#dc cross

03 Greedo and Mike Free — “Drop Down (Feat. KenTheMan)” (Alamo)

The best we can hope for is that 03 Greedo gets out in 2023 on good behavior, but the man born Jason Jamal Jackson isn’t thinking about shortcutting his 20-year sentence stuck in a Texas prison like that. In the space where you thought 2018’s God Level would be a coup de grâce and his legacy forever relegated to jail phone freestyles and unfinished Instagram snippets, Greedo — or the people he’s entrusted to be him in the meantime, anyway — has found ways to keep his name in the game via a steady stream of projects (including Kenny Beats and Travis Barker collaborations) that will shortly include fellow Angelino Mike Free, DJ Mustard acolyte and co-producer of Tyga’s “Rack City,” among others. “Drop Down,” which also features the flavor of Northside Houston rapper Ken TheMan, is one of those earworms that self-evidently shows why the streets still scream the new album’s title. Say it loud, say it proud: Free 03.

Patrick Masterson

Botch — “One Twenty Two” (Sargent House)

And there etched into Tacoma’s forest timber read the words last touched in 2002: Set apart, great divides… but as with so much else culturally two decades later, not so great that mathcore luminaries Botch couldn’t reunite for this one-off born out of quarantine frustrations and snowballing what ifs. It’d be a mistake to look at this as anything more than impermanent, a glimpse through a keyhole of another world full of satisfying returns and flooding nostalgia, but anyone old enough to recognize the significance of “One Twenty Two” should appreciate it for existing at all. It’s a little slower, a little lurchier than you might expect from the Washington quartet, but Dave Verellen’s scorched vocals retain their power and the energy is there. Some days you wonder why it is you keep waking up to an orb falling apart; some days you get an answer back from the cosmos urging you not to throw in the towel just yet. It’s good to have them back for a fleeting moment, anyway.

Patrick Masterson

D.C. Cross — Hot-Wire the Lay-Low: Australian Escapist Pieces for Guitar (Self-Release)

Hot-wire the Lay-low (Australian escapist pieces for guitar) by D.C Cross

D.C. Cross has a lilting, breezy way with the acoustic blues guitar, his tunes unspooling with a lightfingered (and light-footed) grace. It’s fitting then that he wrote those songs during an itinerant year crisscrossing New South Wales during the second year of COVID. The place names, then, are a little different from the usual—Cootamundra and South Albury instead of Memphis or St. Louis—but sound will resonate with fans of Jack Rose, William Tyler and Glenn Jones. These are traveling songs in love with motion. “Stolen Police Car Down the Great Western Highway” has a fluid, onward rushing bravado, its flurries and forays of picking offered in service of a wide-horizon groove. “At Night Those Mountains Disappear” turns ruminative, leaving space for introspection as the dusk falls. Cross didn’t stay for long in any single place, but he let the essence of each locality seep into himself and his music. “Birthday Dread” is maybe the loveliest of a lovely bunch, its quick bursts of picking erupting out of serene melody, just touched with melody. The crossroads has always held a place in the way we imagine the blues, but no one which crossroads, did they?

Jennifer Kelly

 Miles Davis Quintet — Live Europe 1960 Revisited (Ezz-thetics)

It’s possible to assess this album without hearing it. If you’re a more than casual fan of the Miles Davis-John Coltrane partnership, you probably already have this music, either on Volume 6 of the Legacy Bootleg Series or on actual bootlegs. And if you’ve been paying attention he last few years, you probably already have taken a position on the Ezz-thetics label’s practice of taking post-bop and free jazz masterpieces from the mid-20th century, repackaging them with new art, new annotation (respect to Dusted’s Derek Taylor for his work on this volume), reorganized track listings, and giving the sound the most presence-enhancing buff that the 21st century can currently provide.

But what’s the fun in not listening? This music, taken from the beginning and the end of the tour that would put a full stop on that epic alliance, is a torch lit by aesthetic tension and blazing with the diverse passions that fired said tensions. Miles, abetted by most of his band, was going into a slick phase, presenting his modal ideas in streamlined fashion. And Coltrane was ready to take that concept as deep as it could go. They were both right, but no stage could contain their contradictions for long. Framed by versions of “So What,” played at a pace similar to the original on Kind Of Blue, this five-track collection distills the tour’s drama quite irresistibly.

