Indieheads Podcast’s Q3 2020 Favorites
Yet another quarterly collection of our favorite music this year, this time ranging from July to September.
You know the deal, we here at the Indieheads Podcast are back again with another quarterly drop of our favorite music of the year, this time ranging from July to September. Much like previous lists, there’s no ranked order of anything and this collection will include non-Q3 albums as everyone has one wild card pick to talk about something they listened to this quarter not released then that they really wanna chat about.
So, from myself (Matty), Zach, Rose, Nat, Dyl, Lily, and Jackson, here’s the music we’ve been listening to from July to September.
Kelly Lee Owens — Inner Song
Lots of artists set out to make music that is “dreamy” or “atmospheric”, but to make music that feels as weightless and enveloping as Inner Song by Kelly Lee Owens is a much, much harder task than she manages to make it look. The difference between something that is washed out and dreamy in compelling way vs. something that is washed out and dreamy in a lifeless and boring way is a very thin line (for example: compare Beach House to something seemingly similar but infinitely more generic like Cigarettes After Sex), and Kelly Lee Owens appears to walk that line effortlessly.
The Welsh singer and electronic music producer draws on influences from ambient music, house, techno, and dream pop — combining them in unique ways and weaving them together seamlessly often within the same song. That compelling mix of styles and influences was present on her 2017 self-titled debut, but her excellent new sophomore album Inner Song feels like a massive step up in the way it refines and expands her unique ambient pop sound. The way singles like “On” and “Night” are able to blend some of her best pop songwriting to date with techno grooves that are more hard-hitting than anything on her previous album is really impressive, as she manages to stretch herself in different directions from moment to moment without ever disrupting the carefully crafted ecosystems of each song.
On previous efforts, KLO’s ethereal voice was often used more as an instrument or additional layer of atmosphere rather than having it be the star of the show, but Inner Song shows her stepping directly into the spotlight more than ever before. “Re-wild”, “L.I.N.E.”, and “Wake-Up” are the most full-fledged pop songs we’ve ever heard from her and they all go over astoundingly well, combining her immaculate electronic production with a songwriting style that reminds me of artists like Beach House and FKA twigs at their very best. My only complaint with this record is that it gives us such promising flashes of what she might do in the future that it makes me wish we had a whole album in that new style right away. Her sparing approach to songwriting in which every word she chooses to sing feels so carefully considered is part of what makes her so successful in blending her pop music influences with instrumental electronic sections, but the tracks where she really lets it rip vocally are some of the very best here. Despite my yearning for more KLO dream pop, this record feels like a perfect bridge towards that possible full-on pop record she might make in the future while also feeling incredibly satisfying on its own, fully synthesizing the various strands of her musical DNA into something greater than the sum of its parts. Whatever she decides to do next: sign me the fuck up.
— Jackson
Listen to Inner Song on Bandcamp.
Ruston Kelly — Shape & Destroy
Less than three minutes into his new album Shape & Destroy, Ruston Kelly asks the question that he spends the next 40 trying to answer, “Who was I then? Who the hell am I now?” Coming two years after his startling debut Dying Star, Kelly’s sophomore bow arrives under some entirely new circumstances for the rising songwriter. Most prominently, this is the first album he made while sober, and the album excels most often when the writing focuses on his struggles to maintain this new state of being and fighting against what led him to addiction to begin with. The advance single “Brave” is the record’s most effective song, and the one that captures this new mindset most vividly, a simple, unvarnished questioning of his life to this point and the legacy he wants to leave behind. And though the swings at uplift don’t always connect — considering how thoroughly he nailed the portrait of the artist as a young fuckup pose last album, how could they? — he threads each of them with the knowledge that recovery isn’t linear, that there’s always going to be a voice encouraging him to spike his coffee in the morning no matter how far he comes. It’s the sort of honesty that fueled Dying Star’s best moments, and it continues to pay dividends here. Not unlike Jason Isbell, Kelly has a way of striking at hard emotional truths in plain language, and if Dying Star was his Southeastern, you could call S&D his Something More Than Free — an album that doesn’t match its predecessor for gut-punch power, but one that feels at-ease and earned.
Whereas Dying Star was for the most part a cohesive whole when it came to the music, Shape & Destroy finds Kelly playing more with tempo and tone. On Dying Star, Kelly kept things slow-paced and downcast, with even the upbeat songs like “Faceplant” having an air of tragedy. Here, though, he lets some sunlight in; there are still songs that’d fit snugly on his first album, but he’s also made room for anthems like “Radio Cloud” and “Under the Sun,” and honest-to-goodness love songs in “Alive” and “Closest Thing.” Nothing approaches Dying Star’s vocoder-laced curveball “Son of a Highway Daughter” for big sonic swings (though the gospel-influenced closer “Hallelujah Anyway” comes close), but Kelly’s musical language is growing more robust, and it’s something that often works to his benefit. You could look at Shape & Destroy as the morning after Dying Star’s dark night of the soul: not always picturesque, filled with more than a few bumps in the road and hard conversations, but at the end of the day, it’s the only way to get where you’re going. It’s hard to know for sure where the next stop on Kelly’s road is, but this is a record that shows he knows who he wants to be.
