My Albums // 2020
Hi – you may have seen my (tommy) byline (“by tommy”) strewn across Hullabaloo over the last two years. I’ve been graciously offered a space here by Misha to talk about a few albums that stuck with me this (last year) year, as a counterpart to her more novel annual fixture the Year In Haiku. I should clarify though that these aren’t Misha’s or the blog’s albums of the year (maybe some of them) and maybe not even mine – there’s probably a lot of great albums that came out this year that I enjoyed and forgot, forgot came out this year, or altogether forgot to listen to.
This all being disclaimed, here (in alphabetical order) are some, hopefully most, of the records that lived rent free in my head throughout the year:
BARTEES STRANGE // LIVE FOREVER
It’s hard to remember any debut of the past ten years that’s landed as hard or as unyieldingly on the blogosphere (are we still saying that) as Live Forever – I think that’s by design, though, as Bartees Strange makes abundantly clear even just in the title, and in the exhilarating momentum with which these songs careen through his personal vision of indie rock. There’s a solid majority of guitar music (even within this list) dealing with insecurity and unbelonging like Bartees occasionally lets on about here, but precious few artists have the guts let alone the commanding style or personality to respond with such a resounding, heel-digging rebuke of doubt. Live Forever is insistent and brash in its eclecticism, passing effortlessly between genres, influences, and even instruments with a comfort and conviction that feels like it’s challenging the world’s nastiest pedants to find even one piece out of place in his indie rock’s fluid relationship with pieces from hip hop, folk, and soul. “Genres keep us in our boxes … Keep us from our options” he seethes on the brief but blistering “Mossblerd,” a warning about the way genre becomes a means of further gatekeeping and pigeonholing bourgeoning black creatives and fans. It’s with a willfully blind eye, too, that these gatekeepers discourage black fans away from rock music, a genre whose existence is owed almost entirely to black artists and communities. But Bartees doesn’t waste his breath explaining that to the ignorant, or really feeling like he has to make any justification at all – instead, he focuses his energy inwardly on navigating the complex space between everyday malaise, personal demons, and the broader cultural fear he deals with everyday as a Black American, being upfront on principle even when he’s unsure of himself (“Is anybody really up for this one / If I don’t hold nothing back”). In the end, the incredible weight and significance of the work is carried by, and refracted through, that intense commitment to personal truth and his deep personal love for every reference and sound that’s stacked into his own; whether you’re up for it or not is on you. Live Forever is true to that intention, undeniable, massive, and thrilling – the type of record where the masterful and inventive guitar / bass interplay of a track like “Boomer,” some of the year’s best, is something like an easter egg to notice on repeated listens. Released October 2nd via Memory Music.
in a song: “Boomer”
in a word: “I came w/ a mouth full of blood, / Im hurt cuz no one can see me / Don’t ask, why dont I / Want to give you solace” (“Mustang”)
DOGLEG // MELEE
Short of getting gauges, I immersed myself pretty deeply into the burgeoning “emo revival” scene in my late teens, but fell off after a while. Even as I watched the community grew into something really exciting and grassroots, it felt like most of the emerging talked-about bands were mostly chasing the same basic sound. There’s nothing wrong with a winning template, of course, but the vague homogeneity of that pursuit still creates a refreshing context for current scene darlings Dogleg, who throw caution to the wind on their debut album to indulge in the more adrenaline soaked hardcore roots of the genre with the single minded propulsion of some sort of depraved catharsis junkies. Where the calculated, occasional voice crack has become something of a genre dialect, Alex Stoitsiadis shrieks his way through so much of this album at that exact vocal precipice like he’s battling feedback from a tiny PA, spitting self deprecating condemnations, seeking conviction and threatening to “disintegrate” but always sounding like he’s fighting tooth and nail to prove himself wrong. Released March 13th via Triple Crown Records.
