#drekka

Omar Ahmad — Inheritance (AKP)

Inheritance by Omar Ahmad

Omar Ahmad’s music follows dance pulses through thickets of memory. A glitchy beat sinks into slippery textures of synthesizer, piano, strings and field recordings; the music moves but in a haze of memory, as the sounds of women, children and running water flashes and subsides. Omar Ahmad is a Palestinian-American electronic artist and DJ currently based in Brooklyn and in this first full-length, he explores identity (ethnic and otherwise) through a scrim of memory. These glowing ambient compositions don’t hammer the point home—rather they gently suggest and evoke a dual western/Arabic identity. The baby in “Gesso” says “Daddy” in English but is answered in another language. The cut “usra” whose name translates as “home” or “family” incorporates a ululating non-western vocal alongside the pristine electronic modernity of synths. “Sham Oasis” has, perhaps, the most concentrated array of Middle Eastern sounds, a jangle of not-guitars, the thud of hand drums, a shaker, but it also twitches and glitters with space-age electronic sounds. The songs have lovely, idealized, luminous textures that don’t belong, exactly, to any single culture, yet they are warm and beautiful enough to make it feel like home anyway.

Jennifer Kelly

Animal Piss It’s Everywhere — S-T (Half a Million)

Animal Piss, It's Everywhere by Animal Piss, It's Everywhere

This loose and goofy country ramble obsesses over Jesus and intoxicants, sometimes but not always in the same songs. Indeed these bleary sing-alongs seem best suited for Sunday morning with the sun streaming in on the tail end of a one- or two-day bender. They’re exhausted but full of good feeling, played on muscle memory and love of the game. “Jesus Got Under My Skin,” for instance, ramps up the roadhouse boogie in a stunned and stoned narrative about finding one’s savior—and then trying to ditch him. “Naked” slouches and twangs in a righteous chorus of “Naked…ass…man…blues.” There’s considerable talent on hand, however casually it is deployed, from a confederation of Western Mass freak folk regulars. A guitar-heavy line-up features Anthony Pasquarosa, Clark Griffin (Weeping Bong Band, Pigeons), Shannon Ketch (Bunwinkies) and Andy Goulet on pedal steel (Winter Pills, Lonesome Brothers etc.). Rob Smith from Rhyton and Mouth Painter plays drums and Jim Bliss (of various Matt Valentine projects) sits in on bass. “I’ve found sucksess, sucking at success,” croons the singer, making a point; this band of miscreants achieve their aims without coming within a hundred miles of commercial palatability.

Jennifer Kelly

Aunty Rayzor — “Nina” (Nyege Nyege Tapes)

Perhaps the hardest song I heard over the last month opens with an almost demented pogoing and a video staring straight at the sun with an airplane’s corpse and a silhouette on the wing fixing her hair before she struts into your life and all over your ears. If you don’t already know Bisola Olungbenga aka Aunty Rayzor, Nyege Nyege Tapes has done a fine job ensuring you’ll want to hear everything the Nigerian has to say after one listen through of “Nina,” the lead single from September’s Viral Wreckage. Veering between red hair and blonde amid rusty MiG-21s, Rayzor takes the hard-nosed rhythm from Berlin-based beatmaker Debmaster — just listen to the way that kick rumbles on the low end — and matches it step for step to powerful effect. You don’t need Nyege Nyege’s effusive description of the forthcoming full-length to gather we have another formidable female rapper waiting in — or is it on? — the wings to embarrass the boys and prolong women’s global chokehold on the genre that little bit longer. Only a fool or an incel could complain.

Patrick Masterson

Aware — Requiem for a Dying Animal (Glacial Movements)

Requiem For A Dying Animal by AWARE

Alexander Glück, who records as Aware, specializes in producing a haunting tributary of ambient sound that aims to cause unease. His music is ghostly, chilling, and morose. It evokes loneliness yet, like most good stories, contains a faint trickle of hope. His compositions encompass vast swathes of tone peppered with microscopic flecks. These resemble large chunks of metamorphic rock that Glück has fused into rich, veiny patterns. These polychromatic constructions tell stories of isolationism and hardship interspersed with hopefulness and joy. They reflect our species’ interconnectedness with a natural world that simultaneously seeks to nurture and destroy us, as we in turn seek to exploit its bounties. With his music, Glück seeks to find an equilibrium, a stalemate between us and our environment. He will likely never solve this riddle, but Requiem for a Dying Animal is a fruitful step on the journey toward his goal.  

