#isolant

The Attic — Love Ghosts (No Business)

Love Ghosts by The Attic - Rodrigo Amado / Gonçalo Almeida / Onno Govaert

Portuguese tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado is a reliably robust improviser, but a chief pleasure of his work in The Attic is how relaxed he sounds. The trio, which also includes bassist Gonçalo Almeida and drummer Onno Govaert, has the patience to let a performance wander and pause, and the purposefulness to reward your attention by getting you to a destination as appealing as the views you caught along the way. Govaert’s cymbal surges carry Almeida and Amado through some probing exchanges, their lines twisting and curling around each other, but even when they pull the strands taut, there’s room to savor the rich complexity of their tones and they unencumbered logic of their ideas.

Bill Meyer

 David Brewis — The Soft Struggles (Daylight Saving)

The Soft Struggles by David Brewis

David Brewis of Field Music’s prior solo outings have been released under his School of Language moniker. The Soft Struggles is the first album under his own name, the distinction being that this is a much more mellow affair than his usual Prince-indebted funky guitar-pop. The best points of comparison here are probably Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and Nick Drake’s Bryter Layter, the stately, elegant songs enriched by strings, woodwinds and upright bass. When it works it’s beautiful, such as waltz-time single “Surface Noise,” and “When You First Meet,” which features Eve Cole on vocals. “Start Over,” in contrast, feels self-consciously saccharine and stiffly well mannered. There’s no denying this is an interesting and compelling new direction for Brewis, but one that needs a bit more wearing in before it’s burnished to its best.

Tim Clarke

  Chasmdweller — Blood Vortex (self-released)

Blood Vortex by Chasmdweller

These Canadian gutter freaks play old school death metal and get it right. It’s not too fast but also not slow enough to let the doom to slip in. It’s dirty but not too much. There is also nothing new. The cover art is excellent, but the vocalist lacks English; he makes a single guttural sound throughout the whole CD. Is he even human? It sounds as if he’s an entity from hell. With this type of music that only makes it better.

Ray Garraty 

 CVS — Ad Hoc (Feeding Tube)

AD HOC by CVS

Who can resist a little corporate trolling when your mailing address is in Barcelona and the surnames of your combo’s members are Cunningham, Volt and Serra? With luck, they’ll be able to construct the covers of future releases from defied cease and desist letters. Shenanigans aside, the three musicians make a sound you may want to hear more of. Mark Cunningham (Mars, Blood Quartet) takes his processed trumpet sound into more amorphous territory with assistance from Pablo Volt’s looped trumpet and Andy Serra’s guitars and tenor saxophone. Each of the tape’s six tracks stakes out an eerie vibe, which gets less comfortable as the sounds recede multiply; this is the acid bath you won’t be able to refuse.

Bill Meyer

Dignan Porch — Electric Threads (Repeating Cloud)

Electric Threads by DIGNAN PORCH

On Dignan Porch’s fourth LP, Joe Walsh brings his blurry bedroom psych-pop into sharper focus. Since arriving on the scene in 2010, his mostly home-recorded, mostly solo project has often been accused of having a muddled sound and songs that aren’t distinct enough. The kind of music that “you half remember liking when it was playing in a friend's car,” as one reviewer put it, but which fails to leave a lasting impression. This isn’t an issue on Electric Threads. The album’s ten songs — a mix of chuggers and janglers, squawking motorik fuzzouts and one distinctly Lennon-esque ditty — are easily Walsh’s most immediate to date, sailing on their big hummable melodies and plentiful, vaguely sad hooks. Electric threads, besides being the title of the album, is also a good phrase to describe the lead guitar and organ lines, irresistible whenever they surface. Like on the title track, for instance, where a quivering light beam of a riff, evoking Only Life-era Feelies, periodically rises out of the mix and hovers there for a few moments before deferring to the crunchy rhythm action below. This brings up one small bone to pick: at times it feels like Walsh is holding the reins a little too tightly on his otherwise brilliant guitar work, and not letting it drift to the places it feels like it wants to go to. Because when he does cut his playing a little slack on closer “Ancestral Trail,” the album reaches its most gorgeous high note.

