#akolyth

Akolyth — Ecstatic Kingdom (Amor Fati)

Ecstatic black metal? Not so much. Akolyth creates a cavernous, aggressively lo-fi variety of black metal that sucks you in toward the void. There are long compositions, riff-driven structures, occasional departures into guitar soloing, but the emphasis on the filthy, submerged sonic quality effectively cancels any impulse toward showmanship or refined technique. The sound of Ecstatic Kingdom may not be quite as degraded as what you’ll hear on recent records by Black Cilice (see Esoteric Atavism) — but only “not quite.” And the textures are grainier, somehow more material in nature. It’s underground metal: you can just about feel the dirt and decaying matter of its unearthing. Very kvlt, and the facts of the music’s production (who is involved? where are they from?) are as obscure as the sounds. But there is significant venom distilled into the songs. They are bad for you. More, please.

Jonathan Shaw

Zoh Amba — Sun (Smalltown Supersound)

The two cuts that open free jazz saxophonist Zoh Amba’s latest recording could not be more different. Brief, lyrical “Gathering” hazards a long, breathy low note, some smacks on cymbals and as shaking sound as it gets going. A bit of melancholy “Tap” comes through in the melody, carried by sax. The song is a convocation or, if you like, a “Gathering” for four fractious players who seldom inhabit such serenity. “Interbeing” is frenetic by contrast, a spatter-painted rampage over piano and drums, stand-up bass thumping in quick time to give the tumult shape. Amba’s playing is full of grunts and blats and high screaming whistles, a fast-moving vortex of abrasive sounds. However different they are, both cuts showcase an intuitive synchrony between four able musicians—Amba herself, the revelatory pianist Lex Korton, wildly creative percussionist Miguel Marcel Russell and bassist Caroline Morton. Amba recorded these tracks solo before working them out with her ensemble and you can hear echoes of that lucid, solitary process in the just-under-two-minutes “Ma.” But the fun comes when they four of them kick into high gear together, hurtling headlong through chaos to find an active clarity.

Jennifer Kelly

Chris Brown / Ben Davis — Jongleurs (Artifact)

One way of looking at improvisational music practice is as an exploration of the relationship between fixed and unfixed elements. This Californian duo starts with certain knowns. Ben Davis is an adroit cellist with a command of jazz and classical vernaculars; Chris Brown straddles the electro-acoustic divide by playing acoustic piano as well as purchased and home-made and coded electronics. Turn ‘em loose in a nice studio, and what do you get? A dynamic flux of genre-specific and non-idiomatic gestures, all deployed with a concern that they complement one another from moment to moment. So, it matters less that classical-sounding forms coexist with digital sounds that flicker like the northern lights, but that they vibrate together in a complex but sensually pleasing field.

Bill Meyer

Comet Gain — Letters to Ordinary Outsiders (Tapete)

Letters to Ordinary Outsiders is wordy, riled up and engrossing. The music is powerful and emotive, ranging from the hearty jangle of “The Ballad of the Lives We Led” to an actual ballad, “Danbury Road,” and “Beat of the Veins”s roaring glam rock. Seven of the 12 songs begin with wry, nostalgic conversations that guide us through the album. There’s nothing mawkish, the nostalgia is tender and often invigorating. Take “the beat of the veins…that’s what keeps you alive” from “Beat…” or “the fifth rule [of rock and roll] is never stop” from “Ashtray Cult.” Letters To Ordinary Outsiders is an ode, most of all, to carrying on. Often carrying on despite. Over the up tempo strum of “Maybe One Day It’ll Really Happen” the lyrics draw on the past to bemoan the present, “it’s so different these days…they’re putting people in prison just for reading poems.” Still, this is a defiant collection, from scene-stealer Rachel Evans’ spoken piece on “The Ballad of…” – “Don’t call me Rach, it’s not my name/plant your flag and fuck off back home” – to the possibly satirical, certainly incensed rant from “Ashtray Cult,” “give me back my culture/that you stole from me.” But this record never wallows and the band seems at an uneasy peace with an uncertain future, even excited about the possibilities: “We’ve had our say…I know [new artists are] out there, breaking out of their cocoons.” After all, per “Danbury Road,” “nobody stays in the same place forever.” Even as David Christian and company look back, they look forward.

