“Blue Eyes Blue” makes full use of the dual guitar line-up, churning blistered, casually devastating fire, as the sweetness of country harmonies bubbles up over the mayhem. Jake Barczak, the band’s guitarist, singer and main songwriter, has a way with hangdog lyricism. “Now that I’ve turned my eyes from every other girl,” he croons, vocal counterparts crisscrossing dizzily under the main melodic line of “Tell Tale Signs” the most TFC-ish of these songs. It even borrows a line (“Ain’t that enough”) from the originators.

I’m still not sure what to make of “Papillyou Papillons,” with its shout-along chorus and strident clash of guitars. It’s a good song, catchy as hell, but maybe trying a tiny bit too hard for anthemic single status? Bullseye is best when they’re not visibly trying, when it seems like the blare and croon of country rock comes as naturally as breathing. This is a very good record, bursting with jangle, bristling with riffage and as heartfelt and deeply meant as albums come nowadays. Lots of bands try to pull this seemingly simple, rocking country sound off, but few nail it as brilliantly as this one does. Bullseye, indeed, and well done.

A stripped-down trio, Workers Comp marshals the talents of Deadbeat Beat’s Joshua Gillis on guitar, Luke Reddick of Divorce Horse on bass and Ryan McKeever of Staffers on drums. Fair warning, however, the new band sounds not much at all like any of its three predecessors. Instead, it evokes the humorous wallop of the Strapping Field Hands, and the drunken rave-ups of Hootenany-era Replacements. This country viewed through a cracked mirror, amped up and agitated, but also extremely articulate.

The disc starts with its honkey-tonk-i-est track, the Cash-worshiping “When I’m Here,” which starts in profanity and an aborted count, and goes from there. Gills drawls in an uncertain croak, but the lines include some doozies (My favorite: “Labor day in Baltimore/that’s time and a half/planting flowers on a plot between a joke and a laugh/if irony were ecstasy we’d rave until we die, eating bubblegum for breakfast or McDonald’s apple pie.” ) Indeed, the combination of absolute commitment and sly subversion might remind you of Ryan Davis.

It’s a good first track, but also a bit of a head fake. The rest of the songs run more to rock than roadhouse, though of a rootsy, blues-fired, early 1960s variety. And, these dear reader, are the good ones. “Pick and Choose,” rolls like a semi-truck on a steep down-grade, driver frantically looking for an off-ramp. “High on the Job,” maybe the disc’s best cut, flares out of a box drum cadence, its blues riff jutting off towards the horizon, as the singer spouts poetry. “Tripping hard in the parking lot of a quick stop on the go/feeling like an open mic at a lip-sync funeral,” drones Gillis, and it make sense in a lurid, trance-y way.

Gillis sings most of the cuts, but Luke Reddick takes over vocals on “Peel Away” and “It’s Fine” have a noticeably different tone to them, less sardonic, more anthemic and with the singing coming from a different place in the mix. In addition, Anna McClelland stops by to sing “Never Have I Ever,” slipping a bit of sweetness into Workers Comp’s bleak, hyperverbal dystopias, and it makes you think about what a different band they’d be with her as the singer. Still furious, still clanging hard, still letting loose an ecstatic “Whooo!” at unpredictable intervals, but lots more pop.

The music is consistently excellent, rough-edged and full of heart, but brainy enough to catch you up short. I played “Gilt Rigs” for a member of the family and asked him if he heard any Dire Straits in the guitars. “It’s like Dire Straits played by the Fall,” he said, and if you want to know what that sounds like, get on Workers Comp.

Stylianos Ou, whose real name is Stelios Papagrigoriou, is a bit of a renaissance man, a visual artist across multiple media, a novelist and a musician. He’s done some solo work under his current name, as well as one other album backed by his band the Cortisol Cows.  This current record demonstrates a wide-ranging, verbal and sonic intelligence, however ungovernable. He namechecks France’s controversial novelist Micheal Houllebeqc in one song, something not every indie twang singer could do.

And yet while the intellectual firepower is impressive, Fucked Forever is not, by any measure, a cerebral album. It thuds with blood-in-the-ear rhythms and squalls with tortured string squeals. It reels and surges and cavorts atop unscalable mountains of tone. It reaches through your gut as much as your brain, and often at the same time.

Consider, for instance, the frolicsome “Death Will Come for You,” with its antic, agitated banjo, its enveloping masses of guitar tone, its wobbly intimations of mortality that nonetheless vibrate with joy. This one will remind you a lot of Ryan Davis and his Roadhouse band, in the way that it swings and swaggers and blares triumphantly, despite the bleakness of its narrative. Speaking of death, Ou intones, “It will come like a tax collector, she will wash you with your hair, you were born to life, but death will stick it right in if he’s able.”

