#plastic bubble

Ark Zead — Niptaktuk (Glacial Movements)

The Italian label Glacial Movements specializes in music that’s chilled, immense and slow, just like its namesake. Niptaktuk continues this icy throughline, offering a series of highly resonant, frost-tinged drone passages. The creator, of which no information is known, sourced these textures from gongs and singing bowls, stretching the frequencies into lengthy, subtly shifting tone clouds. They cleverly balance lighter shades against darker hues, layering pre-dawn shimmer over sub-sonic bass pulses. The delicate patter of scraped and stroked metal adds a sense of the real to these otherwise uncanny soundscapes. Ark Zead drew influence from the cold northern Canadian winter when they created these sounds, yet the experience of listening doesn’t evoke frostbite or blinding blizzards. Instead Niptaktuk, which is an Inuit word that implies oncoming clear skies, is a remedy against frostiness, a kernel of warmth that seeks to melt the winter ice. 

Bryon Hayes

The Body & Dis Fig — Orchards of a Futile Heaven (Thrill Jockey)

At this point, at least going by actual releases, surely there are no greater collaborators in heavy music (in all its forms) than The Body. In addition to their stellar work as “just” a duo, Chip King and Lee Buford have at this point collaborated with a real murderers’ row of bands and artists, and those albums absolutely refuse to stick to any particular formula. That they’d work with Dis Fig (aka Felicia Chen), who’s made an excellent, emotionally/sonically challenging record called Purge and sang on a full length by The Bug, makes perfect sense. The result, as with many “The Body &” LPs, is so seamlessly satisfying you’d think this was everyone involved’s main gig. The thunderous drums, harsh noise, and King’s peerless shrieks are all present, and Chen gives a hell of a lead vocal performance to centre it all. The closing one-two punch of “Coils of Kaa”/“Back to the Water” is one of the best endings 2024 is going to get, Chen wailing in rage and despair as the music collapses buildings around her.

Ian Mathers

Demiser — Slave to the Scythe (Blacklight Media/Metal Blade)

Retrograde throwback thrash isn’t exactly a growth area in metal, or a particularly enlightened undertaking, culturally speaking. But dudes in denim and bullet-lined bandoliers don’t make records like Slave to the Scythe because they foresee mass-market opportunity or stadiums full of fans in the immediate future. Mostly they don’t see much future at all. Demiser seems to share those perspectives — live fast, die faster, have as much fun as possible in the brief and weird interregnum. Is Slave to the Scythe fun? Depends on your sense of humor, and your tolerance for metal’s more reductive shenanigans. The fellows in the band have given themselves stage names like Gravepisser (he plays guitar) and Infestor (he drums), and they have supplied us with the sublime song title “Hell Is Full of Fire”; no points for innovation, but maximum points for unconquerably up-for-it idiocy. Motörhead seems as significant to Demiser as early Exodus and Kreator (especially the genius of Pleasure to Kill). Sort of nice to hear a thrash record that’s more interested in the riffs than the solos. Sort of fun to play this record really, really loud. Sort of certain that doing so results in becoming materially stupider. That’s okay — it makes that aforementioned lack of a viable future a little less awful to contemplate.

Jonathan Shaw

Dummy — Free Energy (Trouble In Mind)

Dummy’s debut, Mandatory Enjoyment, lived up to its title; it was a record difficult not to appreciate. In her Dusted review, Jennifer Kelly praised it as “a listening experience that simultaneously braces and soothes, agitates and lulls.” Dummy’s second album, Free Energy,has a similar appeal, but knocks this listener off balance with its bizarre fixation on dated drum machines and backwards sounds that bring to mind the baggy indie-dance of the 1990s. You know the stuff: Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Jesus Jones, Pop Will Eat Itself. There are some great songs here, such as “Nine Clean Nails,” but you have dig around amongst the misfires to find them. Dummy still have an ear for a good tune, so you can forgive their more questionable aesthetic decision-making.