Chris Liberato 

 Isolant — Drain (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

Drain by ISOLANT

Isolant’s new mini-LP Drain features a hybrid of doom and industrial metal that may have you flashing on Godflesh, c. Streetcleaner — or, depending on your ears and the depth of your catalog, on Justin Broadrick’s earlier, underappreciated band Head of David. That’s a good thing, and so is the fact that Isolant’s founding member Max Furst is a little less isolated, having recruited vocalist Mattia Alagna and noisenik Miguel Souto into the project. The songs on Drain are piercing and crunching mechanisms of misery, and Alagna adds a layer of organic dread with his growls and groans (he sounds almost as bummed out on Drain as he did on Abominion, the most recent LP from Bay Area crusty doomsters Abstracter). There are also some strangely Goth, dark-romantic passages; see the second half of “Death Pulse” and the rumbling, foreboding tonality of “Lamentation.” Isolant is at its best, though, when the band lets Furst’s guitar create its heaviest textures. Opening track “The End Begins Me” is a steamroller, flirting with melody even as an implacable sense of dread squeezes the life out of the song.

Jonathan Shaw

 Isik Kural — Peaches (RVNG Intl.)

peaches by Isik Kural

Last year, Isik Kural, a Turkish sound designer and musician based in Glasgow, released the gauzy, loop-based synth-pop full-length in february. This new ep presents some of the instrumental tracks from in february with the vocals removed (mostly) and found sounds pared back. The resulting lean quarter-hour of music, by chance, provides an antidote to the tragedy currently unfolding in Kural’s homeland. The beauty of that land is well captured by the video for a live version (recorded in a field in northern Turkiye) of the track “lo si aspetta,” in which birdsong and other environmental sounds blend with what seem like the plucks of a stringed instrument over keyboard effects. Fitting together like a suite, the tracks have distinct touches, such as the frog-like glitches in the title track and the Andean string sounds in “montevideo” with a neat slide at the halfway point. Gentle and thoughtful, peaches offers a welcome respite and a fresh perspective on Kural’s work.

Jim Marks  

 Lantana — Elemental (Cipsela)

Elemental by Lantana

Everyone in this Portuguese sextet is female, and if you’re thinking one should refrain from commenting upon their gender homogeneity, think twice; Joëlle Léandre’s liner notes celebrate the fact. Maria Radich’s dynamic vocals may steer the listener’s associations towards symbols and ceremonies, but be sure to listen to the folks stirring the sounds that swirl around her. The electronically enhanced three-strings, one-trumpet line-up unravels the melodic implications of her post-linguistic forays and weaves them into a multihued sonic cloak. Aughts-era freak-folk followers who wonder where cellist Helena Espvall went after Espers disbanded, wonder no more; she’s now well situated in Lisbon’s improvised music scene.

Bill Meyer

Joanna Mattrey & Steven Long — Strider (Dear Life Records)

Strider by Joanna Mattrey & Steven Long

This long-standing duo’s first full recording together began with the idea to make ambient songs, avoiding the longer and less structured approach taken with some ambient music. Mattrey (credited with the Stroh violin and field recordings) and Long (credited with “Organ, Stove, Barometer, Synth, Short-wave Radio”) have succeeded in one sense, with each of these eight pieces sticking to the melodic yet static framework they were aiming for. But if you’re thinking of Eno’s “it must be ignorable as it is interesting” dictum then much of Strider might not count as ambient, because if anything it’s a little too attention grabbing. The horn on the Stroh’s violin gives the string lines here a plangent, piercing (and yeah, faintly old-timey) quality and Mattrey is unafraid to explore its harsher ranges. Whether it’s paired with an icy river breaking up (“Eyes”), echoing synth beeps (“Retro”) or what sounds a bit like an attempt to replicate an ambulance siren (“Host”) the results are an unusually compelling mix of meditative focus and the aural equivalent of a smack upside the head. Ambient, then, specifically for anyone worried the genre is at risk of lapsing into wallpaper pleasantries.

Ian Mathers  

 Mal Sed / Scy1e— Mal Sed / Scy1e (Weird Ear)

Mal Sed / Scy1e by Mal Sed / Scy1e

Settle down and stop worrying about your influences. That’s the message of this project, whose circuitous production process is inseparable from its sounds. Peter Lamons, whose recording handle is Mal Sed, bought some Giuseppe Ielasi from Weird Ear proprietor Raub Roy, and then shared his own sounds inspired by Ielasi’s chopped and glued treatment of grooves. Roy liked what he heard enough to reactivate the label and make a cassette. When the proposed cover art came in, its design instigated him to make some music of his own, and the project became a split release. Mal Sed’s rhythms are a bit more fluid and less crammed-together than Ielasi’s, but his wheels still bump at each corner. Roy, who tags himself Scy1e when he hits record, matches Mal Sed’s peg-legged beats and raises him several barrages of squelchy electronics. Niches have cracks, and there’s no telling how deep they go.

