live performances, resulting in a sea of zombie-fied headbang every time it’s played.
Despite the obvious heaviness that surrounds a track entirely centered on undead lovers partaking in PDA, there’s an undeniable undercurrent of fun. Previously recorded during sessions for the band’s full length-debut, this unofficial anthem for underworld romance was being saved for a special moment. On the record’s B-side is “Hotel Celebrity,” a single that’s darkness isn’t quite so overt. An examination of aging, and the fruitless celebrity pursuit of superficial perfection, The Paranoyds share in a not so sincere toast to Hollywood. The single was among the last sessions at the famed Tiny Telephone, a San Francisco-based recording studio.
The track is a sneak peek at the future, if there is a future beyond all this shit, of what musical direction The Paranoyds might be headed in next. Suicide Squeeze Records is proud to release the Pet Cemetery EP on a limited-edition, one-time pressing of 750 copies on coke bottle clear vinyl on November 27th, 2020.
Releases November 27th 2020. on Suicide Squeeze Records
Lead-singer, songwriter, and rhythm guitarist Logan Hammon (age 17, pink hair — now eggshell blue) felt that her band wasn’t giving her enough freedom to write her own songs. She took lead-guitarist Jackson Felton (now age 15) and started a new project out of their garage. The duo, what was to become Small Crush, started making music inspired from Hammon’s voice memos (shared over group text) and titled from a self-professed “inability to crush on someone for a long time, so lots of little crushes.” Not long after the band’s genesis, Hammon and Felton recruited bassist Hank Herbert (aged 17) and drummer Will Scherer (aged 16) from a nearby high school and started playing house shows, coffee shops, and restaurants. The group is multitalented, often switching instruments at practice, and the effect of Hammon virtuosic lyrical introversion over playful riffs evokes Frankie Cosmos and Waxahatchee. The music seems to be derived from many small crushes, evoking a sincere and intense conviction too often lost in adulthood.
Planning around after school jobs and football practice, the band rehearse at Hammon’s house in San Leandro. They pulled up sipping cans of yerba mate with skateboards and a giant teddy bear in the the back of Herbert’s CRV.
An unlikely cohesion of seemingly different high school “types,” it became quickly evident that their connection extended beyond the stage. They proceeded to sing along to blaring 80’s synth-pop in the car (when they said it was their favourite music, I wasn’t sure they were kidding) and naturally-athletic Herbert was carrying 15-year-old Felton on his shoulders, The band concluded our phone interview by playing a completely ad-libbed song.
Agitated is more than pleased to announce the long over-due return to wax (and CD) by Carlton Melton, the new album from San Franciscan / Northern Californian space-trippers is here, and its ready to tune you out and turn you on.
Nestled deep in the forests of Mendocino County in Northern California, huddled under the protective shade of towering redwoods and within earshot of frothy waves crashing against the Pacific coastline, squats a geodesic dome that has served as crucible for the experimental genius of Carlton Melton. Nature and Man operate under different logics. But here, Carlton Melton wholly entrusts this idyllic environment with the task of inspiring and guiding their musical improvisations.
The Dome has been the ideal setting to facilitate their creativity. Without forcing a specific dynamic or theme, the band inhabits its womb-like confines to improvise, explore, dream. Their music draws on psychedelia, stoner metal, krautrock, and ambient atmospherics to convey, above all else, a mood.
A prickly guitar melody will float lazily, a wall of dissonant feedback will resolve into a hypnotic drone, or a colossal riff will exhume the soul of Jimi Hendrix. One hears Hawkwind or Spacemen 3 jamming with Pink Floyd at Pompeii.
Indeed, Carlton Melton have one foot in the ancient world and one tentacle in deep space. They are both the pack of proto-humans drumming with femurs in Kubrick’s 2001 and the film’s inscrutable monolith hinting at the universe’s mysteries. The “Stoned Ape” theory holds that early hominids ingested psychedelic mushrooms that provided an evolutionary boost to their brains, helping them blossom into Homo Sapiens. Imagine such cavemen trippin’ balls, their nightmarish visions sending them into feverish bouts of rage and then gentle moments of introspection. They very well could have heard the music of Carlton Melton rattling inside their skulls, first driving our ancestors mad then upward into a higher realm.
Andy Duvall (drums, guitar), Clint Golden (bass), and Rich Millman (guitar, synths) have yet to play Pompeii, but they have already wowed crowds at European festivals such as the Liverpool International Festival of Psychedelia, Roadburn, and Desertfest Antwerp. Live, they are jaw-dropping. On record, mind-altering.
