Crow’s Nest 68: 042124
I mean yeah, the courses were tough, but I wouldn’t exactly consider the literature department to be a site of …
Hello there, and welcome back to Crow’s Nest, issue #68 this time. I thought I’d be able to get an issue out sooner but the planned gap following the last issue landed on Easter, then I decided to take it easy before a day trip to Indiana to catch the total solar eclipse, then it was too nice out to spend it writing instead of outside (surely you understand). I’d been hoping to include an essay this issue as well, but considering yesterday was, you know, that didn’t exactly work out as planned.
I hope you’re doing alright. I’ve been quite busy with like 5 projects on my desk at my job (though that’s rapidly shifting to not enough work lol), and getting going on some health stuff too. Plenty of shows, a number of films (go see Hundreds of Beavers in theaters if you can), a play, and of my friends (who’s also a Crow’s Nest reader) and I made plans to see the ballet while I was writing this. I do feel behind on some listening stuff—I’m now up to a month of stuff in my inbox I want to go over again, and I lost a couple dozen browser tabs of things I wanted to check again due to an issue with my work laptop—but nevertheless I have a dozen+ among dozens more of new releases I feel are worth your attention if you’ve not dug them up yourself. Let’s get into them then.
Cubist Leeds post-punks Drahla took their time between this record and the last, and the wait was worth it. Adding in a second guitarist, the now quartet turn inward, further eschewing conventional song structure a la This Heat, while still providing some explosively memorable hooks within (‘Talking Radiance’, ‘A’). I particularly like the detail in the drum parts—the drummer has started making his own cymbals—and Chris Duffin returns to splatter his sax throughout as well. The press material is a little light on concrete details, but even if you feel tired of yet another post-punk band sounding like that, their take on the genre is fresh and worth the consideration.
St. Louis punk lifer Martin Meyers, formerly of Lumpy & the Dumpers, hard launched his label Inscrutable Records last Bandcamp Friday with a quartet of records, including a reissue of his Soup Activists record from late last year, and the debut from local indie pop outfit Pleasant Mob, fronted by Spread Joy’s Raidy Hodges. The highlight of this drop for me comes from this reissue of the self-titled debut from Oakland’s Famous Mammals. Their lo-fi drum-machine post-punk is filled with peculiar off-noises, solid guitar jangle and the kinds of flourishes that speak to greater ambition and deserve more attention. (That whistled hook on ‘Unspoken Chair!’) No word on if these noteworthy warmbloods will venture to the Central Time Zone yet, but the activists and the mob are converging on the Empty Bottle a couple Sundays from now. That should be worth a couple PBRs and less sleep than desired to start off the workweek after.
Writing about Omni a couple issues ago, I noted that I don’t really consider Atlanta a hub for post-punk. But after giving this record from Vessel quite a few spins, I’m certain there’s more there to discover. The record is incredibly groovy and sunny affair despite some thematic heaviness—highlight ‘Lost Appeal’ is a fairly relatable anthem about apathy—grounded by drummer Alex Tuisku’s standout lead vocals and Isaac Bishop doing everything that’s not guitar/bass/drums throughout. It’s not a perfect record in the same way as my favorite Minneapolis post-punk band’s records, and you missed a very solid gig of theirs at Cole’s last week, though there’s a good chance both that they’ll be back soon enough and that I’ll be spinning this until they return.
A few issues back I covered local shoegaze youth Twin Coast, noting my excitement for further work from them, and their new EP does not disappoint at all. Definitely not the type of MBV worship that makes you wonder if that band should be getting royalties, the duo here present a heavy squall that feels like it’s levitating off the ground of conventional song structure. It doesn’t collapse into ambient mush, though the lyrics are foggy as most anything anyone staring at their pedalboard has put down. If you’re tired of your current shoegaze favorites and are looking for something fresh in the genre, I’m hoping you’ve already clicked play on this.
Scottish label/DJ duo/party Optimo’s anything goes (provided you can probably dance to it) ethos has served them well and ensures they always have my ear for new material. That material is now its own sublabel, Optimo Music Rocks!, focusing on the bands they would book instead of flying in guest DJs. Kicking things off is the (post-)punk(-funk) of Bikini Body, who are a bit too highbrow for that to be an intentional SpongeBob reference. The band combines densely literary, feminist songwriting with the kind of dance band music NYC has always had space for since the initial punk explosion. Any band that can shoehorn in Hemingway and Wilde name-checks without coming across like Lauren Oyler or sacrificing momentum is worth keeping an eye on. Maybe don’t linger too long though.
Dark post-punk lifers FACS are always a solid listen, whether on record or onstage. If their discography has become a bit unwieldy to dive into, this recent single out on Sub Pop is a succinct entry point. The A-side’s got all the markers of a typical FACS song—and also made me go ‘Yeah, that’s the bassist from Lifeguard’s dad there’ on it—with a solid Eurhythmics cover on the B-side. They also recently released a live record recorded at local vinyl pressing plant Smashed Plastic for the flip-side of their sound, if you haven’t been able to catch their highly-recommended live show yet.