in a song: “Kawasaki Backflip”
in a word: “barraged, eager and brave / i know this feeling, it’s in my home, my self, my name /my only conviction, no lack of fiction on my hands / i wait around for nothing / i can’t wait for nothing” (“Prom Hell”)
FIONA APPLE // FETCH THE BOLT CUTTERS
It’s hard not to have this one on here, but at the same time hard to explain with any expedience why; even in her enduring adjacency to the mainstream, Fiona Apple has been one of the most visible, bizarre innovators in music over the last twenty years, growing with such grace as to leave everyone else at least a few steps behind. Fetch The Bolt Cutters, in that rhythm, arrives in a cultural moment that’s finally catching up to Fiona’s affecting and often brutal illustrations of trauma, depression, and private milestones of personal liberation, masterfully supported as ever by the bizarro expressionist architecture of her arrangement and production. In March, a few days before national lockdowns began, she announced her new album via home video, signing in ASL “my record is done” and continued to focus on the making and form / format of the album in the press through a series of profiles and behind the scenes anecdotes about her indivorcible writing and recording processes. Despite its heavy themes and deep personal nature, the very best of this album is Fiona at home – how each portrait and story becomes such a potent playground for gleeful, almost mischievous creativity and clarifying idiosyncratic associations in vivid color and detail. A song about an offhand encouragement from an old classmate becomes a vivid and affecting origin story, while a timelapse of wild growing strawberries, peas, and beans becomes a throaty rebuff of depression. Everything is cradled carefully by a sense of emotional purity, hard-won honesty and contrast that affords the album its biggest gut punches and the earnest discovery of the disparate moods and colors of the most affecting experiences. Released April 17th via Epic Records.
(Please consider a big trigger warning that this album rather bluntly discusses sexual assault)
in a song: “Heavy Balloon”
in a word: “Grinding my teeth to a rhythm invisible / I used my feet to crush dead leaves like they had fallen / Just for me, just to be crash cymbals” (“Shameika”)
FRANKIE VALET // WATERFOWL
As it stands, my last memory of live music for the foreseeable future will be that of watching Frankie Valet tear-ass through songs from Waterfowl in the back of a tiny Bushwick bar in March, a few days before everything stopped in its tracks. With our mutual friend Kati (Lost Dog) filling in on guitar, they told me they’d close out the set with a take on one of her songs, joking that their version was just more of their same loud-quiet-loud dynamic. Sitting with their record this long, though, those shifts feel more subtle and careful in their hands, more like the difference between stillness and motion than the typical A/B of clicking a distortion pedal. Those shifts feel tailor made for songs like these, round and unresolved like pages ripped out of a notebook. Waterfowl ruminates on faded memories of old friends, old relationships, and old homes, carefully balancing the calm peace of nostalgia with the antsy, gutting feeling of picking at the seams of our memories. Blunt drum-and-bass backbones and gnarled chord progressions disseminate into wirey arpeggios and nervous excitement, but built on the backs of a multiple-songwriters setup it becomes a warm sort of collective sigh and collective scream, the kind of precarious collaboration that only works between close confidantes and intimate, open friendships. Many songs find the members singing in straight unison together, and the album ends on a cathartic group shout of “Alright / Okay.” What I’m getting at, I think, is that it’s the type of record where the members are singing along to each other’s songs louder than any audience ever could, a clear eyed comfort as much as a worthy consolation in a live music draught. Released February 7th via It Takes Time Records.
in a song: “Our Apartment”
in a word: “Do you miss your old apartment / Would you go back the way you left it / I feel bad about Ruby / I feel bad about all summer / When you said I knew you meant it / I can’t go back on what I said then / I feel bad about Linden / I feel rough about the ending” (“Our Apartment”)
GANSER // JUST LOOK AT THAT SKY
From the jump, Just Look At That Sky is dogmatic and unflinching, wringing shrieking discordance out of a guitar while hurling a series of forceful, inscrutable commands at the listener. That chaos is deceptive, though, scribbled into tight outlines through the disciplined work of a band that’s clearly just good at playing together, and effective at protracting exactly the right angle between the dark, calculated grind of their rhythm section and the jagged protests of the guitar and vocals. Ganser wield that dexterity here to shape nine distinct portraits of claustrophobia and existential destabilization, soaked in a quiet but seething anger and resentment and shaded in by fragmented lyrics that read equal parts alienated, dissociative, and alienating. Their bio describes the album’s journey as one of “Finding strength in your less desirable traits… Asking yourself: am I improving, or am I just changing into something unrecognizable?” It’s those gnarls and existential splinters that give Just Look At That Sky its graphic and blunt synchronicity with the year we spent living with ourselves. Released July 31st via Felte.
