[exhaustedly] Hello there and welcome to issue #20 of Crow’s Nest. As always thank you for opening and reading this, I sincerely appreciate it and hope you find something within you enjoy. I also hope you’re staying cool despite the seemingly unrelenting heat and humidity. Supposedly it’s breaking here in Chicago tomorrow, I hope.
Rest in Power Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, and thank you for all that you’ve done.
If you blanche every time you see me describe something in Crow’s Nest as krautrock or krautrock-adjacent, you can safely skip the first half or so of this issue. The editor is saying this is too long for email so you may need to open this in a browser for the other half. I probably won’t be publishing another one of these for another month given my schedule and upcoming weekend engagements but that’s how this goes sometimes.
There are a few reasons why I don’t rate or score the music I highlight in Crow’s Nest. First, I don’t trust myself enough to form a definitive opinion on the music I feature after only a handful of listens, usually, that I give a piece before writing it up. The other times I’ve tried cataloging and rating things en masse, I’ve found the experience to be too tedious and unrewarding relative to the effort such an undertaking entails. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve never really found the details or contours of someone else’s taste to be especially interesting, so why should I expect that to be reciprocated?
I know that might sound weird coming from someone who publishes a newsletter highlighting the music they’ve been enjoying listening to, but I hope you read this for my perspective and music within, not the ratings of said music. That’s what I seek out in music—the music itself, not others’ opinion or validation of my own. This is also more personal than professional work for me, to do something of note other than work, sleep, and pay bills.
Simply put, I don’t really believe in the idea of ranking or rating music in the way others do. I understand the impulse to rank music or try to figure out just how good music is, either by itself or relative to others. Yet I find myself incapable of accepting that a numeric rating or aggregation of numeric rankings can truly represent some type of objective, factual claim about the quality of a record, something which is in my view an inherently subjective, opinion-based claim.
I’ve stated this before but I find music to be too expansive to be properly understood via ratings, rankings and comparisons. On what grounds can you really compare a cross-section of disparate releases like a capital-I Important Record like Floating Points and Pharaoh Sanders’s Promises, an EP of dance music club anthems from a label like Livity Sound, and something more (for me) for everyday listening like Dry Cleaning’s New Long Leg, rank them as objectively better than one another, and claim it to be authoritative? It’s something I find absurd if not impossible.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot in light of the fever pitch so-called ‘Score Discourse’ has had on social media recently, particularly reviews from Pitchfork, the self-described “most trusted voice in music”. (Side note: I cannot and will never take that tagline seriously or sincerely, I mean Jesus Christ.) Pitchfork’s decimalic 10-point system has long been notorious for its oblique criteria and debates over the grounds justifying particular single-point differences or scores. There’s definitely a psychic hold Pitchfork scores have over people, coloring their experience of an album well beyond any reasonable degree given the quasi-authority such a ranking carries. The prominence of the score on the review pages themselves leads to easy screenshotting for social media and quick takes. I am certainly guilty of all of this, and admit I open social media previews of the reviews that interest me, see the score, and exit without reading much more frequently than I actually read the review or even keep the review in a tab for reading (eventually, I tell myself).
I don’t have it in me to contribute further to the big picture beyond this—I would encourage you to read B.D. McClay’s recent essay on the larger phenomena in new Gawker for more—but I have 2 things I want to note. First, Pitchfork’s ratings are structurally clickbait, and 2 of the genres most notorious for setting off this discourse—pop and emo—have never been well-covered by the publication. Pitchfork now has a decades-spanning legacy of failing to properly examine these genres and others, which makes it quite bizarre to see this same phenomena recur again and again when it never fundamentally changes.