— Zach
Listen to Shape & Destroy on Spotify.
Jackson’s WILDCARD: Cat Power — Dear Sir
As long as music critics like Anthony Fantano and others of his ilk try to critique and analyze music from a detached, “objective” POV, they will continue to fundamentally miss the point about what makes music such a uniquely fascinating and personal art form. “Objectively” (whatever that word even means), Cat Power’s 1995 debut album Dear Sir is not a very good record: the mixing is spotty, the backing instrumentation is extremely simple to the point of being almost amateurish, and Chan Marshall’s vocal performances are very rough around the edges when compared to her later works. In fact: a year later she released her 1996 masterpiece What Would The Community Think? that is pretty much a better version of Dear Sir in every possible measure, taking the formula of this first record and honing it with stronger production and writing. So why am I still so fascinated with Dear Sir, an album Chan Marshall recorded in a single day (she recorded her follow up album Myra Lee on the same single day!!) and later improved upon with similar records? Why have I listened to this record even more than What Would The Community Think? in the last few months?
What makes Dear Sir so fascinating and worthy of examination is the same thing that will make it impossible for artificial intelligence programs to ever fully replace human musicians: there’s just something so inherently powerful about the way this album manages to capture and communicate the humanity of the artist who made it in such a raw and unvarnished form. Even though Chan’s vocals and songwriting only get stronger and more in the pocket from this point forward in her career, there’s something uniquely compelling about watching her bump her head against the ceiling of her abilities on Dear Sir, like a superhero still learning how to control her powers. Lots of good song lyrics can easily turn into bad poetry when removed from their musical context and read on paper, and the sparse and elusive lyrics of Dear Sir are a perfect example of how a compelling vocal performance can bring immense amounts of meaning and pathos to otherwise simple lyrics. Lyrics like “where do the rockets find planets?” and “hey the headlights are getting too close to me” are unassuming and perhaps meaningless on paper but convey entire worlds of meaning and emotion when delivered as passionately as she does on this album.
Chan Marshall exists in the world created within these 9 tracks as a series of seeming contradictions: immensely powerful yet fragile and vulnerable, venomous and bitter toward the rest of humanity yet desperately longing for connection, slyly funny yet deeply sincere. Her voice is incredibly beautiful on every single Cat Power album I’ve listened to, but the rough, strained quality it possesses when she really reaches for the upper registers on Dear Sir has an emotional power that is completely one of one, there’s nothing else quite like it. Fiona Apple’s Fetch The Bolt Cutters is my favorite record of 2020 for very similar reasons: even though music can be understood as a mathematical equation or a series of repeated structures and formulas, both Bolt Cutters and Dear Sir demonstrate how the human element of music is the truly essential quality that makes music such a powerful tool for connection. Even though Fetch The Bolt Cutters was crafted meticulously over a period of many years and Dear Sir was recorded in an afternoon, both records are a testament to the power of imperfection as a tool for communicating the complicated and messy nature of human emotion.
— Jackson
Listen to Dear Sir on Spotify.
Sufjan Stevens — The Ascension
For my money, the last truly surprising moment in a Sufjan Stevens record was a decade ago, in the latter end of his electro-orchestral stunner, The Age of Adz. The track “I Want To Be Well” went into the mode that many a Sufjan song does, focusing a central phrase into a fervent repetition until it became a rhythm of its own, and then slowly incorporating it into the greater electrical hum of the song. The shock arrived when Sufjan decided to just shout out his intentions plainly: “I’m not fucking around!” To hear him so plainly state his distress was disarming. In the place of the kind of bright and earnest kitsch we’d come to expect from him was a person just stating his emotions, as cold and alarming as they could be.
With The Ascension, Sufjan somehow manages to dive further into the well offered up by that brief moment of emotionality. The common refrains on this record are all direct statements of intent: “Tell me you love me”, “Make me an offer I cannot refuse”, “let’s take a walk in the circle of life”. While one could argue that the removal of the artifice that used to couch his emotional statements is an alarming move, at the same time it’s so freeing to hear him speak plainly and place his ideas into a clear and open space. Similarly, the soundscapes here, while returning to a similar electronic zone that defined Adz, manage to carve out their own territory by dropping the bombast that defined that album and making way for colder, more industrial synthesizers at the base. Admittedly, this record may come with reservations for the average listener. It’s eighty minutes long! It features the phrases “I shit my pants and wet the bed” and “fill me with the blood of Jesus” in the same song! To top it off, its icy synth-work and direct emotionality can feel outright hostile to the listener at times. On the same level, however, one can view these same reservations as strengths to the record’s greater thesis, which has Sufjan looking into himself for a greater struggle with his personal faith as it is weighed against the unbearable terror of the world as we’ve currently made it. As the runtime goes on, you can almost feel the emotional exhaustion yourself going through this journey. And yet, by the denouement of the album’s title track, he finds an inner peace inside of this toil: “Everything comes with consummation / Everything comes with consequence.” His acceptance of this worldly chaos is almost admirable, and yet it feels like there’s no ending. Here we arrive at the latest moment to shock me in a Sufjan Stevens album. After all this time, the last question he arrives on is simply: “What now?”