Bryon Hayes

Blight House — Blight the Way (Syrup Moose Records)

Blight the Way by Blight House

Blight House makes the kind of death metal-infused grindcore that aims for utter absurdity: absurdly heavy riffing; absurdly fast drum-machine blips, blats and thumps; absurdist, so-stupid-they’re clever semiotics. It’s hard not to laugh (or at least ruefully chuckle) at the puns in the band’s name and in the title of this new record. Song titles are even dumber and sometimes even more funny: “Dismembers Only,” “Bible Belt Baby Buffet,” “Walpurgis Date-Night.” And so on. But as is generally the case with records like this, it’s hard to know where the joke ends and the band begins. If it’s all done for laughs, then why is the music executed with such apparent seriousness (n.b., for a less overworked version of a grindy gag act, see this)? And if we’re supposed to hear at least some of Blight House’s stuff with a dash of gravid sincerity, then please, band, send instructions on how to pull off that bit of cognitive jiu-jitsu. Or on second thought, maybe don’t. It’s probably better for everyone involved if we just accept the low-brow yucks to be found in songs like “Acephalophilia III: Hopelessly Headless for You” for what they are, and take the tune at its word. If you think about this sort of edge-lord-adjacent, meme-driven cultural production too hard, you may end up in the writers’ room for Ron DeSantis’s next campaign commercial. Headless and heedless, thoughtless and feckless—blight the way into our collective, idiotic future, dudes.

Jonathan Shaw

Buffalo Nichols — The Fatalist (Fat Possum)

The Fatalist by Buffalo Nichols

Buffalo Nichols’ Carl Nichols has a fine gravelly voice, an unfussy skill with the pick and the slide and the swagger that turns songs of suffering into songs of defiance. In other words, he’s a bluesman of the first order and unusual, these days, in that he’s not 100 years old or a suburban white guy. Yes, Buffalo Nichols is on a mission to reclaim the blues for the folks who invented it—black people—and this very fine album makes a pretty good case for the rightness of his cause. How so? Well, to begin with The Fatalist is mostly acoustic, relying on the speed and accuracy of Nichols fingers rather than a floor sized pedal board; there are no endless wah wah’d solos, no feedback freakery. His vocal delivery matches up, too, quiet but intense, an on-pitch growl that pulls you in and holds you there. There’s a simplicity in the playing and arrangements that underlines the power of these song. Listen, for instance, to the eerie magic of slide, the elemental punch of kick drum on the Blind Willie Nelson cover, “You’re Gonna Need Somebody on Your Bond.” Or the winding melancholy on “The Long Journey Home,” which frolics funereally in banjo and fiddle tones. He brings in the Philadelphia singer and songcatcher Samantha Rise on “This Moment” for a duet, her voice warm and resonant, his hoarse with emotion, a violin twining around the both of them in a dizzy mesh of sounds. A subtle album, but a good one.

Jennifer Kelly

Cyberplasm — First Emanation (Iron Lung)

First Emanation (LUNGS-262) by CYBERPLASM

Electro-punk dissonance melds and mixes it up with anarcho-freak industrial noise on this new EP from Olympia-based Cyberplasm. The band doesn’t seek to exorcize the ghost in the machine so much as conjure it, feed it with nerve impulses harvested from your frontal lobes and then unleash it on our various political and informational systems. Chaos ensues. Maybe it’s liberatory, maybe it just wants to raze all signs of institutional power. Too damn bad if your sense of security or self-worth gets in the way — and in any case, the music is perversely enjoyable. Check out the d-beat scree of “Spit from Fluid” or the foreboding, crust-infused “Second Mind.” The EP’s ten minutes flash by in a series of burned-out synapses and frying amplifiers. Cyberplasm makes underground music that captures the grit and weirdness of lawless subterranean spaces, virtual and material. It’s exciting stuff. It feels dangerous. Punk’s not dead.

