Los Angeles trio Supermercat shared thee new track “Johnny Rack,” their second song ever released, following debut single “Egg.” The band describe themselves as “friendly punk with a dash of Sheryl Crow,” a description that sounds just about perfect. “Johnny Rack” has the pulsing energy of a road song with the sharp edges of a glammed-out punk song, like if someone took a flamethrower to Crow’s “All I Wanna Do” and covered the charred remains in spikes and glitter. Singer Alexa Carrasco’s jumpy vocal delivery is just about the best thing about the song. “Back to Johnny Rack / a stack of papers on his back / he gets an NDA from / everyone he ever met,” she sings, jumping octaves and beats like a muscle car shifting gears while the guitars pump interminably ahead beneath her.
Check out Valley Queen from Los Angeles performing their song “Black Hole”. This live performance was filmed at The 5 Spot in East Nashville, The LA outfit has been around for fewer than five years, though listening to their music, you might think your vinyl-junkie friend picked one of their records out of a pile next to Fleetwood Mac and Hendrix. They have a classic Southern grit that makes you crave a sweet tea. They have defined their sound with a bluesy twang on guitar, driving thump on bass, and a soulful Southern vocal in singer Natalie Meadors.
Band Members
Natalie Carol – Lead Vocals/Rhythm Guitar
Neil Wogensen – Bass/Vocals
Shawn Morones – Guitar/Vocals
Mike DeLuccia – Drums
Julia Holter has described Aviary as “the cacophony of the mind in a melting world”, and it’s easy to feel that mania in its erratic structures and fleeting absurdity. But very often those segments bloom into long and sustained areas of beauty. The thing is, neither the harmony nor the ugliness is given more prominence – they are both valid states and one will always lead to the other.
Aviary is an epic journey through what Julia Holter describes as “the cacophony of the mind in a melting world.” Out on October 26th via Domino Recordings, it’s the Los Angeles composer’s most breathtakingly expansive album yet, full of startling turns and dazzling instrumental arrangements.
The follow-up to her critically acclaimed 2015 record, Have You in My Wilderness, it takes as its starting point a line from a 2009 short story by writer Etel Adnan: “I found myself in an aviary full of shrieking birds.” It’s a scenario that sounds straight out of a horror movie, but it’s also a pretty good metaphor for life in 2018, with its endless onslaught of political scandals, freakish natural disasters, and voices shouting their desires and resentments into the void
Aviary, executive produced by Cole MGN and produced by Holter and Kenny Gilmore, combines Holter’s slyly theatrical vocals and Blade Runner-inspired synth work with an enveloping palette of strings and percussion that reveals itself, and the boundless scope of her vision, over the course of fifteen songs. Holter was joined by Corey Fogel (percussion), Devin Hoff (bass), Dina Maccabee (violin, viola, vocals), Sarah Belle Reid (trumpet), AndrewTholl (violin), and Tashi Wada (synth, bagpipes).
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.
As its title suggests, Kiss Yr Frenemies is an album about forgiveness. Sarah Tudzin’s debut full-length as Illuminati Hotties sees each stage of the grieving and coping that leads to radical acceptance — digging into the grey areas of flings and relationships, growing up and feeling the same. Her disposition shifts from lighthearted smirking to choking on her words. Mood swings are well-met with Tudzin’s diverse palette of influences and genres. She grits her teeth to synth and static booms, bobs her head to jangly guitars, whispers to echoey acoustics, and makes fart noises to a relentless riff. Moving forward is rarely a straight shot. It’s messy. There are distractions, setbacks, and diversions. Tudzin takes the winding road and brings us along for the ride.
Rarely is there an album that I can listen to and enjoy every song, but this album has certainly been able to get me to listen to it on repeat. Love this album already and looking forward to what else Illuminati Hotties has to offer.
The first single on singer/songwriter Anna St. Louis’s debut LP If Only There Was a River was the song “Understand,” and it’s about what you’d expect: wanting to understand, wanting to be understood and the aha moment when you finally do/are, as well as the frustration in not understanding. “Untangled, finally,” St. Louis sings. “Put it all out on the table/ Understand me, do you understand?” If Only There Was a River, released in October on Woodsist/Mare Records, carries on in that same tone throughout its 11 tracks, one of comfort, low-lighted by the kind of delicate, spare acoustics that inspire deep and thoughtful respites. St. Louis, who’s making her full-length debut with the record, often retreats to a similarly soothing zone for her songwriting, which she’s only been doing for about five years now. Although, after spending time with If Only There Was a River’s carefully contrived ebbs and flows and smartly observed lyrics, you’d never know she was a spring chicken.