— Rose
Listen to The Ascension on Bandcamp.
Gulch — Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress
Look, I’m not going to pretend we can just ignore the need to get feral every now and again. We’ve been isolated and scared for six straight months now. We all need to let the demonic side of ourselves out from time to time. We’ve all got a little gremlin in us. We all go a little gremlin sometimes. And we all have our own punishingly unhinged albums that help us feel a little less trapped and cooped up.
For me, it’s been Gulch’s absolutely flooring studio debut Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress. The San Jose hardcore band has been generating buzz in punk and metal circles for a couple years now off the strengths of their earlier 7” releases and the stupefying energy of their live shows. But it’s this album of theirs, produced by Grammy-winner Jack Shirley, that tightens their appeal into its basest parts to create Gulch’s most enjoyable collection of tracks to date. From the tempo shifts on the title track to the gradually speeding up intro of “Shallow Reflective Pools of Guilt,” each track in this 16 minute record feels hand-picked for its unique character amidst the cohesive power violence. These are the kinds of songs that each have their own take on “That Moment,” the kind of short clipped-out highlight where you would expect a moshpit to swell and reach a fever pitch, moments where you’d have to prime yourself for a brutal impact. After all, we’re all missing live music. I especially miss the kinds of hyper-truncated hardcore punk shows in DIY venues that can only come with having a safe environment to be packed into tight spaces with several other sweaty humans. Few albums in these six months have been able to accurately replicate the power of those nights, but Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress feels like viscerally being in the eye of a hardcore punk gig hurricane. When I listen, it’s hard not to imagine myself shouting back the titular refrain to “Fucking Towards Salvation” at frontman Elliott Morrow, throwing back his emphatic staccato delivery of those words that lend their profanity a subversive catchiness, making each syllable of that refrain beat against the brain. I imagine the tidal flows of people pushing against each other during the slower harsh melodicism on the cover of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Sin In My Heart.” Gulch brings out that demonic edge in me, that sin in my heart. And, man, it feels so damn good to let it out.
— Nat
Listen to Impenetrable Cerebral Fortress on Bandcamp
Rose’s WILDCARD: Luge — Luge
The oft-discussed gremlin manifesto presented in previous discussions of this podcast’s work is an important document of our times, but in my opinion it fails to encompass a specific range of sound that I feel is also very important: albums that remind me a lot of the first Battles LP, and nothing else. Luge channels a conduit for the kind of manic energy of that record, and the much more laidback cool of something like Guerilla Toss, and creates a rare guitar record that melts my brain while also building upon hooks that manage to be absurd earworms. I don’t have a very effective pitch like I do with most albums, I’m simply just asking for everyone to LISTEN TO THIS ALBUM.
— Rose
Land of Talk — Indistinct Conversations
When Montreal’s Liz Powell resurrected Land of Talk for 2017’s Life After Youth, the project sounded buoyant and reinvigorated, but on this summer’s Indistinct Conversations, that quality had morphed into something disarmingly weary. Rather than sustain the energy of newfound maturity and independence, Powell instead evokes the feeling of a midlife crisis without a clear end in sight. From the forlorn trills and swells of guitar that drive stunning opener “Diaphanous” and onwards, the music here is pointedly diffuse, less concerned with finding answers than making peace with an overt lack thereof. The album strains to accept the ways in which life becomes a little less shiny with age, even as we become more stable and fulfilled in turn.
Indistinct Conversations’ most novel quality, however, is as a portrait of domestic strain. A generation of queer couples are growing old together en masse for the first time, and the complications this brings about remain relatively unexplored within the culture. Powell seems set on rectifying this, crafting songs about codependency (“Diaphanous,” “Compelled”); trauma and accountability (“Weight of That Weekend”); and romantic inertia (“A/B Futures”) with a startling frankness. The album exposes the inherent dishonesty of the phrase “settling down,” instead illustrating how identities and ambitions continue to be unsettled and disrupted even within the relative predictability of life partnership. If Powell reaches any conclusion, it is that they’ve begun to see this not as a bug, but a feature. In a surprising bit of timeliness, Indistinct Conversations is most resonant as a document of learning to accept the paradoxical beauties of uncertainty and stillness, just as so many of us are trying to do now.
— Lily
Listen to Indistinct Conversations on Bandcamp.