Tim Clarke

“Father” John Misty — Greatish Hits: I Followed My Dreams and My Dreams Said to Crawl (Sub Pop)

With streaming supplying abundant amounts of playlists, one might reasonably ask why a greatest hits compilation would be useful. Curation instead of algorithms. “Father” John Misty’s Greatish Hits presents the high points in his catalog, beginning with early songs“Real Love Baby” (2016) and “Nancy from Now On” (2012). It is by no means a chronological survey, nor is it front-loaded like so many collections and playlists. The popular “I Love You Honeybear” (2015) is saved for the penultimate track. The finale, “I Guess Time Just Makes Fools of Us All,”  is new. At eight and a half minutes long, it stretches out with saxophone, bongo, and electric piano solos interspersing bluesy pop vocals. Worth the wait - don’t skip ahead!

Christian Carey

Ben Felton — A Lot (Island House)

Ben Felton lets the drones linger, layering sounds on top of sounds, like primary-toned transparencies on an overhead projector. You can spend this album watching the colors these tones make when the light shines through them, hitting one, two, three or more guitar/synth textures before getting to the other side. Complex yes, but peaceful, drowsy almost. One track called “A Foghorn or a Loudspeaker,” sounds like just that, an uneasy truce between natural serenity and amplified buzz and hiss. The space it lives in is large and echoey, a cathedral or, more likely, a vast underground cavern with water lapping at the walls. Occasionally, the electronic mode predominates as in the airy percolation of “What You Need.” Yet though the blippy motif is bright and uncorroded, it sits atop a woozy soup of tone; guitar notes crash in sporadically intimating a rustier, more industrial territory nearby. Felton comes from New York but now resides in more bucolic Carrboro, North Carolina. His soundscapes find a meeting place between folk-adjacent ambience and rougher, noisier music. The album gets more propulsive as it goes. Shaken-not-stirred “The Fifth Day,” turns a three-note upward lilting motif into something approaching rock anthemry. You can’t blame the sustained notes for hanging around. It’s nice here, and you want to stay.

Jennifer Kelly

Margarida Garcia And Manuel Mota—Domestic Scene (Feeding Tube) 

Upright electric bassist Margarida Garcia and electric guitarist Manuel Mota are part of Lisbon, Portugal’s experimental/improvisational music scene and have worked together with and without the participation of others on seven records besides Domestic Scene over the past decade. It is their first LP to be released in the USA, and there’s something poetic about that fact, because it feels like an echo of the work of one American musician — Loren Connors, and more specifically, 21st century Connors in solo mode. It shares his sparseness, boiled-down lyricism and willingness to disappear into a haze of noise. Since Garcia has associated with him at times, there’s definitely a shared aesthetic. However, these are not young copycats. Mota’s spare progressions proceed according to a different logic, purged of blues and baroque elements, guided by a north star of sequential consonance that adds up to quiet dissonance. And Garcia’s subdued, bow-born cries have an ability to compound, making the music thick with atmosphere, but still stingy with note counts. Play it late. 

Bill Meyer

Geneva Jacuzzi — Triple Fire (Dais)

Geneva has been making bedroom synth pop for years. On Triple Fire (named after her astrological sign), the production values tick upward, and several of the songs are club ready. “Laps of Luxury” is a case in point, with Geneva’s dulcet singing abetted by backing vocals, early digital synth sonics, and mechanized beats. “Scena Ballerina” recalls her early bedroom pop, with a taut riff and harmonic swerves. Trebly synths and out of the box percussion underscore an emotive vocal on “Take it or Leave it.” Geneva’s speechsong in “Art is Dangerous” and “Speed of Light” recalls Laurie Anderson’s 1980s work, while “Heart of Poison” has an art rock ambience that incorporates tenor saxophone and is rife with shimmering synths. “Rock and a Hard Place” is an aggressive example of dark wave electronica. The closer, “Yo-yo Boy” is an anthemic piece of minimal synth-pop that reminds listeners of Geneva’s roots while presenting memorable tunefulness. 

Christian Carey

Katatonic Silentio — Axis Of Light (Midnight Shift)

Axis Of Light by Katatonic Silentio

Italy-based Mariachiara Troianiello is a long-time DJ, and independent audio and ethnomusicology researcher at the University of San Marino. She also creates electronic music under the name Katatonic Silentio, and on Axis of Light explores a spatial dub, filled with palpating beats and flickering synthesizer sounds. The five tracks on this EP are all based on rhythmic frameworks that skitter and thud with a dark, night-time vibe for the most part. As the title indicates, opener “Drip in the Cave” is indeed subterranean in nature, with rubbery pads and liquid drums reverberating in tactile space. “Bridging the Gap” is lighter and bouncier, bubbling at a fast tempo and filled with electronic hoots and blips. The other pieces mix slow with fast, and machine-like rhythms with heartbeat-like pulses, all swirling in a warehouse ambience populated by ghostly static, quiet bells, or spooky, whistling tones. It’s all a neat combination of machine world and organic atmosphere, like a science-fiction world populated by real, messy people.