Jonathan Shaw

Decoherence — Order (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Order by DECOHERENCE

If you have been following Decoherence’s coruscating, cosmic circuit through the 21st century, you won’t find much to be surprised by on Order, the band’s new LP. It’s 40+ minutes of pounding, pyrotechnic industrial metal, thoroughly blackened and shot through with enough harsh noise to burn off your eyebrows. The pace is a little slower, vocalist Derek Jacobsen (who appears on Decoherence releases as Tahazu, an anglicized version of the ancient Sumerian word for battle) sounds like another layer of gristle is occluding his vocal cords, and the compositions of musicians Stroda and Prior are marginally less engaged by melody than many of those on the band’s previous LP, Unitary (2020). If you’re into this sort of thing, none of those small changes is a bad thing. But while Unitary represented a profound development when contrasted with the band’s first several releases, Order feels like a consolidation — a band summing its aesthetics and refining its songwriting sensibility. Which suggests an interesting question: How much order do we want in metal music? This reviewer likes it when Decoherence embraces the chaos denoted by its band name. Check out “An Unconfined System” on this new record. Play it very, very loud. Order? Not so much.

Jonathan Shaw

Drekka—The Water of Life (Orb Tapes)

The Water of Life by Drekka

Michael Anderson, the artist who records as Drekka, made these four long-form meditations for a live performance in Indianapolis in 2015, loosely basing his mix of primitive and electronic sounds on the sci fi classic Dune. All four cuts evolve slowly out of hiss and static (the first one is even called “Stasis and Static”), a buzz like live power wires in the foreground, the faint ghosts of bells, altered choral voices rising up occasionally to mysterious ends. You could, of course, construct an imaginary Dune world out of these sounds, its vast deserts and obliterating sandstorms, its mystic addiction to spice, but it would take some active listening and imagining on your part. The title track assists, somewhat, submerging drips of liquid in the rumble of wind flapping through sails, and the nearly human chants that rise as if from a distance out of the noise. There’s a lot of activity here, a scramble to rattle bits against each other, the click and ching of various percussive elements. And through it comes the hum of dawning revelation, just hovering notes rising, but seeming to reach some inscrutable insight out of the noisy scrum.

Jennifer Kelly

The Finks — Birthdays at Solo Pasta (Milk!)

Birthdays at Solo Pasta by The Finks

Courtney Barnett’s recent announcement that her label Milk! Records will be closing down at the end of the year means that The Finks’ Birthdays at Solo Pasta will be one of the label’s final releases. This feels fitting for a label that has quietly released some understated gems over the years from artists such as Tiny Ruins and Mess Esque. The Finks, led by Oliver Mestitz, create the kind of intimate, loosely woven songs that thrive on the obvious ease between the players, as if you’re listening in to a front-room jam session in which everyone is warmed up and starting to develop their instrumental parts into a lively, organic whole. Mestitz leads the way with his quiet, congested voice, as if he’s perpetually getting over a head-cold, often accompanied by the complementary vocals of Sarah Farquharson. The rhythm section, piano and guitar are wonderfully restrained, the woodwinds muted and sinuous, with everything unfolding patiently. At their best, such as on “Marco Polo” and the instrumental “Ego Slump,” The Finks tap into something truly gorgeous and radiant.