Young Jesus — Welcome to Conceptual Beach
Hours and days with free-flowing structure, pale afternoon sun, headaches, the emptiness of laying in bed without another next to you. Evening walks through your childhood streets without a soul around, undisturbed sunset colors washing over streetlamps. A breeze blows by your cheek and a rabbit burrows underneath a neighbor’s backyard fence as you pass. You wonder about all the people you’ve loved in your life and whatever happened to all the daydreams you once had of sharing a life with them, and when your mind at last wanders to the one you love now, all of life’s preconceptions wash away and its circular reasoning all feels worth it again. On their fifth studio album, Young Jesus has broken through the realms of everyday spirituality and the improvisationally mundane, a transcendental work of love, longing and exploration that feels more like romantic poetry. A sprawling 45-minute reaffirmation of emotional longing at a time when showing genuine care for fellow human beings feels all too fleeting, the record takes on a narrative entirely not of its own accord — how strange it is to hear the methodical, jazzy riffs and John Rossiter’s soothing, aching wails of exhausted love, and connect it all with a passive and comforting form of rebellion. Growth and recession, push and pull, tethering and untethering oneself from the world are natural cycles of life, sometimes terrifying to comprehend, sometimes welcoming in warm arms.
— Dyl
Listen to Welcome to Conceptual Beach on Bandcamp.
Lily’s WILDCARD: Noah — Sivutie
As the seasons turn and we head into our first quarantine winter, I’ve found myself drawn to increasingly hermetic music, as isolated and still as I am preparing myself to be in the coming months. Few albums are as well-suited to that feeling as Sivutie, the 2015 full-length from Japanese downtempo producer Noah, whose sound takes the “bedroom” in “bedroom pop” to its natural extreme, weaving a set of hushed soundscapes that seem whispered from a chamber high above the city lights. However, where corporate interests have reduced the notion of “chill” music to something as easily-ignored as Brian Eno first theorized, Sivutie’s enveloping sound design commands the listener’s attention at every turn. Rarely since Björk’s Vespertine has beatwork sounded so fragile and vast at once.
Part of what lends Sivutie such vividness is how indebted it is to its environment. Each track acutely evokes the lonely, overwhelming inertia of modern urban life, reflected in the rain-soaked neon cover art that, like the music itself, feels plucked right from a Wong Kar-Wai film. The soaring leads of “Unspoken” mirror the bustling movements of the city, whereas the loping, detuned textures on tracks like “Weak” and “Blur” seem to drench them in fog. Meanwhile, the album’s most intimate qualities emerge in Noah’s voice. Throughout, she sings — as if more to herself than the microphone — in a wordless idioglossia, blending syllables from Japanese, English, and more, into a freeform coo. It’s a striking choice, and one that encapsulates Sivutie’s unique, anonymous warmth. Like a dispatch from a passing stranger, the details may be obscured, but there is no denying something strongly felt at play. Whatever it may be, as the music unfurls, we begin to feel it too.
— Lily
Listen to Sivutie on Bandcamp.
Fontaines D.C. — A Hero’s Death
If you told me a year ago I’d be writing positively about Fontaines D.C., I would probably laugh at you but alas, here we are. I’ve been consumed by butt rock for the last two months so my words here will be somewhat brief, but there’s something hypnotizing about A Hero’s Death that catches and keeps me ahold with each listen. I haven’t listened to Dogrel so I can’t speak definitively on that album as a whole, but I can say its singles really didn’t leave me impressed. It just felt like trite anthemic post-punk music that was more NME psyop than an actual band. Especially since it was released in a year where you had Irish bands like Girl Band pushing what a guitar record could be in The Talkies and other Dan Carey-produced acts like black midi and Black Country, New Road charting a new path for UK guitar/rock music for the generation to come.
A Hero’s Death doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, but what it does do is something I’ve felt is sorely missing from the latest post-punk scene: genuineness. For most of the album, lead singer Grian Chatten feels restrained. But restrained in a good way, for the album at least. I’ve been feeling incredibly burnt out and at my wit’s end for the last month or so and his more lowkey performances mixed with an atmospheric instrumental palette deliver a batch of songs that I can’t help but feel lost in, especially with the repetitive (in a good way!) lyrical motifs throughout. When Chatten repeats and repeats “Life ain’t always empty” in the title track, it’s genuinely life-affirming and a reminder to not get lost when things go awry. Oh and “Televised Mind” is a fucking nasty little banger.
— Matty
Listen to A Hero’s Death on Bandcamp.
Protomartyr — Ultimate Success Today
As 2020 begins to feels more and more like the end of days, few lyrics have rattled around in my head more often than the line from “Processed By The Boys” where lead singer Joe Casey reminds listeners that the true apocalypse won’t arrive in the form of an outside evil force or even a “foreign disease washed upon the beach”, rather “Reality has a far duller edge”. Even though the pandemic is a once in a lifetime threat to our society that has amassed a staggering death toll that continues to rise, the real sickness that strikes fear into Joe Casey’s heart is something more banal, something much more commonplace. More frightening than the disease itself is the way the disease has fully exposed the rotting heart of this country to any who couldn’t see it already. Our society is fueled by selfishness, by violence, by authoritarian control and human weakness masquerading as power. Our world will not be undone by a virus or another apocalyptic event — it will be undone by our own human failings. All we can do is hope that “next time will be different” and that this time “they’ll be gentle enough”.