Mason Jones

Nicole Marxen — Thorns (Self-Release)

Nicole Marxen puts an eerie shimmer over rough crescendos of metallic noise, keening in the ghostliest, most disembodied way amidst vibrating slabs of guitar sound. “Thorns,” the album’s spiritual center, floats a chilly line of vocal melody—think Beth Gibbons or Chelsea Wolfe—over a machine-like industrial beat. Fragility blooms in an apocalyptic afterworld. “The Executioner” is heavier, more ominous, slithering to life out of the flickering buzz of downed powerlines. A stolid march emerges soon, swaggering with drums, swelling with amp-frying volume. Marxen presides like a high priestess, unperturbed amid flares, fills and violence. Like Jarboe astride a Justin Broadrick wall of noise, she stakes her claim, with operatic trills and whispered confidences. Dramatic, large-scale stuff.

Jennifer Kelly

Magda Mayas’ Filamental — Ritual Mechanics (Relative Pitch)

Keyboardist Magda Mayas’ music has often evidenced expansive thinking, but it took the resources of a festival to first bring her large group Filamental together. Once convened, she took full advantage of her octet’s assembled potentialities for imagination and sound. Having had one such experience, Mayas wasn’t going to wait for a festival to marshal such a breadth of mindpower and material again, nor was she going to let the impediments to travel and gathering imposed by a world pandemic get in the way. So, she sent out an invitation to an invitation to Filamental’s members and turned their gathered input into two pieces that run a bout 20 minutes in length. Each sets small, contrasting gestures dancing atop a consonant surface of elongated, layered sonorities. Ritual Mechanics is not so much a drone piece as an expression of continuous, focused action, richly detailed and consistently focused.

Bill Meyer

Rob Mazurek — Milan (Clean Feed)

Rob Mazurek has been recording for nearly three decades and performing much longer. His methods encompass composition and improvisation using brass, electronics, voice, and other instruments. In any body of work so broad, there are themes, some more dominant than others. Milan is a successor to Rome, which together comprise a smaller trend that involves recording solo performances in Italian radio studios with nice pianos. Recorded nine years apart, they offer a measure of how Mazurek’s work has changed in that time. Instead of cornet, he plays concert and piccolo trumpets; sternly ceremonial vocalizing and fistfuls of percussion dropped purposefully into the piano assert a more explicitly ritual intent. And, perhaps reflecting the amount of work that Mazurek has done with Damon Locks of late, the electronics now include playback options, so that vocal and instrumental samples (Is that Sun Ra I hear in there? And maybe some Ocora ethnic recordings?) as well as beat patterns muscle their way through the sizzle and smash of the prepared piano. Explicitly conceived as a journey, it’s quite a trip. Mazurek’s ensemble work can be pretty widescreen, but Milan reminds us that he can be epic on his own.

Bill Meyer

Nadja — Jumper (momentarily records)

Out of the many, many records put out by ambient and/or doom metal duo Nadja, it’s truly rare to find one that doesn’t feature Aidan Baker’s guitar in one form or another. But on Jumper, originally released as a bit of an art object on cassette (the online cover art is a look at the contraption that the tape comes in), he restricts himself not just to their drum machine but to layering and processing one particular pattern from it. Leah Buckereff provides bass, a more typical entry in the credits of their release, but here the way the slowly accreting digital noise plays over and around its pulses and feedback gives the whole album a very distinct feeling. Despite the use of drum machine there’s almost no rhythm to the whole hour here (until a surprise right at the end that catches me off guard every time), instead the effect is one of meditative harshness. The result is absolutely industrial, like a factory that’s weirdly compelling to listen to.