Alex Johnson

The Cords — The Cords (Slumberland)

From headlong opener “Fabulist,” The Cords jump straight to the point and rarely come off it. The point for Eva and Grace Tedeschi being tight melodies, clean, vigorously strummed electric guitar and barreling, no-frills-some-fills drumming. The formula is as old and irrepressible as rock and roll. To be more precise (and not quite as old as rock and roll), The Shop Assistants come immediately to mind, as do The Vaselines, fellow Scots with whom The Cords have shared a stage. The recording fidelity is more Sex with an X than “Dying for It,” but the half-heartbroken, half-grinning attitude isn’t far off the Kelly/McKee charm circa 1988. You can keep this record between the jangle pop beacons and get your Dolly Mixture kicks in the wistful, punchy “Vera” or dance in the splash and dazzle of The Pains of Being Pure at Heart on “Fabulist.” But songs like “Yes, It’s True” push the sonic boundaries further. There, sheets of distorted guitar catch something of Dinosaur Jr’s psychedelic wave machine — think a soupçon of “Little Fury Things” — or My Bloody Valentine’s roseate nightmares, if not at the same volume or intensity. In another direction (specifically to Sweden by way of the American south), "Weird Feeling" finds the Tedeschis swooping through high lonesome country harmonies akin to fellow sister act First Aid Kit. The trick is there is no trick. The Cords is bright, springy and capacious, a self-assured, mature performance that starts fresh and stays that way. You’re thrilled to hear it again.

Alex Johnson

Tim Daisy & Ken Vandermark — Fourth Atlas (Not Two)

Drummer Tim Daisy and saxophonist/clarinetist Ken Vandermark have been recurring partners for about a quarter century in a myriad of settings, including big bands, repertory projects, touring combos and as a freely improvising duo. Fourth Atlas represents the first time that they’ve written for each other. In January 2023, the two musicians reconvened for the first time since before COVID to lay some tunes on each other, take them on a brief Midwestern tour and make a record. The salient qualities of their partnership recur. Daisy’s great at creating rhythmic fields that support Vandermark’s forays into pensive melodicism and stormy expressionism, which means that their duos already hold together without compositional guidance. Fourth Atlas has all the sonic and emotional qualities that have made their work together so satisfying through the years. But the choice to write music for each other introduces a different logic, in which formal devices occur and recur, which means that the twists and turnarounds are as compelling as the vectors and vibes.

Bill Meyer

Flux Brothers — FLX (Self-Release)

Skanky no-wave blues vamps snake through nocturnal alleys and byways in a sound akin to Marc Ribot’s Ceramic Animal or a cybernetic Tom Waits. The two principals—John Maxwell Hobbs and David Azarch — met at the Limelight in NYC, presumably in the 1980s, and their grit-flecked, diesel stained reveries bear the unmistakable mark of that bygone era. “Tombstone Blues” is both primitive and extremely literate, a blistered riff purloined from Muddy Waters pulsing under dystopian poetry.  “Lament” is eerier, haunted with echo and jangling percussive sounds; you could play it on a singing saw, though it doesn’t seem they did. “Kokmo Joe’s Criminal Ballet” bangs and pounds and strikes lurid poses, the verses sketching an anti-hero at least, and maybe a villain, shaking tambourines, yelping hallelujah, wrestling with god. Full disclosure requires that I mention I went to high school with Hobbes, but he’s a long fucking way from Fort Wayne South Side, and more power to him.

Jennifer Kelly

Benjamin Fullwood — The Stars Are Very Far from All of This (Room40)

Benjamin Fullwood is a reedist and experimental musician who roughed out the basics of this five-track EP on a long, solitary night in Tokyo, then reworked the material with electronics some time later. His saxophone and clarinet take precedence in the opener, “Speedboat,” letting plangent, oscillating tones overlap and converse before blasting it all to smithereens with roiling, tumultuous drums from Serbian composer and percussionist Lav Kovacs. But elsewhere, as in the long, shimmering “Black Willow,” the sax comes through only in sporadic bleats against an undulating wash of indefinite sound. Textures fluctuate and bend, so that you glimpse things that might be strings or natural world sounds. But whether natural or electronic instruments prevail, the mix is luminous, nocturnal and mysterious.