Bill Meyer 

 Grotesqueries — Haunted Mausoleum (Caligari Records)

Haunted Mausoleum by GROTESQUERIES

Nuthin fancy, folks — just 17 minutes of rip-snortin’ Metal ov Death, with one ear on the Swedish old school and another on early British speed metal’s tough and dirty tonality. That’s an appealing combination, and Grotesqueries are clearly having a good time with it, in spite of their songs’ titles: “Flesh Prison” sounds like a long night with bad gas, “Gortician” sounds like an obscure species of squash (until you catch the pun). And so on. Drummer Yianni Tranxidis is the band’s principal force and provides the gruesome aesthetic vision, and this reviewer has to note that his skills with beating the skins outstrip his banal, horror-culture-derived enthusiasms for gross-out violence and human depredations. If you can put up with the exhausted and “evil” themes, the songs are fast, thumping and vicious. Check out the opening minute of “Gortician,” which shifts gears a few times without losing its headlong quality or the layer of fetid ditchwater that covers it. Pretty stinky, dudes. More, please.

Jonathan Shaw

 Hellrazor — Heaven’s Gate

Heaven's Gate by Hellrazor

Given how important they seemed at the time, it’s a little puzzling how few bands really sound like Nirvana. Hardly anyone gets the alchemy that Cobain & co. worked with the combination of careening, unhinged but tuneful melodies, noise-blistered guitars and assaultive bass and drums, though the constituent parts are everywhere. But here’s one. Hellrazor the nouveau grunge outfit led by Michael Falcone (drummer for Speedy Ortiz and Ovlov, but here on guitar) gets a lot of that wild, manic-depressive sweetness, that obliterating guitar force right. Heaven’s Gate is the band’s second full-length, after a raft of singles, EPs and cassettes stretching back to about 2016, and it is fuzzily, annihilatingly glorious, i.e., it smells a lot like teen spirit. The best cuts are the super-heavy, feedback bending “Landscaper,” which swaggers like a giant metallic beast, and “Jello Stars” which runs MBV’s guitar blurs into shimmering walls of noise-y mayhem, then parts the curtains for slack shoegaze-y song-ful-ness. There are some goofy spoken word bits bracketing the music, but the songs speak for themselves from the Sonic Youth-riffed (and appropriately named) “Big Buzz” to the Roboto-funked, cartoon voiced “All the Candy in the World.”

Jennifer Kelly

 Jones Jones — Just Justice (ESP-Disk’)

Just Justice by Jones Jones

The search engine-stymying name of this trio obscures, among other things, the formidable proliferation of instrumental skill and improvisational understanding gathered under its banner. Bassist Mark Dresser (Anthony Braxton Quartet, Trio M,), sopranino / tenor saxophonist Larry Ochs (ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Maybe Monday, Spectral), and drummer Vladimir Tarasov (Ganelin Trio, Moscow Coposers Orchestra) each pull together the full package an individual sound, an encyclopedic grasp of past musical advances, and a capacity to tune into the moment’s action. They also possess a decade and a half of collaboration, which assures that what you hear on their fourth album isn’t just the sum of their sounds, but an integrated ensemble concept in which microscopic details enhance evolving sonic narratives. This is music that wears its heaviness lightly.

Bill Meyer  

 Rokia Koné & Jackknife Lee—BAMANAN (Real World) 

Rokia Koné sings with a little sand in the corners, her burnished Malian blues runs scratched up, just a little with a hitch here, a rasp there, so that she sounds both unearthly and very real. Koné once backed up Angelique Kidjo in Les Amazone D’Afrique, and vocally, she shares some of that legendary tribe’s strength. BAMANAN, recorded remotely during the COVID year, pairs her with Jackknife Lee, an Irish producer now living in California, known for shaping the work of U2, Taylor Swift, the Killers and R.E.M. The two never shared physical space while recording this album. Given the two principals, it not surprising that contrast and contradiction is built in. Koné has an elemental, soulful presence; Lee specializes in the sheen and aura of big-time arena pop. So in “Bi Ye Tulonba Ye” the singer calls out lines that could have been written before the industrial age, that would sound perfectly comfortable echoing over miles of empty dunes, while Lee frames her in a shimmering, surreal bed of synths that could have come from The Joshua Tree. The songs vary in their mix of indie pop and afro-blues with “N’yanyan” coming closest to a western-style quiet storm ballad, and “Anw Tile (It’s Our Time)” sounding most undilutedly Malian. “Kurunba” is the club banger with infra-red blasts of synth bass and intricate patterns of hand drums, and an exhilarating communal call and response between Koné and her singers. Lee makes every sound reverberate, especially the drums, which have that Phil Collins-esque, gate-reverbed, realer-than-real punch, creating an uncanny valley for this powerful vocalist to preside over.

