Crow’s Nest #46: 012223
Time to get started on those New Year’s Resolutions, I guess
Howdy, and welcome to issue #46 of Crow’s Nest. Days are finally starting to feel longer if not long enough to stow away the SAD lamp here in Chicago. No essay with this issue tbh, the blurbs are big enough this go-around for sure. As always, thank you for opening this, hopefully something below appeals to you.
The band Dumb from Vancouver, if I had to guess, likely settled on this name because they were sick of all the ‘Stupid … good’ jokes made under an earlier name. Well, at least they were smart enough to get some of that Canadian grant money for this. Canadian early Parquet Courts, Canadian Mush (RIP), post-punk bands with that Antipodean jangle, post-punk bands with that European bass sound, bridging the gap between post-Wire/Y Pants/Kleenex punk and groovin’ funky (post-)punk jams across 18 (!) songs on this album. There are trumpet parts in here too! The lyrics skew more workaday, ‘my life’s boring, I don’t like my job and this town sucks’ than political broadsides, which helps give the album a down-to-earth, shooting the breeze at the dive bar after your shift feeling than one of drinking off your anger following an argumentative political caucus. When my brain has been making me feel down recently, the chorus to ‘Sleep Like a Baby’ has become a bit of a mantra; I continue to count my blessings for not having insomnia issues as I resign myself to yet another future day.
I was fortunate enough to see Does Spring Hide Its Joy, the latest album from drone master Kali Malone, as an installation piece on a Revolutionary War era fort outside of Philadelphia last fall. Admittedly, despite the effort it was a bit lackluster: in the midst of music festival-y grounds there was constant disruption from people heading in and out despite attentive positioning of a blackout curtain, and leakage from nearby soundsystem bass hampered the immersiveness of it. Without additional context, the drone piece and string instrument scrapes lacked direction, and the visual display of constantly shifting color bands felt too grayscale, like the Word font color editor glitching out in full screen.
As with the full album, much of the things out of control about that installation are now, well, up to you more fully. Funnily enough, restriction and control of some of the main themes explored abstractly here. Officially, we have 3 hours of deep listening work with Malone operating 72 sine wave generators, Stephen O’Malley (of Sunn O)))) on e-bowed guitar, and Lucy Railton on cello, composed during the initial pandemic lockdown in Berlin. On the other hand, Malone and her collaborators consider it an open-ended piece full of space to explore through those restrictions and limitations while waiting, both mid-performance and metaphorically, for change to arrive and blossom. If you, like me, see yourself turning to her music for something powerful and magisterial while waiting for change around you, I’m sure you’ll find plenty to enjoy within.
While Kali Malone is likely the biggest artist whose appeal cuts both academic/theory backgrounds while retaining some underground nonacademic appeal, one has to wonder what might have happened if she turned her attention from institutional support. Waiting for Does Spring Hide Its Joy to come out, I found a 2017 EP she recorded as a part of shoegaze trio Swap Babies. Imagine a more hi-fi yet still lo-fi Helen (the side project from another notable ambient-adjacent female artist, Grouper) and you’re most of the way there. I’d call this dream pop but it’s full of a sense of brooding that is giving nightmare pop more than anything that can realistically be described as a dream (outside of, like, Bulgakov or something, I guess).
I saw the band Doom Flower back in 2021 and didn’t think much of them; then again, they were on after Spread Joy blew me away for the first time, which made their murky, low-lit music come across sonically a bit like trying to identify the subtle flavors of a premium single malt after downing a Jägerbomb. Returning with a new album to ring in the new year, I think they can officially qualify as your friendly neighborhood supergroup, with members having played in acts including Brokeback, Campdogzz and Joan of Arc. Their drummer wasn’t able to attend the studio sessions, so the band cut up a breakbeat record as a replacement, giving the music a trip-hop flavor in addition to elements of bedroom melancholy, The xx and Warpaint. For those quiet nights of longing.
Recently it has come to my attention that many of my friends who are so-called music fans don’t regularly check like a dozen venues’ listings to discover music they might like and when it’s playing. What?! How else do you people discover stuff like Surgery Boys, the local trio of ‘bass’/synth weirdos regularly putting out intriguing EPs of jams recorded during winters in Wisconsin cabins, as if Oui Ennui pulled a Bon Iver to make fractured synth-punk with some melodic sensibilities? If you like what you hear here, there’s another EP that should be out shortly and 2 others already out in this series. If you live in Chicago, they play Sleeping Village on Tuesday Feb 21st as part of the $1 beer night series (the beer’s PBR, cope), with Doom Flower labelmates Aitis Band headlining and another band playing whose bio reads, ominously, “FFO: Duran Duran and U.S. Maple”. Eat at home and take transit there & back, and you may struggle to spend $20 on the evening. Now you know, and know there’s no excuses for missing this.
I couldn’t tell you anything about the town of Barcelos, Portugal, where this band is from; a search in Google Maps suggests it’s a quaint little hamlet full of regional character, I guess. I couldn’t tell you much about this record too because, well, I have been spinning it mostly while high as hell. I have a good reason for that: it’s stoner rock, dubby psych, breathtaking builds, mostly instrumental spacey stuff. Exactly the type of music to take a hit to before putting it on to judge for yourself.