Bill Meyer

 Pacific Walker — Pacific Walker (Bluesanct)

Pacific Walker by Pacific Walker

Pacific Walker is the new project from the respawned creative partnership of Michael James Tapscott and Isaac Edwards, who previously recorded as Odawas. For this venture, they’ve enlisted the services of Raphi Gottesman, who drums in Tapscott’s folk-rock outfit China. This sounds nothing like either of those projects, rooting itself instead in drones, field recordings and guitar arpeggios. The A side of the cassette comprises one long multi-part piece entitled “Mycelium Ab Astris Ad Astra,” a patchwork panoply of throat singing, astral ambient atmosphere and dusky desert melodies. Over on the other side, the trio offer up poignant frescoes of twilit synths, guitars and samples that gallivant through the outer reaches of the human psyche. Odawas aficionados will miss Tapscott’s fluid lyricism and upper register vocal range, as there’s not a word sung here. Fret not, sonic adventurers; Pacific Walker are after those parts of your brain that are amenable to unexplored sonic phenomena. Open your ears and let them inside.

Bryon Hayes

 Ivo Perelman / Matthew Shipp — Fruition (ESP-Disk’)

Fruition by Ivo Perelman/Matthew Shipp

While the title implies some sort of culmination, don’t think for a minute that these guys are done with each other. This is their 18th duo recording, and while a full accounting of their trios and quartets will have to wait for another review, suffice to say that the next one, a CD with North Carolinian drummer Jeff Cosgrove, has already been announced. Tenor saxophonist Ivo Perelman and pianist Matthew Shipp have become each other’s most enduring partners, and their rapport is undeniable. Shipp knows exactly when and where to place a stone in the harmonic foundation that his partner needs to formulate and elaborate upon his imploring melodies, and the quavers in Perelman’s ascending queries accentuate the gothic bleakness of the pianist’s heavy chords and ruminative asides. Do you need this one? That all depends on how unacquainted or acquisitionist you are. If you need them all, well, you already have it, right? If you haven’t heard them at all, and you are open to cosmically inclined improvised music, Fruition is an excellent point of entry.

Bill Meyer

Santa Muerte — Eslabón (Hyperdub)

Eslabón EP by Santa Muerte

As Santa Muerte (Our Lady of Holy Death), Houston-based Mexican producer Panch Briones makes bass heavy club music grounded in the culture and mythology of his homeland. The title of his debut EP for Hyperdub, Eslabón translates as “link” and the four tracks make explicit his cross-cultural influences with a mix of IDM and traditional beats under effervescent synths, snatches of µ-Ziq influenced melody and indigenous spoken word samples. The music skips lightly, radiating concentric circles of euphoria across a surface beneath which you hear the bustling tension of living within two worlds. Briones works plenty into these short pieces and leaves you looking forward to what he might do in a longer format.

Andrew Forell 

 Philip Selway — Strange Dance (Bella Union)

Strange Dance by Philip Selway

Strange Dance is the third solo album by Radiohead drummer Philip Selway. While previous albums Familial and Weatherhouse were pleasant enough, they suffered from feeling a little safe and pedestrian, especially compared to Radiohead’s more adventurous work. On Strange Dance, Selway is branching out, collaborating and taking more risks. At best, on singles “Check for Signs of Life” and “Picking Up Pieces,” Selway explores possibilities with growing confidence. On the latter in particular, intricate rhythmic beds are buffeted by swooping strings and dissonant guitar lines from Portishead’s Adrian Utley. At its weakest, such as “The Other Side,” major-key piano melodies unfold sweetly but predictably. However, the main issue with Strange Dance is Selway’s lyrics, which frequently lapse into platitudes.

Tim Clarke

 Shame — Food for Worms (Dead Oceans)

Food for Thought continues a run of albums on which all the elements seem to be in place but never quite gel. Charismatic front man? Check. Bruising rhythm section? Yes. A couple of exciting guitar slingers? Sure. A zeitgeisty sound? OK. Decent songs? Some. So, what’s the problem? Three albums in and Shame seem unsure who they are. They’ve devolved into The Libertines redux without the cocksure attitude that made them kind of fun for five minutes. There’s plenty of earnest belting but the overall tone of Charlie Steen’s sometimes terrific delivery is irritability, and rest of band hit enough highs to make the missteps more noticeable. “Alibis” for instance, burns with righteous fury but the petulance of “Yankees” and sanctimony of “Adderall” grate. “The Fall of Paul” harnesses the band’s energy and dynamism to great effect but is followed by the meandering “Burning by Design” which sucks the air out of the room before attempting to resuscitate itself at the end. Food for Thought is disappointing, there’s enough here to pique the interest but not to sustain it.