in a song: “Bad Form”
in a word: “It’s so profound / How nothing matters / Let’s talk about Nebulous weather / A climate of catastrophes / That’ll never get better” (“Projector”)
ILLUMINATI HOTTIES // FREE I.H.: THIS IS NOT THE ONE YOU’RE LOOKING FOR
One of the year’s best records repeatedly calls into question whether we can even call it that. In an essay this summer I theorized that Illuminati Hotties’ insistent undermining of the form of their latest release (not an album, a “mixtape,” it’s “free,” it’s “Not The One You’re Looking For”) is a feature that nonetheless comes to define the fearless qualities and punk credentials that make it a standout. There’s no bullshit when band leader Sarah Tudzin brushes it off as a record of sonic experiments and sketches, but the immediacy and idiosyncrasy of that working style results in a fiercely combative and rowdy record that defines itself mostly out of righteous spite for the vein of the music industry focused on “clout chasing,” and mining for content and commodity. In a challenging year for that industry, a lot of solutions have focused on the revaluation of recorded music and the work of the artists making it, and Free I.H… articulates this argument in both form and content, an honest year-in-review for the music industry. Released July 17th independently.
in a song: “content//bedtime”
in a word: “while the world burns / why would you care about a fucking record? empty turntables / to polish off the fucking decade / there was no love lost / until you deemed that I was non-essential / I guess it’s my fault / for being good at something sentimental” (“free dumb”)
LONG NECK // WORLD’S STRONGEST DOG
Back in January, Long Neck announced a new album via a crowdfunding initiative to buy it back from their former label, ultimately nearly doubling their goal and releasing World’s Strongest Dog entirely on their own terms in April. There’s a tangible synergy between the album’s content and real life story of underdogs fighting to protect something personal and precious. Many songs are extended prayers for strength, as well as adamant notes to self about when to claim it, and where to recognize it. The band here offer a rustic folk rock album of the kind few bands have managed in years; standout single “Backseat” opens on the story of a beloved guard dog buried in the house he protected so dutifully, while much of the rest takes place in yards and campsites, by creeks, forests, and trails. Something like an indie rock The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, at its heart World’s Strongest Dog is a rugged wilderness survival story about the reasons why we even bother trying to. Released April 10th independently.
in a song: “Slowly, Slowly”
in a word: “I’m still as large as the world that I was born in / I bear the weight of my essence every morning / And I’m so tired of submitting always to this pressure / But it doesn’t make me something lesser” (“Birds”)
MATH THE BAND // FLANGE FACTORY FIVE
Math The Band’s 15th album (give or take) is, depending how you look at it, either a concept album about a flange pedal or the flange pedal itself, an energy drink, or a choose-your-own-adventure fantasy novel of the same name. Available in any of the aforementioned forms, the music of Flange Factory Five continues the band along the last few records’ pursuit of emotional clarity without sacrificing their most lawless impulses, and their growth into a more traditional full band form (credit due to drummer Matt Zappa whose playing is absolutely fundamental here). Make no mistake, this is a record with not one but five interludes titled “Flange Factory One” through “Flange Factory Five,” which features a bizarre (but precedented) cameo from the lead singer of Wheatus. The lyrics, on the other hand, offer grounding depth in meta perspectives, cohabiting cautionary tales about over-editing yourself and trusting your gut with inscrutable off-the-dome metaphors (my personal favorite: “you’re starting to feel like you’re one of the bugs”) and the stubborn absurdity of knee jerk reactions. Later, a song called “Cool Guitar Solo” warns that no amount of posturing with a guitar can change the way you are deep down, before indulging in an extended guitar break. At another point they also address the prophesy that a chosen one will end the terrible reign of Thaddeus Lunch if the wizard council is defeated. It’s a giddy and at times silly record that’s willing to seriously go to bat to defend the way a sense of humor can be a tool for further honesty and personal expression, rather than a coping mechanism to deflect it. Flange Factory Five is Math The Band’s masterpiece so far, a grandiose and insane expression that makes one of the most compelling arguments for itself. Released October 1st independently.