Jennifer Kelly

S*Glass — Benign Neglect (Public Eyesore)

Seymour Glass usually works alongside collaborators in outfits such as Bren't Lewiis Ensemble and Glands of External Secretion, but on Benign Neglect the San Francisco sound artist is operating solo. Both alone and with friends, he weaves bizarre and entertaining collages constructed from tapes, electronics and miscellaneous objects. Here, he offers a trio of lengthy missives that unfold like the sound component of a surrealist synaesthetic happening. “Abandoned Information Kiosk” embodies a riot or the mass movement of citizenry, overseen by a barking dictator. Noise and static usher in “I Have a Prepared Statement,” with soloists and choruses blending in and out, presenting how it might sound if Kevin Drumm visited an opera while its vocalists were tuning up. On “The Exact Opposite of Surveillance,” malfunctioning electronic alarms force a continuously tumbling pile of damaged appliances to recite a monologue. Glass has been crafting acousmatic soundscapes for so long that he’s an expert at sussing out the narrative threads inherent in raw sound. The absurdist yarns he spins are incredibly compelling and loaded with his singularly bizarre sense of humor.

Bryon Hayes

Keefe Jackson / Jakob Heinemann / Adam Shead — Stinger (Irritable Mystic)

This mostly Chicagoan trio (tenor sax and bass clarinet player Keefe Jackson and drummer Adam Shead live there, bassist Jakob Heinmann used to before he went to school out west) takes its cues from the time when free jazz’s lessons were folded back into the music. One tune by Bobby Bradford and another by John Tchicai affirm their commitment to a loosely exploratory but unfailingly swinging cohesion, and originals by Heinemann and Jackson show how fertile that ground remains. The title tune, whose textures are dictated by the composer’s muscular tenor, continually morphs, growing more unbound as it evolves. But Jackson’s bass clarinet is the anchor on Heinemann’s “12345,” allowing the rhythms to rumble and pause. The exquisitely nimble realization of Bradford’s “She” likewise transforms from free flight to somber blues, unfolding with unforced but emotionally compelling logic.

Bill Meyer

Jinzo — Here’s The Meat EP (Sad Cactus)

Jinzo’s Here’s The Meat is an agitated mash of disaffected post-punk, nervy jazz and bar band bravado. Opener “Sharktank” sets a skronk-y tone with vocalist Jordan Germ spitting out scenes and sensations, deadpan but rushed. The frantic repetition of “bugs in the kitchen sink/bugs in the kitchen sink/bugs in the kitchen sink” is reflected by the scurrying percussion and noodle-y Minutemen funk. Funnily, a track later, “8 Big Ugly Legs,” actually told from a spider’s perspective, features a slinking, almost lounge-act groove. Suave and otherwise, this is physical, immediate music that keeps your ears perked. Even on the slower and starker “Take an Inch,” whose echoing advance sounds like a small-scale version of Lifter Puller’s “Nassau Coliseum," you can feel the agonizing claw forward, increment by eponymous increment. While there’s a complementary strain to the vocals here, there’s also something tempering and wistful like (stay with me) Zooey Deschanel a capella in Elf. Not so on the longest and final track, “Factory Smell.” Careful, circular guitar and drums step deliberately alongside the mumbled, noirish narrative. It’s sinister and enveloping, part Slint, part Lou Reed’s “The Gun,” until the instruments break stride, rev up loud and ragged, and roil the record to a characteristically lurching close.

Alex Johnson

Egil Kalman & Hans Hulbækmo — Unit of Time (Motvind)

When you hear the words “drums” and “bass,” what comes to mind? Machinery emitting three-figure bpms? William Parker and Hamid Drake making hollow wooden instruments fill the surrounding space with spirit-summoning rhythm? It’s fair to surmise that Egil Kalman and Hans Hulbækmo know a bit about both, and have taken that knowledge with them as they chart a third course. The duo are the rhythm section that propels Marthe Lea’s excellent folk-jazz ensemble, and their separate adventures have taken in modular synthesis, alternate tunings and choosily omnivorous jazz. Their aim in this pairing is to explore the ways that subdividing time neutralizes its passage. Kalman plays double bass and synth, Hulbækmo kit and hand drums and they both bust out a jaw harp. Their rhythms throb and scatter, summoning meditational vibration from the elasticity of their chosen sounds.