In fact, with each album, Carlton Melton adds a subtle new element, synapses firing new neural connections. In 2020, they release new full-length “Where This Leads”, marking ten years of the band’s working relationship with their UK label Agitated Records and five years of recording with Phil Manley in his El Studio in San Francisco. With “Where This Leads”, the band rewires the listener’s mind. “Smoke Drip Revisited” is a ticklish acid flashback, “Porch Dreams” a dabbling in country psych, and “Closer” a driving, freak-out of guitar heroics.
One senses that the group is conveying a message that cannot be expressed verbally but only suggested through synth sighs, walloping rhythms, and soaring solos.
Dre Babinski is happy to be taking photos at the Edendale Branch Library. She’s not a stranger to the Echo Park spot; it’s near her home and a prime people-watching location. But she’s also happy that the location isn’t definitively Angeleno. We’re not shooting with the LA skyline in the background or at Urban Lights or one of the many other spots that place images firmly in a time and space. “I think of Steady Holiday as bigger than just a Los Angeles project,” she says, owning her ambition.
This isn’t the logical conclusion of years slaving away as an unappreciated songwriter. Babinski spent years not as a bandleader, but as a side-player in bands like Hunter Hunted, Dusty Rhodes &the River Band, and Miracle Days. Often projects would require her to play violin, the instrument she trained on in her school years, but Steady Holiday is a result of her picking up a guitar and writing on an instrument she was less experienced with, resulting in material that merges calm indie pop with gentle psychedelic intonations. Her songs sound like transmissions from an old soul, toeing the line between antique and contemporary.
“One of the things I’m trying to let go of as an artist is the ideas that prowess is important,” she says. “It is to a certain degree. I want to be able to play my songs. Beyond that, creation is so much more important than technicality or cleverness or all the heady, educational things that really haunt me.”
Babinski offered up her debut as Steady Holiday in June, being invited by Paul Tollett to play Coachella this year before the album had even dropped. And though she’s still very much supporting Under the Influence, including an upcoming tour opening for Islands and a local LA headline date at the Bootleg Theater on November 15th, she’s also looking forward to what’s next, ready to test the limits of where her creative endeavors can take her.
After swapping hemispheres, Australian outfit Death Bells have found a new home in Los Angeles, emerging with a new album of fervent guitar-driven rock, stripped of gloom and punching through with a new sense of positivity. “New Signs of Life”, their debut for Dais Records, finds Death Bells using a DIY pedigree to plunder the conventions of “rock music” with a saxophone along for the mission. Rather than leaping genres or formats, New Signs of Life is refined and nuanced—a methodology built on process, craft, and perspective.
Following their 2017 debut, Standing at the Edge of the World, and follow-up single “Echoes,” Death Bells left their hometown of Sydney for the United States. Energized by impulse, extensive touring and exploration led to the formation of an ambitious six-piece band that eventually coalesced as a collaboration between founding members Will Canning and Remy Veselis. With Canning and Veselis becoming the engine, Death Bells began to employ several underground mainstay musicians to complete their live presentation, including Cortland Gibson (Dock Hellis), Colin Knight (Object of Affection), and on occasion Brian Vega (Fearing).
Revitalized and centered, Death Bells released the single “Around the Bend” in 2019, before workshopping material that would eventually comprise their second full-length effort. As much as Standing at the Edge of the World was an energized disclosure informed by fresh naiveté, New Signs of Life harnesses those initial sparks, cloaking the threads of Death Bells with authority, allowing each of the nine tracks which embody New Signs of Life to become lush streamlined vehicles.
The eponymous lead single is a grandiose statement, influenced by the theme song of HBO’s classic television program Six Feet Under. The lyrics are a shopping list of personal neuroses charged with wry optimism, dressed with jagged guitars, brass, and percussion providing a deliberate pace for Death Bell’s new chapter. As method gives way to melody, New Signs of Life exudes an urgent hope laced with drive and verve.
The first track for New Signs of Life, “Heavenly Bodies,” signals Death Bells’ point-blank delivery of a laconic truth: “We all vanish, anyway.” Sombre and cool, it eases into hushed staccato hypnosis while still finding the tenets of guitar-driven rock. ”A Different Kind of Happy” and “Alison” push the edge of convention, speaking to the power of love in a world gone mad. A nod to their homeland and new city’s surf heritage, “Shot Down (Falling)” pivots playful to a sun-soaked beach strum, layered with shimmer before the horizon fades. As a new statement of purpose, New Signs of Life subverts the band’s moniker, offering breath during suffocation; optimism in chaos with sound over sinking.
The Fat Angel Sings 