in a song: “I Get Sick”
in a word: “A mind in a body is a child in a boat / Hand on the wheel, disconnected from the yolk” (“Duel of the Deer”)
OCEANATOR // THINGS I NEVER SAID
Dropping the “they said the title!” moment right off the bat, “Goodbye, Goodnight” clarifies its context: “you’ve been reading too much into / the things i never said.” Maybe it’s a bit of a paradox to offer an interpretation of a quote like that, but I do think it’s a nice code by which to understand an album of instant-classic power pop that’s rendered more in graphic comic-colored vectors than obscurely shaded in. Alternating between diaristic personal confessions and apocalyptic visions, primary songwriter Elise Okusami’s deft hit-making abilities prevent the songs from tipping one way or another into self deprecation or aggrandizement as she utilizes the apocalyptic theme as a metaphor for the world-ending drama with which we tend to see our lives, and also a litmus test for which feelings still hold up under threat of extinction. Musically speaking, the economy of Things I Never Said is second-to-none, never a guitar riff too long or too distracting, despite a noted dexterity in incisive, twittering, stratty riffs. Epiphanic conclusions and answers are as much notes to self as anything else as Elise really effectively streamlines her concerns and priorities, both on and off the record. Things I Never Said is a graphic and dynamic illustration of moments when deep down you know things could be a lot worse, as well as the ones where they really feel like they couldn’t. Released August 28th via Plastic Miracles.
in a song: “A Crack In The World”
in a word: “i think i think too much / thoughts spilling out of my head / and learning how to swim / finding homes in other parts of my body” (“January 21st”)
RATBOYS // PRINTER’S DEVIL
As a kid, I used to have.. spells, I guess, that felt like changes in air pressure, like the air around me or the feeling of the rug on my feet suddenly became heavier and more vivid. Sometimes I would sit outside and try to hold completely still to see how the grass still moved around me under the tiny weight of bugs and the massive network of life that goes on. On “My Hands Grow,” Ratboys use my experiment as a reminder that love is still real even if it’s hard to see outside stillness. “I can’t tell you how I tried / Oh, to love what I can’t describe” Julia Steiner sings nostalgically. Opening track “Alien With a Sleep Mask On,” rousing and electric, the band slows into to a breakdown where digital fragments float like dust in the sunlight, as she covers her eyes and laments being on the outside looking in. Steiner actually spends much of Printer’s Devil with her eyes closed or covered, laying still while darkness falls or while the sun creeps in. It would be neat enough as a plot device, exploring the intersection of faith and object permanence, but Ratboys, restless and literary, make it merely the kickoff point of a winding journey towards a richer and hazier conclusion about all the invisible weight of the world moving around us. Sometimes the grass plays invisible host to life, but other times it dies invisibly while we’re not looking. Other times the air is leaden with invisible history, like the families who’ve lived real lives in a house that’s being used as a movie set now, or the slow and silent work of updating the world by uninstalling old landline payphones. We’re always sharing space with ghosts both metaphorical and supernatural – like the presence of the titular Devil, a 19th-century slang for a print shop assistant which nonetheless evokes the image of a malicious spirit moving the printer on its own. You can also hear it in the impressionistic and organic guitar work of longtime guitarist Dave Sagan, like instrumental EVP, playing like he’s trying to coax out the voice of those ghostly movements, alternately buzzing, sighing, sometimes shrieking. The band altogether is similarly attentive and elastic, often retracting fuzzier sections to simpler and quieter ones almost like shushing to try to hear something. In the end it offers a really subtly funny and empathetic expansion of the supernatural cliche: are we alone in the universe? The world of Printer’s Devil houses aliens, hellfire, and malicious spirits, but also the air and the architecture, the technology and meadows that hold their memories and their earthly influences, the people who move on without us, and the bugs and grass that live and die outside our minds. Ratboys point our heads in their direction nonetheless, in vivid and generous detail.