Tim Clarke

Frode Gjerstad / Kalle Moberg / Paal Nilssen-Love — Time Sound Shape (PNL)

Time Sound Shape by Gjerstad / Moberg / Nilssen-Love

If you’ve been tracking Scandinavian free music for the past few decades, you might think you know what record sounds like when you hear that Frode Gjerstad and Paal Nilssen-Love are on it. After all, they’ve been playing together since the latter was a teen and the former was trying to lure promising players into the out-jazz life, and they’ve made a fair number of steaming recordings in that time. But they haven’t made anything quite like Time Sound Shape. Recorded at the Gamle Aker Kirke, Oslo’s oldest edifice, in 2021, it may be completely improvised, but it takes its cues from circumstance, space and opportunity, and those cues point the music in a very different direction. The old stone church’s resonance amplifies Nilssen-Love’s all-gongs set up into a massive sonic presence, and accordionist Kalle Moberg conspires with the percussionist to create a solemnly orchestral breadth of sound. Gjerstad, alternating between alto sax, alto flute and Bb clarinet, sharpens the action with short, anguished cries. This is the biggest sound that three guys can make without the assistance of electricity.

Bill Meyer

Gerrit Hatcher — Solo Five (Kettle Hole)

Solo Five by Gerrit Hatcher

Gerrit Hatcher’s learned well. Instead of waiting for fortune, the Chicago-based tenor saxophonist makes things happen. He plays in town quite often, tours econo and self-releases music on his own label, Kettle Hole Records. The title of this album (a real, glass-mastered CD, unlike the blue-faced disappointments so often sold under that name on Bandcamp these days) attests to his devotion to solo performance. It takes practice as well as physical prowess to command the quivering presence and driving force of his tone, which might remind some of Dave Rempis. Each of the album’s seven tracks makes an assertive statement, but not always a big, loud one; windy textures can be as compelling as rippling notes.

Bill Meyer

James Howard — Peek-a-Boo (Faith and Industry)

Peek-a-Boo by James Howard

James Howard’s debut is all stardust and stopped time. For some reason, I’m reminded of that scene in Buffalo ‘66 where Ben Gazzara, in surreal Sinatra-in-a-tee-shirt mode, croons his father-in-law-y feelings to an entranced, doe-eyed Christina Ricci. Except that Howard’s voice is closer to the dreamy, chill side of Roger Waters (see “St. Tropez'' and “Wots… The Deal”). And his songs are about things like meeting up with your drug dealer on the scenic outskirts of town and raising your children to fear nuclear annihilation. The high point of Peek-a-Boo might be “The Reckoning,” where Howard’s fingers tiptoe up the fretboard like a kid on Christmas Eve on his way to peek at his presents, and cymbals splash like someone on tranquilizers falling into a pool. But really the whole record is a gem and feels like one big, wonderful, floaty, pill-powered dream.

Chris Liberato

Chuck Johnson — Music from Burden of Proof (All Saints)

Music From Burden Of Proof by Chuck Johnson

Chuck Johnson has long been a master of eerie pedal steel atmospherics, building shadowy cloudscapes out of shifting, resonating guitar tone. Here he turns his grasp of sonic mystery to cinematic ends, composing music both guitar-based and not for the HBO series Burden of Proof. If you’re familiar with Johnson’s solo work, the opening “Burden of Proof” will catch you up short with its Bach organ cantata ominous-ness, its densely arranged chamber strings. It sounds not at all like the silvery dream narratives of Balsams or The Cinder Grove; it gathers up in stirring crescendos of emotional turmoil. “The Night of the Disappearance” fits more neatly with what you might have heard before from Johnson. It floats lingering traces of bending guitar sound over a slow lattice of electric keyboard. But setting aside expectations of what Chuck Johnson should or shouldn’t sound like, there is quite a lot to appreciate here: the glittering rhythms and bare-bones bass plunk of “Interrogation,” the swelling synth tones of “Ruth Ann,” the bright cerebral keyboard cadences of “The Note.” Not having seen the show, I can’t tell you how the music works (or doesn’t) to support mood or plot points, but here on the record, it’s subtle and varied, and occasionally, as on “More Surreal” has the slow moving contemplative grace that distinguishes Johnson’s best work. He’s making art and likely getting well paid. Good for him.