Ian Mathers

Orcas — How to Color a Thousand Mistakes (Morr Music)

Orcas — Rafael Anton Irisarri and Benoît Pioulard — haven’t recorded together in a decade, but they have been abundantly busy with their own projects. How to Color a Thousand Mistakes is consistent with past Orcas recordings and also reflects the music they have made in the interim. “Wrong Way to Fall” stands out in both regards, with Pioulard’s husky vocals over shimmering electric guitar solos, synth riffs and minimally complicated, but driving, drums. “Riptide” is populated by a number of different synth parts against a terse countermelody in the guitar. “Swells” has a strong vocal performance, while vibrato and pitch bends in the synths and economical guitar parts make for a memorable arrangement. “Fare” covers all the bases, with Pioulard’s voice double-tracked in a soaring chorus alongside mellifluous electronics, emphatic guitars, and plenty of drum fills. The recording’s closer, “Umbra,” has an extended introduction with a bass melody and warm synths. Then tangy dissonance and glissandos abound in both voice and instruments. It epitomizes the atmospheric textures that Orcas seem able to summon at will.

Christian Carey

Oxygen Destroyer — Guardian of the Universe (Redefining Darkness)

Guardian of the Universe by Oxygen Destroyer

Guardian of the Universe is another slab of monster-movie-themed, death-metal-inflected thrash from Oxygen Destroyer. The Seattle-based band’s previous LP, Sinister Monstrosities Spawned by the Unfathomable Ignorance of Mankind (2021), expanded their long-standing kaiju theme to include colossal beasts from outside the canon of the Tojo Studios Godzilla movies. The new record shifts tactics, focusing exclusively on Gamera and the giant turtle’s films for one of Tojo’s competitors, Daiei Films. It’s hard to know how much the record will appeal to listeners for whom those inside-baseball kaiju references mean little to nothing. But if you’re down for songs that attempt to replicate the absurd pleasures of Gamera in flight — head and limbs retracted into its massive shell, which then spins and shoots sheets of sparks from the holes, natch — this may be the record for you. Guardian of the Universe is non-stop fireworks: crazy, thrashy riffs; maniacal flat-out sprints; dive-bombing guitar solos. Should we take any of it seriously? This reviewer won’t hold forth (again) on the cultural stakes of post-war kaiju films. If you know, you know. And mostly what matters here is the band’s complete conviction and the joys of the music’s excesses. In these dog days of summer, it’s exactly what some of us need.

Jonathan Shaw

Peel Dream Magazine — Rose Main Reading Room (Topshelf)

Rose Main Reading Room by Peel Dream Magazine

It’s been four years since I’ve checked in on Peel Dream Magazine, whose second album Agitpop Alterna I described in my Dust review as “just like early Stereolab, with occasional blasts of shoe-gazey guitar thrown in for good measure.” I missed PDM’s third album Pad, so this brings us to album number four, Rose Main Reading Room. There’s still plenty of Stereolab in the mix, especially in the Mary Hansen-style backing vocals, the Farfisa, and the squelchy synth sounds (see “Oblast”). But here there’s more of a lean towards the baroque pop of Sufjan Stevens circa Illinois, mainly thanks to the chunky glimmer of vibraphone and the spiraling flute lines, which really brighten up proceedings. This balance between droning indie-rock and tuneful pop is very pretty, with sufficient musical complexity to invite rewarding repeat listens.

Tim Clarke

Plastic Bubble — Circular Breathing EP (Garden Gate/Moon Control)

The Circular Breathing EP by Plastic Bubble

Here’s a slab of happy, giddy, psychedelic garage rock which, except for the 2024 release date, wouldn’t be out of place in the Elephant Six universe. Lexington, KY’s Matt Taylor and Elisa McCabe are the chief blowers of bubbles, spinning out rough but iridescent songs like “Recontextualize,” where a guitar vamp grinds but vocals drift in pop ideality, “ah, ah, ah,” indeed. A classic indie boy-girl vibe permeates these five songs, with McCabe especially fetching in “Bright Morning.” “Forever” pulls back on the guitar roar to uncover a jaunty, girl-group bounce, with sweet counterparts and harmonies weaving in and around McCabe’s part. The set closes with a banger, part Who, part Fountains of Wayne, and all the way infectious, “Anything and Everything.”