in a song: “Listening”
in a word: “I was born into a circle / Widening with every single breath we take / Making all our big mistakes together / We were thick as thieves in the getaway” (“Clever Hans”)
SAMIA // THE BABY
Samia’s debut album, the honest-to-god Bildungsroman The Baby, is a remarkably mature reflection on growing pains, a giddy story about first loves rendered with all the careful humor and melancholy of youth. Much of the record is preoccupied with the way our bodies record those stories, sometimes in moments of youthful and excitable sexuality but also in softer, intimate communications like hand-holding, or touching the small of the back, or the “place between your shoulder and chest / which i would rather not leave.” Here, Samia’s also holds great pain – on “Does Not Heal” she cuts her thigh climbing a fence with someone whose hand she later wishes she could bite and scar, so that both their bodies might hold that memory forever. In “Winnebago” she dances and hurls herself into the pool after a tough day, but still struggles to feel grounded in her body as her legs shake (“fuck my feet,” she exclaims in the next song when words fail her). But in breathtaking closer “Is There Something In The Movies” that she finally finds her legs “grounded and strong” as she wells up the courage to walk away from a deep and storied love. “And I’m not afraid that if i am the skipper / I’ll steer my flesh into the bog,” she proclaims steadfastly. On an album that bears all the butterfly-stomached intensity of bodies in dialogue, that reclamation of her footing is one of the subtler resolutions even within the one song. While Samia’s unique sense of humor and slyness as a narrator may slightly cushion the depth of that fear, the real and personal heart of the album, that terror in letting your body be held or seen or discovering it’s so fragile and sometimes uncooperative, is a devastatingly intimate work of songwriting that plays to Samia’s strengths as much as stumbling upon whole new ones. Released August 28th via Grand Jury.
in a song: “Big Wheel”
in a word: “Carried around a stuffed pig in my arms / and i did it until i was five / I got it from someone who died of attention / and lived an extraordinary life / But i gave it to you on the day that we met / cause already i trusted you best / Everyone dies but they shouldn’t die young /anyway you’re invited to set” (“Is There Something In The Movies”)
SHAMIR // SHAMIR
A self-title is always an invitation to scrutiny, let alone for an artist like Shamir – not only a first-name-only artist (how can one album possibly represent the world’s many Shamirs!) but also one who’s spent three years and five albums restlessly trying to redefine himself after a successful but stifling brush with pop success? It turns out, it works because Shamir is almost like a midterm review for his career after a series of slightly more aimless (though consistently interesting) attempts to distance himself from pop. Calling a truce with, Shamir uses all the fixings of guitar rock to bring his best pop compositions in years to vivid and varied life, compromising nothing in the process. “On My Own” manages to marry a hooky R&B vocal and stop-start club dynamics to a spiraling Pixies-esque guitar line; “Running” turns a post-rock pedalboard into a synth pad while the drummer tags out with the drum machine (and at one point even slides through a 90s DJ lo-pass filter sweep). The four-on-the-floor buildup (and actual bass drop) of a more straightforward pop track like “I Wonder” finally rests on the laurels of Shamir’s early resume, but the consistent and imaginative use of the guitars helps to ease into the banjo-laiden outlaw country of “Other Side” which trades in on the parallel obsessions-du-jour with country in both the indie rock and pop worlds, or the more straightforward snappy guitar pop of “Diet.” It all works under the umbrella of the pop weirdos whose spirits are subtly evoked – there’s the legacies of the late David Bowie and Prince as much as the rock influences that slipped through the cracks of the 2000s charts with artists like Sheryl Crow or MGMT. The droning, curling strings and solid harmonic landing of “In This Hole” likewise evoke the Beatlesy classical drama of Revolver or Sgt. Pepper while Shamir’s trademark vocal chops hearken back to an era where that was a more central facet of rock. Most of the songs on Shamir’s self titled could go toe to toe with the best of that canon, let alone the best of his own previous catalog. The batting average here is actually so good that it makes you wonder if the few 15 second voice-memo clips were peppered in just to make it feel a little more home cooked and slipshod, a nervous laugh while wading back into the pool of pop stardom. Released October 2nd independently.