Jennifer Kelly

Héctor Lavoe — La Voz (Craft Latino)

After arriving in New York as a teenager, Puerto Rican singer Héctor Lavoe became a key figure in the popularization of salsa during the 1960s and 1970s. As part of the Fania label roster that included Willie Cólon, Rubén Blades and Celia Cruz, Lavoe released nine albums beginning with his 1975 debut, the aptly named La Voz. Produced and arranged by Cólon, the album foregoes much of the instrumental pyrotechnics of his contemporaries’ records to focus on Lavoe’s voice and improvisational talents. Opener “El Todopoderosa” (The Almighty) features frenetic percussion, piano vamps and blasts of brass which, good as they are, have no chance distracting from Lavoe’s caramel smooth tone and timbre. The clarity of his voice carries the emotional weight of “Un Amor de la Calle” even as the horns weep behind him. On the joyful, faster numbers his call and response with backing vocalists Cólon, Blades and Willie Garcia drive the songs forward but there’s plenty in the background to grab the ears. Witness the off-kilter piano and trumpet solo in “Rompe Saragüey” or the percussion and horn breakdown in “Mi Gente.” Whether you’re a salsa fan or not, this is an opportunity to hear one of the great vocalists in his prime with a killer band and irresistible songs. What’s not to love.

Andrew Forell

Natalie Rose LeBrecht — Holy Prana Open Game (American Dreams)

Holy Prana Open Game by Natalie Rose LeBrecht

It would not be accurate to describe Natalie Rose LeBrecht’s new record as a mix between La Monte Young/Marian Zazeela’s (who she’s studied with and assisted) cosmic minimalism and the Dirty Three’s more spacey, searching efforts (that trio’s Mick Turner and Jim White both play on Holy Prana Open Game), but even in its inadequacy the comparison points towards the kind of rarified air the record is floating amidst. It’s kind of wild to remember that “Amok” here is a radically transformed (one might even say, ahem, improved) cover of the Atoms For Peace song, it’s so of a piece with the other five pieces that make up the album. Whether it’s the more open excursions of “Open” and “Prana” or the gentle lilt of the opening “Home,” this suite soars into inner space immediately and rests there contentedly.

Ian Mathers

Gabe ‘Nandez — “Louis XIV” (POW Recordings)

Anyone paying attention to Jeff Weiss’ POW Recordings has been able to surmise how enthusiastic the label head has been about the hushed husk of New Yorker Gabe ‘Nandez, and Gabe’s returned the favor in kind with polyglot explorations of the inter- and intrapersonal alike, most recently on April’s Pangea, plus a feature alongside fellow East Coast tome spitter Billy Woods on last year’s Aethiopes. The one-off “Louis XIV” finds Gabe talking kingly killings and heartbreak over a sublimely paired beat from Tel Aviv producer Argov (he of “Venus in Mercury” that preceded this) and kitted in a Burberry coat amid London’s Abney Park cemetery. A low-slung, high-intensity performance, “Louis XIV” is self-evident, a perfect portrait of what makes ‘Nandez so lethal (and appealing) as a rapper. Anyone with an affinity for bars ought to appreciate it.

Patrick Masterson

Jim O’Rourke — Hands That Bind OST (Drag City)

Hands That Bind (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) by Jim O'Rourke

Any word of a new Jim O’Rourke release is justifiably greeted with excitement, especially when that release is via Drag City. However, Hands That Bind isn’t a continuation of the glorious singer-songwriter fare O’Rourke has perfected on albums such as Eureka, Insignificance and Simple Songs, but rather the soundtrack to a new film by director Kyle Armstrong. The instrumental atmosphere is aligned with many of O’Rourke’s Steamroom explorations, which he’s made available in a steady stream via Bandcamp: slow, sparse, mostly abstract synthesizer soundscapes. The difference here, given O’Rourke is responding to a visual medium, is deeper grounding in the creation of an immediate evocative mood. Shimmering synth textures evoke the chittering of crickets and wide-open expanses of countryside, punctuated by percussion and the reassuring thrum of upright bass. Then, suddenly, a detuned piano or dulcimer will cut through the mix, raising an eyebrow of concern, as if uncertainty is looming on the horizon. The drama of this simple juxtaposition creates an addictive tension that sustains this elegant suite’s runtime.