Andrew Forell 

 Sluice — Radial Gate (Ruination)

Radial Gate by Sluice

Justin Morris’ songs as Sluice start spare and pick up weight as finger-picked precision gives way to the rich sustaining drone of string, the howl of untrammeled feedback. This second album from the North Carolina based musician starts in a tremble of immanence as tape hiss shushes and banjo notes tangle in the distance. Bowed notes waft in, glimmering like the bright line in the east when the sun’s just about to rise. This intro piece “Ostern” assembles all the sounds that Morris will incorporate in a humming cloud of sensation. Later, he will separate them out and surround them with space. In “Centurion,” for instance, where his warm spoke-sung delivery sounds a bit like Bill Callahan, as a guitar jangle sidles up into the foreground. Drums clatter in, a violin saws up out of white space, and finally pedal-screeching guitar builds up like a giant wave in previously serene water. It’s indie-folk, sure, but tapped into strong, unruly undercurrents. Or what about the existential inquiry that is “Fourth of” where memories of hot summers past and present cleave together in layers, and swimming hole becomes a metaphor for the connection of all things. (“I am the rock, I am the eddy, I am my roommates in love, I am blackberry jelly, I am the weir, I am the spillway.”) Morris enlists a whole orchestra’s full of capable player to flesh his songs out with mournful arcs of pedal steel, surging tides of stringed instruments and warm communal singing. Hold on for the end with “New Leices” grows from lyric interior musing to bright harmonized concord. Really lovely, this, like acoustic Akron/Family but simpler.

Jennifer Kelly

 Son of Dribble — Son of Drib Against the Wind (Minimum Table Stacks)

Son of Drib Against the Wind by Son of Dribble

New Jersey’s Minimum Table Stacks has a sixth sense about which arcane or overlooked sonic gems deserve the vinyl reissue treatment. Take Son of Drib Against the Wind, for instance. It originally took shape as a limited run cassette, self-released by Columbus, Ohio trio-turned-quartet Son of Dribble in mid-2022. The band’s fuzzy yet morose Velvets-meets-Joy Division garage rock clamor practically screams out for a wider audience and a more robust pressing, so it’s great that the label took the bait. Vocalist Andy Clager, with his handsome blend of Jonathan Richman baritone and Julian Casablancas croon, is the perfect front man. You’re not sure what he’s singing about, but you know it’s poignant. For added effect, the band tips its hat to an eclectic assortment of genres. Doo wop harmonies, proto-punk stomp, and arty synths all make an appearance. It’s as if Son of Dribble are the smarter, edgier, and grumpier cousins to fellow Columbusites Kneeling in Piss. Clager and crew picked the better band name, at least.

Bryon Hayes 

 Spiral Joy Band — In the River (Feeding Tube Records)

In The River by Spiral Joy Band

There are certain varieties of drone music that give credence to the notion that music is always out there somewhere, and humans don’t make it up, they just get to turn the cosmic tap on and off. Patrick Best and Mikel Dimmick are both members of Pelt, so it goes without saying that they are already well practiced at operating the tap. But since Pelt can go for years without a gig, they’ve sometimes run a side hustle in similarly expansive sound named the Spiral Joy Band. The two quarter-hour examples of said endeavor that can be heard on this LP come from a time, about a dozen years ago, when they both lived near Madison, Wisconsin, and had the empathetic assistance of a third string scraper named Troy Schafer. The combination of violin, viola, and harmonium guarantees access to a continuous, pulsing expanse of rich aural texture, which they show no compunction about cashing in. Locked grooves at the end of each side make this the record of choice when you don’t know if you’re going to be awake by the end of the side, but you know how you’re going to want to feel when you wake up.

Bill Meyer 

 Spitting Image — Full Sun (Slovenly)

SPITTING IMAGE "Full Sun" LP by SPITTING IMAGE

“Black Box” careens around the corners on car-crash riffs, drums spiking out of the infinitesimal pause between one hurtling phrase and another. Shouted lyrics slash in and out of the mix. At one point, late in the cut (which is only a minute and a half long so not that late), two people shout the title at each other. It is hard not to picture them, separated by inches, screaming in each other’s faces. This cut, and the harder, faster ones like “Spirit Trouble Flash” have a good bit of Big Black’s punk ferocity, a little of Shellac’s uncompromising angularity, though less complicated, more garage punk than noise art. Spitting Image, out of Reno, Nevada, have been around for a little more than a decade, grinding out an underground, basement show existence with, before this, just a handful of EPs, singles and one cassette release to show for it. This first full-length sounds, to me, a lot like the Xetas, which is to say it bangs pretty hard, until it doesn’t. The last three songs are disconcertingly down-tempo, lyrical and pensive, and I’m not sure that works, but the rest is pretty good.