in a song: “On My Own”
in a word: ” Im okay… i’m just dramatic / I wish it was different… I was born like this / And one day I will enjoy the sun, and I’ll let it burn me / And I will be one with the filth that lit us up” (“In This Hole”)
SIPPER // ROOM VOL. 1
After releasing the more premeditated Have Fun*, in the spring, Sipper spent the rest of the year riding the wave of the pandemic in real-time, first releasing two great collaborative singles in late spring with fellow Brooklyn indie-pop line straddlers Daisy The Great (whose “to be alive” is another favorite song of the year) and then settling into a song-a-week project whose first 8 tracks are collected here. room vol. 1 trades in extremely effectively on the more graphic and imaginative potential of the project, offering eight almost entirely distinct palettes and styles of songwriting, none of which feels out of step with the band’s aesthetic. “Paimon Prom Dress,” is beamed straight of a haunted house, complete with grand pianos like you’re hearing them from upstairs when you know you’re home alone, while another standout “dance in room song” filters a new wave instrumental that would have been a huge hit on its own in the 80s through Joe’s signature deadpan drawl, magnified later by gang vocals performed with all the enthusiasm of a sophomore year social studies class. There’s a maximalist charm in what feels like a very new sense of more complex guitar work, while the smaller cuts make perfect cloudy use of a tape scratched sound and immediacy. Even the most complacent cut “tired,” (which just sounds like a normal Sipper song) is as good as any of his previous best. It’s a late-in-the-year entry but one that, to me, really embodies the manic creative eccentricity of the year every band became a bedroom project. Released December 8th independently.
*I should clarify that I worked on the PR team for “Have Fun” via Sipper’s label but did not have any hand at all in room vol. 1 so therefore its fine and frankly rather nice of me to include it here!
in a song: “Paimon Prom Dress”
in a word: “i cried / i cried / i made a little puddle with my eyes / i look / alive / but i don’t really feel it anymore” (“i lied!”)
TEENAGE HALLOWEEN // TEENAGE HALLOWEEN
Like many Jersey icons before them, Teenage Halloween’s debut album is about the restless and anxious drive to find freedom away from home – what makes their vision so vital is the way the band uses it as a framework to discuss political and class consciousness and queer identity. The songs here are split between rallying cries against power structures and intense urges to hide away, crying out against a world in which clarity feels like a burden – an awful one where the discovery and embrace of queer identity makes you feel more endangered than affirmed. The band’s work embodies that energy empathetically and emphatically, the jittery excitement and fear of a record, as the band dedicates it, “for anyone who feels out of place and wrong in the world they are forced to live in.” Despite drawing from the well of such painful and complicated discussions, Teenage Halloween manages to eke out an eager and hopeful streak without softening its stance, instead affirming to those at odds that sometimes it really is just the world around them that’s wrong. Singer Luke Henderiks’s insular insights and navigation of their own identity feel less like an attempt to inspire relatability than to open the floor to listeners to remind them they’re allowed to make their own insights, even when they’re made to feel like they’re not. “I don’t want to tell you how to feel,” they howl, adding: “I don’t want to be there while you burn.” In album closer “Turn Right, Goes Straight,” sort of their own “Born To Run,” that drive to hide away or escape starts to blur between the geographic (“self destructive queer youth / With our brains set on Hollywood”) and the interior (“dreams of a genderless soul as remedy”), landing hesitantly at the anarchic comfort that sometimes the choice to go at all is the most important thing – that sometimes escapism is still part of a radical fight, to look for something better rather than exhaust yourself trying to fight for belonging in places that are inherently and historically uninterested in offering it to you. Released September 18th via Don Giovanni Records.
In a song: “Racehorse”
in a word: “Can’t be yourself with the feds all around / We’re in the gay part of town” (“Drown”)
TRACE MOUNTAINS // LOST IN THE COUNTRY
Though it’s his second record with this new outfit, it’s the first since his old band LVL UP officially called it quits with their last shows, and Trace Mountain’s Dave Benton makes that landmark clear here in an intentional shift away from that more lean and raucous sound. “rock & roll made me lose control so i can’t hear you anymore,” he sings wistfully on the opening track of Lost In The Country. Compared to the ratty abandon of LVL UP, Trace Mountains here dispenses wisdom carefully and slowly, making good on that promise to leave more room to listen. The wild expanse of Lost In The Country informs its lyrics as much as its breezy arrangements, which make space for winding, limber guitar solos (the first track features two) and extended instrumental meditations. The words describe the “bleating country sky” or the “deep wide” one, a “big blue moon” or a never-ending river- a country at turns “cool,” “dark,” “rolling,” “lonesome,” “wide,” and rich with wifi signal. It’s partly a straightforward metaphor for human connection (a friendly shoulder to cry on, or a kiss that makes “the whole world return to blue”). Often, too, as it connects to life on the road, a longing for the mystery and adventure of days and weeks and months spent traversing the infinite expanse of the country. But there’s a side to the album’s pastoral landscapes that’s a self-conscious conjuring as well. “there are two worlds-” Dave theorizes: ”the one you’re making every day & the one that always gets away.” As he invents the world of the album in a wide-angle lens, it feels like he’s consciously shaping one that leaves gaps for silence in the hopes of letting a bit of that other, undisturbed world peek through. Released April 10th via Lame-O Records.