The incredibly prescient lyrical themes of “Processed By The Boys” are just one of many reasons I adore the new Protomartyr album Ultimate Success Today, which is not only the band’s most thematically interesting work but also their most ambitious and successful musical effort as a band to date. So many post-punk bands like Iceage seem to focus too much on capturing a vibe and general pastiche of the post-punk bands they are drawing influence from and not enough on crafting memorable songs to go with their aesthetic choices, but luckily Protomartyr manage to avoid falling into that trap on this album. An album like Beyondless (that to be fair I enjoyed a lot when it came out) is catnip to music writer types like myself with its artsy presentation and cool musical influences, but doesn’t have a single memorable tune that I can hum to myself 2 years after its release. By comparison, Ultimate Success Today is chock-full of well crafted songs, sticky hooks, and cathartic musical moments that I think will stand the test of time beyond their critical appeal. This album is absurdly well sequenced, with every single song placed perfectly to either build upon the momentum of the last track or to down-shift the energy into something more melancholic and somber when appropriate. That momentum crests in the middle of the record with the electrifying single “Michigan Hammers” that propels the listener forward into the album’s near perfect B-side where they follow it up hit after hit after hit, all culminating in the slow build and release of the stellar album closer “Worm In Heaven”. Protomartyr are the rare art rock band that doesn’t forget to do the rocking part, and their ability to combine their dark and esoteric lyrics and their unconventional musical style with genuinely infectious songwriting makes them stand out in an overcrowded post-punk scene.
— Jackson
Listen to Ultimate Success Today on Bandcamp.
Matty’s WILDCARD: Scott Walker — The Drift
It probably won’t be out until a few days after this list goes up, but I guested on an upcoming episode of And Introducing to talk about the life and career of Scott Walker, revolving around the 2006 documentary, Scott Walker: 30 Century Man (which you can watch right now on Prime Video!). The documentary features exclusive footage of Walker in the studio working on his 2006 album, The Drift, which has since become my favorite album (His section of Nite Flights remains his best work in my opinion, but as a full statement, it’s The Drift) of his upon my re-listen to his discography for research. We are very far at this point from his days as a teen pop crooner and baroque pop influencer, as we are well into the avant-Scott era. But these earlier lives he’s led still influence his music, as despite featuring some of his most punishing arrangements & strangest instrumentation choices yet (the dude uses a dude slapping and punching some meat as percussion along with a giant, hollow wooden cube), these songs still feel like pop music at the end of the day. Incredibly fucked up pop music mind you, but pop music nonetheless.
The packages Walker was putting together in The Drift looked a lot different from the Scott 1–4 days, but the contents inside were largely the same. The trauma that can be felt in songs like “Clara” and “Jesse” are all present in his earlier music, but whereas the packages of his 1960s work tried to cover up that anguish with lush and dense orchestral arrangements, The Drift lays this all bare. This doesn’t mean The Drift is a personal album though, as many of the songs are not really about Walker’s life. The closest you’re gonna get really is “Clara” being largely inspired by Walker’s youth watching newsreels in the theater of Mussolini’s execution and further humiliation. But where you’ll hear these blocked out memories coming back to fruition is in his voice, with his beautiful baritone being further haunted by an aging consciousness that knows it’s closer to death than birth. As someone who feels continually powerless, The Drift is a truly terrifying record, an album that feels like it knew the worst was yet to come but had no way of stopping it.
— Matty
Listen to The Drift on Spotify.
Bright Eyes — Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was
In the podcast Discord chat, we have a running bit called the “Sure, [X]” album. This is used whenever we’re talking about an album that one person (and one person only) goes unreasonably hard for, so we all just nod our heads and go along with it; for instance, Making a Door Less Open is the “Sure, Matty” album of the year. I did not expect a Bright Eyes album to be the “Sure, Zach” album of the year, but nothing about this year is normal anyway. And in the rest of the podcast’s defense, it’s a little tricky arguing an album where Conor Oberst goes over a “Hotline Bling” type beat kinda rules. But, y’know what? Down in the Weeds kinda rules. If it isn’t a patch on the band’s early 2000s heyday, it also doesn’t fall into the bad habits that sunk their last two albums, either. It’s a spirited, respectable return to form, right down to the album-opening skit you’ll skip every time you go back to it.
In the nine years since The People’s Key, Conor Oberst lost his older brother (to whom the album is dedicated), divorced his wife (who appears on the first track), resurrected his punk band, was falsely accused of rape, found a cyst on his brain, and saw everything he feared about the future come horrifyingly true. As Oberst has said while promoting Down in the Weeds, he takes no pleasure in being right. It’s probably a coincidence that the first words from Oberst on the album are “gotta keep on going like it ain’t the end,” because otherwise, his head is largely where it was a decade ago, bracing for the end and trying to squeeze some good tunes out of the whole ordeal. Thankfully, there’s nothing like a “When the President Talks to God” on here; Oberst’s richest vein of existential fear and loathing remains his own psyche, sweeping up his dreams with a pan and broom, daydreaming of his ex-wife’s face while chopping up vegetables, and seeing his brother’s ghost in a fit of sleep paralysis. If these are, on paper, more “grown man” concerns, fear not, Bright Eyes’ stock in trade remains high drama, and the album works best when it doesn’t lose sight of that, like when Oberst sings “you like cinematic endings” on “Stairwell Song,” right before a storm of horns and strings draws the song to a close. When the band goes more pro forma, as on “Mariana Trench,” the record falters enough to keep it outside the upper echelon of their discography. But when it shines, especially on the crushing last call “Comet Song,” it does more than justify its existence, it proves again that one of the great songwriters of the last 20 years still has his fastball. And if it’s just me on this island, that’s alright by me.