Jennifer Kelly

 Tanukichan — Gizmo (Company)

GIZMO by Tanukichan

Tanukichan lays translucent, ethereal textures over buzz saw bass and rupturing drums, in an ice cream swirl of indulgence and crunch. “Don’t Give Up” vibrates like a mirage on heat-soaked asphalt, tremulous, idealized and gut-shocked with an underpinning rock and roll roar. Gizmo is the second soft-focus shoegaze pop album from Oakland’s Hannah van Loon, following Sundays in 2018. It takes its name from her pandemic pup, and, like the first, enlists the support of her friend Chaz Bear, better known as Toro & Moi. Some cuts play up the dreamy sweetness of van Loon’s murmuring soprano; others turn up the wrenching abrasion of rock sounds. “Thin Air” pairs van Loon with Enumclaw, another Oakland artist with a wry, slant on indie anthemry. These are lullabies buzzing with enough TNT to blow down buildings. More of this, please.

Jennifer Kelly

 Tithe — Inverse Rapture (Profound Lore)

Inverse Rapture by TITHE

This reviewer is unsure how an “inverse rapture” might work: will the sinners go to heaven? Will the believers be left behind? In either case, count me out — but count me in for more music from Tithe. The grim gang in the Portland-based band generates a convincingly pissed-off hybridization of grind and black/death, and the resulting songs are as unhinged as you might expect. The gloriously filthy guitar tone is best appreciated when Tithe slows to a trot, or a menacing shamble, as they do in passages of seven-minute-long “Killing Tree.” Still, the short songs have the greatest impact; “Demon” and “Pseudologia Fantastica” clock in well under three minutes, which may be the ideal length for this sort of whirling, battering chaos. Yikes. Beyond the religious symbolics of the band’s name and most of the song titles, it’s hard to say what all shouting and howling concern. One imagines it’s the usual stuff: Christianity is oppressively awful; in its name, people do lots of horrible things to one another; thus, evil and violence (symbolic or otherwise) are the only adequate responses. So why not let the Christian Rapture go off as originally planned? The True Believers will exit the earthball, and the rest of us can hang around and do our thing. Which will likely include turning this record up even louder.

Jonathan Shaw

 Ulthar — Anthronomicon (20 Buck Spin)

Anthronomicon by Ulthar

Fewer things seem riper for black/death musical fixation than H. P. Lovecraft’s fiction and cultural profile. His supernatural imaginary is suffused by the Empire of Slime, an accretion of repulsive, tentacular forms, sanity-shredding powers, and by his mandarin, aristocratic aesthetic sensibilities. Bay Area band Ulthar has embraced the fixation across their recorded output, which has now spread — like a cosmic fungus — onto two new paired LPs, Helionomicon and Anthronomicon, for about 70 total minutes of involuted black/death. By any measure, that’s a whole lot of Ulthar. Anthronomicon is the better LP of the pair, full of spurting pseudopodia and corkscrews of sound, and also imbued with an aggro, blackened hostility. “Saccades,” named for a variety of rapid eye movement, is a strong example of the record’s vibe. The nod to REM sleep evokes the surrealism just underneath the band’s noise and bluster. Check out the riff that emerges around the 2:20 mark; it’s brief lived, but it snaps the song into focus, sending it into the headlong tumble that dominates its second half, during which whirling chaos struggles with downhill momentum. It’s an exciting song.

Jonathan Shaw

 Ed Williams — Decomposition Study (Insub)

Decomposition study by ED WILLIAMS

Do you suppose that the old saying that too many cooks spoil the soup was first uttered by a chef who didn’t want to take questions or orders? Composer Ed Williams takes a different approach on Decomposition Study, one that admits multiple inputs from the distant past as well as the moment of performance. He devised a canon in a form favored 600 years ago by composers of madrigals and handed it to two musicians playing upon one arciorgano, a sixteenth century, bellows—operated organ with two keyboards. As they played the piece, four more musicians intervened at will, and Williams mixed the results, which were projected through a cube speaker. Clearly, there’s still some hierarchy shaping the results, but also a degree of democracy rarely heard in classical pieces for organ. While the antique keyboard’s gentle voices bring a whiff of older times, the performance’s exploration of tonal extremes and clashes feels more in tune with the past half century of psychedelic musical pursuits. Sign up for the novelty, stay for the disorientation.