Ou deploys a black kind of humor, bringing the absurdities of modern life into his blasted stories. Songs like “Fake Tits” and “Pornhub Spiritual” transmute artifacts of a cultural wasteland into profound and funny spirituals. But even as he cracks the listener up, he’s got an abyss in his pocket. “There’s no end in this bottomless pit, no global positioning system here,” he observes in “Kokkinopoulos (GPS Lament).” It’s a dismal mix that’s simultaneously giddy and very much in line with the current state of affairs. It’s an ideal soundtrack for considering exactly how fucked we are. Which is very. And forever.  

This pair of releases allows for fervid collaboration, across and within the noise experimental genre.  The Forthcoming supplements the Spanish outfit’s live line-up—Álvaro Matilla, Mattin, Marta Sainz and Enrique Zaccagnini—with like minded samplers, warpers and droners: Sunik Kim, Dominic Coles and Triple Negative.  The self-titled brings in medieval futurists of CIA Debutante, just off their Siltbreeze outing Willow, Down, reviewed here a month or so ago (“The sound is immersive and disturbing, noises like factory equipment clashing with eerie Suicide-like beats.”).  You can’t really call one disc a solo album and the other a joint effort since both gain intrigue and unpredictability from outside influences. 

But let’s do it anyway  The Al Karpenter disc dissolves and reforms across six tracks, now muttering imprecations over inchoate punk noise (“The Forthcoming”), now approaching bass thumping electro-dance clarity (“A Brand New Brontophobia”), now disintegrating into incantatory chaos (“Poison Sun”), depending on who is involved.  The title track, aided by London’s Triple Negative, launches florid arias out of a chaotic mesh of guitars and drums, where the instruments natter on towards their own ends, unconnected by time signature or key.  A shimmery, shoegaze-y instrumental break tips into lyricism but slides out of true, an antic beat erupting from it like an irregular heart in flight.  Contrast that with the clean, driving agitation of “A Brand New Brontophobia,” where Sunik Kim guests.  A jittering, techno bass rumbles, clipped onslaughts of snare-like drum machines rattle, as Mattin murmurs and croons.  “Happy B-Day,” one of the cuts with Dominic Coles, opens giddily with keyboard before cutting all the way back to guitar notes and murmured threat (“I’m not afraid to kill or die”), alternately minimal and maximal.  “Drood (Can You Hear Me Now?)” offers the clearest distillation of Al Karpenter’s haunted eclecticism, layering vertiginous synths over muttered alienation. 

S/T by Al Karpenter & CIA Debutante

The album with CIA Debutante also delivers dystopic poetry but couched more rhythmically and with the agitation of punk rock.  “Born Dead” lumbers like a giant mechanical beast, its beat slow and inexorable, giving shape to masses of guitar feedback and intermittent shouts of the title.  “Public Scaffolding” bangs more frantically, as a voice rages against income inequality.  It slips into static but doesn’t lose its structure; you can hear the toms rattling all the way through.  “Medieval Cocaine” sounds the most purely CIA Debutante-ish of all these tracks, the ping and squiggle of electronics framing unknowable, evocative verses. “Fuck You All to Fade No More,” dances inscrutably on synth rhythms and shattering machine beats, as the lyrics shatter the f-word into fragments, repeatedly.   

None of this is especially easy listening, and you won’t be putting it on at your next dinner party.  But it is full of layers and passionate inquiry, and the chaos is like the world right now.  Listen and feel the ground under you crumble and everything sure come into doubt. 

Spiritual Mafia sounds more like Cuntz than any of the other bands, with wild spirallng guitar work surrounding detuned and disconsolate screeds about whatever’s on Ben Mackie’s mind. “My body was built to last/My body was made for me/My body is here to stay,” he chants in the single, “Body.” You could also make connections to Spray Paint in the dogged rhythms and minimalist noisiness of these cuts. But really, it’s its own thing, a furious swamp of echo and distortion focused on some curious subject matter—the joys of eating outside, for one thing, a three-legged dog for another. You might make a connection in terms of pure force to Eddy Current Suppression Ring or in slack heaviness to Blank Realm or in unedited stream-of-conscious lyrics to UV Race, but it’s not like any of those bands, not really.

The disc is structured symmetrically, with two brief cuts and a long one on each side, and while the shorter tracks may well end up getting more airplay, the band really gets going on the extended pieces. “Hybrid Animal” is full of violent clatter, an ear-ringing guitar cadence, a volcanic, eruptive bass. Mackie is spitting, slurring and moaning in an unhinged way that is nonetheless rather trance-like about having a hybrid animal inside of him, and just between us, he seems to have let it out for the moment.

“Bath Boy” is even wilder, with its ominous twitching bass line, its flares of effected guitars, its wavering underwater keyboards. It’s full of menace and threat, and yet, it’s all about taking a bath, alone or in a shared, sexual way. It’s not even a metaphor, as far as I can tell, just an objective description of having a soak together or apart (“I am lonely, in the water, relax with me, in the water, dial my number, call me up, run a bath and invite me over”). And yet, as the song runs on, it warps and twists into something fundamental about human beings, water, love, sex and, you know, bubbles. I couldn’t tell you how it does this, but it does.