— Zach
Listen to Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was on Bandcamp.
Katie Dey & Devi McCallion — Magic Fire Brain
Of the many problems in the background of our general existential nightmare of the current moment the ever-present dread of ecological collapse is one that certainly gets the brain running into some dark corners. In another sense though, you can’t help but have morbid curiosity about the distant future beyond that. If our existence is dissolved, what life will take its place after. What mutated creatures will take our place as the dominant species?
Both of the collaborations between Katie Dey & Devi McCallion’s collaborative albums have been preoccupied with this subject matter to some degree, trying to tackle the macabre task of facing this immense disaster from different perspectives at all levels, crashing worlds together to create “digital rainforests” through dazzling musical movements. In contrast to 2018’s Some New Form of Life, this year’s sequel, Magic Fire Brain, opts to jump the story ahead several million years into the future, when things have warped beyond all recognition. The album also opts to stand out from the original by favoring the kind of muted electronic hums of Dey’s solo work over the more ramshackle feel opted for by the original. All throughout the album, Dey and McCallion try to give power and meaning to this existence beyond our own, questioning the nature of these creatures of the future and tying back their struggles to the kind of existential agony that can be faced today by just being in a human body, with all of its individual failures. Throughout the record they manage to take these ideas in a hundred different directions, asking for the faith to just be alive and delivering some of the most devastating writing of the year in the process. More than their previous entry, this one manages to feel like a true synthesis of their styles, ranging from the opening and closing rave-ups of “Plant Matter” and “Milk” to the muted synth worlds of “Plastic” and “Circumstances”. As with my previous recommendation for this list, this is an album that asks a lot out of its listener, but it manages to make this intense emotional journey all the more rewarding, finding that even with life born out of the bleakest circumstances, there may be something worth embracing with love.
— Rose
Listen to Magic Fire Brain on Bandcamp.
Zach’s WILDCARD: Justin Townes Earle — The Saint of Lost Causes
Justin Townes Earle was particular about The Saint of Lost Causes — his eighth studio album and last to be released before his sudden passing late last month — being a social record, not a political one. In a featurette with Billboard, he said that “I’m not gonna write a song called ‘Mr. President’ and talk directly to any politician or anybody who I feel doesn’t listen. I’m not gonna waste my breath. I’m gonna talk to the people, we the people, and do my best as a songwriter and somebody who’s up on stage performing to still feel like I stand amongst them and make them feel like I stand shoulder to shoulder with them.” In a studio session with Paste the week of the album’s release, he was even blunter: “This whole record is about social issues, not political ones. We have to remember that we are the people, we are the people. It ain’t no politician’s problem that America is so fucked up, it’s our problem.” Quibble with the ideology here all you like, but when it came to the songwriting, Earle’s aim was true. If you’re the son of one country legend and named after another, you can’t exactly wash dishes, and over the course of his career, Earle lived up to both of his namesakes. I could have given this space to 2010’s masterful Harlem River Blues, and looking at it objectively, that’s probably the better album. But this one just clicks on a different level for me, one that makes me wish it didn’t take the death of the man who made it to give it the appreciation it deserves.
It’s hardly a feel-good album. Earle sets the scene by describing a world where “there’s nothing left but to grow cold,” and allows for only some shafts of light to break the cloud cover over the next 11 tracks. He’s at his best when writing about these “social issues,” but he’s never preachy: “Don’t Drink the Water” and “Flint City Shake It” are two sides of the same coin, small-town anger threatening to boil over, then the pride and resilience that keeps them upright. He also thrives with character sketches. “Appalachian Nightmare” tracks the last thoughts of a drugstore cowboy cornered by the cops, a fate that Earle — who said he started using drugs at age 12 and struggled with addiction for the rest of his life — easily could have met, and “Over Alameda” puts him in the shoes of a young Black man battling generational poverty and fighting to keep a promise to his mother to move up in the world. Even in the album’s more perfunctory moments, like the schticky “Pacific Northwestern Blues,” Earle’s charisma keeps everything humming. But the album’s crown jewel is the simple, poignant “Ahi Esta Mi Nina.” Earle described the song as a one-sided conversation between a man from Alphabet City, just out of prison on a mandatory minimum sentence, and his daughter, born while he was locked up. It may not even actually be happening. But the conviction and regret Earle embodies his narrator with is enough to crack even the coldest hearts. A line like “I’ll just say I’m sorry, but I know it’s not as simple as that” captures an idea Earle played with for his entire career: the urge to make amends, all while knowing it won’t solve a damn thing. His is a tremendous loss, but his legacy will endure.