If any of the above are too short for you, Texas noise rock troupe Water Damage double down on their pulverizing drones on this record: quite literally, this one is twice as long with twice as many tracks (4) as their record from last year. No doubt the closest contemporary to Pärson Sound, you should know what to expect from their sound, which comes across like extensions of the interstitial parts of a Godspeed You! Black Emperor one. Craig Clouse of Shit and Shine joins in on the final song as the group cover one of his to close this out.
I’ll always have room for more egg-y post-punk out of France, and Tours group Rank-O delivers it in spades on their new record. I hear quite a bit of Delivery in the rollercoaster-y gang vocals and groove, a fair amount of Uranium Club’s bass and sustained droning too, and the requisite post-Devo synth touches in the mix as well.
One more post-punk thing for you this time, I swear. Mysterious Cincinnati group The Drin, featuring members of other Cincinnati post-punk groups I’ve mentioned in previous issues, put out this first single from their forthcoming sixth (?!) album before heading over to Europe for some shows across the continent. I’m not sure exactly if using something that sounds like that Foreigner riff is the type of move I would expect them to make, but they twist the song around it into a sufficiently dark shape for the scene, and the end result has been on repeat enough for me to include it here so evidently it works. It’s not clear why they’ve gone across the pond before (as far as I know) across the Midwest here, but hopefully the summer months bring them to Chicago before long (I’d guess either the Empty Bottle or West Fest).
At the beginning of last year I noted being underwhelmed with local melancholy supergroup Doom Flower’s live show, likely an effect of following up Spread Joy. Their album from last year grew on me, and this recent record compiling live versions of their songs from an East Coast tour last year has re-whetted that appetite to see them. A bit more tender and understated like Warpaint’s quiet moments than trip-hoppy like the studio record here. Now to find a local show that works for me …
The Trilogy Tapes puts out a lot of stuff at a fairly constant clip, so I’m not surprised some gems get buried quickly, but they’re also held in pretty strong esteem by Boomkat and your mate who posts memes about experimental artists, so I’m a bit surprised I didn’t really see anything about this release. Anyway, this is a collaboration between Klara Lewis, a sound sculptor whose loop work exists at the intersection between the European avant-garde and the dancefloor, and Yuki Tsuiji, guitarist in Bo Ningen and otherwise a busy collaborator. Together, the pair have made a gorgeously smeared album that often feels glacial, haunting, and otherwise noisy. Exactly the kind of stuff you’d expect such a pair to come up with during a dark winter, which doesn’t quite fit the mood when it’s now super sunny out … I hear a lot of Jules Reidy, CS + Kreme, and ‘haunted’ ambient that moves into glitchy realms in it. Some feel more like sketches than others. There are still tapes available if you’d like one of them.
There’s been Certifiably A Lot of peculiar, cranky Discourse on dance music recently—that DJ Seinfeld Burial edit from last issue feels more ancient than something from last month, and I had been hoping to write an essay on a peculiar take on electronic music journalism in the most recent Baffler but felt getting this issue out was enough for now—but one of the weirdest came when Skee Mask released his 10th EP of material on his eponymous series on Ilian Tape. A Twitter Bluecheck, who is CEO of an ‘AI for legal work’ startup, complained about it not being on streaming services (which SM boycotts due to its abysmal payout rate), said that managing MP3 downloads was too much effort, and offered SM $10,000 to put it on Spotify. SM didn’t budge—allegedly the douche gave him $100 anyway—and the whole incident left a bizarre taste in many people’s mouths. I don’t think it’s all my new allergy meds.
Skee Mask is a little too talented to be written off as ‘that guy who was told downloading an MP3 was too difficult’, but the record should be considered on its own. (I realize I’m not helping there.) SM is known more for his works with breakbeats, but here pursues techno and clickly dub techno (there’s a difference) throughout, to a usual solid end result. I don’t exactly want to say ‘Give him a tenner to stick it to the tools ruining the internet’ but, there are worse ways to spend your money.
Wisdom Teeth’s latest compilation has a roster that feels like a who’s who of the slightly off-center dance underground, the type of acts I see are booked at Podlasie Club and make me wanna text some people to head out and see them. The compilation focuses on sonic explorations around 160 BPM, but little here sounds like d’n’b, footwork, or other genres around that pace. It’s actually a quite placid listen, at least until you start grooving to it and realize these tracks are fucking zooming along. As many people attempt to use BPM as some kind of material description for their mixes, this is a great reminder of how useless those attempts can be when the overall energy of the tracks determines the mood.
Norwegian producer André Bratten put out this record of techno jams, apparently inspired by Pavement’s debut EP, out on Smalltown Supersound a few weeks ago and it’s one of the better techno LPs I’ve heard recently. Don’t got much more to say about it than that. (If the name sounds familiar, you’re thinking of André Breton, who helped found surrealism in France.)
Well, that’s issue #68 of Tone Glow for you. Thank you for listening and reading, as always, and I hope you found something within you like too. Go out and enjoy spring while it’s here now.
Lots of great stuff for me to root through here! Digging that Drahla record.