The other thing is that, ironically, for all of the outrage and hemming and hawing over their scores, Pitchfork ratings matter less than they ever have before. Legacy-wise, the publication is known for igniting the careers of many acts, and derailing some, as is fairly well documented on the site’s Wikipedia page, which no doubt contributes to the tenor of such yelling. But this no longer seems to occur anymore. It seems doubtful that enough people form their opinions of artists like recent discourse main characters Foxing through Pitchfork reviews such that they’ll be significantly impacted for the worse by a 6.0, or pop stars’ livelihoods will take a tumble over a ‘meh’ review from the site. Greta van Fleet, the most memorable total pan in recent years, probably became more popular as a result of that review, as those not paying attention to their algorithmic-streaming playlist-fueled popularity started checking them out, if only to see just how bad they are. They recently played a stadium-sized large venue in Chicago that previously hosted longstanding Pitchfork darlings like The National and Vampire Weekend.
Conversely, The Weather Station, who admittedly I started listening to only following Ignorance’s 9.0 from the site, seems to have barely seen a bump from such a glowing review. Next year she’s playing a smaller midsize venue here in Chicago that is, in my view, probably half the capacity one would expect to be playing if Pitchfork had the influence social media claims it does. An aftershow for her performance at Pitchfork Music Festival at that same venue was quietly moved to another a little over a third the size of the original booking.
Contemporary social science research, if my understanding is correct, believes one gets worse data in rated opinions on subjects beyond a 5-point scale, 4 if one cannot have a truly neutral opinion on the subject. While I can see value to 7 or 10-point scales on topic of greater interest than quick-fire questions of researchers, I think we could all benefit from not worrying too much about the details of one publication’s opinion on music, especially when it’s only one-tenth of a point. It can’t be better than enjoying the music itself regardless of others’ opinions on it, nor could reducing the joys of one of the greatest phenomena humans have created to arguments over a number.
And with that, it’s time to highlight some of my recent favorites from my listening. No scores included.
Swedish? Yes. Krautrock-adjacent? Yes. On Höga Nord? Nope, not this time. If you’ve found the releases from HN that I highlight too abstract or challenging for your own taste, I ask that you put that aside and give this a spin regardless. Goat have been around for nearly a decade and this album, primarily a rarities compilation, nevertheless holds together. It’s very danceable even through the guitar solos and flute digressions. They’ve courted some controversy through the perception of cultural appropriation in their use of anonymizing exotica, so it may not be totally innocuous, but if you can stomach that this is a fine record. The 2 closing tracks ‘Fill My Mouth’ and ‘Queen of the Underground’ are new recordings and the strongest of the bunch, so hopefully the group has a strong future ahead of them.
Angel Deradoorian was set to tour last year’s Find The Sun before the pandemic squashed those plans; she’s since announced some shows which was enough for me to give this a few more spins. “Saturnine Night” was and remains one of my favorite songs from last year, and listening again I find myself drawn to much more of the record than that. Samer Ghadry’s very expansive, dry drumming sound manages to distinguish itself from almost all other recent drumming, and Deradoorian’s vocals, flutes and more conjure up a enchanting, spiritual desert world I’ve love to get lost in. This may not be for you if you roll your eyes at New Age-y, astrological phenomena or, yes, krautrock, but I’m excited to (finally) see this live in a short while.
South Island rock deconstructionist institution The Dead C, or perhaps their label Ba Da Bing, uploaded some of their back catalog to Bandcamp for a recent Bandcamp Friday which is as big of a push as I’ll probably ever get to dive into them. Of that cohort Patience is easily my favorite, particularly closing track “South”, which clicks for me in that transcendently beautiful, off-kilter way that avant-garde records often strive for. Your results may vary, naturally.
This band has been in my mind and an occasional listen for most of the past year but I just discovered they’re on Bandcamp so it’s time to post. Late ‘60s Sweden. Heavily inspired by Terry Riley. Opened for The Doors at one point. Invited by Warhol to perform at one of his exhibitions in Stockholm. Short lived and wound up running through a few other incarnations I’ve not yet listened to, this is 2 hours of supremely noisy, cello and saxophone (if I’m not mistaken) fueled improvisational not-quite-rock that really hits the spot when you need a swirling haze to disappear in for some time.