Jennifer Kelly

Man Made Hill — Mirage Repair (Orange Milk)

Mirage Repair by Man Made Hill

Unsuspecting listeners, prepare yourselves for a hefty helping of petri dish funk, a sonic concoction as infectious as bacteria, but far less gross. Pop miscreant Randy Gagne – the man behind such bizarre tunes as “Hot 4 Sloth” and “My Accoutrements” – is back with another collection of ectoplasm-flecked ditties. The Hamilton, Ontario-based one-man purveyor of retro-futuristic sleaze is determined to reel you in with his phantasmagoric take on R&B, dance, and lounge music. If this all strikes you as insane, don’t be scared. Gagne has an enticing sense of charisma, so it's best to give in. What you’ll find beneath the faux-sordid exterior is an altruistic family man raised on televised wrestling, Full Moon Entertainment VHS tapes, and other cultural oddities. He's a noise musician with a quirky sense of humor, who’s always had a soft spot for pop music. A freak coincidence brought Gagne into the orbit of Jeremy Greenspan (Junior Boys), and Mirage Repair is the result. The producer gives Man Made Hill’s freaky funk a glistening wax job, polishing away the possibility for any rough edges. Give it a listen and you’ll have Gagne’s earworms penetrating your grey matter for weeks to come. Imagine the stares you’ll get when you sing lines like “take a look at what I brought from the plasma zone / every time you go / you take a piece of meat with you” to yourself in the subway. Doesn’t that image make you smile?

Bryon Hayes

 Mystic Charm — Hell Did Freeze Over (Personal Records)

Amsterdam’s Mystic Charm may be a sort of missing (or at least sorely overlooked) link, between doom metal progenitors like Cirith Ungol and Saint Vitus and the stoner-occult, fuzz-and-snarl antics of Electric Wizard. By the time Dopethrone (2000) put that latter band on the mass cultural map, Mystic Charm had flamed out, disappearing into a smoky (ahem) haze. This new compilation LP includes five tracks from a tentative 2017 comeback session, for which Mystic Charm rerecorded tunes from the planned 1999 Hell Did Freeze Over LP; additionally, you’ll hear five songs from a session in the early 1990s, which issued in the “Lost Empire” 7” single. The tunes and tones all sound pretty familiar now, given the sheer number of occult doom records that have been released, the persistence of Electric Wizard’s dope-infused template and the many imitators that followed in that band’s wake. This record indicates that we should reconsider just whose wake that is. Mystic Charm matches distortion with punch, and check out Rini Lipman’s vocals. She growls and howls with appealing menace. It almost makes you miss the Clinton years.

Jonathan Shaw

Old Million Eye — The Air’s Chrysalis Chimes (Feeding Tube/Cardinal Fuzz)

The Air's Chrysalis Chime by Old Million Eye

When most of the band lived in the Bay area, the psychedelic combo Dire Wolves generated recordings at a rate that another Dusted scribe characterized as “dizzying.” But now that key players are scattered from coast to coast, that rate has slowed to a pace that won’t dent your store of Dramamine. But that doesn’t mean they’ve all just quit. While Jeffrey Alexander courts heads on the east coast, synthesizer and bass player Brian Lucas is keeping the torch lit out west under the guise of Old Million Eye. The seven songs on The Air’s Chrysalis Chimes strive for an effect that condensation achieves naturally in rural meadows on early autumn mornings. They’re light and gauzy, and the harder you look, the more they fade away. But they never disappear; they’re just luring you into an unknown zone. Lead on.

Bill Meyer

Salim Nourallah — See You in Marfa (Palo Santo)

Salim Nourallah spent much of the pandemic releasing a string of EPs, eventually collected in his the World's Weakest Man box set. It seems like the songwriter would be due for another full-length, but he continues his extended play ways with See You in Marfa. This release has a strange origin, coming out of sessions with The Church's Marty Willson-Piper (the two do, in theory, have an LP coming out at some point). One of their collaborations, “Hold on to the Night,” makes an appearance on this EP, an emblematic marker of Nourallah sounding re-energized. It's a wry sort of party anthem, continuously pushing the dawn away. “Not Back to Sad” offers a surprise collaboration between Nourallah and his brother Faris, which should please long-time fans of the pairing (as should the electric guitar tone on this one). The disc's title track marks its other highpoint. It's a straightforward and catchy love song that Nourallah wrote for his girlfriend seven years ago (further evidence that there's a great album hidden among this string of EPs, though that probably doesn't matter in the digital era). See You in Marfa might be a little bit of a stopgap release, continuing the EP procession, but it doesn't sound tossed off. Nourallah might not have put out an album in four years, but he hasn't lost his momentum during that time either.