— Zach
Listen to The Saint Of Lost Causes on Bandcamp.
Hen Ogledd — Free Humans
What does it mean to be free? In what scenario can we as humans truly gain a sense of freedom given how capitalism and social structure keep us locked into the same rhythms, day in and day out, until our bodies exhaust themselves and crumple? These questions run through my head with each listen of Newcastle Upon Tyne supergroup Hen Ogledd’s stellar sophomore record Free Humans, in no small part due to the album’s provocatively vague invocation of the word “free” on the title. It’s a musing that only grows more complicated knowing where the album starts: with human life’s total eradication through doomsday cataclysm on “Farewell.” But even with that subject matter, the tone of the song is downright cheery and serene, evoking a knowing acceptance of rapture and the freedoms it provides from human-made shackles.
That sense of freeness comes through in every moment of the music as well. Hen Ogledd bring a sharp refinement of the varied kitchen sink approach from their last record Mogic, mostly hewing toward an experimental proggy approach to pop and electronica without sacrificing the sheer number of unloosed ideas tossed about. At eighty minutes, Free Humans runs about twice the length of Mogic, but feels both more focused and expansive in tremendously rewarding ways. The swelling harmonies and thumping bass riffs on songs like “Bwganod” and “Skinny Dipping” bring the listener fully in on the exhilaration of hearing a band totally freeing themselves of convention while all locked into the same creative groove. The band feels immensely more confident on this release, nestling moments of vocal interplay and big choruses on tracks like “Trouble” while still leaving space for the jazzier freakout of their take on experimental Scottish poem “The Loch Ness Monster’s Song.” The quartet’s stylings feel cohesive even as they trade off vocals, allowing Sally Pilkington’s falsetto glides and wild screeches to sit alongside Richard Dawson’s idiosyncratic melodicism. Free Humans is the rare kind of eccentric album whose avant-garde ideas never sacrifice the pure fun at the heart of the matter. It’s an album that can, at one moment, wring cathartic pathos out of a song about the Bell Telephone Laboratory’s Voder on “Remains” and still build to the intoxicatingly bonkers explosion of “Bwganod” in the span of six tracks. It’s an anarchic erosion of expectation that comes to a head at Free Humans’ title drop on penultimate track “Feral,” a song that returns the record to its unmoored peace with succeeding the limitations of human life while incorporating lines from Karl Marx and philosopher Mary Midgley’s concept of humans as animals. The word itself, “feral,” conjures its own connotations of being unburdened of human preoccupation and free to indulge in our most primal instincts, the ones we restrain in order to maintain the arbitrary decorum of civility, the ones Hen Ogledd unleashes where other bands might hold themselves back. And, really, isn’t that the most free a human can be?
— Nat
Listen to Free Humans on Bandcamp.
Deftones — Ohms
To Deftones’ credit, it’s difficult to write about Ohms in any terms more elaborate than, “it’s another great one, folks!” But, even as a continuation of the band’s unlikely third-act renaissance that began with 2010’s Diamond Eyes, Ohms sets itself apart with a sense of urgency and intent not heard since the former. While it would be easy to attribute this to a myriad of external factors (the band’s first reunion with producer Terry Date since 2008’s Eros sessions were cut short by founding bassist Chi Cheng’s fatal car accident, most notably), the narratives surrounding the album’s creation would be for naught if not reflected in the music. Fortunately, Ohms embodies Deftones at their most mercurial, making for one of the most unusual and expansive additions to one of modern metal’s most unusual and expansive discographies.
Never ones to downplay their eclecticism, Deftones treat Ohms as a battleground for their most starkly contrasting impulses. The songs here are pulled between vast John Carpenter-esque textures and downtuned groove-metal dirges to such extremes that a kind of monochrome shimmer emerges from the fray. The result feels so effortlessly dynamic you start to forget how much it shouldn’t work, and yet the band’s confidence in their sound never wavers. Even more improbable is that this goth-rock-via-Meshuggah approach yields some of their single best songs to date (“Genesis,” “The Spell of Mathematics,”) anchored by hall-of-fame vocal performances from Chino Moreno (“Error,” “Headless”). Ohms is a late-career high point, displaying a level of quality, consistency, and innovation largely unheard-of for a band entering their fourth decade. Leave your nu-metal preconceptions at the door: for any fans of forward-thinking rock music, this is a must-listen.
— Lily
Nat’s WILDCARD: Twinkle Park — As Much As I Forget
Nobody ever told me how the weariness still lingers. The way I always heard it, transitioning and the social bonds it creates were a comprehensive salve for so many of the emotional burdens weighing closeted trans people down. Not that this sentiment was untrue, as transitioning has helped my anxieties with feeling like I was living the wrong life and keeping myself locked away from the people I wanted to be close to. But I still feel depressive pulls, stronger than ever now that estrogen makes me feel so much more than I ever had before.
