Crow’s Nest 78: 121524
Season’s Subheadline to You!
Greetings from Chicago, and welcome to issue #78 of Crow’s Nest. As always, thank you for opening, reading, listening, and anything else you may do with the contents within.
As a housekeeping note, this will almost certainly be the final issue of Crow’s Nest this year. I don’t really do year-end lists/reflections since I don’t like those, but I won’t be writing next week per my usual schedule, and 2 Sundays from now I will be at (checks notes) a day party Moodymann and Carl Craig are DJing at a River North barcade the day after my birthday. Yep, I’ll be turning the big 3-0 in just under two weeks. I feel like I should have more to day about that in general; but when I think about it if feels like a Big change but also just another number, more defined by others perceptions of it than anything. Consequently … yeah, I don’t know where I’m going with that.
Also: if you’ve made the move to posting (more) at Bluesky recently, I’m there @embirdened.bsky.socal. Feel free to reach out there or if you’ll be in Chicago and would like to join my birthday shenanigans, for that matter.
Here’s a thematically heavy one that feels a bit indicative of the recent energy that’s been around. Good Sad Happy Bad continue their streak as one of the most underrated groups examining adulthood and the exasperated existentialism that accompanies it. The members combine talents from other projects—notably, Mica Levi’s guitar work from her stream of solo releases, and Marc Pell’s drumming that also powers Mount Kimbie—into something greater than the sum of its parts. CJ Calderwood’s woodwinds and (if I’m not mistaken) vocal overdubs on tracks like ‘Turbine’, ‘Twist the Handle’ and ‘DIY’ give everything an eerie grounding and provide some of the most emotionally devastating lyrics I’ve heard this year. I can’t exactly trace why I’ve been feeling down as of late, and admittedly I’m not sure if playing this helps with or further hinders things. Guess I’ll see how things continue as I muddle through with things.
The Shop Regulars formula is pretty straightforward: take a dissonant, angular noise/art rock riff, repeat it to death a la The Fall or Bo Diddley, rinse and repeat. Add in some droning vocals and ramshackle backing from a revolving cast, and it’s a very enticing listen if you’re into this sort of thing. Very much a post-punk, RIUASA philosophy at play. The Portland, Oregon group are a bit of a local delicacy owing to the general economic conditions, but have made noise about making it out to the Midwest, and I’ll definitely grab a ticket in advance to help with that should it come to fruition.
Yeah, spiritually it feels a bit like a sad boy fall/winter right about now. Eschewing a lot of the abstraction that has marked his most recent works, Bon Iver is back with a new EP that goes for articulate if still vague lyrics many of us held tight to when we first discovered Justin Vernon’s work years ago. A well-placed source has informed me that there’s more to come from him soon, which might be the kind of thing you need to keep going through moments like this, along with these songs.
Power pop is a bit of a blind spot in my tastes, so I can’t really say whether Parisian act Alvilda are breaking new territory here, or they’ve only made an excellent record you’ll immediately put back on repeat. The sound is a bit between the aggressive post-punk of groups like VISION 3D and the more mellow, artier side of indie poppers like En Attendant Ana … which I suppose is why it’s labeled as power pop. A bit bratty in the non-2024 sense there, I kinda get the sense it’s Static Shock being ‘sweet’. Still worth your time though.
The DC-centered group Lifted has always been a bit hard to pin down. The group is based around the Future Times label but each release features new contributors, making categorization challenging. Here, the core duo of Max D and Matt Papich take recordings from folks including Jeremy Hyman, Dustin Wong, and Jordan GCZ, feed their playing into CDJs, and create abstract, ambient numbers out of the constituent parts. As others have noted, this ain’t exactly jazz, but it ain’t exactly not jazz either, making for an oddly compelling listen.
Giridhar Udupa is a master Ghatam player in India. After working with Polish musician Waclaw Zimpel, he was introduced to the producer Shackleton, who recorded his debut solo album and added in some trance-y touches to the work. You can guess based on that context and past records by those involved as to what this sounds like, but even more percussive to show off Udupa’s playing; other comparisons that come to mind as I listen are the hand-percussion club numbers coming out of MENA and that diaspora and Mohammad Reza Mortazavi’s Ritme Jaavdanegi, both of which are certainly off base. Apologies to everyone for my ignorance in explaining this wonderful record better.
I don’t know how exactly this one wound up among my links, but I’m glad it did. Taking its title from a word defined as “A kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details like [elven fantasy imagery]”, this record features a pretty strong psychedelic mood over skeletal techno. Great for home listening, it might play well for a spacey non-dub moment on an outdoor dancefloor; I assume the Berlin label that put this out has given it some proper rinses in said space. Slot it spiritually alongside Acid Mt. Fuji.
The dark lord is back. Heavy, dank breakbeat missives that have not mellowed out as de Babalon has aged, I heard the lead single walking to the doctor’s office before 8 AM after an overnight rainstorm, and ‘early AM in a wet city that fucks’ feels like an appropriate description for these tunes. Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em; if you’re still into it, he’s still not out of it.
I’ve known pretty much since I started listening to 60s Swedish progg group Pärson Sound a few years ago that they’ve gone through numerous lineups and name changes, their longest stint known as Träd Gräs och Stenar. You’d think I’d be familiar with that catalog by now, except I’m not, because honestly that’s who I am at this point. Subliminal Sounds recently repressed the 2018 self-titled record the group put out as Träden, and it’s been an enjoyable spin for me, continuing with the longform, largely instrumental psych rock I would expect from them, which now exists within the genre we know as post-rock (and, broadly speaking, progg and PS kind of were predecessors to). Give it a whirl if you’re interested in more from them and haven’t done so already.
This year’s Spotify Wrapped found the platform using generative AI in its annual content package, and many found the slop to be particularly sloppy and uninspired. Did anyone else have an “Indieheads Tribute Indie Rock season” (or concussion) like I apparently did 2 months ago? In a similar vein but far more appealing are the esoteric genres Bay area producer Bored Lord has given to her latest release, including Ambient Acid Funk and Esoteric Dub Grunge. They’re far more fitting than anything a computer network could come up with—and even more so than crap like fluxwork—and way better with a human at the controls to assemble these space-y technological pieces.
I put this one on first thing this morning, and it was hotter than my coffee. Bristolian bass whiz Laksa turns in an excellent single full of modern club goodness, backed with a B-side featuring one of Christgau’s favorite producers. Moderately woozy, great drum work throughout, this would surely wreck things both at the rave and your place after a joint.
For whatever reason I had a bit of a random craving to hear this record a couple weeks back, and have kept it in rotation alongside stuff like EELS, Not God and On The Intricate Inner Workings of the System. And god damn do these boys have some tunes on this one. Definitely a bit of an ur-text for my taste, the shirt I got when they were touring this record is now grimy as shit but that doesn’t stop me from bringing it out every once in a while.
With that, I’ll call it as issue #78 of Crow’s Nest. As always, thank you for reading all of that, I hope you found something within you liked. And however and whatever you choose to celebrate this holiday season, I hope you have a good one as well. See you next year, in all likelihood.
I'm late to the party, but I'm with you on that Alvilda record. If nothing else, they've just gone and made a fantastic record. it just missed my top 10 this year.