Justin Cober-Lake

  Julie Odell — Autumn Eve (Frenchkiss)

Julie Odell has a big strong belt, a kicking band and a way with the giant pop climax, so I’m struggling to figure out why I’m so lukewarm on this album. The Louisiana native borrows the accessible parts from her swampy homeland’s legacy, dotting indie confessionals with blues-y slides, country hiccups and even a few cajun dance moves. Maybe it’s the way she stuffs every factor she can think of that sends big pop songs to the rafters into suitcase-sized songs. Take “Cardinal Feather,” for instance, which combines a thundering, Arcade Fire-style beat, a sauntering blues verse, a flexible, variegated vocal attack and some significant mood changes into its five-minute length. It’s all aimed, clearly, at the feel-good, hands-in-the-air, ecstatic end of the pop spectrum, but it seems like too much thought went into how it would be perceived and too little into how it felt and what it meant. Every one of these songs feels like a late show banger, but you don’t really want a whole album of these. Why not let a few of them just be?

Jennifer Kelly

 Plastic Bubble — Enchance (Garden Gate)

Enchance by Plastic Bubble

Plastic Bubble is a giddy, goofy, lo-fi psychedelic pop band out of Kentucky, one that started as a vehicle for Matt Taylor’s solo material but has lately grown into a more collaborative effort. Only two of the 13 tracks on Enchance give him sole songwriting credit. The rest are mostly joint or group efforts, with one solo composition by Elisa McCabe, who joined the band in 2012. These are, generally, keyboard-wheedling, drum-machine pounding, exuberant songs, tinged with a euphoric weirdness, but eminently hummable. McCabe’s “Point the Way,” for instance, hitches dreaming, melancholic melodies to a motorik pump of drum machine, with spiraling curls of several different kinds of keyboards jetting off the main tune. Taylor’s “Listening to Genesis” is barer and more wistful, just a sketch in electric piano and mechanized beat. I hope no one takes this the wrong way, but “Water,” reminds me of Daniel Johnson, with its wide-eyed, whatever-blinks-into-my-head lyrics and muscular, buzzy guitars. It is a little insane, but totally committed to it, which makes all the difference.

Jennifer Kelly

  Caitlin Rose — “Black Obsidian” (Pearl Tower)

You’d be forgiven at this point for thinking the look Caitlin Rose is giving over her shoulder on The Stand-In’s cover was her way of saying goodbye, but “Black Obsidian” suggests the seven-year quiet period between that look and the recordings of her forthcoming and oft-delayed Cazimi was only space with which to live darkly a little. With a sweeping flourish not unlike Echo & the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon” outro, Rose skirts gothic decadence in spinning the tale of what she terms an “impossible puzzle,” a corroded relationship where one person’s overworking to show the other what could be with no success. “Is it that you haven't got it in you, or that you just don't want to?” she sings, letting the final word lilt and float like a blown bubble. But we know the same way she does how inevitable obsidian feels in the spaces no one else can see: If you have to ask the question, a sad and terminally pining part of you already knows the answer.

Patrick Masterson

 Wolfbrigade — Anti-Tank Dogs (Armageddon)

Anti-Tank Dogs EP by WOLFBRIGADE

The long-running Swedish crust outfit rolls on with this new 7” EP — and “long-running” doesn’t justly represent Wolfbrigade’s stamina and staying power. Jocke Rydbjer, Erik Norberg and the rest of the band are well into their third decade of decrying social injustice and destroying amps. If you haven’t been paying attention, the semiotics of a Nordic hardcore band invoking wolves and martial organization might give you pause, but you should know that in the late 1990s, they changed their name from Wolfpack to avoid any confusion with or perceived support for a Neo-Nazi prison gang using the same moniker. And sure, there’s some cognitive dissonance in a song that takes on the depredations of warfare by alluding to anti-tank weapons. You can hear some echoes from Ukraine, and the West’s provision of lots and lots of Javelin missiles to the Ukrainian military. It’s ambiguous: Putin’s adventurism is repugnant and brutal, but Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are sure raking in the cash. Wolfbrigade has never been particularly interested in subtlety, and like the band, this EP is a blunt instrument. If you’re interested in muscular d-beat with more than a passing interest in death metal’s burly buzz, here’s your late-summer soundtrack.