If Only There Was a River would certainly please any folk fan, and it bubbles over with natural, woodsy energy. St. Louis couldn’t have picked a better time for its release: It seems to usher in all the crispness and change we’re so desperate for in October after a long, steamy September. Nature creeps beyond the album’s treeline in pockets of sunlight and smoke. From the looseness of the album opener “Water” to St. Louis’ ample finger-picking on the mostly instrumental “Daisy” to its winding title track and kicker, If Only There Was a River is laden with quiet, warm music for a loud, cold world
No Age fully deliver on the promises of their earlier albums.
Rock and roll for the black hole – reimagined rippers, for the misfits that 2017 couldn’t kill to blast under the shadow of the big boot and beyond the glow of the chemical horizon. This is driving music, Very psychedelic punk. Perfect highway music and you’re the designated shotgun rider – get in!
Moaning is a band defined by its duality. The abrasive post-punk trio comprised of LA DIY veterans, Sean Solomon, Pascal Stevenson, and Andrew MacKelvie, began nearly a decade after the three started playing music together. Their impassioned debut album comes born out of the member’s experiences with love and distress, creating a sound uniquely dark and sincere. Although the band is just breaking out of their infancy, Moaning’s sleek and cavernous tone emphasizes the turmoil of the era they were born into. One where the endless possibility for art and creation is met with the fear and doubt of an uncertain future.
Solomon, Stevenson, and MacKelvie initially met as teenagers while growing up in the San Fernando Valley, and immediately developed a kinship through Los Angeles’s local music scene. The three began regularly frequenting DIY institutions like The Smell and Pehrspace, eventually selling out dozens of their own shows at both venues with their first few bands. Moaning’s conception came when Solomon sent Stevenson and MacKelvie the first demo for “Don’t Go,” setting the tone for the impulsive songwriting that would follow. The three fleshed out Solomon’s primitive recordings, adding in MacKelvie’s heavy syncopated drumming, and Stevenson’s melodic driving bass and synth parts, capturing each member’s personality in their sparse and fuzzed out tracks. Like many of their previous collaborative projects, Moaning forces pain up against pleasure, using the complexity of personal heart break to inform the band’s conflicted sound.
The band chose the moniker Moaning, admiring the ambiguity the name held, and hoping to reference both an intimate wail and an anguished scream. The band’s homemade video for an early, home-recorded version of “The Same” caught the attention of Alex Newport, a seasoned engineer and producer who had previously worked with At The Drive-In, Bloc Party, and the Melvins. With Newport, Moaning began working on the tracks that would make up their self-titled release, employing a lush, open ended production quality that had never been at the band’s disposal. Tracks like “Artificial” stand out among the recordings, where Moaning used the studio’s recourses to take their frantic live arrangement and give it the intensity merited by Solomon’s lyrics.
As a whole, Moaning drifts from sentimental to catastrophic, hiding meek and introspective lyrics within powerful droning dance songs, giving sonic nods to some of the band’s musical heroes like, New Order, Broadcast, and Slowdive. The band’s youthful attitude is met with the weight of topics like loss, routine, and mental health, reflecting the anxiety towards the status quo that much of their generation faces today. Where many young bands take years to find their footing as writers and performers, Moaning has built up a confidence in sound and vision from the ten years of playing basements, bars, and ballrooms together in their previous projects. Yet, even with their polished exterior, Moaning continues to make the sacrifice of deeply personal anecdotes and emotions to their audience for the benefit of their craft.
In writing Crush Crusher, Ian Sweet’s Jilian Medford committed herself to exploring her own issues with self-image, self-respect/worth, and the responsibility she has felt to others. Recorded at Rare Book Room studios with producer/engineer Gabe Wax (Deerhunter, The War on Drugs, Soccer Mommy), Crush Crusher is full of dissonant open chords and abnormal progressions, finding beauty in a level of conflict not seen on the trio’s 2016 Shapeshifter. By the end of the recording process, Ian Sweet wound up with an unconventional assortment of songs featuring disparate elements of psych-rock, trip-hop, and shoegaze that together forged a sound uniquely Medford’s own. “Spit” is the second single from Ian Sweet’s 2018 album Crush Crusher.
Girlpool have shared “Hire,” their first single off their newly announced forthcoming album What Chaos Is Imaginary, due out February. 1st, 2019, on ANTI- Records.
“Hire” follows the pair of songs Girlpool released earlier this year, “Lucy’s” and “Where You Sink.” While “Hire” is a more rollicking ride, it shares a tenderness with those previous releases. The central revelation of all of these songs is co-vocalist Cleo Tucker’s voice—Tucker transitioned after the band’s last album, and their voice is now a hearty, wounded baritone. The band’s signature harmonies feel weightier, Tucker’s vocals landing with heft while Harmony Tividad’s ethereal coos swirl overhead.
“Hire” finds Tucker maxing out their dynamic range, slowly raising the stakes from hop-along valleys of groove to scorching peaks of winding screams. The possibilities raised by the band’s new vocal dynamics are far-reaching, and “Hire” is a bracing proof of concept.
Listen to “Hire” The band will be touring with Hatchie in 2019
The Fat Angel Sings 