Bill Meyer

Living Hour — Internal Drone Infinity (Beloved)

In my Dusted review of Living Hour’s last album I wrote, “Despite its uneven presentation, Someday Is Today is a beautiful, evocative record, whose charms invite and reward repeat listens. It’ll be interesting to hear where Living Hour head next.” On the evidence of Internal Drone Infinity, the answer is that the band is venturing into fuzzier, more pop-leaning realms, with increasingly emotional vocals from Sam Sarty. Someday Is Today’s finest song, “Feelings Meeting,” was produced by Jay Som, who takes up the production mantle for the whole of this new release. While previous reference points included Beach House, here there are just as many moments that recall the gnarly, countrified grunge of Dinosaur Jr, or early Smashing Pumpkins. Guitarist Adam Soloway gets a vocal turn on the mid-album highlight, “Firetrap,” and the album is peppered with chaotic elements, such as the screwball electro introduction to opening song, “Stainless Steel Dream.” It feels like Living Hour are stepping into their own, perhaps a little unsure on their feet, but with plenty of energy and personality.

Tim Clarke

Lugubrious Garment — Demo MMXXV (Nuclear Winter)

Even in a space that’s notable for nutso band names, Lugubrious Garment is a singularly nutso name. That’s not exactly uncharted territory for Italian musician Gabriele Gramaglia, who has also blessed us with projects named Vertebra Atlantis, Turris Eburnea and Cosmic Putrefaction. That last band has issued some truly, nastily psychedelic death metal, and Lugubrious Garment does the project one better by doubling down on the nasty. The churn and swirl are all here, but the textures and truculence feel more like black/death. The relatively more direct attack is very effective; check out “Eternal Scars and Imperative Backfires,” which hurls itself spiraling through various layers of drywall and brick, simultaneously managing to shove a bootheel into your lower abdomen. Pretty good trick, but nothing lugubrious about it that this reviewer can detect.

Jonathan Shaw

Natural Information Society — Perseverance Flow (Eremite)

Listening to the single piece of music that comprises Natural Information Society’s Perseverance Flow is like taking a brisk, 37-minute walk through terrain that gradually becomes more dense and challenging. Mikel Patrick Avery’s varied percussive palette sets the pace, over which Joshua Abrams’s guimbri (essentially a resonant three-string bass), Lisa Alvarado’s harmonium and Jason Stein’s bass clarinet doggedly maintain simple, loping, repetitive figures, which evolve in stages. Avery periodically interjects triplet fills, as though the rhythm is briefly stumbling over itself, then just as quickly recovers. Abrams’s basslines hold the center, but there are occasional metallic-sounding overdubs, where a couple of notes will jump out of the mix like an angry frog. Alvarado’s harmonium melody unfolds progressively, becoming longer and more sinuous as it goes. Stein’s clarinet calls out high, ghostly, keening notes over the top. During the first 20 minutes the four players introduce enough variation and subtle shifts in emphasis to keep things moving fluidly, then during the final 15 minutes or so Avery skillfully works in a pulsing double-time cymbal and kick-drum pattern that amps up the urgency. In the closing minutes the layers simplify and coalesce, bringing the piece to a satisfying and well-earned conclusion.

Tim Clarke

Pulse Emitter — Tide Pools (Hausu Mountain)

Darryl Groetsch’s latest album as Pulse Emitter seems forever on the verge of becoming. Lost in imaginary stylistic time travel, the surface of Tide Pools slowly reveals microscopic life forms hidden in subaquatic crags and fissures. There assemble the photons, bugs and critters of the track titles busy in their unselfconscious rituals. Groetsch produces a hybrid of Bach and synthesizer music full of baroque flourishes, shifting time signatures and ambient wash which ironically seems totally in tune with the rhythms of the natural world his work describes. The creatures of the pool creating underwater eddies which mirror the birds and scattered clouds which deepen shadows as they pass. With an elegance of form and function and emphasis on movement above destination Pulse Emitter’s Tide Pools is well worth exploring.

Andrew Forell

Nastia Reigel — Identity (Infrastructure)

Identity by Nastia Reigel

Berlin producer Nastia Reigel starts hard and fast on her debut Identity. After the thumping rush of “Do It Now”, she barely lets up. A pedal to metal storm of percussion and disjointed vocal snippets, thankfully unadorned with synth pads, arpeggiated keyboards or any other woo-woo flourishes, Riegel concerns herself only with bruising gut punch rhythm and bass sounds. Reigel’s drums are dry but deep, the kicks and toms influenced by industrial rhythms, stripped to their relentless essence, the hi-hats crisp and tempo efficient to the point of exhaustion. Extremely effective when excessively loud, Reigel also zones in on the sort of anxious alienation that haunted much of the cold war post-punk of the Neue Deutsche Welle. When she chants “Identity” over the pummeling title track it sounds more like a plea than a declaration. Cathartic stuff.