Tim Clarke

Rat Heart — “Flashing Lights Freestyle” (Shotta Tapes)

Rat Heart - Flashing Lights Freestyle by Shotta Tapes

One of Kanye’s most indelible beats is herewith given a kind of Jai Paul-like treatment via Mancunian Tom Boogizm, who runs the Shotta Tapes label that’s known best for the free-for-all experiments of his increasingly visible Rat Heart alias. We’re a far cry from Northern Luv Songs 4 Wen Ur Life's a Mess, obviously, which threw all manner of spaced-out, instrumental guitar hypnotics at the wall only to see it all stick in a manner most Dusted faithful would find familiar — but this isn’t a total left turn for Tom given we’ve also seen stuff like the Actress-esque 'A Blues' come out in the last year. If you don’t know where to start with him, this serves as a good point of entry for his more beat-driven material, the vocals submerged just that little bit too much beneath the fluorescent, once-ubiquitous backing beat of the Graduation staple. Nobody’s asking for a return to 2007 (that I know of, anyway), but it’s enough for a moment to remember the music once outshone the hubris of its creator. Some of us might call that moment simpler.

Patrick Masterson

La Sécurité — Stay Safe! (Mothland)

Montreal quintet La Sécurité combine insouciant new wave and funk driven post punk on their debut album Stay Safe! It’s a lane that’s been driven before by bands like Romeo Void and Au Pairs, but they bring an infectious energy to bear. Singing in French and English, lead vocalist Éliane Viens-Synnott moves from the ironic detachment of Debora Lyall to indignant recrimination, shaping her voice to inhabit each song.  Atop Kenneth Smith’s propulsive drums and Félix Bélisle’s elastic bass lines, guitarists Melissa Di Menna and Laurence Anne Charest-Gagné add chunky chords and sibilant solos. Although you can spend time picking the influences, the songs are uniformly good. The dispassionate sprechgesang of “Le Kick” with its motorik drums and Au Pairs guitar licks, the mocking tone of the Devo like “Waiting For Kenny,” the groove of “Serpent” which sounds like an amalgam of “Snakes Crawl” and “Too Many Creeps.” The rhythms are tight, the guitars slash and chime in equal measure, the quintet all contribute synths, percussion and backing vocals to their stories of toxic men, relationship ups and downs and daily grind of existence.

Andrew Forell

Jumping Back Slash, Būjin — “Order of Change” (Future Bounce Ltd.)

Would you believe this started as a piano-based folk ballad? Maybe not if you only heard the first half of the first single from a promised forthcoming album due in November. But what originated as a song with a “folklike Kate Bush flavor to it” morphed into a Janus-faced split of a dancefloor-filling first half that runs Brit-turned-South African Jumping Back Slash’s bass-heavy club deconstruction right through Cape Town native Būjin’s delicate but firm vocal before turning into a lush, orchestral outro much closer in spirit to the original idea. The balance works both ways for Būjin, who tightropes across the transition clear to the other side. What else this LP has in store remains to be seen, but it’s a promising first dispatch for those who err on the side of futuristic pop sounds.

Patrick Masterson

Whose Rules — Hasler (777 Rules)

Hasler by Whose Rules

If you’ve got any sort of weakness for airy, breathless, pristine indie pop, may I suggest Whose Rules, the solo endeavor from a busy Norwegian producer named Marius Elfstedt. This first album, Hasler, touches ever so lightly on sonic territories staked out by Elliott Smith: a wistful tenor warble wrapped around softly inevitable tunes. You might even catch a whiff of the Sea and Cake’s breezy artfulness. Yet while the songs aren’t weighted down, they’re not exactly scrubbed bare either. Elfstedt’s producer background shows through in shifting, transparencies of overlaid sound: guitars, synths, percussion frame delicate melodies but don’t overwhelm them. The music wafts by in a flavored cloud, but there’s a good deal of nourishment in its ethereal mix. I like “Stone” with its scrabbly guitars, its rainy/sunny moods, its sudden swells of synth that could easily be horn lines. There’s a bigger, brassier song in here somewhere, but for now it’s hiding shyly, reticently in a private corner of Elfstedt’s imagination.