https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog daily 0.75 2026-01-24 https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/dec-2025 monthly 0.5 2026-01-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/2bcb91f3-51b9-4a30-aa3e-2f3164c7c020/its+a+beautiful+place.jpg Blog - December 2025 - Sometimes It Just Gets Messy - Water From Your Eyes - It’s a Beautiful Place As a rule, I don’t find “math” in music inherently interesting. Sure, there are countless cases in which it is interesting, like Battles’ Mirrored, Otim Alpha’s Gulu City Anthems, Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” Minoru Muraoka’s cover of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” or Tito Puente’s cover of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five,” but if you spend enough time hanging out with musicians, you’ll also spend time listening to some dude in a beanie gushing about shit like Animals as Leaders. Like any musical element, it can be interesting, but just because something is difficult to play doesn’t make it interesting to listen to. Fairly or not, I tend to come into anything mathy with one eyebrow raised. So I was surprised how much I liked Water From Your Eyes’ Everyone’s Crushed. Something about the wrongness of “Barley”’s main riff took the polyrhythm idea somewhere new for me. It’s not trying to impress you, it’s almost like it’s trying to annoy you, and as more layers are added through the course of the song, it becomes a creaky, jangly structure all its own. When I say that It’s a Beautiful Place is cut from the same cloth, I mean it literally. Well, not literally — it’s music, not fabric — but almost all of it was written in the same period of time between roughly 2019 and 2022. That was a difficult period for both Nate Amos and Rachel Brown. Both were underemployed or unemployed in NYC, and Amos in particular was “in a really horrible apartment, was super broke, and constantly drunk,” or later, fighting a rocky battle toward sobriety. Everyone’s Crushed was, as they’ve said several times, a “particularly nihilistic representation of the way we felt,” whereas It’s a Beautiful Place is “praying for optimism.” According to them, It’s a Beautiful Place puts a different spin on the same musical ideas, emphasizing the humor rather than the angst. It’s interesting that they see it that way — “Barley” is hilarious — and I think that nihilism is, generally speaking, a pretty funny way of looking at the world. To me, though, it’s a much smoother album stylistically. Not that Everyone’s Crushed wasn’t cohesive in its approach, but It’s a Beautiful Place feels like it’s intended to be heard from beginning to end and that builds to something in a way that Everyone’s Crushed felt kind of (intentionally?) scattered. If you don’t like it on the first listen, I’d recommend putting it on more than once, on more than one sound system. There are days when I find it brilliant, and other days when I wonder why I hearted it to begin with. If you still don’t like it, at least give “Playing Classics” a listen. It’s a tonal departure from the rest of the album, and might be hilarious in a more accessible way. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/8b71533e-0c74-425f-af0b-8baa97b13d95/tell+dem+its+sunny.jpg Blog - December 2025 - Sometimes It Just Gets Messy - Greentea Peng - Tell Dem It’s Sunny The title of Tell Dem It’s Sunny deserves some attention. Right off the bat, the contrast between the title and the album cover is striking. As she says, “Initially, … having the black and white artwork was almost sarcasm. Like, ‘Yeah, tell dem it’s sunny. Everything’s blessed.’ But everything’s not fucking blessed.” It wasn’t until later, after recording “Glory,” that she started to own it as a philosophy: “It is sunny, no matter how much shit they spray in the skies to block out the sun. I travel the depths with the sun in my chest.” The album is a bit of a departure from what she’s done before. If you listen to MAN MADE, you’ll hear the same psychedelic vocals and guitars, but Tell Dem is much sparser and darker, and it’s much less “sunny” lyrically. On the title track of MAN MADE, she takes a defiant position: I don't need your Man-made seeds to grow Everything that I need Maa's put here to know whereas on “One Foot” of Tell Dem she’s much more despairing: Is it too late for me? Is it too late for me? Have you deserted me? Is it too late for me? It's too late for me In interviews, she frequently talks about her life-long commitment to politics and activism: “I was very young when I attended some of the largest protests in London, marching against the invasion [of Iraq] … I remember watching the destruction on TV, fully aware of my Iraqi heritage. I have never met that side of my family, but knowing that some of my ancestors, or perhaps even living relatives, were still there made it all the more difficult.” This album, though, is more introspective: “I’ve started to recognise a pattern within myself and the projects, going inward, outward, inward and outward again. This one’s definitely inward. A lot of the songs are addressed to myself. I like to think that I’m engaged in sonic journaling.” She describes it instead as being “self-political,” touching on themes like mental health and motherhood. It’s interesting that the turn inward coincides with the darker musical tone of this album. I’m tempted to psychologize it, but after all I only know her music. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/d2cd0bb7-032a-4e43-b851-daaf3d6d454c/miien.jpg Blog - December 2025 - Sometimes It Just Gets Messy - MIEN - MIIEN MIEN is something of a psych-rock supergroup, made up of Rishi Dhir of Stone Elephant, Alex Mass of The Black Angels, John Mark Lapham of The Earlies, and Robb Kidd of Golden Dawn Arkestra. Like a lot of bands that were formed in the last few years, they were heavily impacted by lockdown. Since they’re geographically dispersed, it meant that they could only collaborate over Zoom or by sharing clips of their own recordings digitally. I think it’s interesting, though, that the sound on their second album is so much more cohesive. From interviews, it doesn’t sound like they see one another in person any more than they used to, but MIIEN doesn’t really sound like any of their individual bands anymore. It’s something new. And “Evil People” is a total banger. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/983fe556-76d2-4db5-a112-664b2f540e74/basspunk.jpg Blog - December 2025 - Sometimes It Just Gets Messy Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/724a5d12-58e1-462e-8248-a44116a13f01/basalms.jpg Blog - December 2025 - Sometimes It Just Gets Messy Chuck Johnson - Basalms My partner recently turned me on to ambient country, a mini-genre which can be traced back as far as Bruce Langhorne’s soundtrack for the 1971 film The Hired Hand, then made into a thing by Ry Cooder and (who else) Brian Eno. To my ear, a lot of the albums you’ll find on “A Beginner’s Guide” type posts are a little heavy on the “ambient” and light on the “country,” but the general idea is to capture the beauty (and perhaps loneliness) of a wide empty landscape. This album does that well, with a drum-less pedal steel instrumentation that lets you imagine a desert just stretching on and on. According to Johnson, he made the album to calm a dog with a spine injury. [Bubbles] has very specific musical tastes … She lets you know if she doesn’t like it. I started playing around with looping the pedal steel with a tape loop approach, where you just let the length of the tape loop determine the loop, rather than trying to sync it to anything. And then, over time, a tape loop degrades, and that affects the sound and frequencies, certain resonances build up and it gets more lo-fi over time as it keeps looping. I think I’d appreciate this music if I were a dog with a spinal injury. It’s unobtrusive and beautiful. And what dog doesn’t want to be outside, right? https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/nov-2025 monthly 0.5 2025-12-20 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/6e14f9c6-fb9e-4839-a27d-123d1c9840ac/eclipse.jpg Blog - November 2025 - A Night on Which Someone Else Got Down - Walter Astral - Éclipse I hesitated to write about Walter Astral again so soon after the last time, but this album just kicks so much ass that I couldn’t help it. And it’s not like I ran out of things to say. Most of the time, reading interviews in translation is pretty frustrating. Musicians tend to use lots of jargon and slang, so I find myself squinting at Google translations and just sort of hoping that the things I’m saying are like, true. Walter Astral doesn’t feel like that. Not because I trust Google any more for them than for anyone else, but because there’s a weird poetry in it. Sometimes because they actually are just being poetic (“I wander through the suburbs, the boulevards, searching for the grain. The artifact. It’s often very analog. Everything will come together at the end, crystallizing on the computer to make the edits”) and sometimes it just comes out mysterious and hilarious (“It’s incredibly reassuring to be able to — and I’m not minimizing it — but at least to fight something with the personification of a — shall we say, a ridiculous creature. A mental serpent. It’s funny! It’s amusing because at the time I’d never even had a panic attack. And then Tristan shows up with the text and says to me ‘so what do you think?’ I reply, ‘Maybe, I don’t know!’” I really like that interview I linked above. The interviewer asks some good questions about the themes of the album (mental health, nature, technology, spiritualism) and also just rolls with their silliness. I also found an answer to a question from last time. What did they mean about their instrument being a “defective banjo?” I found it in an attic. I brought it back to life, affectionately calling it Banjy. I don't use it in the American style (like bluegrass), but rather for its slightly off-tune, semitone sounds, which you can find in the oriental or Hungarian music that we pepper our production with. It gives us a certain originality. I would have loved to use a serpent too, that instrument from ancient Rome, an imitation of which you can see in some of our photos, but it's very rare and incredibly expensive. I’ll leave it here for now, except to say that if anyone living in Marseille wants to put me up next time Walter Astral plays there, I’d appreciate it. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/a9777df4-75f0-4a3c-ac92-09a33a95b4c2/django%27s+high.jpg Blog - November 2025 - A Night on Which Someone Else Got Down - Future Utopia - Django's High The music industry is full of people like Fraser T. Smith, who’ve been in the industry for decades, working with the biggest names around, but never with their name on the album cover. If you look at his Wikipedia, you’ll learn that he wrote and produced for Adele, Sam Smith, Stormzy, Dave, and Idris Elba. I did a quick googling and found that he’s also worked with Britney Spears, Kasabian, Gorillaz, Florence and the Machine, and Arlo Parks, and I bet if I googled a little longer I’d find a lot more. Smith has commented many times that his goal with Django’s High was to create a “psychedelic spaghetti-Western.” Every morning, he would get up, watch a Western (not always an Italian one, but who’s counting (I am)) and go write a song for the rest of the day. I’d say he definitely achieved what he was going for. I love it. It’s like if you stuck Tame Impala with just an acoustic guitar and some hand drums. Well, and a lot of effects pedals and stuff. I haven’t seen a whole lot written about the album in general, and Smith doesn’t seem especially interested in grabbing the spotlight. As he said, We are still unknown at the moment and that’s cool, that’s how it is for every band. If anything, I’m out there campaigning for people to get behind record shops and small venues and the smaller stages at festivals … I’m very fortunate, I’ve been doing this for 20 years producing other people and have a catalog that brings in a wage [but] making music should not be for the middle and upper classes. He seems like a good egg. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/80cadf07-9a0a-499c-97a2-0dc5d5fc0d3e/alex.jpg Blog - November 2025 - A Night on Which Someone Else Got Down - Daughter of Swords - Alex If you’ve been following Alex Sauser-Monnig for a while, this album might feel pretty left-field. Up until this point, their music has been pretty planted in folk territory (see their work in Mountain Man, The A’s, and their previous album as Daughter of Swords, Daybreaker). Alex is quite a departure. It’s much poppier, much more varied, and much stranger than anything they’ve done before. As they say here: “The earnestness of protest music in the ’60s had its place, and it was appropriate to the moment,” they say, “but there’s no way to make a record that feels totally relevant that’s acoustic-guitar-based. I mean, I’m sure that there is, but I wanted to get away from that being the basis of the record. Before recording any acoustic guitar, I would ask the question, ‘What could do that instead?’ And it opened up so much room for other sounds.” To me, the most striking thing about it - before I even knew that it was the person from Mountain Man - is how sharp-edged the production is. All these sounds feel like they’re launching at you out of nowhere. Sudden buzzing guitars, derpy piano lines, vocal harmonies - it feels like all these things were recorded in different rooms and slapped down on top of each other, like collage art. It tackles some big themes: late-stage capitalism, environmental collapse, gender dysphoria, and others. I think it actually makes a certain amount of sense that Sauser-Monnig would be looking for a different way to approach these songs. These are modern problems, and it makes sense that they would be looking for a modern way to comment on them. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/98aaf933-3f56-46dc-883e-5482a39574f1/M%E1%BB%91i+L%C6%B0%C6%A1ng+Duy%C3%AAn.jpg Blog - November 2025 - A Night on Which Someone Else Got Down Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/cb61a09d-5ca2-483c-9b86-c4a4418e020f/who+let+the+dogs+out.jpg Blog - November 2025 - A Night on Which Someone Else Got Down Lambrini Girls - Who Let the Dogs Out Since I’ve already written about it once, I’ll refrain from re-describing the incredible Lambrini Girls show I went to last summer, except to say that if you haven’t seen them, you need to do that immediately. Their debut album is pretty much exactly what I hoped. It’s loud, blisteringly political, and very very funny. Obviously intersectional feminism is the core of what they do. I won’t bother picking apart the lyrics because they’re pretty frank, but it is worth mentioning how frequently they talk about the challenges of being women in rock music. I don’t think we have an exact translation of “lad culture” in the US - it might be something akin to “bro culture” with more sexism and less chugging - but Lambrini Girls talk extensively about how it manifests in the UK music scene. The ways in which women, trans people, and queer people are made to feel unwelcome and run up against higher bars to admission are clearly a source of frustration and rage for them. I haven’t heard this talked about quite so much in the US lately. I’m sure it’s here, we just don’t have Lambrini Girls screaming about it the way we should. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/oct-2025 monthly 0.5 2025-11-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/e282539e-2655-45d6-aa42-c9a7592f8d87/electronic+phantoms.jpg Blog - October 2025 - Music and Sex and Being With People - maya ongaku - Electronic Phantoms I’m a sucker for vintage synths, and this album has lots of them. There’s something romantic about the idea of an ambient synth band from Enoshima, a sleepy little island off the coast of Japan that’s known primarily for its Buddhist statues and hot springs (and they definitely run with it). Ambient as it is, the album has an underlying tension. It’s hard to imagine myself actually meditating or doing serious contemplation to this, but frequently put it on for a long drive, or in the earliest moments of trying to drag myself out of bed after a nap. They’ve done some pretty interesting writing about life on tour, especially the US leg vs the European leg. It really drives home how difficult this life can be, especially when they report at the end that their total take at the end of the US tour was $1,357.80. They don’t seem upset about it, though. In fact, it seems like they regard being in the black as a major triumph. Which is fair - when I went to see them in Boston, I hadn’t clocked that outside of this album they’re basically an experimental jazz band. I’m not super familiar with the economics of experimental jazz, but I have to imagine that the profits tend to be thin. In a way, I’m not surprised that they repeatedly talk about taking inspiration from Kikagaku Moyo. They definitely have a similar sound, and the timing is about right for them to regard Kikagaku Moyo as elders. They even opened for them once, and (according to an interview) only made their first album because Kikagaku Moyo told them to. They seem to take inspiration not only in their music, but also as role models for how to live a life on tour. In another way, I’m very surprised because Kikagaku Moyo is the only other Japanese band that sounds like this that I’ve written about before. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/c5c44a99-56a8-4d03-8b49-5190044c1c18/billboard+heart.jpg Blog - October 2025 - Music and Sex and Being With People - Deep Sea Diver - Billboard Heart Jessica Dobson of Deep Sea Diver has an enviable resume, having performed with Beck, Conor Oberst, Spoon, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and The Shins, just to name a few. Despite that, her catalog has a pretty consistent indie sound like you’d expect out of a grunge/garage rock band from Seattle (minus the yarling). This album sees her stretching her legs a little, especially with the straight-up rock track “Emergency,” which is my fav. I’m struggling to find interesting interviews with her. It seems like mostly people just want to talk about her influences (see above) and about Seattle (see above). I don’t really find those things particularly interesting to write about unless there’s an interesting take on it. If you want to read about Pike’s Place, go read Gary Bray’s Chowder Thing, you know? Anyway, the album is great, and if you’re into it you might also want to check out Deep Sea Diver’s breakout album Impossible Weight. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/94594db3-a093-40b5-a9e2-2ba765519694/caosmosi.jpg Blog - October 2025 - Music and Sex and Being With People - Addict Ameba - Caosmosi Addict Ameba is a difficult band to write about, at least from the perspective of some random dude in Boston who doesn’t speak Italian. Here are the things I can tell you: They’re a loose collective of musicians based in Milan. This album includes 11 musicians. The opening track is a collaboration with Joshua Idehen, a poet/vocalist you might know from Sons of Kemet and The Comet is Coming. The album title is inspired by French philosopher Félix Guattari's (1930-1992) final book, "Chaosmosis," which celebrates the infinite possibilities that creativity and disorder bring. I haven’t read it. Uh… that’s it. My favorite track is the title track, “Caosmosi”. Afrobeat! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/11f38407-af4f-4131-a372-90d501104c04/halo+on+the+inside.jpg Blog - October 2025 - Music and Sex and Being With People Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/0a9975bb-d287-4f01-b3dd-c03b51d3d1b1/Gary+Air.jpg Blog - October 2025 - Music and Sex and Being With People Gary Air - s/t The theme of this blog post seems to be “difficult bands to write about.” This is me repping a local Boston artist. There are no album reviews or interviews for me to work from, and I don’t know him personally, so I’m a bit out to sea. I just happened to notice that he was playing at The Rockwell in Davis Square. He sounds a bit like Paul Simon. That’s what I’ve got. If enough of you go listen to his album, maybe someone will interview him, and then I’ll have more to say about the next one. It would only take about 100x the total readership of this blog, but hey, anything could happen! https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/aug-2025 monthly 0.5 2025-09-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/6f9993c0-9e08-47b7-8c82-417478d09631/good+time.jpg Blog - August 2025 - More Than One Kind of Song Came Out of Lockdown - DAIISTAR - Good Time A lot of what’s coming out right now was conceived during lockdown, and you can definitely see it in the themes. Loneliness, isolation, grief, fear, uncertainty… it cuts across media and culture, with varying degrees of directness, and it often results in art that’s difficult or cathartic. But not always. Once in a while, you get something like Good Time. I suppose the timing was right. DAIISTAR formed a few weeks before lockdown began in the spring of 2020, and as the pandemic dragged on, the songs on Good Time offered them “a glimmer of light … There was something to look forward to and [they] kept [their] heads in the future,” as guitarist/vocalist Alex Capistran said. You can hear that on the album. Good Time is an sundrenched, major-chord psychedelic haze, with hooky indie rock guitars and dreamy vocalizations. It gets better every time I listen to it, which I’ve done on about 40% of my long drives over the last few months. And if I think about what it must have been like to work on these songs, perfecting them over months and years, I can see how it would have been a relief to create something so light when things were so dark. I want to talk about the album’s reception for a moment, because nearly all of the coverage I found was either on blogs by some random internet weirdo like me, or in publications based in DAIISTAR’s hometown of Austin. People love to say that things are dead. Disco, Burning Man, San Francisco, chivalry, Elvis… the list goes on, but in pretty much all cases (and all but two of the above), any modicum of closer inspection will show that the allegation is ridiculous. Weird Austin is still weird, and the music and the music publications are still there too, no matter how many tech bros film demos there. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/ed7cac85-9570-47bb-92d2-d293d589a32b/Splendour+and+Obedience.jpg Blog - August 2025 - More Than One Kind of Song Came Out of Lockdown - Decius - Decius Vol. II (Splendour & Obedience) As it turns out, I’ve been following the career of Lias Saoudi (aka Meat Divine) for nearly 10 years without even knowing it. He’s the voice of Fat White Family (see “Feet”) and Moonlandingz (see “Vessels”), and generally one of those weird-dudes-who-I-kinda-know-who-he-is that crop up in music once in a while. In fact, Decius is a supergroup of sorts. In addition to Saoudi, you’ve got Quinn Whaley of Paranoid London (see “Love One Self”) and Warmduscher (see “I Got Friends”), and Luke and Liam May of Trashmouth Records. Those guys have all made some fantastic music, and the horny-AF low-fi electronic sound of Decius makes a lot of sense as what would come out if you threw it all in a blender and poured it into bandcamp. The other guys seem very willing to let Saoudi do the talking in interviews. He has a lot to say about the creation of each song and its inspiration, but the story I’ve read over and over is that he originally created the Decius persona at Berghain, the legendary nightclub in Berlin, when he was able to get in. Berghain is legendary for their bouncers’ pickiness, and he would regularly get turned away, even while he could hear his own music playing inside. I’ve actually only heard Decius on a dance floor once, and I have to tell you, I don’t actually think it works. I mean, I love this music - It’s sleazy, weird, and hooky… it actually makes me a little uncomfortable in a good way - but I couldn’t really figure out how to dance to it, in spite of the fact that it’s so obviously inspired by dance music. It’s a little too slow, a little too subtle, for that. But man, it’s a lot of fun to listen to. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/6755ee99-716e-46dc-aea5-96909b817f95/magic+alive.jpg Blog - August 2025 - More Than One Kind of Song Came Out of Lockdown - McKinley Dixon - Magic, Alive! Music bloggers love a concept album and McKinley Dixon loves to give them to us. This one is a story about three kids trying to grapple with the death of their friend. They contemplate loss, leave monuments, and try to find a ritual that might just bring him back. Hence the title, Magic, Alive!. As you might expect, the album dips into some heavy themes: loss, death, grief, the meaning of friendship, and magic, but the overall tone is far from oppressive. The fantastic jazzy beats make it feel much more free than that. He’s always been pretty incredible, and each album has built upon the previous one, thematically and sonically, including a lot of repeated collaborators - especially Alfred. and Ghais Guevera. As he said, “The way I write, they’re all different records, but they’re all in the same world. It’s sort of like Wes Anderson, for lack of a better example. Different movies, but the same people come in, so you’re aware of how he does it. There’s a familiarity that is inherent in his movies because of that, and that’s sort of what I’m trying to do.” There’s also an ongoing arc in his music in its increasing instrumental complexity. The previous album, Beloved! Paradise! Jazz!? (inspired by the Toni Morrison books), incorporated a lot of jazz elements, often with live instrumentation. Magic, Alive! takes that idea to an extreme. It’s orchestral jazz maximalism, so dense that you could listen to it dozens of times and not hear everything. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/05e96e48-1cb0-428f-afdf-a6790a166121/new+internationale.jpg Blog - August 2025 - More Than One Kind of Song Came Out of Lockdown Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/f6af6113-917c-4d20-a22c-6b984f2d7b21/the+cleansing.jpg Blog - August 2025 - More Than One Kind of Song Came Out of Lockdown Peter Perrett - The Cleansing I’ll admit that before I heard The Cleansing, I had no idea who The Only Ones were, which is kind of embarrassing in that they wrote the song “Another Girl, Another Planet,” which was covered by The Replacements in 1997 and then again by Blink-182 in 2005 (Ok I’m less embarrassed about not knowing that one). But the thing is, they just didn’t release all that much music. In fact, Peter Perrett comes up regularly in Reddit threads about squandered talent. Addiction is a serious thing, and in this case, it led to a very talented musician being nearly lost in obscurity. The Only Ones broke up in 1981, leading Perrett into a career-killing spiral that lasted until 2008, and then a long recovery period until finally quitting everything in 2015. In that 34 year period, he’d occasionally quit for a short time and release a single or two, or tour with The Only Ones briefly before relapsing again. It wasn’t until 2017 that he finally started releasing music again with the help of his two sons, and stayed sober to continue releasing music until the present day. He’s 73 now, and the 20-track double-album The Cleansing is a frank look back at his life, the years he lost to addiction, the state of the music industry, and a death that he suspects is not far off. It’s heavy stuff, but it’s also truly great rock music. Its perspective is clear and the music is catchy. He’s clearly acquired a lot of wisdom in his life, and he rarely sounds truly broken and dejected. Instead, I just get the sense that he lived through a lot and finally gained strength in the final stretch. In interviews, Perrett frequently talks about the music Johnny Cash produced in the last years of his life, and how he feels that he’s on a similar trajectory. I think it’s a very fair comparison, because if I’m honest, I think this is the best stuff I’ve heard from him. He also seems to have picked up some aspects of Cash’s “Man in Black” look, and he wears it well in video for “I Wanna Go With Dignity” - I find it haunting how composed and dapper he looks in the suit, sunglasses, and hat, and how frail or even grotesque he looks when he takes it off. It’s a heavy story, but I’m glad to know that he found a way to have one last triumph. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/july-2025 monthly 0.5 2025-08-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/29d33c23-8129-4d70-9735-78e406cf66b5/hyperdruide.jpg Blog - July 2025 - Druids, Nature, and Unrelatedly, Indian-Heritage Hip-Hop - Walter Astral - Hyperdruide Man, you just never know what you’re going to find. Electronic musicians tend to be a little boring to read about, and Walter Astral is French, so I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to find anything on the English internet at all, but I read several versions of their bio and all of them conclude by saying something like this: Walter Astral is a celestial explorer, roaming through parallel universes, and diving down wormholes hidden in gigantic sequoias. Stars living in the trees, candle-shaped men, witches and druids, these and other creatures accompany Walter Astral on his transcendental journey. So, ok, that’s an angle. Apparently, when they were recording this EP out in the countryside, they woke up one morning and realized that they had the same dream in which a guy named Walter Astral came to visit them on his “three-masted ship” and asked them to become his apprentices. At first I thought maybe the whole thing was a bit, given the whole “Hyperdruide” thing, or that something was getting lost in translation, but as I learned from this awesome interview, they do, in fact, consider themselves Druids: Tino : …One of the first principles of the druids is to abandon one's ego in favor of nature. The fairly basic idea of "I am not an individual at the center of nature but rather I am nature at the heart of nature." *to Tristan* By the way, I don't know if you remember your druidic sign. I'm a poplar, and in fact, there are trees with which you can develop more or less affinities depending on your Celtic sign. I'm a poplar. Tristan : I think I'm pine. Tino : Aren't you an ash? Tristan : Oh no, I'm a pine tree. I loved it because I really like this tree. Tino : And yeah, so you can have a special relationship with this type of tree, this species of tree. And have more dialogue. That's why druids do a lot of... either hugging trees or talking. People will say... but what I'm saying is serious! So I don’t think it is a joke after all, or at least not completely. They talk about druidism and astrology fairly seriously, even though they clearly have a sense of humor about it (which, come to think of it, is true of most neo-pagans I’ve met). I would recommend that everyone go to their Instagram immediately and check out their entire “How to Druide” series. You don’t need to know French to get it. Before I started researching these guys, I loved this album, but now I love their whole deal, so, so much. All their music videos are incredible, and they’ve got a full length album called Éclipse that I haven’t even heard yet, apart from yet another hilarious music video. I can’t wait to see what else Walter has going on on his three-masted ship. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/52c50b04-58e6-44a0-afc8-481b636b7ab1/seed+of+a+seed.jpg Blog - July 2025 - Druids, Nature, and Unrelatedly, Indian-Heritage Hip-Hop - Haley Heynderickx - Seed of a Seed The imagery running through Seed of a Seed - and the previous album, I Need to Start a Garden - is plant and earth juxtaposed with modern tech. It makes sense as a language for a folk artist to talk about modern life, and I find the mentions of texting and social media both melancholy and funny. I won’t give you too much more flowery language about the content of this album because her official website already does way more than enough of that. It’s a folk album about the complexities of being a simple human in the modern world. There, done. The vast majority of the interviews I’ve found with Heyndrickx are from her tour for I Need to Start a Garden, which is kind of unfortunate because so much of what she talks about is her own lack of confidence. Now that she’s been around for a few years, I think it would be interesting to hear about her process and how she thinks about her art in general. I did find one interesting nugget in this interview, however: “…Sometimes, I feel (the audience) talking to me,” Heynderickx said. “They have more of an idea of me than noticing the person that’s in front of them. … I guess I’m beginning to see the changes (in) perception (of me by my audience) over time, but I also know it’s just reflections of how they’ve experienced music,” Heynderickx said. “Honestly, when people come up to me, I see them talking to themselves, talking to ideas that they’ve had with music, and I get to view a weird medium vehicle of them reflecting back to themselves. There’s a lot to unpack there, and unfortunately the article doesn’t take the time to explore the way she seems to think that she disappears in front of her own audience. Is it that she thinks the audience doesn’t understand what she’s trying to say or that they don’t see her at all? Or is it more that she provides a space for them to contemplate and is happy to step away? I wish I knew. At any rate, the world of Seed of a Seed is well worth exploring. It’s beautiful, vulnerable, and funny, and as a side-note: Heyndrickx is not a stage name. Apparently it’s the 17th most common surname in Belgium. I didn’t know! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/0eaf067b-808d-4f8b-9cd4-f2f12263381c/illuminator.jpg Blog - July 2025 - Druids, Nature, and Unrelatedly, Indian-Heritage Hip-Hop - GIFT - Illuminator The themes of Illuminator make a lot of sense for the music: dreams, memory, and the desire to stop time. “Wish Me Away” in particular, was written when vocalist-guitarist TJ Freda’s sister was in a car crash. It wasn’t deadly, but it shook everyone involved. He drove from New York to Boston to be with her, thinking about impermanence and wondering whether he was doing the things with his life that he cared about. Shortly thereafter, he quit his day job (literally). Between GIFT’s first album, Momentary Presence, and this one, the band went from being more or less a solo project to a quintet, and I think you can hear the complexity of the music expand as a result. In terms of genre, Illuminator sits somewhere between psych-rock, dream pop, and (people have argued) shoegaze (I don’t hear it, but a lot of people do, so [shrug]). It’s at once dreamy, poppy, groovy, introspective, fuzzy, and loud. It’s such a cohesive sound that you wouldn’t think it would lead to argument about how to categorize it, but here we are. I'm seeing a trend toward this kind of psych-rock sound, with its washed out vocals and fuzzy guitars, but I haven’t figured out if that’s a real trend or if its just where my tastes sit right now. When people talk about The Algorithm, they usually have a specific one in mind - Spotify, Netflix, Hinge - but I think we need another concept as well, for a meta-algorithmic emergent system, in which our online behaviors function in aggregate to push us into a specific taste category. There’s such a thing as “data connectivity” companies, which is kind of a grey market in which companies can purchase users’ history on other platforms in order to drive their own recommendations, but I think that as individuals we’re also ushered into a behavior/thought/cultural pattern by all of our various behaviors reinforcing one another indirectly, including social influences, both online and irl since one inevitably drives the other. It doesn’t seem like anyone has settled on a formal term for this, but there’s been some writing on the subject by people like Taina Bucher and Eli Pariser. I, uh… haven’t read it, but um… maybe I will. Someday. Ahem. Right. Ok, why am I talking about this? Oh, it’s because I’ve been noticing a trend in psych-rock when apparently there’s a whole shoegaze renaissance going on. As for GIFT themselves, they’re cagey about genre, but I think the psych-rock thing is there. Last thought: in the process of researching this blurb, I watched the video for “Wish Me Away” and went down a mini-rabbit hole trying to figure out who this William SIbley guy is because he’s amazing as the butler character. I’m not sure if I’ve really figured it out, but maybe it’s as simple as he says: “I’m never booked as a dancer person but as a character who dances.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/07733202-e292-4d7a-ad6c-72ab1ab29cc8/lafandar.jpg Blog - July 2025 - Druids, Nature, and Unrelatedly, Indian-Heritage Hip-Hop Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/69fb4ff4-7367-4755-90bd-2093c658fc81/All+Born+Screaming.jpg Blog - July 2025 - Druids, Nature, and Unrelatedly, Indian-Heritage Hip-Hop St. Vincent - All Born Screaming Unlike many music journalists, I’m going to avoid the temptation to recap every album St. Vincent has ever done, one by one. There’s 10 of them, guys, c’mon. However, it is worth pointing out the ways in which All Born Screaming is different from what came before. When I first heard it, I remember commenting that some of her music is a little too intellectual for me, and that this album feels a bit more immediate and powerful. As it turns out, that’s not an accident. It’s the first album she’s written without a character to perform through. As she says: On previous records, I was dissecting the idea of persona and using persona to liberate my subconscious from whatever, which I've realized makes perfect sense because I'm queer. I know how to code switch. I've been aware that gender is performance and all that, since I was a child. This record, it's not about persona or anything, it's just kind of life and death, and life is impossible, but we get to live it. And it's really fucking short, and we are all we got, and people we love are all we got. So it's in some ways easier to talk about because it's kind of dead simple. It’s not surprising that the album was written and recorded during the height of the pandemic and shortly thereafter. A lot of us were dealing with isolation, grief, and fear at that time, and the idea of her sitting by herself for hours trying to get the right take of a vocal line from “Hell Is Near” resonates with the tone of the album. As she says: “I was dealing with a lot of loss and literal life and death. … Death is very clarifying because you go, ‘This matters, this doesn’t’. To me, the first half of the record is base – whether it’s death or destruction or your own inner monologue of brutal self-loathing where you’re staring into the void, like, ‘Life is impossible’ – and then the second half is, ‘Well we get to fucking live it, so let’s grab it by the jugular.’” All that said, it’s also one of her most listenable albums. It’s heavy and dark, for sure, but it also has a simplicity and directness that the previous albums didn’t. Or to put it as my partner did as we were driving around listening to it, “It’s makeout music,” and I added, “Very pretentious makeout music.” https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/dec-2024 monthly 0.5 2024-12-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/5fd42ca9-6b24-4b58-890b-db42128eee5d/barbershop+simulator+2.jpg Blog - December 2024 - A Lesser Blog Would Be About Holidays - Slowerpace - Barbershop Simulator 2 Apparently, there’s a thing out there called “barber beat.” News to me too, but ok sure, why not? Barber beat is a sub-genre of vaporwave (you can do your own math on how many “sub-” prefixes you’ll need to capture how niche this is) which was originated by an artist called Haircuts for Men. It’s characterized by its process: taking lounge/jazz/chill samples, slowing them down, pitching them down, adding reverb and sometimes other samples, and mashing them together to make something even more chill than the original material. It’s also common to create album art which evokes the era of vaporwave (late 80’s-early 2000’s), and give everything tongue-in-cheek and/or Japanese-language titles. So, yes, it’s a very specific type of vaporwave. Vaporwave loves wearing masks. It tends to use imagery from pop culture, sometimes it speaks directly to the viewer, and in general it evokes another time by pretending to be a relic of that time (with a sly wink, of course). Slowerpace adds an extra layer of specificity by claiming that each of his albums is a soundtrack from a video game of the vaporwave era. In this case, it’s a game called Barbershop Simulator II, which I would totally play, and is a sequel to his earlier album, Barbershop Simulator (which I would also totally play). I think this album kind of transcends its own joke, though. The album is so lush and varied that the video game premise is just the cherry on top. My recommendation: if you have a nice stereo, lay a bunch of cushions and blankets on the living room floor, turn off the lights, and cuddle up with a friend or lover and just let it wash over you. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/347a2850-96ba-4eec-814e-4095a6c1e1c7/3for82.jpg Blog - December 2024 - A Lesser Blog Would Be About Holidays - Machinedrum - 3FOR82 I appreciate when an established artist like Machinedrum tries something a bit different. 3FOR82 is an album of collaborations, which isn’t new for him, but he changed his process significantly. According to an interview, he paid a visit to Joshua Tree National Park and had a moment of clarity. He needed to take a break from Ableton Live and return to Impulse Tracker, a long-defunct audio sequencer program that was written in 1995. Even loading it up on his laptop required a DOS emulator. So right off the bat, I find that pretty delightful. For the collaborations, he sat in a room with each of the vocalists and recorded a conversation focused on some theme, for example dancing or childhood. The lyrics were supposed to flow out of that, rather than whatever the vocalist’s normal process is. It’s hard to say exactly how much all this changed the sound, but the result is a great series of electronic and/or hip-hop tracks. I’m going to have to look up some of these collaborators too. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/6c632cbc-875d-475c-be74-86c891d85b93/strange+medicine.jpg Blog - December 2024 - A Lesser Blog Would Be About Holidays - Kaia Kater - Strange Medicine Generally speaking, Kaia Kater is thought of as a roots musician. She is a banjo player, after all, and her previous albums fit pretty comfortably into that category. But this album takes a significant turn toward something much more lush, ambitious, and modern. To be sure, the folk tradition is here - the lyrics are generally narratives, and of course the banjo takes a spotlight - but the instrumentation is so lush and complicated. Check out the jazzy percussion on “Maker Taker” and the woodwinds on “Fédon.” Even “In Montreal,” which you might expect to be a bit more straightforwardly roots because Allison Russell is on it, has strange atmospheric passages. According to Kater, this album feels different largely because it was written during the pandemic. Her previous album, Grenades, was written and recorded in just two weeks. For this one, because everything in the world was on hold for so long anyway, she spent two years. I hope she keeps going down this path, myself. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/82973488-66d3-4e3d-9cbb-206256ef9502/red+room.jpg Blog - December 2024 - A Lesser Blog Would Be About Holidays Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/79dda2c3-41cd-4463-a394-c58028908b1c/aprender+a+ser.jpg Blog - December 2024 - A Lesser Blog Would Be About Holidays Mint Field - Aprender a Ser Historically, Mint Field has been considered a dream pop/shoegaze band. The description definitely works, especially on their previous albums. Aprender a Ser, though, reaches for something more in trip-hop territory. There’s a lot of Portishead in here, and maybe some Mazzy Star, in addition to Estrella Sanchez’s Cocteau Twins vocals. I caught Mint Field at a little venue/bar/sandwich restaurant/pinball arcade near Boston recently and was really taken with them. They’re from Mexico City, so unless I have readers there (which seems more than a little unlikely), you’ll probably need to keep an eye out so you don’t miss them on tour. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/nov-2024 monthly 0.5 2024-11-30 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/84223d10-8979-4cd9-8adb-ea4ced0744f9/transparent+eyeball.jpg Blog - November 2024 - Sex, Sleaze, Yacht Rock, and Rage Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/bf75e9c2-2dc3-4a7a-9874-98a1db3da9e3/how+to+make+a+master+peace.jpg Blog - November 2024 - Sex, Sleaze, Yacht Rock, and Rage - Master Peace - How to Make a Master Peace Remember indie sleaze? That subgenre of mid/late 2000s indie art, music, and fashion that celebrated the hedonistic aspects of youth culture - the sex, the drugs, the dancing, the clubbing, the (facetious) anti-intellectualism? For example, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, The Strokes, Peaches, Crystal Castles, Kate Moss, The Cobrasnake, and Alexa Chung? No? You don’t remember that term? Well, that’s because the term wasn’t coined until 2021. The thing is, that’s how it works. Nobody is really able to be helpfully describe their own aesthetic sensibility until later generations look back at it and say, “This is what I was inspired by at that time. This is what it meant to me. These are the things it made me think about. These are the way it made me feel. These are the artists that made me feel that way. And since not all of them did, let’s come up with a name.” No one called it “darkwave” until the 90’s. No one called it “yacht rock” until 2005. And, getting back around to the point, when the stuff that we call “indie sleaze” came out originally, we just threw under the umbrella term electroclash, which we knew was unhelpful even at the time. Master Peace is, by his own description, an indie sleaze artist. This is party music. It’s dance-rock with a hyper-enthused vocalist going over the top. Check out these lyrics from “NARCOS” Girls and the chicks and the drugs and the whips And the Fords and the broads, man, I just don't know Hated my friends 'cause they wanted me dead And I know that I'm lost, that I just can't cope and— If you’re reminded of The Dare’s track “Girls” from a few months ago, it’s no mistake. Master Peace has cited that song several times as a major inspiration. Point being, Master Peace knows what he’s doing here. He’s produced a kickass party album with one banger after the next. And goddamn, it’s a lot of fun. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/9fead653-98c7-47af-9718-3340c9c7f4ab/love+makes+magic.jpg Blog - November 2024 - Sex, Sleaze, Yacht Rock, and Rage - JIM - Love Makes Magic You would think that if you became famous in the band Crazy P (formerly Crazy Penis), you’d be able to come up with a better name than fucking JIM. Sigh. Well, at least the music is interesting. During lockdown, Jim Baron (aka Ron Basejam) decided that he wanted to finally get his guitar skills in order. What came out of it, strangely enough, is an album of lush harmonies, gentle fingerpicking, and introspective lyrics. Comparisons to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are inevitable, but there are also heavy doses of yacht rock and Balearic beat. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/50c61534-8702-40d2-b955-5bee4123b7b6/white+tree.jpg Blog - November 2024 - Sex, Sleaze, Yacht Rock, and Rage - Marjan Farsad - White Tree As always, it’s tough to come up with good research on artists from the non-Western world (even if they immigrate to Canada). Here’s what I can tell you: Marjan Farsad is a writer, animator, singer, and songwriter who left Iran in 2008 to live in Montreal. For the most part, she says that her music is apolitical, focusing instead on personal interaction and emotion. She has, however, at times used her music to comment on the arrests of her friends in Tehran. I can also tell you that her animation is gorgeous, and her music has a beautiful melancholy. It’s definitely inspired by Western folk/rock music, even though the lyrics are in a mix of English, French, and Farsi. Unfortunately, that’s all I’ve got, but her work is beautiful. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/17434225-893a-40ac-9f0d-5cc6f1426d1f/dead+pioneers.jpg Blog - November 2024 - Sex, Sleaze, Yacht Rock, and Rage Dead Pioneers - s/t As Gregg Deal says, “We were punk first.” Like a lot of punk music, Dead Pioneers doesn’t need a whole lot of unpacking. From its earliest manifestations, punk has been straightforward about its rage, and few peoples have been so fucked over, so deserving of their rage, as Indigenous Americans. Deal approaches the topic with both fury and irony. “Bad Indian” is a wry commentary on the expectations of White observers of Indigenous people, and Dreamcatcher zeroes in on what is one of the most absurd examples of appropriation. There are moments in which Deal calls out an affinity across marginalized groups as well. From “This Is Not a Political Song” Religious zealots judging you with eyes and ears that are told not to judge on Sunday Black Lives Matter Land rights Equal rights Marriage rights Voting rights Gay rights Trans rights Black rights Latino rights Indigenous rights Workers rights Labor rights Immigrant rights No one illegals on stolen land but for the most part, he’s zeroed in on the position of Indigenous Americans, which is a punk voice that’s rarely heard. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/sept-2024 monthly 0.5 2024-11-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/dc9f974c-d270-402e-a45e-1229444f40ce/delight.jpg Blog - September 2024 - Don’t Think About It. It’s Still September. Trust Me on This. Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/359a975c-66ab-45a8-8e56-efcfefafd6be/and+now+for+the+whatchamacallit.jpg Blog - September 2024 - Don’t Think About It. It’s Still September. Trust Me on This. - Psychedelic Porn Crumpets - AND NOW FOR THE WHATCHAMACALLIT After following these guys for several years, I finally got a chance to see them a few months ago, and what can I say? It was exactly what I’d hoped it would be. Hard, psychedelic, catchy, and a total blast. And, as I should’ve guessed, their merch is absolutely incredible. Perth, Australia is a bit of a hotspot hot spot for psychedelic rock these days. Off the top of my head, you’ve got Pond, Tame Impala, Spacey Jane, The Silents… and it doesn’t seem like it’s a coincidence. As Jack McEwan (vocalist/guitarist) said of drugs and rock, “well there’s nothing else to do, is there?” To hear him tell it, the Psychedelic Porn Crumpets are a joke that got out of hand. “The Mighty Boosh was a huge influence … it seemed like it was all supposed to be random, but it was actually a perfectly-executed satire on the whole psychedelic mindset.” Even the name is a bit of a joke. The story is that the band met through their drug dealer, threw together some psych-y words together for their name, played around with some psych rock licks, played a couple shows, introduced some visual elements with tessellating cat faces, and then looked back and realized that it had gone way too far to keep calling it a joke. This is my favorite of their albums. It’s one of the catchiest and most varied, but the truth is that they’re all pretty great. They tour a lot so it shouldn’t be hard to see them, but don’t miss the chance because it’s a blast. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/87bae244-c1b6-4196-89ff-4e45a9bf8343/this+wasnt+meant+for+you+anyway.jpg Blog - September 2024 - Don’t Think About It. It’s Still September. Trust Me on This. - Lola Young - This Wasn’t Meant for You Anyway In every interview I can find with Lola Young, someone mentions her haircut and it turns into a metaphor for either taking control of her mental illness or her unapologetic bluntness. Usually it’s her saying that, though, so I guess… fair enough? Much of her music is about toxic relationships and cycles of breaking up/getting back together. She has an interesting take on lyrical structure. To paraphrase, a verse should be very specific and blunt, and the chorus should be metaphorical. Her examples: a verse would be like “You can eat shit because you fucked with my plants.” - that’s about a specific person that did a specific thing - a chorus would be more like, “you throw my phone out the window / The next thing the neighbor said she's calling the feds” - that didn’t actually happen, but it’s powerful figuratively. Musically, she’s got a really wide vocabulary. A lot of it reminds me of Amy Winehouse. The power of her voice, the bluntness of the lyrics, and the sultry jazz grooves all hit me that way. But that’s not all that’s going on. My favorite track, “I Wish You Were Dead,” has a chorus that suddenly becomes 2010’s dance-rock. “Big Brown Eyes” sounds a bit like Lily Allen. “Fuck” has an unexpected electopop edge to it. There’s a lot here. Lola Young is definitely in the category of “rising star” (in fact she was nominated for a Brit Award for Rising Star). I expect we’ll be hearing a lot from her. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/166a3de4-3546-4202-bccf-fc86d2a5f4b1/Big_Brave-A_Chaos_of_Flowers.jpg Blog - September 2024 - Don’t Think About It. It’s Still September. Trust Me on This. - Big|Brave - A Chaos of Flowers Big|Brave are known for their booming, throbbing, sludging guitars and deliberate, plodding tempo. It’s heavy, heavy, heavy. And heavy. For lack of a more helpful categorization, I guess I’m forced to say that they’re a post-rock band. What is there to say about post-rock? It’s like… rock, but um… post-. It can be almost anything as long it’s not catchy. Maybe it would be more useful to say that when I saw them, the crowd was a mix of metalheads and arty weirdos who stood with rapt attention for the entire set, not a single headbang to be seen. The thing that I find most interesting about interviews with Robin Wattie (vocalist/guitarist) is that the songs on this album are inspired by “folk songs and ballads, Appalachian music and blue-collar, working-class music ... But so much of that music is written by men, … [and this record looks at] a cross-generational experience for female-presenting people, especially people of color.” You can definitely see that influence in the lyrics. Take a look at the first verse of “i felt a funeral” I felt a funeral in my brain And mourners to and fro Kept treading, treading 'til It seemed that sense was breaking through There’s a real folk music rawness there, and an Emily Dickenson-like interest in death and the rituals around it (and in fact, that stanza actually is from a Dickenson poem). When I went to see them, I honestly wasn’t sure what I was in for. It’s not exactly a feel-good album. I spent the first 15 minutes watching them strike huge chords and point the pickups at the amps to capture the texture of all that feedback, and I still wasn’t sure what I was looking at. By minute 16, though, I was totally captivated. It’s hypnotic, challenging, and yes, a bit oppressive. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/9b02302a-4556-4331-b365-311da1479f9d/tear+the+place+up.jpeg Blog - September 2024 - Don’t Think About It. It’s Still September. Trust Me on This. The Allergies - Tear the Place Up Alright, enough of all that “art.” Let’s groove. The Allergies are known for infectious, soul/funk-infused hip-hop beats. If you’ve been following this blog for awhile, you might remember them from “Felony,” which has one of the more ridiculous vocal samples I’ve heard. This time out, they’re working with an old-skool rap vibe that makes the whole thing feel like a Kid ‘n Play party. It’s not thematically complicated, but it is a whole lot of fun. I want to call out the title track as a standout, both as one of the best tracks and as a totally different vibe. Instead of a groovy party, it’s a blistering “B.O.B.” style rap. Now… unfortunately as a music blogger, it’s inevitable that I’ll have to talk about appropriation at some point. For the most part, I have a pretty open-minded stance on it, but once in awhile there’s something that has to be called out, and that’s “Hypnotise.” It’s a shame because I absolutely love that beat, but uh… if you’re a white dude, you can’t just decide to do a Jamaican accent. Sorry, man. Other than that, though, this album is a blast. “It’s vibes.” -Some guy on YouTube https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/july-2024-crj76 monthly 0.5 2024-10-05 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/134bee80-a6e8-465f-860d-d430d66040cb/prayers+and+paranoia.jpg Blog - August 2024 - Talk-Singing. Talk-Singing. Music-Binging. Talk-Singing. TALK-SINGINNNNNG! [talk-singing] Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/c4c1dd0e-4a20-4a1b-a106-881881e5b9a9/fine+anyway.jpg Blog - August 2024 - Talk-Singing. Talk-Singing. Music-Binging. Talk-Singing. TALK-SINGINNNNNG! [talk-singing] - Rogér Fakhr - Fine Anyway In interviews, Rogér Fakhr paints a fascinating picture of what it was like to be a musician in Beirut in the 1970s. As he tells it, the city was teeming with musical life from all over the globe - Arabic music was dominant, but they were also flooded with recordings from the US, UK, France, and Italy. He was deeply inspired by the English language stuff, even though he didn’t really understand the words (there’s an anecdote in which he learns the words to Sgt. Pepper only because they were printed in the LP’s sleeve), and as he put it, he “wanted to record and produce music that would put Lebanon on the map and show the extent of the talent existing there at the time.” However, in 1975, a civil war broke out in Lebanon that would continue for the next fifteen years, and that vibrant music world collapsed before Fakhr had the opportunity to put out an album. He describes a painstaking process of recording on the few resources he had available - tearing the tape out of cassettes and splicing it together by hand, recording and overlaying over and over until the tape was such poor quality that he had to start over, getting into the studio for a few scant days before skirmishes broke out again, and never having enough money to make a real go of it. It sounds excruciating, but as he points out, everyone was hunkered down trying to avoid conflict, so there was a lot of time to do things like that. Fine Anyway is a collection of songs that were produced during this time, some of which were released on 200 cassettes and handed out to friends and family, and some of which were never released at all until Habibi Funk put out this record. Fakhr still talks about re-recording everything now that he has more resources, but personally I think there’s nothing wrong with the way it appears here. It’s wonderful stuff. The 1960’s-70’s Western influences are immediately obvious, but I think you can get a sense of the difficult circumstances in which it was created. If you’re interested, I’d definitely recommend that interview I linked above. There’s a lot of interesting social/cultural context there, plus you get to read Fakhr answer questions about his influences by saying things like “Personally? My family and friends and my brothers and sisters in Art. Also the eternal research for a common Spirit.” Did I mention that he lives in San Francisco now? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/9be879af-decb-4f59-9bc7-bd6a68877ab9/detwat.jpg Blog - August 2024 - Talk-Singing. Talk-Singing. Music-Binging. Talk-Singing. TALK-SINGINNNNNG! [talk-singing] HiTech - D É TWAT Before I say anything else: don’t listen to this album unless it’s on headphones. Ok now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about ghettotech. As pretty much always happens with dance genres, the exact timeline for the development is somewhat in dispute. Did ghetto house influence ghettotech or the other way around? Was juke/footwork part of the equation or did that come later? Do we count the rap tacks that led to the development of ghettotech or should we strictly limit it to the techno-y stuff? The thing that everyone agrees on, though, is that its story is inextricable from the Detroit music scene of the 90’s-2000’s. Now, there’s no point in telling you that Detroit was a great place to be in the 90’s-2000’s, but the music scene was tight-knit and hyper-productive. Rap and club music was exploding there at that time - off the top of my head, you’ve got Eminem, Binary Star, J Dilla, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, Juan Atkins, Robert Hood… the list goes on - but what’s most interesting to me is how integrated all the musical platforms were. The DJs on the radio might be the same as the DJs in the club, which might also be the same as the DJs at the titty bar (that’s not my term. Without exception, in every interview I’ve ever read with someone from Detroit, they refer to strip clubs as “titty bars”). The integration of all those musical outlets explains a lot about why ghettotech sounds the way it does. Ok so what is it? Well, for one thing, it’s fast; roughly 145-170 bpm. For reference for non-DJs, house music is almost always 120-130, and rap (non-ghettotech rap, that is) is often as low as 80. So yes, it’s very very fast, which is likely at least in part attributable to the influence of Jeff Mills. Techno is always fast (120-150bpm), but Jeff Mills pushed it to levels no one had ever seen before, and he was omni-present in the scene leading up to the birth of ghettotech. I have to take a moment to mention DJ Godfather, who was one of the essential creators of ghettotech, and its undisputed champion DJ. I’ve seen him spin and it’s truly something to behold. I could pick pretty much any moment in pretty much any of his many videos to make the point, but we’ll go with this one, moments before he takes off his jacket and drops into some of the most mind-blowing turntablism imaginable. Ghettotech is also characterized by very short vocal samples, sexually explicit to the point of being wildly over-the-top. If you were in high school or college at the turn of the 21st century, you almost certainly saw at least one video making use of DJ Assault’s “Ass N Titties.” And if so, you probably thought it was hilarious, which, of course, it was intended to be. You’re not supposed to take this stuff seriously. You can imagine, though, that it would work pretty well at the titty bar. Ok, back to HiTech. These guys are clearly inheritors of the ghettotech sound, but this album is definitely stretching the genre quite a bit. The overwhelming “NU MUNNI” alone is taking it into a totally new place. Interviews with the group are satisfyingly chaotic. Read any two of them and you’ll see direct contradictions in the answers to any personal questions. I’m pretty sure it’s all made up on the spot. The only subject on which they give consistent answers is their vision. They hate the club scene today. Bottle service, VIP areas, people standing around staring at one another. I very much relate to King Milo’s description of the current club scene: “it’s looking real jacked-up because the safe space has been compromised. So we have to have an understanding, we have to save the culture by implementing these safe space rules. Because the first rule is you gotta make sure everybody knows it’s OK, to do this music and dance with people and have human interaction. Because right now, it’s icky for a lot of people.” This idea of the club as a safe space is interesting to me - unfortunately, I don’t think that’s how people normally think about it. He goes on to talk about how metal and punk shows succeed at self-selecting a crowd that you feel safe with because they’re chaotic. Man, I really hope they succeed with their project of making clubs not suck. Now that we’re at the end, I’ll admit that I did not read this 100-page Master’s thesis about the cultural and sociological history of ghettotech. But you should! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/5a21e4cb-bbf5-4038-b30a-a5e4c2f24cae/volunteers.jpeg Blog - August 2024 - Talk-Singing. Talk-Singing. Music-Binging. Talk-Singing. TALK-SINGINNNNNG! [talk-singing] - The Volunteers (KR) - s/t There’s precious little I can tell you about The Volunteers, unfortunately. The English language internet just doesn’t offer all that much about Asian bands unless someone at Rolling Stone or whatever picks it up for some reason. I can tell you a few things, though. The frontwoman, Yerin Baek (Baek Ye-rin in the Korean name order), was already a pop star when The Volunteers formed. She was in a long-running girl group called Oh My Girl that released a few albums and appeared on TV regularly before she went solo in 2015. Oh My Girl is still going strong without her, and in fact just released a “mini-album” a few days ago. The other musicians were formerly in a band called Bye Bye Badman, which had some success in South Korea’s rock scene, but the band acknowledges that their success is probably due to Baek’s existing celebrity. Um, that’s it. Hope you like grunge! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/d8e311da-6b42-49e7-b699-e4fd7cca6c1a/postindustrial+hometown+blues.png Blog - August 2024 - Talk-Singing. Talk-Singing. Music-Binging. Talk-Singing. TALK-SINGINNNNNG! [talk-singing] - BIG SPECIAL - POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES You can probably guess from the title of the album what it’s about. Here in the US, we’d think of the Rust Belt, with its decaying factories and emptying industrial towns. In the UK (I’m taking BIG SPECIAL’s word for it), it’s the West Midlands, Black Country, and Birmingham. It’s about the experience of the working class, the depression and the oppression of living in a place that’s forgotten and derided. BIG SPECIAL have a lot to say about what it’s like to live there. As they see it, the Midlands are looked down on by every other part of the country, and the minute someone hears their accent, they’re treated differently. And even at home, artists are looked down on. As Cal Moloney said while comparing their music to Detroit’s, “It all comes out of the struggling, working-class musician, even if the music they're making isn't necessarily political. The fact that they're making music at all is inherently political. Society wants us to be factory workers and 9-5ers.” It’s inevitable to compare this album with other bands from the current post-punk revival like Yard Act or Sleaford Mods. There’s a tendency toward poetry in this genre, and BIG SPECIAL is practically spoken word. As compared to a lot of other contemporary post-punk albums, though, POSTINDUSTRIAL HOMETOWN BLUES comes off pretty primal. It’s heavy, and it’s generally much less self-aware. It’s not a post-ironic take on douchebaggery, it’s a scream. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/july-2024 monthly 0.5 2024-08-23 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/b3aa5006-3947-4995-9d3b-eb9a76a0506d/news+of+the+universe.jpg Blog - July 2024 - Man, That’s a Lot of Tracks Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/129bd1b2-d0b9-4fe8-9230-8df0e0a82f32/britpop.jpg Blog - July 2024 - Man, That’s a Lot of Tracks - A.G. Cook - Britpop If the name A.G. Cook rings a bell, it might be because he’s Charli XCX’s creative director and producer of 5 of her albums (including this year’s acclaimed Brat, which you’ve probably been hearing in bars for the past few months, and which weirdly became the semi-official aesthetic of Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. Go figure). Or if you were a weirdo music fanatic in the mid-2010s, it might be because he was the founder of PC Music, the legendary label that launched SOPHIE, and became the foundation for hyperpop (see 100gecs). Or you might know him as the founder of Witchfork, “the least trusted voice in music.” That’s almost certainly not it, but I wanted to put it here anyway. The story of this album is at least in part the closing of PC Music. That sound is very much a part of this album, especially Volume 1, with its exaggerated pop music tropes and frenetic stabby synths. I think it’s one of his more accessible albums, though. Each track has a coherent arc, rising and falling in intensity, but staying within its own sonic universe. 7G and Apple were a lot more challenging and jarring. Maybe some Charli XCX rubbed off on him. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/65f1b685-3c7d-41b1-a534-b82f29d4ddd4/challengers.png Blog - July 2024 - Man, That’s a Lot of Tracks Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, Boys Noize - Challengers [MIXED] I haven’t seen the movie Challengers, which has been referred to as “the horniest sports movie you’ll ever see” (thanks for the quote, Men’s Health), but I probably need to. Not so much for the horniness, but for the fact that Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross did the soundtrack. This version, mixed by Boys Noize, is especially great, and probably makes for a better listen outside of the film. It’s relatively chill for Boys Noize, but that isn’t saying very much. He even manages to work in his 2010 banger “Yeah.” As an aside, if you ever find yourself wondering “whatever happened to [musician],” try googling “[artist’s name] soundtrack”. You might have to look up their real name to get it, but you’ll find that a lot of musicians are out there doing this. Reznor and Ross have certainly built up a demand for themselves this way, as has Clark and Oneohtrix Pointe Never). Mark Mothersbaugh practically owns the soundtrack industry. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/e19f819f-b1b8-4d0f-974b-29e53dbc4427/anime+trauma+divorce.jpg Blog - July 2024 - Man, That’s a Lot of Tracks - Open Mike Eagle - Anime, Trauma and Divorce When he set out to make this album, what Open Mike Eagle had in mind was a concept album about the role of anime in the lives of Black people. It was supposed to be an exploration of the idea that anime provides an escape into another world and a power fantasy for people who have grown up in a world of generational trauma, poverty, and racism. Instead, he suffered a series of personal losses which took it in a completely different direction. The anime stayed, though. Sure, the album is about loss - divorce, the dissolution of his collaborative group Hellfyre Club, the cancellation of his show The New Negros, and then 2020 happened - but the story is always told with a metaphor from pop culture and a wry joke. It’s sad! But it’s mostly hilarious. I mean, he’s got a whole track called “WTF Is Self-Care,” a question I’ve been asking myself for years, even though I kind of know the answer already. “It’s like finding good smells/or fine wood shelves.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/da7e7363-b8fb-4a6c-a954-cfde85a4a8e2/youre+welcome.jpg Blog - July 2024 - Man, That’s a Lot of Tracks - Lambrini Girls - You’re Welcome If Lambrini Girls are playing anywhere near you, cancel whatever you have planned that day and go to the show instead. When I saw them, it was at a half-filled venue in Cambridge, MA. The danger with a crowd that size is that people have too much space to walk around, look at each other, get a drink, or get distracted and chat. Instead it was absolutely electric. Within minutes they were in the audience, climbing up on people’s shoulders, crowd surfing, making everyone lie down on the floor, picking up their amps and walking around with them. There wasn’t a split-second of opportunity for anyone to get bored. I didn’t even know you could crowd surf with an audience that size. It was also furiously political. The songs on this EP are all about the culture of abuse, victim-shaming, misogyny, and TERF-ism of the Brighton/London music scenes, which easily translates to American culture. Ours was one of the first shows on their US tour, and between songs they would occasionally ask the audience if we knew what “TERFs” or “lads” meant. TERFs yes, lads maybe. She mused that our version might be “chads.” I’m not sure, but I don’t think it matters. Even if we don’t know what a lad is, exactly, it’s not hard to get the gist. My friends and I left the show absolutely shaking with adrenaline. On the way out we told the drummer (who was touring but from the US) how much we loved the show, and she responded by saying, “Yeah, those girls are machines. They’ve been in the country for two days, they’re horribly jet-lagged, and also very drunk. I don’t know how it’s possible for them to do what they do.” https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/june-2024 monthly 0.5 2024-07-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/99d63483-a5b0-4581-9136-e29204c63e58/the+moon+is+in+the+wrong+place.jpg Blog - June 2024 - Everyone Releases Albums in May and It Takes Forever to Write a Blog in June Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/0bb353e1-abb2-445b-ac1b-cf8320771090/entangled+routes+2.jpg Blog - June 2024 - Everyone Releases Albums in May and It Takes Forever to Write a Blog in June - Pye Corner Audio - Entangled Routes As I’ve been doing research for this blurb, I’ve been trying not to roll my eyes at some of the terms floating around Pye Corner Audio (aka Martin Jenkins), like “hauntology” and “mycorrhizal networks.” Unfortunately, once you parse that ridiculous intellectual-ese jargon, it actually describes his music pretty well, and since everyone who talks about this guy insists on using them, I’ll get into it a little. Hauntology: starting in roughly the 2000s, there was a movement in which artists took aesthetic elements from the kind of mid-20th century media that we normally wouldn’t think of as “art” (cheesy electronic music you’d find in educational videos, weird visual warping, white fuzz on old VHS tapes, poorly-acted PSAs, bad audio tracking, visual artifacting in low-rez images and videos, etc) and turned it into menacing, psychedelic, disorienting music and video art. Good examples would be Boards of Canada, the TV show Look Around You, Tobacco, etc. It’s supposed to be “haunting” - hence, “hauntology.” The grad student in me is annoyed that they borrowed “hauntology” from Jacques Derrida’s 1993 book Specters of Marx because my reading of that book suggests that it was intended as a dire warning against political and economic triumphalism (in particular the common impression at the time that democracy and capitalism had achieved victory over all other systems and global conflict would inevitably come to an end - see 1992’s The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama), and using it for this microgenre seems more like a general description of how like, the past comes back sometimes or whatever, and in this music it’s like kinda spooky, I guess. Also, why are we talking about Derrida right now? Anyway, yes, if you accept “hauntology” as a microgenre/aesthetic movement, this is it. It’s got all the warbling, droning effects of 70’s-80’s experimental music, which was weirdly echoed in the interstitial music of news shows and ads for new consumer technology like the Commodore 64. It’s also, as indicated above, kinda “haunting”. Mycorrhizal networks: this one is Jenkins’s description of his own work. There’s been a lot of scientific interest in the communication networks of fungi and plants, which span incredible distances through intricate webs of roots and veins. According to Pye Corner Audio, this album is an exploration of human attempts to listen in on these communication networks. It’s there, I think. There’s something about the swirling arpeggios that evokes a complex tangled system, and the slow synth patches evoke a kind of otherworldly logic. I haven’t been able to find any interviews in which Jenkins really breaks down what he has in mind here, but I think that as an aesthetic, it kinda makes sense. Ok so there’s all that. Pye Corner Audio is beautiful, haunting music. Stay tuned for next month because I’ll also be checking out his aliases, Head Technician and House in the Woods. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/c8cca8f9-3e76-4ede-b73b-3b9ff3d452b4/lives+outgrown.jpg Blog - June 2024 - Everyone Releases Albums in May and It Takes Forever to Write a Blog in June Beth Gibbons - Lives Outgrown Of course it’s inevitable to compare Beth Gibbons’s solo album to her time with Portishead. It’s been more than 15 years since Third came out, and she hasn’t released a whole lot of music in the meantime, so it’s about all we have to go on. At a glance, the two projects couldn’t be more different. She’s ditched the trip-hop beats and electronic textures that made Portishead iconic in favor of acoustic guitars and orchestral compositions, and instead of being mixed down into the production, her voice is front-and-center. Portishead could sometimes feel a bit removed, dissociative even. Lives Outgrown is much more personal. But the connection is there. Obviously, there’s the melancholy. Lives Outgrown proceeds at a meditative pace, dwelling on every syllable, and Gibbons’s strained delivery carries through from one to the other. I’d even argue that the compositions have something in common. The slow-paced swell of the orchestra reminds me of some of Portishead’s slower pieces. Of course, the themes are quite different. Portishead’s most famous songs are about love, bad relationships, and depression. Lives Outgrown is about motherhood, menopause, and the loss of friends and family. It’s powerful, like meeting an old friend who is startlingly honest about the 15 years since you saw them last. It’s a beautiful, powerful work. I hope we hear from her again soon, but that’s not really her MO. After all, she mentioned to Pitchfork that she was working on an album way back in 2013. Assuming that this is what she was referring to, she certainly took her time to get it right. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/f7c5b44a-c42b-46a5-adc2-cd509bd8c9b9/kommit.jpg Blog - June 2024 - Everyone Releases Albums in May and It Takes Forever to Write a Blog in June - Der Dritte Raum - KOMMIT As usual with producers, there’s precious little on the (English-language) internet about Der Dritte Raum, even though he’s been around for decades. If you’re a techno fan you might recognize his track “Hale Bopp,” which was released all the way back in ‘98. It still holds up today, I think. I wonder what I would have thought if I listened to it 10 years ago. Would I be into it or would I think it was cheesy? This album, KOMMIT, is a response to the end of the pandemic lockdown in Germany. It’s a return to the exuberant nightclub life, and a beautiful spacey journey unto itself. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/4ab1d35a-6c04-434c-8708-26e807ffed4a/Congo+Funk.jpg Blog - June 2024 - Everyone Releases Albums in May and It Takes Forever to Write a Blog in June - Congo Funk! - Sound Madness From The Shores Of The Mighty Congo River (Kinshasa / Brazzaville 1969 - 1982) I’d love to do a deep dive into the history of Congolese music here, but just isn’t enough time or space to do justice to it. Kinshasa, the capitol of The Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaïre), is in kind of a Twin-Cities relationship with Brazzaville on the other side of the Congo River, and they played off of each other in the development of the Congolese funk sound. Kinshasa is often thought of as the hub of central African music, giving rise to bands like African Jazz, O.K. Jazz and African Fiesta, but Brazzaville is home to the radio stations that spread the word. I’ll admit here that I’m cribbing very heavily from the Bandcamp article and I’m going to let you read the rest yourself since I won’t be able to tell you a whole lot more than that, but I encourage you to do so. It touches on a number of interesting topics like the dictator Mobutu Sese Seko funding a three-day music festival in the runup to The Rumble in the Jungle, and James Brown’s defining concert there. There’s so much to be fascinated by in the history of music. Here in the US, we’re well acquainted with the political dimensions of musical events like Woodstock, Motown, gangsta rap, the rise of swing, and punk, but most of us know almost nothing about how music played similar roles in other parts of the world (and of course it did!). Personally, I’m taking this moment to sign up for the Analog Africa newsletter. They’re the group that put together this compilation, and they have a healthy back catalog of music from around the world and short articles on how/why that music came about. It’s great stuff. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/may-2024 monthly 0.5 2024-06-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/d8825886-0a3f-4743-8f14-7109b8dc788e/ichijikikoku.jpg Blog - May 2024 - A Quick Trip Around the World, and a Lot of Time in Africa Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/c790dcd0-68c3-4290-96ed-50b25a586ef0/jpeg+raw.jpg Blog - May 2024 - A Quick Trip Around the World, and a Lot of Time in Africa - Gary Clark Jr. - JPEG RAW Even though he’s often described as a blues artist, Gary Clark Jr.’s sound has always been pretty eclectic. He’s said many times that he likes to avoid being pigeon-holed and tries to avoid doing the same thing twice. JPEG RAW is even more wild than ever, bringing in elements of West-African music (which seems to be a theme on this blog these days), hip-hop, blues, gospel, rock… it’s a great variety of influences, and (mostly) resolves to a single vibe nonetheless. For my money, the title track is one of the best (I love a good “unh!”) and also “Don’t Start,” about a jilted lover who’s about to kill his rival. You know, traditional blues stuff. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/033289df-dfc9-46fc-bd3c-966a57656a4f/teenage+witch.jpg Blog - May 2024 - A Quick Trip Around the World, and a Lot of Time in Africa - Suzi Wu - Teenage Witch Apologies for the grainy image. As a rule, when you’re looking for images of album art, bandcamp is the place to find the best ones, and this is what was there. I’m not sure whether it’s intentionally grainy - it would make sense, since she seems to be taking a mirror selfie - or if it’s just because she produced all this in her bedroom when she was 19. To be honest, I like it either way. This EP is pure teenage angst. It’s extremely catchy and lackadaisical in that high school “fuck you” kinda way. Unfortunately, I haven’t been crazy about the stuff she’s done since, but clearly there’s talent here, so I’ll keep listening. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/d9cc9516-df04-48a0-b2fa-0dc1f386d82c/hold+on+to+deer+life.jpg Blog - May 2024 - A Quick Trip Around the World, and a Lot of Time in Africa KABEAUSHÉ - “HOLD ON TO DEER LIFE, THERE ’ S A BLCAK BOY BEHIND YOU ! ” (sic) on all the above. Awhile back I highlighted the track “THESE DISHES AIN'T GONNA DO THEMSELVES” from this album, and was recently reminded that the whole rest of the album is pretty incredible. It’s a wild collage of sounds, rhythms, and influences that all comes together into a single explosive, apocalyptic sound. It’s got some of the best handclaps I’ve ever heard. KABEAUSHÉ is (or was?) Kabochi Gitau, a Kenyan pop artist. He’s doing a little bit of play with his identity à la David Bowie or Lady Gaga, in which the character and the artist are difficult to pull apart. As he said: Interviewer: How was KABEAUSHÉ born from your previous name, Kabochi? KABEAUSHÉ: Oh! He got executed - Kabochi was trying to save the world by curating the softest tissue ever that would save humanity from all its madness and he didn’t know that there was someone that was out for him, and so he got executed, and Kabeaushé is who is sat in the chair now. I’m not going to be able to pick that apart at the moment. Almost none of the interviews I’ve found are in English, and I’m a little nervous about trying to understand the nuances of his character via Google Translate. It’s pretty clear that there’s some kind of playfulness happening about who “he” is. I couldn’t resist the temptation to link to a friend’s recent book about how David Bowie’s identity shifted from album to album, and the question of “who” he was was intentionally obscure. This album is a huge leap from KABEAUSHÉ’s previous, The Coming of Gaze. That one was quite a bit simpler and softer. According to him, The Coming of Gaze is a collection of songs he wrote while he was still in Kenya and his exposure to music outside of the country was quite limited. It wasn’t until he was noticed by Nyege Nyege, a Ugandan label, and sent around the world that he heard a lot of music we take for granted in the US, like Lil Wayne and Kate Bush. This album, meanwhile, was written on that international tour while he was being inundated with new sounds and aesthetics. The other thing to know about KABEAUSHÉ is that he’s always incredibly cool-looking. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/583a5567-bced-4349-8f40-545a83c3c993/ignore+this.jpg Blog - May 2024 - A Quick Trip Around the World, and a Lot of Time in Africa - Dead Pony - Ignore This At this point, I shouldn’t be surprised about how each generation of rock music tosses everything from 20 years prior into a blender. That’s the whole deal with rock music! And almost any music at all. And really almost any art at all. Even so, I’m surprised about Dead Pony. It’s a blend of girl rock, pop-punk, nu metal, and indie rock - that’s not so surprising on its own - what’s surprising is that I love it. I absolutely hated at least 60% of Dead Pony’s influences when they were fresh, but Ignore This is just so hard and so catchy that it’s kind of undeniable. Although admittedly, some of those influences were kind of guilty pleasures at the time (*ahem* Powerman 5000 *ahem*). The other thing that blows me away about this album is how freaking long it is. 16 tracks? And almost all of them really good? That’s pretty amazing. I really hope I get to see these guys at some point because I bet it’s great. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/apr-2024 monthly 0.5 2024-05-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/e7699429-57f8-437b-b17d-2795ebe290f3/kosmischer+laufer.jpg Blog - April 2024 - Long-Form Music With Long-Form Names Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/21cab89b-6a2c-40cc-a6e9-842ad8d323e8/One+More+Thing.jpg Blog - April 2024 - Long-Form Music With Long-Form Names - Lime Garden - One More Thing Here’s a funny thing about music journalism: everyone writes about the same bands at the same time. Not just because all the journalists are suddenly paying attention when the album comes out, although that’s certainly part of it. It’s also because new bands only do interviews during press runs, typically in support of a new album or a tour. I currently have five interviews with the members of Lime Garden in front of me, all of which open with some comment on how cold it was during the interview, which is because all five of them took place between February 12th and March 1st of 2024, which is because the album came out on February 16th. I love that I don’t need to pump out content when it’s relevant, I just do it whenever. Anyway. This album is a really interesting combination of influences. Obviously it’s heavily indebted to The Strokes, but it also dips into territory like The Breeders and (as all five of those articles mentioned) Charlie XCX. There’s a lot of interesting experimentation happening here. The Charlie XCX thing obviously refers to “Pop Star,” but for my money the most interesting tracks are in the second half, like the jagged guitar part of “Fears” and the weird hyperpop of “Floor.” I like almost every song on the album, and it has that quality of pop music where I constantly find myself thinking, “I’ve heard this. Where have I heard this?” and eventually deciding that no, I’ve never heard it, it’s just really great. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/31bc633c-b46a-4483-ba0b-b3c652e6aabe/Were+ok+but+were+lost+anyway.jpg Blog - April 2024 - Long-Form Music With Long-Form Names Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp - We're OK. But We're Lost Anyway I’m finding it a bit frustrating to research these guys. They’ve existed since 2006, but they don’t have a wikipedia page? I even tried the French version of wikipedia. Nothing. And yet, this year alone they’re traveling through fifteen countries on three continents. Go figure. Here’s what I do know: Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp is kind of a loose collective led by Vincent Bertholet, a self-taught musician from Geneva. What we’re hearing on this album is very precisely orchestrated with little or no improvisation, which makes a lot of sense given how complicated it is. It kind of reminds me of Kate NV in how intricately layered the rhythms are. It’s kind of hypnotic. The album was created in the midst of the Pandemic (which also makes sense, given the title), and there’s a lot of political frustration in the lyrics. “So Many Things (to Feel Guilty About)” is just pretty funny. It’s a powerful album if you give it a chance to build. It took me awhile to find an ear for it, but now that I have, I really like it. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/29a8f689-7420-4502-8357-9c19385366a9/gulu+city+anthems.jpg Blog - April 2024 - Long-Form Music With Long-Form Names - Otim Alpha - Gulu City Anthems One takeaway I have from researching Otim Alpha is that I should really try to get myself invited to a Ugandan wedding. Alpha is a bit of a legend in his world. He and his collaborator Leo Palayeng invented the genre Acholitronix by taking traditional Larakaraka wedding songs and recreating them using synths and electronic drum kits. The result is a frenetic dance music that’s totally unlike anything we get in the West. Alpha himself is an interesting character who went on a journey from being a farmer, then a boxer, then an acclaimed adungu and nanga harp player, then a wedding band leader, and then finally an international musician. It’s interesting how this stuff eventually gets here. In this case, Alpha caught the attention of Damon Albarn, aka the guy from Gorillaz and Blur, and their collaboration brought him to the UK. It’s easy to make fun of Damon Albarn - he’s a weirdo, Gorillaz is a goofy project, he seems to have built the latter half of his career entirely on collaborating with people, etc etc - but he has a long history of bringing in artists who deserve to be heard and probably wouldn’t get a chance in the West otherwise. There’s an awful lot to say about the Ugandan music scene. Certainly much much more than I’ll have space to write here (or time to learn tonight), so I’ll leave it there, except to say that this festival show he did in Paris was obviously a bangin’ time (and it apparently featured “The Sisters of Twerkistan”). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/ac60a0b2-87a9-4293-9810-783d7c2361d1/rare+birds.jpg Blog - April 2024 - Long-Form Music With Long-Form Names - The Bug Club - Rare Birds: Hour of Song Asked for comment on this album as compared to their previous, guitarist/vocalist Sam Willmett said “Just more songs, really.” I find this album kind of refreshing. It’s lo-fi, most of the songs are less than 2:30, and most of the lyrics are cute and simple. But also, the harmonies are really beautiful and interesting, almost Beatles-esque structures. If you’ve ever looked at Beatles music in a Real Book, the chords are often listed as like C/E- or something, indicating that this music doesn’t easily settle into a single scale or chord structure. That’s the kind of thing that’s happening here (I think. I doubt that The Bug Club appears in a Real Book). They’ve said that they try to write and record in one sitting, ideally getting all the thought work done during a cup of tea and then just going into the studio and doing it. The music certainly sounds unpretentious and spontaneous in that way, but I have to think they’re being a little coy. I haven’t figured out what all the little poems are about, except that they’re supposed to be spoken by the bird on the cover. I think maybe the thing to do with these guys is just not overthink it. They’re not. (supposedly). https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/mar-2024 monthly 0.5 2024-04-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/ea27498a-5333-4e2b-8ee4-f3dd04478656/headache.jpg Blog - March 2024 - A Mystery Poet With an AI Avatar, an Ecologist Rapper, Some Pretentious Brits, and a Bit of Satanism Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/f87b5d55-e715-431e-b69c-e475ec9e6749/disques+debs.jpg Blog - March 2024 - A Mystery Poet With an AI Avatar, an Ecologist Rapper, Some Pretentious Brits, and a Bit of Satanism - Discques Debs International Vol. 1 Think back on tropes of the Caribbean in the 20th century, and one thing that might come to mind is a smoky nightclub where illicit meetings take place between spies and lovers. It’s a staple of literature from the era, but I’ve always kind of wondered like, where is all that music? Well, here’s a fantastic compilation of music released by Disques Debs, a record label that was active in the French Caribbean for the latter half of the 20th century. It’s an astonishing collection, with one banger after another by artists that I’ve never heard of, presumably because they’re working in Creole, and historically the US music market has ignored anything that isn’t in English (much less true today than ever before, but still a thing). This volume focuses on the earlier years of Debs’s existence, from 1960-1972, when they were primarily working with artists in Guadeloupe and Martinique. There’s also a Vol. 2, which focuses on the years when they were more of a pan-Caribbean enterprise and much more influential. Both are worth a listen, but for my money, Vol. 1 is the really incredible stuff. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/ab9c5206-ac49-4e3b-aa61-059cbc722f22/vanities.jpg Blog - March 2024 - A Mystery Poet With an AI Avatar, an Ecologist Rapper, Some Pretentious Brits, and a Bit of Satanism W. H. Lung - Vanities Last month I called out W. H. Lung’s single “High Pressure Days” as a catchy and fun electropop/dance track. Well, I went back into the archive and discovered this awesome album of euphoric, insistent dance music. It’s a serious evolution from what they were doing on their previous album, Incidental Music. While that one was more of a post-punk thing that was interesting and kinda fun, this has all the electricity of being in your 20’s, pregaming with your friends before a long night out. I read a couple interviews with the band in which they talk about the album’s creation in 2021, and how intentionally they pursued their new sound. Like a lot of us, they had been cooped up for over a year, starving for live music to become a thing again, and as soon as they could, they threw themselves into the Manchester nightclub scene, soaking up as much as possible, and channeling it all here. It really does feel like a long-awaited explosion. This is also the kind of album that makes me think “man, this would be incredible live.” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/183cb12b-2299-4cd1-ac20-5795ac8513c8/built+2+last.jpg Blog - March 2024 - A Mystery Poet With an AI Avatar, an Ecologist Rapper, Some Pretentious Brits, and a Bit of Satanism - KAM-BU - BUILT 2 LAST I love when someone has an alternative vision of what hip-hop can be. In this case, KAM-BU is chasing rave culture, audible in everything from the explosive bass to the chintzy keyboard grooves. He’s very frank about it, citing touchpoints like Prodigy and working with legends like Leon Vynehall. It seems like he actually sees partying as a political statement, and he likes to throw free dance parties on the street as a way to spread love in his community. I mentioned his collaboration with Leon Vynehall on a track called “Black on Black,” an experimental, dystopian commentary on racism and financial literacy in minority communities. That was the track that really launched him, and he often comments in a kind of off-hand way on how surprising it is that his first hit is a song about something as boring as financial literacy, but it seems like this kind of off-beat theme is very much his thing. Check out his many comments about ecology. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/671c8a3c-cee7-4c1f-b2cd-c404590dcf22/prelude+to+ecstasy.jpg Blog - March 2024 - A Mystery Poet With an AI Avatar, an Ecologist Rapper, Some Pretentious Brits, and a Bit of Satanism - The Last Dinner Party - Prelude to Ecstasy The Last Dinner Party is unusually frank about their influences, and extremely unusual in that the artists they list actually check out with their sound. Kate Bush, David Bowie, Florence + the Machine. Yep. That’s all there. Their outsized sense of drama is definitely one of their defining qualities. They exploded onto the scene just over a year ago with a song called “Nothing Matters” and almost immediately got booked to open for The Rolling Stones. They’re definitely a buzzy band. The primary criticism seems to be that they’re pretentious, which well, doesn’t seem like much of a criticism at all. Pretention gonna pretent. I was lucky enough to catch them about a year ago and was totally blown away by the power and versatility of Abigail Morris’s voice. My favorite track is “The Feminine Urge,” in which she gracefully jumps two octaves in the space of four notes. I’ve heard that song dozens of times, and it’s still startling to me every time she hits the high note and switches her delivery to a delicate breathiness. As often happens these days, I find that the album doesn’t really open up until track 4 or 5, but from there it’s brilliant. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/feb-2024 monthly 0.5 2024-03-12 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/f9ca128b-60a9-4306-a191-0cd46328a477/the+underside+of+power.jpg Blog - Feb 2024 - In Which I Have a Lot of Trouble Googling Stuff Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/4c663a81-8ed7-45f1-a114-aab94f5d1a7b/melusine.jpg Blog - Feb 2024 - In Which I Have a Lot of Trouble Googling Stuff Cécile McLorin Salvant - Mélusine Us music writers love a concept album. It gives us a place to start, guarantees that there will be something to say, and since all the other music writers are inevitably talking about it as a concept album too, we don’t even have to do much research. And wow does that help with jazz. Try writing 150 words about a saxophone. Not easy. Mélusine is a concept album. It’s based mostly on the story of Mélusine from European folklore, and tells the story of a woman who (for reasons) turns into a snake for awhile every week. She’s not supposed to let anyone see her like that, but eventually her fiancé breaks down the bathroom door while she’s in the bath and sees her as a snake, and then she uh, turns into a dragon, gives him some magic rings, then flies away, I guess. Look, it’s folklore and things get kinda weird over the centuries. Anyway, much has been written about this story, as you can imagine. In particular, scholars have been interested in its themes of femininity, hidden power, and a man who cannot allow for his partner to have a life apart from him. For Salvant to work with this story is interesting, both because of her personal take on the story (some excerpts from an interview on the subject are available on her Bandcamp), and because its juxtaposed with the blending of genres and cultures that Salvant is known for. This album is primarily in French, but it also contains English, Occitan, and Haitian Kreyòl, which I think grants takes the story a universality, whereas it may have otherwise felt like a European affair. This is about women across the world. It’s also interesting how her vocal and emotional inflection changes from song to song. It’s a beautiful piece of work, and, for the audio nerds out there, absolutely beautifully recorded. It’s also worth checking out her visual art, which is pretty weird and cool, and reminds me of one of my favorite avant garde artists, Leonora Carrington, albeit in a way that I don’t really know how to justify. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/597c858c-a3c9-4d7e-a2e6-3572c26f410e/%D0%9F%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%BA%D1%81.jfif Blog - Feb 2024 - In Which I Have a Lot of Trouble Googling Stuff - вспышка - Параллакс I wish I had more that I could tell you about this, but I don’t. I can tell you that her name, вспышка (Englishized as Vspyshka), translates as “Flash” and the album name Параллакс translates as “Parallax.” This is one of the challenges that come with listening to music from other cultures - sometimes you just don’t turn up much in the way of context, and you just have to hope that the vibes you get from the music are the ones that the artist intended. Or, I suppose, you could go out into the world and call up label heads and booking agents and eventually land an interview or something. But look, nobody’s paying me for that kind of thing. So, giving up on the idea of historiography, I love this brand of mysterious electro-pop. It reminds me of some of the early Chromatics stuff, or maybe even some modern darkwave like Boy Harsher (I’ll take any excuse to talk about Boy Harsher). So… uh… idk, that’s it, I guess. I can’t even find the lyrics written down anywhere so I can run google translate on them. Sorry! Um, enjoy? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/8a7a91de-41eb-4530-9e66-94a0baf1d966/room+for+the+moon.jpg Blog - Feb 2024 - In Which I Have a Lot of Trouble Googling Stuff - Kate NV - Room for the Moon I gave my dad a copy of this album for his birthday a few years ago and what he said about it was this: “Well, I really liked it, and then I looked her up the other day and… I don’t know, reading about it is so much more complicated than listening to it.” Indeed. Kate NV is a badass. Under this name, her work is complex, full of polyrhythms and odd musical modes. It’s a dense layering of sounds, and it feels like nothing is ever on the same beat. And yet, it feels pleasant. I almost never like anything in major chords, but this one is an exception. Kate NV’s description of her own work is a dizzying constellation of influences ranging from Japanese city pop artists like Haruomi Hosono, Soviet children’s shows like Dot Dot Comma, Sailor Moon, John Cage, New Wave, Kraftwerk… It would be easy to roll your eyes, except that, once you’ve been told that it’s there, it presents itself the music and music videos. It’s tempting to think of her as over-intellectual, except that everything she claims about herself seems completely true, she clearly has a sense of humor, and even more than that, her work includes a lot of other stuff which is (on the surface, at least) much less cerebral. Check out her rock band Glintshake, and her new wave/electro group Decisive Pink (which is a collab with another favorite of this blog, Deradoorian). I have to just say once again that I love that video I linked above. I have no idea what’s going on, and I’d probably assume that there’s nothing to know, except that she’s such an interesting artist that she probably actually does have something in mind. She’s so cool. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/0625fa3b-6574-41dd-b547-55403343a879/purposely+uncertain+field.jpg Blog - Feb 2024 - In Which I Have a Lot of Trouble Googling Stuff - Lake People - Purposely Uncertain Field Once again, Google has failed me. Producers can be tough, especially when they’re no longer active. As my friend KKV said, “This sounds like standing in a nightclub in Barcelona in 2017.” That is correct, and it’s also the deepest commentary I’ve been able to find. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/jan-2024 monthly 0.5 2024-02-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/6db94b7d-12e5-494f-a1e9-f7b0f2406b79/for+better+for+worse.png Blog - January 2024 - Several Different Vibes, All of Which Call for a Leather Jacket Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/dcf05c65-09f2-4520-9977-dad666140e87/elegaic+beat.jpg Blog - January 2024 - Several Different Vibes, All of Which Call for a Leather Jacket Public Memory - Elegiac Beat Quick note: if you ever find yourself in the position of interviewing a musical artist, never suggest that they sound similar to any particular other artist. Even if you’re right, you’ll never get a satisfying response out of them. No one wants to say, “Why yes, I sound just like Cocteau Twins. Thanks for noticing.” Robert Toher’s take on it (that’s the Public Memory guy) is that he’s influenced by krautrock, rock psychedelia, and Burial, and that makes sense. It’s a dreamy, dark, minimalistic haze, full of chimes and ethereal vocals. It’s hallucinatory and lush. Public Memory is yet another reason to recommend O’Brien’s Pub in Boston. It’s a little hole in the wall which has music seven days a week and punches way, way above its weight class in terms of talent. I try to get over there any time something sounds even vaguely interesting. Most of what I know about this band comes from chatting with someone who was sitting next to me at the bar, who said that she drove all the way down from Portland, ME for the show (roughly 2.5 hours for those who aren’t in the area), and that the reason she follows them is that they used to play shows in her basement in Allston. I was kind of enamored with that woman, ngl. I also learned that Public Memory’s sound came from an evolution from a Mogwai-esque post-rock band called Apse, to a band called ERAAS which was also Mogwai-esque post-rock but with more electronic stuff, to this. I’m going to spend some time with those previous iterations this month. More soon. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/1d076af1-cdd7-4d16-85cf-d5b60c8526cb/euphoric.jpg Blog - January 2024 - Several Different Vibes, All of Which Call for a Leather Jacket - Calva Louise - Euphoric Calva Louise is a really interesting blend of styles. There’s certainly a lot of metal-y screaming in here, which I think is probably the first thing listeners hear in it (it’s the first thing I heard, anyway), but I’m really struck by some elements of 90’s rock as well. In particular, I’m thinking of the off-kilter guitar hooks, and some of the vocal production reminds me of Republica’s “Ready to Go” and the like. But of course, it’s so much harder than that, and at times they pull in some electronic elements and a bit of Latin rhythm as well (see “Alcanzar” and “Tiranito”). I’m jealous of the cross-culture collaborations that happen in the UK. In this case, it’s a Venezuelan vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist working with a French bassist and a Kiwi drummer. You’re inevitably going to get a fresher sound from artists that grew up listening to different stuff than you would otherwise. Around here everyone just grows up listening to other Americans. Jess Eastwood is a total badass. She writes all the songs and also does the vocal, guitar, and keyboard parts. She also apparently does all the album covers now, because her pandemic skill was learning Blender and Unreal Engine. And I guess she also invented her own keyboard stand, which has some kind of sliding mechanism? As I’ve been listening to this, I’ve been thinking about how we listen to music, and how we’re hearing the production just as much as we hear the songwriting and performance. I love almost every song on this album, but the production is a little uneven, and sometimes I have to remind myself to stick with it and enjoy what’s here. I’m always rewarded when I do that, but sometimes it sounds a little thin, and I’m sure that as a live show these tracks would all be absolutely amazing. I also want to call out “Oportunista” from the new album, which is much more metal than anything you’ll find on Euphoric. That’s the song that got me into these guys to begin with. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/500df23f-c186-4c96-acd4-f5c0153e9595/istikrarli.jpg Blog - January 2024 - Several Different Vibes, All of Which Call for a Leather Jacket - Gaye Su Akyol - İstikrarlı Hayal Hakikattir Gaye Su Akyol is a super interesting interview. She’s very direct about her goals as a musician, the social and political world of contemporary Turkey, and LGBTQ+ issues in particular. I encourage you to read her commentary on all of those issues, both in the interview I linked above, and in pretty much every other interview she’s ever done (she’s done lots in English, and I have to imagine many many more in Turkish). For our purposes, since I only have a few hundred words, I’ll focus on the stuff she wants to do with this album: bring Turkish music into the world of modern psychedelic rock. As a Westerner, it’s helpful context to have her describe her music that way, because I wouldn’t necessarily have thought “psychedelic rock” immediately. My mind went immediately to some of the slinkier 60’s lounge music, or maybe some alt-pop stuff from the 2000’s, like Florence + the Machine. But having read that, it’s totally here. The reverb effects on electric stringed instruments (I don’t think they’re guitars, but I don’t know enough about Turkish music to identify them), and the delays on the vocals put it in that territory. Not to mention the themes of the album. The title translates as Consistent Fantasy is Reality. She’s described that idea like this: We are living in a dualist world full of injustice, inequality, and grief but also love, passion, and art at the same time. Life turns into what you are convinced of. People looking at the same point can perceive totally different things, so there is not “one reality”, there are actually infinite realities even in one mind. Reality changes according to an individual’s perception. So at this point my mind asks the question: if the reality we are living in is quite absurd but the only thing that makes it real is consistency, then what is the difference between a consistent fantasy and reality? We do not know if we are living in a simulation or holographic world but I do know that the software of this life is based on “dreaming the reality”. The world is ruled by idiots who lack imagination while the rest of the world feels powerless and hopeless. What these people are missing is the power of consistent dreaming. If we see the same dream then it becomes our mass reality and the only thing left is to take action which is quite simple when you believe in it. As Picasso once said, “Everything you can imagine is real” and none of the organised evil can survive against it. That’s quite a trip, and certainly a much more interesting take than you normally get when psychedelia becomes political. There’s a lot to unpack with her. She’s got a lot of awesome music out there, and before we go, I also need to call out the surprisingly electronic “Biz Ne Zaman Dman Olduk” from her most recent album, Anadolu Ejderi. And I also just want to point out that every pic of her I’ve ever seen (as well as every music video) is incredibly awesome looking. Apparently she does tour in the US occasionally, so everyone keep your eyes peeled. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/d4d59b22-9bbb-4dde-9a25-5f34d322386f/DEEWEE+Sessions+vol+1.jpg Blog - January 2024 - Several Different Vibes, All of Which Call for a Leather Jacket - EMS Synthi 100 - DEEWEE Sessions Vol. 1 Don’t be fooled. It’s Soulwax. Pretty much the whole story is explained here, on their Bandcamp, but EMS Synthi 100 is actually the name of a very rare and powerful (not to mention physically enormous) analogue synthesizer. There are only 31 of them in existence. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to hear that Soulwax are collectors. They’d been looking for a Synthi 100 for years without success, and then, right after opening a new studio in Ghent, they discovered that there was one at the University of Ghent, right across town. As it happened, the department that owned it was in the process of moving to a new building and needed somewhere to put the thing in the meantime, and at that point Soulwax raised their hands and were like “uh, we can hold on to it for you.” This album came out of their time with it. They’ve said that their intent is to show off the power and potential of the Synthi. I don’t understand enough about modular synth to know exactly what’s cool about it, but they list a whole bunch of features that I’m sure are very impressive. Apparently it’s a uniquely versatile and powerful machine. I can tell you, though, that this album has a lot of cool stuff on it. It’s probably best thought of as an ambient album, with lots of hypnotic arpeggiation, only occasionally veering into Soulwax’s signature buzzing. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/dec-2023 monthly 0.5 2024-01-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/4f501a83-d20c-4605-b2d8-57c0f8c57237/everyones+crushed.jpg Blog - December 2023 - Easy Listening, Difficult Listening Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/d51a810d-46a4-4a06-a297-ffc9c787d802/silver+cord.jpg Blog - December 2023 - Easy Listening, Difficult Listening - King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - The Silver Cord I don’t care, guys. I love this album. For those who don’t know who they are, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard are a psych-rock band, one that creates music at an astonishing, breakneck pace. Since 2011 they’ve made at least 25 full albums, to say nothing of all the various live albums, EPs, and solo projects they’re also doing. With all that material out there, it’s not super surprising that they have some breadth of sound as well. My favorite of their albums, Polygondwanaland, includes some metal, some prog, some jamming, some folk, some psych… it’s just kind of everything rock and roll. Even with all that, The Silver Cord is a pretty wide departure for them. For starters, there are virtually no guitars in here. It’s almost entirely synths. Instead of taking inspiration from across the history of rock, they’re fairly narrowly focused on a bygone era of electronic music. It’s heavily indebted to people like Georgio Morodor and Tangerine Dream, who explored a space-age utopian sound. We haven’t heard much of that recently (or I haven’t, anyway). There’s also a fantastic song, “Set,” in which it suddenly becomes a My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult track. Of course there are lots of detractors out there who wish that they stuck with their rock elements, but as stated above, I don’t care. I love it. And honestly, I don’t know why you would bother being disappointed. Just go listen to the other album they put out this year, or wait 3 months for them to release the next one. If you ever run into the person who told them that it’s ok to rap, though, slap that person in the face for me. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/f45fc02d-6364-4db7-ae12-908f73c626dd/saved.jpg Blog - December 2023 - Easy Listening, Difficult Listening Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter - SAVED! If you want to experience this the way I did, you should stop reading this and just put it on. I’ll give you a few minutes to do that. Back? Yikes, right? Ok, take a breath. Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter is a persona adopted by the experimental artist Lingua Ignota, which makes a lot of sense. Both acts explore the depths of trauma and grief, and the hostility that organized Christian religion has to unbelievers (or even to its own congregations). The difference is the sound. Lingua Ignota’s experimentation attacked the listener directly, assaulting them with complicated chorus-less soundscapes, but Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter plays it much straighter, adopting the dirge-like repetition that one might expect from an earnest Christian musician of the early 20th century. To my ear, the new version is actually quite a bit more challenging. In a way, it’s quite beautiful, and the vocal trills and cracks sound right, too. To be honest, I found it pretty easy to turn Lingua Ignota off. Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter insists on being listened to, in the way that it’s so difficult to suppress curiosity about an ambulance called to the next-door apartment. I know I don’t really have to involve myself in this horror, and I should turn away and do something else, but I find myself kind of transfixed even while physically curling up with stress. I feel like I need a massage after listening to this. This is also an album with which the art is inextricable from the artist. I wasn’t even done listening to it before I had to get to googlin’ and try to figure out exactly what her relationship is to organized religion. The answer (of course) is that it’s complicated. She was raised Catholic, turned away as an adult, and then in 2019, "renounced her teenage atheism" and became fascinated with “divine retribution.” It’s hard to imagine that the content of this album is meant to be taken completely at face value, but it doesn’t seem like it’s completely ironic either. I think that’s probably a lot of what’s so uncomfortable about SAVED!. It refuses to be filed in one column or the other, and it’s impossible to think about it outside of Hayter’s larger artistic vision. It has to be said as well that she’s a survivor of domestic abuse, from her childhood through a number of abusive relationships as an adult. As recently as 2021 she accused her ex-boyfriend Alexis Marshall, the frontman of Daughters, of sexual assault, rape, and emotional abuse. Trauma seems to have followed her through her life, and clearly it’s been the basis for a lot of her work. She’s done a number of really fascinating interviews in which she really digs deep into her influences and intentions. If you’re interested, here’s a good place to start. There’s way more to say about her than I’ll be able to here, and despite her insistence that she’s not a feminist, I’m sure that a feminist literary academic could come up with mountains of theses on her work. Someone go get a JSTOR account. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/c40a8777-41cd-4354-beb8-795dd00581ed/SUNSTRIKESD.jpg Blog - December 2023 - Easy Listening, Difficult Listening - The South Hill Experiment - SUNSTRIKES What is with these bands and their all-caps? A couple of months ago I highlighted these guys’ track “Chameleons” from their first album, MOONSHOTS, and I commented that there was a lot I liked about it, but the album didn’t really hold together for me or get to the same highs as that one track. Well, this album really does hold together. Astonishingly well. It’s a lush world of jazzy chord changes and dreamy melodies, and I’m hoping it’ll serve as a nice palate cleanser for those who are listening to it right after Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter. I’m writing this literally a week after the album came out, so I haven’t managed to turn up a lot of information about it. It’s so new that Tidal isn’t even able to take a guess for what to play after it. The best I can do is tell you that The South Hill Experiment (or S/H/E, as it’s stylized), is Baird and Goldwash, a pair of brothers who have solo projects but mostly serve as studio musicians. They’ve worked with some major artists though. Most notably they were on Brockhampton’s TM and ROADRUNNER: NEW LIGHT, NEW MACHINE (I swear, these guys and their caps). This album is wonderfully mellow. I don’t understand why they went with “O SOFIA” as the single instead of “Snake at the Altar,” but I suppose it doesn’t matter very much because the people paying attention to them are probably going to listen to the whole album anyway. Maybe they just liked the all-caps. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/8e61c5de-301b-4e8e-9397-f0ea25f49f9d/Hawaii+pt+ii.jpg Blog - December 2023 - Easy Listening, Difficult Listening - Miracle Musical - Hawaii: Part II This is a weird one. In 2014, some of the guys from Tally Hall, an indie band that flourished between 2006 and roughly 2011, made this: a concept album which takes the form of a weirdo musical. I’m tempted to try to talk about the story that it tells, but it’s fairly abstract and theories on the subject vary from a simple love story about a man and a woman to something about the fall of the Twin Towers. Um, I’m partial to the former interpretation… I think it’s just “Variations on a Cloud” that’s about the Twin Towers, and that’s not even on this album. But I’ll let you look into it yourselves. Ok, so what’s here? Well, it’s certainly playing with the sound you’d expect out of a musical - lots of major chords, complicated piano accompaniment, narrative lyrics, duets… but it’s also quite a bit weirder than that. For one thing, there’s a lot of production work in here, with ping-ponging vocals, an entire track of backwards-masking, and heavy use of autotune. I did find myself thinking about Brian DePalma’s bizarre musical film Phantom of the Paradise, but that makes for a pretty weird “musical” itself. It’s possible that you can also pick up a bit of the whimsy that Tally Hall was working with, especially on tracks like “Black Rainbows,” but this strikes me as much more ambitious than what they were doing back then. I think the album really opens up at track 3, “Black Rainbows,” when it suddenly turns tropical, and then shortly thereafter you get the intricate and sinister “Murders.” Hawaii: Part II really flew under the radar when it was released, but has recently been rediscovered by the internet. I wonder if it has something to do with the advent of hyperpop, in which this kind of operatic melody would be right at home. And of course the autotune. It’s possible that I’m just comparing it to hyperpop because I need to explain to myself why I’m ok with the autotune. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/nov-2023 monthly 0.5 2023-12-02 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/9f329d1b-3923-4d93-a1e4-17b9c1204b2c/jjuuiices.jpg Blog - November 2023 - Weren’t the 60’s Great? I Mean I Have No Idea Because I Wasn’t Born Yet, but This Music Is Pretty Great, at Least Yussef Dayes - Black Classical Music If you had asked me just a few years ago, I would’ve told you that I had pretty much zero interest in jazz. It felt like it was something from another era - in a bad way. It was a genre which was originally defined by openness and experimentation, but became hamstrung by tradition. Everything had to use traditional instruments, traditional head/solo/head structures, and it was too intellectual to have much vitality. I think a lot of people would still say that. And it’s too bad! Even leaving aside all the technical prowess and vitality of live improv, jazz strikes certain vibes that just don’t exist anywhere else in music. When I lost interest, it was because I got bored with it (and because I got totally swept into the electronic music explosion of the 2010’s), but I definitely felt the loss. I don’t feel that way anymore though. There’s a new world of jazz out there, led in large part by the London scene. You have bands like The Comet is Coming going on atmospheric forays into electronic territory, guys like Theon Cross experimenting with bass-heavy hooks, Kokoroko doing afro-fusion, Ezra Collective pulling in hip-hop and calypso… the list goes on. Dayes is a vet from that world. This is his debut studio album, but he’s been around for awhile now. What we have here is a breathtaking tour of jazz subgenres, including a dizzying array appearances contemporary jazz badasses. It’s an incredible thing, and it strikes just the right balance between technicality, complexity, groove, approachability, and crucially, it manages to be fun. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/58d7fa1d-b083-4d77-8951-b1d67c863e77/XXX002.jpg Blog - November 2023 - Weren’t the 60’s Great? I Mean I Have No Idea Because I Wasn’t Born Yet, but This Music Is Pretty Great, at Least - Simple Symmetry - XXX002 I went back and forth on whether to list this as XXX002 as I have it, or by the actual text on the album cover, which is “небылицы.” In the end, I went with this because it’s more googleable, and because as they put it, “We can try to explain to you what this XXX002 'небылицы' is all about, but we wont (sic).” Well ok, fine then, don’t. The Cyrillic translates as something like “fables,” for whatever that’s worth. Anyway, you might remember another Simple Symmetry album appearing on this blog in the past, but this one is a pretty different animal. Where SORRY! WE DID SOMETHING WRONG was making very clear references to 1960’s/70’s psychedelia and took pretty big swings in its experiments (sometimes bordering on irritating), XXX002 shoots for a much more hypnotic, space disco vibe, a la Lindstrøm. It’s a really wonderful groove for getting things done around the house (or say, writing a blog). https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/dd5ec554-1658-4112-b172-ae744219b838/open+mouth+open+heart.jpg Blog - November 2023 - Weren’t the 60’s Great? I Mean I Have No Idea Because I Wasn’t Born Yet, but This Music Is Pretty Great, at Least Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/5bdcd26f-620b-49cc-8185-e2e46b76c2c4/laufey-love-art.jpg Blog - November 2023 - Weren’t the 60’s Great? I Mean I Have No Idea Because I Wasn’t Born Yet, but This Music Is Pretty Great, at Least Laufey - Everything I Know About Love As my dad said about this album, “It’s so old-fashioned you can’t even call it retro.” Let’s talk about the “cool jazz” era for a minute - the dominant style in the post-war period of the late 40’s/50’s. In the bebop era, which immediately preceded it, the hot thing was explosive, complex solos, high tempos, constant, blistering chord changes, and instrumentation that mostly stayed out of the way and let the soloists go nuts. Think Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk. This is the kind of stuff Kerouac talked about. Cool jazz developed out of that world and was both an evolution and a response to it. The tempos dropped, the compositions smoothed out, instrumentation got much more lush and sweeping, and everything got generally, for lack of a better way of saying it, a lot more accessible. Those same musicians were the ones creating this stuff, too. In fact, it was Miles Davis - who’s not exactly thought of as an easy place to start with jazz - who created the album that’s often credited as the most most influential, Birth of the Cool. One way of thinking about it: jazz moved out of the smokey lounges full of amphetamines, whiskey, and heroin, and into the mainstream concert halls and home turntables of middle-class America. Laufey is doing the cool jazz thing. Like, it’s not just that she’s influenced by that era, she’s doing that style, complete with all the excesses of lush composition you’d expect from that period. She does add a few elements that modernize the endeavor like modern production methods, use of soundscape, and the very modern technique of recording her own harmony parts so that you’re basically only hearing her voice, even when there’s a whole array of harmonies. She also has a few wonderfully contemporary-sounding lyrics like “[He’s] the first one to ever like me back,” and “I tell him that he’s pretty too / Can I say that? Don’t have a clue.” I love this album. In particular, "Valentine” is just wonderful. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/c45e4419-4c53-4d9f-8a1b-72ec90f23aa3/punk+tactics.jpg Blog - November 2023 - Weren’t the 60’s Great? I Mean I Have No Idea Because I Wasn’t Born Yet, but This Music Is Pretty Great, at Least - Joey Valence & Brae - Punk Tactics Ok so: it’s the Beastie Boys. But like, the idea of sounding like the Beastie Boys is a really good idea which no one else is doing, and they pull it off really well. Just sonically, it sounds right: blown out, low-fi production of opulent samples; deliberate, composed flow that trades off between one voice and the other; and of course it helps that Joey Valence’s voice just happens to sound an awful lot like Mike D’s. But what I like is that they nail a lot of the things that work about the Beastie Boys, and which haven’t really had a place in recent hip-hop. It’s composed in such a way that it has to be a group. They’re both part of the same song in that they’re both part of every chorus - or even every line - not just trading verses. It really opens up after track one, and the rhythms don’t stay in one place - each track has an interesting variety of beat patterns, moving from half-time to double-time and back. It’s high-energy and the jokes are delivered with a straight face. Every song sounds different. Now, I have to admit that as far as the actual rapping goes, it’s a little primitive. They’re not exactly Busta Rhymes, and the lyrics are largely humorous nerd-rap takes on hip-hop swagger, with soft irony at best. And that’s made painfully obvious when Logic comes in and absolutely slays a verse on “TANAKA 2.” But, it’s an awful lot of fun. And I’m impressed with this album in part because they’ve moved so far beyond their previous. The Underground Sound was basically just a loose pastiche of old-school hip-hop. It was a joke, and it was simple to the point of being thin. This has so much more going on. They’re young, and if they keep moving in this direction, they could do some really awesome stuff in the future. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/sept-2023 monthly 0.5 2023-10-24 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/86526185-b25f-4671-8372-948550964541/black+classical+music.jpg Blog - September 2023 - People Grow, People Change, and Sometimes They Change Back (Like How I’m Into Jazz Again) Yussef Dayes - Black Classical Music If you had asked me just a few years ago, I would’ve told you that I had pretty much zero interest in jazz. It felt like it was something from another era - in a bad way. It was a genre which was originally defined by openness and experimentation, but became hamstrung by tradition. Everything had to use traditional instruments, traditional head/solo/head structures, and it was too intellectual to have much vitality. I think a lot of people would still say that. And it’s too bad! Even leaving aside all the technical prowess and vitality of live improv, jazz strikes certain vibes that just don’t exist anywhere else in music. When I lost interest, it was because I got bored with it (and because I got totally swept into the electronic music explosion of the 2010’s), but I definitely felt the loss. I don’t feel that way anymore though. There’s a new world of jazz out there, led in large part by the London scene. You have bands like The Comet is Coming going on atmospheric forays into electronic territory, guys like Theon Cross experimenting with bass-heavy hooks, Kokoroko doing afro-fusion, Ezra Collective pulling in hip-hop and calypso… the list goes on. Dayes is a vet from that world. This is his debut studio album, but he’s been around for awhile now. What we have here is a breathtaking tour of jazz subgenres, including a dizzying array appearances contemporary jazz badasses. It’s an incredible thing, and it strikes just the right balance between technicality, complexity, groove, approachability, and crucially, it manages to be fun. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/bb35cab2-4e04-4c28-a798-2879302e5747/data+doom.jpg Blog - September 2023 - People Grow, People Change, and Sometimes They Change Back (Like How I’m Into Jazz Again) Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Data Doom I have to tell you guys, I finally saw Frankie and the Witch Fingers a few months ago. It was exactly what I thought it would be, and it was amazing. It was basically non-stop adrenaline, and a giant mosh pit from the first notes all the way to the end of the show. Also, the setlist was just this album from beginning to end. I love when bands do that. Obviously, it’s very satisfying to hear it exactly the way I hear it in my head, but I think it shows that they think of their album as a single work. I have to admit that I’m not quite as hooked on this album as I was their previous, Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters..., but it’s still pretty great. Especially since every time I hear it I imagine a giant mosh pit. While we’re here, I have to mention that Frankie and the Witch Fingers has the best merch I’ve ever seen in my life, and most of it isn’t even available online. Those tie-die shirts are so freakin’ good. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/c2edce9e-4e8f-4e7b-ac2b-754a5a0f453f/Dreaming.jpeg Blog - September 2023 - People Grow, People Change, and Sometimes They Change Back (Like How I’m Into Jazz Again) - Weval - Dreaming I love how round Weval’s textures are. Their music is beautiful and soothing, even when it’s intricately composed. They also do a really beautiful job of incorporating vocals, which I often find really jarring and sometimes irritating in electronic music. They manage to work them into a swirling landscape where they sound right at home. They’re a very solid group, and if you haven’t dug into their stuff at all, I’d highly recommend going back and checking out Half Age EP at the very least. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/44a1852f-9ee7-413e-ab2f-43022206d8ae/Nude+Casino.jpg Blog - September 2023 - People Grow, People Change, and Sometimes They Change Back (Like How I’m Into Jazz Again) Iguana Death Cult - Nude Casino I had to put these guys in here because they opened for Frankie and the Witch Fingers at the show I mentioned above, and they absolutely slayed. Coming into it, I had only heard the album Echo Palace, so I was expecting something kind of whimsical and playful, like if the Mighty Boosh Band was actually as good as their hype. Instead, it was blistering rock music that touched everything from rockabilly to ska-punk, with Jeroen Reek strutting around on stage like a true rock star. It was something else, and the crowd ate it up. By the end of their set, people were moshing, screaming, and throwing horns for a band no one had ever heard of from The Netherlands. It was a helluva night of music. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/d33c1fea-619e-4b0e-8a8d-7f6af15d74f6/back+to+the+water+below.jpg Blog - September 2023 - People Grow, People Change, and Sometimes They Change Back (Like How I’m Into Jazz Again) - Royal Blood - Back to the Water Below If Royal Blood sounds familiar, there’s good reason for it. Their music is huge in the UK/EU-sphere, which means that the US mostly gets it in commercials and film/TV soundtracks. It’s great stuff, though. You can hear a lot of the great rock bands of the last 15 years in here - White Stripes, Black Keys, Queens of the Stone Age… It’s hard, catchy, and a lot of fun. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/aug-2023 monthly 0.5 2023-10-14 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/7df5c8da-99cc-4ba4-bae0-920620b60981/19+MASTERS.jpg Blog - August 2023 - Sludge. Sludge. Sludge. - Saya Gray - 19 MASTERS Sometimes you hear an album and you think, “Do I like that? I can’t tell.” 19 MASTERS is one of those. It’s undeniably brilliant - complicated production, composition, lyrics, moods - but do I like it? Pretty often, those kinds of albums end up being some of my favorites once I give them enough time. I’m not sure if I’m there yet with this one, but I hear more in it every time I put it on. For one thing, there’s no symmetry here. Every song starts in one place and ends in another. The choruses, to the extent that it has any, hit differently every time they come around, and it blearily meanders from one sound to another. She’s making art, clearly. It’s not a summertime bop. For another thing, there’s a dizzying array of inspirations and sounds at work. Picked acoustic guitars, filters sweeping over the vocals, hazy guitars, The Blow, St. Vincent, CocoRosie, fucking Lorde? Take some time with it. Put it on at night when you want to go to bed sad. Put it on on long drives, when you’ll have time to put on Parliament after. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/694869aa-2c71-4b03-8bf8-9d5c0703c34d/Angels+%26+Queens.jpg Blog - August 2023 - Sludge. Sludge. Sludge. - Gabriels - Angels & Queens This is how you make soul/gospel/jazz fresh and modern: first, add some subtle, sludgey electronic elements and harmonies, then add some heart-wrenching lyrics about the contemporary backslide of American values from progressiveness to conservatism, then be an earth-shattering vocal talent. And I mean, obviously I say that last thing to kind of be funny, but you really do need all of those elements. There are plenty of incredibly talented vocalists, but not many of them feel as relevant and vital as Gabriels. Jacob Lusk is an astonishing singer, as you can see here on this 2011 American Idol performance, but you could be forgiven for thinking that he would pass into obscurity like nearly everyone else that succeeds on that show. Not so for him. It helps that their live shows are absolutely electric, and that they have a bit of a sense of humor when they put together music videos, but I still think that none of it would be nearly as interesting if not for the somewhat muddy sonic context for all of it. At any rate, as everyone said at the end of that American Idol clip, “WOOOOOOOO!!!!” https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/9e6d3a86-ee93-45da-91ee-0c8c7d2f4f34/Beautiful+Scar+of+Society.jpg Blog - August 2023 - Sludge. Sludge. Sludge. - Sexual Purity - Beautiful Scar of Society Last month I promised that there would be more goth shit, and here it is! More dark wave! Or cold wave, maybe, since they’re from Ukraine? Sounds more dark wavey to me, so I’m going with that. Sigh. Sexual Purity is as gothy as they come. It’s essentially someone muttering unintelligibly over some hazy, dark round thumping basslines. As you can see from their various music videos, they lean heavily into the kind of traditional goth aesthetic. It’s hard not to be reminded of the incredible Death’s Head Theatre public access show, famous now for being endlessly parodied, but undoubtedly a source of real comfort for people in small towns who want to know that there’s someone out there like them. It’s also hard for me not to mention Boy Harsher here, who are easily my favorite dark wave band on the planet. It’s hard to explain, and hard to capture on video, but they played one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. The best video I can find of them onstage is this one, which doesn’t come close to capturing what I experienced at the Brighton Music Hall in Allston. I’ve talked to a few different people who were there, and everyone has described that show as just vibrating with barely-contained sexual energy. I know that sounds ridiculous and maybe kinda pervy but I’m not the only one who’s said so! Anyway, I bring it up because Sexual Purity sound a lot like those guys. Like… almost identical. I would say, though, that Boy Harsher hasn’t really captured their sound as well on albums as Sexual Purity have. And as hilariously on-the-nose as their videos are, I suspect that Sexual Purity would also be a pretty fucking fantastic show. Too bad they don’t seem to tour here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/0d9b19b4-67d5-44a9-838c-5ad3dac19e1f/chaos+for+the+fly.jpg Blog - August 2023 - Sludge. Sludge. Sludge. - Grian Chatten - Chaos for the Fly This is really everything you could hope for out of a solo project. As the front-man of Fontaines D.C., Chatten has a well established career in rollicking post-punk, and as dark as those albums can get sometimes, they tend to stay in a high-energy fury, and don’t really sink into the kind of dwelling-on-a-bad-time that happens on Chaos for the Fly. And while it’s a wide departure from what Fontaines D.C. has done, it’s not completely unrecognizable (see “Fairlies” for more of a rock vibe). I’m tempted to say that this is folk music, at least in spirit. It has a serious Nick Drake misanthropy, and a Leonard Cohen storytelling, not to mention some confessionalism. It also reminds me of The Postal Service in that it takes this kind of rumination into a new place by introducing modern production and drum machines. It’s really effecting and demands your attention. As a side-note, the title refers to something Morticia Addams said: “Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.” And like, I just respect the hell out of that choice. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/bb3dfd90-22a3-4b9f-b0aa-96758da53084/tumult.jpeg Blog - August 2023 - Sludge. Sludge. Sludge. - MEUTE - Tumult MEUTE describe themselves as a “techno marching band.” Before you go rolling your eyes (as I did), you should know that they mean it literally. They are, in fact, a marching band (as seen here marching - albeit slowly), and their catalog includes lots of direct covers of electronic tracks, such as “The Man With the Red Face” by Laurent Garnier. One could split hairs and point out that these are house tracks, not techno, but that would be obnoxious and who wants to do that? (I do. I want to split hairs, which is why I pointed it out just now). They capture some of the best of both worlds - the hypnotic repetition of electronic production and the vitality of live horns, and just in general, they’re a lot of fun. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/july-2023 monthly 0.5 2023-09-04 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/4aa48c79-526c-4e7c-baf1-f3b776ef68a1/ARENA.jpg Blog - July 2023 - Dark Wave, Cold Wave, Hard Wave, No Wave - Pixel Grip - ARENA In stark contrast to last month, when all I wanted to listen to was laid back psych-rock and alt-pop, 90% of what I listened to in June was hard-ass, oppressive goth music. For the sake of this blog, I’m going to break up my reporting on all of that into at least a couple of months, because like, I’m sure people want to hear other stuff too. But to start with: Pixel Grip! Pixel Grip are a bit unusual in the world of dark wave. Generally, I would expect a dark wave song to put you in a slow-swaying, hazy malaise. Pixel Grip involves a lot more headbanging, and takes a slightly more antagonistic stance with their listeners, throwing in nonsense lyrics and sometimes open (if ironic and hilarious) insults. It’s also unusual in that you can understand any of the lyrics at all. Case in point, “ALPHAPUSSY”: Your pussy wait My pussy go My pussy fast Your pussy slow My pussy rock it Your pussy don't Your pussy don't pop My pussy explode Not all their stuff is this hard, ofc. For a different flavor, see “Play Noble” or one of my favorites, “Dancing on Your Grave.” I found track 2 a little irritating the first time I heard it. I’ve since come around to it, but skip it if you need to. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/d6e71c2f-61d0-4b2f-8fc3-1f80b45823b1/wildswept+adan.jpg Blog - July 2023 - Dark Wave, Cold Wave, Hard Wave, No Wave - Ichiko Aoba - Windswept Adan Ichiko Aoba is generally considered a folk artist, but this album is reaching for something much more ambitious - it creates its own ethereal universe with piano, glockenspiel, guitar, drums, complex chord changes, and a pleasant dreaminess that I think matches the aquatic theme of the album art. According to her, this album is intended to be “the soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist.” It’s a beautiful inspiration, but I think it sells the music short a bit, in that the music creates the universe - I don’t think it’s lacking anything in itself. But that said, it’s her art and what do I know? She also cites Studio Ghibli as a major influence, which makes a lot of sense. Sidenote: some of her music is featured in the 2019 remake of Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening. Neat! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/569827b1-5e38-4767-b9d7-4484b9599ca1/escapades.jpg Blog - July 2023 - Dark Wave, Cold Wave, Hard Wave, No Wave - Gaspard Augé - Escapades This is another case of someone totally nailing it with their album art. The so-called EDM Explosion of the 2010s casts a long shadow over electronic music today. Everything is created with some reference point in that era. To be fair, there was a lot going on at the time - dubstep, trap, techno, industrial, probably forty or fifty subgenres of house… - but did you know that people made electronic music before 2005? It’s true! On this album, Augé skips right past all of that to a time when people were still exploring the sonic possibilities presented by synthesizers and drum machines. A time when the beats were a bit stiff and the synth patches were crude, when people like Ryuichi Sakamoto and Mort Garson were still inventing the sounds that we hear every day. It’s loud, unsubtle, stridently major-chord, and a lot of fun. Take a look at the photo he used for the single “Force Majeure.” Big time Georgio Moroder vibes. By the way, Augé is a member of a major electronic music duo from the mid/late 2000s. I’d recommend listening to it first and then trying to guess which one. It’s not immediately obvious, but more like a “now that you say that” kind of thing. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/ea7aaca5-5917-4d31-9fc1-eaa86ef40c0e/origins.jpg Blog - July 2023 - Dark Wave, Cold Wave, Hard Wave, No Wave - Skalpel - Origins As the 1990’s gave way to the 2000’s, electronic music was seeking out new directions, and trying to expand beyond the old mainstay genres like house, techno, and drum-and-bass. One major thread was to try to make electronic music something “intellectual” - i.e. more than “just dance music” - which led to the creation of a number of genres like downtempo, “IDM” (one of the most obnoxious terms I know of), and various experimentations with incorporating non-Western samples and rhythms. But more than anything, it was an era marked by attempts to incorporate jazz. This is the era in which Skalpel came on the scene. There are lots of subgenres I could rattle off here by way of describing their sound: nu jazz, acid jazz, broken beat, groovera… but maybe it’s easier to just say “they were on Ninja Tune” and leave it at that. Origins captures so much of what was going on in that time. Naturalistic drum sounds, soulful vocals, piano, standup bass, and a beat pattern that would feel right at home in the CD collection I kept on the floor of my mom’s car when I drove to school. But it goes quite a bit beyond what was possible at that time, both in terms of the complexity of the instrumentation and in the quality of the recording techniques. Dig all that negative space. And if you haven’t, dig into some of the Ninja Tune stuff from the 2000’s. I can make recommendations if you want, but there’s a lot to explore. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/0a5ebc00-41e6-4494-92ca-46db58746804/Electricity.jpg Blog - July 2023 - Dark Wave, Cold Wave, Hard Wave, No Wave - Ibibio Sound Machine - Electricity Ibibio Sound Machine would be awfully fun to see live. They’ve been around for awhile now, and while their general sound is the same as it ever has been - an electro take on funk/soul/afrobeat - they’re still evolving, as you can hear on this album with the explosive opening track “Protection From Evil.” This album is fairly representative of their career so far, but to my ear, a bit harder than their past stuff. Maybe not coincidentally, this is their first album produced by Hot Chip. The vocalist, Eno Williams, is from the UK originally (and that’s where the rest of the band is from), but she spent a lot of her childhood at her family’s home in Nigeria. A lot of her lyrics are adaptations of stories and folktales she heard there as well. But yeah, lemme know if you get tickets. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/648d66f2-8a45-4426-a68d-37b4aef62cad/%D0%AD%D1%82%D0%B0%D0%B6%D0%B8.jpg Blog - July 2023 - Dark Wave, Cold Wave, Hard Wave, No Wave - Molchat Doma (Молчат Домаa) - Etazhi (Этажи) Jumping all the way back to the beginning of this post: goth shit. As you might get a hint of from the album cover and the Cyrillic, Molchat Doma draw inspiration and aesthetic from the post-Soviet world. They’re from Belarus, but the lyrics are Russian. Unfortunately I don’t know Russian (or Belarusian, for that matter), so I have to rely on other people’s translations. From what I’ve gleaned, it seems like their lyrics aren’t explicitly political, but describe the Soviet and contemporary landscape in Belarus as both being pretty bleak, and to give you some translations here, their band name translates to “Houses Are Silent” while the album name translates to “Floors.” It seems like bleakness is a theme for them. They hadn’t given any explicit political opinions in interviews either, until the invasion of Ukraine. They condemned that pretty forcefully. And maybe not surprisingly, they’ve done extensive tours in the US and the EU, but never in Belarus. Anyway, the music: um, also bleak. But in more of a Robert Smith kind of way. Genre notes: Molchat Doma are described as cold wave. What’s cold wave, you ask? Is that like dark wave? Yes, it is. Honestly, I’ve been trying to figure out what exactly the difference is supposed to be. When “dark wave” was coined back in the 80’s, it basically just meant “new wave, but dark.” and when "cold wave” was coined - at almost exactly the same time - it meant “new wave but cold.” So that’s very helpful. Plumbing the depths of the internet to figure out what exactly distinguishes them, the most descriptive explanation I’ve been able to find is that dark wave tends to be more sweeping and overwhelming, where cold wave tends to be more minimal and stark. That’s a somewhat satisfying explanation, but it seems like splitting hairs. A more precise explanation goes, “dark wave is from the US or UK. Cold wave is from anywhere else.” It feels very plausible that music critics would be that as arbitrary as that and not want to admit it, so I think the latter explanation is probably the truer one. Regardless of which criteria you go with, Molchat Doma is cold wave. There you go. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/jun-2023 monthly 0.5 2023-07-28 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/1aa4273a-244a-42cc-8f36-1bb6d96d490c/house+in+the+tall+grass.jpg Blog - June 2023 - Let’s All Just Take a Minute, Yeah? - Kikagaku Moyo - House in the Tall Grass I don’t know about you guys, but for me, June was one helluva month. I had responsibilities left and right, piles of emails to respond to from friends, family, and associates from every part of my life, and - as things shook out - a big life change that I haven’t even had time to think about. When my life reaches fever pitch like that, I find myself seeking out activities that have nothing to do with whatever else is going on. It ends up filling time that I could be spending doing like, the shit I’m supposed to be doing, but I think it’s also useful as a break break. Active rest, if you will. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that House in the Tall Grass has been on heavy rotation. I have a vivid memory of driving around looking for parking in Cambridgeport, on my way to visit a friend that I hadn’t seen in a year or two, listening to these chill, dreamy tracks, eating chocolate-almond chunks from a nearby gas station. These guys broke up in 2022, which makes me sad, but their reasoning was, “We achieved everything we wanted to. We wanted to play psychedelic music festivals and tour the world, which we did. We poured time and energy into not just making music, but creating art, merchandise and a vision for what Kikagaku Moyo is. And we now get to complete our journey on our terms, on the highest note possible.” So like, fair enough. Be like, artists, or whatever. I’ll be over here eating Bark Thins. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/3f0c58bf-d7e8-499a-8f04-04192e5ae7c4/luno.jpg Blog - June 2023 - Let’s All Just Take a Minute, Yeah? - Blood Cultures - LUNO “Alternative pop” is a pretty big umbrella. It covers everything from Dirty Projectors to Magdalena Bay, to Jesse Ware, and if you really want to be broad about it, you could probably even toss in Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger.” It’s one of those too-big-it’s-unhelpful terms. Except that this album hits on nearly all of the territory covered by the term. You might say that it’s all over the place - creepy, oppressive, bopping, twee - but it’s all really pretty great. Blood Cultures have been out of the public eye for a few years now (you might remember them from the 2013 track “Indian Summer”), and this is their comeback album (see track 1, “Keeps Bringing Me Back” - get it?). But I suppose that since this came out in 2021, there’s an open question about whether they left after coming back. Maybe they’ll do a re-comeback eventually? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/bdd0a5f8-efc5-40cd-8636-1e5e7fd32ef2/talisman.jpg Blog - June 2023 - Let’s All Just Take a Minute, Yeah? - Fakear - Talisman East Asian influence has a complicated history in the electronic music world. At times, it’s handled really poorly, with canned samples of shansin repeated ad nauseum or just plain people speaking nonsense Japanese over a house beat. At other times its risen to the heights of artistry, with complex live instrumentation that make their influences plain. The nuances of what constitutes a respectful use of other cultures traditions vs what is simple appropriation are probably beyond the scope of this humble blog, but it’s almost inevitable that someone will bring it up any time that “world bass” comes up. And probably rightfully so. There’s more garbage out there than there is gold. Nonetheless, I think Fakear falls into the latter category. He’s (usually) not just using some samples and throwing them over a dominant 7th, he’s crafting some intricate melodies in non-Western scales. There’s a lot of beauty here. I’m deeply annoyed that the second sentence of Fakear’s Wikipedia page is, “Boasting a distinct style akin to that of French musician and producer CloZee, Fakear's music is best described as "world bass," a term also used to describe CloZee's music.” Look CloZee is great and all, but Fakear is a different artist doing a different thing. Who on Earth went to all the trouble of writing a Wikipedia page for him without thinking about what makes him a different artist? (sigh) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/92c27a68-7010-458d-b9c7-5d7a756b36ed/king+stingray.jpg Blog - June 2023 - Let’s All Just Take a Minute, Yeah? - King Stingray - s/t King Stingray are a great example of my favorite kind of artist to highlight with this humble blog: artists outside the normal channels of US/Canada/UK/AU music promotion who include their non-Western music traditions in their sound. To make that a little more concrete: King Stingray are Yolŋu and balanda artists making 90’s style rock music that incorporates Yolŋu and balanda sounds and stories. Disorientation in Australian urban life is a common theme, and the instrumentation includes didgeridoos. It’s also damn catchy. IMO, this album gets better with each successive track. I don’t even especially like track one. Everything else is pure gold. If you’re not feeling the 90s rock vibe, try “Milkumana” for a little disco flavor. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/7b2b9bc0-7d52-4775-b65c-ed2dcfe9bb21/duoii.jpg Blog - June 2023 - Let’s All Just Take a Minute, Yeah? - Bugge Wesseltoft & Henrik Schwarz - DUOII It’s rare, but every once in a while, a collaboration between two diverse artists will produce something like this: an album that would be completely left-field for either of them on their own, but perfectly situated between their distinct styles nonetheless. I mentioned last week that I think Henrik Schwarz is a genius as both a producer and a DJ, but I don’t think I gave enough attention to Bugge Wesseltoft, a brilliant jazz/classical musician and composer in his own right. This album is ruminatory, introspective, and troubled. It’s worth sitting with and contemplating. I had to try more than once to find the right occasion, but if you’re willing to take the time, there’s a lot here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/0aa724e9-367a-4379-b35f-f114483446ab/I+came+from+love.jpg Blog - June 2023 - Let’s All Just Take a Minute, Yeah? - Dave Okumu & the Seven Generations - I Came From Love I thought about using the word “haunting” to describe this album, but I think really the word I’m looking for is “haunted.” Certainly, there’s a lot of stuff here that evokes spookiness and sinister portent, but it refuses to stay in that territory. It hops around between creepy electronic productions, bluesy guitar-riffs-and-muttering, quick paced hip-hop-esque bops, and something-like-jazz oppressiveness. It does everything, but nearly all of it refers to the long history of oppression that black people have faced in the Western world, and expresses it through some combination of depression, defiance, dread, despair, and a complicated and honest evaluation of history. Musically speaking, it’s complicated, layered, and dense. I can’t listen to it a whole lot, but man, is there a lot here. Quick note: if you look up The Seven Generations, you’ll probably turn up some news articles about a hardcore band that got cancelled in the 2010s. That’s someone else. I think this “Seven Generations” is just kind of a collective term for the many, many collaborators that Okumu called in for this tour de force. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/may-2023 monthly 0.5 2023-07-13 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/436f5287-be80-42b5-890f-c1078b1db7eb/district+roads+open+space.jpg Blog - May 2023 - A Smattering of Artists Who Played in London During the Week Following the Coronation of Charles III (No Causal Relationship) - Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan - Districts, Roads, Open Space I share this guy’s love of overlong titles. From the little I’ve read, Warrington and Runcorn are both extremely boring places. Not boring like, “oh man, rich suburbs like Lexington, MA are so boring; everyone is so predictable,” or even “oh man, the ravages of post-industrial decay have left former manufacturing towns like Lowell, MA almost entirely bereft of cultural gathering places, in spite of having a large and vibrant artistic population.” No, more like “um, well, I’m looking around Monroe, MI and it seems… fine? People are like, not rich, not poor… there’s mediocre architecture and a lot of concrete… I’m sure there’s some music here somewhere… right? Someone said there’s good hot dogs?” (I couldn’t think of an example in MA. Every town around here at least has a lake). I think it’s interesting that boring places would generate music like this. WRNTDP is clearly making reference to the stately electronic music of the late 70’s (such as, notable for its commentary on boringness, Ambient 1: Music for Airports). Every individual sound is beautiful, and he works them into long, evolving, contemplative soundscapes, only occasionally gaining something like a drumtrack or a sound that’s not basically a sinewave. This isn’t music for you to stomp your feet to, it’s music to sit and stare into space with. As an aside, for me, it’s impossible not to think of Mini Metro or Mini Motorways. Those games play magnificently with a similar sonic palate, but do so procedurally with each of the sounds representing the addition of a new subway stop or residential area. They’re also wonderfully minimalistic, and highly recommended. Also, maybe not coincidentally, once again, the theme of cities and towns. Someone should write a paper. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/b4b39b9d-3ac2-434d-8ce4-ebb95f8cf721/Second+of+Spring.jpg Blog - May 2023 - A Smattering of Artists Who Played in London During the Week Following the Coronation of Charles III (No Causal Relationship) - Beaches - Second of Spring I suppose that Beaches falls loosely into the category of psych-rock. The melodies are hard to pick out of the wall of sound, and the vocals are way behind all the guitars and even drums. Apart from the occasional “ahhhhhh-ahhhhh,” that is. Generally speaking, you’ll have better luck singing along with the bassline than the vocals. In spite of that, they avoid the common pitfall of the genre being too abstract to really get into. the songs are easy to bob your head to and have a great energy to them. There’s no need to think about what the songs are “about” since they’re about the sound itself. I find this band extremely confusing to google. Nearly every search box I’ve tried turns up the similarly-named Canadian band, The Beaches, and the official Beaches sites aren’t much more helpful. They’re almost all either broken or way out of date. Like, the official Beaches Facebook page has a pic of the band, but I’m not totally convinced that it’s a pic of Beaches instead of The Beaches? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/65ae8de2-e3aa-4e1a-a95e-cdd16061dcc8/not+your+muse.jpg Blog - May 2023 - A Smattering of Artists Who Played in London During the Week Following the Coronation of Charles III (No Causal Relationship) - Celeste - Not Your Muse Celeste is something special in the world of singers - there’s a clear power in her voice, and she’s great at making the sudden ups and downs she throws into her verses seem spontaneous and fresh. It’s interesting that on this album, she keeps the instrumentation so minimal. It gives her a lot of space to work with, and she’s very much the star of the show. In the best cases (or my favorites, anyway), there’s a complex, interesting riff that just repeats over and over and she uses it as a launching pad for whatever it is that she feels like doing with it. I feel completely different about the choruses, where she seems to opt for a much more straightforward anthemic approach. This is the part you’re supposed to sing along with, I guess. Anyway, if you want a great example of both of those thoughts, try “Stop This Flame.” I dig piano vamps. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/3d58d18a-c53c-4530-9238-72d7ac46e6bb/-22celcius.jpg Blog - May 2023 - A Smattering of Artists Who Played in London During the Week Following the Coronation of Charles III (No Causal Relationship) - Molécule — -22.7°C I don’t think I’ll ever do one of these without including an album of dark, cinematic electronic music. In this case, it’s as beautiful as it is dark, with lovely rounded arpeggios floating over the murk. I suspect that Molécule would tell you that it sounds this way because it’s a concept album. He recorded samples during an expedition to Greenland, produced the entire album in situ, and changed nothing before he released it. -22.7°C is the lowest temp recorded during the trip. Hence the name. Interesting to note that he has a previous album called 60°43’ North, which was recorded on a trawler at that latitude. That album sounds completely different, and much more conventional. 60°43’ north is like, the southern border of Alaska, and Greenland is something like 59° to 80°, so I guess like, maybe he gets more experimental as he goes further north? Note: it turns out that this is extremely difficult to search for because he also did a soundtrack for a film with the same name, about this album! You're looking for the album on which the first track is called Aria. H/t to dear reader Sketch for catching this! https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/886d9efc-1f1d-49d4-86ad-a5c9a0156dbb/social+distancing+from+reality.jpg Blog - May 2023 - A Smattering of Artists Who Played in London During the Week Following the Coronation of Charles III (No Causal Relationship) - meat computer - social distancing from reality Apologies for the poor-quality image. I think this is the only one in existence? There’s no way around it - meat computer is super juvenile. The choice of samples, the repetitiveness, the buzzy bass, the indistinct mumblerap-esque vocals… it’s got kind of a punk vibe, in the sense of “punk-ass kid.” But there’s something here. It’s catchy and hard, and it’s got 2 or 3 tracks that I keep coming back to. Plus, it’s got a real DIY quality that I find appealing (for ex, not having a hi-res image). I like this new generation of music. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/apr-2023 monthly 0.5 2023-05-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/a31565b0-e20f-44ab-808a-bed659bc086c/with+a+hammer.jpg Blog - April 2023 - Ba-doot-doot chk, chika-chika chk! - Yaeji - With a Hammer Yaeji is one of my favorite artists working today. She’s made her career out of incredibly ambitious electronic music that travels between avant-garde pop, psychedelic soundscape experiments, and straight-up dance music. She has a couple thing that make her unique in my estimation though. Like, she has an interesting earnestness about what she’s doing, writing songs about the value of friendship and being proud of yourself for getting simple things done during the day. Also, major chords. Who uses major chords these days? This album has her doing some really strange things with analog instruments, which is new territory for her, along with her signature haze of vocals, resolving into heavy bass and sharp vocal lines. I think she’s a genius. And also, like, she’s Korean and she speaks Korean on her albums. I love that. Like, why should people in non-English speaking countries have to speak our stupid language just to get their albums released over here? Anyway, her stuff is brilliant and complicated and danceable. See also her first LP, WHAT WE DREW 우 리 가 그 려 왔 던 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/7be00ab5-9493-4623-adf3-fa430e1bf30f/Jpegmafia-Danny-Brown-2023.jpg Blog - April 2023 - Ba-doot-doot chk, chika-chika chk! - JPEGMafia x Danny Brown - SCARING THE HOES Speaking of ambitious sonic adventures, here’s JPEGMafia. He’s known for complicated, chaotic headbanging hip-hop productions that bounce around between hip-hop subgenres and incorporate everything from trap, noize, vaporwave, classic R&B, to um… Fergie. Just off the top of my head. This album is a fascinating, hyperactive sonic collage - loud, abrasive, bottom-heavy, tinny, intellectual, dystopian - strung together by Danny Brown, who’s perfect for this kind of thing. Even just the sound of his voice is a lot. I have no idea what he’s talking about here. I mean, I generally have no idea what he’s talking about, honestly, but especially on this album. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/29f4d54f-1e9f-4d2f-a6c8-598f16309b4e/lost+in+tokyo.jpg Blog - April 2023 - Ba-doot-doot chk, chika-chika chk! - Soil & “PIMP” Sessions - Lost in Tokyo Let’s change gears for a second here. Jazz. People hate it. But I think a lot of what people hate is its most opaque, complicated iterations like some of John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, or to take a more modern example, Kamsai Washington. If you’re not a jazz musician yourself, or if you didn’t grow up with this stuff, it’s kind of tough to see why anyone would care about these 12-chord monsters with interminable solos and abstract melodies (I love some of that stuff, tho. Don’t @ me). But jazz doesn’t need to be like that, and a lot of the time it’s not like that! For whatever reason, more approachable jazz tends to get buried (I think maybe it’s because jazz fans are kinda like, well, idk, a little pretentious. Don’t @ me). There’s plenty of stuff out there with fun, energetic beats and solos that capture an energy and a vibe, without being as cerebral. Getting around to the point, here. Idk why, but Japanese jazz - or at least the Japanese jazz that makes it to this side of the ocean - tends to feel more like that. Soil & “PIMP” Sessions sounds like that. My personal experience with this: my friend KKV texted me saying that she was at Record Store Day in Paris, and spotted a whole rack of Japanese RSD releases. What followed was an hour-long frantic research session, and this was one of the promising finds. What really solidified it though, was the other night when I watched David Lynch’s 3-hour film, Inland Empire. I enjoyed it, but afterwards I felt like I needed to do something with a little more negative space, and this album came to the rescue. You may want to skip track 2, though. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/393a74a0-cdef-48e2-ac13-71c1cf7f26fa/mmxx.jpg Blog - April 2023 - Ba-doot-doot chk, chika-chika chk! - Jon Kennedy - MMXX I think that the title of track 1, “Once Upon a Time,” captures a lot of what this album is doing. Music can be a form of story-telling. You can create a sonic universe and travel with the listener from one place to another, adding and taking away elements and transforming the vibe from one thing to another. I think that’s what’s happening here. There’s a reason that these tracks are all more than 3 minutes. I think this album is also trying to visit another “time” in music - using the tropes of late 90’s trip-hop and drum-and-bass to transport us to that era, and updating them to a modern sensibility. Listen to that trip-hop bassline on “The Base” and try not to think of Funki Porcini’s Hed Phone Sex. Even the reverbed-out treatment of those vocal samples is super late 90s-y. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/91366ca6-8332-4a59-bc43-5204f49a62ef/love+market.jpg Blog - April 2023 - Ba-doot-doot chk, chika-chika chk! - Filmmaker - The Love Market I’m just going to let Filmmaker’s words do the talking here: ”Revisiting my engravings i found that image so i decided to make the music to it. Some ideas around: hostile party culture, relationship standards, destructive hedonism, system castrating creativity, biased innovation, infoxication break-ups, fake hope, abusive friendships, and as the album title suggests, trademarking of feelings.” I hadn’t heard the word “infoxication” before, but I like it. For more great synonyms of “information overload” see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_overload#cite_note-3 https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/mar-2023 monthly 0.5 2023-05-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/4208c850-ebdf-4d9d-a2f1-cc5fac922806/leenalchi.jpg Blog - March 2023 - In Which I Give Up Yelling at a Cloud - Leenalchi - Sugungga One of the interesting things about listening to music from other countries is that I’m never really sure whether it sounds weird to me because I’m an ignorant American or if it’s just that this is their equivalent of Bjork and everyone over there is just as confused as I am. In the case of Leenalchi, I suspect that it’s a little of both. There’s a lot to say about them, but I’ll limit myself to saying that that this album recounts a traditional Korean folktale of the same name, about a dragon king from the Southern Sea, a softshell turtle and a wily rabbit. Also that this music is sometimes categorized as K-Pop, which is just ridiculous. As far as listening to this goes, my friend KKV told me that it sounded like a collaboration between Ethel Merman and Yoko Ono, which I think captures it pretty well, if you throw in a dance-rock beat. There’s some wild, abrupt vocal stuff happening and some people talking over each other, and… I do a lot of wide-eyed blinking. It’s even more mesmerizing to watch it happen live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCZPF0eg9UA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P1CnWI62Ik&list=RDLVLCZPF0eg9UA&start_radio=1&rv=LCZPF0eg9UA https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/b22f7f57-3561-4d9e-b629-3f81abb85c16/bones+uk.jpg Blog - March 2023 - In Which I Give Up Yelling at a Cloud - BONES UK - s/t BONES UK are a very 1970’s idea of what a rock band should sound like: loud, lewd, stridently on-the-nose lyrically, and - to my great surprise - full of awesome guitar riffs. For a long time, guitars haven’t been the driving force in rock music. It’s been all about synths, drum machines, and screaming. Guitars have been relegated to instrumentation and rhythm elements, and in the rare cases where the guitars take a little solo, they tend to kind of blend in with the rest of the track (the exception that proves the rule being Jack White). Not so in BONES UK. Here, Carmen Vandenberg’s solos tear violently out of the instrumentation and thrash around for a few bars. It’s exhilarating. I can’t wait to see this happen live. There’s a thing that happens sometimes where a rock band will put their most radio-ready tracks right at the beginning of the album (in this case, imo, the worst songs), so I’d advise starting with track 3: “Pretty Waste.” I actually kinda like “Filthy Freaks,” but I think it’ll be better to get a taste for them before going back to it. I also tend to skip the ballads, but I imagine that has more to do with my proclivities than with their quality. At any rate, I probably listened to this album 7 times in a single weekend. Happy headbanging, everybody. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/d62ad8e0-38e4-4215-a925-602e8dd90996/low-fi+house.jpg Blog - March 2023 - In Which I Give Up Yelling at a Cloud - lo-fi_house.zip This isn’t really an album, per-say, it’s a compilation, but nonetheless, I’ve been listening to it a lot lately, and I wanted to put it here to give my dear readers a break from all the rock stuff (and honestly, to give myself a break too). It’s a lovely little journey through a calm spring day, lying around in a field with friends or someone you love. I like to put it on when I’m on my way back from something and need to wind down a bit. Just chillaxing. I’m going to take a little moment here to go off. I’ve always hated the way people are using the term “low-fi” now. The “fi” part is supposed to mean “fidelity,” right? Well this is plenty high-fidelity imo. Now, I get it. The term developed because it came from “low-fi hip-hop,” in which the vocals are mixed down and kind of indistinct. Fine. And I get it, the damage was done a long time ago and “low-fi” means what it means and there’s nothing I can do about it. Fine. So, this paragraph is my last tilt against the windmill of musical subgenre naming conventions. I officially accept the new meaning of “low-fi.” You win, English language. Anyway, this little mix is great. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/70bc47cd-9c84-4ad3-85d9-ad9d16415789/slowthai.jpg Blog - March 2023 - In Which I Give Up Yelling at a Cloud - Slowthai - UGLY Slowthai is not an easy listen. His themes are extremely personal and painful - anger management issues, drug addiction and suicidal ideation - and the beats he chooses are appropriate to them. He paints a picture of himself as erratic, hostile, out of control. It feels like he’s trying to let his listeners experience what it’s like to be Slowthai. Art-from-the-artist and all that, but it seems like it might be true. And if it is, well, being Slowthai sounds tough. All that aside, he’s taking us on a wild ride here. It’s heavy, abrasive, and difficult at one moment, and then a 2000s-era pop-punk track a few short tracks later. It took me a couple tries to get through the whole thing, but I’m glad I finally did. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/49eb0278-1b64-42b7-b88c-d1e79d44fa7f/10000-gecs.jpg Blog - March 2023 - In Which I Give Up Yelling at a Cloud - 100gecs - 10,000 gecs I’ve been told by probably 6 or 7 different people that hearing 100gecs for the first time was a watershed moment for them. It was the moment that they realized that they no longer understood the kids’ music. Which is fair. Hyperpop is not for the faint of ears. It abruptly leaps from genre to genre and places so much ludicrous autotune on the vocals that you can barely keep your headphones on. Well, if you’re in that camp, I suspect that 10,000 gecs won’t entirely change your mind, but for those who are new to the 100gecs sound, it’s probably a good place to start. They’ve reigned things in a little since their earlier work, and created some stuff that sounds a little more akin to what would normally be called “songs.” Nonetheless, it’s uh… a lot. Brilliant, but… a lot. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/feb-2023 monthly 0.5 2023-04-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/093c79a2-9d27-4fe2-a919-66b2e0b616da/Jockstrap.jpg Blog - Feb 2023 - Art-Pop, Art-Rock, Art-(Hip)-Hop - Jockstrap - I Love You Jennifer B A band’s name isn’t always a great indicator of what they sound like. In the case of Jockstrap, it would be tough to come up with a name that captures all the different things they have going on in a word or two, but even so, like, I usually associate jockstraps with machismo and… I dunno, that feels pretty distant from their sound? Anyway. A lot of writers will tell you that Jockstrap is one of the most exciting new bands out there. It’s a brand of art-pop that incorporates everything from electro to metal to folk… but not in a hyperpop way where everything is kind of hyperactively jumbled together. No, this is a real melding of influences that allows them to effectively bring you from quiet rumination to overwhelming menace within a couple bars, in a way that captures how a human might actually feel when they’re sitting alone with their thoughts. I have to admit that I didn’t immediately see what all the fuss is about, and I think it has to do with that “sitting alone” thing. The first few times I heard this album, I was doing something else at the same time. Driving, playing a game, filling out job applications, whatever. That’s how people listen to music a lot of the time these days, and when I did that, I was disappointed. I wanted it to sound like their incredible 2022 single “50/50”, a scorching and disorienting take on industrial/techno that works just fine in the car. I Love You Jennifer B is not like that. I needed to do what I finally did: come home drunk, sit alone in the dark, and put this on the living room stereo at a volume that was just barely acceptable for 1am in a Somerville apartment. It’s an album that deserves to be sat with. Take your time with it and you’ll be rewarded. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/21392746-c231-40ec-884a-587f6b95d26b/little+simz.jpg Blog - Feb 2023 - Art-Pop, Art-Rock, Art-(Hip)-Hop - Little Simz - NO THANK YOU The last few months have been big for all-caps album titles. Little Simz is one of my favorite rappers working today. She’s one of the few who regularly use this kind of stripped-back old-school beat. It really lends a feeling of intimacy to her sound. You’re listening to her voice, and the beat is there to carry it along, not the other way around. It’s particularly refreshing for her because her delivery is (compared to a lot of other rap), kind of subtle, almost flat. She doesn’t do a lot of ad-libs, shouting, singing… it’s Little Simz talking to you. Her subject matter isn’t particularly unusual for modern rap - she talks about her personal history, talks about her experiences in music, throws in a bit of bragging here and there, and talks about some things she learned in therapy. That last one is where she really differentiates herself, I think. It’s not terribly uncommon for rappers to talk about their emotions anymore, particularly in the UK where you have guys like Dave really letting loose with their trauma and pain, but Little Simz is doing something a little different. She wants to tell you about things she’s learned, rather than about the agony. And going back to her stripped-back sound, it feels honest, like a conversation with a human being. See also: Grey Area https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/f60e5a0f-6c04-4d7f-960c-83ebb9149ecf/Leila+Moss.jpg Blog - Feb 2023 - Art-Pop, Art-Rock, Art-(Hip)-Hop - Leila Moss - Internal Working Model This art-rock album builds an interesting kind of tension for me in that the tempo is always about 10% slower than I want. I feel like I’m walking somewhere in a hurry and the person in front of me on the sidewalk is just moseying along, staring at their phone. And yet I keep coming back to it. So often that I have to conclude that I actually like that about it. Now, for one thing, that’s a feature of this kind of theatrical art-rock in general. Kate Bush takes her time with you, just like Bat for Lashes and Bjork (when she feels like it. Bjork does what she wants). Going slow gives an artist time to hold big, long, majestic notes and harmonies. But Leila Moss is particular in that seemingly everything she does is in half-time, and she refuses to fill the negative space with instrumentation. She makes you sit and listen. This is probably my favorite album she has, but she’s a pretty consistent artist. Check out Who the Power or the single “Turn Your Back Around” or even her previous band, The Duke Spirit. It’s all got a similar sensibility. Also of note: Internal Working Model has a cameo by Gary Numan. Just wanted to point that out. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/66a61062-8339-4e21-883e-5cee11d0610c/Soft+Moon.jpg Blog - Feb 2023 - Art-Pop, Art-Rock, Art-(Hip)-Hop - The Soft Moon - Deeper When someone says “industrial music,” there are actually a few different things you that might come to mind. It could be a kind of rock music with loud distorted guitars. It could be a kind of techno with loud distorted square waves. It could be a kind of avant-garde music with micro-samples smattered disorientingly all over the beat. But, whatever it is that comes to mind, you’re probably imagining something inhumanly aggressive and abrasive. Or if there’s a humanity there, it’s twisted by angst or fury. The Soft Moon is all of those things. A loud wall of sound, delay pedals on the vocals making the vocals twist with angst, cutting cymbals and relentless one-note bass beats. It’s overwhelming and incredible. I saw him perform over the winter, and I’ve never seen a better use of a metal trash can on stage. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/jan-2023 monthly 0.5 2023-03-01 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/c99853e3-f11b-4c73-9867-74488d86204e/taxi+kebab.jpg Blog - Jan 2023 - In Which We Go Hard (Sometimes) - Taxi Kebab - Visions al 2ard I’m so excited about this one. A lot of the international music we get here in the states feels like it’s either a) tailored for the US market or b) really commercial and manufactured. This, though, has some real rawness to it. Aggressive, cutting guitar tones, dark electronic beats, arabic-scale melodies, wailing vocals… I love it. The vocalist/guitarist/buzuq player, Lea Leïla Jiqqir, is from Morocco by way of France, and partnered up with the electronic producer to create this sound. It’s pretty unique to my ears. I’m dying to see them live. Unsurprisingly, that would mean traveling to the EU, but… maybe… Also, if anyone knows Arabic and is able to translate these lyrics, I’d love to know what she’s talking about. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/60e13e3f-0df3-4872-9e4e-9af246724aa3/the+organism.jpg Blog - Jan 2023 - In Which We Go Hard (Sometimes) - The Organism - Dictator Even I get tired of all the glitchiness and the distorted guitars sometimes, and I just want some sophisticated, mid-tempo house music where the weird little dissonances are just spice. The Organism has delivered on that with a really solid left-field album that sets up a nice groove and keeps it interesting without attacking you. If you don’t know his other work, you should definitely check out his back catalog because there’s a lot of variety there, from more hard-nosed electro to some hip-hop influenced stuff, to just straight up techno. This one is feeling good to me this winter though. It’s cold out and I want some of this coziness. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/ec41db4f-14dd-48d8-a427-4925e43545f0/gaz+coombs.jpg Blog - Jan 2023 - In Which We Go Hard (Sometimes) - Gaz Coombs - Turn the Car Around I’ve been trying to place this most recent album in terms of his work with Supergrass. Obviously a lot of time has passed since In It for the Money, or even since Road to Rouen, so I guess it’s not all that surprising, but I really have to squint to see the relationship between something like “Don’t Say It’s Over” and all his other late-stage britpop. Gone is the squeaky-clean production, the peppy vocal melodies, the quirky subject matter… this sounds much more personal and messy to me. It still has the nice piano lines and the storytelling, but the overall sound is a completely different animal. Coombs commented that he thought this is some of the best work he’s ever done. I’m not sure if I agree with that or not because it strikes me as pretty apples-and-oranges, but there’s no doubt that this is very, very good stuff. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/f00da199-e00b-4482-9f91-7072a090d4f2/wata+igarashi.jpg Blog - Jan 2023 - In Which We Go Hard (Sometimes) - Wata Igarashi - New Dawn EP Wata Igarashi is one of the grand heroes of the Japanese techno scene. He’s one of the first Japanese producers to become internationally famous, and developed Labyrinth into a world class festival. I’d describe his style as layered, progressive, and… relentless. This EP does a little bit more relenting than his past albums, but there’s still plenty of pounding and glitch. He’s an extremely consistent artist, so if you like this, you’ll probably find it rewarding to dig through his back catalog a bit. Kioku is another of my favorites. I’m going to go on a short little rant here because, dear reader, I spent hours and hours this month trying to find East Asian electronic music, and came up almost entirely empty-handed. I dug through festival lineups, found local club nights, and read articles about the scene, and none of the music is available here! Even artists that I know about are impossible to find on any of the major streaming services. What gives? Tidal and Spotify have tons of great music from the Middle-East, Eastern Europe, North Africa… are they just using some other app over there? Anyway, end of rant. Listen to Wata Igarashi, and if you’re ever in Seoul or Osaka, pick me up some vinyl, ok? https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/dec-2022 monthly 0.5 2023-01-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/1672938175784-W87GJ8B0FKJRQP99APWH/psychic+data.jpg Blog - Dec 2022 - In Which Everyone Loves Psychedelia - TVAM - Psychic Data This is one of the most surefire Ben Great albums I’ve ever heard. Space-filling, reverb’d up guitar/synth tones? Check. Unusual drum patterns? Check. Psychedelic, glissando-y melodies? Check. Washed out, indistinct vocals? Check. It’s my fav psychedelia there is. A couple weeks ago I had some people over and put this on while my roommate was watching Adult Swim in the next room. When I came back from a trip to the kitchen, everyone had given up whatever they were doing and was just staring gape-mouthed at the TV with the sound off. We tried putting on the normal audio for a second, but everyone agreed that TVAM is better. See also the follow up album, High Art Life. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/dd7f57a2-8ea2-45e0-ab91-4356d1fc22ff/working+mens.jpeg Blog - Dec 2022 - In Which Everyone Loves Psychedelia - Working Men’s Club - s/t Imagine if someone took all the sonic hallmarks of the 80’s, left the hard-edged production style in place, and sweetened all the back-ends to make it even more jarring, and gave it a hard techno bass beat. Severe limiters on the drums, Chintzy Casio synths, concise funky guitar riffs, and someone talk-wonder-singing “Why is the darkness so strong?” Apparently, before this album these guys were basically just doing indie rock? That must be why I’d never heard of them. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/e4b2573b-1095-457b-bd22-98dce672d197/sorry+we+did+something+wrong.jpeg Blog - Dec 2022 - In Which Everyone Loves Psychedelia - Simple Symmetry - Sorry! We Did Something Wrong Even just from looking at the album cover, there’s no question about what these guys are trying to do: they want to recreate the sound of 1960’s experimentation, complete with all the bongos and bells and sitars and all that. What’s interesting is that they want to do it by slamming it together with the 2000’s era experiments in major-chord electronica. Think “Little Fluffy Clouds” by The Orb or “Squares” by The Beta Band. And of course updating all of it to modern production styles. Does it sound cool? Yes! But like a lot of ambitious stuff, it sometimes verges into the territory of “interesting” rather than “enjoyable.” Nonetheless, it’s well worth a listen, even if you skip around a little. Even if you don’t like this album, Simple Symmetry has some fantastic singles out there. I’ll mention one below, but poke around and you’ll find more. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/03f48665-1730-4f2e-a821-d23895412017/topical+dancer.jpeg Blog - Dec 2022 - In Which Everyone Loves Psychedelia - Charlotte Adigéry & Bolis Pupul - Topical Dancer There are two very different things to talk about here: music and lyrics. When it comes to music, I absolutely love this project. It’s got interesting effects on the vocals, fun ping-ponging boings, occasional interjections of acoustic instruments… check out “HAHA” for something amazing that verges into irritating and back to amazing again. That said, your ability to enjoy this album will depend a lot on how you take the lyrics. Charlotte Adigéry is extremely direct in her snarky, condescending takes on race, gender, and sexuality. To be completely honest, I find it kind of gratingly on-the-nose, in spite of the fact that I agree with absolutely everything she has to say. YMMV, but overall, there’s a lot to love in here. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/77415227-3049-4bd6-974d-ce549886fe56/djangodjango-cover.jpeg Blog - Dec 2022 - In Which Everyone Loves Psychedelia - Django Django - s/t I’m cheating more than a little here, in that this album came out in 2012. I’m not being very strict about everything on this blog being “new music,” but this is definitely beyond what I’d normally do. Nonetheless, I was led here because MGMT did a remix of “Spirals” in 2020, and as a result, their self-titled album has been on heavy rotation for me. No one is doing Beach Boys-style blended vocal harmony like this these days. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/nov-2022 monthly 0.5 2022-12-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/1670785944748-14KHE4EU7BTFE9VAUKOR/ab67616d0000b273d6472dec1ab0d921c0321b2a.jpg Blog - Nov 2022 - In Which the US Sanctions Against Russia Prevent Me From Buying a T-Shirt - Otyken - Kykakacha A friend turned me on to this Siberian band that has a lot going on. There's like, electro, throat singing, some non-Western melody lines, what I assume are traditional Siberian rhythmic tropes, a little hip-hop maybe... and not as like individual tracks, but all at once. I wasn't totally sure after the first track, but was really convinced on "My Wing" when she does the big wailing "ah-ah-ah-ah" on the first time through the chorus, then unexpectedly drops to a more subdued lower pitch the 2nd time around. That's a pretty cool composition choice imo. Kind of a dodge-and-weave. And, it stays fresh all the way through the album. I love it. Unfortunately, it seems like they only tour in Siberia. Summer trip 2023? (jk) Usually, when I find a new band, I try to buy some kind of merch. Both because I want to support them and also because it makes me feel cool and relevant. This time, I quickly got a response from Otyken explaining that they can’t process my payment because of the US sanctions against Russia. Never ran into that before. They also helpfully provided three different ways I could get around the sanctions anyway. I guess this must happen all the time. Anyway, I didn’t do that. I’m not sure in what way that t-shirt would support the Putin regime, but it’s not worth it for the sake of a shirt. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/ade137bd-0516-480f-9ab6-651188c01804/a0163267805_10.jpg Blog - Nov 2022 - In Which the US Sanctions Against Russia Prevent Me From Buying a T-Shirt - The Wants - Container This album lives somewhere in the territory of post-punk, noise rock, and some kinda no wave industrial thing. The front-man is also the guy from BODEGA, which you can really hear on "Container" just based on his cadence and the way his lyrics are so aggressively on-the-beat. But that's about as far as the comparison goes, I think. This has none of BODEGA's tongue-in-cheek irony. It feels a lot more raw. And they love doing the thing where instead of having a traditional chorus, the main vamp just gets bigger and louder until the track ends (see "Ramp" and "The Motor"). Also, Depeche Mode? Cake? https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/78bd33c9-d29d-4eaf-b0e0-8e7824a56aac/CS883546-01A-BIG.jpg Blog - Nov 2022 - In Which the US Sanctions Against Russia Prevent Me From Buying a T-Shirt - Röyksopp - Profound Mysteries I-III Well, it's been an awfully long time since Röyksopp did a full album, so I guess that's some kind of explanation for why they did three of them at once. Maybe they were like "oh right this huge pile of tracks we've been making for the past 7 years. Guess we should do something with those." Anyway, this is pretty much what you'd expect out of Röyksopp: warm and pleasant majory tones like a warm bath, lots of Air-esque melodies, lots of bass that goes "eeyowwww," and way, way too many collaborations with vocalists. Fortunately, a few of those collabs are with Alison Goldfrapp, who's always good, and if nothing else, between Röyksopp and Goldfrapp you'll get plenty of the letter "p." https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/7edc15f5-df40-4ed8-bb78-885ea7f3952a/fb6e520ee13e0fbc914b06892e4c20ce.jpg Blog - Nov 2022 - In Which the US Sanctions Against Russia Prevent Me From Buying a T-Shirt - Bob Vylan - Bob Vylan Presents: the Price of Life Awhile back, I went to see Amyl and the Sniffers and caught a few minutes of these guys’ awesome opening set. It's a blistering blend of punk and hip-hop that I don't always have an appetite for but when I do, I love it. I recently had a conversation in which a friend was mad that there was too much money in punk music for it to be about class issues without being hypocritical. Well, this album is very much about class in a way that feels legitimately angry and dangerous. "Wicked & Bad" is the single, but I think the rest of the album is probably better. Particularly note the electroy "Take That" and also "Health is Wealth", which includes a complete recipe for lentils, justified by the importance of nutrition when waging a class war. I don't think he's joking. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/85f3780c-6028-45c8-90a2-2a8b28801d80/a0796411347_65.jpg Blog - Nov 2022 - In Which the US Sanctions Against Russia Prevent Me From Buying a T-Shirt - El Búho - Cenotes There's a lot of reggae beat happening in here... maybe some cumbia. But it's all in interesting electronic sounds. Sometimes piratey, a lot of chill. I've been using it as kind of late-night driving music. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/e4668598-1819-4867-bbee-1283f024082b/0024989621_10.jpg Blog - Nov 2022 - In Which the US Sanctions Against Russia Prevent Me From Buying a T-Shirt - Audiobooks - Astro Tough I fully expected this band to be a one-trick pony with their joke/not-joke "The Doll" but I found that this album is pretty consistent in having lyrics that are both hilarious and beautiful. Like when "The Doll" suddenly goes from a convoluted story about a little girl losing her toy to the melancholy "We wеre both just there, standing there/ Wet from the rain in Coventry" or in "English Manipulator" when she's so mad at that guy for mansplaining about Monet and Manet. The compositions also get a little more varied once you get past the opening few songs. Skip track 2. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/38c4a3b5-8760-4599-bf12-50e6201affad/a3795654693_10.jpg Blog - Nov 2022 - In Which the US Sanctions Against Russia Prevent Me From Buying a T-Shirt - Soulwax - ESSENTIAL Soulwax isn't as cool as they think they are. But... pretty close. And I have to admit that the "essential" conceit is pretty funny. This album is Soulwax being Soulwax: loud, noisy progressive electro that rolls over the one and glitches non-stop. A little pretentious, but undeniably great. And yes ok fine, I admit it, I love them. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/f0455a68-d803-4988-83f3-0006bfb576dd/ab67616d0000b273b7e499c452e497f2ab6a351c.jpg Blog - Nov 2022 - In Which the US Sanctions Against Russia Prevent Me From Buying a T-Shirt - Yann Tiersen - 11 5 18 2 5 18 This guy must think he's Nils Frahm or something, giving his album a name like that. And well, I guess it actually is kinda like Nils Frahm. It's all intellectual and weird, starting from almost nothing and building into some Philip Glass-esque arpeggiations. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/51c1350f-cb63-4adc-8410-078d2e490a33/a1187603079_10.jpg Blog - Nov 2022 - In Which the US Sanctions Against Russia Prevent Me From Buying a T-Shirt - Holy Fuck - Deleter It's what you'd hope for out of Holy Fuck: driving, weird, psyechedlic, noisy. I saw them open for Hot Chip pre-pandemic and Alexis Taylor came out to do a song with them, which is also included here. Good stuff. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/blog/oct-2022 monthly 0.5 2022-12-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/1671683668173-018X8SNCXK93E6OERYWY/icons.jpg Blog - Oct 2022 - Vaporwave Dystopia Wins the Day, and Not-New Bands Make Great New Stuff - Two Shell - Icons If you’d asked me a month ago, “Hey Ben, would you be into an electronic music concept album in which a vaporwave AI is distorted into a bass-heavy, menacing dystopia because it doesn’t want to be forgotten?” I would have said… well… I would have said yes. And yes indeed. Icons is a techno tour de force, touching on DnB, breakbeats, and trance. It’s menacing in spite of the fact that it’s primarily major chords, and it’s such a unified vision! It’s a contender for my album of the year. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/71feb8ad-cafd-4b55-aa0f-56025963790c/forever+story.jpg Blog - Oct 2022 - Vaporwave Dystopia Wins the Day, and Not-New Bands Make Great New Stuff - JID - The Forever Story When I first heard JID, it was on Spillage Village's 2020 album "Spilligion" and I hated him because his verses seemed so put-on. I assumed that he was maybe a younger member of the collective who hadn’t found his voice yet. But, I think the reality is just that a few bars isn't enough time for him to spin out his ideas. On this album, his whole thing is changes. His rap moves around through lots of different rhythms, different vocal tones, different diction, and his beats are completely different at the end of some songs than they were at the beginning. This album is a journey. I’d recommend “Dance Now” as a single, and “Surround Sound” as a more representative piece. But, really, just listen to the whole thing (and if you find your interest flagging during “Crack Sandwich” I get it. Just push through.) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/1e0bb1f4-881b-4f74-be8a-0925428c1d9f/monsters+eating.jpg Blog - Oct 2022 - Vaporwave Dystopia Wins the Day, and Not-New Bands Make Great New Stuff - Frankie and the Witch Fingers - Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters… I didn’t expect it, but I think this might be my most-played album of the last few months. It’s a straight-ahead rock-and-roll headbang. Perfect for a 35 min drive, perfect to get psyched for something, and perfect just because. I did some real thinking about what genre to say this is, and I guess it just falls under the unhelpful umbrella "garage rock." The whole is more than the sum of its parts here. Each track is somewhere between "good" and "very good," but what really puts it over for me is that I'm pretty sure that if you saw them live, they would just play their set straight through without stopping. Also, the lyrics are considerably more interesting than they need to be. Simulator is about the Simulation Theory, which is eyeroll-inducing on its own, but they address it with such anger that I find it compelling anyway. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/15815211-4266-447f-ad84-7111734f65b0/congregation.jpg Blog - Oct 2022 - Vaporwave Dystopia Wins the Day, and Not-New Bands Make Great New Stuff - Witch Fever - Congregation I'm told that this is punk music. I suppose that's true overall, but a lot of this fits in that category a little uncomfortably. It sounds to me more like the kind of "heavy" music that people were doing at the tail end of the 90's, like something from the soundtrack to The Faculty or the first Matrix. Or maybe like Evanescence but without all the unlistenable rock-rapping (rap-rocking?). They're supposed to be amazing live. "Beauty and Grace" is the one that got my attention first, but “Congregation” is pretty wonderfully Garbage-y. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/3c6105eb-65dc-4aa9-ba5e-346471b6b89f/white+girl+wasted.jpg Blog - Oct 2022 - Vaporwave Dystopia Wins the Day, and Not-New Bands Make Great New Stuff - Sonnyjim & The Purist - White Girl Wasted This is SO RETRO. The main single is "Barz Simpson," a title that's only excusable because MF Doom probably came up with it. That track was recorded before he died, but wasn't released in album form until this year, and it feels a lot like they took that one track and just expanded it into a whole universe of drug-addled 2000's era hip-hop. I'm not sure that there are any actual bad tracks on here. It’s a really good choice if you need something low-key, or if you want to chuckle at the wonderfully drug-addled universe they’ve created. Highly recommend listening attentively to the final track “Buy Cocaine Not Art.” I don’t think they wrote this story, but it’s worth your attention anyway. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/3919fb4f-8b0f-4c90-9f5c-a47f42183479/cambio.jpg Blog - Oct 2022 - Vaporwave Dystopia Wins the Day, and Not-New Bands Make Great New Stuff - La Chica - Cambio This is some interesting experimental electronic/vocal work, sort of in the spirit of Imogen Heap or someone similarly intellectual like Ibeyi, maybe. It's all pretty cool, but the one that caught me originally was "Oasis." I looked at her site and the tour page is split into "Electronic Tour" and "Piano Tour," which is exciting because it probably means that she's actually playing all those trills. Even at its least interesting, like "Drink," her music kind of reminds me of Kali Uchis's fantastic 2016 album Isolation, so I'm not complaining about that. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/d8c91955-a1d2-4494-824b-a5ed2d93adfa/Into+the+Blue.png Blog - Oct 2022 - Vaporwave Dystopia Wins the Day, and Not-New Bands Make Great New Stuff - Broken Bells - Into the Blue There’s a lot of great 70’s rock stuff on here, kind of in the vein of pre-disco Beegees or ELO. My only complaint is that they put all their slow, sad stuff at the beginning. I really like "Saturdays," "We're Not in Orbit Yet..." and for a different flavor, "Love on the Run,” but for some reason those are at least 15 min into the album. This inspired me to look back at some of their hits back when they were a big deal in the 2010s. I was in a totally different place at the time, musically, but I have to say that there are some pretty great tracks on their s/t album. It's very 2010 though. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/86beca55-cce5-4589-96c4-1a2ec6da679d/basic+instincty.jpg Blog - Oct 2022 - Vaporwave Dystopia Wins the Day, and Not-New Bands Make Great New Stuff - Session Victim - Basic Instinct Jazz/funk-infused house music - great idea, almost always poorly executed. These guys, however, never miss. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/fc716a84-e8df-469c-839e-2a71ec4dda59/10000+hours.jpg Blog - Oct 2022 - Vaporwave Dystopia Wins the Day, and Not-New Bands Make Great New Stuff - Session Victim - 10,000 Hours I love them and you can’t take them away from me. https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/home daily 1.0 2025-12-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/d42d6bec-e38e-4f0d-804a-c17801d47cab/yay+saturday.jpeg Home Girl Group - Yay! Saturday https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/d2cd0bb7-032a-4e43-b851-daaf3d6d454c/miien.jpg Home Mien - Evil People https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/84d9cf9d-d51e-44ba-bbb1-157f51978bda/escalate.jpeg Home VLURE, Psweatpants - Something Real https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/63961cced0f1865cd3f78ee9/381ad7a2-c49b-41eb-badd-0afd7714b60f/its+a+beautiful+place.jpg https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/about daily 0.75 2023-04-01 https://www.thebengreatmusicthing.com/about-1 daily 0.75 2022-12-11 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/624b5039eaa0101b5bdb9529/1649102906958-MOZT5KKR10XPYONT0I64/image-asset.jpeg