Sometimes it takes seeing a band live to ‘get’ them and understand what’s going on on the record, though that’s no guarantee. I think I’ve experienced the opposite with Belgian-American group Fievel Is Glaque though; I was familiar with them before they were announced as opening Stereolab’s tour last year, and while multiple people who saw them were converts without prior knowledge, they didn’t do much for me. It just didn’t cohere. But that appears to be the point; listening to their latest, proper album Flaming Swords after seeing them, I get it. What I saw live as nonsensical art-rock/contemporary classical meandering—akin to non sequiturial statements from an obnoxious art-y friend, you know the type—reveal themselves as slice-of-life flourishes that seem to relish in the absurdity of urbane street life. Exquisite miniatures and the sort of passing scenes that remind you of the vibrancy of life and the little things that make it worth it—fittingly, this was all recorded in one day by the collaborators then surrounding the core nucleus of composer Zach Phillips and singer Ma Clément. Reading interviews with them, you start to get concerned at how concussion-prone the two are, but hopefully they can continue to knock heads together and produce gorgeous work like this.
They say a picture’s worth a thousand words which is more than enough for this one:
Chris Korda, co-founder of the Church of Euthanasia, picked her career in electronic music back up in 2019 after an extensive stint in software engineering. Putting her archives up on Bandcamp, this 38-minute electronic soundscape from 2007 is an ambient piece meant to stimulate alpha brain wave activity. One of my goals for this year is to get more into intentional, deliberate relaxation and meditation, and I’ve got this noted as something to queue up when I get going on that.
I’m not familiar with TAAHLIAH so forgive the slant here. Loraine James, the prolific, ever-mutating producer whose sonic omnivorousness has made her one of the most exciting acts from the British underground as of late, has teamed up with TAAHLIAH for this one-off single. While much of James’s recent output has had an off-kilter liminality to it, this one’s a straight up hyperpop banger. Peak time dance floor destruction shit. Don’t overthink this one.
Brooklyn producer Relaxer is, you guessed it, another one on my periphery who’s never left a strong enough impression on me until now, and I think I’ve been following him since he appeared on Ghostly in the mid-2010s. This set of self-released tunes sees plenty of energy in the drum programming, intriguing squelches, weirdo turns and other leftfield strangeness to keep things interesting for home listening and hopefully some basement parties. Bass music through and through. Capped off with a remix from Bruce which is never a bad thing too.
I don’t pay much attention to music described as ‘cinematic’ or ‘orchestral’—frankly, enough detail in the recording and anything can sound as detailed or lush as a full symphonic orchestra as far as I’m concerned. But the latter of those especially feels apt for Swiss artist Noémi Büchi here. Electoacoustic and glitchy elements remind me of a lot of the experimental stuff FACT Magazine would highlight in the middle of the last decade, grounded in synth work but more ambitious than your standard out-of-the-box offering from that palette. Towards the end of this album some instrumentation that sounds like an accordion comes in, which makes this the second inclusion in this issue to make me think ‘damn, wouldn’t a bunch of jazz music with the accordion as the lead instrument be sweet’. If that sounds wrong to you, hopefully by the end you can see my side of things.
Lisbon electronic staples Niagara continue their streak of small-circulation hardware jams with this latest album-ish CD release. While the trio have never exactly been a dance act, even if you resist comparing them to their associates centered on Príncipe across town—this one is especially unsuited for even a warmup set. Plenty of detailed clicking, clacking, and straight up reveling in getting an exceptionally great sound out of their gear without necessarily attempting to cohere into anything more.
AD 93 sublabel Lith Dolina takes a more atmospheric, rocky, desert-ish feeling to the technical sounds emanating from the main label. Japanese producer Bot1500 lives up to the aesthetic, turning in this suite of tunes with 90s techno drum programming and expansive synth work that gives one the sense of time beyond the human scale, something bigger than your typical human lifespan/timeframe and the greater phenomenological perception of it. (That is both the academic in me and the weed talking.) It reminds me of Quirke with his hardcore sensibilities sanded off. Speaking of Quirke, I wonder what he’s up to; he has multiple releases on AD 93 and would be perfect for Lith Dolina too.
You might recall that last year I quite enjoyed the ambient-adjacent ashbalkum from South Korean duo Salamanda despite some aversions to the genre. In November they released a trio of remixes of the material from some names fairly familiar to me. These aren’t necessarily tracks for the DJ set but they do take things into leftfield territory and closer to dance than the originals.
It’s always humbling to go ever so slightly outside your wheelhouse taste-wise, thinking you know most everything in that realm, only to catch that slight difference and realize how siloed you can be and how much more is out there. That’s how I felt seeing Home Entertainment as part of a local rock bill at the Bottle a couple weeks ago. The foundation is post-punk, heavy on the low-end as you might expect from a guitar-bass-drums trio setup, but the group fold in post-hardcore and emo elements that freshened up my perceptions about them and reminded me how little I follow those genres. Look-wise they came across on the anti-rock Metz side of things while still ripping. It’s just another reminder to always check out the openers on the bill too.
A nice record of cosmic longing out on Maple Death. Excellent drones over alt-country sounds, perfect for crying at the bar during the honky-tonk or an ever so-slightly less dark version of the Dividers record from last year.
Unless you live under a rock and, somehow, receive this email newsletter, you’re probably aware Neutral Milk Hotel announced a career-spanning box set last week. Not that I expect everyone to know about NMH, but come on, it comes with the territory here. Anyway, part of the set includes the official release of the demo of Little Birds, the first and afaik only known post-In The Aeroplane Over The Sea composition from Jeff Mangum to surface. The demo is better than the live version recorded during their 2013-2015 reunion tour. It’s probably too much to ask for anything more than another reunion tour from the group at this point … then again Jai Paul also announced his live debut at Coachella in a few months last week, so never give up hope.
Alright, that’s plenty for an issue now, isn’t it? As always, if you’ve gotten this far, thank you for reading Crow’s Nest. Hopefully something within was worth it. Stay cozy as winter continues.
Really digging Dumb’s “Pray For Tomorrow” and the Investments record. Really NOT digging this 1-2 punch Mother Nature dropped on us this week.
Also: Luck, Wisconsin is out there!