in a song: “Lost In The Country”
in a word: “as i saw the deep wide sky stand before me all this confusion made my heart grow fonder it seems there is only one thing that i am ought to glean there are all kinds of ways that we wind up walking on our way to a different type of country” (“Dog Country”)
TOLD SLANT // POINT THE FLASHLIGHT AND WALK
When the opening track of Point The Flashlight and Walk settles into an honest to god pop hook, it’s a beautiful and revelatory moment for a band that’s previously traded mostly in bleak, casually devastating (great, breathtaking) observational poetry. It’s even more impressive that this album, their third, manages to keep previous tenets of intense emotional intimacy entirely intact, mostly just slightly relaxing the white-knuckled grip of resignation. That change is right out front in singer / primary member Felix Walworth’s voice, which settles comfortably here into a warmer, softer timbre. But you can also feel it in the storytelling, which relaxes and zooms out to show the scenes and the characters around those moments, or at least a glimpse of them through the noted static and nighttime fog – highways, parking lots, back seats, front doors. In its title and these thematic threads, the recurring story in these songs seems to be one about people finding their way home in the dark by only the narrow visibility of headlights, the dull beam of a flashlight, the gleam of the moon. But in its intense and personal detail, it’s also very much about the tragic human patterns that tell that story too, about our tendency, faced with thick literal and emotional darkness, to just trace our steps back to what’s familiar and comfortable, even (and even especially) when we know we shouldn’t. Released November 13th via Double Double Whammy.
in a song: “Moon and Sea”
in a word: “And I like you / Crooked glasses leaning / Or when you clean them with your t-shirt / Because that’s like seeing you completely.” (“Run Around The School”)
WAVEFORM* // LAST ROOM
Around a few obvious standout tracks, Last Room as a record feels designed to creep up on you and grow out of sight like a cobweb. Part of that, I think, is that its aplomb is reserved, as waveform* hold their distortion and jagged edges close to the chest, threatening more often to dissipate than to explode on tracks like the creeping and lilting “Miner’s Lullaby” which nearly breaks off into fragments of digital noise at various points. The most distorted offering, Tell You,” still seems to hold onto its distortion with a tenuous grasp, slipping into a rubbery and fluid breakdown in the middle, whereas “Go To Bed” uses distortion to fortify rather than expand the tiny intimacy of the composition. When they finally deliver a blistering fuzz at the end of “Blue Disaster,” it’s epilogued with the soft and billowing atmosphere of the title track which eventually fades itself out slowly. The lyrics are appropriately shy and withdrawn, alternately decrying and embracing loneliness and singing soft affirmations of love and affection. The most vivid scenes are blurry and unclear, often omitting character relationships – “Book of Curse” is a wintry snapshot of an older woman who “made me sad / yeah she hurt me” but with no context offered about their relationship other than that it’s past. The narrator of the title track visits a “red and nice” house with someone else (just “them”) and finds a box of used needles, while the narrator of “Go To Bed” finds their father asleep on the couch in the “house of the rotten man,” but falls short of suggesting that the two are one and the same. These cryptic and fragmented images feel like they could just as easily be recent adult experiences as they could be lingering, weird memories from childhood and that, I think, is what makes this album so slowly gripping. The earnest, bashful intimacy bathes each song in nostalgia and a clandestine stillness, like the hidden things we carry from our childhood into our most affecting adult memories – or like the way you still feel like a little kid when you tell someone a secret. Released September 18th independently.
in a song: “Hello Goodbye”
in a word: “i am the sun when the moon is dead / nothing can breathe when i go to bed / into the light up the marble stairs / i see your face in the blue we share” (“Go To Bed”)
Goodnight!