Jennifer Kelly

SUUNS — The Breaks (Joyful Noise)

The Breaks by SUUNS

Elusiveness characterized SUUNS’ last album, 2021’s The Witness. As I noted in my Dusted review, “There’s no denying that its elusive character is part of its charm, but there are stretches where it feels more evasive than elusive, stubbornly refusing to engage more directly.” On their new album, The Breaks, the Montreal band are more direct in terms of the sounds they’re employing, but more evasive when it comes to songwriting. The majority of contemporary pop music is based around heavily effected vocal melodies and beats, which The Breaks seems to take as a cue towards similar immediacy. However, aside from the title track, the nagging piano of “Road Signs and Meanings,” and the loping stomp of opener “Vanishing Point,” this record is a tough nut to crack.

Tim Clarke

Tatsongs — Bushcraft (Self-Release)

Bushcraft by tat songs

Tatsongs are neither tat, nor really songs. The former implies fussy decoration, and these long, glacially evolving pieces seem as raw and elemental as rock formations. You can almost hear an icy wind blowing through their sheered off contours. The latter argues for a Pavlov’s buzzer of pleasing tone arrangements, and Tatsongs’ Tom Sadler is really not concerned whether you can guess then next 10 seconds of his compositions from the preceding 20. But even so, there’s something to be said for looming, sheeny layers of guitar and synth sounds that carve space and time into epic, barren landscapes. Tones vibrate in and out of true, zooming close and fading back, twitching in rhythm and coalescing in static fuzzed drones. Not a song in the bunch, nor much embroidery, but powerful stuff nonetheless.

Jennifer Kelly

TELESTIALVISIONS — Taurus in a Field (Island House)

Taurus in a Field by TELESTIALVISION

As Dittocrush, Pittsburgh resident Trevor D. Crush assembles tape loops into ambient symphonies. He often adds layers of live instrumentation from other musicians, such as Island House associate Chaz Prymek (Lake Mary, Fuubutsushi) and guitarist Ryan Fedor. TELESTIALVISIONS is his latest project, a tag team with New York guitarist Brinton Jones. The pair offer up a frothy brew that tastes rich and complex. Their debut Taurus in a Field is a pair of woozy collages that, while undeniably loose, are sharp in focus when compared to Dittocrush’s ghostly soundscapes. Crush’s tapes construct tangible shapes that intersect in a variety of patterns, while Jones unveils angelic melodies with his guitar. These two are telling a story that’s more Borges than Burroughs, a fantastical tale that defies conventional logic but manages to meander toward a graspable conclusion.

Bryon Hayes

Tycho — Infinite Health (Ninja Tune)

Infinite Health by Tycho

Tycho is Scott Hansen, and Scott Hansen is a designer. You can hear Hansen’s day job in Tycho’s music: the clean lines, the smart use of space, the sheer digestibility of it all. But should music go down quite this easy? Listening to Infinite Health feels a little bit like you’re at a trendy gym, playing a bit-part in an advert, or hitting up a bar packed with influencers. The common denominator is wanting to feel seen; everything plays a part in attracting attention. The synths sound like Boards of Canada, some of the funkier electro-pop moments sound like Daft Punk, and there’s an expensive sheen over everything. It’s hard to deny it’s appealing, but it also feels like experiencing capitalist obsolescence in real time.

Tim Clarke

White Collar—S/T (Static Shock)

White Collar by White Collar

Listeners with a long memory for North American hardcore might flash on those mid-1980s records by White Flag when listening to this new release from White Collar. Like that earlier Inland Empire band, White Collar frequently turns its critical gaze and its caustic smart-assery on the contemporary cultural climate of punk and politics as lifestyle (and your reviewer uses that odious term advisedly here). Songs like “Compassion Fatigue” and “Petition Signer” snarl at and spit on liberalism’s excesses of self-righteous smugness, to often hilarious effect. There’s a puritanical element to Gen Z’s dispositions and discourse that White Collar finds deeply irritating — not that the band is against strong ethico-political speech; check out “Meat Market” and “Equal Wrongs.” This is not the space for sustained analysis of Gen Z punk, and the extent to which we may want some sort of political purity from punk in the first place. But certainly, it’s an intrinsic good for punk to have snotty, disputatious and nasty voices in the mix. White Collar’s songs are short and sharp, and vocalist Loosey C’s performance is memorably unpleasant. Snarl on, punks.

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.