Veteran UK producer Appleblim, now based out of Berlin, released his latest album on UK hardcore label Sneaker Social Club. It’s tough for me to detail where exactly in the dance music spectrum this falls, given the hybridity of many of these tracks. There’s definitely rave and dubstep energy to it with some more modern programming, all wrapped in a lightly psychedelic sound. I’m not sure when, exactly, would be the best time to play some of this during a warehouse party but it surely deserves a spot.
Irish producer Mano Le Tough released his latest album on DJ Koze’s Pampa Records a few weeks ago. It’s got that slightly off-kilter, warm and friendly sound shared by, among others, the label head and their likeminded Stockholm peers Studio Barnhus. The middle of the album between Aye Aye Mi Mi and Pompeii is a personal highlight.
The cover art for this release is incredibly fitting, connecting the dots between physical post-industrial wreckage with that of the emotional territory within. Karly Hartzman et al. of Asheville’s Wednesday have created a wonderful record I need to spend more time with. Sounding quite like Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan in a 90s noise rock band, it’s as crushing as one might imagine. Hanif Abdurraqib contributes an essay on the album for the liner notes too.
For those of you not keeping track and even those of you good at calculating binary values, Sheffield electro label has released its (in binary, the somewhat arbitrary) 100th release from Dallas producer Cygnus. It’s fitting this EP is both called 100% Dope and is a throwback to the genre’s 90s heyday. It leans hip-hop overall and I wouldn’t be surprised to find these tracks going off in an old-school rave somewhere outside of tastemaking locales and perhaps time itself. Here’s to 01100100 more quality releases from both!
Don’t actually buy this one. Regretfully, this release is ridiculously priced on Bandcamp to serve as a preview only, and discourage purchasing a digital copy. Soundcloud still exists, guys, and if you do want to use Bandcamp for selling wax I believe you don’t need to offer a digital version? You know some of us actually like to purchase digital copies to send a small amount of money to support artists above the fractions of a cent streaming offer, while not obtaining a physical product we won’t utilize that much? If I had a bit more money and less sense I might buy it just to see what would happen, but alas, I’m only streaming what I can for now.
Anyway, despite my annoyances this upcoming reissue single is a very sweet, surf-heavy piece of power pop from this short-lived, somewhat controversy-courting group from late 70s Japan. It’s worth a spin or two to put you in a better mood, and hopefully its formal release next week will offer something more accessible than a limited run repressing.
Insofar as one could claim the pandemic has been in some sense “good” for the non-elite classes, one upside has been that many underground artists active before the internet subsumed most everything have started making their out-of-print works more accessible via Bandcamp and other platforms who weren’t there the first time. Portland (Maine) group Cerberus Shoal has been one of them, and it’s been a pleasure to discover and listen to their work as they release it. The highlight of this release, a collaboration with Alvarius B. aka Sun City Girls’ Alan Bishop, is the expansive final track which proceeds at a dirge-like pace one could re-imagine as an Elephant 6 deep cut of sorts.
I don’t have a whole lot to say about this one. It’s a jacking techno EP indebted to the Detroit sound out on Berlin’s Rekids from Venezuelan producer Confidential Recipe. Give it a spin if that sounds up your alley.
This landed in my inbox over the weekend and, listening as I was writing this out, figured why not include it. From Lisbon’s Black Hole Time Warp, this single has a strong sci-fi influence alongside some watery, dubby grooves. Midsommar has had a bit of an extended moment in the sun given the recent weather and other things stewing, perhaps this is what Haxan Cloak might make to suggest disquiet during a seemingly placid day on the water?
Alright, that’s enough for this issue. As always if you’ve gotten to this point in the newsletter, thank you for reading Crow’s Nest. I hope you’ve found something within you enjoy. Feel free to give me a shout via the buttons within or on Twitter @embirdened. I realize there’s a strong creepy summer vibe to much of this issue but I hope yours isn’t anything like that at this time. Take care in the meantime.