Andrew Forell

Repetition Repetition— Fit for Consequences: Original Recordings, 1984-1987 (Freedom to Spend)

Fit for Consequences: Original Recordings, 1984–1987 by Repetition Repetition

With the Freedom to Spend imprint, Pete Swanson and Jed Bindeman mine the buried gems of yesteryear with their Freedom to Spend imprint. They’ve struck gold with Fit for Consequences, which pulls from the corpus of LA duo Ruben Garcia and Steve Caton. This is a suite of minimalist soundscapes that the pair self-released in the mid-1980s under the name Repetition Repetition. Garcia was a follower of the Steve Reich and Philip Glass school, which favored long repetitive passages sewn from short phrases. These tracks hew to that trajectory: brief shimmering keyboard lines become hypnotic mantras, emboldened by subtle percussion and simultaneously resting on soft pillows of drone. Caton was a rocker, collaborating with Tori Amos, and he lends his rock’n’roll attitude to the songs. He unfurls 1980s electric guitar flourishes that lend the music a movie soundtrack vibe. Fit for Consequences shows off the pair’s ability to conjure sounds that fascinate and enchant but also surprise and delight. There are times where the guitar strays a bit too far into 1980s glitz (see “The Men are Fighting”), but for the most part Garcia and Caton keep the atmosphere calm and copacetic.  

Bryon Hayes

Soga — Corrosión (Iron Lung)

Corrosión (LUNGS-303) by SOGA

A fearless, ferocious punk band from Mexico City, Soga addresses femicide, cartel violence, government cynicism and all manner of other discontents. This is a sharper, harder record than the demo Soga released back in 2019. The sound summons the Avengers at their most desperate, or Crucifix at their most deranged, or the textures of first-wave hardcore you can hear at various points on Not So Quiet on the Western Front (1982) — check out the tunes by Social Unrest, MAD, Los Olvidados, heck, just listen to the whole thing. Then put Corrosión back on the turntable. Punk lives, and these Mexican women invest it with the all the energy and fury generated by the current conjuncture. “El Himno Desentonado de Una Nación Moribunda” pretty much says it all, but your reviewer really likes “Fuego, Ataque.” It’s pissed and relentless.

Jonathan Shaw

Status: Expunged — Skull Crusher (Self released)

Skull Crusher by Status: Expunged

Breakcore, as a genre, is not so much polarizing as it is defiantly, happily, and probably permanently unpalatable to most people. As with every other form where “everything sounds the same,” though, if you dig into it a little there are nuances. Yes, even in breakcore, where half the fun is feeling like you’re being energetically clubbed over the head. A really excellent recent example comes from Red Deer, Alberta’s Status: Expunged, whose Skull Crusher does indeed do what it says on the tin. And yet over these 31 minutes things never get tiresome or repetitive, never wears out its welcome and stays consistently involving. Give or take a Venetian Snares album or two that have broken genre containment, the result is both an excellent example of the form and one that the curious would be well served to use as an introduction.

Ian Mathers

Three-Layer Cake — Sounds the Color of Grounds (Otherly Love)

Sounds The Color Of Grounds by Three-Layer Cake

Mike Watt may have compared himself to a tugboat, but his bass is more like an icebreaker; it can plow through obstacles that would sink or stop most other vessels. In Three-Layer Cake, his postal collaboration with drummer Mike Pride and guitarist Brandon Seabrook, that quality gives the other players license to splash all manner of commotion at his grooves. Bursts of stun guitar, bowed banjo textures, speed-demon note flurries, sideways drum perambulations and triple-speed, forward-backward beat assaults — none of it’s going to sink the good ship Watt. However, Watt’s got a curve of his own to throw. His spiels this time were rendered in sonnet form, although you might find it hard to tell, since Watt’s voice is as unflappably consistent as his bass.

Bill Meyer

Tiberius — Troubadour (Audio Antihero)

Troubadour by Tiberius

Brendan Wright calls Tiberius “farm emo,” a raucous mixture of hearts-on-sleeves feeling, churning guitars and pounding rhythms. “Sag,” an early single, warbles with sincerity, but roars with sudden, hurricane-like gales of guitar sound, a singer-songwriter confessional radicalized by amplification. “Moab” twitches and sprawls and moans, its palm-muted punk tensions soothed by pedal steel. Consider what might happen if Centro-Matic and Built to Spill had a red-haired bastard child, running twangy self-revelation through a triumphant wall of sound.