I’ve found As Much As I Forget to be strikingly representative of this persistent feeling. Much in the vein of pop-punk and emo naturally deals with depression and mental health, but the vivid bluntness with which Twinkle Park captures the intersection of these subjects with trans experiences is especially remarkable. From feeling like a burden to the friends who bring you comfort on “Aggravated Conditions,” to the reflections on the process of repeatedly coming out to oneself “before it [sticks]” on “Something To Hold On To,” songwriter and lyricist Hazel wrings intense resonance from detailing the extreme specificity of her experiences with these commonly-lived moments. The album’s lyrical delivery via vocaloid only adds to the record’s approach at the personal, imparting a feeling that these candid chronicalings are too painful to recount through human voice, without sacrificing any of the inherent emotion that comes with crafting lines like, “For all the work I did to make my bones a home they barely fit.” Each compellingly complex riff or catchy melodic moment on the album works so well in isolation, but it’s their reappearances on the incredible final track that put them into elucidating new contexts, making for a moving culmination that brings the album’s stray thoughts into a starkly cohesive throughline. It’s possibly the most pivotal moment across the entire album, crafting a ten-minute-long multi-part emo narrative that answers the worried musings of the album with a self-corrective missive, openly acknowledging the need to address the root of depressive thoughts rather than dwelling on them forever. With an arc this complete and piercing, As Much As I Forget is an album I’ve found myself returning to constantly as I work through my own understanding of what it means to feel this way. And, with each listen, it becomes more and more of a comfort to hear the truth in what I’m feeling, and it becomes easier to take the album’s culminating self-assurance through duress as one that I can take to heart. It becomes easier to tell myself, “I will stop wishing for death at every sign of discontent.” To say, “[I will] give myself time and some more credit for every day I wake up sad and still get out of bed.” I will get out of bed.
— Nat
Listen to As Much As I Forget on Bandcamp.
Bill Callahan — Gold Record
At this point there’s very little of Bill Callahan that seems left to be discovered. What you hear is what you get at this point, and the man appears perfectly content writing songs to himself about the quintessential movements and mumblings of the everyday. Songs about making breakfast, driving a new young married couple, of time and the ability to age — Callahan impresses that he has perfectly transitioned to the stage where life passes him by, and there are few artists who can do so with as much grace and poetry as him. Even to return to a decades-old song (“Let’s Move to the Country”) and re-record it with updated lyrics feels so much like a master both perfecting his current craft and reshuffling his older work so that it may continue living alongside him. Like a dusty country monk, Callahan explores the depths of his own restraint, his mundanity giving strength to weariness and exhaustion, vitality lining every finely-coarsed growl he sings. What a rarity it is these days to share space with an artist so confident and willing to give himself up to the trappings of time.
— Dyl
Listen to Gold Record on Bandcamp.
Girl Band — Live at Vicar Street
If I could go back to October or November, I would tell myself to buy myself a fucking ticket to Chicago to go see Girl Band play in the US because not only are you not going to get another chance to see them live for a few years probably, you’ll never get to see anyone live for a while and you’re going to want to experience this before things go to shit.
Live at Vicar Street is a nice little consolation prize though, as despite the band taking a near three year hiatus from touring due to frontman Dara Kiely’s mental health issues, Vicar Street shows that not only has the band not lost a step as a live act, they’ve only gotten better. With a fucking incredible setlist spanning their two albums and various singles, this shit fucking rips and roars for its 1 hour and 13 minute runtime. It’s one of the best live albums I’ve heard in a long while and if you’re missing moshing the fuck out to loud rock music, this should hopefully tide you for a bit.
— Matty
Listen to Live at Vicar Street on Bandcamp.
Dyl’s WILDCARD: Celer — Everyday After
Lately I have been obsessed with the exhaustion weighing over each passing day. It’s a symptom endemic to life in the crumbling empire, the inability to breathe without filling each pore with resistant fervor, every word uttered carrying some type of emotional baggage. How can we show we care when solidarity is high and material victories so low, is an impossible task so ever resolute in our daily bearings and beings of existing. To fill these gaps in myself I’ve begun growing plants, taking naps whenever laziness falls upon me, giving myself up to time and feeling its ribbons wrap around me gently. So too, has one of the many ambient projects by Tokyo-based composer William Long, known in the Bandcamp sphere as Celer. Recorded in the thick of global quarantine, Everyday After is an exercise in patience and exhaustion, the drones and loops of the composition ebbing and flowing from the serene to the tired, and it’s in these movements where the brilliance of the project shines. The space between the meta and the physical, the natural world, the concrete bearings and the bits of time locked inside both constructs, the endlessness and its inherent futile qualities. Among the wealth of typical descriptors heaped upon this music — peaceful, meditative, soothing — comes a revelation of stark imbalance in the ways in which we live our lives, and a reminder that there is always time to fix things, always time to correct a wayward course.
— Dyl
